Puck

“The music came forth as a no that became a yes, then a no again, then again a yes:” and then the drums kicked in and “nothing is true except our conviction that the world we are asked to accept is false. If nothing is true, everything is possible.” (9)

Welcome to Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Greil Marcus’s collage-o-phonic booklike substance that rings with voices in a thousand registers.

“As I tried to follow this story [the one he perceives running through chapters filled with medieval heretics, Dadaists, Situationists, and the Sex Pistols: “I am an anti-christ,” sang Johnny Rotten]–the characters changing into each other’s clothes until I gave up trying to make them hold still–what appealed to me were its gaps. and those moments when the story that has lost its voice somehow recovers it, and what happens then…. [quoting an ad for Potlatch he found in a “slick-paper, Belgian neo-surrealist review” dated 1954:] ” ‘Everywhere, youth (as it calls itself) discovers a few blunted knives, a few defused bombs, under thirty years of dust and debris; shaking in its shoes, youth hurls them upon the consenting rabble, which salutes it with its oily laugh.’ ” (20)

Situationist gnome, 1963: “The moment of real poetry brings all the unsettled debts of history back into play.” (21) That’s getting personal: I’ve resisted reading this book for twenty years. Now that I have, and since you’ve read this far, I recommend you do, too. So much for the niceties of the book review. What follows is engagement with Lipstick Traces. Read the rest of this entry »

On Joanna Russ, a new book of essays on the great lesbian-feminist science fiction writer and to which I am a contributor, has just received a great review in The Village Voice:

Mendlesohn brings 17 writers (including eight men) to her critical enterprise, which picks up where Jeanne Cortiel’s 1999 Demand My Writing: Joanna Russ/Feminism/Science Fiction leaves off. The essayists all believe that Russ’s career trajectory has much to teach next-generation feminists. And all approach Russ’s seven novels, three nonfiction collections, and three short-story collections impressed by how each book bristles with epistemological invention. Her fiction twists the most shopworn genre conventions—like time travel, sword-and-sorcery, or all-female planets—into scenarios that intentionally subvert stereotypical expectations. Comparing these texts against copious amounts of analytical opinion from her various interviews, letters, book reviews, and pedagogic essays, Mendlesohn’s team constructs a fascinating picture of this pioneering “scholar/practitioner” as visionary cultural critic.

Sometime in 2002, I responded with a proposal to a call for papers on Joanna Russ from British science fiction scholar Farah Mendelsohn. Mendelsohn accepted the proposal on the condition that I not write about The Female Man, Russ’s most famous novel – and pretty much the only thing of Russ’s anyone reads anymore.That was fine with me, and I proceeded to write a paper that touches on pretty much everything but The Female Man.

It was a long road, full of switch backs and revisions, but On Joanna Russ has finally been published Wesleyen University Press. Edited by Mendelsohn, contributors include Samuel R. Delaney (it’s too bad he and Russ never conceived a child), Tess Williams, Gary Wolfe, myself and a host of others.

My essay, the last one in the book, is called “The Narrative Topology of Resistance in the Fiction of Joanna Russ.” In a nutshell, I try to show that narrative is a space of gendered topology; in other words, that fiction is a landscape of cocks and cunts. Russ certainly resisted that landscape. Her writing is a macrophage ravaging the immune system of mainstream science fiction. I tried to take a snapshot of the action (a highly academic one) to capture the lesions, superations and oozings of consciousness through space that I found in her work.

Thank goddess I had Delaney’s great essay to guide me. After the book is available, I’ll post the essay.

Fortune Telling 000

The arrangement and interpretations of the I Ching’s hexagrams can be attributed to the astute analysis of human nature in many contexts by many contributors over many years. It’s much more difficult to account for the uncanny accuracy, reasonableness, and wisdom of the I Ching’s answers to one’s questions. That, at least, has been my experience.

The I Ching is the ancient Chinese book that accreted around a series of 64 hexagrams. A hexagram, in turn, is an arrangement of six lines. Each line is either solid or broken. Here are the first two hexagrams, the Creative and the Receptive:

Hexagrams are formed by chance action (e.g., the rolling of three coins, and taking combinations of heads and tails for either a solid or broken line) from the bottom up. The lines are taken to represent a temporal sequence, the unfolding of change over time.

Lines themselves can change, and a changing line is indicated by chance action, as in the roll of three heads (a changing broken or yin line) or three tails (a changing solid or yang line). In the above example, if one tossed a set of three coins six times—once for each line in the Creative—and each roll came up three tails, each line would change into its opposite. The result would be two hexagrams: hexagram one, the Creative, would change to hexagram two, the Receptive.

The odds against a six-in-a-row coin toss are astronomical. But, then, what are the odds in favor of receiving a response that strikes one as both wise and a propos to the question?

Questions. Where do they come from? You, me, worrying the hems of our lives; John Cage, wondering what it really means to compose; and anybody, really, who engages in the act of breasting change with a story of self in mind. To put the previous question another way, What are the odds of a story emerging from apparently unconnected facts, experiences or observations?

As with most fortune telling systems, the odds favor making sense—if you can accept enigmatic replies as sense. For me, the difference between the I Ching and, say, the tarot (which has much sexier images), is perceptual: the I Ching responds in poetry, the tarot in cliché. One enlightens me, the other makes me vomit. It’s not the tarot’s fault; it’s cultural chance. The Romany, vectors of prognostication by chance action of card dealing, eschewed written language until relatively recent times (and then a palette of languages pattern Romany texts, rather than a national language); the Chinese, just as ancient, famously co-pioneered written language. The Romany poetry of the tarot is, at best, confined to a small group of disrespected people while the written texts of the Chinese have become venerated for their wisdom and verisimilitude. Read the rest of this entry »

Jeanette Winterson, the British novelist, wonders in the Times of London (and which I found via BroneteBlog):

As the floodwaters rose around me and we sank in a summer of rain, I tried a kind of homeopathic charm; what books could I find on my shelves where floods and rain played a part?

Winterson rattles off the usual list of suspects, including the biblical flood story and (weirdly) the movie version of Frankenstein (which movie? and why not the novel?). What’s odd to me is that almost none of the academic eco-criticism types have picked up on climate as at least a viable leit motif for analysis. In my reading of gothic lit, climate and weather are veritable characters. Wouldn’t it be useful (something that is normally very difficult to say about contemporary literary studies) to analyze climate and weather in literature with an eye toward shedding some light on our current crisis, a crisis which, in our inability to do anything concrete about, is surely as much moral and psychological as scientific and economic?

I took a stab at it a couple years ago by presenting a paper at a low-level, regional MLA lit-studies conference. I was met with blank stares, for the most part, perhaps because I eschewed the jargon of the trade as much as possible. Because they could understand all the words I used, the audience may have felt talked down to. Or maybe it’s just a crappy paper. It certainly doesn’t delve deep enough into the implied thesis: that climate is a character or anyway a means of characterizing roles.

In any case, here’s the paper as presented at the conference in 2005. Perhaps it’ll be of some use to an eco-conscious scholar attempting to open the field of climatocriticism. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite writers, Peter Gelman, is up to his old tricks. He’s done up some real nice podcasts, including one of his novel “Skull of the Robot.” Pete’s also a bicycle activist with a wry and dry (and possibly extra-planetary) sense of humor, so don’t miss “Mysteries of the Bicycle Explained.” Pete’s site, Danger Quest Mysteries, has more juicy goodness, so check it out, ‘k?

Long-time Permeable Press fans will remember Pete as the author of “Flying Saucers Over Hennepin” which Paul di Filippo, writing in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, described thusly: “Serious frivolity is in short supply today … Gelman spins a hilarious tale that addresses crucial dilemmas of our modern existence via a rubber chicken upside the head.”

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

As Robert Anton Wilson (the man, the modality, the moonmeld) indicated in undisclosed locations known only to a select few, and the Dogon of West Africa have known for thousands of years, cheese is of alien origin. The phrase “the moon is made of green cheese” is not just smoke blowing from the door of an opium den. Rather, it is a literal truth, one a world-wide conspiracy has sought to suppress for many moons. Cows are robots from space, implanted with soulful stares that have but one purpose: to disarm and befuddle the planet Earth’s population into thinking that they, and other udder-bearing beasts, are the sole source of milk and milk by-products. Which, in fact, they are. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Ezra Pound: Early Writings
edited by Ira B. Nadel
Publisher: Penguin, 2005

Ezra Pound was the godfather of the modernists. James Joyce, the reigning Titan, said that “Nothing could be more true than to say we all owe a great deal to” Pound: “I most of all.” Unlike T.S. Elliot, who is better remembered for his poetry than his criticism, it was Pound’s critical faculties that made him such a seminal influence among his peers. Like some omnipresent deity from Olympus (apparently a mountain near Pound’s birthplace in Hailey, Idaho), he had his fingers in everything and everybody’s business as a kind of jovial dictator and boss vivant.

Collected here are some of the early works of the mature Pound. No juvenilia sullies the mix of poetry and prose. As a poet Pound was always interested in translation—from the Anglo-Saxon, the Chinese, and other languages—and the surprising discord and serendipitous harmonies to be heard when poetry crosses borders. So here we get Pound’s wonderful “Seafarer,” one of the oldest poems in the English language, rendered in modernist (if not exactly “modern”) English, and “Liu Ch’e,” “a wet leaf that clings to the threshold” separating the placid, nature-loving philosophy of Chinese poetry and the speed-obsessed futurism of the early twentieth century. Read the rest of this entry »

review by Brian Charles Clark

Freedom of Expression
by Kembrew McLeod
Publisher: Doubleday, 2005

No Trespassing
by Eva Hemmungs Wirtén
Publisher: U. Toronto Press, 2005

In recent decades intellectual property (IP) law has become the handmaiden of transnational capitalism. “Fair use”, at least in the United States, has become a hollow shell: tap it and it shatters into a thousand sharp-edged lawsuits. Two recent books delve into the history of and effects on creativity resulting from globalized IP law. The overall picture for scientists and artists in all media is gloomy. As novelist Michael Chabon concluded, in a recent review-essay on the sources of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, “Every novel is a sequel. Influence is bliss.” Influence is bliss indeed, at least until it falls under the boot heel of regressive capitalism. Now royalties, licensing fees and corporate secrecy make creative ‘gene swapping’ too expensive for most artists and scientists.

“Follow the money” is the credo of investigative journalists. As Eva Hemmungs Wirtén argues in No Trespassing, it’s also the logic of empire when scoping out the landscape of IP law in general, and copyright law in particular. No Trespassing is tightly focused on book culture: the rise of copyright law in Western Europe and the U.S., the role of translation in commodifying authorship, and the blood-drawing lawsuits that result from the bliss of influence and the influence of technology (the photocopier in particular). Wirtén’s book, with its tight focus, deep historical view, and thorough-going scholarship make it a well-written complement to McLeod’s more free-wheeling Freedom of Expression. Read the rest of this entry »

Essay by Brian Charles Clark

I always fall in love with the girl in the book. When I was five, I fell in love with Sal, in Blueberries for Sal. She filled her pail with berries and then ate them all, saving none for later. That’s the sort of self-indulgence I can identify with.

When I was twelve, my biblioamour was Eowin, the warrior princess in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. Eowin dressed up like a boy in order to escape the confines of her gender, so that she could go out and fight the good fight. Later it was voices on the radio, like when I was ten and fell hard for Melanie. That was around 1968, and when she belted out a chorus to, “Candles in the Rain,” I understood why people sometimes said, “I’d lay my life on the line”—for her, to protest the War, to ensure that we can each love whom and when we want. At about that same time I came to the realization that love can’t be restricted, at least not the way that, say, grammar can be prescripted. If the culture I was born into seemed to insist that boys fall in love with girls, I was certain, at nine or ten, that this must be some sort of misunderstanding. Read the rest of this entry »