Ubu fils


"The grotesque or, if you prefer, the 'Ubu-esque,' is not just a term of abuse or an insulting epithet, and I would not like to use it in that sense. I think that there is a precise category, or, in any case, that we should define a precise category of historico-political analysis that would be the category of the grotesque or Ubu-esque. Ubu-esque terror, grotesque sovereignty, or, in starker terms, the maximization of effects of power on the basis of the disqualification of the one who produces them. I do not think this is an accident or mechanical failure in the history of power. It seems to me that it is one of the cogs that are an inherent part of the mechanisms of power. Political power, at least in some societies, and anyway in our society, can give itself, has actually given itself, the possibility of conveying its effects and even more, of finding their source, in a place that is manifestly, explicitly, and readily discredited as odious, despicable, or ridiculous." --Michel Foucault, Abnormal: Lectures at the College de France, 1974-1975

A meandering post

I've been reading Nevermore, by Marie Redonnet. Beautiful, telegraphic sentences; a blow job every 5 pages or so; and a lot of the tropes that are so tired in American cinema but are remarkably new here: a small-town sheriff, a circus, a mystery, a Southern California border town.

The interiorty of the main character, Willy Bost, is mostly presented through the wierd, admonitory notes he writes in his notebook: "Do not think about the past."

Redonnet apparently had herself committed to an insane asylum so that she'd have time to write. I admire that. I generally mourn the passing of the clinic: a certain genteel crack-up is no longer an option, it seems to me.

In Montreal, I went to dinner with three people I'd just met: Henk, his girlfriend (?), and Jane. I mentioned a book by Teresa Brennan. Jane told me Teresa had been killed last year, in a hit and run accident; the driver was never found. --These three people I was with that night had met each other through Teresa.

The book had been about "exhausting modernity." A book of feminist Freudo-Marxism. I didn't say this, but I had eventually grown dissatisfied with the book's insistence on the infant's illusion of omnipotence, I mean with its insistence on the explanatory value of this thesis, that the illusion of omnipotence, and subsequent disillusionment and rage, are universal, and are central to the ills of the world. Like a psychological theodicy.

But at dinner I was told that Theresa had been planning a place, a sort of think tank, in the Bahamas. For herself and her friends to come to. And this made me reconsider my opinion of the book, or of Teresa Brennan. I had an illusion of potency just then, myself, of collective potency, at that moment, in that company.

Because we talked a great deal about how awful the world was lately; about "energetics," which had been Theresa's object of study toward the end of her life, and which had played a part in a memoir Jane had read, in which a raped woman fighting for her life suddenly stopped being frightened, and at that moment her assailant became frightened, and ran away; prophetic dreams; the dismantling of social welfare state in Holland and the Americanization of the world; the fact that Theresa's death was a murder, even if not an intentional one; the need for an alternative to marriage and nuclear family.

(I'm a little naive, reveling in the company of "free thinkers," as though this were 1910. My interest in "alternatives to marriage," is never, by the way, founded on a wish for variety, for supply, for multiple partners. I've often thought a disjunctive synthesis would be best: rather than an ideal fusion, or even a sober partnership of complementary equals, rather something appallingly or impossibly ill-fitting, right at the heart of the union: marriage to a gay man, for example. My twin utopic visions are: 1, the disjunctive synthesis of Millicent, Elijah, and the narrator in James Purdy's novel I Am Elijah Thrush, and 2, the community on a terrible, short-lived TV show about a priest, 'Nothing Sacred.' Everyone there was sexually incompossible, if I may say so: a celibate priest, a pregnant teenage girl, a Jewish accountant separated from his wife, a nun. If I can't live in an insane asylum with lap robes and cups of tisane and a nice view of the greensward, then let it be in some hopeless disunion such as this.

(The accountant of course was a free agent. He could have hooked up with anyone, so could the girl, so could they all. The important thing is that he was non-married, ex-married. His Jewishness--maybe the show was trying to be "inclusive," maybe it was a repetition of a loathsome stereotype--to me, for my utopic ideal of disunion, what mattered was that he was not entirely part of the church, never fused in the community.)

Anomalia

Why is this my dullest post yet? Is it a foretaste of how dull I'd be if I became an academic? Now I'm editing.

I just got back from a conference in Montreal called "Anomalia."

I gave a paper drawn from Charles Mudede’s and my work on landscape and crime. It was about Tarde and imitation.

There were some very good papers: Henk Oosterling on what he called "radical medi(a)(o)crity," Martin Lefebvre on cannibalism, and Peter Paik, of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Paik gave a paper titled "Saturnalia of the Automatons or, the killer stripped bare by his guru, even." About Kiyoshi Kurosawa's "Cure," post-9/11 films, and "omnicide," or cult homocide. This film the Cure, I'd love to see it. He showed a clip where the affectless cult leader, in police custody, sort of hypnotizes a policeman by repeatedly asking "who are you?" The film, Paik claims, is an advance over the abject-hero film, where a killer is dashing and bad and sexy, like Hannibal. In the Cure, the killer is, Brechtianly, "just annoying."

--So but then the people he hypnotizes are not aware of being in a cult, they just carry out brutal murders and then are found near the scene, amnesiac, dazed. Paik: "The marvelous irony of the film consists of its insight that when people act on their most repressed desires and fulfill their most disavowed fantasies, they do so mechanically, even mindlessly, with all the gusto of robots or zombies. "

And Montreal! Ah, Canada. How I long to live in Canada. Like here, but so much better. I've lived in so many places that were shadowed by Canada: Buffalo had Fort Erie and Toronto; in Seattle, it's Vancouver. Some day, Canada.