Pt. I, Ch. 2, “L.A. Noir and Forgetting”
“there are noir and apocalyptic scenarios that continually repeat in literature, film and the visual arts from Los Angeles. By the mid sixties, they take on an increasingly disengaged spirit, like a nightmare one watches through the windshield of a car” (81).
Pt. V, Ch. 12, “Suburban Noir and Cyberspace”
“in the chain of exurban extension, cyberspace is the next suburb. The best guided tour of suburban cyberspace is probably by architect and critic William J. Mitchell …. how ‘asynchronous’ it will be … with ‘fragmented subjects who exist as collections of aliases and agents.’ He could have been describing the imaginary L.A. freeway circa 1970″ (298).
Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (London and New York: Verso, 1997)
“I Re-wrote Those Motherfuckers From Scratch”
Posted by Marc Bousquet on 01/05/10 at 03:26 PM
Bérubé How many submissions did you receive for The Institution of Literature?
Williams 385, not counting the nine essays you submitted, eight of which sucked, if you don’t mind my saying so.
Bérubé Not at all. I totally respect your opinion when it comes to essays of mine that suck.
Williams Well, they did. As did many of the 65 essays I accepted, 38 of which I had to rewrite.
Lyon That sounds like a lot.
Williams Yeah. I take editing seriously.
Bérubé Well, how much rewriting did you do? We’re talking line edits, right?
Williams Fuck no. I rewrote those motherfuckers from scratch.
Bérubé Really? What did their authors say about that?
Williams I didn’t ask them. Why?
Bérubé Well, because most of the time, when editors make substantial changes to a manuscript, they run them by the authors, that’s why.
Williams Fuck that. If I ran things by people, do you know long it would take me to produce an issue?
Bérubé No, how long?
Williams Too fucking long, that’s how long. There’s no way I have time to send editorial suggestions back to people who’ll only sit on them for four or five months and then get back to me with a bunch of bullshit complaints about what I’ve cut. Besides, do you think that guys like Leitch and Kumar give a shit either way? It’s not like they’re going to notice. Hell, I stuck three paragraphs from the Grundrisse into your first essay and you didn’t say a fucking word.
Bérubé Wait, wait. That whole bit about how “the question of the relation between this production-determining distribution, and production, belongs evidently within production itself”? That wasn’t mine?
–excerpted from Michael Bérubé and Janet Lyon, The Early Years: An Interview with Jeffrey J. Williams
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Posted 01 February 2010
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My contribution to the ongoing discussion “O co toczy sie gra” in Dziennika/Kultura. PDF here. Polish only
He wants to live long enough to witness a news, post-genomic fiction. one that grasps the interpenetrating loops of inheritance and upbringing so tangled that every cause is some other cause’s effect. One that, through a kind of collaborative writing, shakes free of the prejudices of any individual maker. For now, fiction remains at best a scattershot mood-regulating concoction - a powerful if erratic cocktail like Ritalin for ADHD, or benzodiazepines for the sociophobe. In time, like every other human creation , it will be replaced by better, more precise molecular fine-tuning. (Generosity 230)
“You’re going to make us all happy. Is that the plan?”
His eyebrows crumple and his lips sour. She’s hurt him, at least as much as he’s capable of being hurt by anyone. He shrugs off her mockery. “A little more capable of being well in the world. But not if you don’t want it, of course.”
“You folks have finally found the formula for soma. Damn.”
He breathes out a long-suffering sigh and leans against her car. “First, I really do hope that Aldous Huxley is burning in the pain-ennobling hell of his choice. That book is one of the most dangerous, hope-impeding, ideological rants ever written. Just because the author is stunted by some virtuous vision of embattled humanity, the rest of the race is supposed to keep suffering for all time?” (178)
(Richard Powers Generosity. An Enhancement)
Will I see you again? he wanted to ask. But he was afraid of ruining everything.
He left the circle, and after waiting a long time caught a bus on the road back into the city proper. Whatever I do now, he said to himself on the bus, staring out the window at the volcano in the distance, I cannot do for her. I cannot assume she’ll be mine. I must act on the assumption she’ll never be mine, that it will never be less impossible than it all seems at this moment. I must act on the assumption that I’ll never see her again, except for a passing moment in the street or the Market, and that love has been left hanging in the black space of a small room, and in the light, with a husband and a child, she’ll feel very different tomorrow., if she doesn’t already. Therefore, what I do now ultimately has nothing to do with her. It has to do with the life I’ve been living. It has to do with the man I’ve been and who I am now, without her, and what my life is now, without her.
He went home and left his wife.
She wanted him to say something. She wanted him to say it was alright, but more than that she wanted some ridiculous sort of reassurance that somehow it all didn’t matter. The enormity of what she’d done hadn’t sunk in. She hoped he wouldn’t hate her, and she could take some relief in that, because he didn’t hate her, there was nothing in his face like hatred, only disbelief; he stood up from the bed not looking at her at all; and she’d suddenly realized he was leaving, and she was simply astounded by it. It simply didn’t occur to her that whatever had been dome or said could mean he was going to walk away now and be gone from her. It never crossed her mind for a moment that these were the last moments she’d ever lay eyes on him. She reached for him as he turned to go, and he bent down and kissed her gently and quickly.
I love the ashes. I love the endless smoky twilight of Los Angeles. I love walking along Sunset Boulevard past the bistros where the Hollywood trash have to brush the black soot off their salmon linguini in white wine sauce before they can eat it. I love driving across one black ring after another all the way to the sea, through the charred palisades past abandoned houses, listening through the open windows to the phone machines clicking on and off with messages from somewhere east of the Mojave, out of the American blue. I’ve been in a state of giddiness ever since the riots of ten years ago, when I would take a break from finishing my last book and go to the rooftop, watching surround me the first ring of fire from the looting. I still go up there, and the fires still burn. They burn a dead swath between me and my memories. They burn a swath between me and the future, stranding me in the present. reducing definitions of love to my continuing gaze across the smouldering panorama as Viv, my little carnal ferret, devours me on her knees. I love having nothing to hope for but the cremation of my dreams; when my dreams are dead the rest of me is alive, all cinder and appetite. (Amnesiascope 5)
Because Beau, the only one she would have stayed with, was unclaimable - not all the nights she had spent by his side had let her into him, he would stop at her frontiers, always, or gently stop her at his own - and it was so painful and disorienting that she thought she had better find out if it was because of something that was in her or something in Beau or something in all men, something that wouldn’t couple with whatever it was in her, as though she were threaded wrong, or they were (230).
He had never made his general happiness, the furtherance of his goals or the fulfilling of his needs, a condition of his love for anyone, certainly not any of the women he had been with. He had tried to find and supply what they needed; hadn’t asked anything for himself but that they would not go, not tire of him, not discard him. He’d never learned - who could have told him, if he simply didn’t know? - that one thing you can do to keep her by you, given a general good disposition toward you, is to give her something to do for you: something that, maybe, would take a lifetime. That way she’d remain, maybe. And the thing you asked for would be done for you, too, to some degree, in some way, which would be heartening and lovely even if it wasn’t always or entirely successful. I need your help (238).
At the dawn of cinema these two tendencies were already evident in the split between the brothers Lumiere and George Melies, for whereas the former concerned themselves with realist spectacles such as the arrival of a train at a station or people sitting around playing cards, Melies invented the special effect as a tool by means of which he was able to render spaceships, robots and dragons in a way that would be convincing, at least, to the average theater goer.
It was precisely Melies’s concern with what we refer to as the “Visionary” tendency in cinema–its Carnival cultural residue–to be the true and proper use of the medium. In this sense, film is closer to the spirit of the delighted rabble depicted watching The Magic Flute in Milos Forman’s Amadeus , than to the stiff-necked upper classes shown patronizing The Marriage of Figaro. For it is in the Visionary modality that myth functions as the telescope for viewing into the deepest reaches of the human soul, ironically transforming the movie camera from a mere optical device for recording consensus reality to a pulsing organic machine capable of peering with its intrusive Eye into our dreaming skulls.
from “The Visionary Movie: a Manifesto”
This is the way movie reviews should be written. Or any kind of reviews. In fact, why don’t you go on and check out the entire website - it’s funny, informative and scary-smart to boot.
God, he thought, and felt ill. Was this what Tanya Lee had called the “aquatic horror” shape? It had no shape. Nor pseudopodia, either flesh or metal. It was, in a sense, not there at all; when he managed to look directly at it, the shape vanished; he saw through it, saw the people on the far side — but not it. Yet if he turned his head, caught it out of a sidelong glance, he could determine its boundaries.
It was terrible; it blasted him with its awareness. As it moved it drained the life from each person in turn; it ate the people who had assembled, passed on, ate again, ate more with an endless appetite. It hated; he felt its hate. It loathed; he felt its loathing for everyone present — in fact he shared its loathing. All at once he and everyone else in the big villa were each a twisted slug, and over the fallen slug carcasses the creature savored, lingered, but all the time coming directly toward him — or was that an illusion? If this is a hallucination, Chien thought, it is the worst I have ever had; if it is not, then it is evil reality; it’s an evil thing that kills and injures. He saw the trail of stepped-on, mashed men and women remnants behind it; he saw them trying to reassemble, to operate their crippled bodies; he heard them attempting speech.
I know who you are, Tung Chien thought to himself. You, the supreme head of the worldwide Party structure. You, who destroy whatever living object you touch; I see that Arabic poem, the searching for the flowers of life to eat them — I see you astride the plain which to you is Earth, plain without hills, without valleys. You go anywhere, appear any time, devour anything; you engineer life and then guzzle it, and you enjoy that.
from “Faith of Our Fathers”
Spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things.
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Posted 05 November 2009
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“—You is from hunger, Mr Bones”
Intense.
James Elkins Six Stories from the End of Representation. Images in Painting, Photography, Astronomy, Microscopy, Particle Physics, and Quantum Mechanics, 1980-2000
Albert Sanchez Pinol Pandora w Kongu
Michel Faber The Fire Gospel
Richard Powers Generosity. An Enhancement
Quote. Tom Waits is made of awesome. Unquote. Can’t agree more. This IS poetry.
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It’s dreamy weather we’re on
You waved your crooked wand
Along an icy pond with a frozen moon
A murder of silhouette crows I saw
And the tears on my face
And the skates on the pond
They spell Alice
I disappear in your name
But you must wait for me
Somewhere across the sea
There’s a wreck of a ship
Your hair is like meadow grass on the tide
And the raindrops on my window
And the ice in my drink
Baby all I can think of is Alice
Arithmetic arithmetock
Turn the hands back on the clock
How does the ocean rock the boat?
How did the razor find my throat?
The only strings that hold me here
Are tangled up around the pier
And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I’m dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I’m lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
And so a secret kiss
Brings madness with the bliss
And I will think of this
When I’m dead in my grave
Set me adrift and I’m lost over there
And I must be insane
To go skating on your name
And by tracing it twice
I fell through the ice
Of Alice
There’s only Alice
America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
America two dollars and twenty-seven cents January 17, 1956.
I can’t stand my own mind.
America when will we end the human war?
Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb
I don’t feel good don’t bother me.
I won’t write my poem till I’m in my right mind.
America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I’m sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.
There must be some other way to settle this argument.
Burroughs is in Tangiers I don’t think he’ll come back it’s sinister.
Are you being sinister or is this some form of practical joke?
I’m trying to come to the point.
I refuse to give up my obsession.
America stop pushing I know what I’m doing.
America the plum blossoms are falling.
I haven’t read the newspapers for months, everyday somebody goes on trial for
murder.
America I feel sentimental about the Wobblies.
America I used to be a communist when I was a kid and I’m not sorry.
I smoke marijuana every chance I get.
I sit in my house for days on end and stare at the roses in the closet.
When I go to Chinatown I get drunk and never get laid.
My mind is made up there’s going to be trouble.
You should have seen me reading Marx.
My psychoanalyst thinks I’m perfectly right.
I won’t say the Lord’s Prayer.
I have mystical visions and cosmic vibrations.
America I still haven’t told you what you did to Uncle Max after he came over
from Russia.
I’m addressing you.
Are you going to let our emotional life be run by Time Magazine?
I’m obsessed by Time Magazine.
I read it every week.
Its cover stares at me every time I slink past the corner candystore.
I read it in the basement of the Berkeley Public Library.
It’s always telling me about responsibility. Businessmen are serious. Movie
producers are serious. Everybody’s serious but me.
It occurs to me that I am America.
I am talking to myself again.
Asia is rising against me.
I haven’t got a chinaman’s chance.
I’d better consider my national resources.
My national resources consist of two joints of marijuana millions of genitals
an unpublishable private literature that goes 1400 miles and hour and
twentyfivethousand mental institutions.
I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of underpriviliged who live in
my flowerpots under the light of five hundred suns.
I have abolished the whorehouses of France, Tangiers is the next to go.
My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I’m a Catholic.
America how can I write a holy litany in your silly mood?
I will continue like Henry Ford my strophes are as individual as his
automobiles more so they’re all different sexes
America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500 down on your old strophe
America free Tom Mooney
America save the Spanish Loyalists
America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.
America when I was seven momma took me to Communist Cell meetings they
sold us garbanzos a handful per ticket a ticket costs a nickel and the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and sentimental about the
workers it was all so sincere you have no idea what a good thing the party
was in 1835 Scott Nearing was a grand old man a real mensch Mother
Bloor made me cry I once saw Israel Amter plain. Everybody must have
been a spy.
America you don’re really want to go to war.
America it’s them bad Russians.
Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen. And them Russians.
The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia’s power mad. She wants to take
our cars from out our garages.
Her wants to grab Chicago. Her needs a Red Reader’s Digest. her wants our
auto plants in Siberia. Him big bureaucracy running our fillingstations.
That no good. Ugh. Him makes Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers.
Hah. Her make us all work sixteen hours a day. Help.
America this is quite serious.
America this is the impression I get from looking in the television set.
America is this correct?
I’d better get right down to the job.
It’s true I don’t want to join the Army or turn lathes in precision parts
factories, I’m nearsighted and psychopathic anyway.
America I’m putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.
Listen. I’m going to try one more time. I don’t promise anything will come of it, or that I won’t try to put it off for as long as possible, or that in the meantime I may not have to do something sensible first, like find Viv for instance. I don’t promise that the deep fault line that runs from my psyche through my brain out my front door and down the street won’t run all the way from L.A. to America and beyond, all the way from memory to the moment and back, splitting me up in the middle and leaving half of me on one side and half of me on the other. Not far from this very bluff where I am now is the beach where I once told a woman about talking to myself; actually I can almost see the very place, right down there. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend that I’m talking to myself again, like I used to. Now, just for a while, we’re going to pretend - don’t take this personally - that you’re not here at all. Most of the best things I’ve ever said, the most fluid, stutterless, sonorous things, were to myself, and now I’m going to try one more time to say everything I can find in me that might be worth saying, and hope that whatever I find in me to say is only the road, and not the place to where the road is going. And then when I’m finished, perhaps I’ll be finished for good. There’s always the off-chance that, from another bluff, I’ll actually be able to see the place to where the road is going and that, having seen it, I’ll find that nothing else needs to be said. But there’s also the chance that, having seen it, I’ll find something entirely new that needs to be said, something I never knew before that I could say. And then, having tried one last time, perhaps I will try once more.
“No,” he said, and then it no longer mattered, what he knew, tasting the salt of her mouth where tears had dried. There was a strength that ran in her, something he’d known in Night City and held there, been held by it, held for a while away from time and death, from the relentless Street that hunted them all. It was a place he’d known before; not everyone could take him there, and somehow he always managed to forget it. Something he’d found and lost so many times. It belonged, he knew – he remembered – as she pulled him down, to the meat, the flesh the cowboys mocked. It was a vast thing, beyond knowing, a sea of information coded in spiral and pheromone, infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read.
When the world ends, it ends somewhat differently for each soul then alive to see it; the end doesn’t come all at once but passes and repasses over the world like the shivers that pass over a horse’s skin. The coming of the end might at first lift and shake just one county, one neighborhood, and not the others around it; might feelably ripple beneath the feet of these churchgoers and not of those tavern-goers down the street, shatter only the peace of this street, this family, this child of this family who at that moment lifts her eyes from the Sunday comics and knows for certain that nothing will ever be the same again.
And through the world ends sooner for some than for others, each one who passes through it - or through whom it passes - will be able to look back and know that he has moved from the old world to the new, where willy-nilly he will die: will know it though all round him his neighbors are still living in the world, amid its old comforts and fears. And that will be the proof, that in his fellows’ faces he can see that they have been left behind, can see in the way they look at him and that he has crossed over alive. (17)