Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor opens the evening’s set, though I can’t say much of the 1972 performance of it by Dutch prog group Ekseption. It all feels a bit too tight, too clean, too controlled. I stick around nonetheless for the rest of the A-side on the band’s album Trinity. Flute, organ, and synthesizer solos on “The Peruvian Flute” reach across the frame a bit. “Dreams” is a track that could be sampled, as is “Smile.” And “Lonely Chase” features a lovely organ solo. Heard between episodes of Exterminate All the Brutes, however, it can’t but be a bit repulsive. Tacky, uninspired peacockery. I find myself wanting instead to read Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World.
Tag: Books
Wednesday June 2, 2021
Kim Stanley Robinson has written far too many books of a similar nature to be of much interest to me here in 2021, I think to myself as I survey the many books of his that I’ve purchased and read these last twenty years. I read Red Mars in a graduate seminar in the first years of the new millennium. His Mars trilogy was the focus of the final chapter of my dissertation. Is there a way to salvage that older project? Could I write a preface introducing it as a document retrieved from a time capsule? The author-self writing in 2021 is “a person of the future” compared to the version of me who wrote the dissertation. I live amid the time about which he wrote, in a world other than the ones he and others imagined. And Robinson, meanwhile, has only grown in the time since more boosterish and grotesque in his optimism about science and technology. His commitment to “science fiction” leaves his imagination bereft of magic.
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.
Friday May 14, 2021
In the pop milieu wherein the culture does its work, gets its shit together, or doesn’t, writers like Kim Stanley Robinson rise up to insist that the doom that we’ve been asked to accept is false. Robinson offers in its stead The Ministry for the Future. Friends reading it ask me to join them, their enthusiasm for this new discovery of theirs visible on their faces. Defenses down for a time, I climb the book’s first hundred pages. Yet I find it to be ground I’ve trod before. Where once I had enthusiasm enough to write a chapter of my dissertation on Robinson’s Mars trilogy, now I find his outpourings bothersome — each work ever more salesmanlike in its pitch to budding technocrats. Read several such books, and alas: you’ve read them all.
Thursday May 13, 2021
Secret history: like the one Greil Marcus tracks in Lipstick Traces. That’s what a friend sees me working toward in these trance-scripts. The “Gnostic” in me is drawn to the detective role entailed by such a tale: the “postmodern sleuth” who explores the maze of the contemporary, ever-skeptical of the machinations of the simulation, the Spectacle, the construct. The Gnostic responds to History with cosmic paranoia. History is a Text upon which one exercises an hermeneutic of suspicion. Or in the best versions of Gnosticism, as in the work of philosopher Ernst Bloch, an hermeneutic of hope, with dream or Imagination the absent Messiah deconcealing itself across time. The conservative philosopher Eric Voegelin warns that hope of this sort prompts a reckless utopianism, a desire to “immanentize the eschaton.” For a Christian like Voegelin, the eschaton is a day of judgment, whereas for the Gnostic, it’s the resurrection into joy and the dawn of a New Age. The Catholic trembles while the Gnostic revolts. I think of Allen Ginsberg on the back cover of his book Kaddish, asserting the “triumphancy of Self over the mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time.” By “Self,” Ginsberg means the defenseless, open, original self we all share in common, not the mere individual of liberal ideology, the monad disaggregated from the whole. Time is revealed as mind-illusion as we conduct our secret history. Events share affinities and those affinities arrange themselves into stories. The best Gnostics are the ones who become bricoleurs.
Friday May 7, 2021
Through a door in the wall opened by Robin D.G. Kelley’s Freedom Dreams, I arrive to the Chicago Surrealist Group. (Kelley had recommended Paul Garon’s book Blues & the Poetic Spirit. “Look, too,” he’d said, “for an edited collection called Refusal of the Shadow: Surrealism and the Caribbean. And don’t forget special issues of Living Blues and Race Traitor.”) Instructions received, I descend the stairs and work the stacks, knowing that my attention is the one thing that might save me. Sources arrange themselves on the shelves of the memory palace shouting “Read me, read me!” So I do.
Thursday April 29, 2021
The Ramsey Lewis Trio rouse me midafternoon with their “Blues for the Night Owl.” More to my liking, though, is Expansions, a 1975 LP by Lonnie Liston Smith & the Cosmic Echoes.
“Expand your mind…to understand…” sings Lonnie’s brother, flutist Donald Smith, on the album’s opener. This LP and another (Jerry Butler’s The Sagittarius Movement) arrive bearing reference to Sagittarius. “Lady Sagittarius.” Let us thank her, as Smith does, “for her Earthly Guidance.” Here I am, meanwhile, at semester’s end, students and I grappling with Philip K. Dick’s downer dystopia A Scanner Darkly. Chapter 15 is for me the book’s nadir, as the book’s third-person narrator recounts the thoughts of cop character Mike Westaway. Mike manipulates others, justifying these actions by claiming that the people he handles — characters like the book’s protagonist Bob Arctor — are already dead.
Tuesday April 27, 2021
Friends and I plan an in-person gathering: three of us, outdoors at a brewery, discussing chapters from Mark Fisher’s final book Postcapitalist Desire. The book ends disappointingly given Mark’s untimely end, leaving it to all of us, the book’s readers, to complete the course ourselves, as did Mark’s students. Or we could accelerate the narrative onward, well beyond what was previously conceived, by reading “Experimental Time Order” from Rasheedah Phillips’s book Recurrence Plot (and other time travel tales). Through Phillips, we encounter ideas from Robert Anton Wilson’s book Prometheus Rising. Desired futures create their own pasts.
Sunday April 25, 2021
I sit in the yard staring at the sun on the western horizon, singing along to “Hermes Trismegisto E Sua Celeste Tábua De Esmeralda,” listening carefully to the sung nature of the Portuguese, longing to read Christopher Dunn’s book Brutality Garden: Tropicália and the Emergence of a Brazilian Counterculture.
The song’s author Jorge Ben is an interesting figure in occult or hermetic terms, having penned not one but two songs about legendary Egyptian sage Thrice-Greatest Hermes: the one above from 1974, and a second one, the one below, called “Hermes Trismegisto Escreveu” from Ben’s fabulous 1976 album África Brasil.
Trance-Scripts 