Pedagomania update
I dropped the class that was the focus of my late, hysterical student-dom. All my cryptic, thrilled notes about student-dom in the earlier blog entry refer to being in that class. And not to the main business at hand, my thesis, which only tangentially takes place in the arena of student-dom. It's mostly just sitting at my desk and writing. --Perhaps I shouldn't have been so cryptic. I knew what I meant; I just didn't want the Arabic professor's name coming up in some Google search.

I came to that Arabic-lit teacher's office hours TWICE in three weeks. Now that it's all over, I think my manic efforts to secure his approval had something to do with the extreme discomfort I felt at being in a class of Ivy-league undergrads. I am as old as their parents. I was like one of those fabled Japanese soldiers who never got the news that the war was over. And not just age, but class differentiated me: look, kids, here's how you'd age without cosmetic dentistry and a good dermatologist. Three times a week, I was living out the scene in Brave New World where the mother, the savage, turns up amid all the pretty people.

School: it's a Verblödung, a cretin-i-fying, in the end. Anyways, now I just have my advisor to deal with. Much better.

Just now somebody was ringing my doorbell like crazy, at 4 on a Sunday morning.

Edited, later.

I don't have an intercom or a way to see the front door. I called the police. The police at my door say, "Is your name ____ ____? Is your apartment number ___? Is your car a Chevy bla bla bla?" (I can't remember car names, or recognize them). I say yes to the first two questions and no to the last, implying that I do in fact have a car, and they point to the tow truck idling at the curb and say, "these guys are repo men. They're here to get a white Chevy, but there're three white Chevys here on the street."

It's MY job to help out the repo men? And the police were so quick to label me, as if they were saying, "let's get to the bottom of this; your sleep was disturbed and you had to call us because you're a deadbeat, ma'am." You know, with that visciousness you see on that show "Class," I mean that show "Cops"? But that's their real job, the protection of property.

I said, to the repo guy in the truck, who looked really hapless, a skinny guy wearing sunglasses at night, "I don't own a car. Take any car you want, just stop ringing my doorbell."

I left just as the police were saying, weird, the name is ___ ___ and the address is right.

It is weird. Damn. I used to say, "Identity crime? Ha. Somebody else could hardly make a worse hash of it than I have." As if to prove this, right when the doorbell rang, I had been having a dream about sex with some guy, some imaginary guy, and the voiceover of my dream was talking about how this could "nonetheless be considered gay sex." [i should edit out the dream, too, but it's funny.]

Clear Cut news & pedagomania outbreak

Charles D'Ambrosio once again, at long last, in The Stranger's books pages. He reviews the Clear Cut anthology reading at Elliot Bay. This "audience review" feature started as a jokey, smirky way to get out of town writers into the Stranger--a total waste of ink. But this one by Charles D'Ambrosio, besides being local (or regional, anyway), is worth reading. So was Heather McHugh's, a few weeks ago.

In other news, my student-self is undergoing some kind of paroxysm of, uh, a spasm. Maybe it's the death spasm of my student-hood, in this my final semester ever at the Institute. It has that feel, what I've been doing: a bit hysterical, a bit melancholy like a late-bloomed talent. I'd be more specific, but it's all so embarrassing. [Late edit: I was obliquely referring to the class I was taking,about Arabic literature. And its teacher. I was just trying to keep the name from coming up in a Google search.] Let's just say it involves eagerness, reading, name-dropping, e-mail, and office hours. Yes, office hours, this early in the semester. What is next??? Extra credit? Are there further modes of abasement? Oh, let's hope so.

I told Naima this is probably going to happen again with me. At the Elderhostel they'll be saying to me, "yes, yes ma'am, we're all aware how very smart you once were. Now please take your seat and stop bothering the other students."

Abject-o-rama. Or, the beauty of the swerve.

(how are those for M.F.A. thesis titles? Ha ha. I kid.)

I fell asleep this afternoon. In my room, with the sun flooding in. There is a state of sleepiness I sometimes reach, where the least little percussive sound puts me further under. It has to be the right sound, like somebody hammering on a house a few blocks away. With each tap, there's a reaction completely beyond my control: I slip down. A weird but utterly just disproportion obtains between the tiny, dim percussion and the immense distance I am dropping down.

I've read good descriptions of death and fainting lately, in the last month. These are all weakened by being put together here. The passages just erupt, or swerve, there's no expecting them from what has come before. Which is an effect that's lost here, with all these things labeled and lined up next to one another. (The Graham Greene is the weakest, but it's in this frivolous novel, it's shockingly good in its context, being so out of context.)

Dying: "…Saunders shot him in the back through the opening door. Death came to him in the form of unbearable pain. It was as if he had to deliver this pain as a woman delivers a child, and he sobbed and moaned in the effort. At last it came out of him and he followed his only child into a vast desolation." Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale.

Fainting: "Fortunately I am beginning to drift, and my body to go numb as I leave it. My mouth opens, I am aware, if that is awareness, of two cold parted slabs that must be lips, and of a hole that must be the mouth itself, and of a thing, the tongue, which I can push out of the hole, as I do now. I hope I am not going to be called on to say anything because besides going numb I am also sweating a lot and turning white, in a fishy way. Also, something which I usually think of as consciousness is shooting backwards, at a geometrically accelerating pace, according to a certain formula, out of the back of my head, and I am not sure that I will be able to stay with it. The people in front of me are growing smaller and therefore less dangerous. They are also tilting. A convention allows me to record these details." J.M. Coetzee, Dusklands.

Dying: "Towards evening Andrey Yefemitch died of an apoplectic stroke. At first he had a violent shivering fit and a feeling of sickness; something revolting, as it seemed, penetrating through his whole body, even to his fingertips, strained from his stomach to his head and flooded his eyes and ears. There was a greenness before his eyes. Andrey Yefemitch understood that his end had come, and remembered that Ivan Dmitrich, Mihail Averyanitch, and millions of people believed in immortality. And what if it really existed? But he did not want immortality, and he thought of it only for one instant. A herd of deer, extraordinarily beautiful and graceful, of which he had been reading the day before, ran by him; then a peasant woman stretched out her hand to him with a registered letter… Mihail Averyanitch said something, then it all vanished, and Andrey Yefemitch sank into oblivion forever." Anton Chekhov, "Ward No. 6" (ellipsis in the original).

Waking: "I lay there in a sick stupor, with my head aching very much, and growing slowly numb with cold, till the dawn light came shining through the cracks of the shed and a locomotive whistled in the station. These and a blinding thirst brought me to life, and I found I was in no pain. Pain of the slightest had been my obsession and secret terror, from a boy. Had I now been drugged with it, to oblivion?" T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

Doesn't fit in this category, but is so beautiful a swerve: "Edward sighed. People do sigh, in fiction, and in real life after they have been trapped in a fantasy and a sudden noise, movement, a physical demand, sets them free to rejoin the insistent clatter and irrelevance of day-to-day living. Edward sighed again. He realized that noises, shadows, even his own body, were in a continual state of jealously toward him, as they are toward all human beings. Even the furniture of his room--the table, the bed, the chairs, the light bulb, everything which the landlord termed 'fixtures and furnishings' experienced this dark uneasiness at his every thought and act; while within his own body his arms were jealous of his hands, his head was jealous of his belly, his eyes could not bear the fact that they were not his ears; his mouth moaned that it was not his fingertips touching; there was no satisfaction anywhere; there was war." Janet Frame, Scented Gardens for the Blind.

Late addition: an entry on swooning, by jodi via jenny, whose blog, jenny's, reminds me that I'd like to read Kathleen Stewart.

Negri

Finally, the Antonio Negri book I've been waiting for. Not that I knew about its existence before it showed up. Negri on Negri is an interview in the form of an abecedary: A is for arms, B is for Red Brigades, etc. It's so lucid, so concise.

I haven't been able to write about it yet. Favorite passages:

From H, for Heidegger…

In Heidegger's work of the 1920s and 1930s there is this fundamental intuition of Being in moral terms. And it is obvious that the conception of time, terrifying and absolute, still remains marginal. The Heideggerian conception of time remains a piece of folklore, a caricature.
[Interviewer:] Why terrifying and why a caricature?

Because there is this immobile, fixed Being--and time, which turns around it! And man's moral behavior, his position in this movement, is completely marginal. Man is caught up in time, but it is a time that is nothing, a continual revelation of being-nothingness. This being-nothingness is absolutely compact, destinal--it can't be escaped from.

From R, for resistance ( but also for return)…

Return is therefore not only a coming back but also the effort and the joy of being back: of being there rather than somewhere else. It is the joy of rediscovering not community and roots, but linguistic innovation and the freedom of the passions.

Emerald City

I came back to Providence yesterday. By a circuitous route: night flight on New Year's Eve from Seattle to Burlington, Vermont; a day and a night at my sister's in Burlington, where I ate some Hoppin' John and collard greens for good luck in the new year; and then an all-day bus ride, Burlington to Providence.

Travel highlights: having my bags and my person searched in Boston's South Bay bus station. Whew! Another "event" wisely averted, thanks to vigilant luggage-searching of Greyhound passengers. It's so creepy to see this become normal, people pliantly submitting to searches by all variety of uniformed men and women.

Now that I've just come back here, I have the same weird and dislocated feeling I had there, on arrival in Seattle. It always seems to me that the threads of my life, my life of social ties and relationships, are so few and so tenuous. As if it takes all of half an hour to telephone all of my acquaintances, either to say hello I'm here or goodbye I'm leaving.

I named this blog "carceraglio"--well, for a number of reasons, not least because of a sense of living in exile while here in Providence. Yes, it's melodramatic, and maybe scandalously inappropriate for somebody attending an Ivy League university, but there it is. So the life in Providence is built on a notion of Seattle as "home," a notion that gets more and more fragile each time I go there, less and less believable.

Each time I arrive in either place, now, I'm momentarily gratified by some familiar sight, and then right away I'm devastated. This is it, this is my life? Is this all? --But in Seattle, after a while, certain things built up again over time, in the course of my ten days there. There were accidents, things I couldn't have foreseen while sitting in my temporary apartment, looking over the few phone numbers at my disposal.

This one thing, this is probably very sad to admit, but I was sitting at Septieme, waiting for a friend, when the waiter came by and said, "Are you Diana? Charles is delayed by the snow; he'll be here as soon as he can." --Now, I hope it's not simply the case that I'm that pathetic, that I'm so easily puffed up and so readily deflated, that a glimmer of recognition from even a waiter made my day…. OK, well, that level of pathetic-ness played into it, but there was something delightful about feeling enwrapped in a certain density of relatedness and the service economy and technology that could only come together in a city. And a modern city, at that, not a postmodern one. It was so delightfully anachronistic, because I don't have a cell phone. I felt I was in a nineteen-forties movie, and the waiter at a nightclub had just brought the telephone to my table, trailing its fifty feet of cord. There's something about the formality of that moment that's so pleasing. It's the impersonality of it, or the impersonal crossed with the personal.

The Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo

A few weeks ago, just before leaving Providence, I read a new pamphlet from Prickly Paradigm Press, Magnus Fiskesjö's The Thanksgiving Turkey Pardon, the Death of Teddy's Bear, and the Sovereign Exception of Guantánamo . It's an anthropology of the U.S. President, along the lines of Carl Schmitt's theses about power and sovereignty. The sovereign, in Schmitt, is the one who has the power to decide what is the exception (the state of emergency, martial law, response to the threat of civil war, etc.) In the U.S., the sovereign decides the happy exception of a pardoned Thanksgiving turkey or (unlikely, for this president) a pardoned prisoner, as well as the dire exceptions: the establishment of a camp in which U.S. laws do not apply.

OK, it's canny of Fiskesjö to have focused on the persistence of this ceremony, the pardoning of the turkey. And it's a delightful bit of reporting, too, to have discovered that these same turkeys, supposedly sent to a farm to "live out their days," are generally dispatched without ceremony not so long after their arrival at the farm--they are genetic freaks, after all, bred for early slaughter, not really capable of a good long life.

And it's quite apt of Fiskesjö to bring up Giorgio Agamben and Carl Schmitt, with regard to Guantanamo. There could not be a better or more gruesome example of Agamben's concept of "bare life" than in this month's Vanity Fair, which reports on the rise of suicide attempts at Guantanomo, or, as these acts are called by the camp administrators, "manipulative self-injurious behavior," m.s.i b, an invented syndrome. --One s.i.b.'er was so self-injurious that he is now in a permanent vegetative state. How manipulative of him! But that's what the camp commandant actually says of this wretched being: he says he's "childish." !!!

The pamphlet is onto something, but I wonder about the usefulness of a "weak Agambenianism," as I would call it, or a weak "Schmitt-ism." I mean, the more I read this word, "the sovereign," without context, without history, the less satisfied I am. It's not an eternal condition, is it? I guess it is, according to Schmitt. I think there's something about deploying the concept of sovereignty anthropologically that I don't like.

Denys Arcand, The Barbarian Invasions

Arcand is an argumentative filmmaker, or a maker of filmed arguments. This film has stagy monologues, and monologues partitioned out amongst a number of characters in imitation of conversation. (And, most gratingly, as in The Decline of the American Empire, characters make sexual puns while whooping and hooting in imitation of a rollicking good time, or the kind of rollicking good time waggish intellectuals can have.)

Also grating are the Houellebecq touches: the frank chauvinism, the references to Mohammedans and Albanians and Chinoises.

Still. I loved it. Anything that addresses the odd invisibility of death interests me--not violent death, but the way most of us will die, in walled institutions. I recently read Foucault's essay on "heterotopias," the places of exclusion to which we consign the unacceptable. The sick and the old are put in prisons: their uselessness, and worse, their incapacity for enjoyment, are a scandal.

I read somewhere that this film was a denunciation of the Canadian healthcare system, but it doesn't seem so different from hospitals in the U.S: beds in the corridors, people in misery, thoroughly exposed and yet invisible, alone and yet without privacy.

The film is a fantasia of the good death: friends and family around, sympathetic health workers, limitless money, the final narcotic injection from a kind friend. I would like such a death (eventually, I mean; not soon). Mais ca coute.

It used to be that the good death was like the one pictured in this film: time to prepare, to say farewell. According to Phillipe Aries. At the time Aries was writing, the sudden death had become the good death--I mean, people had started to say it was best to be hit by a bus, to drop dead of a heart attack, to be taken unawares, even if this was not how people actually died. And now, now that we all linger so long, one dreams again of the older kind of good death.

The bourgeois will start to buy these good deaths for themselves. The rest will do without. Whenever you talk about palliative care or the right to die or assisted suicide, people bring up the fear that the poor will be subtly or brutally encouraged to die. But what if it's the opposite? What if it's the poor and ill who linger and vegetate, kept alive by all the forces of medicine, warehoused in prisons for the aged, while the rich die good deaths at the seashore?

Vladivostock, Rhode Island

There's about a foot and a half of snow on my fire escape. It has been snowing since Friday afternoon, and it's still snowing.

Films I've been watching in the last few weeks, but can't remember well enough to review in full:

Comedy of Innocence, Raul Ruiz. A son and two women, each his putative mother. The three of them trade the roles of seducer/outsider and contented dyad. The mobile-faced Jeanne Balibar (who reminds me of Holly Woodlawn) plays the crazy, false mother. I love to watch her, though she's made to look a little too elfin for my liking here. I like the film's tense spookiness, the slight suggestions of the supernatural, though it's dismaying to watch two women battling over a tiny little male.

Sister My Sister. Opens on the bloodied walls, staircase, and floor after the maids have murdered their employer, and so the rest of the film is a flashback whose whole promise is that we will return to the appalling carnage. On that level, it's very manipulative, and there the (somewhat) recent French version, The Maids, is probably better: more diffuse, more about the coda of their life in the prison. Still, what I love about this film is the physical portrayal of the employer and her daughter. Both of them are tiny. The stiff, self-satisfied mother, a tiny manic doll, and her oddly ageless daughter, who looks like both a giant five-year old and a pudgy, infantile thirty-year-old. No doubt, this, too, is manipulative: The maids are willowy, long-haired, lithe; the bourgeoises miniature/grotesque. Still, the mother dancing alone, unaware that her daughter is watching, is genius: she traipses around in her stubby way, her arms waving about in an approximation of conductor/ballerina/sylph; her face folds in on itself with rage when she sees the daughter seeing her.

Queer as Folk. (Seasons 1 & 2, on tape.) I like the fantasy that every night in downtown Pittsburgh is a saturnalia a la Querrelle. I also like the crudely Gothic Lite hero: outwardly heartless, secretly sentimental.

Frenzy, Alfred Hitchcock. After listening to Martin Lefebvre's paper on cannibalism, I had to see this. There's a scale here that's sometimes missing from Hitchcock's American movies, a sense of crowded city life. People listening to a speech about cleaning up the Thames's industrial effluent rush to look at a woman's body washing up on the bank. The Covent Garden food market, its crowds and motion. There are frequent juxtapositions of food and bodies: as Lefebvre points out, the corpse in the potato sack is the "meat and potatoes meal" that the inspector, restricted to his wife's disastrous experiments in French cuisine, longs for.

Friday Night, Claire Denis. A transit strike, a chance sexual encounter. I like the traffic jam better than the sex-idyll. The boredom, the fumes, the drivers wavering between impatience and drowsiness. The difficulties of city life: missed dinners, friends who implore you to get a cell phone, the fact that wherever you are in the city, you're supposed to be somewhere else. Claire Denis toyed with me: just after the woman hears a radio announcement asking drivers to do their civic duty and offer someone a ride, the lovely Colin Gregoire (Beau Travail, Nenette et Boni) happens by, but he refuses a ride. This is a departure for Denis: not about beautiful men. (I didn't see Trouble Every Day, though.) There's a nicely handled prolepsis: the woman imagines what would happen if she brought her hitchhiker to dinner at her friends' house, and she rejects that alternative. But there is very little or no hint that this is happening on another level, a mental level, except for the speed at which this part of the story unfolds: the arrival, the awkwardness, the crying baby. We return to the glacial creep of the traffic, and the entire thing has been accomplished without dialogue or any visual marker that this narrative thread is unreal.

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.

My Own Private Lavant

Too much of a good thing. I thought I'd round out my Denis Lavant festival (see previous post) with a viewing of Carax's The Lovers on the Bridge. I want to like it. I admire the excess. If you're going to reinvent melodrama, I'd rather it be this than Todd Haynes: not Haynes' careful, pained dialog ("it must be terrible to be a black man"--that's Tisa's friend Naima's summary of the dialog in Far From Heaven), not the exacting 1950s palette; not the ironic re-stagings. Carax is blood and fire and gratuitous narrative acts. --And I like the ending, which rewrites L'Atalante. (Or, I like that I'm able to congratulate myself for noticing its relation to L'Atalante. Cineaste that I am. The ending itself is actually another gratuitous narrative act.)

Lavant's kineticism is put through its paces in Lovers on the Bridge: he's given a cast and a crutch; he hobbles and clambers and runs peg-leggedly; he drinks and shivers and passes out; he breathes fire, he does handstands; but the film is oddly inert for all Lavant's motion.

(Speaking of melodrama: I'm also watching Fassbinder lately. Fassbinder's melodrama is much better than Haynes's. Especially if you count the marriage films, The Marriage of Maria Braun, Effi Briest, the Station Master's Wife.--My other favorite actor of late is Fassbinder himself, in his segment of the omnibus film Germany in Autumn.)

I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts

Last night my friend Tisa and I watched Leos Carax's Mauvais Sang. Its star, the beautiful-ugly Denis Lavant, is a kinetic genius. About half an hour into the film, he runs/dances down a dark street to David Bowie's "Modern Love," going from a hunched-over lurching to an off-kilter boxing to running to handspringing. At one point, he grasps his trousers near the front pockets and yanks them up so that his socks show, all the while bizarrely skip-running with ever increasing speed. Part of the thrill comes from the stasis of the preceding scene, part from its irruptive unreality. Mainly it's the way Lavant moves, his odd "phrasing" of the strides: there's a hesitation, a taut point, a second of hang time where you wouldn't expect it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=8e5g_wXJf1I

(I know, this is getting to be a habit of mine, the largely uncritical post about a male actor. I suppose I should be commenting on something of great import, or at least writing criticism of Carax. The actual news--Schwarzenegger, Iraq, Syria, the suicide of Carolyn Heilbrun--none of that do I care to comment about. Except to say this about Schwarzenegger, after Hegel's comment on Napoleon: "I have seen the World Spirit on steroids, with totally ripped delts.")

Continuing the Denis Lavant festival, today I rented Claire Denis's "Beau Travail" again, for what must be the fourth time. At the end, in an epilogue, Denis Lavant stands still in a dark disco, alone, and then bursts into moments of speed to the sound of Corona's "Rhythm of the Night." His dancing is jolie-laide; it's not the beauty or precision of execution that matter. It's the abruptness of his shifts from stillness to motion, and his careless, flailing grace.

Dawn Raffel, Carrying the Body

The territory this book stakes out is the abject; the female body as the site of horror, of fluids, leaks, blood, birth: "Unsoppable," in the narrator's phrase. But it's this horror from the perspective of the women themselves, who are not exactly horrified. "Oh, drink! See such a trough as this! Unsoppable. The blood was on the bedding, and afterward the afterbirth."

Though the "Aunt" of the story is dry: her lips are cracked, she cannot get enough to drink (gin). There is no juice or milk for the child, only tonic. At some point, someone says, "there is no balm in the house."

Eve K. Sedgwick suggests to her students of 19th-century fiction that they keep a tally of the "Gross Novelistic Product," how much money is made and exchanged in the novel. You could try figuring out the gross fluid product of Carrying the Body, or maybe not the gross, but how it's distributed, floods here, droughts there. There is gin, there is tonic (though never together, in the same glass), there is gray bathwater. No juice, no milk, no drinking water.

Raffel makes a weird and arresting use of the partitive: " 'Here,' said Mother, 'have some, have less.' " A tendency to vanish, dry up, dwindle. A mother as an offering that retracts. There's an Alice-in-Wonderland illogic to the invitation to have some, have less, though in Alice it's illogic of plenitude (something like, "how can I have more cake when I haven't had any yet?").

There is also a great deal of "whatever." Though not as a dialect marker, it's not the whatever of teen culture. It's also not the general; it's the name of the singular. --well, I can't exactly prove that. Anyway, there's a particular construction, "what with whatever," that the Aunt often uses: "The house collects dirt, what with the child and also what with the mice, of course, and what with whatever it is that is living in the pantry." (The child is only another species of vermin, like mice and "whatever.")

Last week I finally saw Pirates of the Caribbean, so now I'm working my way backward through the Johnny Depp oeuvre, though not very systematically. I watched Jim Jarmusch's Dead Man last night.

Depp's William Blake is only fully conscious for about twenty minutes of the film. The rest of the time, he's falling asleep to the rhythm of the train, suffering from his gunshot wounds, blacking out from hunger on a vision quest, or dying. It's a beautiful performance. The camera, too, closes like an eyelid at the end of each scene.

Apart from the gunshots, it doesn't really take anything much to put Blake under. Everything makes him reel. His swooning reaches its loveliest pitch when he blacks out in a village of Northwest Indians, his lids fluttering over the whites of his rolled-back eyes. And again when, for no obvious reason, he curls up to sleep beside a slaughtered fawn in the woods.

Although the film toys with providing viewers with the traditional satisfactions of righteous film violence--Blake becomes a "killer of white men," a killer of killers--its rhythms are off-kilter in comparison to the poetic slo-mo gun battles of Peckinpah or Woo or Tarantino (this comparison is from Jonathan Rosenbaum at Chicago Reader). Everything goes on too long--Blake never stops bleeding, there's always an extra beat or three while Blake lingers at the scenes of his killings.

It's not the first demystified Western, or even the first demystified Western to feature a passive hero--Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller was also fairly hapless. It's Depp's physical passivity that's so entrancing, all manner of dozing, fainting, staggering, bleeding, falling...

I meant to write something, months ago, about the hypnosign, in the manner of Deleuze's terminology in the Cinema books. But, whatever.

Q&A with Gary Lutz

About a year ago, I interviewed Gary Lutz for The Stranger. Here's what got left out.


Q. Many of your characters seem to be in a sort of bafflement about "sexual relationships." Though some of your narrators become serially involved with (or successively detached from) men and women, the word "bisexual" has a connotation of equipoise that just doesn't apply here. And the more or less heterosexual narrators also move through a succession of ties that tend toward obsolescence. Even at the level of the sentence, there is a tendency for your series to leap from the singular into a sort of "whatever." As in this from “The Pavilion”: "cinquefoils, observatories, anything."

A. Yes, I doubt that any of my characters would even for an instant consider themselves bisexual, and for many of them, the words "heterosexual" or "homosexual" would probably be little more than confoundingly inapplicable nomenclature. Some of my narrators find the differences between the genders negligible and not worth even acknowledging or honoring or troubling over. For them, I guess, every encountered person, every arrival, is a novel, consuming totality of life and limb--a stupefying array of skin, hair, teeth, arms, busying emotions: a useful human integer, in short, for the narrator to blunder against, mount, disappear into, rhapsodize about, ride out some sadness on, suspect of almost anything. And you're right to observe that after a point, the fussed precision with which the narrator carries on about the regarded person and their conjoint fumbles reaches a crisis of depletion, and the regarded person vagues out, and the relationship gets pretty vaporous pretty quick. At that moment, another person is no doubt motioning into the narrator's cleared gaze.

And also this, regarding writers:

A. Elizabeth Smart is a favorite of mine, solely on the basis of a tiny, thrilling, thunderous collection of stories called THE ASSUMPTION OF THE ROGUES & RASCALS. Among living writers of prose I admire Gordon Lish, Ben Marcus, Diane Williams, Christine Schutt, Sam Lipsyte, Dawn Raffel, Amy Hempel, Pamela Ryder, and Brian Evenson, each of whom is a supreme virtuoso of the sentence.

The Empty Secret

Steven Shaviro’s recent entry on the film Time Out reminded me of The Adversary, the non-fiction book about the case from which Time Out takes some of its plot. As in the film, Jean-Claude Romand drove over the border to Switzerland every day. He pretended to have a job at the WHO in Geneva; he sometimes hung around WHO headquarters, pilfering stationery and brochures. More purely than in the film, though, he did nothing, day after day. He made absolutely no money; there were no smuggling schemes, as in the film; he borrowed money from his family and his in-laws. On the point of being discovered, he murdered his wife and children and burned their house down.

It’s the doing nothing that fascinates me.

Romand started doing nothing in med school. He failed the exam that would have let him advance into his third-year training; moreover, he did not tell anyone he had failed. He stayed registered at school. He studied. He would be allowed to take the exam again (in secret, though, from his friends and family.) At this point, his secret life was merely on loan from his public life; once he passed the exam, he would again be what he seemed.

On the day of the make-up exam, though, he never left his room. He slept through the time appointed for the exam. This is delightful to me: he’s not diabolical, he’s Oblomovian. He exploited a curious lapse in the school regulations: there was no positive provision for throwing out someone who failed this exam twice. Nor did this mean they expected people to do an American-style perpetual schooling. A good Frenchman would’ve thrown himself out, would’ve declared his failure to everyone and lived with the shame, or even killed himself. Romand just quietly kept registering, pretending to always be in different courses than his friends. When everyone else graduated, he stopped going to med school, too.

He kept it up for eighteen years, from the failed exam to the murder of his children. All this time, he had secrets but no interiority. That his secret life was so dull fascinates me. Sleeping in his room, sleeping in his car at a Swiss rest stop, waiting for the hours to pass until it was time to go home again.

Tony Leung Chiu-Wai's Face

Usually, there is something faintly ridiculous about an actor "doing" particular emotions with his face. An actor serially portraying now rage, now happiness, now anticipation strikes us as amateur, the more so if his or her discrete emotions are legible as separate states.

In Wayne Koestenbaum's book The Queen's Throat, which I don't have at hand, there's a series of photographs from a century-old instruction book called How to Sing; a woman who looks something like Margaret Dumont mugs for the camera to demonstrate a series of emotions every singer must know how to portray with her face. Her facial expressions are both hilariously overstated and hilariously under-differentiated: what really separates her portrayal of ecstasy from her pity from her scorn from her yearning? You get a giddy sense that the captions could be switched around with no effect on the senselessness of the illustrations.

The unwittingly comic series the Dumont-ish singer portrays--it's full of disjunctive inclusions, most of which my memory can't do justice to--culminates in an expression I would describe as a an edgy, almost hysterical half-smile, but which bears the caption "Neutral Indifference: Nothing in the Eyes, Nothing in the Mouth." This degree-zero of facial expression is, as I said, somewhat un-neutral, perhaps because the singer is a woman and ideals of femininity demanded (or still demand) that a woman's neutrality evince sympathy toward any onlooker.

(That the photographs are next to each other is also part of their comic effect: they appear to be a Muybridge series that uses a fast shutter speed to capture the rapid passage from pity to scorn to yearning to indifference.)

In films today, a more truly neutral version of "neutral indifference" seems to be the standard. Er, okay, that's a weak generalization, "seems to be the standard." My only evidence is the prevalence of this scene in recent comedies: a tyro actor offers to demonstrate his skill: "this is my angry face," he'll say, and then he'll do the Dumont-singer thing: an expression at once grotesquely overdone and poorly realized. We, the audience, know better: a real actor works by the dictum "nothing in the eyes, nothing in the mouth."

And there is a sense in which this is true: everyone who knows anything knows that the film actor has always been a prop (a "Requisit," Benjamin writes somewhere). Any theory that fails to recognize this threatens to perpetuate some naïve ideas about expression and emoting. Self-expression is the theory, melodrama is the practice.

Thus a good theorist will write about the face's thingliness: Barthes on the whiteness of Dietrich's face, Delueze on the way that Dreyer's close ups disorient space.

(Even Dreyer's Joan of Arc, the film that's all about the face, might be said to be structured around a series of oppositions in which the male face preserves something of its neutrality; the judges scowl, Falconetti weeps with wide-open eyes: scowling/weeping, closed/open, male/female.)

Tony Leung is, by these lights, a "bad" actor. He's extremely expressive; he also makes use of a seriality of expression that comes dangerously close to that weird Muybridge/Dumont series of photographs. And yet he's the greatest actor working today.

There are a few scenes in Tony Leung's films that are exemplary of his radical departure from neutral indifference. In Happy Together, a friend has told Leung that on a mountain at the tip of the South American continent, where he's going to travel, you can release your cares. He then urges Leung to speak into his cassette tape recorder, to leave him a souvenir on tape. He, the friend, offers to leave Leung alone with the tape recorder. Alone, Leung picks up the recorder, holds it to his mouth--it's not a mike, he's holding the whole paperback-sized thing pressed to his face--and his face crumples in sorrow. He's weeping.

Earlier in the same film, Leung is sitting on a curb outside the tango bar where he works. His ex-lover, who's now hustling, has just given him a watch, obviously given him by (or stolen from) a john. The ex-lover is gone and Leung is alone on the curb. In contempt, he tosses the watch onto the street. He makes a sort of moue, as if reconsidering his contempt. He looks around sheepishly, picks up the watch, listens to it, and, again contemptuous, puts it in his pocket. He looks, in the end, like he is thinking for the benefit of anyone watching "I've seen better watches than this; I'm not impressed."

Finally, in Hard Boiled, there is a scene in which the undercover Leung has to abjure his criminal mentor, tell him to go to hell. And somehow his renunciation means that the mentor will die. (I'm getting the plot somewhat wrong, but the basic situation is right: he has to act an indifference while feeling pain about the mentor's certain death.) He coldly tells him off, then he turns around. Now the mentor cannot see him, but we can; it's as if he's alone. There are tears welling up in his eyes; then an intense effort passes over his face, like the effort of using rage to suppress tears. The expressions follow very closely, but they are nonetheless serial: sorrow, then suppression, rage.

There is a term for exactly matching the musical score to the action: it's called Mickey-Mousing. Likewise, the expression-series is a kind of Mickey-Mousing; now I throw the watch down, see my contempt; now I reconsider, see my sheepishness; now I pick it up, see my curiosity. Now I condemn my friend to death, see my sorrow; now I master myself, see my rage.

How does he get away with this? I could watch him every day, adding the seriality of repeat viewings to his serial displays. Though perhaps I damn him all the more with my enthusiasm; what demands repeat viewings more than a serial actor, a matinee idol? But that's not my intent. I really meant for these musings to be adjacent to, but more interesting than, recent think-pieces about "the new melodrama," which pieces are invariably hampered by a naïve the-artifact-reflects-the-zeitgeist thinking.

Is the risible seriality of Leung's emoting only in my description of it? Perhaps he never displays discrete states, perhaps it's the modulation, the continual change, that fascinates me in Leung's performances. I don't think so. He really does perform serially, even if there are fine modulations.

This is too long already, so no conclusions yet, only a few more remarks toward the typology: he is alone in all these scenes, or effectively alone. The scenes are all silent, in the sense that there is no dialogue. They are not close-ups, at least not of the extreme type of Dreyer's close-ups.

Yeah, well. Big deal. Last post, I was all excited about Negri's release from prison. Yes, Negri's the ultimate bad boyfriend: in prison, well read, Spinozistic Marxist, totally unavailable, remote, ungiving. (Bad, as in unsatisfactory, unhelpful, not "bad boys.") But, jeez, his books. If he didn't write with Michael Hardt once in a while, would I ever understand him? Would I ever read him? "Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudes:" about the only part I can follow is the "Multitudes" section, and even there, I wonder, about the apotheosis of the poor.

Even now, a certain piety, hangover from my deconstruction days, dogs me. "they do not read." It was the worst thing you could say about anybody, back then.

Lately, I do read. These are the books on my bed, starting at the head end on the left side, trailing down toward the lower third of the bed:

• Barbara Einzig, Distance Without Distance.


• Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (which I read in Germany as Lebenslaeufe/Anwesenhetsliste fuer eine Beerdigung. There always seems to be some story missing in English, though I could be wrong.)


• Kluge, again, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (I can't believe I waited until now to read this.)


• Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue


• Lynn Crawford, Solow


• Lynn Crawford, Simply Separate People (this book frightens me. The artlessness of it, the apparent artlessness. Am I John Updike, in comparison to what is really happening now in writing?)


• Camille Roy, The Swarm (see above)


• Charles Wright, The Wig (I think at one time this was a necessary maybe scandalous book. But now, after Ishmael Reed, after Danny Laferriere, ...? I stopped 2/3 of the way through.)


• Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times (he takes Ben Marcus' Kluge-ean futurism and restores some of its mournful political fantasy. Whereas as in Marcus that's all shunted into the sorrows of the family.)


• Victor Shklovsky, The Third Factory