I'm reading this nasty little Pynchon book, and can't decide whether I love it or hate it yet.
I hate being jerked around by an author. That is, I hate when the author attempts, transparently, to control my interpretation of and relationship to the text in ways which transgress against the format of a novel. At a basic level I find it presumptuous: the author, it is clear, thinks he is smarter than me and is going to pull some shrewd trick on me by reversing chronologies, changing spellings, etc.
Not to sound too much like an arrogant prick, but I'm too smart for that, and the game quickly becomes tiresome for me. I don't want to keep flipping back and forth to check whether or not a name has been mentioned before, or whether or not a character has been introduced. The disorientation that is supposed to be some kind of literary narcotic euphoria more nearly approximates being forced to take a field sobriety test while sober. It's just tireless jumping through hoops, and no kind of valuable use of anyone's time.
This is the main gripe. The other being that Pynchon creates for us probably the most vapid, irritating protagonist I have had the pleasure of slogging through a story with. His aforementioned attempts to destabilize the narrative, aside from exhausting me as a reader, have the effect of creating an unstable (in many senses of the word) protagonist. As a result, the prose style which is often engaging and dynamic seems affected and shrill.
This segues pretty well into what I actually like about the book. Pynchon has some pretty damn good poetry here, and when he's not trying to weasel some symbolist or aptronymic bullcrap his comparisons all resound clarion. If I didn't get the feeling that he was trying to bewilder/impress rather than entertain I would be entirely satisfied to let the book work entirely on its verbal harmony.
The other part is once the narrative breaks out of its sordid meditation on California (to be honest, a nasty little state which is far less worthy of obsession than Pynchon and the RHCP make it out to be) it becomes quite gripping. Its got a sophisticated bit of surrealist horror and conspiracy thriller: the black-uniformed Tristero assassins become namelessly dreadful in a delicious was. If Pynchon didn't insist on regularly breaking the mood with loud, postmodern farting noises I could even call the whole thing cool.
But we'll see where he goes. I have the suspicion that he'll knock the wind out of the intriguing (speaking literally) aspects of the novel towards the end in order to punish the viscerally driven reader for daring to take pleasure in such things. We'll see, we'll see.
06 January 2010
01 January 2010
The pornography of art
Every kind of love is pornographic. It's all dirty. Even beautiful people are ugly, because a beautiful body, one that engenders love, is a pornographic body. This abstracts itself to art. There is no such thing as high art. Art is love, and love is dirty, and low.
This is why "erotica" pisses me off, and why the postmodern refutation of "high art" pisses me off. Erotica is supposed to be pornography elevated. Usually this equates to subtlety of presentation, but that's just an affectation. The most demure, arty, "erotica" is exactly equivalent to the dirtiest, comespattered fuckfest Hollywood can offer.
The refutation of high art comes from the other end. Postmodernists abstract and bowlderize the pornography of art as postmodern "uncertainty." They claim that art considered "high" and "low" is characterized thus based on illusory criteria. And what they WANT to be saying is that all "low" art is "high," because the criteria for "high" art is supposedly exclusive. In fact, it's entirely the opposite.
Good art gets you to come hardest, because all art is porn. The more love a work of art can engender, the more a masterful piece of pornography it is. There is no such THING as high art. All art is low, because no matter how "high" or artistic a work of art is, the mechanism is the same. A metacultural tribute to action movies still causes adrenaline to pump. The same penis that is made erect by a black and white spread of supermodels having sex under white sheets as is made erect by some coked up college student from Kansas getting ejaculated on by Italians.
All art speak to our basest desires, because base desires all we have. Some art makes us feel more in control of those desires, but even that sensation of control is a psychological mechanism to allow us to indulge them further. All desires are base. All art is low. All art is love, and all love is pornography
Pereat Ars, Pereat Mundis
This is why "erotica" pisses me off, and why the postmodern refutation of "high art" pisses me off. Erotica is supposed to be pornography elevated. Usually this equates to subtlety of presentation, but that's just an affectation. The most demure, arty, "erotica" is exactly equivalent to the dirtiest, comespattered fuckfest Hollywood can offer.
The refutation of high art comes from the other end. Postmodernists abstract and bowlderize the pornography of art as postmodern "uncertainty." They claim that art considered "high" and "low" is characterized thus based on illusory criteria. And what they WANT to be saying is that all "low" art is "high," because the criteria for "high" art is supposedly exclusive. In fact, it's entirely the opposite.
Good art gets you to come hardest, because all art is porn. The more love a work of art can engender, the more a masterful piece of pornography it is. There is no such THING as high art. All art is low, because no matter how "high" or artistic a work of art is, the mechanism is the same. A metacultural tribute to action movies still causes adrenaline to pump. The same penis that is made erect by a black and white spread of supermodels having sex under white sheets as is made erect by some coked up college student from Kansas getting ejaculated on by Italians.
All art speak to our basest desires, because base desires all we have. Some art makes us feel more in control of those desires, but even that sensation of control is a psychological mechanism to allow us to indulge them further. All desires are base. All art is low. All art is love, and all love is pornography
Pereat Ars, Pereat Mundis
29 December 2009
Maintenance
I suppose that fooling around on the observation deck is a lot more bearable than toiling in the engine room. I do not post here, enough. I post the fuck out of tumblr. I will live here, the place of work, from now on. And that is a firm promise to myself and...whoever else is listening.
"The access code is 'Alone'"
"The access code is 'Alone'"
03 November 2009
If you deconstruct gender, you aren't a lady
I have a hard time respecting feminism. Not because its underpinnings are in any way unsound or fallacious, but because like any idea grounded in the higher realms of sociological or philosophical thought by the time it trickles down to the laiety it is nothing more than a loose conglomeration of slogans having less to do with its ideological corpus and more with the same unsavory forces which have always governed the intellectual drip-pan. In this case it has become little more than a mating evaluation with little other power.
I assume much about feminism's intent and basis, with good reason. If feminism indeed originated in the spirit of the snake-necked diva claiming her right to womynly power because her boyfriend just raised her allowance to stop her withholding sex, then the whole thing is bankrupt, and I renounce all involvement with the word and proudly instantiate myself as a born again chauvinist.
In the first place feminism as it is commonly encountered is nothing more than the last in a long line of arbitrary criteria applied by women to men in order to ascertain how pliable and inoffensive they are. Most of the criteria which are now decried as trappings of the patriarchy originated in just this way: social expectations of gender interactions which place women in a dominant or unassailable position, i.e. the right of a woman to be supported by her husband, "chivalry," the wearing of veils (are we really to believe the gender responsible for designing Bloodrayne's outfit came up with that practice all on their own? Men left to their own devices will NOT restrict their access to female sexuality). What these things have in common is that to contest them constitutes a failure on the part of any man who does so, and thus a legitimate cause to deny him sex. The only function of these institutions is to allow their male participants to demonstrate that they are docile and socially compliant.
Feminism practiced thusly permanently establishes the guilt of all (mostly heterosexual) men, living or dead, for the entirety of woe, oppression, and general disenfranchisement of women throughout all time. According to this capacity of feminism men are saddled with a permanent discursive onus. This then follows the pattern of the dominant, unassailable female against the male who is placed in a morally inferior position, and who is thus eternally "wrong."
Evidence of this abounds. Feminism is no longer an ideological technique or school of thought but an ideal to be striven towards, much as chivalry, modesty, piety, or chastity was. Women do not talk about whether or not they are feminist (rarely will any woman who does not grossly misinterpret the term declare she is "not a feminist") but about whether or not they are a "bad feminist." A woman who is perceived to grant concessions to the patriarchy is a "bad feminist." That is a woman who cooks, cleans, and does anything during sex other than close her eyes and pretend her lover is Janis Joplin. A man who expects a woman to do any of these things can forget about every obtaining a female mate, because to transgress against feminism would be as egregious as men in bygone eras expecting their veiled wives to show their hair, to not pull a woman's chair out, or to expect her to get a job, to pay her share of the bills.
The salient point of this is that feminism is something expected of all educated citizens. But because it is a social expectation, yet another criteria used for the evaluation of a mate, it lacks any power as a social idea. Most men a woman speaks to will declare themselves "feminist" or at least in sympathy with feminist ideals. At the very least they will proffer comments about how much more difficult it is to be a woman.
Let me let you ladies in on a little secret: men never speak about feminism when YOU ARE NOT AROUND. I have never spoken with another man in depth about feminist theory, not have I sincerely evaluated the position in which men and women find themselves from the perspective of gender. As feminism is practiced in the lay discourse, NO MAN is a feminist in private. Men make these pretensions for the same reason they consented to the other, now reviled practices: so you will fuck them. Those guys in "this is what a feminist looks like" shirts know what they are doing. Those shirts might as well say "I'll let you win any argument we have, now suck my cock!"
When a practice becomes an evaluative, it falls into the ideological stagnation I a few paragraphs up. When I made the caveat that I assume much about feminism's basis, I was NOT talking about the alogical guilt machine I described. I mean that I assume feminism aspires to something higher. Rather the exact opposite.
"Pop" feminism, the feminism which asserts woman as "right" and man as "wrong" throughout the entirety of social discourse, is NOT feminism. Rather it is simply a kind of intellectual chivalry. Men are supposed to defer to women: to "empower" them, to continually acknowledge their superiority of perception and judgment as a perceived "payback" for centuries of mistreatment and neglect. When a man agrees with you that Freud was a chauvinist pig, he is mentally holding the door for you.
Coming back to the title of this entry, feminism is NOT about female empowerment. Feminism is about the deconstruction of gender roles into forms which do not deny ANY person the right to whatever identity they choose, regardless of gender. The flip side of this is that if no rights are restricted, no rights are accorded. Which means the position of dominance which a woman is placed by pop feminism and similar "chivalric" practices must be relinquished in order to establish equality.
What this means in the language of the laiety is you cannot be a lady. You cannot expect men to pay for dinner, you cannot expect men to hold the door for you, and you cannot expect men to treat you with any more courtesy, dignity or respect than they would show to each other. You cannot engage in worship of your uterus as "the giver of life," you cannot gender violence (for you to hit a man is every bit as inappropriate as him hitting you: no more 'V-day.' The argument that women are physically less powerful is both fallacious in many cases, and a sexist generalization. The disparity in physical power between two individuals should be based on that power, not on their gender).
This is to say, you CAN do all these things. However when you do these things you are less than a "bad feminist," you are an active counterfeminist. A woman who expects pop-feminist-brand sympathy from men is a proud and enthusiastic subject of the patriarchy, and deserves the corollary subjugation based entirely on the fact that she encourages it vigorously.
I assume much about feminism's intent and basis, with good reason. If feminism indeed originated in the spirit of the snake-necked diva claiming her right to womynly power because her boyfriend just raised her allowance to stop her withholding sex, then the whole thing is bankrupt, and I renounce all involvement with the word and proudly instantiate myself as a born again chauvinist.
In the first place feminism as it is commonly encountered is nothing more than the last in a long line of arbitrary criteria applied by women to men in order to ascertain how pliable and inoffensive they are. Most of the criteria which are now decried as trappings of the patriarchy originated in just this way: social expectations of gender interactions which place women in a dominant or unassailable position, i.e. the right of a woman to be supported by her husband, "chivalry," the wearing of veils (are we really to believe the gender responsible for designing Bloodrayne's outfit came up with that practice all on their own? Men left to their own devices will NOT restrict their access to female sexuality). What these things have in common is that to contest them constitutes a failure on the part of any man who does so, and thus a legitimate cause to deny him sex. The only function of these institutions is to allow their male participants to demonstrate that they are docile and socially compliant.
Feminism practiced thusly permanently establishes the guilt of all (mostly heterosexual) men, living or dead, for the entirety of woe, oppression, and general disenfranchisement of women throughout all time. According to this capacity of feminism men are saddled with a permanent discursive onus. This then follows the pattern of the dominant, unassailable female against the male who is placed in a morally inferior position, and who is thus eternally "wrong."
Evidence of this abounds. Feminism is no longer an ideological technique or school of thought but an ideal to be striven towards, much as chivalry, modesty, piety, or chastity was. Women do not talk about whether or not they are feminist (rarely will any woman who does not grossly misinterpret the term declare she is "not a feminist") but about whether or not they are a "bad feminist." A woman who is perceived to grant concessions to the patriarchy is a "bad feminist." That is a woman who cooks, cleans, and does anything during sex other than close her eyes and pretend her lover is Janis Joplin. A man who expects a woman to do any of these things can forget about every obtaining a female mate, because to transgress against feminism would be as egregious as men in bygone eras expecting their veiled wives to show their hair, to not pull a woman's chair out, or to expect her to get a job, to pay her share of the bills.
The salient point of this is that feminism is something expected of all educated citizens. But because it is a social expectation, yet another criteria used for the evaluation of a mate, it lacks any power as a social idea. Most men a woman speaks to will declare themselves "feminist" or at least in sympathy with feminist ideals. At the very least they will proffer comments about how much more difficult it is to be a woman.
Let me let you ladies in on a little secret: men never speak about feminism when YOU ARE NOT AROUND. I have never spoken with another man in depth about feminist theory, not have I sincerely evaluated the position in which men and women find themselves from the perspective of gender. As feminism is practiced in the lay discourse, NO MAN is a feminist in private. Men make these pretensions for the same reason they consented to the other, now reviled practices: so you will fuck them. Those guys in "this is what a feminist looks like" shirts know what they are doing. Those shirts might as well say "I'll let you win any argument we have, now suck my cock!"
When a practice becomes an evaluative, it falls into the ideological stagnation I a few paragraphs up. When I made the caveat that I assume much about feminism's basis, I was NOT talking about the alogical guilt machine I described. I mean that I assume feminism aspires to something higher. Rather the exact opposite.
"Pop" feminism, the feminism which asserts woman as "right" and man as "wrong" throughout the entirety of social discourse, is NOT feminism. Rather it is simply a kind of intellectual chivalry. Men are supposed to defer to women: to "empower" them, to continually acknowledge their superiority of perception and judgment as a perceived "payback" for centuries of mistreatment and neglect. When a man agrees with you that Freud was a chauvinist pig, he is mentally holding the door for you.
Coming back to the title of this entry, feminism is NOT about female empowerment. Feminism is about the deconstruction of gender roles into forms which do not deny ANY person the right to whatever identity they choose, regardless of gender. The flip side of this is that if no rights are restricted, no rights are accorded. Which means the position of dominance which a woman is placed by pop feminism and similar "chivalric" practices must be relinquished in order to establish equality.
What this means in the language of the laiety is you cannot be a lady. You cannot expect men to pay for dinner, you cannot expect men to hold the door for you, and you cannot expect men to treat you with any more courtesy, dignity or respect than they would show to each other. You cannot engage in worship of your uterus as "the giver of life," you cannot gender violence (for you to hit a man is every bit as inappropriate as him hitting you: no more 'V-day.' The argument that women are physically less powerful is both fallacious in many cases, and a sexist generalization. The disparity in physical power between two individuals should be based on that power, not on their gender).
This is to say, you CAN do all these things. However when you do these things you are less than a "bad feminist," you are an active counterfeminist. A woman who expects pop-feminist-brand sympathy from men is a proud and enthusiastic subject of the patriarchy, and deserves the corollary subjugation based entirely on the fact that she encourages it vigorously.
15 October 2009
05 August 2009
If everyone in the past was so great, why are they all dead now?
Stop complaining that no one uses land phones anymore. Stop complaining that no one writes letters. Stop complaining that people have bad handwriting. Stop complaining that people don’t look at each other on the subway. Stop complaining that it isn’t okay to let strangers give your kids candy. Stop complaining about how it’s the future and you miss the past.
If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.
I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.
If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.
I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.
I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.
Home
Lampshades spool out from the house, becoming clotheslines,
the mountains at dusk, the way the light
burrows under the island. You are invoked by it, your separate parts
become harmonics of a single string, your hair
bleeds out from the gash of the first and the second
retreats from your skin in the familiar capillary.
A third and standing wave reverberates.
Your image back and forth between the buildings, back and forth.
There are factories even here, it smells like flowers and
the metal rink of making.
Here are stories you won’t tell me, here are
two of both kinds of heart, and the vascular systems
wound around them. Here every star and its grey orbits hum with blood.
It is a place that you can simply move to, simply
turn to like a radio dial. You are so far away. You
are so much of my home here. I am stuck fast,
take me with you, take me with you.
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