Story of the Eye

Story of the Eye (1928)

Georges Bataille

I don’t want you to jerk off anymore without me.      

This book was for years sitting on my shelf waiting to be read. I constantly passed it over in favor of other books, for no good reason. I think I figured it would just be boring antique smut or trashy shock pornography, which it was in a way, or at least the sex scenes were, but it was also something different and quite interesting. When I finally sat down to read it a couple of days ago I went in expecting Fifty Shades of Grey for dorky intellectual types but it wasn’t like that at all. It was dirty and obscene, yes, but all of that is secondary to the book’s real point, which is about freedom and rebellion and inventing new ways of seeing the world. I haven’t read DeSade but I gather that DeSade and Bataille occupy the same sort of territory. And I understand that DeSade takes seven gazillion pages to say what Bataille says in eighty. You could read Story of the Eye in a short afternoon. Which is the perfect length for porno. Porno movies are a half hour, forty-five minutes long but nobody ever watches the whole thing. The book kind of reads as if one of the children from The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea grew up, read some Nietzsche, got a girlfriend and shoved a hard-boiled egg in her butt. Which sounds great. If that were a real I’d read it every day.

I don’t even know if I should discuss the plot or anything like that. Is it even important? It doesn’t matter in regular old porno, does it matter in 90-year-old French erotic fiction? The unnamed narrator and his girlfriend, a distant cousin named Simone, screw a lot, they urinate on each other, crack eggs on each other’s genitalia, a friend goes insane at an orgy so they break her out of the bug house and screw her and when she hangs herself they pee on her still warm corpse and screw next to it. They don’t want to get arrested (who does) so they flee to Spain, meet a depraved English gentleman who likes to watch, take in a bullfight, Simone inserts bull testicles into her vagina, they break into a church and sexually assault a priest, who basically enjoys it because under the cassock he is a depraved and sick creature, they kill him and pry out one of his eyeballs, which Simone puts in her butt, and then they all flee to Africa on a yacht crewed by negroes.

Even though this book was certainly dirty and pornographic it was surprisingly unsexy. Maybe it’s because my tastes don’t run towards eggs, eyeballs, urine or urinating on eggs but it didn’t arouse me one bit. When someone says “erotic fiction” I expect something that will really titillate but it wasn’t like that. I was kind of expecting innocent and naive racy smut. Something that would really shock a Victorian, I guess. It was instead filthy, degrading, violent. Which I imagine was sort of the point. It was also surprisingly funny. Bataille constantly uses the term “jerk off” to describe both masturbating the penis and what could more properly be termed “fingerblasting”. It’s probably just an archaic old usage that hasn't aged well. He also favors “cunt” and “beaver,” which is one of the funniest names for a woman’s cooter there is. There was one line that made me bust out laughing: “And she could also stick my cock in her mouth, and what not.” Shit man, this is a porno, you’re not supposed to leave it to my imagination. You’re supposed to tell me about cocks and mouths in detail, and what not.

As I said this book is all about transgression and rebellion. It’s about looking at the petrified social order and deciding to turn the other direction. And if you’ve ever sat down and had a good long think about what kind of ugliness happens on this benighted planet then maybe you understand that transgression against social conventions is one of the most noble goals a human being can have. Listen brother, this is a disgusting and hideous world where billions are kept destitute, enslaved and ignorant; where bigotry and oppression are the global pastime, where the use and abuse of human beings is perpetrated by some of the most awful criminal profiteers history has ever known and this profiteering occurs with the full support of the church and the state… not exactly a status quo with much value. Story of the Eye isn’t the sort of trashy low-grade juvenile transgression practiced by say, Sarah Silverman, the “look at me, I told a homophobic or racist joke” school of transgression, which isn’t really rebellious at all but merely a chance to make the privileged blush… this is the sort of rebellion that is about burning the old world to make way for the new. About smashing and destroying the decrepit, festering morality of previous generations and installing something never before seen. The characters in this book are teenagers and seem to be missing parents, which is basically what life is like… parents are for the most part useless, they selfishly give birth to a child who doesn’t ask to be born into this sickening world and are only there to indoctrinate the young into a society that is built on a foundation of slavery and warfare. The narrator has an “awful father” and Simone’s mother, when walking in on the narrator and Simone during a piss-soaked fuckfest has nothing to say… her own sins are worse.

The characters are perverse not because filthy degenerate sexuality is valuable on its own but because if this civilization is awful then the only recourse is to become perverse and whatever society labels as filthy and degenerate can’t be half bad. Nazi Germany occupied itself by organizing collections of what it called “degenerate” art, and it was all some of the best art Western Civilization has ever produced.

I found this book far more personally affecting then I expected it to be. It really spoke to my own desire to shake things up, to erase my own sense of impotence and powerlessness. As a basically uneducated and poor absolute zero the curtailing of my will to power is something I am constantly aware of. The nobody, of which there are billions, arranged on a graduated spectrum of nothingness, is constantly reminded that he has no power over anything. Sometimes I want to grab the globe like a dice cup and shake it and see what numbers we get. Can’t be any worse than the numbers we’ve got now. And who hasn’t—when lonely and longing and tormented nightly by the sex-death urge—wanted to be dissolved and liquefied by a torrent of sex and violence, to be washed away in a river of vaginal secretions like a cheap shanty in a rainstorm? With a dark-haired and beautiful French teenager? To copulate violently and die beautifully like some doomed, glittering insect? Let the innocent among us stand and be counted.

Bataille’s writing is exquisite. His language is amazing, clear, lucid. Every word is a well-chosen bullet. I know that I previously accused H.G. Wells of pretentious diction when Georges Bataille uses similarly grand language. I don’t think fancy ten-dollar words are pretentious in and of themselves, but they certainly are when they don’t fit the story. They’re out of place in a pulp sci-fi novella about time travel but they’re fine in a bit philosophical erotica about French teenagers who disintegrate themselves and annihilate the world via fucking. I understand that Bataille was a big deal in the world of European philosophy, of which I know nothing about, but if the rest of his books are this beautiful and lucid I’d read the heck out of them.

I think I said everything I wanted to say about this book. Story of the Eye was the sort of story that is philosophical enough that I’m not entirely sure I comprehended it the way the author intended, that it went over my head, that I’m not smart enough and not well-read enough to get all the references that the author makes (though since it’s a slim and lean read there can’t be that much hiding in it), and that I, an intellectual featherweight, am punching far above my weight class, and to make it even more difficult the story is different enough in form from your usual novel that it takes a new sort of viewpoint to crack the code. One almost has to hold the book upside down to understand it. Hopefully I found the right angle. I’m going to quote a paragraph that I thought was very alluring (and contained within it a seed of beautiful revolution so precious it should be locked up in that seed vault buried under the Norwegian glacier) as a way to wrap this all up:

I stretched out in the grass, my skull on a large, flat rock and my eyes staring straight up at the milky way, that strange breach of astral sperm and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, apparently made of ammoniacal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they burst forth absurdly like a rooster’s crow in total silence), a broken egg, a broken eye, or my own dazzled skull weighing down the rock, bouncing symmetrical images back to infinity.

The Time Machine

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G. Wells

            It’s been a long time since I’ve written about a book. The truth is the last few months in my life have been very hectic. I moved, which was way more complicated and stressful than it needed to be, and I’ve been working a lot, up to six or seven days a week sometimes. I’m also “working” on my “novel” (barf) and I have other things to do and since I can’t fit everything into one day I often have to choose one or the other. Unfortunately the ol’ book blog, and books in general, have often been the “other”. I was also briefly in jail (violence against cops) and hospitalized, for a spell, with a prolapse of the face. The surgeons had to staple it back on. And on top of that I’m constantly tired.

            In between reading The Third Reich and The Time Machine I wasted a bit of forever struggling to get halfway through one really awful book (To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf), which I had planned to write about here because I was really looking forward to reading it since it’s a really famous beloved classic but god, it was so horrifyingly bad. As bad as Pride and Prejudice. I tried and tried and eventually I had to move on. One day I’d like to finish it so I can tell the world about how shitty it was and is. Really drained me. I almost swore to never read another book again in my life, that’s the level of repulsion I felt. It was in a way like a really painful break-up. You feel murdered, betrayed and obliterated for a few months or so but then you realize you’ve got to pick up the pieces of yourself so you pour the bottle down the kitchen sink and take a long hot shower and put on some pants and go back outside.

            So to wash the taste of Virginia Woolf out of my mouth I read The Dharma Bums by Jack Kerouac and The Time Machine, which is the book I’m going to talk about first, mostly because I feel like it was more the medicine I needed, and I just finished it last night, so it’s still fresh in my head, and because I feel like I have more to say about it.

            I’m really ashamed of myself for not reading this book when I was in middle school. When I was thirteen. There was an overlong and tragic period in my life (years 10-15, probably older really) where I was into painfully sad and dorky nonsense like Dungeons and Dragons and trashy fantasy novels. I was obsessed with knights and castles and troll-slaying and all the other trappings of the really awful trashy fantasy novel. I suppose that I was enamored with the idea that somewhere out there was a world that was more fantastic and heroic than this real world, hostile and pitiless, that I found myself imprisoned in. Which is how it felt at the time. All those years wasted trapped indoors brain-damaged by escapist fantasy books with embossed lettering and an elf on the cover. So many hours of pointless unhappy teenaged masturbations spent friendless doing nothing but sitting on my stupid ass. I never had the fortune of having a guide to tell me to read this and don’t read that, an older friend or brother to hold my hand and make sure I don’t make bad choices. Those are only in movies, I guess. Of course my parents were no help, but that’s another story for another time.

            The Time Machine would have been such a great gift for a lonely, unhappy and angry teen such as the one I was for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being that it would have lifted me up from the ghetto of fantasy and into the paradise of science fiction. Though I wasn’t savvy enough to think of it at the time I’ve developed a pretty good working idea on why the science fiction genre is superior to the fantasy genre, and why I think it’s better for our society in general. Indulge me for a moment here while I talk about what is quite possibly the least important topic in the history of humankind. It’s pretty simple: fantasy promotes fascism and sci-fi does not. This is not to say that all fantasy is fascist and all sci-fi isn’t but I think it’s generally true. Fantasy is about characters who are empowered by their birthright with mystical abilities or portentous destinies and who have to use these gifts to save the world on behalf of the little ones, the uninteresting and faceless peasants (so basically exactly like racial nationalism). As a whole it's very romantic and unintellectual and mostly a mess of lamely fascistic wish-fulfillment power worship that preys on the weak minds of the lonely, unhappy, powerless and disenfranchised who wish that they, in whatever fashion possible, could one day be a person of consequence instead of what they are, which is a nobody, a zero. I have a roommate who is addicted to that terrible Game of Thrones television show. He watches it all the time and sometimes I hear it when I’m in the kitchen or otherwise puttering around. From what I can tell the show is about two things: objectifying women (by showing some tits so a nerd can beat off or by having the characters engage in really demeaning sex) and searching for newer and more appalling ways to glorify the military and warfare in general. As if the military didn’t get enough congratulations. Game of Thrones not only sucks the military’s dick, it also lets the military cum on its face and probably sticks a tongue up the military’s asshole too, it’s called analingus and it’s something you only do to someone you really like. There are more than enough hawkish cheerleaders out there (a disgustingly large and vocal number really) but you know what doesn’t have enough friends in this world? Liberty, equality and fraternity, that’s what. I also think that Harry Potter is a terrible thing to expose children to.

            A good deal of sci-fi is pro-military and fascist (Orson Scott Card and Starship Troopers I’m looking at you) but the best of it is not. Science fiction is a lot like punk rock in one respect, in that they are both at their core anti-establishment. And if it’s not anti-establishment then it’s not punk rock. Likewise with sci-fi. There is a sort of anti status quo spirit that’s really important to sci-fi. I think a good thing to compare something like Game of Thrones to would be the original series of Star Trek. Game of Thrones is a world where the protagonists are depraved militaristic aristocrats who command armies to burn and pillage and the common man is just a powerless, voiceless plaything in the dramas between the vain and power-hungry elite. And these are the people you’re rooting for! You are literally asked to arbitrarily pick one violent slave owner over another. Just flip a fucking coin. So in that respect it’s exactly like the real world, and the viewer is being brainwashed and preconditioned into seeing one fascist autocrat as his buddy, instead of some other fascist autocrat. In Star Trek, by contrast, the crew of the USS Enterprise live in a democratic utopia where technology, science and rationality have ameliorated the physical and material needs that keep so many today in poverty and want. Everyone is educated and nobody is exploited. The society is completely equal. One of my favorite things about the original series is that nobody on that ship is drawing a paycheck. Everyone in Starfleet is there because they want to be there, on a mission of exploration, to expand the borders of the knowable, to show us back here on the merciless and inhospitable Earth what exactly the human spirit is capable of. It would be a good standard for our species to hold itself to. A nice, reasonable and completely realistic set of goals. The polar opposite is something like Harry Potter where technocrats who are born better than us save the day.

            Back on topic: I was really impressed by The Time Machine. I adored it. It isn’t really a fantastic work of art by any stretch of the imagination but I don’t think that things like plot, characterization or more technical aspects of writing are especially important when talking about sci-fi. What’s important in sci-fi is the clarity of future vision. And ho boy does Herbert “Groovy” Wells ever have a clear future vision. The Time Machine is about a future where the class system (a very real and pervasive problem right here today) is a tumor that has gone unaddressed for so long that in the intervening years humanity has undergone radical speciation. It’s a world where the upper and lower classes have devolved into semi-intelligent animals that prey on each other in some form of mutually symbiotic class cannibalism. It’s fantastic. When talking about sci-fi it’s important to know the difference between “hard” and “soft” science fiction. “Hard” sci-fi is more grounded in the materialistic and mechanistic realities of the universe. “Soft” sci-fi is more often about society and the organisms that make it up. I like both but I’m definitely more in love with the latter. I’m less interested in how the space rocket gets to Mars than in what happens to us when we get there. I was surprised by how soft The Time Machine was. Since it’s a book about a Victorian Brit building a time machine, which will never be possible in Victorian Britain or anywhere else, I suppose that I shouldn’t be at all surprised. I guess I think of hard sci-fi as being more traditional or old-fashioned, though I don’t think that’s really true at all. The Time Machine like a socialist pamphlet with a thin veneer of science fiction, which is more than all right in my book. In fact I’d prefer to read much more of this sort of thing during my lifetime if at all possible.

            I’ve also developed a system for cataloging sci-fi, a system of my own invention, which I think works out great. I draw a distinction between what I call “kinky” and “non-kinky”. Non-kinky sci-fi asserts that our future is basically bright and that through cooperation we can conquer the outer and inner spaces, that good things are in store for us and that technology will make us better men, et cetera. Think Arthur C. Clarke and Isaac Asimov and 2001. Kinky sci-fi sees our civilization as a sham, sometimes our whole reality as a sham, and our species as barely intelligent predators who will eat each other alive if given half a chance. William S. Burroughs (though as I’ve said before fuck that guy), Thomas Pynchon, Phillip K. Dick, Neuromancer and Mad Max are all kinky. One is not superior to the other and both have their merits, mountains and valleys and all that. One is just more cynical, but given the sort of person I am (given to long bouts of pessimism and misanthropy, mostly work-induced) I more often feel myself drawn to the kinky kind. It also tends to be a bit more avante garde, experimental and over all better written than the non-kinky sort. Maybe a good way of summarizing it is that non-kinky sci-fi is for ideas and kinky is for feelings. One is the brain and one is the heart. Or the gut. Whichever you prefer. I was pleasantly surprised by how kinky The Time Machine was. The last few chapters are reminiscent of a really lurid H.P. Lovecraft story, where under the dark red light of a bloated and dying sun all that remains of life on Earth is foul lichens and sinister crustaceans that graze on the shores of a black and motionless sea. It’s a very cynical view of our future. I wasn’t at all expecting that.

            I was also struck by how bad of a writer H.G. Wells is. He’s sort of a gifted storyteller and passionate future prophet but an awful writer. Phillip K. Dick is a poor writer too but in neither case do I feel that the author’s clumsiness at all detracts from my enjoyment. When I read this kind of book I don’t worry about plot or consistency or poetry or anything, I just strap myself in and enjoy the ride. I will say that the one thing that really grated on me about this book is that H.G. Wells writes as though someone gave him a thesaurus as a birthday gift and he up and decided to marry the fucking thing. One of my least favorite things that writers do is when I can very physically sense that they looked up fancy-pants words to season their writing with when older and simpler words would probably go down much easier. Here’s a selection of painful ten-dollar words from the very first paragraph: expounding, recondite, incandescent, trammels, paradox, and last but not least, fecundity. Jesus Howard Christ. At no point in The Time Machine does his infatuation with the thesaurus ever abate. There's a paragraph towards the end of The Temple of the Golden Pavilion by Yukio Mishima where Mishima or his translator decided to use the word "adumbrate" or some derivation thereof about a thousand times. It's not a long paragraph but man does it hurt like a kick in the teeth. "Adumbrate" is a word with several different meanings, all of them poetic and flavorful and simpler on their own so why not just go with one of those? Faulkner does it too, and both Mishima and Faulkner are a thousand times better prose writers than H.G. Wells so I guess it's a mistake even a master is capable of, and I suppose what do I know, they're writers who are immortalized in culture and I'm just some dork sitting in his tiny room thinking about the stutter steps of more interesting writers than I'll ever be.  It’s not a deal-breaker but in my sort of clumsy mental manifesto about writing I envision writing as an Occam’s Razor where the simplest and most soulful is the best and there isn’t anything simple about “fecundity” or “recondite”. The goal isn’t to dazzle me with pretentious diction. The goal is to sear my balls off with your irradiated and lysergic vision of the future where in the shadow of the crumbling ruins of human civilization our brain-damaged and mutated descendants barely cling on to whatever meager, pitiful shreds of their humanity remain.

            So to wrap this puppy up I guess what I’m trying to say is that I really love the science-fiction genre and I wish that I had understood why I like it and why it is good earlier in my life. It plays all the right notes for me. Could talk about it for days, and believe me, if you get me going I will. Sometimes I feel bad for my poor coworker, who is also a book reading type, and has to hear about this sort of shit all day long. Poor guy. I was so happy when they landed that one-ton metaphor on Mars just a while back. If something had gone wrong I would’ve cried.

El Tercer Reich

The Third Reich (2011)

Roberto Bolaño

This kind of game creates a pretty interesting documentary urge. It’s as if we want to know exactly how everything was done in order to change what was done wrong.

            It’s absolutely astounding to me that one of the greatest and most interesting writers of the last twenty years could have such a backlog of unpublished work, enough for his publishers and heirs to put out a half-dozen books since his death in 2003. Whoever rejected this book in 1989, 1990 must surely be kicking themselves now (if it was in fact rejected, to be honest I don’t actually know). If I had books like this just sitting around in my desk drawer doing nothing I’d be set for life. One facet of Bolaño’s legend--his cultish and confusing mythology--that I’ve always found particularly enthralling is that his entrance into fiction writing was motivated, at least partially, by purely mercenary reasons: he spent the first part of his life as a vagabond poet, wandering up and down Latin America, until finally settling down in Spain, where he got himself a wife and kids, and knowing that he was dying and that there is no money in poetry, no money at all, turned to fiction writing in order to secure his children’s future after his passing. This was his first book, the first one he wrote, and I like to imagine him sitting at his desk every day with dollar signs in his eyes, knowing that this was the only way he could do it. Most aspiring writers, if they wanted to make a big pile of cash, would write cheesy patriarchal detective fiction, or politically disgusting children’s fantasy novels, or something similar, but not Roberto Bolaño, he’s way too smart and ambitious for that and he knows he’s still got to look at himself in the mirror. His first novel is of course, like everyone else’s first novel, a metaphor using tabletop war games to explain how we still ache for the return of fascism (or a time machine to reverse the mistakes of the past) even if we don’t realize it or think better of ourselves (how liberal and educated we are, certainly no Nazis; our in-laws are Jewish, we have a gay nephew, one of our neighbors is black, we could never be a horrible fascist.)

            The book is pretty simple: it’s the journal of a young man, Udo Berger, the German champion of a board game called The Third Reich, who goes on vacation to a seaside Spanish town with his pretty girlfriend Ingeborg. While there they meet another German couple, go out drinking and dancing, sit on the beach, fraternize with vaguely threatening locals the Lamb and the Wolf, Udo has some sexual tension with the woman who runs the hotel but she keeps her legs shut so he humps a maid instead, at night the sea is black, thoughtless and menacing like a predator, and so on. There’s a death and eventually all the Germans return to Germany one way or another, save Udo, who locks himself in his dark reeking hotel room to practice and refine his revolutionary new Third Reich strategy with a disciple of sorts: a muscular and horrifically scarred hulk who rents pedal boats and sleeps on the beach, not Spanish, possibly South American, a grunting mysterious threat named El Quemado: The Burned One, The Burn Victim.

            Though this is Bolaño’s first novel and it’s pretty rough, not as mature, his prose isn’t as good as it would later be and the dialogue is sometimes cringe worthy and it meanders quite a bit, even for Bolaño, but it’s still quite evident that this is a Bobby Bolaño book and that name on the cover means you are in for something good. It’s a real mark of quality. It’s not his best book (The Savage Detectives or 2666) but it’s certainly not his worst (looking at you, Amulet). All his hallmarks are there: long ruminations on literature and poetry and how they relate to state violence, tourists (outsiders) who travel to a place and discover the real outsiders, the people really on the fringe who drag the tourists into their ugly underworld, our latent unrealized potential for fascism, narrators or central characters who may or may not be going slowly insane or just falling apart from pressure and stress, vague threats from indeterminate sources, generalized modern world bourgeois anxiety, and the blistering away of the mundane and banal surface to reveal the violence and darkness at the core of our societies and ourselves.

            A Bob Bolaño book is always such a special gift. They excite a hunger in me, a real voraciousness. An almost animalistic feral book love. I feel like I’m a pretty slow, plodding reader but not when I’m reading Bolaño. Bolaño sets me on fire: I finished Nazi Literature in the Americas in a single afternoon, 2666 in a week. The Third Reich took me a couple days. I’ve been dog sitting for my girlfriend’s parents for the last few days, gentle relaxed mornings with a cup of coffee and this Vizsla on my lap, when I get off work evenings with a beer and a pastrami sandwich and the dog again… what a life. A fellow could get used to this. If they kept on putting out Roberto Bolaño books like they've been doing I’d be in paradise.

            Roberto Bolaño is my favorite writer for a lot of reasons. I recommend him to anyone who asks and will listen. I can and will ramble on about Bolaño when I’m drunk at a bar but this is the first time I’ve really tried to sit down and articulate what I like about him. Almost all of the books I read were written and published before I was born by writers who died before I was born (there’s so many books out there that I can’t really read all the classics and keep up with what’s being published now so I stick mostly with the classics) and I feel like a lot of books that have been published recently that I have read just plain aren’t very good (up your ass with a stick Dave Eggers and Brett Easton Ellis) and have little to nothing say and no interesting ways to say it, and that the world of American letters is in a really sorry state, so I guess what I’m trying to say is that I think Bolaño is the first writer I’ve read whose books make me feel like I’m part of something important, a secret discovery, a secret someone took to the woods and buried in a shallow hole in the roots of a tree and I later dug up, horrified; in on the ground floor of a zeitgeist, a movement, and that part of that movement is mine and mine alone. I feel included and in on something. I also feel like a lot of authors popular these days are fake transgressive, like they play act at being shocking and avant-garde but they’re really just conservative, tedious and boring (for example Chuck Palahuniuk, the worst writer in the history of the English language) whereas with Bolaño I don’t feel like he’s being phony about anything. I find his prose and writing skill worthy of worship and the level of detail he can get into a novel astounding. He speaks to me like we're equals. He’s the perfect writer (a eulogist, really) for the end of the 20^th Century, a hundred years that were so ugly for so many people. I think I might be obsessed with him and I’m not at all worried about it.

            Also, and I don’t have any proof of this but it’s something I feel has to be true: there aren’t many American writers around these days that I could think of who could produce a politically acceptable novel. Ninety percent of American writers teach creative writing at some public college somewhere and, therefore, have a stake in maintaining the status quo even if they think they don’t, and aren’t going to rock the boat, not in any real way. Sort of like how NBC is never really going to tell you how many children were disintegrated by General Electric cruise missiles today, or how many mutants were born in a fifty-mile radius around a Superfund site. The writer is institutionalized, part of the state apparatus. What a tragedy. Of course there’s worse things in the world than a public college (nearly everything I can think of is worse) so maybe I’m overreacting but I don’t think it’s helped to get any teeth back into our limp wrist culture, as if anyone actually wants some teeth, and if the state is violent and obscene, and a writer works for the state, doesn’t that just make him part of the propaganda machine? It’s a stupid and confused feeling, I know, but this is what I think about when I read Bolaño.

            Mostly though, what I like about Bolaño is that I find him inspirational, if that doesn’t sound too dorky and stupid. When I read him I get the feeling that I could do this, that anyone could—but most importantly that I could—that in Bolaño I’ve found someone who speaks the same language as me, after years of searching, and that language is pretty awesome to hear (I can finally have a conversation with someone), that it’s in my grasp, and that all it takes is a determination and a desire to paint outside the lines, to stand against boring institutionalized MFA literature, especially the really pernicious kind that infects this country and has since the 1970s and makes us stupider and duller and supports the violent sadistic goals of the state, to stand for something and put it into words. That it doesn’t take a fancy NYU writing degree to write a book, just a bibliography and a pair of eyes and one or two ears and some balls.

Justine

Justine (1957)

Lawrence Durrell

           

           

            Some writers I wouldn’t want to engage with socially. I just don’t like their books, or I find their politics repulsive, or I imagine that they were assholes, and then there are writers like Lawrence Durrell, who I would drop anything to spend an afternoon with, sitting on the balcony of some bar with dark beer and bread and cheese, shooting the shit, learning from him. He was kind of an old-fashioned sort of British world-traveller, the kind that they don’t make any more, a man with politics likely just as unbearable as Borges’ politics were but, like Borges, a writer whose writing is so good that I find myself unable to give a hoot, a man who wandered around the Mediterranean, started spontaneous and modern literary movements with Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, moving from government post to government post. Rhodes, Alexandria, Corfu, Yugoslavia…

             

          Justine is the first part of Durrell’s most famous and well-regarded work, The Alexandria Quartet (the other three books are Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea), a series of experimental modernist novels about a tormented love triangle (it’s sort of a love octopus, with a tentacle everywhere) viewed from different angles, a different angle in each book. In this book the angle is an unnamed narrator who is trapped between two women:  the simple, sweet and loyal Melissa, an impoverished dancer in a bar and the sort of woman a man should marry; and the magnetic and carnivorous Justine, a lodestone of sexuality, a cannibalistic man-eater that men would break their necks to get a glimpse of from across a crowded room. The book is achronological, it has the rhythm of a man sitting in the rubble of his life sifting through painful old memories; there isn’t any order or sense to when a memory surges up from your gut (that’s where an ugly or painful memory is, in your stomach), they just come when they come, one leading you to another. The tone is also pretty interesting, part romance novel and part travel guide, sort of like if a National Geographic met a Playboy though that isn’t entirely right.  It’s not pornographic. It’s not even racy at all, certainly not as racy as I was expecting from a man who had a deep and long-lasting friendship with Henry Miller, author of Crazy Cock. Though, as I understand it, some of his early books were banned for obscenity so maybe he just got it out of his system by the time he wrote Justine. It sort of reminds me of an old painting of a harem, like a Delacroix or something… one with tons of fine gilt detail where you can really smell the sweat, the musk and the hookah smoke, where bored dark-eyed girls sit on cushions fanning themselves and looking downward, waiting miserably and nervously for their turn.

             

          The book definitely fits in a genre that I think should be a genre but isn’t yet. I don’t know what you’d name it but it’s mostly about one thing: white Europeans in the Colonies doing ugly things to each other.  There are a million books like that… The Stranger, The Quiet American...

I’d say almost without hesitation that Justine is by far the most beautifully written book I’ve ever read. Very sensuous and emotionally rich, very luxurious and exotic. This is a book that has a smell (redolence), that has a sound (clanging weekend bazaar), I know where I am when I read this book; I’m in Alexandria. I used to live around the corner from this Ethiopian market. It was in the bottom floor of an apartment complex, and I’d go there sometimes for toilet paper or soap. It wasn’t really a convenience store, mostly what they sold were spices. Racks and racks of spices. Curries, dried peppers, tins of desiccated things I’d never seen before and were never a part of my cooking. It smelled like a wizard’s laboratory in this store, the smell was sometimes so overpowering it would wrack my nerves…it smelled like ancient secrets, and that’s what I imagine this book smells like. The prose in this book is very high quality, just the absolute finest stuff. Some prose is “workmanlike” and gets the job done (Steinbeck, say) but this is something else… this is loveliness.  I’d drag myself across the Mojave on broken legs to write a sentence like “…etiolated flowers of afternoons spent in anguish, tossing upon ugly beds, bandaged by dreams.” I'd staple my nutsack to a revolving door to write something extraordinary that Durrell could probably do without thinking in one afternoon on a Greek island on the beach with a beer and nothing else but the waves.

One thing I really loved about this book is how deep the characterization is. I don’t really have any clue what most of these characters look like, with a few exceptions, but I know exactly what they are like internally, in their souls. Durrell’s skill at forging metaphors really stands out when he’s describing someone’s essence, for example, something that really struck me was a line about the titular Justine: “She could not help but remind me of that race of terrific queens which left behind them the ammoniac smell of their incestuous loves to hover like a cloud over the Alexandrian subconscious. The giant man-eating cats like Arsinoe were her true siblings.” I don’t know if she’s tall or short or anything, but I know what she is (and goddamn what images Durrell uses) and what she is is elemental, tempestuous, amoral in the way that the ocean is amoral. The ocean calls to men like a siren, and it will kill a man as surely as anything, and has taken the lives of innumerable men, but there is no guiding force behind it. But what a way to go: death in the arms of the sea, maybe the only death worthy of manhood.

But, really, the main character of this story is the city of Alexandria. It’s where Durrell directs his most loving attention. Alexandria is an ancient, endless, eternal city like a dark dense jungle where age, rot, endless chaotic growth and decay build upon each other and the weight of history and timelessness enervates and entombs the inhabitants. History here is heavy, burdensome. In a lot of ways it reads like some made-up fantasy city from Borges or Calvino where time never passes, I mean to me a timeless city of minarets, labyrinthine rat warren ghettoes and spicy fumes on a narrow isthmus between the cold sea and a saline blood-colored lake sounds fantastical but it isn’t, Alexandria is a real place and it’s still there. Alexandria was there before any of us were, and it’ll be around after we’re all gone. I just looked up airplane tickets: a round trip is about thirteen hundred dollars at the cheapest. People spend at least that much to go to places that aren’t nearly as interesting: Hawaii, Japan, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, San Francisco. I think most of those places sound tedious and boring. Japan is where people go to fondle teenagers dressed up like cartoon characters, and Las Vegas is for blowing a life’s savings and pawning your old lady’s wedding ring but Alexandria, by contrast, is one of the most important cities in the history of mankind. I’m positive you could fondle a teenager or lose a lot of money in Alexandria, but it’s almost impossible to overstate how important that city has been to the development of Western Civilization, whereas it’s really easy to exaggerate the importance of Los Angeles or Dallas. Alexandria was a nexus of history for a long, long time. Celestial objects with massive gravitational fields distort space-time, forming a dip or a well around them in which smaller objects fall into and circle like around a drain. Significant cities are like that as well: they force history into orbit.

Unfortunately as pretty as this book is I’m not really sure what it’s about, what the deeper meaning is. That may be a failing on my part. It’s lyrical and metaphorical and richly executed but I don’t know to what end Durrell is working towards. Supposedly it’s an allegory for the Second World War but the novel is so internalized and solipsistic that I’m at a loss to tell you what Durrell is trying to say about it. Perhaps I have to read the other three books to find a resolution. I looked it up on good old Wikipedia and it says The Alexandria Quartet is an “exploration of relativity and the notions of continuum and subject–object relation, with modern love as the subject” but I’m not sure what that means, if it means anything at all. However, this book is pretty enough that I’m willing to accept it on its aesthetic value alone, and for that reason I would give it a hearty recommendation for anyone who is interested in scaling the magnificent heights that a true prose artist can lift you towards. Millions stampede to the Mona Lisa every year but as anyone knows it’s just a pretty picture.   

Powell's Books

I just spent a week in Portland, Oregon, with my girlfriend, and blew a ton of bread in the world famous Powell's Bookstore. It's an enormous place, and I feel like I could spend a year there and still not see everything. It was of course like heaven to me.

Here's what I picked up:

Kobo Abe, The Face of Another
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
William S. Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads
Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet (Justine, Balthazar, Mountolive, Clea)
Lawrence Durrell, Prospero's Cell
William Gaddis, The Recognitions
John Hawkes, Second Skin
Cormac McCarthy, Outer Dark
Andre Malraux, Man's Fate
Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi
Yukio Mishima, The Decay of the Angel 
Yukio Mishima, Runaway Horses 

Currently reading Justine right now. Seems good so far, and I'll have another review up soon.

The Woman in the Dunes

Woman in the Dunes (1964)

Kobo Abe

            Futility oppresses every man. That’s what this book is about. It’s about the futility of struggling against society’s current. If you try to fight they’ll grind you down with exhaustion and hunger. If you color outside the lines they’ll break your fingers. A disproportionate punishment for a exercising a privilege we all think we have--our “individuality”, our “freedoms”, our bourgeois dreams of self-fulfillment—things that we take for granted and so few of us ever utilize. If freedom can be stolen at someone else’s leisure then you didn’t have much freedom in the first place, you merely had a privilege that was allowed to you for as long as it was convenient.            

            
          I did some searching around on the internet and found information on Abe’s other books. I gather that they’re all some kind of kinky science fiction (plotline summaries: doctor melts his own face off in liquid nitrogen accident, invents artificial face so that he can seduce his own wife; doctor grafts well-endowed lower half of a dead man onto his back, transforming himself into some kind of super-sexual centaur so he can sexually please an adolescent girl patient who is slowly turning into a gelatinous blob as her bones dissolve from a mysterious disease; man invents artificially intelligent super-computer to predict the future and when the predictions become more and more uncomfortable for the guardians of the status quo the computer is banned from answering political questions, simultaneously the government is genetically engineering children with gills so that when the ice caps melt and the water level rises humankind can survive underwater) which is one of my favorite kinds of science fiction—I’d take Philip K. Dick’s urban loss-of-identity paranoia over Orson Scott Card’s crusade of heteronormative militarism and religiosity any day of the week, to say nothing of the dime-a-million trashy sci-fi and fantasy novels that pander to the saddest desires for wish-fulfillment—but The Woman in the Dunes isn’t science fiction or fantasy at all. It’s actually pretty normal. If not entirely plausible it isn’t totally impossible. It might be important to note that Kobo Abe, previous to being one of Japan’s most famous writers, attended medical school and graduated but only on the condition that he never practice medicine. He also spent a good portion of his childhood in Japanese Manchuria, where some of history’s most godawful atrocities were committed. Context is important!

             
           The book is really simple but not simplistic. A man, a poor schoolteacher and amateur entomologist takes a bus to the country for a weekend bug-collecting trip. He hopes to discover a new species of insect in the dunes near the ocean. It’s a mildly adventurous ambition, I mean, it’s not the Mercury Program or anything but about as adventurous as a person can hope to get on their own during a holiday weekend without zillions of dollars of funding from a global superpower, and really, how many people get to discover something new, classify it, have it documented in a journal? An insignificant fraction of our species gets to do that, that’s how many. Closer to zero than to one. When night begins to fall he goes to the local village and gets a bed at a widow’s house. Her house is unusual: a dilapidated shanty at the bottom of a funnel of sand. Other houses in the area, the ones on the side of the village closest to the beach, are arranged in a similar fashion. He soon discovers that he is trapped with the widow in the bottom of the quarry and is forced into laboring, digging up sand that the villagers sell for use in construction. The man tries several methods of escape but all are ultimately futile. The villagers control entrance and exit from the pit, and if he interrupts the work or doesn’t work, they withhold food and water. Eventually he gives up and accepts it. Nobody really misses him. The widow uses her body to ensnare him but she isn’t exactly a seductress, she’s just there and warm, and she’s more trapped than he is, she’s completely indoctrinated and has totally surrendered. The man clings on to his hope of escape—if only he could just think up something perfect he could get out of this pit—but all the woman wants is a radio and a mirror. What good would hearing the news or pop music do her, and who is she ever going to see? To the rest of the world she’s less than dead: she doesn’t exist and never existed. She doesn’t need amenities; she needs freedom and years of psychological counseling.

             
          The Woman in the Dunes was made into a movie in the 60s, and it is by all accounts a fantastic film, but I’ve only seen about half of it. Netflix sent me a few scratched copies and eventually I just moved on. What I did see I really liked though, but after reading this book I’m surprised that it could have been made into a great film. It’s a lot like Frankenstein (which has been attempted many times and never done well) or The Sound and the Fury (which as far as I know has never been filmed, probably for good reason) in that so much of it is psychological and internal, which doesn’t really make for the greatest or most viewable film experience, and always misses out on a good portion of whatever the point of the book was.

The other half of the book that isn’t about fruitlessly shaking the bars of our social construct prisons concerns sand and heat. That’s the first thing I really liked about this book. I loved how sensory it is without being purple. It’s even a little on the spartan side. Abe’s prose is fantastic, and he managed to make me feel, in a way that is almost very real, the throbbing sadism of the sun, the grit of sand on my skin, and the hopeless asphyxiating fog that rises at night to occlude the stars away. The second thing that I really liked about this book is how well Abe delves into the mental state of someone who is completely and utterly trapped. The trapped person retreats inward, his life becomes internal, he surrenders to pointless sad fantasies of escape and freedom. He’s totally isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, and eventually, when he’s exhausted enough, comes to accept his situation and the rules of conduct, as presented, become in his mind totally reasonable. The Woman in the Dunes reminded me a lot of Hubert Selby, Jr.’s The Room, another book about a trapped man deluding himself with fantasy.

This book is a bit surreal at points, but that’s okay. Unlike, say, Murakami, it’s not weird just to be weird, it’s a novel with a slightly fantastical bent that does what every book, and especially every fantastical book needs to do: engage the real world. I’m going to start digressing a little bit here, so, my apologies. Eventually on this blog I’d like to get around to writing about how I think that the fantasy genre is the genre that most specifically plays to our shared, unconscious, deep-rooted fascist tendencies, but for now I’m going to say that there are two major types of fiction books: the realistic (Grapes of Wrath, say) and the unrealistic (Gravity’s Rainbow) and that the unrealistic books can be further divided into two categories: those that use a device to make a point about the real world and those that don’t. The former includes some of the best books ever written (1984, for instance) and the latter are mostly trashy no good fantasy novels that your dumpy sister reads while drinking tea and petting the cat. The Lord of the Rings is a marginal case, but I’d definitely put, for instance, Game of Thrones in the latter category. I think there’s only really one thing that separates the two: that the author believes in something, and at this point, since I basically totally despair for humanity, I’m going to say that it doesn’t really matter what the author believes in, it could almost be anything at all, just as long as it isn’t about elves, wizards, dragons, and terribly pathetic anaesthetizing wish-fulfillment for a civilization that is totally devoid of real-world fulfillment for most everyone who has the misfortune of being alive.

I almost feel like I have less to say about this book than I did about Naked Lunch because unlike Naked Lunch I liked this book unambiguously, without reservation. I’m not conflicted about it at all. I don’t know if I’m going to rate these books with stars, or with numbers or what, or just talk about them because that’s really what I’d like to do, just talk about books, so I guess I’ll just say that I highly recommend The Woman in the Dunes on its literary merits and on my own belief that reading books, lots of them, that engage our internal and external worlds is a pretty simple way to alleviate a lifetime of slavery down in the pit.

           

Naked Lunch

Naked Lunch (1959)
William S. Burroughs

     I first tried to read this book several years ago, when I was still in high school or just out of high school, and hated it, probably only read maybe a quarter of the way through, but recently another Burroughs book was recommended to me (Cities of the Red Night, one of his later books) and I read that and liked it. I found Naked Lunch unpleasant and off-putting the first time, but Cities was a nice trip down into Burroughs’ kinky and pervy world. So I gave Naked Lunch another go and found a book that is both vastly overrated but still pretty... I dunno... alright? I feel like “good” is a bit strong but it’s not a bad book by any means, and I can see why it really gets some people stiff.

    I think I appreciated this book mostly for what it represents and barely at all for what it contains. Naked Lunch is the definition of a book that is “great” but not “good”. I can feel its greatness on every page; it’s a totally unique, inventive, iconoclastic artifact from America’s Literary Golden Age (I dunno, the end of the Second World War until like... 1980) that will never be duplicated. It has little to no plot and the characters are just cardboard, just little wispy ghosts, which I was expecting. It’s confusing, disjointed, and achronological. I understand where Naked Lunch sits in the American Canon (and despite the druggy pretensions it is very American) and I know why it is there, but man... I think there are a lot better books out in the world. One thing I really appreciated was that Burroughs used randomness and chance in his writing (cut-ups, etc.) something that’s noticeably absent in literature. There’s randomness in music (silly beat-off jazz music, for example) and in painting (Abstract Expressionism) and even in filmmaking. One of my favorite things in The Wire is a scene where a drug dealer gets shot in the leg and for a brief moment the camera assumes his viewpoint looking down the barely lit block and in that second of vision a big old fucking rat runs out from under a car and across the street. You know that was completely on accident. Baltimore is probably a place with a lot of rats, and someone just happened to have a camera at that exact moment.

     Instead of approaching it as traditional novel (with a narrative and other things novels usually have) I think this book really looks best when you think of it as a collection of really vibrant, well-drawn images, probably every image Billy Burroughs thought up for a couple of years put into one book. Filthy, disgusting, revolting images but mostly well-executed. It has about as much emotional depth as a mid-80s Ministry video. I can imagine the video now, it’s mostly made up of horrifying and ugly archival and news footage, lots of quick cuts juxtaposing embarrassing moments in human history. Like they’d show a clip of B-52s saturation bombing North Vietnam, hundreds of thousands of tons of explosives, and then a cut to a handheld video of a cop shooting a black man in the head with a shotgun, and everyone who made it (the director and Al Jourgensen) would pat themselves on the back over how clever they are for connecting the Military-Industrial Complex to Domestic Racial Violence. Meanwhile, at Jupiter State University-Ganymede, under a big glass and steel dome two students, college types, slack around their dorm room on the couch ingesting space drugs while watching MTV’s 120 Minutes, beamed in from Earth. One turns to the other and says, Paul.. do you... wanna? and Paul says you don’t know how long I’ve waited for you to ask me that, Jordan. Jordan gets down on his knees and unzips Paul’s space suit and pulls out Paul’s quivering pink erection and begins administering a suckjob so potent that Paul is rendered instantaneously senseless from homosexual ecstasy, he puts his hand on the back of Jordan’s head and unconsciously begins muttering incantations he studied in the Sex Magic 220 class he took last semester. Paul’s magic and the suckjob magic mix and merge and Jordan’s face and Paul’s ding-dong start melting, fusing together like two pieces of plastic doused in model airplane cement until the two of them become one quivering mass of gelatinous anger, like a tumor with hair, teeth, eyes and a murderous rage. The jelly undulates its way out of the dorm and down a storm drain into the sewers. Of course, the jelly gets hungry sometimes so it captures an engineering major and drags him or her (but probably him because Burroughs doesn’t really include women into his worldview) down to its underground lair where it jacks off acidic semen all over its prey, like a nightmare penis fly, the student melts into a mushy sludge which the Paul-Jordan Jell-O sucks up with a hideous proboscis. After ten or fifteen students and several dozen Hispanic janitors disappear the campus authorities alert the Man who sends in a platoon of Men in Black all wearing Ray-Ban Wayfarers, and down in the sewers they burn the jelly to death with government flamethrowers. Because the Man is always oppressing (destroying) things that are unique and beautiful. And BAM I just explained Naked Lunch by William Seward Burroughs to you, I shit you not.

     I’ve been thinking about Naked Lunch more than I ever thought I would, and you know what this book reminds me of? Eraserhead. They’re both very vivid and lurid, a clear collection of disturbing images but I’m at a loss trying to figure out if either of them actually mean something. I’m not sure that they need to mean anything, and that's a point a lot of people would make, and when I think about Naked Lunch this way I like it a lot more than when I think about it as a regular ol’ book. I’m positive that it’s not a coincidence that Naked Lunch and Eraserhead seem related to me. They’re sort of puppies from the same litter. I can't possibly be the first person to see similarities between Naked Lunch and Eraserhead, and if I am... that's fucking sad.

     Supposedly Naked Lunch has some sort of anti- Capital Punishment message but I don’t see it, and I defy anyone to explain that to me. I’m not sure it’s about anything except teenaged boys masturbating while being hanged, and zombified drug addicts sucking each other off. The real world Bill Burroughs shot his wife in the head, so I guess if I were a murderer I’d probably be against the death penalty too. There are some folks out there who say you shouldn’t judge a piece of art by the life of the artist but fuck that nonsense, a biography is context and you need a lot of context to analyze and understand anything. Knowing about Greek civilization will give you a better understanding of a Greek statue. Hey, here’s one thing the ancient Greeks and Willy Burroughs have in common: they were both massive pederasts.

     One thing that really struck me is how hugely misogynistic Burroughs is. He’s sort of this homosexual supremacist woman-hater who is totally incapable of writing about a woman as anything more than a piece of meat. And not just any old piece of meat. A regular piece of meat would be much better. I could go down to the supermarket right now and get me a steak and cook that and it would be filling and delicious. No, in Burroughs’ world a woman is a stinking, rotten piece of meat crawling with maggots and covered in slime and it’d kill you to eat it. Or at very least give you the squirts. He’s worse than Yukio Mishima in this regard, and I’ll get to Mishima later, but at least Mishima wrote female characters who were still human beings, whereas Burroughs sees them as unnatural, revolting mutants who invariably die hideously, a death usually caused in some way by their womanhood or female sexuality. Off the top of my head I think there’s only two female characters in Naked Lunch, out of a book with a zillion characters, and one dies in a gangbang, and the other is hit by a car and miscarries a mutant fetus right in the middle of the road. Of course, everyone in a Burroughs book lives and dies hideously but when a woman has sex (or even just breathes in, really) it’s some kind of blood sucking perversion of nature that results in disturbance and death, whereas if three dudes suck each other off and take it up the ass over and over again and then two of them kill the other (of course it’s a redhead adolescent boy with a perfectly formed penis and a tight little asshole) and rub his blood and entrails and semen all over themselves it’s the most beautiful expression of love and some sort of supernatural mystical experience. I think if one were to sort of assemble a spectrum of misogyny you have at one end your Rush Limbaughs, your Rick Santorums, your Jerry Falwells, your Taliban, just real actively, aggressively misogynistic types, and at the other end of the spectrum you’ve got Naked Lunch and Bill Burroughs, whose misogyny manifests as sort of a total apathy. He was also as gay as the day is long so maybe he didn’t write about women because they didn’t interest him, but I’m pretty sure that most gay men don’t think that women are virally contagious mutants who need to be completely immolated to ensure their total destruction and when they're all gone we can build a homosexual junky utopia where there's no death penalty and we can just indulge our hedonism with drugs and passive poopchute sex with teenaged runaways whenever and however we want.

     You know what else this book is like? It’s like Ron Paul. To the simpleminded and gullible Ron Paul seems like a revelation (yeah man legalize weed, and rights and shit, rights) but a good solid think about it reveals that at the heart it’s quite ugly. Burroughs doesn’t want a libertarian utopia because he believes in the inherent dignity and goodness of mankind or any such thing as positive as that, instead he dreams of a libertarian utopia so he can shoot heroin and screw around with adolescent boys without having to worry about the cops.

     All in all Naked Lunch is a fairly... decent... book, and it probably deserves its place in the Hall of American Literature. It’s full of lurid, lingering imagery and is completely, totally unique. There’s nothing else out there like it, not that I’ve read. I’m actually really surprised that I have this much to say about it, because I think that Cities of the Red Night is a much better book and I certainly enjoyed reading it a lot more. I doubt this book is for everyone, or even, I dunno, ten percent of everyone. What percentage of the population do you think has sufficient tolerance for rambling junky nonsense and kinky gay porn? Certainly not a very high percentage. Most people can't even sit through a long movie with zero explosions. But despite how negative this has sounded I'm glad I read it: it’s an important piece of America’s literary history and I’d be negligent if I missed out. Burroughs may have been a completely deplorable human being and I wouldn't want to spend any time with him at all, but he was a talented, skilled, thoughtful writer and if I had a fraction of his skill at crafting memorable images I would be fucking set for life, I'll have you know.