We kick off the weekend relaxing beside a community pool in our neighborhood. Frankie loves it. After some initial skepticism, I too come to like it. It’s a bit busy, but Sarah packs us a great lunch. And in the afternoon, we gather gang-like for a barbecue in a friend’s backyard. It’s a good group; we all enjoy each other’s company. And the friend is a great host. For all who make events of this sort possible, for all who labor in their preparation and/or facilitate their happening, I give thanks.
Category: Uncategorized
Friday May 28, 2021
A flute is blown, a tone sustained, strung like a bridge of sound across an otherwise silent expanse. By flute I mean the shakuhachi, the most important of traditional Japanese wind instruments. “Certain special effects such as flutter-tonguing and distinctly audible breathing, which in Western music are associated with 20th-century avant-garde flute repertory,” writes David Loeb in the Kōhachirō Miyata album’s liner notes, “were a standard part of traditional shakuhachi technique by the 18th century.” The sounds are ones I reimagine come evening as I listen to birdsong. As May concludes, it’s time to plant. ‘Tis summer–nearly so. If not for rain, I’d have been at the pool reading Reclaiming Art, a book by Weird Studies podcaster J.F. Martel. Or perhaps I’d have finished Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows. I find the latter troubling in its traditionalism. Japanese communists of the 1930s regarded Tanizaki as a reactionary in the years prior to the Second World War. His writings failed to adopt a recognizable ideological “stance.” He was a foot fetishist; a masochist; his writings explore the erotic and the grotesque. To the ideologues of his day, this made him “decadent,” his worldview colored by nostalgia for premodernity and by an embrace of fantasy and the unconscious. The elements I admire in Tanizaki, however, are his visceral aversion to capitalist modernity, his respect for embodied being, and his desire to live well.
Thursday May 27, 2021
It is the discussion of aesthetics in Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s In Praise of Shadows to which I am drawn as I contemplate objects that have “come into appearance” at the level of the trash stratum. The book is one I gleaned just this morning from a bin at Goodwill. It begins with an appreciation for traditional Japanese architecture. Tanizaki mourns this architecture’s defeat by the trappings of modernity: electricity, lightbulbs, flush toilets. “A man who has a family and lives in the city cannot turn his back,” he writes, on these “necessities of modern life” (1). Places of beauty and meaning undergo “improvement.” Homes of paper shoji give way to homes of glass. This change provides the occasion for Tanizaki to reflect on “how different everything would be if we in the Orient had developed our own science” (7). “The facts we are now taught concerning the nature and function of light, electricity, and atoms,” he writes, “might well have presented themselves in different form” (7). ‘Tis a delicious thought. Tanizaki’s thought experiment supplies the premise for an alternate history. Tweak the premise a bit and you get Sesshu Foster’s novel Atomik Aztex. Or better yet, Foster’s latest book, ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines, co-written with Arturo Ernesto Romo.
Wednesday May 26, 2021
“For my next act” I think as I stare at trees, their upper branches bathed in the orange light of the setting sun. I feel like a magician having built boxes, four wooden raised beds, conjured them in the midst of a field of clover here in the yard behind our home. In these beds, we’ll plant our garden. Yet the utopian in me (or the Faust in me? the Gnostic in me? the “slow sick sucking part of me”? same difference?) is already restless, ready to set sail (as per Wilde), ready to walk away (as per Le Guin), wishing for something other than what is here, wanting in its stead some other bower of bliss (this not that): a vertical garden, say, in the midst of a food forest.
Tuesday May 25, 2021
While Joanna Lowell’s The Duke Undone works wonderfully on its own terms as an historical romance, it can also be read and enjoyed as a kind of postmodernist metafiction. In her role as artist, the book’s protagonist serves as an allegorical double or doppelgänger of sorts both for the author herself, and for all who take pleasure in the reading and writing of romance novels. For the ungenerous interpretation of the book’s protagonist is that her attempt to profit from her sexuality — by which I mean that which happens to her in response to the sight of the nude duke in the book’s opening pages — makes her a “pornographer.” The character stumbles upon the duke: quite literally steps upon him. “A kind of god,” she thinks, “passed out nude in an alleyway.” The divine enters our lives here, as Philip K. Dick said, “at the level of the trash stratum.” This flash of the spirit in the form of the male nude is then a thing the character paints, and the painting is then a thing that she sells. Hence the “pornography” complaint — a trumped-up charge that, to those who read romance novels, can only seem hypocritical and absurd, baldly demonstrating the Victorian era’s patriarchal double-standard. Pulpit-riders and other anti-sex moralists have been wielding such rhetoric to police women’s agency since day one. The charge itself is thus an easy one to dismiss, as the novel itself makes clear. In no way, it insists, should Eros be cause for shame. The sale of nude art matters in the novel — draws it up short for a time, places its characters in a bind — only in the sense that, given an unjust climate, such exchange places both the protagonist and the duke in danger. If word of the protagonist’s painting were to reach her superiors, for instance, she could be expelled from the Royal Academy. Much the same is true for the duke. If word of his scandalous behavior were made public, it would interfere with the terms of his inheritance. Both characters, in other words, stand for a time on the brink of ruin. Yet as stars in a romance, both are in luck. For romance interrupts realism’s tragic bent, its anti-utopian fixation on comeuppance, allowing love to enter life as a kind of grace.
Monday May 24, 2021
Historical romance means the book should be sexy, and it is. Sex is built toward, alluded to. Sex is a potential (however much it may seem “fated,” so to speak, by genre). It’s the desire the protagonists sense in each other’s presence, a longed-for intimacy made possible slowly through a series of encounters wherein first are established after negotiation, following correction of initial misunderstandings, the revelation of each character’s love for the other. Characters reveal themselves through charming gaffes and faux-pas. And what fun characters they are! Each has been wrong, and each has been wronged; each learns through experiment to forgive the other. So goes the first 150 pages. Sex is savored and prolonged through its postponement. The encounter with the other brings with it pain and hurt, but also a reawakening of the senses, allowing each to “think, see, feel, new things” (The Duke Undone, p. 159).
Sunday May 23, 2021
While in no way meant as a comment upon yesterday’s chapbooks, which were indeed a pleasure to read, horror nevertheless continues to trouble me, remaining for the most part a genre I hold in low regard. Horror disappoints — depresses and deflates the spirit, if such a thing can be said, i.e., assuming we have a theory of spirit. The conventionality of its unhappy endings reads like a failure of nerve. If one is to allow magic back into the cosmos, let it be a positive magic like the magic of love. So I think as I trade yesterday’s diet for today’s: Joanna Lowell’s The Duke Undone.
Saturday May 22, 2021
A package arrives from my friends at Theurgical Studies Press containing two chapbooks, the press’s first releases: Benjamin Gardner’s “Incident at Funk’s Grove” and Erik Waterkotte’s “Inside the Found Photograph.” Along with the chapbooks, Gardner also included his read-along book The Cabin. These are beautiful small-press objects made by writers who are also talented printmakers and painters. Gardner and Waterkotte work adeptly wherever they try their hand. They present themselves as theorgoi, who, as the Chaldean Oracles report, “do not fall under the fate-governed hand.” Theurgy was a form of magic performed by Neoplatonists. Theorgoi, then, are those who practice this magic: figures who invoke deities through ritual. Horror is generally not my cup of tea, and Theurgical Studies Press is at least in part a publisher of horror. “What is the nature of the horror to which my friends are drawn?” I hear myself wondering. But “Incident at Funk’s Grove” is a delight. Entry into the story’s grove functions as would passage through a portal. One crosses the magic circle that bounds contemporary realism so as to access the world of the weird.
Wednesday May 19, 2021
Today’s therapy involves observing the sun’s movement in the sky, plotting out raised garden beds, measuring them, marking their perimeters with stakes and mason line. I break ground with a four-pronged hand tiller, turn up the soil, pull out clumps of grass and clover. It’s happening: we’re building our garden.
Tuesday May 18, 2021
The gardener in me wants to cook — so why don’t I? And why am I erupting with anger here at the end of another round of grading? I should be pleased and gracious. Instead I behave poorly, in ways that I regret. Sarah and I haven’t had time to communicate much of late. Her parents have come to visit. They’re helping with Frankie as we complete projects around the house. Some of my anger is admittedly distant in origin: anger, for instance, over the Israeli settler-state’s murderous deployment of military and mob violence against the people of Gaza. And of course, anger over the usual ideological bullshit: conservative narratives spewing forth from talking heads, speech-bubbles of blah spreading via News app and word of mouth. Anger about traffic and construction; anger about time-poverty. Hunger for “reality” — as opposed to this dreaded “normal” to which some wish to return. But much of what I’m feeling here — my “negative affect,” as the APA would say — is of a more proximate sort: oikos-derived, interpersonal in nature, inspired by the terms by which I live. Therein lies the dilemma: for what am I to do?
Trance-Scripts 