Shadowbahn, Steve Erickson’s 10th novel, opens with the impossible happening in America: the Twin Towers appear in the heart of the Badlands in South Dakota and Jesse Presley, Elvis’s stillborn twin, wakes up on the 93rd floor of the southern one. Much of the “United States of Disunion,” as the nation is known here, flocks in to bear witness, only to fall into intense disagreement about what has happened and what it means.
Long obsessed with the the fault lines running through the American soul, Erickson has now given us the first key novel of the Trump Era. Written before the election but published after, Shadowbahn is hyper-aware of the ways in which America has not only been split into rival factions, but into mutually exclusive realities. If the old wisdom was that “it’s impossible to be in two places at once,” in 2017 it has become impossible to be in one place at once. All places in Trump’s America, which represents both the End Times and the supposed return of a great mythic past, are frighteningly multiple.
After an opening scene in which a trucker whose truck bears the bumper sticker “SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF” discovers the “American Stonehenge” in the Badlands, Shadowbahn only gets stranger as it goes along. Jesse Presley works up the nerve to jump out of the South Tower and finds himself flying into a revised 20th century where JFK lost the Democratic nomination to Adlai Stevenson and the Beatles never took off. Making his way as a cantankerous music critic, Presley meets Andy Warhol and falls into a bizarro version of the Factory scene, commenting on the decline of America from within the novel just as Erickson comments from without. Meanwhile, a brother and sister (one born in California, the other in Ethiopia) drive across near-future America via a series of lost highways and secret tunnels, discussing their fraught relationship with their writer father (a clear Erickson stand-in, carried over from 2012’s These Dreams of You) en route to visit their mother in Michigan. By the time they reach the Badlands and see the Towers for themselves, numerous realities have been born and died and reemerged transfigured, and the map has gotten ever more skewed without quite ceasing to be navigable.
In bringing all these strands together without forcing them to cohere, Shadowbahn marks a culmination of both Erickson’s apocalypticism and his vision of history as a porous entity, full of glitches, wormholes, and “Rupture zones.” Straddling the Millennium, the terms of his ongoing project are most clearly defined by 1989’s Tours of the Black Clock, which charts a simultaneous history in which Hitler far outlives the 1940s, eventually coming to America. That novel—which lent its name to the glorious and now sadly defunct literary journal Black Clock, yet another casualty of 2016—develops the notion of hidden events running parallel to, and occasionally intersecting with, those we’re aware of. The black clock itself is the embodiment of this idea: it’s the “dark back of time” (to borrow a phrase from Javier Marías), ticking with unseen minutes and hours behind those we perceive passing.
Like the black clock, the shadowbahn renders subjective experience objective, making Erickson’s psychic landscape disturbingly physical. Cutting “through the heart of the country from one end to the other with impunity,” it connects disparate times and places the way a jittery radio dial splices together stations.
On the one hand, it’s a dangerous strand of wishful thinking to imagine a simultaneous America in which Donald Trump is not our president, or one in which he turns out to be merely a blowhard and not a tyrant; on the other hand, the election represents a possibly unfixable rift in the fabric of our national consciousness, so that the present we now occupy is both unimaginable and hyperreal—so in-your-face it’s impossible to see.
Not Quite a Surrealist
By charting this process, Erickson’s work bears resemblance to that of sci-fi visionaries like Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, but he differs from them in that he has a poet’s soul, not a paranoiac’s. Though he makes use of the language and imagery of sci-fi, his simultaneous histories excavate buried layers of how our reality actually is, not alternate paths it could have taken or could one day take.
This is not to say that Erickson’s work isn’t heady, just that its primary theme is heartbreak, not cracks in the matrix. He believes too strongly in the promise of what America could be to give in fully to highbrow cynicism. In this sense, he’s a patriotic writer, one committed to an American promise that’s been broken over and over again without yet ceasing to resonate.
Just as Erickson isn’t exactly a sci-fi writer, he’s not quite a surrealist either. Perhaps in the European surrealism of the early 20th century—Buñuel, Dalí, Magritte—there was a sense that the external world had become too real, and thus that departing from it (or rising above it, in the literal sense of the term sur-real) was a necessary and plausible response. But now, almost a century after Un Chien Andalou, the events around us and their incessant representation online are too bizarre and too ubiquitous to satirize or depart from: everything, in one way or another, is part of the same post-truth morass. If this is the logic that 21st century fascism will exploit, then Erickson’s determination to plunge all the way into the real, deeper than is comfortable, rather than departing from it or offering any reassuring vision of its ultimate unity, has never been more necessary.
Disjunctive Style
Shadowbahn is self-consciously a symptom of the situation it reflects: the style itself (composed of lists, snippets of dialogue, newspaper clippings, and free-floating paragraphs) is as disjointed and hard to navigate as the lost roads its characters drive down. In this regard, Erickson’s authorial logic has a strange resonance with Trump’s: the shared understanding that our American language is one of constant revision and self-contradiction, and that the grotesque distance between the American Dream and its reality only makes that Dream grow stronger. Needless to say, this language holds great potential for both good and evil.
Living in the End Times
Jesse Presley dates America’s lifespan as running from 1776 to 2001, and yet he still exists in America; indeed he exists for the first time long twenty years after the Towers fell. This means that he’s living in an afterlife, along with everyone else in the novel.
Whether one chooses 2001 or 2016 as the year of America’s death, there’s no denying that we’re all sharing that afterlife now. The apocalypse may have come, but here we still are. In this sense, the book's value lies in its exploration of the Times aspect of the End Times. The End, if and when it truly comes, will neither require nor allow for literature (”when you're dead, you're dead,” as they say), but the Times do require interpretation and consideration, more so than ever because their rules are unwritten.
Since life goes on, growing stranger but not yet unlivable, a book like Shadowbahn serves as a bulwark against numbness and the dangerous belief that the only response to incomprehensibility is inaction. Much to the contrary, Erickson argues that even when reality has splintered, it still contains right and wrong and the two remain distinguishable, in art and in life, until enough people stop believing they are.
American Music
Animating these End Times, as in much of Erickson’s work, music is the one source of renewal. Perhaps because it’s an ephemeral, ever-evolving entity, deriving its power from groove and rhythm, not from rhetoric and ideology, music, especially the blues, which was born out of oppression and worked to overcome it, is the one sanctum in which the American Dream can’t be killed. Music streams from the Towers “like the northern lights”—a natural phenomenon that verges on the supernatural—and everyone who flocks to the Badlands hears different songs, from a sheriff nostalgic for the tunes of her youth to an older man hearing Brian Eno for the first time. This too echoes the current multiplicity of news and social media feeds we all curate, plugging into whichever version of reality we find most satisfying or most exciting, and yet, beneath this disjunct, the power of music itself remains singular.
Late in the novel Erickson writes, “At the previous century’s root was a blues sung at the moment when America defiled its own great idea, which was the moment that idea was born.” Throughout Presley’s and the siblings’ long strange trips, blues, rockabilly, and spirituals like “Shenandoah” (which recurs numerous times throughout the book, sometimes with the word “Shadowbahn” set to the same tune) express both yearning for what America could be and outrage at what it’s become.
Further, with many of the novel’s sections organized as annotations to playlists of classic and forgotten songs, and an absent father (the “Supreme Sequencer ensconced on a mountaintop”) communicating with his children through his mp3 collection, Shadowbahn posits music as our only means of straining to hear the voice of God in the new American desert. Maybe, in one simultaneous history, the current moment will revert us not to some whitewashed version of the 1950s, but all the way back to an age of primal wandering among weird monoliths and along unmarked highways, praying for salvation wherever it may be found. And perhaps out of this, a new America, however disfigured and unruly, will begin to grow, one in which we listen not to the punishing voices of the Old Testament patriarchs but to that of Elvis and the blues and whatever musical forms are still to come.
A Future
The possibility of such a regeneration is the only hope Shadowbahn leaves us with. This is a hope for American life going on, and also a hope for Erickson’s continued literary project, which has by now fully processed the psychic fallout of the 20th century and begun in earnest on the 21st, a time when it seems that “wealth and power is the only American idea left.”
Until now, all of Erickson’s novels have been self-referential, a giant interconnected body of work developing alongside the history we all share, deviating from it but always returning to some recognizable baseline of communal fact. Now that history is unraveling, splitting into ever narrower and less internally consistent versions, perhaps a similar unraveling will occur in Erickson’s future work. There’s certainly no American author better suited to embrace the assault on reality we’re now witnessing, and the ways in which history has been jump-started again, after the lull of the Obama years. No longer are we listening to an album we all know; the soundtrack of 2017 is a stranger’s mp3 player set on Shuffle. Given that there’s no longer any stable ground to stand on, the job of serious contemporary fiction is to reflect this instability, not to deny it.
At the very end of the novel, the truck with the “SAVE AMERICA FROM ITSELF” bumper sticker reappears, this time in a ditch beside the highway, its driver having fallen asleep at the wheel. The siblings, after some debate, decide to rescue him. In beginning to consider how such an act of rescue might still be possible on the national scale, one could do far worse than consulting Shadowbahn for inspiration.
David Leo Rice is a writer and animator living in NYC. His stories have appeared in Black Clock, The Collagist, Birkensnake, The Rumpus, Hobart, Volume 1 Brooklyn, and elsewhere. He's online at www.raviddice.com, and his first novel, A Room in Dodge City, is available now.
Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #4, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers
Stephanie LaCava on Ed Ruscha’s Metro Mattresses
The following is from a letter Ed Ruscha wrote on February 25, 1966 to John Wilcock, a publisher who asked Ruscha to write about his books:
The only thing I can say about my books is that I have a certain blind faith in what I am doing… I am 28 and am mainly a painter (in Ferus stable). One important thing is that I do not cherish the print quality of a photograph. To me the pictures are only snapshots with only an average attention to clarity. The only distributor I have is Wittenborn’s in N.Y.C. They will actually buy a certain amount of books without consignment…
This is a charming prologue to an exemplary career. Fifty years later, it’s difficult to get a hold of Ruscha's early books, and impossible save for a certain price. The books Ruscha made in the 60s and 70s are largely credited with a reinvention of the genre. They all feature photographs: images of gas stations, small fires, swimming pools, palm trees, cacti, LA apartments, buildings or parking lots, Dutch bridges, babies or film stills, and Ruscha’s record collection.
Unlike the others, Ruscha’s latest book, Metro Mattresses, features no photographs. Inside are twelve reproductions of the acrylic and pencil mattresses rendered on museum board paper as they were shown at last year’s Metro Mattresses exhibition. Ruscha and I emailed about Metro Mattresses last December, on his 79th birthday.
—Stephanie LaCava
Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #8, 2015. Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers
STEPHANIE LACAVA: Is there an implied narrative in the mattresses?
ED RUSCHA: There is no story line with the arrangement of images in the book. These mattresses began catching my attention as I moved around the city, especially Hollywood. They became my “clown” paintings. Clown paintings, in general, might be universally detested for what they are, but I began seeing mattresses as sad, and yet humorous subjects like clowns.
Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #9, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers
SLC: Why not photos of the mattresses?
ER: A shift from photographs to painted images gave me a vision of another kind. The images were pampered with paint rather than with a camera. However, this left the book with a feeling of street objects being interpreted within the confines of a studio rather than being grabbed from the street itself.
Ed Ruscha, Metro Mattress #4, 2015, Acrylic and pencil on museum board paper. 102 x 152,5 cm, 40 1/8 x 60 inches. Copyright Ed Ruscha, Courtesy of the artist, Gagosian Gallery and Sprueth Magers
SLC: What do you think is most vital and important about artist's making books? Has this changed since you began your practice?
ER: I am wide awake when I see artist books. Here are people using actual ink on paper in the eventual age of total digital. For this reason I am retaining my hope and expectation of more books.
Material taken from the Roth Horowitz books on Photography put together by Andrew Roth in 1999.
Read Part 1: A Conversation with Seth Price
Read Part 2: A Conversation with Paul Chan
Read Part 3: A Conversation with Alissa Bennett
Read Part 4: A Conversation with Ed Atkins
Stephanie LaCava is an author and journalist living in New York City.
This past September, the Abrams’ imprint Image, which specializes in illustrated and reference works, published a novelty book entitled Bad Little Children’s Books by the pseudonymous Arthur Gackley. The small hardcover, which itself quite deliberately resembled a little golden book, featured carefully-rendered and patently offensive parodies of classic children's book covers. Instead of happy, apple-cheeked tykes doing pleasant wholesome things, Gackley’s covers featured kids farting, puking, and using drugs. Others included children with dildoes and racially inflammatory portrayals of Middle Eastern, Asian, and Native American youngsters. The book was clearly labeled a work of satire aimed at adults, and adults with a certain tolerance for bad taste and crass jokes.
Upon its initial release it received positive reviews and sold fairly well. Then in early December, a former librarian named Kelly Jensen posted an entry on Bookriot entitled “It’s Not Funny. It’s Racist.”
“This kind of 'humor' is never acceptable,” Ms. Jensen wrote. “It’s deadly.”
Jensen’s rant circulated quickly across social media, and Abrams suddenly found itself besieged by attacks from the outraged and offended, who assailed Gackley for creating the book in the first place, and the Abrams editorial board for agreeing to publish it.
“There is a difference between ‘hate speech’ and free speech,” one outraged member of the kidlit comunity wrote on Facebook. “In the same way, you cannot yell ‘Fire!’ in a crowded theater just because you feel like it. This book was in very bad, insulting, racist taste, and designed to look like a children's book. How is that a good idea? Children are too young to understand this as parody. If it's for adults, why is that even funny? Oh, I guess if you are a racist you would think it's funny.”
Another tweeted, “Sounds like something that should've been completely ignored and removed before it hit the shelves. Just because we have the freedom of speech, it can be taken way too far.”
Still another confused and enervated soul wrote, “Argue all that you want, but this particular book was for children yes? Or no? If it was, does that mean we should allow and subject young children to gratuitous violence, gore and pornography? And what age is it acceptable? Does this mean we have to start putting PG-14 on printed material and make it mandatory because certain writers can't conduct themselves with a moral scale?”
Another angry reader summed it up quite simply by posting, “Freedom is bullshit, literally.”
[Note: As much as possible, the spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors which peppered the above posts have been corrected here for the sake of simple comprehensibility.]
Although Abrams initially stood by Gackley and the First Amendment right to offend, and had received the public support of several anti-censorship organizations, by December tenth the noise had simply grown too shrill. Mr. Gackley, maintaining to the end his intentions had been grossly misinterpreted, admitted there was no way to salvage things, and asked that Abrams not reprint the book. In a statement, Abrams announced they would be complying with his wishes. Although Bad Little Children’s Books was not banned in any official capacity, it had all but completely vanished from online booksellers within a few days after the announcement. Used copies, while available, are now selling for outrageous prices.
At the same time that this was happening, there were also calls to ban the (real) children’s books When We Was Fierce and A Birthday Cake for George Washington. The invented slang used in the former was interpreted as racist by some parent groups, and the latter was attacked for its historically inaccurate portrayal of the daily lives of slaves on Washington’s estate. Meanwhile, a mother in Tennessee led the call to pull Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks from the local school system. The New York Times bestselling biography, which concerned a Baltimore woman whose massive cervical tumor had become the invaluable source of several generations worth of cell lines used by cancer researchers, was being taught in local high schools as a means of educating students both about cancer and about racial issues within the medical community. The Tennessee mother calling for its removal, however, found the book pornographic.
Point being, I guess, that certain sectors of the population harbor an insatiable, even desperate desire to be shocked and offended by something they’ve read, seen, or even heard about, and the drive to ban these things (made much easier with the advent of social media) will likely always be with us. But back to the Gackley for a moment. Reading through the enraged postings aimed at Abrams, a number of the offended make the point that they are not attempting to censor, but are merely exercising their own First Amendment right to criticize. That’s fine and understandable. But the crux of the matter is that these people would be much happier if the book never existed in the first place, and considered Abrams’ decision a glorious victory for their cause.
Let’s try to put it in some sort of semi-comprehensible historical context. Dark and occasionally tasteless adult-oriented satires of children’s books, television and toys have been with us about as long as media aimed specifically at the innocent set. We just can’t help ourselves. Present us with the doe-eyed lukewarm treacle of the Smurfs or Care Bears, and some of us will instinctively reach for a baseball bat. In the case of Bad Little Children’s Books, the outrage in many instances seems to be sparked less by the content than form, and the fear that the book might actually be mistaken for legitimate kidlit. So here are a handful of similar cases from the last half-century. While reactions and results differ wildly, a certain historical pattern does seem to emerge.
Ralph Bakshi’s 1972 animated feature Fritz the Cat, based on the R. Crumb character, became notorious overnight for being the first theatrically-released cartoon to receive an X rating from the MPAA. What people tend to forget is that the film received the distinction not on account of its sexual content, nor because it included characters who were overtly racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot. The real problem was the film featured cute and fuzzy animals who were racist, misogynistic drug addicts who cursed a lot, and had sex. The MPAA board was afraid people would see the cartoon poster and stroll into the theater, family in tow, expecting the latest Disney opus. By modern standards the film should have received nothing more than an R rating, but the damning “adults only” designation was an effort to avoid any confusion. It didn’t matter. People saw the X rating and immediately concluded Bakshi had made a hardcore cartoon in a diabolical effort to corrupt the nation’s youth. Although the publicity attracted large audiences and earned the film an undeniable bit of underground cred, that same publicity did irreparable damage to Bakshi’s career. For decades afterward, even while trying to redeem himself with the family-friendly Mighty Mouse cartoon series for TV, he found himself labeled a racist, sexist pornographer determined to get America’s young people hooked on heroin—charges leveled at him mostly by people who had never seen Fritz the Cat.
Long before he won a Pulitzer for Maus and became a regular contributor to The New Yorker, cartoonist Art Spiegelman spent twenty years working for the Topps trading card company. Among other things, he was one of the primary creative forces behind Topps' wildly popular and wickedly subversive Wacky Packages series, which satirized American consumer products. In 1985, Topps attempted to arrange a licensing deal to release a series of trading cards based on Cabbage Patch Dolls, which were all the rage at the time. Finding licensing fees had already gone through the roof, they decided instead to release a Wacky Packages-style parody. As it happened, an unreleased Wacky Packages design called Garbage Pail Kids was already on the boards, so they ran with it.
Spiegelman and the involved artists took the basic design of the cuddly and adorable plush dolls beloved by all the world and twisted them into deranged monstrosities covered in snot, vomit, oozing sores and bugs. From the moment they hit convenience store checkout counters, the GPK stickers were outrageously popular. Although some school systems banned them as an unwelcome distraction and more than a few parents were mortified and disgusted that any sick individual would do such a horrible thing to something so innocent and cuddly, there was no organized grassroots effort to censor the stickers on moral grounds. Topps' only real trouble came in the form of a copyright infringement suit filed by the Cabbage Patch Dolls’ creators, Original Appalachian Artworks, Inc.
Topps’ argument that what they were doing was clear and obvious parody (and therefore protected under the First Amendment) didn’t quite cut it. The suit was settled out of court, with Topps agreeing to alter the Garbage Pail Kids logo and basic character design so as to avoid any possible confusion with the original dolls. The stickers continued to come out, and went on to inspire an animated television series, a feature film, a book and an unholy array of merchandise ranging from trash cans to sunglasses. In the end, it could easily be argued that over time the Garbage Pail Kids had more of a lasting impact on the culture than their inspiration.
Struwwelpeter was first published in Germany in 1845. The cautionary and terrifying collection of nursery rhymes (with graphic accompanying illustrations to drive the point home) warned children that if they sucked their thumnbs, didn’t eat their dinner, didn’t clean themselves up properly, mistreated their pets or threw tantrums, a horrible fate awaited them. The book became a standard instructional volume in most German households with young children. In 1898, a similar but decidedly British version was released in England under the title Shockheaded Peter, and was nearly as popular. Nobody it seemed thought much about presenting naughty children with images of potential disfigurement or death. The book helped keep the little buggers in line.
In 1999, American indie publisher Feral House released a gorgeous new edition of Struwwelpeter, complete with new illustrations, interpretive and historical essays, and assorted bowdlerized and satirical versions of the nursery rhymes which had appeared over the years. Feral House, which had always prided itself on publishing dangerous and controversial works, soon found this simple history and analysis of a once popular if disturbing children’s book could be just as troublesome as their books by notorious British serial killer Ian Brady or the Church of Satan’s Anton LaVey.
“Yes, we had minor trouble with Struwwelpeter,” says Feral House founder and publisher Adam Parfrey. “But most of that was put to rest when bookstores simply refused to carry the book. I guess 21st century Americans are more touchy than the Germans of yore. For a while, a couple chains and many independent bookstores stopped carrying the Anton LaVey books we published after Geraldo Rivera put on those sensationalist programs about Satanism... I credit Marilyn Manson for putting an end to that crap. After he spoke out about it, so many people went into bookstores to order them that the stores saw best to get them back into their shops. Time passed, and the crazy ideas receded.”
Parfrey also sees a potential connection between the backlash Abrams suffered over Bad Little Children’s Books and the present brouhaha over what has been termed “fake news.”
“Right now there’s a good bit of madness going on with Trump-loving crazies, including Alex Jones and Infowars building up this idea that Hillary Clinton and John Podesta are torturing and killing children…and they’re pointing at Marina Abramović, too. That’s a big deal on Facebook at this instant. And anyone who poo-poos this story is being accused of covering up kiddie killing. I can see how this sort of madness can amplify into the book trade, a situation where parodies are mistaken for outright kiddie torture. Sad, isn’t it?”
As a final example, in 2010 Simon and Schuster published my book These Children Who Come at You With Knives, a collection of darkly comic fairy tales aimed at adults. Across roughly a dozen stories written in traditional fairy tale formats (though with more cursing, gratuitous gore, and uncontrolled bodily functions), assorted anthropomorphized animals, magical creatures, human children, the elderly and the dull-witted come to various terrible ends. The book received decent reviews and publicity, but there was no outcry, no controversy, and no one insisted the book be banned in order to protect the innocent. Meaning, of course, that I didn’t sell millions as a result of the hoo-hah. Christ, I’ve even heard from people who use them as bedtime stories for their own kids. Dammit! What the hell did I do wrong?
I think I made two deadly mistakes. First, despite my best efforts to the contrary, my publisher decided to release the book without illustrations, meaning it could never possibly be confused with an actual children’s book. More devastating still, I was cursed with bad timing. These Children Who Come at You With Knives was released halfway through President Obama’s first term, and while there was certainly a good deal of rancor in the air, satire was still a viable form and accepted as such, at least among the literate.
In different eras and in different ways, all the above examples were damned by a public inflicting its own preconceived notions upon works of obvious satire, insisting they be what the public believed them to be instead of what they actually were.
By the time Bad little Children’s Books was released, the world had become too ridiculous, too absurd, and as a result we lost our sense of humor. There was simply no longer any way to lampoon our chosen leaders or our own insecurities, with the world itself poised and ready to top us at every turn. In short, the book’s publication coincided with the precise moment satire breathed its last, meaning readers had no choice but to take Gackley’s work, as Parfrey points out, at face value. Lucky bastard.
Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.
"Think of a pencil being more like a cup of coffee rather than a pen.”
An Interview with Joey Cofone of Baron Fig
As far as pencils are concerned, I’m a late adapter. I made the switch from a fountain pen (how pretentious, I know) after finishing an essay by Mary Norris on her quest for the ideal No. 1 pencil (contrary to the cabal of No. 2 makers at Ticonderoga, they do exist, and are nigh impossible to find). It shows how deep pencil-freak culture goes that if you’re too occupied to maintain your pencil-point, you have the option of mailing your dulled graphite to David Rees, author of How to Sharpen Your Pencil, to be professionally sharpened. But is there anything more to be said about pencils? Can the pencil be re-conceptualized?
For minimalist pencil-designed Joey Cofone, the answer is an all-caps yes to both questions. Cofone has taken 1st place in the 2013 AIGA CMD-X competition, while Print Magazine named him one of 15 designers under 30 to watch.
The thing to understand first off about Cofone is that he likes simplicity a lot. The co-founder of Baron Fig, a New York-based maker of notebooks, Cofone has recently delved into reinventing the pencil. Or revolutionizing it. At the very least, he’s produced a damn fine instrument to write with and to hold.
The fittingly named Archer has a design that’s extremely clean-lined, forsaking the ferrule and even the eraser in pursuit of lightweight practicality. It’s also incredibly aromatic.
—Michael Peck
BLVR: What got you into paper and notebooks?
JOEY COFONE: Several years ago, back at the School of Visual Arts here in New York City, I had realization that changed my life. Walking through the design department and taking a look at my fellow classmates’ tools, I noticed something: each of us was using two tools—a laptop and a notebook—to design. The laptops were all the same, MacBooks, but the notebooks were all different brands, sizes, paper types, and so on. I was intrigued. Why was there ubiquity with one tool but no loyalty to the other?
I went home and checked out my own bookshelf, and lo’ and behold all of my notebooks were different. There was this unspoken search for the right notebook that was going on all around me. Eventually my Co-founder Adam Kornfield joined the mix, and together we talked to thinkers all over the world, asking them one question: What do you like in a sketchbook or notebook?
Out of the five hundred plus cold-emails, we received a whopping 80% response rate. It turns out others were on the same search as us—and they had a lot to say. We used all that feedback to design the first community-inspired notebook, the Confidant, and put it on Kickstarter. At the end of thirty days we sold almost ten thousand notebooks and raised over $150k. That was just over two years ago.
BLVR: How did the name Baron Fig come about?
JC: I had this hankering for the word “Baron.” No idea why, such is life. I took the word to my co-founder Adam and our friend Scott, and told them that it needed a second word. Scott immediately, without hesitation, said “Fig.” Adam and I were confused—what does it mean?—even Scott didn’t know why he said it. Somehow it stuck, but I wasn’t happy with it. How could a company about thinking, about infusing meaning into creativity, not have a name with meaning itself?
For the next few weeks I wrote down hundreds and hundreds of possible names, but none stuck like Baron Fig. Finally, pretty much at wit’s end, I decided to look up the origins of baron and fig. Baron was a symbol of Apollo and Fig was a symbol of Dionysus—brothers that represent order and chaos. The name essentially symbolizes balance, of having the discipline to work hard but also the impulse to play, which is the essence of the creative mindset.
BLVR: What prompted the leap into pencil-making? Were there specific models that influenced the design of the Archer?
JC: I’m a minimalist designer. Hell, I’m a minimalist exister, if there is such a word. I like everything simple, fluid, clear. Clutter and excess drive me nuts. Even when I was a kid, I always wanted things to be just right. I used to go around the house and organize each room as if they were showrooms on display. Lamps squared with the edges of tables, stove tools arranged from longest to shortest, you name it and I was all over it.
The Archer pencil was sort of a minimalist dream come true. I’ve always wanted to design a pencil—they’re like little creative wands—and it took our team over a year to hone in on the right production quality. In the meantime I designed dozens of versions before landing on the Archer you see today, each iteration a little more refined and simpler than the ones before it.
BLVR: Minimalism is definitely a noticeable trait, and it seems like the Archer is something of an ultimate statement of this simplicity. How does one go about re-conceptualizing the pencil?
JC: I don’t know how other designers do it, but I keep iterating until things feel right. Sometimes it’s quick, sometimes it takes 82 versions like the Confidant notebook’s packaging. My goal is to isolate and preserve the best elements, improve the weak ones, and look to my inner self’s gut response to see if the new outcome pleases or not. Rinse and repeat. My old teacher and designer James Victore has a good line about this: “In the particular lies the universal.” Solve your problem—and delight yourself—and you’ll do the same for others.
BLVR: The Archer, besides its other greatnesses, smells so good I have to pause what I’m doing and take a hit. How much wood did you have to test/sniff to make the best choice?
JC: I hear you. We try to take our hits when no one is looking. Sometimes you can find Adam near the stock shelves face-deep in a box of them. It’s definitely an issue.
BLVR: You mentioned earlier this idea of ubiquitous loyalty when it comes to laptops, etc. Pencils are sort of marked by promiscuity—once you’re done with one, you just pluck another from the box. So how do you hope to gain that kind of loyalty with the Archer?
JC: Think of a pencil being more like a cup of coffee rather than a pen. We all find our favorite coffee and stick to it. Sure, the cups run out, but there’s always another one waiting—and you know it’s going to be just as good as the ones that come before it. Quality, reliability—they’re both extremely important in designing a consumable, especially a tool that helps us do our work or hobby.
BLVR: For pencil nerds like myself, how does the Archer differ, and improve upon, something like the Palomino Blackwing?
JC: I get asked this a lot. We put major emphasis on community feedback, and design accordingly. Since we launched Baron Fig we’ve tweaked and redesigned every product directly based on the ideas that come our way from our customers. When we say “Designed by the community,” we mean it. As far as the Archer goes, they’ve been a requested product since day one. Each Archer is extremely high quality, better than anything available at their price point of $15 per pack. And, if I do say so myself, sexier than any pencil, period.
BLVR: It’s definitely a sexy pencil.
JC: Thank you.
BLVR: Pencils, packaging—it’s so minimalist it’s sans-serif, without a stray line in sight, the Phillip Glass of writing implements (I could go on). But I do find myself a little thrown off by the lack of an eraser. Was there a debate to excise the eraser?
JC: Well said. Since launching the Archer I’ve been asked this question often—"Why did you remove the eraser? What’s your thinking?“—as if I’ve committed an atrocity. There’s a disconnect, though, between how people say they feel about erasers versus how people actually feel about them. When’s the last time you used an eraser on a pencil and thought to yourself, "Damn, this eraser is great”? I don’t think it happens. They’re pretty much crap, every one seems to leave marks on the page, gets dirty and blemished, and in the end delivers an underwhelming experience.
So I nixed it. Boom, goodbye eraser at the end. With that out of the way now we can actually deliver a quality eraser on the side, one that doesn’t mark up your page and isn’t limited to the lifespan of the pencil itself.
BLVR: What do you see the Archer going into the world to achieve?
JC: Everything. Imagery and language are some of the oldest and most glorious technologies known to man. Technology? What? Yes, technology. But I’m digressing—what do I hope for the Archer to achieve? For these pencils to be the vehicles of communication, of images and words, that affect the world. Ideas are powerful, writing instruments are the means by which they’re communicated. On our site, at the top of the Squire pen page, it explains that a writing instrument “…grants the power to move entire nations, to touch people’s hearts and souls—to make something from nothing.” And I mean every word of that.
Michael Peck is the author of The Last Orchard in America. His work has appeared in Tin House, LA Review of Books, Pank and elsewhere. He lives in Oregon City, where he deals in rare books.
There are roughly ten blocks between the theater where David Bowie watched rehearsals for Lazarus, and the studio where he recorded Blackstar. In his last years, we both lived between them, on opposite sides of Houston Street.
My side is the Bowery, known in real estate speak as NoHo (North of Houston). On the street where I live—a two-block stretch of 3rd Street known as Great Jones—is a chandeliered butcher shop occupying the spot where Basquiat worked, and died, of a heroin overdose. Twenty years before his time, Charlie Mingus’ heroin-addicted presence on this corridor is said to have birthed the term jonesing.
I’ve passed a decade in Brooklyn, but never before now lived in Manhattan and love being a downtown kid, stepping through the door and onto crowded streets, passing CBGBs—now a skinny pants boutique I’ve never entered—on my way to buy groceries, or borrowing books from a library branch housed in the one-time factory of Hawley & Hoops’ Chocolate Candy Cigars—that Bowie lived above, in a modern penthouse perched atop the turn of the century brick building.
For twenty-four months, barring the occasional trip to Central Park, I’ve lived below 14th Street and in this time Bowie loitered here too, sipping La Colombe’s double macchiato, fetching chicken and watercress sandwiches at Olive’s, or dinner supplies at Dean & DeLuca. One day I’d catch him on the street, I figured, hailing a cab or taking out the recycling in his flat cap and sunglasses, and when I did my well-worn New Yorker discretion would be jettisoned as I tried, and likely failed, not to cry.
I didn’t, of course, know that for most of the time we were neighbors David Bowie was dying. Today I walk the familiar stretch of blocks to his building, eyes tearing, I tell myself, from the frigid, bone-dry air. At the front entrance, a group of fans stand gutted, surrounded by news trucks, generators, vulturing reporters.
A growing pile of daisies, tulips, roses, daffodils leans against the wall, along with a few photographs, a pair of silver glitter heels, a Jesus candle with Ziggy Stardust face. Tucked here and there are handwritten notes: Look out your window, I can see his light and We are all stardust and Hot tramp, we love you so.
Everyone here, news crew aside, feels known somehow, the mood is gentle, polite, quiet. Too quiet, I realize, when someone plays “Life On Mars?” from a tinny smartphone speaker. As the closing strings swell, a woman turns to me to say through tears, “I love this song!” All I can do is nod, “I know!” and take comfort among fellow kooks.
A pair behind me wonders aloud about a “world without Bowie,” and while I know what they mean—the way some people feel like a force and invincible—you could argue we’ve been living in such a world for a long while. David Jones-ing.
2.
Three days earlier, on the night of Bowie’s 69th birthday, I danced in my kitchen to the foppish, falsetto, “‘Tis a Pity She Was a Whore,” delighting in his rude lyrics and wild whooping. Later at a dinner hosted for the birthday of a friend, I commented on Bowie’s continuing fixation upon mortality, but also his energy, sly humor, return to form, exclaiming, not tentatively, “Bowie’s back!”
I was thrilled he’d finally slipped the ghost of what he called, “my Phil Collins years.” In one of the endless interviews now flooding my screen in text and video, he explains, “I was performing in front of these huge stadium crowds and at that time I was thinking ‘what are these people doing here? Why did they come to see me? They should be seeing Phil Collins.’ And then that came back at me and I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ It’s a certain kind of mainstream that I’m just not comfortable in.”
Like the divisiveness of fat and skinny Elvis, there were those of us who fancied ourselves glittering, androgynous, apocalyptic half-beast hustlers who bought drugs, watched bands and jumped in the river holding hands, and there were others, contentedly jazzin’ for Blue Jean.
When, in your Golden Years, your mentor of not only music but all things relevant—art, clothes, books, films—enters his Phil Collins Years, suddenly high-kicking in Reeboks and staring in Pepsi commercials, how not to feel betrayed?
I took it personally, coining the unforgiving term David Bowie Syndrome. As a burgeoning artist, I feared (a scaled-back version of) his creative arc with my whole heart—reaching the greatness of Bowie’s 1970s only to follow it up with Let’s Dance. To say nothing of Tin Machine. Like many old-school fans, I’d stopped tuning in to modern Bowie to keep my vintage Bowie flame flickering.
In my most youthfully caustic moment, I joked that Bowie’s personal Oblique Strategies deck—that famous stack of cards, creative prompts such as Ask your body, Abandon normal instruments, and Courage! allegedly used when Bowie and Brian Eno recorded Low and Heroes—should be made up of cards that all read, simply: Call Eno.
Unfair, untrue. Kindly allow this counterpoint mea culpa admission: I secretly love the ham-fisted, cringtastic video for Dancing in the Street.
3.
On the third day after Bowie’s death I step outside, wondering if I’ll still hear his presence hum. Just feet from my front door I’m greeted by his face gracing one of two large posters advertising Blackstar. Well hey there, Mr. Jones.
They’re wet with wheat paste and like a teenage fangirl I consider stealing one, but then notice a smaller poster hung next to them, featuring the Sesame Street characters peering out joyously, encouraging me to attend an event entitled… Let’s Dance!
I accept Bowie’s cosmic joke, had it coming I suppose, and briskly hoof it to Union Square where at the farmer’s market I find apples, apple cider, cider doughnuts and not much else. My gloveless fingertips smart as I pocket change and consider the possibility that the visitation was an invitation to dance through the sorrow. A bit maudlin perhaps, but then, so was Bowie.
When I return home the Blackstar posters are gone. In under an hour someone has pasted them over with clothing and gym ads—leaving all the posters on either side for the length of the street untouched. Like Steppenwolf's Magic Theater, the message—whatever it was—had appeared and just as quickly vanished.
My feet walk me to Bowie’s memorial, which has exploded in a heap of bouquets, black bobbing Prettiest Star balloons, cha-cha lines of platform heels, disco balls, eye shadow, quarts of milk, British flags, drawings and paintings of Bowie’s many incarnations, fuzzy spiders, bluebirds, boas, vinyl copies of David Live annotated Forever in thick silver marker.
A giant orange tissue paper flower hangs from a nearby tree, electric blue eye at its center, petals edged in lyrics: Give me your hands, because you’re wonderful! Let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.
Here and there are tucked personal notes: You taught me that weird = beautiful, and: When I was a teenager I wished I could check off “David Bowie” for both my gender and my race. I still do.
“Taking away all the theatrics…” Bowie said, “I’m a writer. The subject matter…boils down to a few songs, based around loneliness, isolation, spiritual search, and a looking for a way into communication with other people. And that’s about it—about all I’ve ever written about for forty years.”
Perhaps, then, my “Let’s Dance” visitation was an anti-message, a warning against wasting creative juju by pandering for cash. Of course, Bowie made not a dime (relatively, and thanks in large part to shifty management) from his artistic era I find most inspiring. The seed of the fortune that brought him financial security was that very song. So what then?
When I return home, Bowie’s spot on the wall has been papered over yet again, all white this time, as though to say, as he has when pressed to interpret his lyric’s meaning, “nothing further,” “you figure it out,” “space to let.”
4.
I rise before the sun, pull on bright turquoise tights and red clogs and walk the cobblestone of Lafayette Street in the dark. Collar up, breath ghosting, I feel as I secretly do in all such moments, like the cover of Low, or The Middle-Aged Lady Who Fell to Earth. Car headlights slide over me as I approach the memorial that is, it appears, being dismantled.
I quickly make the photograph I awoke imagining: my platforms meeting Bowie’s shore of flickering candles, cigarette butts, stray boa feathers, sea of glitter. Beside me a sweet lone man sorts out the dead flowers, shuffling handmade things to one side, candles to another, not tossing it all as I first suspected, but tidying up, preparing for another day.
What drew me into this frigid darkness, half dressed in pajamas? Perhaps a need to meet Bowie toe to toe, promise to honor the contract, all in, heart wide, funk to funky.
Put on my red shoes and dance the blues.
“I don’t think (the act of creation is) something that I enjoy a hundred percent. There are occasions when I really don’t want to write. It just seems that I have a physical need to do it...I really am writing for myself.”
Before Blackstar, the last time I know of Bowie creating under extreme duress is when making the album Station to Station—which coincidentally also opens with an epically long titular song wherein a man yelps from the darkness, singing with pride and pain about a fame that has isolated him beyond measure.
As the Thin White Duke, Bowie sings with bitter irony, It’s not the side effects of the cocaine! I’m thinking that it must be love! It’s well known that Bowie, living for a year (1975-1976) in his despised, self-chosen, wasteland of Los Angeles, had fallen victim to a kind of Method Writing, unable to escape in life the character he’d crafted to hide behind on stage.
Subsisting on a diet of cocaine, chili peppers and milk, he grew paranoid, hallucinating, allegedly dabbling in Black Magic and storing his jarred urine in his refrigerator. I was six years old at the time, living less than a mile from Cherokee Studios where Station to Station was in session, and smudging my mother’s brand new Young Americans vinyl with powdered sugar fingerprints.
He said of the following album, Low, “It was a dangerous period for me. I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity. But I get a sense of real optimism through the veils of despair from Low. I can hear myself really struggling to get well.”
It’s the pale, shimmering hope that makes Low my favorite of all of Bowie’s offerings, but for Station to Station’s Duke of Disillusion it’s too late—for hate, gratitude, any emotion. It’s not, however, too late to lay himself bare in the work: there’s no reach for sanity, just a man collapsing while still directing, as the camera rolls.
Blackstar has been called a gift, and on “Dollar Days,” a song that describes his effort to communicate in the face of death, Bowie breaks the fourth wall to address this directly: Don’t think for just one second I’ve forgotten you/I’m trying to/I’m dying to(o).
I believe as an artist he had no choice, no other way to confront his circumstance other than to talk himself through it, put it in the work.
The profound generosity of Blackstar, and a vast swath of Bowie’s creative output, is that in this most intimate conversation with death, god, time, himself, we’ve been invited to listen in.
5.
What makes a good death? Bowie withdrew from the public in the last decade and was characteristically silent regarding his illness, in this tell-all age (that owes him not a little for its status quo “tolerance” of Chazes and Caitlyns). He was also, in his time post-diagnosis, compelled to make his most raw and exposing work in years, and between the play and album, likely spent a long part of each day in their pursuit, while presumably also tending to his needs as a father, husband, friend, man.
In Walter Tevis’ book The Man who Fell to Earth—the basis of Nicholas Roeg’s film that inspired Bowie’s production Lazarus—stranded, despondent space alien Thomas Jerome Newton records an album called The Visitor: we guarantee you won’t know the language, but you’ll wish you did! Seven out-of-this-world poems! Newton explains it’s a letter to his family and home planet that says, “Oh, goodbye, go to hell. Things of that sort.”
Bowie’s seven-song swansong, Blackstar, is rather more generous, and from a writer notorious for lyrical slipperiness, layered meanings, a cut-up technique (copped from Burroughs) that spawned lines about Cassius Clay and papier-mâché, its text is frequently plain-spoken and direct.
Even my favorite frolic sounds a combative calling down of his illness, time: Man, she punched me like a dude/Hold your mad hands, I cried/She stole my purse, with rattling speed/This is the war. It would not be the first time Bowie referred to Time as a “whore.” (see: Aladdin Sane.)
In the title video’s most vivid sections, Bowie becomes god—less vengeful than dismissive—singing, from heaven’s attic, a swaggering takedown of Bowie himself: You’re a flash in the pan, I’m the great I am. (From Exodus: And God said unto Moses, I AM THAT I AM: and he said, Thus shalt thou say unto the children of Israel, I AM hath sent me unto you.)
His button eyes in both videos suggest a puppet, and so the presence of a puppet master, but I don’t read these images as signs of deathbed conversion. Bowie was a spiritual seeker who borrowed magpie style—in this case from Egyptian, Kabalistic, Christian and Norse iconography—to create a language to give voice to his fears and dark entries.
“If you can accept—and it’s a big leap—that we live in absolute chaos, it doesn’t look like futility anymore. It only looks like futility if you believe in this bang up structure we’ve created called ‘God’.”
In his last gestures Bowie answered not God, but himself, regarding the way he’d lived, and in particular, as an artist. The pulse returns the prodigal sons suggests that the characters he inhabited—some regrettable, but not irredeemable—are with him as he assesses the intentions behind, and perceived short-comings of, his creative offerings: Seeing more and feeling less/Saying no but meaning yes/This is all I ever meant/That's the message that I sent/(but) I can’t give everything away.
In his almost unbearably haunting last video, it seems we’re finally invited to meet David Jones, or Bowie playing Jones. Jones the man lies in bed, clutching a blanket with those mortal, frightened hands. Nearby the writer manically, fretfully reaches for immortality, while Bowie the performer, dutifully dances to the end.
“There’s an effort to reclaim the unmentionable, the unsayable, the unspeakable, all those things come into being a composer, into writing.” “You present a darker picture for yourself to look at, and then reject it, all in the process of writing. I think that’s what’s left for me with music. Now I really find that I address things to myself. That’s what I do. If I hadn’t been able to write songs and sing them, it wouldn’t have mattered what I did. I really feel that. I had to do this.”
This morning I remembered where I'd seen the writer's austere, black and white striped costume before: the program for the 1976 Isolar tour, wherein Bowie self-consciously poses with a notebook or makes chalk drawings of the Kabbalah tree of life. Isolar is a made up word—and name of his current company—said to be comprised of isolation and solar.
I love this costume—a kind of artisan worker-bee uniform. There are satin kimono-sleeved ass-baring rompers for when its time to present the work, but when making it, roll up your revolutionary sleeves and get to it.
1976 saw the success of Station to Station, the premiere of The Man Who Fell to Earth and the recording of The Idiot and Low. It was not the most grounded time for Bowie personally (to understate it), but arguably his most vital creatively, and this nod to the continuum of creative spirit seems to suggest that the artist dies, but through the work, like Lazarus, rises again.
6.
So what, then, is a Blackstar? Perhaps a marked man, a sly reference to Elvis’ song of the same name whose lyrics include, Every man has a black star/A black star over his shoulder/And when a man sees his black star/He knows his time, his time has come.
Although Bowie did not, as rumored, write “Golden Years” for Elvis, he did find (somewhat bashful) significance in their shared birthdays, took pains to catch his concerts, had his white jumpsuit copied to wear while performing “Rock and Roll Suicide,” modeled his own costume in Christiane F after Elvis’ ensemble in Roustabout, and perhaps his Aladdin Sane red/electric blue lightening bolt was inspired by Elvis’ signature gold one. Which is to say, he likely knew of The King’s “Black Star.”
Blackstar could also suggest the theoretical transitional state between a collapsed star and a singularity—a state of infinite value in physics, a metaphor for immortality.
I’m not a gangstar/I’m not a film star/I’m not a popstar/I’m not a marvel star/I’m not a white star/I’m not a porn star/I’m not a wandering star/I’m a star’s star/I’m a blackstar.
“Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m a person at all...I’m just a collection of other people’s ideas.” Is Bowie simply claiming his right to throw off all mantles?
The car crash that is the documentary Cracked Actor opens with a reporter asking, “I just wonder if you get tired of being outrageous?” “I don’t think I’m outrageous at all,” Bowie throws back, miffed. The reporter persists, “Do you describe yourself as ordinary? What adjective would you use?” Bowie searches his brain for an appropriate response to the inane question and finally lands upon: “David Bowie.”
Or perhaps, as Isolar suggests, a Blackstar is someone hidden in plain sight. In an interview that seems more therapy session, with Mavis Nicolson in 1979, mostly drug-free and grounded Bowie speaks of the appeal of life in Berlin, whose physical wall seemed to mirror his psyche. Without referencing himself or the characters he’s inhabited, he describes an isolated figure who finds no home in the world, but instead creates “a micro world inside himself.”
When Nicolson suggests that as an artist Jones must keep himself from love, he rejects the idea outright, but when gently pressed about the demands of relationships in actual life and not “from afar,” he concedes, extending his arms before him like a shield, “No, love can’t get quite in my way, I shelter myself from it incredibly.”
The moment is so resonantly raw that the two break into manic humor, shifting to the story of his eye injury in a childhood fight over a girl, wherein he laughs and says, “I wasn’t even in love with her.”
In “Lazarus,” the dying Jones sings: everybody knows me now, and perhaps that is so, as much as it ever could be for a man who spent an artistic career in self-sustained exile.
And why shouldn’t David Jones have been—with the exception of a few deeply druggy years—free from the curse and blessing of being Bowie? What are we owed by our artists?
7.
Blue, blue, electric blue, that's the colour of my room.
The Bowie song that forever circles my brain describes a writer waiting for the muse, describing the loneliness and blessing of the electric blue of creation. Vishuddhi, or the electric blue throat chakra of Hindu tantra, is associated with the vocal cords, communication, creative expression, one’s inner-truth.
For sixteen months I lived in Berlin’s Schöneberg quarter, around the corner from 155 Hauptstrasse and the apartment that song was composed in and of. I’d pedal my bike past and nod to the ghost Bowie inside, still wondering and waiting for the gift of sound and vision.
It’s the seventh day since Bowie’s death, the final day of shiva I’ve sat beneath his window. I’ve never much understood funerals, always felt they were for a “living” that didn’t include me, but this has been different.
Over this week I’ve shared glances with occasional bleary-eyed oldsters coming or going from where I’m headed or have just been–there have been no young folk to speak of and no platform boots necessary to recognize the kooks.
Today, from a block away, I spy a pair of women making the pilgrimage. The taller of the two—who for one moment I mistake for Patti Smith—has Smith’s hair, a floor-length bright blue shearling coat and an armload of exquisite orange, flame-tipped roses.
Trailing my comrades I think of Smith’s line in Woolgathering when, upon being given a dandelion, she asks, “What could I wish for but my breath?”
At Bowie’s door the energy feels less personal, dissipating. After the roses-bearers depart, a lone woman and I stand shivering before the diminished pile of offerings framed by narrowed police barricades: plastic-wrapped bodega flowers and a few handmade items, the most prominent being a cigar box shrine with a Halloween Jack eye patch and what seems a bunch of random stuff tossed in. The woman plays “Starman” on her phone, and rather than poignant, it’s just sad.
A years later follow-up to his first solo release, “Major Tom,” “Starman” takes the isolation of planet earth is blue and there’s nothing I can do and turns it into an anthem where a cosmic DJ messiah tells us misfits not to blow it, ‘cause he thinks it’s all worthwhile.
The 1972 Top of the Pops performance famously featured Bowie’s flirty finger wagging at the viewer, and casually intimate embrace of Mick Ronson, which blew the minds of much of Britain and beyond and marked Bowie as a more than a one-hit wonder. I silently give thanks to many, including Bowie, not to live in a world where a rock and roll arm thrown over a shoulder can cause a stir.
Over the song’s fade out the woman shrugs and says something about bears—at least I think that’s what I hear. I smile and nod remotely, then realize she’s drawing my attention to the carefully rendered Ziggy Stardust teddy bear—complete with lightning bolt and guitar—hanging from the police steel.
This bear abrades me for no good reason. A few young women pass by on their way into American Apparel. “That was David Bowie’s house,” one says over her shoulder, and the other makes an “awww” sound like she might at the sight of a teddy bear, or the memorial of that musician guy that died the way people do—other people, older people. As they pause to take a selfie in front of Bowie’s memorial offerings I turn and nearly sprint downtown.
I learned in this week of Bowie Internet inundation that he trailed these streets too, often at dawn, in solitude, but right now I need Chinatown’s chaotic, smashing life. I’ll buy those killer clementine from that vendor on the corner, I think, and eggplant, scallion and ginger for supper.
I weave among cardboard boxes of dried silver fish and lotus root, tourists linked arm-in-arm in matching New York pom-pom hats, Chinese grandmas pushing plaid shopping carts in (Harold and) Maude braids. A man exits a hallway, arms loaded with red-ribboned funeral flowers. A chef in a paper hat leans against a wall, smoking beneath a pumpkin-sized, spinning dumpling.
Beneath crisscrossing wires strung with giant, glinting snowflakes, I warm my hands on a cup of milky tea and wonder when we’ll get winter’s first snow. Glancing up to cross Mott (the Hoople) Street, I wonder when the city’s details will cease to conjure Bowie.
I tuck dragon fruit into my sack, humming “Starman”—whose chorus melody is plainly lifted from The Wizard of Oz’s “Over the Rainbow.” Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly/Birds fly over the rainbow./Why then, oh, why can't I?
In performance, Bowie sometimes coyly sung a mash-up of these anthems of longing for belonging. On “Lazarus” he sings, seemingly of his death, This way or no way/You know, I’ll be free/Just like that bluebird/Now ain’t that just like me.
Blackstar begins by naming the Norse village of Ormen. In Norse mythology, the rainbow bridge that connects this world to that of the gods is Bifrost, which translates as tremulous way. Tremulous—as in trembling—as Bowie does so heart-wrenchingly as he backs into the armoire and out of this world.
When he heard the call, David Jones, who could walk the streets of Manhattan undetected, slipped over the rainbow and into his own imagination.
But with generosity and courage it seems he did not fully recognize, David Bowie spent his life pulling back the curtain on the Great Oz, showing the man, his frustration and fallibility, questioning art-making and then making it anyway.
I fear in the end he imagined himself “a very bad man but a very good wizard,” when in fact the opposite was true. The droves of people gathered at his front door and around the world may have found the masks fascinating, but only as much as the man, and heart, behind them.
I imagine catching David Jones wandering past shop windows plastered with red New Year monkeys, beneath golden, swaying lanterns. I would thank him for Ziggy Stardust, whose hair my mother copied and Scary Monsters, whose poster graced my eleven-year-old bedroom wall. I’d say thanks for Low and Hunky Dory, which got me through hard times. Thanks for The Man Who Fell to Earth and The Hunger, Aladdin Sane and the Thin White Duke. Thanks for Diamond Dogs, Heroes, Lodger, Station to Station. Thanks for creating a soundtrack for my life and the lives of my favorite people.
Thanks for being a fierce, literate libertine, giving permission when I so badly needed it and inspiration always. Thanks, from the strange kids, for saying, No love, you’re not alone! You’re wonderful!
On the afternoon of January 10th, in what I later learned were the last hours of Bowie’s life, a double rainbow drew me from my desk and to the window. It arced across the skyline and ended at the Empire State Building, so strikingly that fire fighters in the station across the street took to the emergency dispatch microphone to exclaim to the neighborhood, “There’s a rainbow!”
As the first snow falls over Chinatown’s back alleys, I think: rainbowie!
There’s a Starman, over the rainbow, way up high, and he told me—let the children lose it, let the children use it, let all the children boogie.
Kim Wood's writing has appeared in Out Magazine, McSweeney’s, Tin House's Open Bar, and on National Public Radio. She has received grants from the Jerome Foundation and is a MacDowell Colony fellow. She is working on a book, Advice to Adventurous Girls, based upon the unpublished archive of a 1920s motorcycle daredevil. Her documentary film on this subject has screened internationally in festivals and museums including Sundance and the Guggenheim, where it double-billed with an episode of ChiPs.
On Friday, January 8th 2016, David Bowie turned sixty-nine and his final album Blackstar, was released. I purchased it that morning, having waited for months. On the following day I sat for a black star tattoo straight from the album cover; a recent writing project was lousy with black stars and I felt more than ever that Bowie and I were on the same wave. After a weekend of listening to the album I was awoken Monday morning, January 11th 2016 by my wife, “before you look at your phone, Bowie passed away yesterday.” She was right, my text messages were as full as my Facebook feed with tearful and shocked notifications from friends, but I was glad I heard it from her first.
It took until December of 2016 for me to finally read Simon Critchley’s little book, Bowie (OR Books/Counterpoint, 2016). I’ve wanted this book since it came out in 2014 and I remember reacting, “a book by one of my favorite living philosophers on one of my favorite living everythings? Yes, please.” Luckily I put it off until this 2016 re-issue with extra chapters treating Bowie’s death and final album. Although most of the book was written more than two years ago it is hard not to read the whole thing eulogistically. His spirit goes on though, now more than ever, as the last dreadful year has come to a close. I lost of close friends and faith in my country, but now my thoughts turn back to Bowie with hope his art can carry me forward.
What have I lost in Bowie? For the most part, the same things we all have: the chance for more music, more movie appearances, and just the knowledge that he is out there being brilliant and dashing, making art, and giving a wry smile to a paparazzo. What have I lost personally? True confession time. I have always dreamed of knowing Bowie (I’ve never even seen him perform live), but more so, and more embarrassingly, I’ve always wanted him to know me. I’d hoped one day he would read one of my books and like it. That moment of mutual respect between artists, that bump to my sense of worth from an artist who has helped shape my understanding of the world, art, and myself.
This is why sometimes Critchley’s book feels like it’s talking to me or for me. I haven’t read much about Bowie. He is mine and my feelings for him and about him need not be mediated. Critchley’s book however is now added to a small list of my favorite Bowie books which also includes Hugo Wilcken’s Low and Steve Erickson’s These Dreams of You.
Critchley’s book praises Wilcken’s so I’ll start there and circle around back. Wilcken’s Low (Continuum, 2010) doesn’t need a book review; it’s kinda perfect (I say kinda since perfect is such a strong word). It’s one of the best 33 1/3s I’ve read, and I’ve read a lot. I’m a sucker for this series of tiny books on albums of music as I have always suffered from that most Cartesian of obsessions in regards to my most beloved art works, the need to know how he, she, or they did it. The reverse engineering of a work gives me faith that maybe I could also do or make something comparable. Wilcken’s Low is like the sweetest of candies; I wanted to devour and savor all at once, which is difficult with such a short book. Wilcken chose Low because it was a definitive turning point in Bowie’s body of work and during maybe the most beloved period in the myth of the artist. In 136 pages the reader experiences a thorough historical context for the album and detailed production notes for each song as well as each song. The most important moments I savor from this book are descriptions of his work ethic and the well-researched information about his time in Berlin.
After a teenage obsession with Ziggy Stardust, the Berlin years have always been my favorite period and that’s where Erickson’s These Dreams of You (Europa Editions, 2012) comes in, illustrating the Berlin years in the subplot of a larger novel. The book is about a white novelist, Alexander “Zan” Nordhoc, and his family. The narrative opens with the election of Barack Obama not long after their adoption of a little Ethiopian girl with gray eyes named, Zema (mostly called, Sheba). The structure involves small paragraph vignettes familiar from Erickson’s last Europa novel, Zeroville, but otherwise from the start of my first read I wondered, “is Steve Erickson actually writing a domestic family novel? Where is the trademarked weirdness I love so much?” My worries were for naught, for after about fifty pages it started getting weird, and oh so wonderfully weird. Ultimately it is a novel about race in America and therefore about America itself. On the second page, watching the first black president’s victory, Zan wonders, “Do I have the right… as a middle-aged white man, to hold my face in my hands? and then thinks, No. And holds his face in his hands anyway, silently mortified that he might do something so trite as sob.”
It is the only book by a white guy that I included in my African Diaspora Literature course, and only in a summer section to follow complementarily Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father. The book captures the spirit of Obama’s election, his place in history, but never directly names him. This is Erickson’s way of writing historical fiction since Zeroville, never naming names. But what does this have to do with David Bowie? We can only assume that he is the “British extraterrestrial in a dress” or “the man who sings the hero song [with] red hair” whom four year old Sheba/Zema is obsessed with. These Dreams of You is a complicated work that shows all of Erickson’s narrative deftness, the twisting, ellipsing Mobius strip orchestration of strands and timelines that all interweave and make total sense by the end. One of those twists that proves essential to the whole follows a black woman named Jasmine, who while working in the music business is assigned to assist a rocker who seems a lot like David Bowie. She accompanies him and his friend Jim (Iggy Pop?) to Berlin where they record music with a man called The Professor (Brian Eno?). In his not so covert way, Erickson depicts the recording of the albums Low and “Heroes” and all of the escapades of that period: the lingering Crowley occultism, the conviction to kick cocaine through copious amounts of alcohol, the transvestite clubs, the obsession with kraut-rock like Can, Neu!, and Kraftwerk. Moreover, Erickson captures what drew Bowie to Berlin, what first enticed him through the writing of Christopher Isherwood. Berlin was not just the City of Ghosts, it was the City of the Wall, both East and West, Old World and New, Weimar burlesque and pulsing kraut-rock. It was a time and place that inspired Bowie to create two of his greatest albums (and eventually Lodger, which is still pretty good) that both helped take “pop” music to a whole new place, along with great solo work from Iggy Pop (The Idiot and Lust For Life, both produced and co-written with Bowie). In the almost caricatured portraits by Erickson are a stylized ideal of the artists at work, inspired by this liminal space, the guards posted on the Wall just outside the Hansa studio windows. It is a space where maybe the most emblematic theme in Bowie’s work comes out: love as defiance. “I can remember/Standing, by the wall/And the guns, shot above our heads/And we kissed, as though nothing could fall/And the shame, was on the other side/Oh, we can beat them, forever and ever/Then we could be heroes, just for one day,” as he says in the song “Heroes.”
But now, what does this have to do with a book about race in America? The Bowie character in the book tries to explain to Jasmine why he’s in Berlin and what this new work is all about. “Look, the whole century has been about black and white fucking… New York Jews like Gershwin, Kern, Arlen cumming southern Negro music while Duke Ellington ravishes Nineteenth Century Europeans like Debussy,” he says. Erickson’s use of “Bowie” gets at the heart of another central theme in Bowie’s oeuvre, the embracing and merging of binaries.
This is why I chose the book for my class and why I believe the students responded so well to it. The narrator explains, “Zan began pondering race when he was younger only because he began pondering his country, and knew that it wasn’t possible to understand his country without pondering slavery and it wasn’t possible to understand slavery without pondering race. He considered how his countrymen from Africa were the only ones who didn’t choose to be there; Africans were compelled to come and only once they were made to come did they choose to stay. Did that make them, then, the true owners of the country’s great idea, by virtue of having accepted the country in the face of so many reasons not to? If the country is more an idea than a place then are those who were so compelled its true occupants, given how the country’s promise to them was broken before it was offered?”. This is to support a conversation Zan has about race in America a little earlier where he says, “what the zealot or the ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions—the crusade against gray.”
As this book illustrates, grayness is what Bowie was all about. This AND that. Andro and gyne. Like how gray is both black and white, Bowie was masculine and feminine, straight and gay, artist and pop star (one could be critical and declare that all of this grayness is aspirational and point out that Bowie never escaped being a white, straight male whose aesthetic endeavors were all rooted in privilege and appropriation, but right now I am most certainly here to praise Caesar). Bowie helped destroy binaries by embracing them. His place in Erickson’s wonderful novel helps express this. If you think Erickson might be alone in this sentiment some tangential support might be found in the Acknowledgements of the 2016 novel, Underground Railroad, where Colson Whitehead says, “David Bowie is in every book [of mine].”
It is especially the last duality, Artist and Pop Star, which always excited me most about Bowie. He was legit and fun. Dissertation-worthy and danceable. He was the first side of Low and the second. He was references to Greta Garbo and the Golden Dawn all in one song. Maybe this is what makes David Bowie the quintessential Pop Star to many people. In Low, Wilcken explains how “popular music as it developed in the fifties and sixties turns the cultural paradigm on its head. With pop, postmodernism always came before modernism. Pop culture didn’t actually need any Andy Warhol to make it postmodern. Rock ‘n’ roll was never anything but a faked-up blues—something that the glam-era Bowie had understood perfectly,” and then quoting Brian Eno: “Some people say Bowie is all surface style and second-hand ideas, but that sounds like the definition of pop to me.”
This now brings me back to Critchley’s book in which early on he describes the “inauthenticity” of Bowie. “The ironic self-awareness of the artist and their audience can only be that of their inauthenticity, repeated at increasingly conscious levels.” Bowie clearly understands this as is evidenced in his song “Andy Warhol” off Hunky Dory (1971) in which we find the line, “Andy Warhol, silver screen/Can’t tell them apart at all.” On this topic Critchley continues, “Art’s filthy lesson is inauthenticity all the way down, a series of repetitions and reenactments: fakes that strip away the illusion of reality in which we live and confront us with the reality of illusion;” and, “Bowie’s genius allows us to break the superficial link that seems to connect authenticity to truth.” Finally, after more Heideggerian digressions, he brings it all home with: “In my humble opinion, authenticity is the curse of music from which we need to cure ourselves. Bowie can help. His art is a radically contrived and reflexively away confection of illusion whose fakery is not false, but at the service of a felt corporeal truth.”
I might not have been able to express this better myself and that is why I’m so grateful Critchely did. He and I are of the same world, a world he describes “of people for whom Bowie was the being who permitted a powerful emotional connection and freed them to become some other kind of self, something freer, more queer, more honest, more open, and more exciting.” Critchley also helped me understand that what makes Bowie’s music so successful in reaching people is that what is at its core is a yearning for connection. For all of Bowie’s lyrics about tragic characters, dystopian settings, solitude, and loneliness, there is a romantic notion about the ability of love to triumph in some small way, to make us heroes even, just for one day. The song that ends the album Ziggy Stardust (1972), that ends the eponymous tragic character’s narrative, is called “Rock ‘n’ Roll Suicide” and it sure hit a nerve with me as an angsty teenager. It can still bring a tear to my eye as the pleading bombast of final lyrics (which Critchley writes about in a short chapter titled, “Wonderful”):
Oh no love! You’re not alone
No matter what or who you’ve been
No matter when or where you’ve seen
All the knives seem to lacerate your brain
I’ve had my share I’ll help you with the pain
You’re not alone
Just turn on with me and you’re not alone
Let’s turn on with me and you’re not alone
(wonderful)
Let’s turn on and be not alone (wonderful)
Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful
(wonderful)
Gimme your hands ’cause you’re wonderful
(wonderful)
Oh gimme your hands.
Critchley’s little book is heartfelt and thoughtful. I’ve read it twice now—almost as many times as the other two books—and it is another element in my connection to a great artist that I will never know but always love. What these three books reinforce to me about David Bowie, the thing I take the most away from him after sheer aesthetic pleasure, is a deeply committed artistic discipline. Critchley dwells on the fakeness and inauthenticity of Bowie’s artistry, and while I like what he makes of that philosophically, I’ve always understood this about Bowie to just be professionalism. Bowie wasn’t some bright shooting star of a rocker, burning himself out and dying young, although he did get to experience that with his Ziggy Stardust personae. David Bowie was a consummate artist who mostly worked in the medium of popular music and created great work until the end of his life, a year ago today.
Jordan A. Rothacker is the author of the novella, The Pit, and No Other Stories (Black Hill Press, 2015), and the novel, And Wind Will Wash Away (Deeds, 2016). He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature and a MA in Religion from the University of Georgia. He lives in Athens, Georgia.
“To Make Oneself Understood is Impossible”: Thomas Bernhard Speaks
Jim Knipfel talks to Blast Books’ Laura Lindgren about the publication of Thomas Bernhard: Three Days.
Novelist William Gaddis once said that writers should be read and not heard. For the most part I would agree, but there are rare exceptions—Henry Miller and William Burroughs, say—writers whose voices and personas and free-flowing ideas remain as vital and significant as their published work. Thomas Bernhard fits neatly into that extremely limited category.
Along with Günter Grass, Bernhard remains one of the most monumental figures of postwar German literature. Beginning with On the Mountain in 1959, he published nearly forty novels, plays, and poetry collections before his death in 1989.
In novels like Gargoyles, The Lime Works and Concrete, employing a language at once rich and spare, Bernhard painted unrelentingly bleak and nihilistic portraits of isolation, frustration, and melancholia marked, as in Beckett and Gaddis, by both gallows humor and an intense aversion to traditional storytelling structures. Bernhard was an Austrian who, in Heldenplatz, referred to his home country as a land of “six and a half million retards and maniacs,” and a writer who became a writer only after finding art, music and business too easy. Writing was difficult, it was the only thing that offered any resistance, so that’s the path he followed. As filmmaker Errol Morris puts it, “He wrote in such a way as to undermine the process of writing. The writer with an underlying hatred of writing, as if each word was a stain on the page.”
After some difficult negotiations, in June of 1970 (the same year The Lime Works was published) experimental filmmaker and documentarian Ferry Radax and a small crew followed Bernhard to a park just outside Hamburg. Bernhard was thirty-nine at the time and already well-established as Austria’s greatest living writer. He took a seat on a park bench and, over the course of the next three days, talked about whatever came to mind.
Occasionally prompted by key words provided by Radax, Bernhard’s wide-ranging extemporaneous monologue touches on everything from his childhood, (“I remember still, from that very first school day, a pale boy laid out in the mortuary, a cheesemaker’s son...”) to his work, (“In essence, isn’t such a book nothing but a malignant ulcer, a cancerous tumor?”), to aging, to the inescapably existential human condition.
Radax took the footage and edited it into Three Days (Drei Tage), a fifty-five minute feature for German television. Far more than simply a monologue, Radax’s film was marked by prolonged silences, abrupt blackouts, and cutaways to trees, birds, and shots of the crew setting up. Subtly over the course of the film, the camera draws closer and closer to its subject, ending on a tight close-up. Weaving through it all is Bernhard’s precise and measured voice, at turns irritated, uncomfortable, even occasionally wistful and funny. It’s a deceptively simple and brilliant film, and Bernhard’s monologue, as dark and hopeless as much of it is, is enthralling.
Some forty years after it was made, and over twenty years after Bernhard’s death, Blast Books co-founder and publisher Laura Lindgren caught a screening of Drei Tage at New York’s Anthology Film Archive.
“I could hardly stand up from my chair when the end credits rolled,” Lindgren says. “I instantly thought I need this as a book to read anytime I want to sit down and read it. Everything he says makes absolute sense to me. Some people find it depressing—I don't. His concluding thought is one of the most perfect expressions of a perfect idea I have seen.”
Lindgren, who had also been an instrumental force as managing editor, designer and typesetter of the 2006 centenary corrected edition of Samuel Beckett’s complete works, first became aware of Bernhard through William Gaddis.
“Joseph Tabbi's terrific afterword to Agapé Agape, Gaddis's final book, published in 2002, identified Gaddis's affinity with Bernhard. Gaddis—like Bernhard recognized with awards and yet obscure to most readers—wrote of Bernhard's book Concrete: ‘he's plagiarized my work right here in front of me before I've even written it!’ So I started with Concrete and couldn't stop—The Loser, Gargoyles (which is titled Verstörung in German, which means ‘Deranged’), Amras, Gathering Evidence, My Prizes. There's a distinct kinship between Bernhard, Beckett, and Gaddis: among other things, the pursuit of truth, in all its terrible absurdity.”
Having decided she wanted to turn Three Days into a book forty-five years after it was first broadcast, the question became how to go about it.
“First I contacted Ferry Radax's son, Felix, to propose the book, and originally thought I would use the English subtitles from the DVD issued in 2010. However, film subtitles, written for instantaneous, quick comprehension are not best suited for book publication. Felix told me of the German paperback.”
Unbeknownst to Lindgren at the time of the Anthology screening, German publisher Residenz Verlag had already published the text of Drei Tage as a slim volume, though with no stills and minus the film’s prologue. The German edition, which contained a post-production note by Bernhard about the film, was titled Der Italiener (The Italian), after a short story Bernhard revised to be shot by Radax after completing Three Days.
“So I bought a copy and translated the text, adding the prologue from the film,” Lindgren says. As an afterword, she also translated and revised an essay by Austrian film historian George Vogt, which had originally accompanied the DVD release. “Radax sent me a high-quality German DVD, and I pulled images from the film and designed a sample layout with my translated text. With the sample, Radax and Residenz Verlag could see precisely what I had in mind when I proposed to publish a book of the film in Bernhard and Radax's honor. The head of foreign rights at Residenz in turn sent my sample layout to Bernhard's brother, Dr. Peter Fabjan, executor of Bernhard's estate, for approval. We all came to immediate contractual agreement.
“By the way,” she adds, “I was curious about the book Bernhard has alongside him on the bench in part of the film and looks into now and again. Georg Vogt knew. As a means of triggering thoughts for Bernhard's extemporaneous monologue, Radax had prepared a book with quotes from Bernhard's works thematically arranged. From Radax's archive, Georg supplied images of four pages from the book, which I included with my translations as the book's appendix.”
The translation was central, though not necessarily an easy thing when it comes to someone like Bernhard, a writer who—like Gaddis—had a reputation for being a bit of a stickler over the tiniest details.
“Bernhard certainly was a stickler about the publication of his work,” Lindgren admits. “Radax, too, knew of Bernhard's ability to sustain an argument over a comma... Bernhard basically considered translations to be not his work, but other books in themselves. Of course loss is translation's unshakable companion, but what else have we got if we can't read in multiple languages? Bernhard's works have been translated into English by a variety of translators, and scholars have discussed their successes or shortcomings in getting Bernhard across in English. Bernhard had facility with the imaginative compounding of German words (Wirklichkeitsverachtungsmagister, Menschenwillenverschweiger), but with Three Days, the text is quite conversational. My aim was to keep it feeling natural to the situation of Bernhard sitting on the bench and talking.”
Published by Blast Books in November, the compact finished volume, also designed by Lindgren, is a gorgeous thing which, like Bernhard’s prose, is at once rich and spare. Beyond being a mere movie tie-in, the book is a work of art in itself, which both accentuates and expands the themes and style of Radax’s film. Combining dozens of stills, assorted shades of gray and black, supplementary materials and a text laid out in such a way as to leave the monologue reading at times like a collection of existentialist aphorisms and at others like a prose poem, Lindgren has meticulously crafted a singular and invaluable addition to Bernhard’s English bibliography.
“My model for the book layout was the film itself,” she says. “I designed Three Days in synch with Ferry Radax's vision, in particular his ideas about observing—at times intensely scrutinizing, at times extremely distant from—his uncomfortable and yet astoundingly open subject. With some 160 film frames, the pace of the book reflects the pace of the film. Image and word combine to form a visual-verbal poetic prose. The book is intended as an extension of the collaboration between Bernhard and Radax, a way to slow Three Days down yet further to the stillness of a book, the silent conveyance of ideas and images to the reader.”
It is interesting to consider from this vantage point what Bernhard, a man who (to put it mildly) could be a bit prickly, a man who bought and polished his own tombstone in the months shortly before his death, would have thought about both the film and the book.
“As Bernhard says in the film, ‘To make oneself understood is impossible; it cannot be done.’ No question about that,” Lindgren says. “But Three Days is a powerful attempt to break through the impossible--the film itself is a prime example of Bernhard's ideas about confronting that which one resists, doing that which one wants nothing to do with.
Ferry Radax has spoken and written about Bernhard's reaction to the film. When Radax first showed him the finished work, Bernhard, of course wary, was seated in an adjacent room. From his vantage point, Radax could see only Bernhard's crossed legs and feet. Radax says from the mere swing of Bernhard's foot, he could see that Bernhard's anxiousness dissolved into satisfaction with the result. Radax is very happy with the book, and Bernhard's brother has told me Thomas would be content with it. I can imagine the easy swing of his foot.”
See more about Three Days.
Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.
Still from Happy Birthday, Ed Atkins. 2014. Courtesy the artist.
Stephanie LaCava in Conversation with Ed Atkins
At the end of the summer, Fitzcarraldo Editions released the thick blue A Primer for Cadavers, a selection of British artist Ed Atkins’ writings from 2010 to 2016. While the Berlin-based writer is best known for his videos of computer generated figures spliced to vivid sound cuts, he is very much preoccupied with words.
Atkins sometimes provides texts to accompany his exhibitions. Many of these are included in the book, like “A Tumor (in English)”, once distributed alongside his 2011 Tate Britain show of the same name. Both writing and video often reference the abject or unseen body: a poetic meditation on tumors, for instance, or a CGI severed head bouncing down the stairs. It is perhaps best to let Atkins explain his writing, which seems eerily prophetic in relation to political events of late.
Take the following, from Hammering the Bars, as an example:
X: A Concern Troll.
Stage one is
X phantom limning in whichever web forums.
The masked troll seemingly devoted to the forum’s consensus: a proper apologist, as immoderate as the damnable moderator.
Stage two involves
X’s attempts to sway the group’s action or opinions—
all the while opining on their specific goals—only with professed concerns.
—Stephanie LaCava
STEPHANIE LACAVA: Can you speak to the recent world events and how you see them playing into your practice and point of view? In past conversations, you’ve mentioned The Invisibles, a comic book series with a drug that turns a word into the actual thing it represents, and you said how this is mirrored in the gaming of electronic profiles for impressions that lead to actual events or outcomes.
ED ATKINS: This is vast, right? I mean, to even scrape the surface feels like it requires a heft I’m not sure I can properly muster here… I’ll try a few thoughts. Firstly, there’s the thing I rehearse pretty much constantly in my videos and writing, namely poles of literality and figuration and how they are confused to political or ideological ends—and conversely how they might be used productively. Responsibly, even. So in a lot of my stuff this would directly relate to the disappearing of the material history of an object by the deliberate misapplication of literality for figuration—how calling something “The Cloud” maintains or conjures a fantasy for the express purpose of dematerializing server farms in a puff of pretty clunky figuration: A Cloud. This misuse is similarly likely in the other direction: the figurative for the literal. Like a Render Farm, for example. How it might be super productive to delve into the literal aspects of terms like that in order to better understand or make tangible the intangible world of digital representation, process, etc. The obfuscation in either direction is clearly about creating situations where the use of these things can occur with an impunity afforded by their apprehension as not really existing in our material world—rather in some digital no-place next to desire, fantasy, convenience and money. Obviously, the particulars of what I’m referring to are attached to the digital, but the effective cynical employment of figurative and literal language has been for ideological ends forever. It just seems like the particular ignorance and fantasy that orbits the ways in which we live with, via or in the digital, affords a new kind of virulence to these feints.
Our digital lives feel both more important than they actually are, and weirdly way less impactful—way less culpable than they certainly are. This, surely, is at least partly to do with our lack of understanding about the material conditions of the digital—how it’s constituted—and how it confuses temporal immediacy with material intimacy. Which is, I reckon, a version of the literal/figurative confusion. Certainly so much of what’s been happening—from the coining of various “post-truth” terms, to the rise of so-called populism—feels directly related to the ways in which life becomes increasingly disincorporated in genuinely disturbing ways (the conflict in Syria; bodies floating in the Med), and wholly incorporated in others—and I mean as in the forming of a corporation. But given the subject, you understand my underscoring of an etymological split in that incorporation. Rendering, farming, cutting, capturing, performing—this is a preeminent lexicon for computer generated imagery, but its also almost entirely rooted in material violence. That first slip of linguistic use was enough to eventually vanish the abattoir and the cadaver. Now, as applied to digital process, they are a part of another material evanescence, and on a massive scale.
I suppose this also relates to Grant Morrison’s Key 24 drug, as it appears in his Invisibles comic. That it makes whatever word written on a piece of paper become the real thing. There is perhaps no really reliable way in which one might be able to know what a word means any more. Or what its reality would be in application. This does feel deconstructionist, really—albeit crucially embodied, crucially corporealized in its attachments, its application, if it is to be saliently critical.
SLC: Much of the writing in the new book are from texts given for free in conjunction with exhibitions. Do you see them as explanatory texts or more as a way to prolong engagement with the viewer? Is there an aspect to them that functions based upon the ability to remove the “work” from the space?
EA: Totally. Though this was something more common earlier on. Nowadays the texts have pretty much entered the videos entire—or the videos have become texts. I always wanted things to be more holistic, less discrete, but I couldn’t quite work out how to do it. Or I didn’t quite have the courage to not use the writing as a bolstering or an apologetic thing. Inveigling the work a little further, I thought.
And certainly I wanted people to engage in the work in way that I think I also thought was asking too much. On my part. Giving people a free text—giving people a chunk of the work that they could have and engage with in their own time, felt both generous and demanding. People would hopefully get closer to the work, would allow it up against them in ways that an installation cannot sustain. The texts are certainly not explanatory. If anything, I think of them as extending the condition of the work as something resistant to the explanatory in general. I suppose they have directly engaged with the idea of something explanatory—particularly pieces like “An Introduction to the Work”—though they pointedly refuse to mean in pretty much any coherent way. I suppose I think of the videos and the writings as entirely equivalent to one another.
Still from Warm warm warm Spring Mouths, Ed Atkins. 2013. Courtesy the artist.
SLC: There is a history of artists playing with misspellings—Twombly, Broodthaers. Your device of choice seems to be metaphor. There are also instances of grammatical error. ("“Um, wherever I will go, there I fucking will are am,”) and moments of word play—“digits” for example, as both numbers and figures, code and image—why fixate on metaphor?
EA: Regarding the visualizing of metaphor, the computer generated thing explains this best, I think. I mean, using CGI is to conjure imagery similarly to the way the written word does—from nothing but the imagination and some code, manifest only as image, as fantasy. That’s a forced and convenient rhyme, of course, but the sensation stands, I think.
CGI is capable of a level of realism that approaches proper signs—or at least they function like the real thing. However, their impossible plasticity and their infinite combinatory aspect means that I can make metaphors happen in an imagery that shouldn’t be able to do so. Cartoons have been doing this forever —and it’s the specific satire of caricature that is perhaps the best testament to that. But CGI introduces this crazy realism to the formula, meaning that the manifesting of a metaphor, visually, is super close to the metaphor becoming the real thing: the coming true of anything, really—with that always-already caveated “truth.”
A basic example would be at the end of my video “Ribbons,” where the guy is deflated. Literally: his head deflates. It’s dumb, but because of his empathy, his discomfiting approach, his address, etc, and how they’re predicated on his cleaving to reality, to realism, his deflating is a puncturing of that performance of reality for the sake of metaphoric affect. CGI makes the confusion possible. I guess this directly relates to what I was saying about the literal and the figurative above.
I’m not really aware of fixating on the metaphor. Or rather, isn’t “fixating on the metaphor” simply fixating on the structural? Fixating on the reappearance of language from whatever transparent, solely communicative application it might have been presumed to be able to perform.
Still from Safe Conduct, Ed Atkins. 2016. Courtesy the artist.
SLC: When you say “And the truth of metaphor being that it too much emphasizes a community of sameness.” Is this a nod to that recognition that occurs between a reader and a work (often of fiction) that endears them to the page?
EA: The “community of sameness” line is a quote, I think. Though from what, I can’t recall. I suppose I used it to mean the problems of determinism or determined coherence as regards understanding the Other is still very much present in as apparently poetic and potentially “free” a thing as metaphor. That it relies on a consensus as much any kind of literalism. More so, really, as what it occludes or negates is the thing that we have to rely on as our point of understanding. It’s certainly a way to hopefully engage the viewer, to rely on their understanding of what I mean (like the rhetorical appeal in conversation: “do you know what I mean?”) in order to move on, but also as way to create community between us—even if that community is perhaps dangerously a community of samenesses.
SLC: There’s aways talk of Gothic literature and Lacanian nods in reference to your work, wondering where Freud’s Uncanny comes into play? Do you have any special affinity in ETA Hoffmann’s Sandman story? (Also, what about Gabrielle Wittkop?)
EA: I guess there’s some pretty obvious, overt nods to Freud’s Uncanny and his reading of Hoffmann. The avatar, the heretical anima in the non-living. The not-quite human. These are a huge part of the affective aspects of my work. Gothic literature in general, I suppose. Horror, certainly—and genre more generally, of which I would say gothic horror is the preeminent example.
To engage with genre structurally is, I think, to engage with horror, insofar as genre’s movement is attached to presumed understanding—to go back to some instinctive, antediluvian sense of what we are and what we might presume our responses to be, surely horror most accurately describes what those presumed reactions are.
Right up to horror cinema, which is so terrifyingly legible, which- relies so heavily on its legibility. It’s something all my stuff flirts with, predominantly in order to undermine that very presumption, that formula. I can’t say I’ve every read any Wittkop—which I guess I should find shameful. Will rectify: have just placed an order for what is tantalizingly titled, The Necrophiliac. I would say that the Gothic might be an unavoidable style if you’re going to deal in corpses as regularly as I do. Fantasizing around the dead will render the gothic, no?
SLC: How much does Beckett come into play? I’m not sure I’ve ever read this confirmed, but the title Even Pricks—is that a nod too? What about the non-linear narratives of Alain Robbe Grillet (and his commentary on the collaborative nature of film)? John Barth? Does Mallarmé factor in at all—his name comes up time and time again among visual artists.
EA: Beckett, sure—how could it not?—though perhaps less explicitly or deliberately than I should admit. Even Pricks is certainly tonally a nod—though I’d like to think more broadly, to a kind of bathetic confusion Beckett would afford, but so would a lot of those later pomo americans, who certainly had a more immediate and steeling effect on me.
Barthelme is the big one, and so I suppose I kind of went backwards from there. Robbe Grillet, certainly—though I prefer the harder-core. Guyotat, Klossowski, Artaud. Mallarmé, yes, though not really worth going there, considering both your tired tone around his cropping up with artists, and the fact that he crops up with artists all the time!
SLC: And lastly, you’ve talked before about how there is not the primacy of say, drawing in writing, you are able to go back and edit. I’d love to hear more on this. You’ve also mentioned taking time to write a novel. Why continue to make visual art and not turn to literature full time?
EA: Do I have to choose? Probably. I’m almost entirely certain the whole threat of a novel thing is bollocks. I don’t think I mean it. At least in any conventional sense: I can scarcely write a sentence without getting mired in it, totally absorbed by it. Why a novel, then? I do know that I’d like more time to write solely. I continue to make visual art because I really enjoy it. And it’s a place (more than anything else, I increasingly think) that affords so much more possibility than any other. Why choose when I can keep smooshing shit together into tighter, weirder objects to be concurrently read, looked at, heard, felt.
I used to hardly edit the writing or the videos. Rather I’d generate what felt like fragments but which were actually whole: created that way. Sentences that feel like abbreviations of things, broken versions of things that once made sense, are actually broken from birth. Now I do edit a little more, though seldom for a reason that makes much sense outside of my own dim sensations. Edits that excise the sensible, mostly.
SLC: What are you reading now?
EA: I’ve recently read and enjoyed and felt and felt affinities of all kings with Linda Stupart’s first book of spells and misandry, Virus. Ian White’s collected writings, Here Is Information. Mobilize. Lots of Laura (Riding) Jackson, and I’d never read, amazingly, Edward Dorn or Geoffrey Hill until this year. Steven Zultanski’s Cop Kisser. Colette Thomas’ The Testament of the Dead Daughter. Theweleit’s Male Fantasies is sitting here begging to upheave shit. I dunno. Keston Sutherland’s circled back round—and Joe Luna is a constant. I did get a lot out of Seth Price’s Fuck Seth Price, though I’m not sure what I’ve ended up with. Sort of exhausted, I think. Jon Leon! Which was recommended by the anonymous lovelie(s) who write Contemporary Art Writing Daily, which is so so so good and renewed lots of things for me.
Still from Hisser, Ed Atkins. 2015. Courtesy the artist.
Read Part 1: A Conversation with Seth Price
Read Part 2: A Conversation with Paul Chan
Read Part 3: A Conversation with Alissa Bennett
Stephanie LaCava is an author and journalist living in New York City.
If you were able to spend 2016 immersed completely in the world of books, I genuinely envy you. As for myself, I think asking for words on paper to make up for the general horribleness of so much of the rest of lived experience might be putting too much pressure on them. It takes great concentration to impose sense on horizontal lines of text when sense seems to be seeping out all around you. And even if you manage, for an afternoon, to forget about reality in the space of two covers, you’ll look up from the last page and remember that reality has not forgotten about you. And so what, to quote Missing Persons, are words for when no one listens anymore? The answer depends on what you’re reading. At the end of the day, books are the only available technology capable of transmitting our dreams to one another as repackaged realnesses, each one an option for what another life might look like, a satellite porthole onto the orbital planetoids known as other people. Below are fifteen model worlds worth aspiring to and what they offer is not escape from the present, but a novel interface with it. The world of books is our world.
—JW McCormack
The Revolutionaries Try Again by Mauro Javier Cardenas (Coffee House Press)
The best book of the year and the reason this list exists is also proof that James Joyce is alive and well and splitting his time between Ecuador and the Bay Area. The revolutionaries of the title are a collection of ex-students, devastated by their fractious adulthoods, who reunite to take advantage of their home country’s vulnerable government. The opening image of a lighting bolt striking a pay phone is the ideal set-up for the following series of collisions between English and Spanish, thought and expression, the social and the personal, prose and poetry, finding wholeness in fragmentation until the reader is completely attuned to a style as perfectly realized as it is unique in all fiction. The Revolutionaries Try Again is such a wonder of composition that its very existence is an argument for literary consciousness as ongoing experiment.
The Babysitter At Rest by Jen George (Dorothy, a publishing project)
This collection of art brut short stories is a primer on what it feels like to be young and desperate, even if the stories themselves move between surreal encounters with phantom lovers and pornographic phantasmagorias set in schools and hospitals, where the institutional air acquires a certain porousness. Every young writer reckons on some level with the contemporary atmosphere of minimal employment, isolating education, the impossibility of privacy and the ubiquity of etiquette; George’s method is to pump everything full of helium until the ridiculousness of it all is laid giddily bare.
Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte (William Morrow)
Quite simply, a book it seems just about everyone would like to find in the glove box of a rental, stuffed into a time capsule or dog-eared in a bus station. Devious is the mind that fails to identify with this lucid novel of contemporary Americana, which follows four millennials through the post-University wilderness of protests, start-ups, and web porn. For all its force as painfully-recognizable panorama, Private Citizens is also a savvy rejoinder to the treatment this latest, shat-upon generation has received from their elders; Tulathimutte initially assigns each of his leads a type, daring us to mistake them for updated Breakfast Club cartoons, only to delve into their deeply-rooted pathologies, romantic misfires and the panicked sojourns into degradation that pass for day jobs. The result is a lively set of misadventures populated with a cast possessed of a rare humanity, acquired at enormous cost.
The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay (Melville House)
Less on-the-surface experimental than some of titles on this list, Mirror Thief is the year’s best hefty, character-driven novel-qua-novel, with chase scenes, mysterious strangers and spies whose intrigues span roughly four hundred years. We begin in 2003 with an Iraq War veteran tracking a mysterious gambler through a Las Vegas casino, then cut to West Coast beatniks on the verge of a mid-century mystery whose true nature is disclosed in Sixteenth-Century Venice. Erudite and action-packed, Seay’s novel is a yarn for all time that stacks up handsomely beside the likes of Jorge Luis Borges or Robert Louis Stevenson.
Dating Tips for the Unemployed by Iris Smyles (Mariner Books)
The title isn’t just a cuteness, this is a practical book for impractical people. In this chronicle of one woman’s navigation through the creeping normalnesses of 21st century life, you will find helpful tips like “Never date someone more or less miserable than you,” translations of party talk, and ideas for board games amid advertisements for home courses in snake handling, dream interpretation guides, and a novelization of Weekend at Bernie’s 2. And yet, there’s so much more than novelty at the heart of Dating Tips, which is ultimately a classical reckoning with modern love and a sure way to turn a disappointing day around or find solitary delight while fully clothed.
Trysting by Emmanuelle Pagano, tr. by Jennifer Higgins and Sophie Lewis (Two Lines Press)
Pagano's first book in English contrasts different vignettes, none of them related by scene or character. Like the books of Marguerite Duras or Maggie Nelson, each fragment builds upon the other, managing to paint a picture of every single stage of being in love. These vignettes range from a couple of sentences to about a page, and reveal love in all its guises. A woman is woken from her sleep every night by her partner coming to bed. A man searches for his lover for years, only to find her featured in a documentary, still beautiful, though filthy. Another woman spends her life plucking hairs from her husband's back. These moments are dazzling in their personal specificity, and together they create a universal experience of love, one in which you can simultaneously witness every relationship you have ever had, those you have witnessed from the sidelines, and all those loves you have only imagined and have been lost from their very conception.
Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada, tr. Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
The story of one writer’s Eastern Bloc beginnings and the struggle of two generations of her progeny and, yes, they are polar bears. What could have been frivolous in the hands of another writer acquires poise and implication, as German-language writer Tawada is deadly serious on the subject of the daily toil of the circus, labor movements, interspecies love and the thrill of invention. Central to the story are the intricate routines that the polar bears enact before their big top audiences, which seems an argument for insisting on one’s own peculiarity in the shadow of strict accord.
The Vegetarian by Han King, tr. Deborah Smith (Hogarth)
A novel of male domination, starvation and madness, The Vegetarian is a nightmare in three parts. First there is Yeong-Hye’s husband, who responds to her decision to give up meat with violence, then there is Yeong-Hye’s video artist brother in law, who enlists her in a pornographic fantasy, and finally Yeong-Hye’s embattled sister. The clipped tone is studiously unsentimental, the frailty of the characters beautifully rendered, as though weakness and insanity were themselves a rebuff to society’s emphasis on strength and unity. This is a pitch black book—I’m pleasantly surprised by its popularity—and one that makes Lars Van Trier look like Frank Capra. The most salient critique on structural power to appear in years.
Madeleine E. by Gabriel Blackwell (Outpost19)
A unique, curvilinear collage of texts found and imagined, Madeleine E., circles Hitchcockian themes of doubled identity and filmic consciousness, alighting on everything from Slavok Zizek and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Crack-Up” to Francois Truffaut and Kim Novak along the way. It’s also a biography-in-fragments that fingers the cracks in its own composition and emerges with a unique form that’s neither quite fiction, essay, or film critique but partakes of the pleasures of all three. Blackwell takes his cues from David Markus in his configuration of a mind by annotation of its influences, but pushes the envelope of the medium even more by suggesting that a person is that imposter we glimpse between the scenes.
Infidels by Abdellah Taïa, tr. Alison L. Strayer (Seven Stories Press)
The latest from prolific writer/filmmaker Taïa is the story of young Jallal who grows up in the Morocco underworld under the tutelage of his mother, Slima, who is both a prostitute and a saintly mystic. In alternating, largely dialogue-driven chapters, mother and son navigate the cruelty of their surroundings through a mélange of Arab pop music, Marilyn Monroe, and the promise of heaven. Jallal eventually falls in love with Mouad, a Belgian convert to militant Islam whose secrets lead Jallal and Slima both to salvation and destruction. Revolutionary for both in terms of content and the circumstances of its composition (homosexuality is a crime in Morocco), Infidels is a much larger on the inside than its slim page count would seem to suggest.
Gesell Dome by Guillermo Saccomanno, tr. Andrea G. Labinger (Open Letter)
The seedy double life of an Argentinian resort town is depicted in snaking storylines in this noir masterpiece, which reads not unlike Twin Peaks by way of Roberto Bolaño. Opening with the outbreak of a kindergarten sex scandal and getting darker from there, Gesell Dome shows us a criminal government, a captive press, and an economy based on blackmail and fear mongering. For all its strength as a microcosm of failed statehood, it is the characters who make this 600+ page book a speedy read, including a cursed painter, a Pilates-obsessed crime wife, a supposed Nazi diaspora and a monster lurking in the forest. What more could you want?
John Aubrey, My Own Life by Ruth Scurr (NYRB Classics)
A towering whatsit of a book, John Aubrey, My Own Life is a biography of Aubrey—a founding English eccentric and collector who pioneered the form in his portraits of eminent friends—which takes the form of a diary by the writer himself, each entry traceable to a primary document, be it a letter, bulletin, or Aubrey’s own work in the natural sciences. This allows Scurr to channel her research into a full-scale recreation of Aubrey’s life and times that is as vivid a rendering of Cromwellian London as seems possible. Imagination and scholarship, as well as supplementary drawings, arrange the past into an elegant mosaic that also manages to overflow the boundaries of what a book can be.
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead Books)
Pond is a quiet book. A woman goes to live in a cottage in rural Ireland, and nothing much happens, yet everything is strange. In Bennett's work, you experience the defamiliarization of eating bananas for breakfast. The narrator wants to throw away her freshly-cooked stir fry into the garbage. The banalities not only work but become something strange and full of wonder. Bennett's writing is steeped in Lydia Davis and has the wit and bleakness of Beckett. Outside the narrator's cottage the Irish countryside reflects and reifies her loneliness. Over the course of the novel-in-stories, the narrator comes gently undone.
The Knack of Doing by Jeremy Davies (David R. Godine & Black Sparrow)
What do Kurt Vonnegut, sad white people, the Rosenbergs' executioner, and a hypercube all have in common? I don't know. But Jeremy Davies does. The stories in this collection run the gamut of Davies' incredible and hyperliterate imagination, and are a reminder that being playful is of great importance to our humanity. Reader beware, these stories are a deadly serious labryinth of fun.
The Natural Way of Things by Charlotte Wood (Europa Editions)
A group of girls are captured and imprisoned deep in the Australian desert, as punishment for unruly behavior and their sexuality. Gradually we learn that they have all been involved with powerful men in some way, and are now forgotten by the company that's imprisoned them, the playthings of their ever-more deranged jailers. Exploring what it means to hunt and be hunted, this book is vicious and prescient and astonishingly visceral. The Natural Way Of Things resonates with you long after you've read the final pages. A Handmaid's Tale for end times, this is an important book about contemporary femininity.
A group of Native Americans approach Alcatraz Island with the aim of reclaiming it from the U.S. government in 1969. (Ralph Crane/Getty)
By Jim Knipfel
In March of 1963, Alcatraz Prison in San Francisco Bay was closed down, and the few prisoners who still remained were transferred to other facilities. As per standard operating procedure, the following year the island, which housed the former penitentiary, was declared surplus federal property. According to the Treaty of Fort Laramie, signed in 1868 between the federal government and the Lakota Indians, all retired or abandoned federal lands were to revert back to the native peoples from whom they had been stolen. Apart from the members of a group calling itself Indians of All Tribes, or IOAT, very few people seemed to remember this.
Although a handful of Native American activists made attempts to reclaim the island in the years after it was declared surplus property, nobody paid much attention. Then in November of 1969, eighty-nine members of IOAT took up residence on the barren and rocky island, declaring it their own in an effort to call attention to the shabby treatment Native Americans had received at the hands of the U.S. Government. The occupation lasted some nineteen months, until June of 1971, and received a great deal of publicity.
The Alcatraz occupation was just one of several actions undertaken around the same time by what was known as the Red Power Movement, though most of it was concentrated on the West Coast. The targets of the assorted occupations were, without fail, either government office buildings (like the Department of Indian Affairs) or historic sites with a darkly ironic significance to Native Americans (like Wounded Knee and Mount Rushmore).
On the East Coast, Ellis Island ceased operations as an immigrant checkpoint and detention center in 1954. It, too, was soon declared surplus federal property. Over the next decade the island moldered; its neglected and unattended buildings fell into ruin. Then in 1965, President Lyndon Johnson linked the island together with the Statue of Liberty, placing it under the stewardship of the National Parks Service. The declaration didn’t help much. Although several plans for revamping Ellis Island were drafted, most were shelved as there were simply too many other things going on at the time. The only thing that changed was the arrival of a single Parks Department security guard, who was supposed to patrol the island a few hours every day.
Noting this situation, inspired by the events on Alcatraz, and frustrated by the lack of Red Power activity on the East Coast (where arguably Native Americans had it far worse than those on the West Coast), thirty-eight members representing over a dozen local tribes decided to occupy the island themselves to call attention to their plight and forward a few demands.
Like Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills, Ellis Island was an appropriately ironic target, as from a Native American perspective it essentially represented a welcoming gateway for the foreign invaders who stole the country from them. As symbols go, it would be much more powerful than Alcatraz, as soon as most Americans were reminded what Ellis Island was.
At about 5:30 on the morning of March 13th, 1970, the protesters gathered on the docks in Jersey City. As the rest waited on shore, eight activists, the first wave of the planned occupation force, climbed into a boat and headed for the island. A press release was sent to the media announcing the action, and soon local news broadcasts were reporting the protesters had landed on the island.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t. The boat’s engine had stalled thanks to a leaky gas line, and those first eight would-be occupiers were left adrift in the channel. Meanwhile, the National Parks Service, who only learned what was happening on Ellis Island thanks to those news broadcasts, got in touch with the Coast Guard, who sent out two patrol boats to safeguard the island’s perimeter, and that was pretty much that. No arrests were made, as no one actually landed on the island.
Afterward, John White Fox, a Shoshone Indian from Wyoming who helped plan and organize the attempted occupation, held a news conference in which he demanded a Native American cultural center be created on the island. He also demanded an end to pollution. He was about as successful as the occupation itself.
Even before the attempted Red Power occupation, Dr. Thomas W. Matthew, the nation’s first black neurosurgeon and chairman of the National Economic Growth and Reconstruction Organization, or NEGRO for short, was already in talks with President Nixon to let his group move onto Ellis Island. He proposed his group would repair and refurbish the buildings for use as home to a self-sufficient black community. The island would also offer rehab facilities for drug addicts. Matthew’s NEGRO had received a good deal of national press in the late 60s for its assorted venture capital endeavors, and despite the socially conscious plan he’d laid out for Nixon, his ultimate goal was to transform Ellis Island into a decidedly for-profit spawning ground for young black entrepreneurs.
Although Nixon never officially signed off on the plan, a few months after the abortive Native American occupation, Matthew and a few dozen supporters snuck onto the island and set up shop as if he had. A few weeks later, with no interference from the Coast Guard or Parks Service, everyone just assumed he had the right to be there and let him be.
Matthew and his group did some minor work toward rehabilitating the island, making assorted small repairs on a couple of the buildings and clearing away some brush, but conditions remained primitive, and the numbers on the island began dwindling quickly. The winter took a further toll on the occupiers, and by the autumn of 1971, the tiny handful remaining gave up and went home. In 1974, representatives of the National Parks Service would report it seemed Matthew and NEGRO had done little if anything to make improvements to the island. In 1973 Matthew himself, who had a checkered criminal history (mostly for assorted financial improprieties) was convicted on federal Medicaid fraud charges. He would insist to the end he had done little wrong, and was the target of a character assassination plot spearheaded by the Nixon administration.
Only a few weeks after the last of Matthew’s supporters vacated the island, still a third group of disenfranchised Americans took their fight across the channel to an even more symbolic (and easily defensible) site. If you have a beef with what you see as the federal governments failure to promote the blessings of liberty, where else can you go?
On December 26th, 1971, the same day similar protests and occupations were held around the country, fifteen members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) occupied and barricaded themselves inside the Statue of Liberty in order to protest America’s continued efforts in the war in Southeast Asia. Occupiers flew an American flag upside down from the statue’s crown and posted a note on the door directed at President Nixon, stating they would leave when he provided a specific date on which American efforts in Vietnam would cease.
While most of the other similar protests around the country that day lasted only a few hours, the VVAW occupation of the statue went on for two days. When a court order was delivered insisting they vacate the premises, they did so peacefully. Unlike the Native American and African American efforts, the VVAW protest was not only high-profile, the protesters themselves received a good deal of public support for their actions and intent.
Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1976. (Courtesy of VVAW Inc)
The Statue of Liberty occupation was considered such a success another group of VVAW protesters returned and occupied it yet again on June 6th, 1976, this time to call attention to the plight of Vietnam vets following the end of the war. But the mood of the nation had changed, and sympathy was harder to come by. They were all quickly arrested by Parks Department police.
In 1977, a group of Iranian activists briefly took control of the statue in order to protest the Shah’s long and bloody record of human rights violations, as well as the US government’s continued support of the Shah’s regime. A few months after the Iranians were booted out, 29 members of the New York Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Nationalist Prisoners infiltrated the statue and hung a Puerto Rican flag from the crown. Among other things, they demanded Puerto Rican independence, immediate pardons for all political prisoners being held in Puerto Rico, and an immediate end to all discrimination against Puerto Ricans in the United States. After eight hours, the Parks police stormed the building and arrested them.
Perhaps noting that however peaceful they had all been, six occupations (or attempted occupations) over a seven year span was a bit excessive, in 1981 the National Parks Service finally got down to fundraising in earnest to regain legitimate control of both Ellis and Liberty Islands. The plan was to transform Ellis Island into a tourist attraction and refurbish the Statue of Liberty (including improved security measures) before its 1986 centennial. A cleaned up and revitalized Ellis Island, complete with museums, historic reconstructions, and several gift shops, officially opened to tourists in 1990. No one has tried to occupy it since, and now that it’s back in business as a National Monument, Native Americans no longer have any claim on it.
Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.
Go Forth is a series that offers a look into the publishing industry and contemporary small-press literature. See more of the series.
An Interview with D. Foy
I read and loved D. Foy’s novel Made to Break a couple of years ago when Two Dollar Radio published it. His new novel is Patricide, just out from Stalking Horse Press. His work has appeared in Guernica, Literary Hub, Salon, Hazlitt, Post Road, Electric Literature, BOMB, The Literary Review, Midnight Breakfast, The Scofield, and The Georgia Review, among other places, and has been included in the books Laundromat, A Moment’s Notice, and Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial. I recently talked to D. Foy about Patricide.
—Brandon Hobson
BRANDON HOBSON: In the opening chapter of Patricide, "Sleep," the narrator tells us: "I was ten years old, and I was stoned." I was drawn to the childhood scenes of Rice's struggle with family, with peers and life itself. What inspired you to write such a damaged but likable young character?
D. FOY: I think it’s safe to say that not all, but a good portion of today’s fiction emphasizes the question of “what” as opposed to the questions of “how” and “why.” Just about everywhere I look, in course descriptions, workshops, essays, and interviews with authors and editors, writers are encouraged to focus, first, on character, and, second, through character, on conflict, as expressed in their actions, as opposed to their feelings and thoughts. Honestly, I find this as astonishing as I find it baffling. It doesn’t make sense to me that readers wouldn’t be interested in the workings of the human mind. And yet, obviously, since most readers aren’t, this must say more about me than it does about them. Most readers, actually—what’s left of them, anyway—aren’t concerned to enter into the consciousness of a character to see what motivates them, and, more, why and how. Instead they want to escape themselves by living vicariously through another person’s generally unexamined actions.
While I have to confess that the dirtiest of my little secrets is that I space out by watching sci-fi, fantasy, thriller, and action TV and films—I wait, for instance, for a season of Game of Thrones to close, then buy it on iTunes and binge watch the crap out of it for two days tops—in my work, and in life, too, I suppose, I’m interested in how the forces that play on people in their youth ramify through the rest of their lives. Probably this obsession explains my proclivity to trash when I’m not engaged in the obsessions themselves. In any case, I’m interested, in why and how people become who they are, in the moments that affect them so profoundly that they affect just as profoundly everything they do going forward, and, from there, how they process these events.
So a boy who becomes a drug addict when he’s ten years old is fascinating to me. Why does he become an addict, and how? And how does his dependence affect him as he moves through adolescence into adulthood? What sorts of decisions does he make, what sorts of people does he fall in with, and how does the rest of the world see and treat him? Is such a person able to surmount the difficulties in which his circumstances inevitably engulf him, or is he destined to the state of apathy—avoidance and denial—with which a human can’t do more than fail at everything he touches? I imagine what makes Rice likeable for some is that to whatever degree, they can identify with him—more with his psychology, his thoughts and feelings about his circumstances than with the circumstances themselves.
BH: I really like the way you structured this novel, employing various point-of-views with chapter titles that, in a way, make this book feel like a series of connected stories. Can you talk specifically about this structure?
DF: The structure of Patricide is the structure of a tornado. Though I didn’t set out with this image in mind, it didn’t take long to see. I’ve talked elsewhere about a principle I could almost say describes everything I do artistically: the work will show you how to do it. In this book, at first, in any case, my protagonist Rice was confronted with his father and everything that makes his father who and what he is. But once the writing deepened, the further into the work I got, I began to consider the uber-matrix in which our fathers are molded. What is the father? How is it he’s become the figure of power and fear he is? What is patriarchy? How does the patriarchy maintain dominance and control, and how and why does its influence pervade every aspect of our society and culture? Things like this.
The answers made it clear that I wasn’t simply treating a father/son relationship, but also a Father/World relationship. There’s the father in Patricide, but there’s also The Father, which is both every father ever and every thing that makes the world what it is today—our customs, codes, morals, laws, ideologies, rituals, taboos, and on—everything, everything, not one thread of which isn’t of and by and controlled by the patriarchy. So between Rice’s father and The Father that’s the system from which both Rice and his father emerge, I was challenged to wrestle an entity of universally colossal proportions. And the only way I could see to have a chance in this contest was to employ every tool I have in my box from every possible vantage. In other words, I had to circle around this father/Father figure in way that circled back on itself even as it moved inexorably forward. It didn’t matter that I’d set myself to a job I didn’t know how to do. The job itself, and the work of it, showed me the way.
BH: I've had more than my share of experiencing tornadoes in my life, so I know how violent they can be, then calm, then erupting again into chaos all while following a very straight path. Is this what you mean?
DF: That description is one aspect of the structure, for sure. Growing up in California, I’ve experienced some hardcore earthquakes, though, unlike you, I’m lucky enough never to have weathered a tornado. I just know how they work. Another characteristic of tornados, the one that interested me most, I think, and which is the structure’s foundation, as it were, is that they work according to the principle of a vortex. They spin from without to within, laying waste to everything in their path, none of which anyone knows when it will be taken. Nothing in a tornado’s path can escape, either. Once the tornado scoops it up, it can’t do anything but what the vortex says. What’s more, it’s constantly cycling back to ground it’s already razed, even as it moves along an arc that’s more or less random. There’s more, too, stuff I’ve addressed elsewhere, so I hope you won’t mind that I plagiarize myself! The book’s structure and approach, I said, are at once a reflection of the devastation of The Father and an act of patricide. They use the patriarchal framework within which the novel has until now largely been created to destroy that framework. The Father’s way is The Father’s death.
BH: While the first person scenes with Rice feel emotionally close to the reader, there are third person scenes as well as character names (the father, the mother, for instance) that seem to convey a distance for Rice. The balance works very well. Can you speak to this balance between closeness and distance?
DF: I don’t think you’d disagree when I say this book is emotionally fraught. That, actually, would be close to grotesque understatement. Again, the work showed me what to do. The scenes narrated in first person are those that, typically, Rice tells from the distance of memory—moments and events he’s exploring retrospectively. They’re intimate in the sense that he treats them directly. And regardless of how personally intense they may be, the buffer that is the space between Rice’s telling of the events and the time of the events themselves enable the reader to absorb the telling. The opposite is true, frequently enough, of those passages that are narrated from the perspective of a tight third person. Many parts of Rice’s story verge toward what Judith Herman calls the “unspeakable.” Had Rice narrated these experiences first hand, it seems to me, the reader herself would’ve been forced too unbearably close. She couldn’t handle these moments any more than Rice could. Such events would literally asphyxiate a reader. This is in part why they’re unspeakable. They steal the breath we need to speak them. The space between the telling and the perspective of the telling provided by the remove from first person to third person gives the reader the space they need to breathe. Without that space, they’d collapse, figuratively, in the least.
As for how names work in the book, you’ll notice that the only characters without proper names are those in Rice’s family. This isn’t about anonymity per se, but, as you noted, about the actual distance such anonymity creates. Rice doesn’t call the people in his family by name because he’s always felt disastrously remote from them. These characters aren’t so much people to him as constructs, products of the systems I was just describing. But it’s also his way of creating the space he needs to see them clearly. Names have a lot of power. Names can imbue their objects with power, just as they can divest them of that power, to the point of powerlessness. In other words, in the same way that sex clouds, so do names. They’re nothing if not nebulous, right? Rice knows this. Or rather he’s learned it over time. In his refusal to name the people in his family, he’s divested them of the murk within which they act. Nameless, the people in his family stand out in the relief that’s vital to Rice’s seeing them as he must if he’s to understand not just them but, more importantly, himself as a product of them.
BH: Was there any specific book that influenced this one?
DF: Not a specific book. I did read a shitload of stuff about time and memory and language and writing, though, by way of constructing a thesis of sorts about how they’re inextricably entwined. That’s the stuff I struck almost entirely from the book. It was a lot!
BH: What are you reading right now? What books are you excited about?
DF: I had a really, really bad year-and-half that didn’t quit till the end of last spring, a time during which I’m almost ashamed to say I read next to nothing. It took a bit to get back in the swing of things, but I’m more or less in it now, which means I’m reading maybe fifteen books at once. I just reread Sōkō Morinaga’s Novice to Master and the Tao Te Ching while swinging with Wendy C. Ortiz’s Excavation and one of yours, Desolation of Avenues Untold. I read Jeff Jackson’s new novella, Novi Sad, Mark de Silva’s Square Wave, Annie DeWitt’s White Nights in Split Town City, Elizabeth Crane’s The History of Everything, and Matt Bialer’s epic poem about Bigfoot, Distant Shores. Also, László Krasznahorkai’s Seibo There Below and Satantango, and Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick. I’m writing an essay about Kraus’s book, in fact. It’s incredible. Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan quartet is in the mix, too, and so is John Domini’s Movieola! I also finished Zoe Dzunko’s chapbook of poetry, Selfless, which is really fantastic. Next to Natalie Eilbert—whose press Atlas, not incidentally, published Dzunko—she’s probably the first poet in a while that’s supercharged me. There’s more, but I can’t recall them now here in this café. All I know is that my to-be-read pile is plural, as in piles, what I call hoodoos and fire hazards by turns. It’s comforting to know there’s so much good stuff out there, but it’s also a reason for anxiety. Choosing a single book to read entails a decision, which I somehow find stressful. Maybe it’s because so many of the books are by people I know? But oh well! I’m reading me some books.
Brandon Hobson is the author of Deep Ellum and Desolation of Avenues Untold. His work has appeared in The Believer, The Pushcart Prize XL, Conjunctions, NOON, The Paris Review Daily, Post Road, and elsewhere. He can be found at http://brandonhobson.com
WARNING: This interview was conducted in late 2014 and concerns Kool A.D.'s novel Not OK, which at the time was known as O.K., but is now the unpublished prequel to OK, which is just out from Sorry House. If you are the type of reader who prefers interviews about published books rather than those about unpublished prequels, you are advised to pursue other interviews.
An Interview with KOOL A.D.
KOOL A.D.’s debut novel, O.K., is reminiscent of the drawings of visual artist KOOL A.D. as well as of the music of rap artist KOOL A.D. If you don’t know, you better ask somebody. If you’re asking me, I’ll tell you what’s distinctive about the work of KOOL A.D., no matter the medium, is its eclectic and idiosyncratic melange of people, images, sounds, ideas, and references. His source materials are as broad as you could hope and the consciousness he filters them through is witty, playful, political, subversive, and deeply intelligent.
If you’re someone who has been waiting for the novel in which Anne Carson appears “in a pink velour FUBU tracksuit sniffing poppers,” your wait is over. If you’ve been looking for a book in which large reptiles are taxis, O.K. is also that book. Celebrities you’re not sure if you’ve heard of on Hunter Thompson-drug binges channeling theorists you haven’t read? Plenty of that.
The novel is as fluid as its narrator, who metamorphoses (a la Kafka’s Gregor) into LL Cool J, Steve Buscemi, Donald Duck, and many others, or more often combinations thereof. It flattens any neat distinctions between fantasy/reality, online/offline, thought/action, exposition/plot, intoxication/soberness, and perhaps most fundamentally dreaming/waking. There is no way to read it but to jump in and move with the dream-logic. For this reason, I found Chuang Tzu, of the philosophers invoked in the novel, the most helpful, in particular his butterfly dream, after which “he didn’t know if he was Chuang Chou who had dreamt he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Chou.” Subjectivity in O.K. is a function of environment, needs and desires, and the present moment. The notion of stable identity over time doesn’t begin to obtain.
While the shifting self is culturally produced from our everyday world and the book is therefore of pop culture, it isn’t for it. Rather, it sucks up the textures and personalities of pop, de- and recontextualizes them, subverts their cliches, and empties them of signification. Justin Bieber is Adorno is Tupac’s hologram. If Reality Hunger were a recipe, O.K. would be its cake. You can have yours and eat it too.
We conducted this interview over email. I used my computer. He used his phone.
—Scott Parker
THE BELIEVER: Tell me, is everything O.K.? Is the moon?
KOOL A.D.: Everything is not O.K. A lot of cops shooting black kids and getting away with it and I guess it's nothing new but things seem to have reached a spectacularly terrifying boiling point right now. Israel seems particularly fucked up as of late too. Afghanistan and Iraq don't seem like they're doing so well either. Mexico has been going through some shit. Ozone layer seems fucked. Peak Oil, deforestation, polluted oceans, pharmaceutical monopolies, massive corporate tax evasion/bank fraud/general fuckery, record-breaking incarceration rates, truly insane economic disparity, a global atmosphere of paranoia and xenophobia, Militarized Prison Industrial Complex in full effect, etc. Which isn't to say there aren't some things that are O.K. This book is I guess mostly concerned with rooting out a reason to live despite all of this, looking for the occasional O.K. moment to be found in a world of suffering. And I mean, on an extra "grand scheme of things" level we're all a tiny speck in a vast essentially infinite universe and someday we'll all be dead, so like in that sense I guess you could say everything is O.K., but I guess in that sense you could say anything. Moon seems pretty O.K.
BLVR: When Hui Tzu asked Chuang Tzu how he could sing after his wife’s death, he answered: “When she first died, do you think I didn’t grieve like anyone else? But I looked back to her beginning and the time before she was born. Not only the time before she was born, but the time before she had a body. Not only the time before she had a body, but the time before she had a spirit. In the midst of the jumble of wonder and mystery a change took place and she had a spirit. Another change and she had a body. Another change and she was born. Now there’s been another change and she’s dead. It’s just like the progression of the four seasons, spring, summer, fall, winter.
“Now she’s going to lie down peacefully in a vast room. If I were to follow after her bawling and sobbing, it would show that I don’t understand anything about fate. So I stopped.”
Question would be something like: Is it too early to understand fate?
KOOL A.D.: Yes.
BLVR: Last summer I saw you perform with Run the Jewels. Killer Mike has gained a bit of a national presence lately as one of the smartest people speaking on Ferguson. What was he like to work with, tour with, talk to, etc.?
KOOL A.D.: I was a casual fan of Killer Mike before that tour but on that tour Killer Mike became one of my favorite rappers and one of my favorite dudes, period. That dude could talk all day and I'd sit there with a bowl of popcorn. I don't know if I can tell you like a specific "lesson" I learned from him, just observing dude move through the world and interact with people I soaked up some game.
BLVR: You invoke and engage so many novels and novelists in O.K., and of such variety (e.g., Proust, Kafka, Gatsby, Tao Lin, Dan Brown). What kind of novels are you reading these days?
KOOL A.D.: I started 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (R.I.P. Also R.I.P. Roberto "Chespirito" Bolaños), the first three parts were tight but the last two I couldn't fuck with. Catching up on some recent Haruki Murakami I used to read all of his shit, it's very relaxing stuff.
BLVR: I read 2666 about, oh, almost five years ago. The Part About the Crimes has lingered in my thoughts more than just about anything I’ve ever read. What couldn’t you “fuck with”? The kind of violence? The amount? That it’s based on real femicides in Juarez?
KOOL A.D.: Funny thing, I actually read 2666 about five years ago, too, but left it on an airplane when I was halfway through part three. Recently saw it again and bought it and started it again from the beginning because I had sort of forgotten the specifics. I guess my problem with part four is that I kind of would rather have just read a straight nonfiction account of the Juarez stuff. I didn't quite understand the choice of changing the city to Santa Teresa (or the changing of Bobby Seale's name to somebody else in part three for that matter) and the laundry list of murders/rapes/kidnappings gets a little Law & Order SVU when it's put into a fictionalized world. It was a rare instance where I felt his trademark Bolaño "postmodern" vibe wasn't quite doing it for me, like I guess I just wanted "the straight story" as complicated a desire as that is? I understand he was trying to make this horrible event be felt in all its emotional weight but it all seems to get lost in the murk. I found it having almost the opposite effect, these murders washing over me and me starting to feel numb and desensitized. So after about a hundred pages of that, I skipped ahead to the next part and read about a hundred pages into a Nazi bildungsroman before I gave up. Wasn't finding it "relatable" I guess. Don't get me wrong. I'm a huge fan of the dude, Savage Detectives was one of my favorite books. And part one of 2666 on its own is one of my favorite short novels. Maybe I'll give the whole thing another shot in like another five years.
BLVR: You said once that O.K. would be like The Inferno but significantly better. I’m kind of reading Chuang Tzu, and specifically the butterfly dream, as the Virgil to your Dante. Is he a guide for you? Do you know where he's leading you?
KOOL A.D.: Yeah, I did say that, and I believe it to be true. Who's Chuang Tzu? Naw, just playing. He seems like he was a cool enough dude. Lao Tzu seems like he was pretty cool. I feel like everything guides me and I'm being led to everywhere.
BLVR: I can hear this alternately as a spiritual statement and as a cultural one. What do "everything" and “everywhere” mean? Is it a Kanye kind of everything?
KOOL A.D.: Everything is everything and everywhere is everywhere. I guess everything and everywhere include Kanye West, among like literally everything else, yeah.
BLVR: The narrator of O.K. is a collage of people, animals, and fictional characters. There’s also the great use of this quote from Dreams of My Father: “I can see that my choices were never truly mine alone; and that that is how it should be, that to assert otherwise is to chase after a sorry sort of freedom.” I wonder in what ways KOOL A.D. is a kind of collage?
KOOL A.D.: I think all the stuff I do has a collage aspect because I feel like a collage and the world feels like a collage to me.
BLVR: You don’t include this part of the film, but in Six Degrees of Separation, Paul (Will Smith) says to Ouisa (Stockard Channing), "Did you see Donald Barthelme's obituary? He said that collage was the art form of the twentieth century." Here we are, twenty-first. Does collage mean the same thing now it did then?
KOOL A.D.: In this day and age, how can the collage be real if our eyes aren't real?
BLVR: Was it Nietzsche or KOOL A.D. who said, “if you gaze long enough into the screen, the screen will gaze back”?
KOOL A.D.: Feel like that was KOOL A.D.
BLVR: Are you using all the parts of you?
KOOL A.D.: I don't think so, but I think I'm using a good amount of me.
BLVR: Are you working toward using more? If you could, would you use all, or do you need to hold something back? What would it look like if you did use it all?
KOOL A.D.: I guess I still believe to some extent in the myth of privacy at this point in my life.
BLVR: You said in another interview that “the rigorous logic of prose is often times antithetical to the freedom of art, or at least it feels that way.” Was that true to your experience writing O.K.?
KOOL A.D.: Well I guess a lot of the book is "in prose" but some of it is more "poetically" structured or whatever and I think a fair amount of it walks whatever line that is. I guess to edit that sentence, I would say that "art" seems to operate in a spacetime that's freer than what we typically consider to be logical.
BLVR: When Half Dennis Rodman Half Kim Jong Un is on Family Feud, I think his survey answer is from Hegel. Is he someone who’s been influential for you? The second printing of your collection of aphorisms, Joke Book, is a takeoff on the copy of the Phenomenology that I think everyone read in college.
KOOL A.D.: I like Marx and apparently Marx was a big fan of Hegel, so I try to give Hegel a shot every now and then but dude is pretty hard to read.
BLVR: What accounts for your prolificity in so many mediums?
KOOL A.D.: Boredom, drugs.
BLVR: Any particular drug? What about drugs helps you create?
KOOL A.D.: Any drug is fine. I think it's more that I get bored so I do drugs and then I'm still bored so I write or whatever.
BLVR: Have you always written fiction? If not, what made you start? Your raps seem to go any which way they please, but does writing for songs ever feel like a constraint?
KOOL A.D.: I've pretty much always written in some form or another. And I mean songwriting can involve elements of fiction and fiction writing can involve a certain measure of lyricism/musicality. I find making songs to be good old-fashioned fun. If songwriting felt like a constraint I probably wouldn't do it.
BLVR: I’d like to put a couple of the book’s questions back to you. Where does the “ambiguity of art fit within the rhetoric of revolution, if at all”?
KOOL A.D.: I guess that's tied up in that "freer spacetime" that art seems to operate within. Art is like a think tank in which to imagine freedoms as of yet unreachable by more "logical" means. I believe Jaden Smith said that. Also if you're trying to "revolutionize" the world and change what's wrong with it, then what is the new world you're bringing about? Feel like it would probably include art, which seems useful and even like "good" for people.
BLVR: And, is it fair to ask: “WHAT IS ART? WHO DECIDES WHAT ART IS? IS ART PROBABLY BEST LEFT NOT TALKED ABOUT?” (Keeping in mind that, as you also write, “Capital letters means yelling on a computer but what does yelling on a computer mean?”)
KOOL A.D.: ART IS TITE. U DECIDE WHAT ART IS. YES, ART IS PROBABLY BEST LEFT NOT TALKED ABOUT. YELLING ON A COMPUTER MEANS NOTHING, BASICALLY.
BLVR: If language is metaphor, what’s it metaphor for? Or, is reality more than a concept?
KOOL A.D.: I guess language is metaphor for existence or else maybe language is the inside of a mirror-lined donut. And I guess reality seems like more than a concept or else maybe reality is the inside of a mirror-lined donut. Is the inside of a mirror-lined donut more than a concept?
BLVR: Who is the second best rapper alive?
KOOL A.D.: KOOL A.D.
BLVR: Did you slip?
KOOL A.D.: I ain't never slip.
Scott F. Parker is author of the memoir Running After Prefontaine and, writing pseudonymously as The Synthesis, the anti-memoir in here.
Typical of the Times: Growing Up in the Culture of Spectacle
We’re So Famous was my first published novel, but it is not the first novel I wrote. I originally attempted to emulate my hero F. Scott Fitzgerald, attracted to and influenced as I was by his narratives about sad young men, a thread I’d pick up later for my trilogy about Charlie Martens. But when my first novel failed to sell, I cast about for another theme that interested me, and didn’t have to ruminate long before recognizing my intense interest in the culture of celebrity. It seems naive to claim that back in the late 1990s, celebrity culture was a relatively new phenomenon, but fame for fame’s sake seemed new and curious to me—previously those who wanted to become famous aspired to be athletes or actors or musicians or models—and so it was the perfect subject for a novel in that moment in time before the Internet truly became the enabler it is for any and all attention seekers. (As proof of how pre-Internet this novel was, I remember a late-night trip to the record store to confirm the spelling of the name of one of the singers in Bananarama, at the behest of the copy editor.)
As I contemplated the afterword for this new Bloomsbury edition, I tried to transport myself back to that time and place in my life when I was obsessed with and amazed by fame, to create a little sketch meant to provide the context in which the novel was written. Instead a torrent of words issued forth over the course of a month, and when I was finished, it was apparent not only why I wrote We’re So Famous, but also that it was a book I was destined to write.
Donald Trump’s speech on immigration from August input into Paul Chan’s “oH Ho.”
Read Part I, Part II, Part III.
By Rick Moody
October 3, 2016
One of my jobs is teaching writing classes for visual artists. I do this at two schools—at the Yale University School of Art, and at the NYU graduate program in fine art. This is a job I dearly love, in part because I love visual artists (I am married to one), love their minds and their conceptual brilliance, but also because I love making writing accessible to people who aren’t always sure that it is for them. My theory is that creativity the same across disciplines, and if you can take a great photograph, or make a multi-media extravaganza, you can definitely write well too. People think the writing always has to be perfect, literary, or, in the case of visual artists, that it has to sound like Artforum or October. Not at all! It should sound like human beings!
What this has to do with the election is that I always give an assignment that involves making found text, or collage-oriented poems (something I do myself on occasion) at the beginning of the semester in order to give the non-writers a chance to demystify language, and so that they might realize that it’s okay to treat the words like objects (I’m quoting the great poet Susan Wheeler here).
In both classes this semester, I gave the artists Donald Trump's speech on immigration from a couple of months ago and then a copy of the National Enquirer—the last publication supporting him, it would seem—after which they were encouraged to make four lines of poetry combining words or lines from the two sources. We then voted on our favorites lines and made “sonnets” out of the resulting collages.
Here’s the Yale class (who consisted of: Joe Hoyt, Res, Danna Singer, Chau Tran, Anna Shimshak, Ashton Hudgins, Farah Al-Qasimi, Bek Andersen, Lance Brewer, Matt Leifheit, Carr Chadwick, Kathryn Kerr, Harry Griffin):
Word Salad #1
Most people thought the era of the super-powerful diet pill ended
because of safety concerns,
and they would comply if we would act properly
The juiciest body doesn’t serve you—let me tell you who it does serve.
Don’t forget the Supreme Court of the United States,
don’t forget that, and don’t forget building up our depleted military,
and don’t forget dad’s high school ring.
Someone from your past who you never expected to hear from
reaches out to send her daughter one final message—
weak, weak, weak…
I would hide them all in my lace-up shoes,
and before I would go home I would Febreeze my car.
A vampire breast lift, a pair of my jeans, the reign of terror.
Hear these words from me—they think the biggest thing is that
The crimes scenes are desperate for heroes
Say hello to the police, disgusting pig fat mother of a whore
Touchy royals, guilt free wanks, cut it off! Cut it off!
Welfare use will decrease
Skid row squatter, flowers on the tarmac, another creep, white supremacist:
America itself.
And here’s the NYU version (and the students were, Lara Saget, Jerry Adams, Biraaj Dodiya, Nick Doty, Alex Heffesse, Jessica Lanchester, Luca Molnar, Omer ben Zvi, Erin Schiller, Meeka Patton):
Word Salad #2
Without the laws against crime we have got a shock—primped metrosexual guys, wow.
Lip plumpers cost our country more than $113 billion a year.
Toking and twerking, they're going out fast.
I'm going to ask the moms to come join me. These are amazing women who can crush steel with the slightest ease. That's what's going to happen sure as you're standing here.
I used to put a sock under my arm and touch the doll but I don’t have to now.
The Trojan Horse will capture your woman folks, the heavens will fall.
I am by the way just a twisted baby killer who got a glam makeover from Susan Smith, who doesn't have a mom many more, seriously, the chin-implant made her look like a different person.
It seems you have multiple tragic deaths and attempted murders and it’s all going to end very, very badly.
*
Word salad, the term, in the Trump era, has come to suggest the denotative stylings of Trump during the first debate. More or less. But I remember word salad from my trip through the psychiatric hospital in the 80s. My ward had a number of schizophrenics in it, and they were usually the schizophrenics who were in the middle of heavy decompensation. I can remember one guy, a tall skinny fellow in his late forties, reasonably good-looking, who was so psychotic he couldn’t really put a sentence together at all. The only time I can remember him saying anything sensible was when he told one resident of the ward that smoking was bad for him. The rest of the time it was all paranoid gibberish. Word salad, then, describes a way that syntax fragments, bends and breaks, beneath the flood of bad chemicals in the brain, in which the best you can manage is a sort of late-Artaud heavily symbolic nonsense that says little specifically and is more indicative of the painful state of you who deploys it than it is about anything.
A good example during the debate was Trump’s comeback on the Miss Universe topic. He seethes into a writhing serpentine misery, in front of his bad microphone, spitting, and snorting, and repeating where did you get this? As though his disdain will be enough to shut down Clinton. The above poems, then, are part of the strategy of word salad, the fulminating and sputtering that seem liable to cost Trump the election. Were he to fail to prepare for the second debate more than he did in this case, we would have to conclude that he actually does not want to be president.
October 8, 2016
Pussy. We have now seen the word pussy in the The New York Times (though I noticed they used fuck last week, too, and, I believe, motherfuckers, when transcribing some heart-rending remarks at the scene of the police assassination of an innocent party in Charlotte, NC), and we have seen it bandied about, along with some not-to-be-overlooked-pro-rape-culture stuff, from the nominee of an American political party.
As the vice-presidential debate seemed to indicate, the longing for a softer-gentler time is now upon us, and all the militating for a Pence presidency now, is an indication thereof. Pence is no prince. But at least he probably has never allowed the word pussy to escape his mouth.
There’s a point in the election cycle when the opposition research starts to get its message out, and we are now in that point. It surprises me that the Republicans have not managed to come up with more on Hillary Clinton (though careful what you ask for), but it may be, as she said in 2008: she has already been vetted. If Vince Foster will not stick, if Benghazi will not stick, then there is nothing that is going to stick. But you have to hand it to the Clinton team: they have lined up their October surprises, and they are going to get out one or two a week from now until early November.
This is not to say that Trump is not a pig, and a sexual harasser of the keenest variety. He is. That pig is the man that was nominated by the Republican Party, and he is in keeping with the Republican Party. He is being counseled by another sexual harasser, Roger Ailes. His views are not out of line with the Republican Party. They are exemplary for the Republican Party. So it’s not some kind of conservative trainwreck. Trump is the result of Republican and conservative policies. This is who you wanted, someone who was not moderate like McCain and Romney, and, barring the unforeseen, you are going to get your asses handed to you.
The only person who looks worse than Trump right now is Billy Bush. If I were him I wouldn’t go outside for six months. Can he possibly keep his job on the Today Show. If anyone has not seen the video here’s the link.
This is what we’ve come to.
8:16 PM: Condoleezza Rice calls on Trump to drop out.
October 10, 2016
The entire second debate was about rape culture.
My friend Elizabeth Crane, the novelist and short story writer, posted on, not Friday, not long after the video footage of the pelted one and Billy Bush came to light, that the footage was all about rape culture. Not merely about the fact that the pelted one is a pig, and that he has narcissistic personality disorder. Not about about Billy Bush’s frat-house guffaws of support, with the added veneer of entitlement and television-culture vacuity. No, once you get into parsing the language of the boasts, the peculiarity of the Tic Tacs, it’s clear that Trump’s speech is a how-to manual about unwanted sexual attention, at the very least, and, more accurately, about how to sexually abuse another human being. This speech, given just months after he had married Melania, was transparently about how to sexually abuse a married person.
This is one idea about power. It’s the same idea about power that Vladimir Putin has, that with power (and in this country capital always amounts to a kind of power) one catapults oneself beyond the rules of decorum, to the point where one can always force another to submit.
Trump’s problem is that the video is absolutely consistent with what we know of him from his Howard Stern appearances, and the dip-shittery of his television show, and his annoying and uninformed political remarks past. (Like his full-page ad about the Central Park jogger. If he’d had his way, five African-American men would have been executed already, regardless of their innocence.) He is a person who believes this sort of thing, in absolute power and the subjection of anyone and everyone, and who believes in the inerrancy of his every immediate perception.
With that in mind, we watch the second presidential debate, knowing that Trump believes that sexual assault is legitimate, is just red-blooded masculinity, and his every move, from the You’d be in jail line, to his stalking of HRC as she stood near the audience, from his dragging out of Bill Clinton’s demons, to his accusation that HRC made the tax code what it is, and you see a man who does not acknowledge that a woman could be more than a piece of property, and who honestly believes the use of force upon a woman is natural, is the course of things. Had he reached over to strangle her, as it honestly looked that he might do, I would not have been surprised in the least. He would have done it, and gotten up from closing off the last bit of oxygen in her wind pipe, and stepping over her lifeless body, certain of the idea that his supporters would cheer him on for it.
The entire desperate and toxic charade, every do-or-die second, was about forcing a woman to know her place. That’s why the deplorables love Trump so much, the David Dukes of the American heartland, because they believe in this kind of power, the rape kind, and they believe in this kind of femininity, the fantasy kind, the kind that lies down for their violence, intimidation, and entitlement.
My agony at gazing upon the proceedings comes from always having hated, with every ounce of life in me, guys like this. There was a guy in my boarding school who seemed to be a serial rapist of one degree or another, and he had a similar vibe, charming, malevolent, heedless, entitled, repellent, and I have known others who if not reliably convicted of sexual abuse at least talked a good game. Indeed, in a certain stratum of American civilization, Trump’s menace and intimidation and rape talk are endemic, and that is because rape culture is endemic. I wish they would go to a separatist Europeans-only nation-state in Idaho, where they can worship a tree god, rectally fondle one another, eat brisket every night, and bet on college football, though few of them ever graduated college.
HRC’s performance was off all night. She seemed inarticulate, rattled, forgetful, unable to martial obvious points of attack. For example: the answer to the question of why accept more dispossessed Syrians is: because we are nation of immigrants, because diversity is our strength (as her husband used to say), and because at every stage, when America has grown more robust economically, and more powerful, it has been because immigrants made it possible to do so. Even now, in Trump’s empire, it is Latin Americans who are building his buildings and mowing his golf courses, as it is just about everywhere else in the United States. The whole good life of the moment is fueled by the labor of Central Americans, in particular. HRC missed this, and she missed a few other tantalizing pieces of low hanging fruit, and I assume it is because, on some level, she worried for her physical safety. Her one perfect answer for the night was about Trump’s tape, and Trump’s character. She was right on the money here, and devastating, and having divested herself of this answer, she had done most of what she needed to do for the rest of the night, even if it meant she has no idea what to do about Aleppo. Nobody else does either.
HRC only had to still be standing on the stage at the end to be heroic. And she was.
Trump performed like a man who doesn’t care if he burns down the entire edifice of presidential candidacy. He has nothing to lose now, because he is going to lose. He doesn’t care who is the collateral damage anymore. He’s cynical, he believes in nothing except money and power, and he loathes women. He is a rapist as a matter of course. And if he can’t have the presidency, he’ll settle for a television network, and last night he proved the validity of that enterprise, by having all eyes on him.
The debate was disgraceful. And we, the whole of the United States, are disgraceful for allowing this to happen. We have defiled the electoral process, we have cheapened the presidency, we have become the laughingstock of democratic nations across the globe, we have emboldened dictators, and we have proven that even the most placid and orderly of transitions can disintegrate into something where autocracy seems like a virtue, and plunder a sign of ideological certitude. I don’t really want to live in this country very much, the one on display last night.
Who knew that the Paddy Chayefsky who wrote Network was timid, mild, and had not enough conviction to see the ramifications of his imagination.
October 19, 2016
Third debate: a righteous ass-kicking.
October 31, 2016
The news this week is all about the crumbling and decline of the idea of the checks and balances of the American system of government. In the Senate, they're talking about failing to fill the empty spots on the Supreme Court, until they have it down to six (an even number) as though this notion were routine or historically justified. And as everyone knows, it now appears that the department of justice, and its Federal Bureau of Investigation, has jurisdiction over the presidential election. I imagine that this all has to do with styles and varieties of power. The idealizing of despots, the idealizing of Assad, the idealizing of Putin, these are late-night fantasies about power for the pelted candidate. The fantasy of total control and the crumbling of the separation of powers these suggest that it IS democracy that is at stake. It's power as masturbatory fantasy versus the broadcasting and decentralization of power in democracy.
I think democracy is robust in theory but frail in practice. People love it when they don't have it, as in the Arab Spring, but how quickly it decays when unsupported. Is our country democratic? Does it live up to the billboard? Perhaps it aspires to be democratic. But money and power often prevail. They often bulldoze democratic formulations. (One of the candidates has worked on behalf of the disenfranchised, and one has not.) These tendencies are complex, paradoxical, but if you tease apart the curtains you can see.
The fundamentally undemocratic objectives of the Republicans in the senate and their nightwatchman, their rent-a-cop, James Comey, are bent in the prism of pelted rhetorical flourishes. How easy it would be to push too hard on the one branch until with a muffled crack it breaks. If you say "Our nation needs a strongman" enough times you will eventually get your strongman. And his simplistic rhetoric and violent force and nepotism.
The other piece of this sinister moment is Anthony Weiner. I do not judge the addict who admits to the disease, accepts the consequences thereof, and goes about getting help. Weiner, so articulate in the documentary, appears to be that addict but is not. As he was willing to jeopardize his son, in his continuous masturbatory fantasy, it's no stretch to imagine him stealing shit off his wife's computer, and fantasizing about the power he no longer has. It's just across the bedroom there. Addiction has no moral compass. I myself did many things as an addict that I cannot explain nor rationalize. The addict self is a divided self. Bad decisions are made at every turn until the vehicle of compulsion strikes the implacable wall.
But if it turns out that democracy gives out once and for all because of an adult male jerking off online with a 15 year old, while his toddler son slumbers next to him, we're all to blame. We didn't nurture the democratic vine while it was right here in front of us, apparently flourishing. We didn't educate the ignorant, we didn't welcome the huddled masses, we didn't make the case for democracy. Instead we wanted the zircon-encrusted hotel lobby, the lifestyles of the rich and famous, the final solution, the total control, and we would stop at nothing.
He still could win.
November 3, 2016
I stayed up late watching game seven of the World Series, and I rooted for the Cubs, because my father-in-law grew up loving the Cubs, and because the Indians’ uniform is racist, and because a 108-year-long hex is a beautiful thing to watch as it comes to the end, and because I love lost causes. I love when hope seems the most foolish thing of all. So I watched game seven, which had more twists and turns than the last ten years of World Series games put together, and all throughout the evening my father-in-law texted back and forth.
Rick: Just turned it on. Hair-raising.
Neil: Anything can lead to something . . .
Rick: I’m digging the small-ball technique. They can knock Kluber out. Like maybe right now. Action in Cleveland bullpen!
Neil: Especially if Hayward gets on.
And then, later.
Rick: Rain delay!
Neil: Tarp?
Rick: Could be a long night.
Neil: Chapman done in any case. Cleveland pitching situation not clear to me.
But I assume new pitcher after rain?
The point here being the foundational quality of something relatively innocent and traditional, the dare-I-say-it audacity of sports-related hope. The fact that the Cubs snatched victory from the jaws of defeat seems to suggest (despite the apparent horrid politics of the Ricketts family, who opposed Trump, and then were the subject of veiled threats, via Twitter, from the man himself, and then turned around and gave him a cool million) real possibility, the coming from behind to victory, the sun behind the clouds, the possibility of things improving, of droughts coming to an end, of rampages of bad thinking eventually culminating in the eureka moment, the sudden blinding instant of enlightenment, the cresting of the new moon, the receding of the flood, the union of the disputing parties, and the ways in which these things happen only after years of trouble. I went to bed, after four and a half hours of baseball, and I felt like things could really improve.
November 7, 2016
I had Paul Chan, the great conceptual artist, sculptor, and renegade publisher sit in on my writing class in the NYU art department today, in this the last bit of the pre-election era I’ll be able to concentrate on. At one point, a few years ago, Paul made a lot of “fonts,” as he calls them, in which he basically converted your regular typeface on your computer into a sort of a code. When you type in words on your keyboard, Chan’s “font” outputs, usually, a weird, and fascinating code gibberish. At one point, the “fonts” consisted of a lot of pornographic language, and so I decided to see what you would happen if I input some of Donald Trump’s speech on immigration (from August) into Paul Chan’s font entitled “oH Ho.” This is just the first paragraph, I believe. I think it sits well in the field of what we know of Donald Trump’s interests.
November 8, 2016
I actually took notes while it was happening, in real time:
7:22 Trump takes IN and KY, Clinton takes VT. Horrible sinking feeling.
7:29 Trump up 75% to 23% in Georgia. Horrible sinking feeling.
7:39 Trump up in FL. Horrible sinking feeling.
7:51 Trump wins SC. Horrible sinking feeling.
7:53 Changing networks. NBC too depressing.
8:00 Back to NBC. Child asleep. Home sprayed by skunk. Horrible sinking feeling.
8:02 Clinton sweeps the vast majority of New England states. Cautious feelings of hope.
8:06 Kellyanne Conway is a remarkable a dipshit.
8:41 Trump opens lead in FL. Horrible sinking feeling.
8:47 Trump running strong in VA. Horrible sinking feeling.
8:58 Horrible sinking feeling about MI.
9:01 Horrible sinking feeling about OH.
9:04 New York!
9:37 I think Trump may win.
9:49 Systemic horrible sinking feeling.
9:50 Just the worst, most horrible sinking feeling.
10:18 So demoralized I am considering going to bed.
10:22 Susan Sarandon? Wanna rethink that endorsement?
10:25 OH to Trump.
10:26 I wish I could feel comfortable telling America it deserves what it gets, but I feel terrible sadness and foreboding about what's to come. It's heartless to fail to see how much suffering is to come, how immigrant communities are going to suffer, how the very people voting for Trump are going to suffer. It's going to be a truly dark four years.
10:51 Still awake.
11:01 A brief moment of hope as the West Coast falls in line.
11:11 Women's rights will be set back fifty years.
2:19 A.M. Trump wins PA.
2:28 Just a truly historic loss for Democrats. With a full Republican slate and at least three Supreme Court picks ahead of him, Trump has immense power and his core supporters among racists, Anti-Semites, and lovers of the police state are well situated to make significant cultural gains.
2:34 I sure hope we can scale up the Trump U investigations and the rape charges immediately.
2:36 White people with no higher education: you paid his taxes for him, that’s how smart he is.
2:42 Trump pronounced winner.
2:42 What is James Comey doing right now?
2:42 What is Anthony Weiner doing right now?
2:47 I would rather eat glass than watch his victory speech.
3:11 Christie gets a second act, I guess . . .
November 10, 2016
I have come now, in these dark days, to two conclusions about the 2016 election, about which I have been thinking, now, for eighteen months.
The first way to think about it, in fact, is that it really is about pussy. I’m using the word though it pains me to use it after all these months. And I hope you will forgive me. Trump, obviously, really loves the word pussy, and he believes that power and money make it inevitable that he should have pussy and that an inevitable adornment of money and power is not only heterosexuality, but the dominance of the masculine, and the submission of the feminine. The feminine is the wallpaper of the masculine habitation of money and power. That’s one thing we know about pussy. But the other thing we know about it is that it brought Anthony Weiner’s life to an abrupt halt. Weiner used the word with his child bride: “I would bust that tight pussy.” Weiner’s lust for political power, as he says in the cinematic documentary about his mayoral ambitions, comes from the same place as his heedlessness about the propriety of his online sexual relationships. For him, as with Trump, and perhaps as with Bill Clinton (of whom it was said that he “eats pussy like a champ”), the feminine is something over which we assert ownership, as an indication of our masculine achievement.
It’s entirely consistent with rape culture. With the idea that men have some kind of privilege that women don’t have, and that women, or the bodies of women, more exactly (because the total personhood of women is never part of this equation), are the site of male power. That Hillary Clinton’s eleven-point lead essentially evaporated because of Anthony Weiner, and what was alleged to be on his computer, or because the FBI is as full of male privilege as the Donald Trump campaign staff, is ironic. She was the one person in the tawdry embarrassment that was Election 2016 who would not have overused the word pussy.
The hordes of white men in the Midwest who helped Trump through the needle’s eye of the electoral college, they approved this message. (Their wives, in many cases, did too.) The great America that we are supposed to be getting back to, the mythological, once-upon-a-time America, is a culture in which women knew their place, and in which the head-of-household privilege of the male was uncontested. This America never existed, of course, except in the early iterations of television; this America was more about back-alley abortions, and compulsive Victorian-style perversion, in which there was the lust with for pussy, or conversely the traditionally Republican closeted gay sex-and-drugs compulsion.
Where we were getting, with Barack Obama, and where we might have gotten with Hillary Clinton, was away from rape culture. Though there was work still to be done, we were making some progress. In fact, the mere fact of identity culture on campuses in the last few years suggests that things were improving enough that there was time and space, at last, to deal with our own philosophical failings. But: when you dig in and threaten the dispossessed of their last cherished vanities—that they are more important because they are white, and that they are more important because they are men—watch out.
The second way to think about the election is this: the Democratic Party really stands for something. When Hillary Clinton stood up to give her concession speech on Wednesday, in the great shimmering of despair in the room, the paroxysms of loss—which I have seen since, among young people, among women, among children, among people of color, among all of those who fear their own dispossession now—it was pretty clear that by dialectical reasoning, all of those who are against the oligarch, and his grim policy agenda stand for something. In Clinton’s incredibly graceful remarks, some of the particulars began to be clear: we are a nation of immigrants, we are about equality for all, we are about opportunities those without opportunities, and we are about lending a hand to whoever needs it, we are about equal access to law for all, we are about conserving the environment, we are about insuring a future for our children and their children, and we are about civil rights for those who have historically been treated as though they had none: women, Latinos, African-Americans, the disabled, the LGBTQ community, people of Jewish descent, people of African descent, Asian-Americans, refugees from the war-torn corners of the world. Clinton played through the themes of the Democratic project like a consummate musician, perhaps knowing that it was the last time she would do it for a while, and I could feel the language being hammered into a shape where it really means something, really stands for the ages, at last.
So if you feel lost, and hopeless, and like there is nowhere to turn, there is somewhere to turn, there are others, if not right next to you, then within reach through the instantaneous communication of these times. There are others. And with these others remember this: that at the site of most ignominious negation the voyage back begins.
Rick Moody is the author, most recently, of the novel Hotels of North America. With Kid Millions of Oneida, he also recently released The Unspeakable Practices (Joyful Noise Recordings).
Announcing the start of what later was called Operation Desert Storm on January 16, 1991, President George H. W. Bush argued that “the world could wait no longer,” a declaration which led to a five-week bombardment of Iraqi command, leading to coalition casualties in the hundreds and Iraqi losses in the tens of thousands. Written in January 1991 and completed, as Judd specified, on the 18th of January, “Nie Wieder Krieg,” which translates from the German as “No More War” is Judd’s direct condemnation of the First Gulf War. Whereas President Bush proclaimed in his speech of January 16th, “We will not fail,” Judd argued to the contrary that “War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency and laziness.” Condemning the inaction of the US citizenry, Judd continued, “The people in the United States said nothing in August against the first soldiers, just like Vietnam, or the second soldiers, also like Vietnam, and have not said anything since, and Congress mumbles OK, whatever you want. Only people in the streets can stop this waste of their labor and lives.”
Collected in this new volume are essays, notes and letters reflecting not only on art and architecture, but also on the societal and political conditions that allow, or in the case of war, disallow the freedom with which to produce art and architecture. Made possible through the transcription of handwritten and typed writings from the Judd Foundation Archives, these writings provide insight into the consistency of Judd’s political attitudes from the late 1960s onward. Written for an exhibition catalogue for the show Donald Judd—Architektur, at the Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst in Wien in 1991, “Nie Wieder Krieg” is just one example in which Judd explicitly linked his work in art and architecture with his political concerns. As Judd wrote in response to a survey conducted by Artforum in 1970, “I’ve always thought that my work had political implications... I think everyone has to be involved in politics.”
—Caitlin Murray
It’s hard to write about constructive and peaceful matters before a war.1 It’s difficult to live threatened by war all of your life, and further to know that the reasons are not outwardly determined and serious, but are inwardly caused and frivolous. War is failure. War is caused by carelessness, wastefulness, thoughtlessness, incompetence, complacency, and laziness. That’s why war is the solution and dream of governmental bureaucrats, and as well the easiest way out for their subjects. If the Americans, governors and governed, ordinarily thought of war as failure, they would not be in Arabia. But even there, without being able to say why they are there, war is exciting and a little glorious and seems to be a brave defense. This war, which may happen, and which may carelessly grow to be World War III, will be very destructive in lives and in buildings, which are labor and effort, the construction of lives. But war is not just a mindless spasm that goes away. The preparation for war for all of our lives has made our society. At length and steadily it destroys constructive and peaceful activities.
Almost no one in the United States has said that for fifty years the country has been a military state and that the “Cold War” was, and is again, a situation devised to maintain that military state. War is patriotism, which is first, single, and sacrosanct. Hardly anyone dares to complain or object, mostly no one thinks to object. In August no one in the United States objected to soldiers being sent to Arabia.
The intention was obviously to set up a situation for further soldiers and for war. Since then there has been even less discussion than accompanied the last election, the least lively in a dead series, the height of freedom worth dying for. War is sacrosanct. There can be no discussion of its benefits and results. Not even the most crass self-interest is considered; war is conspicuously without self-interest. To the Americans it immediately means the total destruction of the enemy. The last time that they couldn’t do that was against England in 1812.
They have no grand plan, other than maintaining the military, only little schemes, and no purpose once war begins other than extermination. Here is an example from 1891:
Meagre reports have reached Pine Ridge Agency of the battle fought on New Year’s Day between General Carr’s troops and the hostile Indians. Several Indians have been wounded and a number of government horses captured by hostiles. General Miles is now at the Agency, preparing for the last act in the bloody drama. His plan is to completely surround the enemy; then, in case they refuse to surrender, he will lose no time in wiping the rebellious Sioux off the face of the earth.
The Americans are supposed to be innocent, which they are not, and naive, which they are, and not good at diplomacy, which is true, having no purpose. They are vicious and naive and just as dangerous as if they were calculating, even more so.
The other extreme, however, of the calculating, selfish, and ruthless ruler, is never reached. The originators of war are foolish and lazy and guided by the vague and dying slogans of institutions already dead. One generalization that I found, a better one than most, is that you should constantly check to see whether a big social institution, or its generalizations, is still alive, or if it ever was. Everything, good and bad, decays and all that remains for a while are slogans. Now neither the United States nor the Soviet Union can even speak in slogans—Bush mumbles one from time to time but he has trouble getting it right—and still people of both countries submit and follow. It’s like watering the liquor until the drunkard gets drunk on water.
War is rich and lazy. It’s simple and easy. Totalitarianism is simple and easy. The Soviet Union thinks it’s easiest now, since the bureaucrats solved the threat of reform by moving even more slowly, to go back under the KGB and the military, ever more idle, more wasteful. The President of the United States, once the chief of the CIA, is not interested in the declining productivity of the country and its debt, the results of the military economy; he is not interested in real problems and solutions. A war can hide these problems. No one has stated flatly that the main purpose of the invasion of Arabia is to provide a reason not to reduce military expenditure. The United States is in Arabia to continue its military establishment. It searched desperately after “the Cold War ended” and finally, since Panama was so quick and the “Drug War” so insufficient, found, even made a justification for the military. All talk of small reductions ceased. I suspect the United States “set up” Saddam Hussein, enticed him into Kuwait, so as to produce a situation of imminent war. They were desperate for the threat of war.
Once there is something to destroy, it’s easy to let destruction run in order to conceal the real problems. Destruction can only be of construction and consumes it. The Soviet Union ran what it had into the ground for seventy years and now that’s buried. As A.J.P. Taylor said, the Russian people are fine and don’t deserve their government. But of course everyone deserves their government since they allow it. The people in the Soviet Union, which is a perfect name for reform, should object quickly, while they can. The United States has been running its economy down for sixty years and had a better start, so that it will be later, but not much, in burying itself. World War II, insofar as it was about anything, was about the somewhat conflicting natures of the large central systems. The present threats and wars are the death throes of these systems, which will fight each other over minor distinctions, to prevent collapse, and especially as they collapse. They all have ideas of the future, based on central authority, joined to ideas of the past created for the nation. None of this hangs together, which is a good reason not to die for it.
There is not enough freedom in the Soviet Union to produce art. There will not be enough to produce science, even technology. At this point destruction collapses upon itself, like an old star, in fact like a red giant. Uncle Sam can be the white dwarf. The steady pressure of bureaucratization and militarization has pretty much destroyed art and architecture in the United States. Art is back to less than the handful that it was in the 1940s and 1950s.And like the Soviet Union, the United States proves that the large bureaucratic system cannot have its own art. This inability is the sign of its general inability, of its failure as a viable philosophy, just as the inability of Christianity for three hundred years to produce good art is the sign of its demise as a reality. Some institutions have produced good art and architecture, not lately; some at least have barely allowed these, as during the 1950s and 1960s in the United States.
In 1984 I saw the cemetery of Piskaryovskoye in Saint Petersburg. Five hundred thousand people are buried there, even so only a part of those who died during the siege. I made a poster of a photograph of the cemetery as a poster against war. Last winter in considering posters for this exhibition, I was inclined not to put this in the show, since it seemed to have become irrelevant. And now it’s relevant. The Soviet Union is going back to 1984 and the United States is in 1984, off in the desert preparing for perpetual war, claiming for itself the biggest justification ever, that of policing the world, forever seeking each Idi Amin. One hundred and seventy years ago Simón Bolívar said that the United States would destroy all freedom in the name of freedom. Or as Simon de Montfort said of the Albigensians: “Tuez-les tous! Dieu reconnaîtra les siens.”2
The consequence of a fake economy, which is the military economy, is a fake society. One consequence of that is fake art and architecture. As the enforcing bureaucracy grows omnipresent and omniscient, real art and architecture shrinks. As I’ve said elsewhere, architecture, which is more vulnerable, is gone for now. Art is next. There are certainly architects that I don’t know of, but the ones that I do know of internationally are almost all terrible, except perhaps Tadao Ando, of whom I know little. Mario Botta has recently designed an art museum for San Francisco which establishes him solidly among the terrible. Art museums are the best form of fake architecture since neither the clients nor the architects take art seriously. And then many artists obligingly add fakes to those made by ignorance. The art museum becomes exquisitely pointless, a fake for fakes, a double fake, the inner sanctum of a fake society. Of course, Hans Hollein is good at this. He and the Guggenheim Museum of New York plan a negative and fake Guggenheim for Salzburg, a hole in the ground. And what is the public and what are students supposed to think of the horrifying design of Frank Gehry’s museum of design for Vitra? These buildings make a joke of architecture, of art, of culture, of the community, and of the whole society. This allows the present horrifying situation; it decorates it.
The so-called postmodern architecture is a manifestation of the fake economy, even of fake business, of fake institutions. It’s perfect that McDonald’s has opened in Moscow and that the KGB can keep the line straight. It’s all meeting on the right. Eventually it becomes obvious that fake was fake, but this will be too late for us. And probably when this is recognized new unrecognized fakes will dominate. It’s endless. Fascist architecture’s main quality is not its aggressiveness but its mindlessness and vague generality, that is, that it is fake. Mostly the fake disappears, which is less likely in architecture than in disposable art, but for a long time now new fakes have far exceeded real work. This is a permanent condition in the United States.
The vague purpose of the museum is to immobilize art, to have culture without culture having any effect, to make art fake. The purpose of fake is to avoid disturbing the social hierarchy. The definite purpose of grand expenditures in a community is to show the power of the central government without disturbing the hierarchy of the community, and without benefiting it. One reason for a great military force is the same. It uses up a lot of money and doesn’t do anything. An example of this in architecture is some news from Philadelphia:
“North Philadelphia is the city’s largest area of physical decay along with having the most concentrated poverty in the city,” said Barbara J. Kaplan, executive director of the City Planning Commission. “But despite all the poverty,
it has a significant percentage of homeownership, ranging from about 38 to 60 percent in different areas, and that is a real strength....”
On Monday night, the team held a town meeting and dreamed aloud about a utopian North Philadelphia, a place with a Crystal Palace for a train station, a glass-sided School for the Creative and Performing Arts and a Grand Civic Plaza.3
The solution is a palace, of course, “postmodern,” as in Dallas, Texas, where the crime rate is among the highest in the United States. The solution is an unnecessary token, a fake community. Thirty-eight to sixty percent of the people own their own homes. Since they are poor and since their ownership is stable, constituting a real community, the obvious way to help them would be to abate their property and income taxes, even to “grant” to each family a little money to repair their homes. This seems harmless. But it’s unthinkable. Conceding money would bring them up a little in the hierarchy, which is absolutely forbidden. The implications are fearful: it’s undemocratic, it’s unfair to others, it’s a violation of free enterprise, it’s tampering with the market – who knows what might happen—it’s tampering with nature; and then the hand of the central government wouldn’t show—the dispensation wouldn’t be clear. Even to think of such a thing admits the existence of hierarchy and unleashes, who knows, my god, class war, and then they will never again be able to be upwardly mobile. Ten years ago in the once wealthy cattle town near where I live in West Texas, declining since the triumph of the United States in WorldWar II and now sped to poverty by the invasion of Arabia, a tin “senior citizens’ center” was built over the town swimming pool with a $500,000 grant from Washington, DC. First, there’s not a person in town who will admit to being a “senior citizen.” Second, throughout the town the water line is contaminated by the sewer line. Then part of the town doesn’t have sewers anyway, or paved roads, and most of the other roads need repair, as well as many of the homes. The solution to real faults is a tin box over a pool in a sunny climate. Of course this is a better monument to the central government than the ones for the eighty thousand coffins which it has just ordered for the soldiers in Arabia. But the attitude is the same.
The consequences of the invasion of Kuwait would have been minor and a lengthy embargo would have punished and moderated Iraq. The consequences of the invasion of Arabia are war and vast death and destruction and poverty worldwide. The consequences are the solidification of all right-wing governments—the Soviet Union now dares to send more soldiers to Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania—and the final, complete respectability of violence. The consequence is the culminating victory for the totalitarianism which has been growing for the last twenty years, for the last fifty, for sixty. Last year’s freedom is put down; last year’s moderation is discredited. What China did is worse than what Iraq did and China is forgiven now. For me and others, the consequence of the invasion of Arabia to the town in West Texas was that since August we have had to fire some twenty people because of the disastrous effect on the economy of the United States. Death is next. The consequence of the invasion to employment was as direct as drinking makes you drunk.
The war of next Tuesday is a military fantasy. Allowing this fantasy is a failure of the society, of people everywhere, just as allowing the rise of Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism was. The people in the United States said nothing in August against the first soldiers, just like Vietnam, or the second soldiers, also like Vietnam, and have not said anything since, and Congress mumbles OK, whatever you want. Only people in the streets can stop this waste of their labor and lives. Only they can return this extreme fantasy to fantasy and make their fantastic problems real.
The two vast military systems, the United States and the Soviet Union, after being rattled for a couple of years, are recovering and cooperating to stop all change and freedom. Without opposition they will solidify a totalitarianism which will last for ten or twenty years or so, until incompetence
and the poverty of thought and freedom cause the congealing systems to collapse. Their attitudes will continue in the collapse and into nuclear war. This solidification of totalitarianism might be stopped now, but opposition next year will be too late. In fact, the fatal mistake may have occurred last year when the people didn’t go far enough, quickly enough. The Baltic republics, for example, may have lost their freedom through their own reasonableness and moderation.4 Even last August, for the first time, Russia, for the last time, was free.
We had all left our countries as a result of the war. Ball and
I came from Germany, Tzara and Janco from Rumania, Hans Arp from France. We were agreed that the war had been contrived by the various governments for the most autocratic, sordid and materialistic reasons; we Germans were familiar with the book “J’accuse,” and even without it we would have had little confidence in the decency of the German Kaiser and his generals. Ball was a conscientious objector, and I had escaped by the skin of my teeth from the pursuit of the police myrmidons who, for their so-called patriotic purposes,were massing men in the trenches of Northern France and giving them shells to eat. None of us had much appreciation for the kind of courage it takes to get shot for the idea of a nation which is at its best a cartel of pelt merchants and profiteers in leather, at worst a cultural association of psychopaths who, like the Germans, marched off with a volume of Goethe in their knapsacks, to skewer Frenchmen and Russians on their bayonets.
—Richard Huelsenbeck, 19205
The signers of this manifesto are well aware that the recent venomous attacks on modern art are no accident.
The violence of these attacks stands in direct proportion to the worldwide growth of the totalitarian idea, which makes no secret to its hostility to the spiritual in art or its desire to debase art to the level of slick illustration.
—Richard Huelsenbeck, 19496
This essay was written in January 1991 (finished on the eighteenth) for the exhibition catalogue Donald Judd-Architektur, Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst,Wien, 1991.
—Donald Judd7
1 “Nie Wieder Krieg” translates from the German as “No More War.”
2 Translates from the French as “Kill them all! God will know his own.”
3 Michael deCourcy Hinds, “Philadelphia Journal; Planners Offer Vision in Area Without Dream,” The New York Times, October 24, 1990.
4 In the spring of 1990, the Lithuanian parliament proclaimed the reestablishment of Lithuanian independence. Estonia and Latvia proclaimed only a transition to independence at this time. The Kremlin refused to recognize Lithuanian independence and imposed an economic blockade on the country.
5 Richard Huelsenbeck, “En Avant Dada: A History of Dadaism,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press,1989),23.
6 Richard Huelsenbeck, “Dada Manifesto,” in The Dada Painters and Poets: An Anthology, ed. Robert Motherwell, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 398.
7Operation Desert Storm, a military operation to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait, began on January 16,1991.This was the beginning of a five-week bombardment of Iraqi targets from air and sea. The ground invasion followed in February; see Judd’s note from 23 February 1991 in this volume, 702.
First published: Donald Judd-Architektur, exh. cat. (Vienna: Österreichisches Museum für angewandte Kunst,1991),10–16 (in English and German).
Donald Judd Writings is a new collection of Judd’s writing spanning 1958 to 1993, co-published by Judd Foundation and David Zwirner Books. Available November 2016.
Caitlin Murray is the co-editor of Donald Judd Writings and the director of Marfa Programs at the Judd Foundation.
"An artwork doesn’t necessarily need to be loving or kind.” —Ariana Reines
Our own Ross Simonini has a new podcast out with SFMoMA, Raw Material. This week’s episode on divination features Ariana Reines, Melissa Buzzeo, and CA Conrad. The poets discuss astrological techniques used to perceive and foresee the unknown. Recommended for fans of anti-authority talk, Madame Blavatsky, and arachnomancy.
Jim Knipfel on Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Translations from the French by Mitchell Abidor
At the time of his death in 1961, French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline remained an extraordinarily controversial and contradictory figure. He had been a cavalryman in World War I who collaborated with the Vichy government during the French Occupation and was later found guilty of treason. He was a physician who treated the poor in some of the worst slums in Paris, yet who was also a virulent racist and anti-Semite. He was a disillusioned humanist who turned misanthropist after seeing a world overrun with stupid human brutality. He spread myths about himself, and publicly attacked those who repeated them as truth. He loved the ballet, he loved animals, and was during his lifetime perhaps the most singularly despised man in France—a role he accepted and performed with undeniable gusto. Some said he was the embodiment of evil, others that he was merely and utterly insane.
He was also one of the most important and influential writers of the 20th century. He smashed forms and rewrote the conventions of what constituted proper style and storytelling. Without Céline’s bitter, sprawling, phantasmagoric black comedies, there would have likely been no Henry Miller, no Beat movement, no Jean Genet, no Kurt Vonnegut, Nathaniel West, Hubert Selby, Thomas Pynchon, William Gaddis, or a thousand others.
So then the question becomes, given Céline’s undisputed literary importance, why does so much of his work remain unavailable?
In 2009, fifty-five years after its original French publication, Normance, the last of Céline’s twelve novels to be translated into English, was finally released for the first time. Mea Culpa, an attack on communism written after a brief visit to Russia in 1936, was translated and released in the States in 1938 but never reprinted. In 2012, a small Quebecois publisher released a limited edition of three notorious pamphlets (some would call them “screeds” or “rants”) written by Céline between 1937 and 1941. It was expressly forbidden to sell or ship the book outside of Canada. Apart from the novels and two minor works (a play and a collection of ballets), none of Céline’s other writings are available in English. The amount of untranslated material is staggering—thousands of pages worth of essays, speeches, and correspondence.
Yes, Céline was an unpleasant fellow with some mighty harsh and unpopular ideas, but I’m hardpressed to think of another writer of similar stature, no matter how loathsome we may find his or her opinions, whose work has been so effectively quashed. Contrary to general perception, it’s not that these works have been banned. They haven’t been, at least not in any official manner. People are simply afraid of them, it seems, in a way they fear few other writers. People who have never read Céline call him a Nazi and dismiss the novels on that basis, often insisting, in fact, no one should read him. Academics treat him as if he will quite literally leap from the pages to inject poison into the minds of those who dare open his books. Publishers are apparently afraid of the repercussions of being associated with such a monster.
Funny thing is, over time the shrill, hair-pulling paranoia surrounding Céline has come to resemble a mere reflection of the ignorantly superstitious world against which he aimed so much invective. (On the fiftieth anniversary of his death in 2011, the French Culture Minister struck Céline’s name from the list of the five hundred most important French cultural icons because he was a nasty person.) It’s a situation that would have come as no surprise to the author of Journey to the End of the Night.
In 1934, after being approached by noted art historian Élie Faure to denounce the recent fascist riots in France, Céline wrote the following, excerpted from a previously untranslated letter:
... I absolutely refuse to line up on this side or that. I am an anarchist to the tip of my toes. I always was one and I will never be anything else. Everyone has spit on me, from Izvestia to the official Nazis, M. de Regnier, Comœdia, Stavisky, president Dullin, all of them in almost the same exact terms have declared me unacceptable, unspeakable. I haven’t done this on purpose, but it’s a fact. I’m fine with this, because I’m in the right. Every political system is an enterprise of hypocritical narcissism which consists in projecting the personal ignominy of its adherents onto a system or onto “others.” I admit that I live quite well; I proclaim loudly, emotionally, and strongly all of man’s common disgustingness, on the right and the left. I will never be forgiven for this. Since the death of the priests the world is nothing but demagoguery, shit is constantly flattered, and responsibility is rejected through ideological and verbal artifice.
There is no more contrition; there is nothing but chants of revolt and hope. But hope for what? That shit will start smelling good?
The ironic thing is that until 1937, with two masterpieces behind him (Journey and Death on the Installment Plan), Céline was considered a national treasure. Critics and readers alike hailed him as a revolutionary literary genius. They loved the shattered flow of his dark and hopeless poetry, his absurd humor, and his unrelenting, all-purpose misanthropy. In the novels he revealed himself as a non-denominational despiser of mankind, which he presented as a teeming mob of idiotic, cruel, drooling buffoons. He hated the French and the Germans alike, as well as the English, the communists, the Jews, the Jesuits, the generals and the foot soldiers, the rich and the poor. No one escaped his wrath, and everyone loved him for it.
But then in 1937 he published Bagatelles Pour une Massacre (Trifles for a Massacre), a pamphlet in which he ostensibly urged France to stay out of the inevitable war to come, as the results would be devastating. There was, however, a bit more going on in the screed as well, as the following excerpt reveals:
The only serious thing right now for any great man, scholarly writer, filmmaker, financier, industrialist, politician (and I mean the most absolutely serious thing) is to inconvenience the Jews. The Jews our masters, here, there, in Russia, in England, in America, everywhere!... Act like a clown, a rebel, someone daring, someone anti-bourgeois, the enragé righter of wrongs…The Jew doesn’t give a damn! Divertissements!... Babble! But don’t touch on the Jewish question or else he’ll burn your ass… Stiff as a board, they’ll have you croak in one way or another…The Jew is king of the gold of the bank and of justice…Through a straw man or directly. He owns everything…Press… Theater… Radio… The Chamber of Deputies… the Senate… Police… here and there… The great discoverers of Bolshevik tyranny emit a thousand eagle shrieks…that’s understandable. They beat their breasts till they bleed and yet they never never discern the swarming of the Yids, never track things back to the world-wide conspiracy…Strange blindness… (In the same way that in studying Hollywood, its secrets, its intentions, its masters, its cosmic racket, its fantastic bazaar of international stupefaction, Hériat nowhere sees the essential, the capital work of Jewish imperialism).
For pages on end he heaped bile on the Jews, accusing them of being behind the coming war, as well as every other war and evil known to man. He attacked the communists and Nazis as well, but few seemed to notice. The pamphlet sold 75,000 copies before being banned in 1939. When it was republished two years later, it became one of France’s top-selling books during the Occupation. But among critics, intellectuals, and the Left, the pamphlet was proof Céline was no longer a genial misanthrope like that quaint Mark Twain, or a slapstick existentialist like Samuel Beckett who would come later. He was pointing fingers, and worse—he seemed serious. It just wasn’t funny anymore.
Almost overnight, Céline’s literary reputation collapsed, which always struck me as more than a little ironic and baffling, considering that in historical terms France had long been held as one of the most anti-Semitic nations in Europe. It confirmed and exacerbated his disgust for humanity, and fed his anti-Semitic paranoia. Instead of being contrite, he used that burning disgust to publish two more pamphlets, L’École des Cadavres (The School for Corpses) in 1938, and Les Beaux Draps (The Fine Mess) in 1941. In the latter, he examined Germany’s defeat of the French, and one has to wonder if the almost gleefully bitter tone doesn’t hint at a big Fuck You to his countrymen. After all, not only had the French population refused to heed his warning to stay out of the war—they went so far as to turn on him for even making such a suggestion. (It’s worth noting that until his death, Céline would insist that he was the last true French patriot.)
The German presence vexes them? Well what about the Jewish presence?
More Jews than ever on the streets; more Jews than ever in the press; more Jews than ever in the courtrooms; more Jews than ever at the Sorbonne; more Jews than ever in medicine; more Jews than ever in the theater, the opera, at the Français, in industry, in the banks. Paris and France more than ever handed over to the Freemasons and the Jews, more insolent than ever. More Lodges working backstage and more actively than ever. All of them more determined than ever to never surrender an inch of their farms, of their privilege to white slavery through war and peace up until the final jolt of the last confused native. And the French are quite content, perfectly in agreement, enthusiastic.
Such stupidity is beyond man. So fantastic a stupor reveals a death instinct, a gravitational pull towards the mass grave, a mutilating perversion that nothing could explain if not that the time has arrived, that the devil has captured us, that destiny has been fulfilled.
Needless to say, this did not help him reclaim his earlier popularity, and his overwhelming hatred of his countrymen only deepened. In later years (especially following the war when he was convicted of treason in absentia and facing the gallows) he would insist he wasn’t a collaborator during the Occupation—specifically that he had never written for the collaborationist papers. While technically true, he never wrote articles for them and was never paid, he did supply these papers with numerous letters to the editor, which were of course published in their entirety. The following, excerpted from a letter written shortly after the release of Les Beaux Draps, was submitted to Au Pilori, one of the more militant of the collaborationist publications.
...All of French public opinion is philo-Semitic and increasingly so! (We ate so well under the Mandel government). Who would dare swim against such a current? No one. Public schools (so Masonic) once and for all gave the French their hereditary enemy: Germany. The issue has been decided. The French never change their ideas. They are immutable and will die that way. They’re sickly and will never grow up. They are no longer of the age or have the taste for variations. They would rather die than think; they would prefer death to the abandoning of a prejudice. Who (they think) are the surest enemies of the krauts? It’s the Jews? Well then, five hundred times: Long Live the Jews!
Propaganda? Explanations? Demonstrations? Idle chatter? Zero! Everything is finished. The play is over. Wasted money, wasted time.
In order to re-create France it would have had to be entirely reconstructed on a racist-communitarian basis. We are ever farther away from this ideal, from this fantastic design. The lark has remained valiant and joyful; it still flies into the heavens, but the Gauls no longer hear it. Tied to, towed behind the Jews’ asses, kneaded in their shit up to their hearts, they find this to be adorable.
Three months earlier, once again revealing his contradictory (or perhaps merely anarchist) nature, Céline lobbied to spare the life of a French sailor who was scheduled for execution after claiming he sabotaged a German phone line. The efforts failed and the sailor was hanged. Afterward, Céline wrote the following to Dr. Augustin Tuset, a physician who had likewise fought to save the sailor.
And here we have an example of morality—There is no doubt that if this unfortunate had been a Jew he would have come out fine. It doesn’t matter what Jew: wandering disgusting showman. Why? Because all of Jewry would have immediately cast fire and flames, Mgr Duparc first among them, and all of Christianity of the Finistère and elsewhere would have taken up the cause of the little Jew—Countless petitions would have been covered in less than a week – The Krauts would have been so bothered that they would have released their prey. But an Aryan! In reality no one gives a damn – neither Jews nor Aryans give a damn. The proof is that they were ready to sacrifice two or three million more to defeat Germany, to begin 1914 all over again. Who is ready to sacrifice three million Jews? No one! And especially not the Pope.
The Aryan is a dog, fit only to kill. This is what all the Jews think, and the Aryans, too. In the case in question - imagine a Jew! All of Brittany would go into a trance; Rome the Lodges, Vichy, New York, the world. It’s the crime of crimes! For an Aryan? Weak protests lacking in faith and conviction, numberless [sic, read: few in number], sporadic, abnormal, dragged by the hair, rare—The fate of the Aryans is to die in the most normal of fashions: for the Jews.
(Worth noting here is that by the time of this letter numerous anti-Jewish laws had been enacted by the Vichy government across France. Jewish residents had been stripped of their citizenship, and several concentration camps had already been established.)
Despite the evidence of the above letters, Céline’s apparently monomaniacal hatred of the Jews was not quite as exclusive as it might seem. As seen in an excerpt from a 1942 letter to another collaborationist paper, he still had plenty of hatred left over for other groups as well.
...Count on me to throw the Jews, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, the synarchists, the priests, the English, the Protestants, the lukewarm, the soft, the vaguely anti-Semitic all in the same bottomless boat in the waters off Nantes. For me all these people are hanging on to this rotten civilization and must disappear. For us, racism for at least a few centuries.
In 1944 Céline returned to fiction with Guignol’s Band, but would not publish again for several years—not until after his self-imposed exile and a stretch in a Copenhagen prison awaiting extradition back to France to face his sentence. Once he began releasing novels regularly in the 1950s, the unflinching, hilarious misanthropy and nihilism of his earlier work was as harsh as ever (if not more so). Missing was the scalding, specifically antisemitic venom of the pamphlets and letters written during the Occupation. That never leaked into the novels except in a very broad and general manner. In his correspondence and statements to the press, however, he made it perfectly clear his attitudes had not changed, and he adamantly refused to apologize for anything he had said or written.
As despicable and loathsome a character as he presented himself to be (quite consciously and spitefully, I tend to believe), his final trilogy of novels—translated as Castle to Castle, North, and Rigadoon—may well be the most brilliant thing he ever wrote. He completed Rigadoon the day before he died, and shortly after finishing the novel he wrote one final letter, this one to his publisher, Gaston Gallimard:
My dear editor and friend,
I think it’ll be time we bind each other by another contract for my next novel, “rigodon”… in the same terms as the preceding one except for the sum—1500 new francs instead of 1000—otherwise I’m going to rent a tractor and smash in the NRF and sabotage all the baccalaureate exams! And I mean what I say!
Many, if not most readers will react to the few brief, unpublished letters and excerpts above with repugnant horror, and some will see them as proof of why such things should remain unavailable, hidden, tucked into a shadowed corner, forgotten (though writers may empathize with that last one). It’s easier not to think about those things that make us uncomfortable. But in spite of how ugly the contents and the sentiments behind them, there’s little denying that they’re still beautifully written (as much as the term “beautiful” could ever apply to Céline’s prose).
For those who would still deign to tell us what is proper and improper, what we can and cannot read for our own good, consider that since its original English publication, Mein Kampf has never been out of print. You can pluck a copy of the Turner Diaries off the shelf at Barnes & Noble. Goebbels Diaries and even that godawful novel of his are available, as are The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Céline at least wrote well, and these documents are of great historic and literary value—if only as a glimpse into the psychology of an important and complex artist. Consider also that we live in an age in which cable television is awash in fetishistic documentaries about the Holocaust and serial killers, where you can go online and watch videos of people eating shit or torturing animals, yet it’s Louis-Ferdinand Céline—in the grave for over fifty years—who frightens us. Somehow I believe the very notion would give him a chuckle. And then he would blame the Jews.
Jim Knipfel is the author of Slackjaw, These Children Who Come at You with Knives, The Blow-Off, and several other books, most recently Residue (Red Hen Press, 2015). his work has appeared in New York Press, the Wall Street Journal, the Village Voice and dozens of other publications.
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