Subsequent art

It is little wonder, then, that people tend to move from a belief in determinism to a belief in fatalism and to an attitude of resignation, for they may be conflating determinism with predictability. The right response is to distinguish more clearly between determinism and predictability.

- "From Determinism to Resignation; and How to Stop It" by Richard Holton,
Decomposing the Will, ed. Andy Clark, Julian Kiverstein & Tillman Vierkant. Oxford, 2013.

Well, hey. At that time I lacked easy access to the relevant citations, and so assumed I'd veered into an established fire-access road off the layperson highway. Instead, my cri de W. may have been as original as all these stupid obvious jokes I don't find in a websearch. (However much that is.)

Aside from the usual (and far from trivial!) pleasure of being proven disposable, I enjoyed Holton's assurance that the catastrophe of complete predictability isn't imminent. (Other catastrophes, sure, but not complete predictability.) As the NSA recently re-established, in a social universe, no matter how much you know as an individual — even if you're a CEO, or a Big Ten-Inch Data Czar, or indeed The very Girl herself — someone will make it their business to surprise you. Omniscience may or may not be compatible with consciousness but it surely isn't compatible with company.

Movie Comment: Bank Holiday (1938) & The Third Man (1949)

Carol Reed had a knack for depicting horny Nice-by-their-own-assessment Guys whose lust is neither reciprocated nor refuted by its target, and his signature suspense anticipates a crisis of extortion and humiliation. Ralph Bellamy without his angelic harmlessness; Guy Kibbee without the safe distance of the gargoyle; Joan Blondell with the powerlessness of Joan Blondell. That's the startle of the real in Reed's quota quickie; that's Reed's highest-stakes modification to Graham Greene's condescending entertainment: the unreassuring observation of incompatible fantasies at close quarters.

The Hunsecker Equation

"The cat is in the box and the box is indeterminate."

Realism : An Anthology

An appeal to an artwork's realism, its roots in reality, is an appeal not to its accuracy at registering facts but to the depth of its claim upon us. The claim is not, 'this is the real world', but rather, 'this is your world'.

- Josh Kortbein, josh blog

Career tip: flatter your readers by telling them they're "made of stories".

Some days I wake up sick to death of language.

As for fiction.

99.999999% of the "conversation" is rhetoric so bad you don't know whether to choke or laugh.

You look around in despair for some state that doesn't include the use of language.

"Made of stories." Bland, meaningless crap.

Noncommunicative actions, impossible to to turn into language & thus not subject to constant mild but slimy abuse. Where are they?

- M. John Harrison, Twitter

“Oh, I’ve said, ‘You can't describe it. You'd have to be there.’ But that’s my first wife telling her mother-in-law about the time we went to Persia. And that isn’t what I mean.”

Kid smiled back and wished he hadn’t.

It isn’t his moon I distrust so much, he thought, as it is that first wife in Persia.

- Samuel R. Delany, Dhalgren

The lineaments of Gratified Desire are very round.

Yes, the notifications were right; awesomeness was general all over Google+

So I checked email a couple of hours ago and saw that rare event, an important message from GOOGLE PLUS:

Google+ Auto Awesome

2 Auto Awesome photos were added

So I clicked the link and sure enough, the picture I took on the week of my father's death was now covered by animated snowflakes.

On this holiday season, I'm grateful that I don't have to figure out what to give an army of tiny killer robots.

First came Saturnine by Rayner Heppenstall, precious documentation of bad behavior in England's finest hour. Then The Crust on Its Uppers by Derek Raymond (all flash and no trousers), La Fanfarlo by Charles Baudelaire (sad stuff), An Anecdoted Topography of Chance by Daniel Spoerri (a less plot-driven Robbe-Grillet), and Minutes of the Last Meeting by Gene Fowler, purportedly a mean-spirited biography of a grotesque old fart once justly loathed by Whitman and Debussy, but more sincerely a shelf of humble-brags honoring the author's parasitism during John Barrymore's and W. C. Fields's terminal declines.

(That last formed a twofer posthumous-character-assassination setlist of its own with Nollekens & his Times by John Thomas "Antiquity" Smith, projected as friendly tribute but executed as vengeance for Nollekens's will.)

Then The Bohemians by Anne-Gédéon Lafitte, Marquis de Pelleport, a 1790 proto-novel formally closer to Thomas Nashe than to Ann Radcliffe. And then, to complete the tour, and my favorite of the lot, a female waster at last!

* * *

The Monkey Puzzle by Veronica Hull (1958)

What with The Golden Notebook and The Bell Jar and so on, and between Piper Laurie and Julie Harris and Liza Minnelli and so on, the post-Home-Front pre-second-wave-feminism era seems like a bloody golden age of broken female intellects, with a casualty rate approaching the post-first-wave-feminist pre-suffragette era of Alice James and Clover Hooper Adams.

And Hull's "Catherine" hits familiar marks: a questing young woman isolated in an aggressively male academic environment (albeit an analytic philosophy department rather than English lit); emotional collapse followed by traumatic institutionalization; substance abuse; joyless sleeping around; unplanned pregnancy; unsupportive marriage; fag-haggery; an old-school try at governessing; and a first experience of political demonstrations, teaching her the first lessons taught by all political demonstrations in every time and place:

‘But what I don’t understand,’ said Catherine, rubbing her head and feeling a bit better for the whisky, the crisis extravagance was still on, ‘is why. Why they charged us. What were we doing?’

‘Existing dear,’ said John, ‘if there are too many people existing in the same place at the same time they have to be removed. On a big scale it’s done by war. On a small scale by the police.’ [...]

‘I find it so extraordinary, when all one’s doing is trying to stop war, and people spit at you.’

What distinguishes The Monkey Puzzle from title onwards is its classically waster attitude, as if the whole mess has been redeemed by providing so many good-humored bar stories and flaring bar rants. Funny as hell (nor is she out of it), utterly unique, it's the Paula Prentiss of young-woman-goes-insane novels.

* * *

Veronica Hull's recoverable literary career consists of a few months in 1958, during which she provided four (unsigned) reviews for the TLS:

The publishers have spared no pains to produce a book that is easy on the eye and has every appearance of scholarship. The writing is often good. But it is as if an intelligent, expert artist were commissioned to paint the portrait of an eminent but stupid general. Unable, for fear of hurting his sitter's feelings, to reproduce the complete vacuity of expression, the artist has instead concentrated on other aspects. The portrait that emerges is a curious one. The man has no face; but on his ample chest is a row of medals depicted, down to the last tedious detail, with the utmost care and accuracy.

This association ended around the time Hull's own book was blasted by (unsigned) Peter Myers in a group review:

Mrs. Hull, however, has succeeded only in being cynical in a juvenile way; she is inclined to rely too much on the merely crude (the dust-jacket delicately describes it as 'outrageous') to create an effect, and the reader, having been suitably shocked, as intended, in the first thirty pages or so, will find the repetition wearisome as he works his way towards the end. The story is told jerkily, in one sudden gush of effusiveness, and this style does not make the heroine's chaotic happenings any easier to follow. Characters are unpleasant and unsympathetic (doubtless they are meant to be) while the occasional flashes of mature wit do little to relieve these loosely packed trivia of an unattractive adolescence.

Mr. Richard Charles, in his enchanting novel, A Pride of Relations, has succeeded in full measure. He writes with real humour of three Great-Aunts, Betty, Frances and Jessica, of Grandfather Quincey Charles, and especially of Great-Uncle Justly....

Others provided kinder blurbs: Time and Tide with "the most promising first novel from a new English writer that I have read since the night I stayed up reading Iris Murdoch's Under the Net," Angus Wilson with "remarkably amusing, frightening, and intelligent," and young V. S. Naipaul with "shrewd, barbed, lit up with delicious perceptions."

The book was not reprinted, however, nor published overseas, and its title lived on only among analytic philosophers. With the "rightly confident" blinkeredness so characteristic of the breed, Lord Quinton even declared her "a pseudonym."

It always puzzled Catherine that they should be able to indulge in this mysterious study of the meta without any reference to the science in question. She supposed she would understand one day, in the meantime the whole business seemed unimportant.

The final word I've found on her (or her editor-bookseller husband Tristram) was dropped in a boast by the aforementioned trouserless fellow.

Our Far-Flung Against the Wall Correspondents

Nov. 4, 2013 may represent a high-nonpotable-water mark for Adam Gopnik. In the New Yorker of that date, he finished a long essay about his, his mom's, and his girlfriend's total awesomeness like so:

Women, I thought, remember everything. Bread forgives us all.

Cf. B. Kliban:

And thirty pages later, in a piece on JFK's assassination, Gopnik demonstrated the exact limits of male memory:

“Know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes?” the guilty Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) tells his virtuous insurance colleague Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) at the end of the great “Double Indemnity,” in a taunting confession. “I’ll tell ya. Because the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya.” Keyes’s beautiful, enigmatic rejoinder is: “Closer than that, Walter.” He means that the cop and the killer share more than they knew before the crime, that temptations that lead to murder are available to us all; the lure of transgression makes us closer than we think.

From the screenplay:

KEYES
Closer than that, Walter.

The eyes of the two men meet in a moment of silence.

NEFF
I love you too.

Movie Comment : Most Effective Sabotage by a Producer, 2013

Weinstein thought he had a lock on this one, but nothing beats the one-stick-of-dynamite-against-the-Hoover-Dam accuracy of Brad Pitt's tail-end turn in 12 Years a Slave. His bizarrely indulged, buff, and merrily twinkling speechifyin' retroactively consigned Chiwetel Ejiofor's performance and the relatively uncompromised aspects of the script to middlebrow trimmings around another exercise in torture porn. And with Paul Giamatti right there for the asking!

The Fiend by Margaret Millar

Millar's muse wanted to horrify us with suburban life c. 1960. Millar's job wanted a suspense plot with a revelatory twist. Their relationship ended in divorce.

American Hustle (2013)

A well-constructed comedy with sparks of recorded life — in the 1940s it would've been just another picture; in 2013 it's a fucking miracle. Period points for a leading actress who actually looks like a '70s leading actress.

Her (2013)

I could accept Joaquin Phoenix as a Thorne Smith hero, an all-rich all-white Urbanland as Spike Jonze's social experience, and porn ELIZA as contemporary Hollywood's sincerest conception of soulfulness. But when a content-shoveler's work-for-hire was pitched and published as his own writing under his own name without legal intervention, disbelief dropped to the floor. And disbelief landed mad.

Love is the Plan, the Plan is Death

"War, in other words, destroys pretense." - some preening asshole in 2002

For all my life I've been called pretentious, and for all my life I've proudly accepted the charge. It seems to me a just label and a worthy calling. It has at any rate called me to all that's seemed worthy.

The opposite of pretension isn't sincerity. The opposite — and the end — of pretension is silence. First comes pretension, then tension, then sleep.

Ba-lue Mun-deii Ba-lues-Are : Ed's Man's World

Like everyone else I liked Mudhoney and acknowledged the one hit of the one-hit crybaby. But my favorite grunge band was Ed's Redeeming Qualities. When I first heard them in '89, Ed's consisted of four songwriters and one musician:

• Dan Leone (now L.E.) wrote patter songs and songs about chickens, played ukulele most always, and played M.C. at shows.
• Carrie Bradley, the musician, played mostly fiddle and guitar, wrote dozens of songs about mania, depression, and manic-depression, and sang them hearty through a blinding Billy-Zoom-ish grin.

• Stately plump white-haired balding Neno Perrotta wrote least, sang least, played bongos, and centered the group. "At times like these you need a friend who can help you with a kind word...." On October 20, 1991, I drove into the Oakland hills against the flow of evacuees to retrieve a young housesitting acquaintance. I brought him back to San Francisco for the day, and that evening at his insistence drove him back again to resume his duties. It felt odd to turn away from the sunset and aim dead-center at that wide glower. I left the car with him and caught the last westbound BART of the night. The train was packed and reeked of something other than conviviality. At 16th & Mission, my ticket failed and I had to argue my way past the agent booth. By then I was beat and decided to see if the 22 bus was nearby. Waiting for it was Neno, so I waited with him and then sat with him. We talked about the fire, and about Ohioan bohemia vs. San Francisco bohemia, and about how cool and talented Carrie was. I got out at Haight & Fillmore. Neno got out too because he'd missed his stop and needed to walk back a few blocks.
• And relative-baritone Dom Leone played worst, drew cartoons, and dropped song-organisms as simple-minded and inexplicably powerful as Eugene the Jeep. His most widely heard number, "Drivin' on 9," represents him well: an instantly unforgettable driving song which sounds like the driver's making it up on the spot. If I was the kind of dope who believed in the spirit of the folk I'd say he was a direct tap into the spirit of the folk.

Together they seemed happier than they expected to be apart; they sounded like a 1989 unheated-apartment version of boiled cabbage at the Hungry Hash House. Or, OK, then, they sounded like "garage-folk, with an emphasis on storytelling and black comedy and poignancy." They taped a couple of cassettes and released an EP, curated and hosted a fine vaudeville series, made mistakes on the radio, and then Dom Leone got sick.

Characteristically the opening number of Ed's next release, a final cassette of the original line-up, promised "So many things that can kill you dead; if you don't have cancer there's a hole in your head." Someone like They Might Be Giants could easily have recorded a tribute to the periodic table of elements; Ed's made it personal.

Carrie, Dan, and Neno moved to San Francisco, kept playing Dom's songs, and kept sticking Dom's scrawls on the merchandise. Their first CD was gratingly bare, but their second seemed more at home in the trio format. Third was best, recorded live, with all-musician no-songwriter Jonah Winter to put sonic love handles on the old favorites.

For now, though, and with the aid of these fine digitizations, I'm reaching back to 1989. From the "Ed's Day" EP, Carrie Bradley explains how the patriarchy maintains power in one solidly idiomatic pun. From a tape made the year before, Dom Leone explains how the patriarchy maintains power in one completely moronic consultation.

The Intellectual Condition

Coated and hooded by pecking birds, struggling to shut himself into a phone booth for a few minutes of relative security. A flock descends.