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.
Tag: Books
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.
Thursday April 22, 2021
My eyes travel across spines of books, searching, seeking ways to proceed. Parenting, though, leaves little time to read. As Mark Fisher notes in Postcapitalist Desire, “In order to raise consciousness, you need time” (265). Time is the terrain of struggle. Time is what capitalists steal from those who labor. Stolen time equals stolen consciousness.
Sunday April 18, 2021
Utopias and dystopias promote and project contrary “affects” or (to use Raymond Williams’s term) “structures of feeling.” Reading Philip K. Dick’s drug dystopia A Scanner Darkly, one feels deflated. One would rather get stoned. Stand around in the yard, share a joint and chat about bats, skunks, porcupines, dogs, and gardens with one’s elders. “Bats are interesting,” says a friend’s mother.
Sunday April 11, 2021
Friends gather for a gala get-together on my front porch, all of us vaccinated and thus able now to be with one another after our year apart. Spring is lovely here this year, trees budding, the yard awash in constellations of blue, white, and purple: wildflowers and patches of clover. We celebrate the publication of a friend’s novel, an historical romance just out this past week from Berkley, everyone wanting to read it, cheered too by the arrival of her parents, new in from up north. When last we saw each other, F. was new in as well: a newborn, a wee lass just home from the hospital. Amazing how much she’s grown these past fifteen months. Our friend’s dad is an artist, as is another of the party’s attendees. Both draw beautiful illustrations in colored chalk on our cement walkway. I admire these on my evening wanderings about the yard come dark. ‘Tis a starry night, across which flies a ship, discernible here below only as Morse code flicker: modest dots of red and white light. I resolve to read Black Quantum Futurist Rasheedah Phillips’s book Recurrence Plot (and other time travel tales), at the heart of which is a character named after the scarab-faced Egyptian god Khepri. This character is, like me, a frequent thrift-shopper. Let us, like Khepri, donate something each time we thrift.
Trance-Scripts 