These are interesting times indeed. When something we collectively call time is interrupted by a situation, when by situation we mean something that has moved although we know not yet in what direction, we have something very interesting developing. Lauren Berlant says a situation is a kind of time “in which a relation of persons is sensed to be changing but the rules for habitation and the genres of storytelling about it are unstable, in chaos.” Situation is interruption, a fiery bowl poured onto the sea.

A canister of pepper spray on a line of seated students: I see the video from UC Davis showing the officer whose name has not been released lowering a smooth and righteous handle of pepper spray from the sky to the students’ heads and faces. The nameless judge throws down upon them a sword of fire. It is evidently well practiced. I wonder how many others have swallowed his burning fist. An incident videotaped and an officer suspended doesn’t change certain facts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AdDLhPwpp4

What brought Los Angeles to a breaking point in 1992 wasn’t just that famously grainy video but that that video finally revealed what had been experienced as the status quo for years. And the police seem to understand the terms of their relationship to an increasingly agitated group of disaffected people; so the status quo hasn’t changed, their defense of it has just learned to allow itself such excesses across a broader base. The end product, so to speak, is an antagonistic police force with an increasingly diminished compulsion to hide its use of excessive force. Notice how he raises the canister to the sky before lowering it with an air of grace over their lowered heads. So high that the four corners of the earth should see.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yE0Uua7jnSA

And they would be gathered for battle, their number like the sand of the sea. And they would march up over the broad earth and surround the camp of the saints and the beloved city.

In college I took a translation course with Robert Hass. He was working on the Japanese Haiku of Basho and I was into doing some variety of Latin and Romance lyrics. Given as he was at that time to environmental concerns, his selections were pretty idiosyncratic and, likewise, my own probably reflected a range of interests limited to matters erotic if not blithely inebriated and esoteric. Something like a decade later, I read his opinion piece in the New York Times describing his assault by the Alameda County deputy sheriffs. The story of his wife thrown to the ground while he is bludgeoned in the ribs follows a string of similar stories and incidents: Women and the elderly pepper sprayed and beaten, military veterans killed, all kinds of people submitted to egregious uses of oppressive force. The videos I see show me an army who would kill but are at the moment content to maim. If I were taking Hass’ class today, my selections would be different. Ernesto Cardenal, Roque Dalton, and Pablo Neruda would be more pertinent voices.

I am surprised by the difference ten years can make to the social tick of the earth’s clock.

We have a situation here: And they marched up over the broad earth and surrounded the camp; but fire came down from heaven and consumed them and they will be tormented day and night for ever and ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FGf9wEIXMns

The weeds seem to laugh as they hit and slide on each other in the wind until the wind brings a fire upon their hissing bodies, a situation.

Hass’ editorial ends with the strange image of a tent lifted by helium balloons into the air, hovering over the plaza, “large and awkward,” he says, “occupying the air.” “Today and everyday,” echoes Geoffrey G. O’Brien, “we occupy the air.” And from one Abiezer Coppe again the injunction to “occupie the ayre.” After a recent post, I was criticized for comparing the voices of the occupy movement’s human megaphone to a hymn of ghosts, enchanting alien bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. When air traverses the windpipe it is breath or spirit, the vital principal within living beings. In German “spirit” is geist, our etymological ancestor for “ghost,” of which Hegel says that communal forms of life are built. Geist, as he uses it, could also be translated as “mind,” if mind is understood to be operating at a higher level of existence than just self-awareness. “Spirit, so far as it is the immediate truth, is the ethical life of a nation: — the individual, which is a world.” This worlding of the individual occurs by a process of acculturation and, in moving his discussion to effective cultural objects, he defines culture as the “world of self-alienated spirit.” Although we might feel ourselves to be reflected in another person’s poetry, for example, we are not committed to it except insofar as we are bound to its alienations. Culture allows us, more generally, to reflect and, in doing so, enter a concrete actuality, a grounding effect. Spiritual substance brings us into actual reality. Geist is breath and is also mind, much like Donne’s spiritus or pneuma, (“Since thou and I sigh one another’s breath”), the motile air bringing body and mind together in the speaking voice. When air traverses the windpipe, it, also voice, likewise can be poetry. So I likewise repeat the injunction that we occupy the air.

And though they might stand at the four corners of the earth, holding the four winds of the earth, that the wind should not blow on the earth, nor on the sea, nor on any tree, a vial of air will be released with a great voice out of the temple of heaven. And the voice will be as of many waters.

When a certain illusion is eroded, gnawed like a cliff-base by the sea’s persistent tooth, it will not be again stabilized. Who still believes (viz., gives spirit to) the fantasy that they are today there to serve and protect anything other than a system designed to serve and protect a privileged few? The number of violent police might be like the sand but the sand is not the sea, churning in its spirited contradictions, even swallowing the sand, if it will. These waters rush from the voice of the occupations. They are the churn of history, even as that churn might sicken the sick. They have become the intractable situation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGKuX8akRzw

In the final sequence of Michael Wadleigh’s 1981 film, Wolfen, three detectives are caught crossing the stock exchange steps at Wall Street by a pack of wolves. The wolves are predatory shapeshifters whose point of view is depicted with an in-camera thermographic effect similar to that used in Predator (McTiernan, 1985) to show the point of view of the extraterrestrial creature hunting the US special forces team sent to destroy rebel encampments in the Guatemalan jungle. The thermovisionary wolves have been descending from a wasteland South Bronx to kill the tycoons intent on transforming their decayed haunt to a high-rise luxury development. When they aren’t in their wolf form, these shapeshifters appear in human form as a group of Indians, presumably Mohawk or Iroquois, as they are at other times shown working on the high cables of the Brooklyn Bridge—special steel-working labor contracts were offered to the Mohawk and Iroquois when it was learned that they did not fear heights or dangerous conditions (Don Owen’s High Steel, 1965). They encircle the police on the steps, growling and baring their fangs amid filmic night mists.

The cop that reaches for his gun loses his hand to the leaping maw of one of the wolves. With his other hand he tries to radio backup to the stock exchange, when another wolf implausibly decapitates him with a split-second pounce. I suspect this is meant to suggest that wolves’ teeth are razor sharp as, earlier in the film, a wolf’s bite had been compared to a guillotine blade. The head rolls on the pavement, its mouth struggling to voice a last word.

The other two escape by sparking a massive explosion (again, implausibly) by firing two shots at the bumper end of a parked car; afterward making their way back to one of the dead tycoon’s luxurious if not gaudy penthouse homes. For a moment, the car and body are shown burning on Wall Street before we see the wolves arrive at the gaudy penthouse where the two detectives are hiding out. Dewey, the lead investigator, faces off with the lead wolf. A voice-over indicates that Dewey is now remembering what he had earlier been told at a dive frequented by the film’s Indians. “They can hear a cloud pass overhead, the rhythm of your blood,” said Eddie, the Indian leader, with a picture of Geronimo behind him, “they can track you by yesterday’s shadow; they can tear the scream from your throat.” Dewey drops his gun, raising his palms in a show of surrender to the shapeshifters. After he smashes a scale model of the high-rise luxury development planned for the Bronx, the wolves howl and leave. The final scene shows them running through their South Bronx haunt, still howling as the film fades out to the Indians atop the Brooklyn Bridge. Dewey is heard musing in a final voice-over: “In arrogance man knows nothing of what exists. There exists on earth such as we dare not imagine—life as certain as death, life that will prey on us as we prey on this earth.”

The wolves protest nothing; ultimately implacable, they return to rampage over what, in their minds, must already be occupied land. Furthermore, the ancient, thermovisionary perspective of the wolves is not the ideology lens-shift of They Live!. There is no symbol beneath the symbol. There isn’t even a simulation to be pierced, no master signifier to burn away at the edges. There is only heat and movement. Whatever dialectical polarity might be abstracted on them, it is already a foreign design. And you can’t occupy what is already under occupation. The wolves protest nothing. Of Geronimo, Edward Dorn wrote in his 1974 Recollections of Grand Apacheria: “Notorious through his opposition/To Alien authority/And by Systematic/And Sensational advertising/His Pleasures were widely known/As Depredations among the Invader//Eyes like two bits of obsidian/With a light behind them.” “In their eyes,” Dewey is told, “you are the savage.”

¤

Personally I am susceptible to a questionable line of thinking when it comes to what to read to rally yourself to revolution. In part it is because I am suspicious of rallies. But also because, when out in a mob, one can still reserve a right to ask what would Ezra Pound think? Confessing this odd impulse to James, as we recently attended the inaugurating protests at Occupy New Haven, he admitted that he did the same but instead replaced Ezra Pound with Robert Anton Wilson. We thought about it a few seconds and realized that essentially they would probably say the same thing—or at least what we are looking for is the thing that they would say that would be the same; something to do with blanket antagonism and a necessary fostering of chaos.

¤

It is a strange accident that the code name for the operation to capture Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo.” Several Native American tribes protested to this.

¤

I went down to Occupy Wall Street with Josh. The next day I received the below email from him:

Dear All,

Last night, I went down to NYC to check out Occupy Wall Street and attend a poetry reading being held there. I arrived at Liberty Plaza at 7:45 and the poetry reading was at 9. At 8:30, after having walked around the occupation, Edgar and I went for a drink and wrote poems to read. We stayed at the reading until 10:30.

The reading took place at the northwest corner of Liberty Plaza, close to Occupy Wall Street’s library boxes (plastic tubs filled with books). No microphone no megaphone and a loud organizational meeting about twenty yards away (and music twenty yards south of that). So a human megaphone was utilized: the speaker said a phrase, line or sentence and everyone close to the speaker chanted it back so those at a greater distance could hear. This was how the organizational meeting behind us was being conducted too. Most of what I have to say about the reading is determined by this fact. People read for 3-5 minutes, but everything took a while because of the crowd repeating back the phrases, lines or sentences. First names and some second names were written on pieces of paper, which were then collected in a cardboard box. The organizers pulled out a name and then you went up onto the steps.

Only two poets whom I saw read chose to go without this chanting (and neither actually *read*; they recited from memory). The first of these was a guy who read a poem about Neda Agha-Soltan called, I think, “What can be said;” the second was a woman who performed a poem about hooker school, dressed only in lingerie. Both were interesting performances, the second less inclined to bombastic language, but turned from satirically performed spoken language (conversations with cops and GRD instructors) to a somewhat earnestly delivered refrain of “your pussy is a sword, even if you don’t know it,” a phrase which seems to me to be making a few distinct arguments at the same time and invoking an archaic supposed poetic habitus of swords and sorcery, and my not buying all this makes me feel uncomfortable. But neither of these are what I want to talk about.

What I learnt at this event I am not sure I want to develop into any type of principal, but it does produce a truth I need to know. When you say a phrase and hear it said back, what falls away is the internal logic or complexity of the poem. One version of the poem only could be locked in, and this was very clear and conscious for me. To refuse the human megaphone, as I almost did, meant to invest the power of language to express suffering and argument only in the windpipe and bones of a single speaker, and not in the shared momentary voice of a crowd of people collected in Liberty Plaza, New York, on the 7^th October to peacefully protest against the current conditions of capitalism (I put this as vaguely as I can because I do not think even the vagueness of calling the occupation *anticapitalist* is vague enough). The logic of the poem belonged to the crowd. Every phrase was chanted back. Critical judgment was for me a secondary faculty. Primarily, I wanted to involve myself with how every phrase was an attempt to give voice to suffering, a condition of truth which could not be avoided for the reason that I simply was there, in attendance, and listening in the act of chanting. The unity of a poem was secondary to the unity of the line first read and the line chanted back; that a poem was a whole unit was knowable because the person standing on the steps a few yards away from you was the same person. This is to say, the reading became a joint project. The passion of an individual was unsustainable because the lines could not be held together, and no prosodic or tonal intensity could be worked up into music because the chants were near-monotone, the prosody necessarily slow and simple. The passion of the collective of reader-chanters-auditors was predicated on a (vague) political commitment. I don’t think it was a poet’s job, here, to provide passion in language to a political organization, with an individual’s language chanted out as emblematic of the spirit of an occasion. Instead, the reading became implicitly a religious-service-esque expression of conviction with respect to two things. First, that a repeated phrase belonged to the whole group (or language community) and must be known, without hesitation, as a voice for suffering. Second, that this language community was in fact speaking and thinking in a very precise language, so that words and phrases from various poems were immediately processed from English into smaller signifiers, with reference only to the geographical and historical context (even the Arab Spring was being reprocessed in my brain).

A man called Joseph went up second and read Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius,” the last poem of The White Stones. The first sentence of this poem reads:

……….Leave it with the slender distraction, again this
……….is the city shaken down to its weakness.

Potentially, these are two parallel statements either side of a comma and consciously either side of the verse turn, with the second line conditioned as a reiteration of the first: say “this,” what has just been said, “again.” At OWS, though, this sentence progressed logically. You leave the city into the minute exile of the occupation, away from the slender distraction which I heard as dollar bills, and the result is the city being shaken down to its weakness. The mutilation of life which distraction is suggested to be meets its counter force in the occupation, which shakes down the city, replacing the con-artist with the activist collective, bringing power down to its knees. Untrue. But longed for. The corrupt version of an ideal city does not imply backwards a moral imperative to “Leave”; the city is an actual city, New York, which has been left behind in the act of resisting business as usual. Contemporary praxis is no problem, but is instead a solution to real humans owning all the money. That is to say, no city nostalgia was even thinkable for me when these phrases were being chanted. The later lines “O how farre | art thou gone from thy Country, not being | driven away, but wandering of thine owne accord” (see Reitha Pattison’s commentary on this poem in Glossator on this quotation from Boethius’ Consolation) were interpreted (by me) in the context of the nationalism of the occupation (with people shouting things like “This country was built on liberty! Where’s the liberty? You’ve replaced it with slavery!” – when this great country was of course built on slavery). You (our political society and especially you, the bankers) have strayed far from the ideals of the grand USA, not because you have been forced to, but because proper regulations were never put in place. The city of New York becomes in transfigured in turn into an exile from the America of yore. I heard the lines as moving, delicate stuff, but the consciousness with which I received them wasn’t mine. The poem was a fracture of its form on the page. But the reading, for all its poverty, denounced the abyss, at the entrance to which is an instruction to words to abandon all feeling and experience of physical sounds. The liquid matter discovered is being worked into pebbles, not the hard rock of meanings which would compel us to make capitalism yield. If that should ever come, when that comes, it will be a very different event from OWS, but the discovery of these fractured rocks within the array of available political responses (Banks are bad! Stop the bailouts! Money shouldn’t rule, so just separate money from the state! The banks are the new John Bull!) is a prologue toward possibilities.

I feel compelled to stand with the badness of the poetry as much as I feel I ought to be disgusted by the bad interpretations of poems forced on me by the context. Attending to the feeling and sound of every utterance was the virtue of the occasion. The wrong way I heard poems, in the fragmented whole of the evening, is something that perhaps may be correctable by a poetry that learns from this (I certainly didn’t know what the chanting would do to the event). If the poetry readings continue and continue to be amplified by chanting, this may happen; if so, the interpretive consciousness produced in that corner of Liberty Plaza may do some good for the whole occupation. As it is, I think the fragmented-feel-good thinking of OWS at the moment constitutes how poetry exists there too. This is not to say I do not admire what is being done.

Best, Josh

¤

I thought about Josh’s letter for a few days, turning it over in my head, trying to tease out the specific anxieties underpinning it. I remembered the poems he mentioned, the one about Neda Agha-Soltan, a stirring recitation by a man who filmed all the poets who read. And also the one by a woman who recited her poem in her underwear, a poem about a well educated prostitute and the problematic situation when the court mandates she go to “hooker school;” that is, get the GED the prosecution presumes she doesn’t have. There were, in retrospect, two women on display in these recitations—the woman’s body for sale for all to see and the woman we all saw, dying on the streets of Tehran. One uncovered and one covered, one pressured and one released. And still they were both there, together under a totem of poetry or performance, standing for the fundamental contradiction that some must live while others die, even as death seems so far away. I thought about why Josh took issue with the refrain, “your pussy is a sword,” not so much because it was hard for me to imagine how a pussy could be a sword, but because there are much more violent weapons of destruction hanging over our heads and shooting into people’s bodies. Even if Neda had had a sword, would it have done any good against the bullet that blasted inside her chest? Around this time, I came across a passage from Mike Davis that told of one financier’s peculiar obsession: “When the Federal Resolution Trust Corporation seized the assets of Columbia Savings and Loan Association they discovered that the CEO, Thomas Spiegel, had converted its Beverly Hills headquarters into a secret, ‘terrorist-proof’ fortress. In addition to elaborate electronic security sensors, a sophisticated computer system that tracked terrorist incidents over the globe, and an arms cache in its parking structure, the 8900 Wilshire building also has Los Angeles’ most unusual executive washroom: Tom Spiegel’s office, in addition to the bullet-proof glass, was designed to have an adjoining bathroom with a bullet-proof shower. In the event an alarm was sounded, secret panels in the shower walls would open, behind which high-powered assault rifles would be stored.” When facing the banks, one suspects a poem would make more sense if it said a woman’s pussy should be a high-powered assault rifle.

¤

Rereading Blake’s “America, a Prophesy” could be interesting in light of recent events.

¤

I thought about the letter again when walking alongside the Occupy New Haven encampment a few nights ago. It was late night and the denizens of the tents set up on the city’s green were mic checking, or calling out for each others’ voices with a radiating human megaphone. From the far side of the green, I could hear a fainter “mic check” than the one that followed it and than the one that followed that one, “mic check!” There was no speech or assembly being prepared for. They were voices checking for each other through the dark, misty park. Like the bodies of the dead buried beneath them in the green, they sent out wandering specters to ensure each other that they were still around. Chanting their voices toward alien bodies, they enchanted those bodies to be re-chanted by alien windpipes. I disagree that this is the voice of a crowd. It is a hymn of ghosts.

¤

“You don’t have the eyes of the hunter,” Dewey is told, “you have the eyes of the dead.”

¤

It’s true—a man did read J.H. Prynne’s “The Corn Burned by Syrius” at the Occupy Wall Street poetry assembly. On his feet at the citadel’s threshold, the reader ghost-hymned a dream of departure. It is necessary first of all to disentangle the citadel from the nation, as it has already done so, in order explain why the reader was even holding his vigil on the steps of a financial stronghold and not, as the Bonus Army did in 1932, on the lawn of the U.S. Capitol. In dreaming of self-possessed exile, he paradoxically came to the heart of the citadel, its market and tables of exchange. In a strange way, however, it seems that one can feel most far away when most near an intolerable thing. We can imagine that he had money in his pocket, if not a debit card. And nonetheless there he was making outward motions with his arms. But could his hands be unmarked anyway, as far down the sloping grasses as he might take them, so long as he went with the citadel on his horizon?

And if he discovered in his exile the “fractured rocks” which Josh identifies as “a prologue toward possibilities” does he hurl them with a poem or not? And, if so, is he throwing them at the same abyss at which they were thrown in Cairo or Rome? “The so-called revolutions of 1848 were but poor incidents—small fractures and fissures in the dry crust of European society. However, they denounced the abyss. Beneath the apparently solid surface they betrayed oceans of liquid matter, only needing expansion to rend into fragments continents of hard rock.” I recently heard Slavoj Zizek echo Marx’s point: “The system has lost its self-evidence, its automatic legitimacy. And now the field is open.”

¤

I am peeved by the supposition that circular-time as we understand it is somehow autochthonic to the Americas. That idea of time comes from the industrial circuit of endlessly repetitious monotony or monochronicity (emblematized by the wrist watch). Indigenous time is more like a loom-piece. “Their world is older,” Dewey is told, “more finished; more complete.”

Indeed the indigenous dialectics that I am familiar with are often based on crisscrossing and colliding lines of history. Americans could do with a better sense of line.

¤

In an exchange of emails on chaos and circular movements, I sent the below passage (the last paragraph from Heriberto Yépez’ El Imperio de la Neomemoria, 2007) to Jose-Luis and Oscar:

Desordenándose unos a otros, resistiendo influjos de la otredad, desigualándose, el alterverso mantiene su libertad, su descarga. Lo irreversible es la verdad. Nuestras prácticas, ideas y fantasías sociales acerca del funcionamento del cosmos bajo un mismo juego de leyes es otro más de los espectros de nuestro pensamiento totalitario. Hemos pensado al caosmos como si fuera un Estado total. La noción de un “Universo” es la de una detestable omnisistema absolutista, cuyas leyes todo lo encadenarían a través de la eternidad. Autoengaño y engullimiento, abondonar la idea de la existencia de una Totalidad, puesto que la caótica es la prueba definitiva de la existencia de la libertad. Para que yo sea Soberano deben dejar de existir todas las Leyes Generales. Sé que negar la existencia del Universo es un absurdo; por ser absurdo, lo asevero. El Universo jamás ocurrirá.

I translate the passage thus:

Throwing itself here and there into disorder, resisting the influences of otherness, unbalancing itself, the alterverse maintains its liberty, its charge. What is irreversible is true. Our practices, ideas and fantasies with respect to the workings of the cosmos under one set of laws is another specter of our totalitarian thinking. We have imagined the cosmos a total State. The notion of a “Universe” is a detestably absolutist omnisystem, whose laws would shackle everything by means of an eternal. Self-deception and gullibility need abandon the idea of the existence of a totality, as chaos is the ultimate proof of the existence of liberty. For me to reign sovereign in this, all General Laws must cease to exist. I know that denying the existence of the Universe is an absurdity; so, as to be absurd, I declare it. The Universe will never come to be.

¤

A fractional-reserve banking system increases the money pool by lending a multiple of what it actually has. For all the deposits a bank receives, it keeps only a fraction of those deposits as reserves. Deposits are widely understood to be in the form of money or currency. But a parallel banking system exists, known as the “shadow banking system,” which is a misnomer because it operates openly and liberally. Trading in debt via packages such as hedge funds, money market funds and structured investment vehicles, this banking system is harder to control because it trades in forms of credit doing the service of money. The repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 made it easier for these banking systems to collude. In the years leading up to the banking crisis of 2008, banks borrowed from short-term liquid markets, subsequently multiplying the money pool to invest in long-term, risky illiquid assets (such as mortgage-backed securities); the same person that dips a hand to pull money from one purse uses their other hand to drop the funds into an unregulated, risky investment. This is also known as a diversion of funds for speculative operations, in so far as the parallel investment is secured by nothing and, on the other hand, the bank accepting deposits continues to require cash to go about its daily business. Either it has to continue taking risks to increase an available pool of cash (for its depositors and, of course, its operators) or it teeters on the brink of bankruptcy with the hopes of being rescued by some larger entity.

Any corruption stemming from such an enterprise isn’t as much a matter of greed as it is of a flawed system. Although, nevertheless, the system was designed.

Furthermore, when a money pool is multiplied from its multiples (the funds lent at a multiple of what a bank actually holds can be re-received as deposit to count in the fraction that it needs to be considered as holding reserves; so can likewise be re-multiplied), it makes money a linguistic exponent, only ever realizing itself as a greater abstraction. Braving absurdity, I say that the money you hold has never actually been.

¤

In any event, here’s a poem:
What we forget we remember
in more whole form
……….this is how
came about the universe
the sky dropping
like a honeysuckle rose
into the hand
from which it stemmed, a hand
stopping over a keyboard
to tap one key just once
but then to walk away
and what of apocrypha have we
……….to say or speak to
the story of the fish who ate
the sea or the rabbit
who swallowed the limbless fish
……….the tide is itself
its opposite and forcible bend
the people pushing toward refutation
………………..meagre push
while the eel dreams of limbs
and a desk is washed out
……….by its time, out
………………..to inscription
that in memory it remain
hopeful of these things
though hidden they delay, evacuate
…………………………or protest

¤

“They can see two looks away.”

.

On the road in southern Utah

Thelma left the soundtrack up to me. She would plan out our five-week trip from Los Angeles to New York and all I had to do was come up with some music to play. Our first stop was Las Vegas. We would stay in Circus Circus for a colorful slap in the face of the spectacular. From there we would abruptly shift from gambling and buffet-gorging in stale casinos to hiking and camping in the southern Utah desert, a sprawling and extraordinary landscape of red rock and blue sky. Some of the rocks were massive, unapproachable. I nearly collapsed from exhaustion three times in the shining sand. Maybe it was from shock.

We would then trek through Roswell–just to satisfy my childhood obsession with alien conspiracy theories–and through the endless truck pastures of the Texas panhandle. When returning from a relaxing jaunt in a swimming hole outside of Austin, a white Dodge Ram armored with a gleaming cattle herder would rear-end us, spin us sideways, and send us shopping for a beat-up hoopty in the many used car lots of East Texas.

The heat wave across the country, which fittingly skipped over our California point of departure, would assure profuse sweating for the rest of our escapades through the south: a horridly swampy New Orleans knocked me near-delirious. The driver of the Ram, a young Texan dressed in business casual, blamed his missteps on the sun. He was reaching for a bottle of water and didn’t notice the slowed down traffic zone. He just wanted to go home and have a beer. He tried to swerve but still hit us. His car had no dents. Ours was destroyed. Glass stormed down onto the asphalt and our bodies flung like Slinkies from the chairs. He was sorry he ruined our trip.

Hardly ruined. Road trips across America, I realized, aren’t like they read in the books. They are more difficult, tiresome, often filled with stretching moments of static, boredom. Sometimes, unimaginable violence. While Denis Johnson hit the mark with his short story “Car Crash While Hitchhiking,” I found our travels neither as loopy nor alienated. “And therefore I looked down into the great pity of a person’s life on this earth,” writes Johnson. “I don’t mean that we all end up dead, that’s not the great pity. I mean that he couldn’t tell me what he was dreaming, and I couldn’t tell him what was real.”

The songs capture the road trip better. For one, they are able to movingly navigate that tension Johnson pinpoints between reality and imagination. Since our expectations on the road met brute forces of resistance, our soundtrack required flexibility. And music is also precisely the sort of thing that can adapt to the friction of the world. Folk songs fold into blues into gospel into electronic dirges and driving chants and slapstick raps. We would finally cool off under the puffy white clouds of the Appalachians and come to a sudden stop in our home to be, New York. The city greeted us with crashing markets, an earthquake, and a hurricane.

* * * * *

Since my duties didn’t seem all that difficult compared with organizing a road trip throughout a great stretch of America, I devoted serious time to them. Coming up with a soundtrack isn’t as much of a precise science as an unarticulated form of alchemy. An art of summoning the ghosts. So I did fairly extensive research. I started with humble beginnings: the cheesy, overwrought, and overused, yet signature moments which mark the kernel of the genre. First, I watched the late Dennis Hopper’s 1969 cult classic film, Easy Rider. In the film, the duo of Hopper and Peter Fonda travel on cruiser motorcycles to Mardi Gras after a successful drug deal somewhere in the southwest makes them rich.

The story, however, ends tragically. The two outsiders lose their poetico-alcoholic ACLU lawyer friend (played brilliantly by Jack Nicholson) to xenophobic locals. The film closes when the duo are shot off their bikes and killed by vindictive truck drivers somewhere in the thickets of Louisiana. It’s a pretty straightforward 1960s story of undermined liberation, but I’d argue that the soundtrack is what really holds the film together. A mix of psychedelic rock and folk from the likes of Jimi Hendrix, The Byrds, and Steppenwolf (including the “Born to be Wild” theme) casts the personal story into a broader narrative charged with the urgency and tarnished idealism that spread across America as the shadow of Civil Rights movement faded on the horizon.

Clip from Dennis Hopper's 'Easy Rider' (1969)

Easy Rider‘s carefully curated soundtrack recalls how Jack Kerouac underpinned his novel On the Road, published just a decade earlier, with the jumping bop of the 1950s. For instance, while residing in San Francisco, Sal, Dean, and Carlo channel the firey pulse of live jazz played in the black clubs of the Fillmore district. They get wild in the jukebox bars on Central Avenue in Los Angeles and to the landmark radio shows blasting the new music across America. But it’s not just specific scenes in the novel that sing of bop, the whole off-the-cuff lyricism and spirit of adventure spiral around the improvisational flow and melodic breakdowns and screaming horns of Charlie Parker-era jazz.

In his substantial notebooks for On The Road, Kerouac wrote with the frenetic pulse of bop: “Let’s hear no more about jazz critics and those who wonder about bop:–I like my whiskey wild, I like Saturday night in the shack to be crazy, I like the tenor to be woman-mad, I like things to GO and rock and be flipped, I want to be stoned if I’m going to be stoned at all, I like to be gassed by a back-alley music….” But Keroac’s understanding of  American music, and in this work primarily black-American jazz, did not stop there. More than anything else, he associated music with the very constitution of American identity: “That grand wild sound of bop floated from beer parlors; it mixed medleys with every kind of cowboy and boogie-woogie in the American night.”

Going ever deeper in my research of the American road genre and its pairing with music I learned that Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank culled inspiration for his book The Americans around the same period Kerouac published his groundbreaking novel. Indeed Frank met Kerouac one evening at a party in the Lower East Side and asked him to write something for it. Kerouac agreed and began an introduction to the work by identifying Frank’s photos of the Americans with the music they make:

That crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and the music comes out of the jukebox or from a near-by funeral, that’s what Robert Frank has captured in tremendous photographs taken as he traveled on the road around practically forty-eight states in an old used car . . . with the agility, mystery, genius, sadness and strange secrecy of a shadow photographed scenes that have never been seen before on film.

Traveling across America on Route 66, Frank documented the doldrums and the rumbling and the fragmentation and the violence and the dreams forming the people of America in the places of their time. By 1972, The Rolling Stones would commission Frank to design the cover of their outsider record Exile on Main St with photos from his numerous road trips across the country. This was a surprising displacement of Frank’s photos. They were reassembled to represent a British rock group who left their home on the run from tax debt–an analogue for another young and anxious generation on the rise, an unsettled multi-national grouping of nomadic people including those on the other side of the Atlantic. Frank also took footage of the group on a Super 8 camera, which eventually became the now bootlegged Cocksucker Blues, during their own journey on the road across America to the Sunset hills of Los Angeles.

* * * * *

In pursuing all this research over the past year–of which many segments of my findings were published on Hydra–I began to wonder whatever happened to the on-the-road genre of Americana. Certainly the theme of the quest for self-reconciliation or exploration still permeates American lore. But music, I think, has lost its crucial role of both organizing these stories with the rhythm of adventure and charging their lyrical flesh with something larger, the movement of the times. (Vincent Gallo perhaps comes closest with his mawkish attempt at a loner rock odyssey, The Brown Bunny.)

The themes of travel, migration, and free spiritism have underscored Americana music as far back as we can collectively remember. Perhaps the most famous early excavation came from eccentric ethnomusicologist Harry Smith who arranged a broad selection of regional blues, cajun, country, and gospel in his Anthology of American Folk Music for Folkway Records in 1952. Smith carefully crafted the anthology from his own collection of 78 rpm phonograph records dated from the years 1927-1932, a lush period for recorded music right before the advent of radio and television would supersede the local, and the Great Depression would snare small-town sales.

Smith divided the anthology intro three parts: Ballads, Social Music, and Songs. Despite these categorial divisions, the poetics of the road–travel brought on by economic pressures, commercial exchange via train, anxious callings of unrest, or the many seductions of exploration–saturates the whole collection. On the cover of each album Smith put an etching of the Celestial Monochord, an instrument of allegedly mystical powers pilfered from the work of alchemist Robert Fludd. According to Fludd, the monochord linked musical intervals to the cosmic cycles of the Ptolemaic universe. Smith, in turn, incorporated the instrument into his own embedded cosmology which oriented around the water, fire, and air of the living Americana ghost.

Print of the Celestial Monochord.

About the time we cruised through thunderstorms in Mississippi in our lugging Subaru Forester–without working windshield wipers and with a huge leak in the trunk–Furry “Memphis” Lewis’s rendition of the hypnotic folk tale “Kassie Jones” whirled through the speakers. Lewis’s haunting voice, covered in layers of distorted buzz and electric humming, spun ciphers around his expert guitar strums. He waned about the life and vital rhythms of a train engineer whose train eventually crashed:

I woke up this mornin’, four o’clock
Mister Casey told his fireman get his boiler hot
Put on your water, put on your coal
Put your head out the window, see my drivers roll
See my driver roll
Put your head out the window, see my driver roll

A couple days later we found ourselves in a blues joint on a commercially redeveloped Beale St. in Memphis–the historic black music strip was remade into an amusement park of itself. An original Furry Lewis guitar hung on the wall with big blocky white letters spelling out his name on the case. I thought of Casey’s crash and our own as if the song meandered through a portal in time and struck us in a lightning storm on the Texas highway and sent us on some sort of alternate course of discovery. But then it all seemed too silly. Kerouac’s novel is too earnest and abused to be taken seriously today; Easy Rider pivoted around a cosmopolitan paranoia of the backwoods southerner, while Lewis’s guitar stayed lifelessly framed on the wall; none of it really worked anymore.

Perhaps I’ve been too much of a historicist, concerned with collecting and archiving and researching in order to inform my own experiences and give them weight. Perhaps many of us young people have become too dusted in our nostalgia–inclined to praise the avant-garde of yesteryear rather than throw those generations and their work into the wastelands and start afresh. Isn’t that what’s required of us? But it’s hard to think Keroauc or Hopper or Frank did that so categorically to Smith’s anthology. Nor did The Rolling Stones a generation later.

So we listened to music on the road. Araabmuzik’s haunted trance in Vegas. The synthetic droll of Ford & Lopatin, the electronic drone of Emeralds, and other self-effacing music rotated under the sun in Utah. In the desert, even songs exploited for years by commercial interest, and identified for so long with an older generation’s heritage, (yes, America’s “Horse with No Name“) burned deep into our marrow.

We circled through the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico listening to jazz and beats and techno on BBC Radio 1 and Rinse FM. We bought cheap cassettes and CDs in thrift stores in Texas with names we never heard of, hoping to find occultist religious rock from the ’80s, but didn’t find a single one worth listening to besides a Quickflight vinyl which melted and broke in the heat. Local radio, sadly, was primarily homogenous and awful everywhere.

We were disoriented and pleased by Kraftwerk on the Panhandle. By the time we got to Louisiana, we cycled through two huge compilations of pivotal and overlooked New Orleans funk on Soul Jazz Records. Through the rest of the South, we listened during rubbery hours from dawn to dusk through Smith’s entire folk anthology. By the time we floated out of North Carolina on the Blue Ridge Parkway we eased our weary travels with the lull of Washed Out, the gurgled boogie of Toro Y Moi, and the plastic funk of Com Truise.

* * * * *

Smith’s anthology featured regional sounds of Americana not only before radio and television became commonplace in the typical American household but also before the forces of mass commodification would streamline our music into product and business. Even children and teenagers can no longer sidestep the threat of sonic inculcation as they once were able in the baby boomer generation. But at some distant point in the gunning American memory, music was just the stuff of myth, ephemera.

Now, music is global, worlding, in a different way. Our soundtrack, I think, reflected that. We’re restricted neither by space or time nor vertical structures of marketing; 1928 blues from Tennessee in collusion with 1977 German techno and 2011 digital synth-pop; live radio from wherever (and whoever) and recorded broadcasts from whenever.

Yet we still haven’t lost a sense of place. Surely the Internet and new technologies programmed for social networking have reshaped the road, wired it to the globular layers of computer networks and information databases, connected it to unstable modes of movement and direction, restructured its linear geometry into a great big open possibility of blinking dots. But the music still filters through the speakers and spills out the openness of the car, overflowing into the rush of the wind, and into the thickness of the earth. The soundtrack on the road, formed and reconfigured in collage from the far reaches of recorded time and space, now taps into something more diffuse and nebulous–maybe even a strange spirit again, unruly, mystical.

What a soundtrack can achieve is the opening up of a place. The highest aim of a soundtrack undermines the familiar callings and purposes of a place and works through them to uncover the richness of its substance. Music has a mysterious way of letting what things are shine forth. Ours seemed to channel the highly networked road, lightly suspended in an ethereal recorded body of sound and heritage, as if we called up the spirits of the American past and tapped into a resonating present–still alive, still circling in the shadows of the road, and wandering in the glow of the horizon.

“On the road again/ Natural born eastman on the road again,” Lewis crooned through the rumbling time machine. And so we drove on.

Faces in the crowd; in the metro, faces. Faces on the bus; through the bus window, faces. Outside, faces. Inside, portraits. Of the General & the Dictator, of the Emperor & his beloved Carlota, of the poet-king of Texcoco and the Tlatoani, of the Neo-Marxists & the Republicans, of the Zapotecs & the Zapatistas, of the shoe-shiners and the narcotraficantes, of the trafficking cars and the bones of the indigent beneath the blind wheels of the cars. Of a striking worker, assassinated, his face streaked with blood and his eyes in pools on the ground. Such are the fates of beastly loves. The public women and the sculptors of addictions, the drunkards, the tequileros de primera, the gamblers, the pickpockets, the stock-holders, the politicos, the assassins, the priests, the telecommunication titans, the federales, the mestizos and mystics, the carnivores and criollos, the quick-tongued chilangos and the sagging pelados – these, their beastly loves, in a city of palaces. In the Museum of Anthropology the faces of ancient patriarchs, young hustlers, of miniature women and capacious grandmothers, of smiling children and the serious-faced children of men, these countless specimens of innumerable facial types fanning out in a color spectrum, change gradually into skulls. The skulls all look the same, regardless of the face that once was there. For when the face vanishes, the inescapable fact of the flesh remains, bone-white, ineradicable. Beyond the gate, digitized skulls whisper into your ear, bienvenido a México.

Within the flesh-wound of the sky a word for every season, a logos for all the cities of the world. A word designed in the heart of the pregnant sky for the poinsettia and the night panther impartially: this secret word no one knows, not the eagle or the snake (if they could speak our tongue), neither man nor the kings of men (if such regaled hominids still exist in our posterior age). No one willingly befriends the Eternal. But there are few. In Chapultepec Park, los voladores de Papantla spin in slow circles toward the ground from the heights of clouds while the flayed one, Xipe Totec, observes. Four Totonac men descend and form a spinning pyramid, while a fifth stays posted at the apex and plays the flute. It is the music rain makes in a drought season — the music that is unclenched from the throats of birds parched from thirst — and the falling men embody the supreme desire to drink and harness the rain: they are feathers wafting in the air, but they are also falling raindrops.  At the end of the dance, a foreign exchange student from UNAM goes up to one of the voladores and hands him a political pamphlet discussing the costly activities of a pan-american post-industrial military complex and the cultural desiccation of the indigenous; the student asks the volador if he feels he has been ‘dispossessed of his natural rights,’ to which the cloud-man placidly responds: ‘Dispossessed? Of what? I belong to the sky, my home is in the clouds, where many mansions abide; my father was a volador, and so am I, and my brothers and I descended long ago from the great heights.’ In the obscure heart of the city, dispersed among the 16 delegations and throughout the hundred colonias, one can hear among the speakers of castellano the syncopated patter of ancestral dialects: nahuatl, zapoteco, mixteco, otomi, mazahua. The voladores, if anything, continue to ascend and descend in the hope that their idiom — physiological, but also musical — never dries out.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CGd5owGow1E&feature=related

Mexico-Tenochtitlan in those days, when coyotes fasted and sang of flowers, had nearly half a million people in its vicinity; this was more than Sevilla, at that time the largest city in Spain with just 45,000 inhabitants. Despite the voluminous tribes that resided there, Mexico-Tenochtitlan was renowned for its cleanliness; one could walk barefoot through the clean-swept streets, tread upon the white-washed patios and polished steps of the temples, and suffer nary an inconvenience or blister. It is said that the tlatoani employed nearly a thousand men to sweep the streets daily. Waters flowed freely through that isle city, following Nezahualcoyotl’s dictum: ‘A city must have the heart of a river breathing through it — water holds the origin of life’ – he built the albarrada, and it parted the brackish from the fresh, an engineering marvel. A century later the city had thrived on the swamp, the island grew larger, the lake of Texcoco was drained by Neza’s genius to maximum effect – the loftier citizens of that city drank mountain spring waters and bathed twice a day when they wanted. Moctezuma Ilhuicamina was in the liberty to bathe four times a day.  At night the smooth-stone roads that led out and into the city were lit with resinous, aromatic pine torches to guide the laborers home, the priests to the temples, and the Tlatoani to his luxuries.

A city cannot escape itself; once it is founded, it is found for all time: it repeats its themes, it recalls its past lives, it announces the imminence of its own destruction. “Instantaneity: Mexico’s response to temporal flux” (Carlos Fuentes). The Valley of Anáhuac was already el Distrito Federal when the tribe of Tenoch sighted the eagle feasting on the snake. Aztlán is always being rediscovered. Across from the Catedral Metropolitano an archaeologist unearths the head of Huitzilopochtli; to the right hides the countenance of Tlaloc. El Templo Mayor stands contemporaneous with the Basílica de Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe. La Virgen, dressed in the raiment of Tonantzin, compounds 500 years in a single appearance. Dahlias continue to grow in splendor on the hill of Tepeyac, and the pilgrims, despite the constant change in their attire throughout the decades, continue their pilgrimage on the bone of their knees.

I see her face in Magdalena Contreras. Take the orange tram to the Paseo de la Reforma: el Zócalo, filled with tourists, vendors, and soldiers. The blurred faces of children running, and green balloons, white balloons. A solitary red balloon waltzes and rises slowly to disappear in the smog-stuffed sky. Maybe she is here. Someone, I am certain of this, is watching me from the 55th floor of the Torre Mayor. A taxi ride down the Empress’s Avenue. We merge with the Insurgents. At a distance I can see the massive blue microchip of the World Trade Center. The resplendent figure of Diana, a body like a machine rather than a virgin’s – her sensational breasts her wide thick hips her taut bow her dripping arrow aimed at me – in the center of gaping glass monoliths. I believe I am in love, yet there is no face to confirm it, only a memory, a residue, a broken trail that I reinvent through a confusion of places. In the Plaza de Toros the bulls are seasonally sacrificed to the gods buried underground. In the Central de Abastos a woman wanders through the markets, in between the menacing parked vehicles, in search of a child whose name she has momentarily forgotten in her panic. A gold ribbon drops out of her hand onto the dry salt-littered ground; trampled upon by a hundred feet, a thousand feet, a million feet.

What is left after a city has ground itself under, when the monuments to great men no longer bear the inscriptions of their names and their faces have eroded into skulls? Nothing but the wilted flower petals of fame. Nothing but the unheard songs of the nocturnal axolotl. The Palace of Fine Arts sinks daily under the mass of its marble, the sheer weight of its European inflection too much to sustain. The City of Mexico sinks lower and lower with the generations. If beauty exists, then we are thankful that its fearsome power fades with the turning of the seasons and the forgetting of illustrious names. Six dead boys, boys who were men before they were adults, died protecting the Castle of Chapultepec from the Yanquis; in place of their names, the white columns of their spines rise up and form a gateway to the Castle, a gateway through which the remembrance of death is enough to permit passage into the corridors of an assassinated monarch and a failed usurpation.

In Article 50, Section 28, of the 1824 Federal Constitution of the United Mexican States, it declares that it is the especial duty of the Congress of the Union ‘to establish a suitable place of residence for the supreme powers of the federation and therein enact the legislative power of the state.’ As a result there followed the institution of the Federal District of Mexico within the greater City of Mexico, and through a rapid inward process the Federal District came to absorb the City and transform it into the official seat of the Powers of the Union. In a word, the City of Mexico ceased to exist. The Federal District took as its center the Plaza de la Constitución, with a radius of 8,380 metres, per instruction of the first President of Mexico, Guadalupe Victoria. Thirty years later, on the heels of the Mexican American War, burgeoning internal movements within the social and political spheres would incite new reforms and designations in the re-structuring of the Federal District, and it was General Santa Anna’s voice that rang out in Congress in support of the extension of the Federal District (in land and in law) to prefectures that were traditionally outside the earlier versions of the city:

La de Tlanepantla al norte

La de Tacubaya al occidente y

La de Tlalpan al sur –

But the City of Mexico proper would thrive regardless of its assimilation of the outlying communities; its antiquity would survive the modern implementation of constitutional legislation and the perpetual demarcations of its originary properties. If the instruments of representational government would absorb the municipalities that lay outside the city, with the autonomous municipalities reciprocally absorbing the centralized power of the Seat of the Union, the city would continue to grow despite the reforms and divisions that crippled its older integrity – if it was a District for the Federation, it was also a City independent and composed of a diverse people and of movements invisible, indeed impervious, to the invasions by foreign interests and to the splicing of its fundamental identity throughout the modern era. If it is the Distrito Federal, it is also la Ciudad de México; if it was the site for the New Spain, it persisted in the marrow of its bone to be Tenochtitlan, only now disguised in the vestiture of the Modern, its inhabitants the inheritors of a technology of the New; that is, of a mixtec-nology that would alchemize the Ancient with the Modern, the Mesoamerican gods with Catholic monotheism, the Templo Mayor with the Torre Mayor, the chinampas in Xochimilco with the neo-Champs Elysees, the Paseo de la Reforma.

In the City of Mexico there can be found in a single area the neo-classical buildings of Paris, the baroque avenidas of Spain, the stone-cut indigenous faces of the warring cuauhpipiltin. To the south lies the arboreal mountain of the Ajusco; to the north the grassy hills of the Chiquihuite and the Three Fathers; to the west the Naked Lord of Cornstalks, el Nevado de Toluca, snoozes under a cap of snow; to the east the colossal and majestic lovers, Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl, rest in a bed of landscapes, the one awake and ponderous, the other asleep on her back, her lifeless body depressed to the side, asleep in death. Grief took the white soft lady’s warmth away, never to wake again, while the warrior, returned from the Oaxacan battlefields, rages at the sight of her body stripped of life: one day he shall burn to ashes those close enough to gaze on her denuded majesty; his head smokes with anger, the dagger of bitterness still rooted in his beating heart.

On the invisible lake of Texcoco the waving reproducible image of a brown eagle descends on the featherless serpent, lands on the nopal, and decimates the history of a city. It had sighted all that could be seen on that land, in one fell swoop: the founding of Mexico-Tenochtitlan by the Mexica, the wandering tribe of Huitzilopochtli; the Triple Alliance of Tenochtitlan, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, brought to fruition by Itzcoatl and the ingenious Nezahualcoyotl; the imperial achievements made by Ahuitzotl in the expansion of the empire; the melancholy surmises of Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, in conversation with his priests; the three year war for Tenochtitlan, and the Conquest to last 300 years hence; the Victory of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and the coming of the Angel of Independence; the entrance of a Hapsburg into the city gates; three years after, the restoration of the Republic upon the entrance of a Zapotec into the City of Mexico; the assassination of Maximilian I; the countless reforms by Juarez, and the re-establishment of the Republic; the thirty-year Porfiriato that would return Mexico to the French Intervention it had just overthrown, and regress the national achievements of the Zapotec liberator; the Revolution that would destroy everything that existed before it and build up a storm that would last decades after the first wave; the establishment of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, and the 70 years of a perfected dictatorship under the umbrella of a revolutionary cause that continues to thrive in the hearts of partisans; and the positivist urbanizing spirit of the times that would bring skyscrapers, the 1968 Olympics, the Tlatelolco Massacre, the 1970 World Cup, and NAFTA to the neo-classical post-modern streets of Mexico – extending blood and expanding borders and exploding the free market, at the helm of a mystic nation  – from a moment’s perch on the cactus – in the solitary eye of the eagle: if Mexico City continues to sink with the florid seasons, the urban congestion, and the heavy traffic into the soft soil of the evaporated lake, then Tenochtitlan will surely rise from its ruins, a phoenix from the ashes of Aztlán; so had Chimalpahin prophesied:

En cuanto tiempo dure el mundo,

nunca se perderá la gloria de México-Tenochtitlan.

Workbook pages. Images courtesy of Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

On April 15, the day Pale King was to arrive in bookstores, I got a sign from David Foster Wallace.*

That Friday, I was getting ready to go out when I heard a tremendous thud from the hallway. I was momentarily terrified, as I was the only person in the apartment. Birds?! (Rewatching Hitchcock.) Clumsy robber? When I went to see what the sound was, I saw that one of my books had mysteriously tumbled out of the shelf “on its own” and was now lying in the middle of the hallway. The huge brick of a book was none other than my copy of Infinite Jest. Boom!* I looked down, and there was DFW’s author picture, staring right up at me. This, I thought, was definitely a sign.

Edits for Infinite Jest

Being pre-inclined to think people are mad at me, I naturally assumed that DFW was mad at me. I must have done something bad! But had I not recently gone all the way to Austin, TX during the week of SXSW, not to partake in hipster revelry, but to spend all day in the overly-air-conditioned library of UT Austin poring over the DFW archives? Had I not driven in a rented Ford Focus with three other unshowered, unrested people for 56+ hours? I thought hard about what I had done.

I came up with a few possibilities. 1) I had not attended the midnight Pale King “release+reading+sleepover.” 2) I had not pre-ordered Pale King on Amazon or tried to obtain it before anyone else. 3) I had said, in secret, or maybe to one or two of my students during office hours, that the language in his recent New Yorker story “Backbone” was “not all that alive.” This was all concrete evidence that DFW was mad at me.

I apologized for all these things, put Infinite Jest back on the shelf, and tried to forget about the incident.

Fast forward to April 18, the next Monday, as I was preparing for my undergraduate Creative Writing class. Based on my findings at the UT Austin archives, I was planning to do a kind of “editing workshop” where we would examine certain changes and “decisions” DFW made between the first and final drafts of his story, “Good Old Neon.” My plan was to project onto a large screen the first handwritten pages of “Good Old Neon” for us to study and scrutinize. For those who haven’t read it, this is the story about the character who believes himself caught in an endless cycle of fraudulence and so drives full-on into a concrete abutment.

As I prepared my notes for my class, I began to get a sinking feeling that this kind of thing just should not be done. First drafts should not be shared with the public. The “magic” and “illusion” of fiction should not be revealed to just anyone, not unless they had really earned it, prayed at the altar of, & etc. Maybe these drafts contained information that the devout, practicing fiction writer should just keep quietly to herself.***

I chatted some people up on gchat and asked if these were indeed “signs” coming from DFW himself.  Some friends said they might be “auspicious” rather than inauspicious; others–my sister–said I was being crazy and Chinese.

She said: “If thunder strikes you down then you’ll know it’s a sign.”

Draft page from Pale King

Now, I know some New Criticism type people will probably feel a little queasy as I begin to describe what we actually do in my Creative Writing class. In my class, we actually talk freely about intentionality, without shame, and often conflate the views of the narrator with that of the author. One of our favorite things to do is speculate on an author’s personal life as if we were gossiping about a common acquaintance at a bar. I guess I allow this because I’ve always had this gut feeling that writers shouldn’t engage with a text in the same way an academic would; as writers, we are I think just trying to find friends and company among our predecessors.

So why was I now treating these first drafts as mere “text,” as if it were completely divorced from the person behind it?

In DFW’s drafts, there are funny remarks scribbled in the margins, i.e., “Cheers wasn’t ON in 1977! When did Cheers! run?” as well as not so funny remarks—“I am so sad.” There are remarks where he is goading himself on—or chastising himself—“Just finish this.” The drafts of “Oblivion” (or, the “Snoring Story”) show him struggling in a very sad way. These parts were like looking at stolen pictures of a celebrity on getaway. They instantly satisfied that voyeuristic desire to delve into the private life of a celebrity, but also made me queasiest about showing them to other people. Would I ink out these sad parts? That, too, felt wrong.

Of course, the drafts showed equally meaty stuff that can be so helpful to writers trying to understand craft. The drafts show very clearly how delaying desire is a valuable thing. How replacing the word “therapy” with “analysis” can make a lot of difference. How an engaging list is just a matter of patterning. I wanted to show my students that his long digressions and overabundant detail weren’t a result of lack of discipline/understanding. That his insertions of “whatever” and “and so” were not accidental or arbitrary. These were the kinds of discoveries I planned my lesson around.

If this were a piece of unrealistic fiction I would tell you that my lesson was a disaster because the projector exploded from its dock in the ceiling, and the much-needed classroom fans sputtered to a stop in an almost spiteful way.

If this were a fairy tale, I would say that the ghost of DFW appeared before the class as a semi-transparent, bandanna-ed head, and cried in a booming voice: “DON’T LOOK AT MY DRAFTS!”

If this were non-fiction, I would say that the adapter connecting my computer to the projector turned out to be broken, and I didn’t try very hard to fix it. And as a result, the drafts couldn’t be shown.

Annotated copy of Don Delillo's Players

What’s the point of this article anyway? I just wanted to tell a story about how I tried to show my class some drafts by a very famous and brilliant writer and got subsequently thwarted.

Is it “right” to look at a writer’s drafts and unfinished work? Especially one who died in such a tragic way? Somehow it has an icky rubbernecking feel to it. But why?

Maybe it all depends on belief. If you believe that good art is simply a well-constructed vessel with its rows of sturdy nuts and bolts, then the idea of looking at drafts is no big thing. It’s like looking at an architect’s sketches, or at a dancer rehearsing. Even if what’s inside is unpolished and horrifically embarrassing, it’s okay, because these imperfections are just technicalities that need to be dealt with. But if you believe that good fiction also comes from a place of fear, vulnerability, insecurity, ugliness, and extreme doubt, then of course looking at drafts is anathema. It exposes what should not be exposed. Because drafts is where petty, raw, immature things sit loudly on the page; things that need to be expurgated or transformed before it can become something beautiful.

Why was my lesson plan thwarted, either by DFW or by my own unwillingness to share something true that I also felt should be kept secret? I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I guess I still don’t know. If this essay or article or whatever I’m writing has to end with a moral, or something learned, I would say that it’s not magic that makes something good, but at the same time, it also is. A writer should know why it’s valuable to thwart desire. But wouldn’t we say that it’s miraculous when an artist is able to (using his words) “[apply] CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness”?  And to show what is still worth salvaging, despite darkness and fear?

Anyway, I didn’t go to the archives to try to steal craft tricks. I think I just wanted to get to know someone better.****

___________________________________

*100% true!

**Apparently the MS of IJ was so heavy that when it was dropped on DeLillo’s front porch it sounded like a gunshot.

***There was also that scary, bolded clause in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center’s copyright contract that warned of serious lawsuits if one used materials acquired for anything other than “personal research.” I’m sure, though, that this had nothing to do with my feelings of fear and dread.

****This is a kind of apology.

“Our Earth is degenerate in these latter days,” reads an Assyrian cuneiform tablet dated to approximately 2800 BC, “there are signs that the world is speedily coming to an end. Bribery and corruption are common.” Ubiquitous on the internet as the earliest recorded instance of the human obsession with the end times, the quote was first widely disseminated by Isaac Asimov’s 1979 Book of Facts. Before that, the only other recorded appearance of the quote seems to be in a 1953 character-building book, Personality and Adjustment, by a certain William L. Patty and Louise S. Johnson. It appears, in other words, to be as spurious an invention as a number of the marvelous, if not ingenious and inspired, predictions that I will present as my top 11 for 2011.

11. Immediately preceding the paragraph on the cuneiform tablet in Asimov’s book is another outlandish ‘fact,’ which claims that “the lone surviving record of Mayan history is three codices written in hieroglyphs on bark paper.” We know that this is untrue because Mayan history was also carved on the stone stelae found at their cities, the most famous of which has become the tabulation of the baktun shift at Cobá. Otherwise known as the 2012 prophecy, the stele reads:

13…,

13… stones, 13… bundles,

13…, 13…,

13… bundles, 13… bundles,

13…, 13…,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, 13… stones,

13… stones, … 13 lord stones,

13 ended bundles, 13 higher bundles,

13 bundles, no scores of stones,

no single stones, no scores of days,

no single days, on 4 Lord;

the ninth lord of the night wore the headband,

and 3 days ago the moon had arrived,

… is the name of the new

month of a score and 9 days; it was on 8 Kiln

Translated by Dennis Tedlock in his anthology, 2,000 Years of Mayan Literature (another work whose very existence refutes Asimov’s outlandish claim), he additionally calculates the long count by taking every 13 to be the completion of a bundle (much as the number zero works in decimal systems), producing a date for the beginning of time that is “so enormous that it exceeds the powers of the imagination. . . the resultant time span would be more than billion times longer than the age astrophysicists currently assign to the universe, which is 13.7 billion years.” This massive long count, the prophecy tells us, will switch over (exhausting the maximum possible ‘zeros’ in the Mayan system) on December 22, 2012, when the Mayan calender will dawn again at 1.0.0.0.0.1. Supplementing his reading of the baktun shift with the prophecies of the Chilam Bilam, Tedlock concludes that “the new era will have a feminine character… [and] should be a good time for planting, and for making new starts of all kinds.”

In contrast to the more apocalyptic 2012ers, Tedlock’s reading is nearer in spirit to J.L. Navarro’s theories of an Ascension period. Navarro, whose early poetry and fiction appeared in the 1960s East L.A. magazine Con Safos, follows Carl Calleman’s calculation that the baktun shift will not occur in 2012, but on October 28, 2011. With the cosmic forces already pressuring the great shift, Navarro’s period of Ascension, already underway in the year 2011, requires that the heart’s eye be open to the highly unusual transformations happening around us and, if we are sensitive to the cosmic forces, within us as well. What those transformations might be exactly, will be the substance of the rest of this list.

10. One possibility that is particularly engrossing for Navarro is that UFO disclosure will begin this year. According to retired NORAD officer, Stanley Fulham, who claims to be in continuous communication with extraterrestrial life, a few large-scale sightings over Russia and London in January will force governments to reveal what they know about life from other galaxies. Much more on UFO disclosure here.

9. And, if it isn’t persons from other planets that arrive in 2011, it might be the arrival of another planet into our solar system, as is believed by proponents of the planet Nibiru = Planet X hypothesis, and the Edgar Cayce Association for Research and Enlightenment.

8. Furthermore, if not another planet, unusual contact might come from our own sun, which some believe will be entering a period of high turbulence, an especially violent solar max period that could last from 2011-2013, disrupting relatively stable conditions in our solar system with a season of chaos.

7. Others, on the other hand, affirm that it will be ‘not by fire, but by ice,’ calculating ice age cycles to last approximately 11,500 years, with the last ice age ending (you guessed it) about 11,500 years ago. The calculation seems somewhat arbitrary, but many who suffered through the blizzard that carried the North American East Coast into the new year would be sympathetic to the possibility of a world getting colder.

6. A world getting colder would, however, fail to account for the increase in dry seasons and droughts throughout the world. With many ex-oil tycoons (such as the Bushes and T. Boone Pickens) now buying up water springs and deposits, some theorize that 2011 will be a year in which the Water Barons calcify their hold on Worldwide Water. The research on the rise of ‘Blue Gold,’ despite the conspiracy theory-buzz, is in reality extremely disturbing.

5. But how about some synthesis? A combination of possibility number 4, 5 and 6 comes from the Pentagon, who, in addition to affirming that “future wars will be fought over the issue of survival rather than religion, ideology or national honor,” also predicts that “between 2010 and 2020 Europe [will be] hardest hit by climatic change with an average annual temperature drop of 6F. Climate in Britain becomes colder and drier as weather patterns begin to resemble Siberia.” And that “by 2010 the US and Europe will experience a third more days with peak temperatures above 90F. Climate becomes an ‘economic nuisance’ as storms, droughts and hot spells create havoc for farmers.” The Department of Defense’s prognosis sounds similar to what John Hogue is calling Nature’s current, 2-year World War on Humanity, which he expects to last one more year.

4. The heavy and horrible idling of the ram.

3. The potential to take the ram, so to speak, by the horns. Some view the ultra-rare total lunar eclipse coinciding last month with the winter solstice, compounded with Mercury in retrograde sling-shooting the Earth into its New Year, as an opportunity to enact extreme transformations in outlook and motility. Resulting from a sensitivity to these cosmic turns, a person’s body could begin to feel more nervous than usual, desiring to take up the opportunity for radical transformation that the cosmos is offering it.

2. That Hopi visionary White Feather’s predicted emergence of a Fifth World, in its defining characteristics similar to Vasconcelos’ Universópolis, a city to be founded by the fifth race, la Raza Cósmica, will finally begin to be realized in the Americas. Developing a truly robust notion of absolute humanity, this world will be profoundly transformed by a notion of humanity that extends that category across borders and into the cosmos. To some Hopi, the prophecy suggests an opening of the Earth’s tunnels. The word alien will be as reprehensible, if not as comical, as the world wetback or redskin or chink.

1. That Hydra Magazine and its heads will continue to dig up tunnels to reveal what is outside them, and inside them, so that the total reality tunnel of its writers and readers will expand unto the coming era. Or, as J.L. Navarro put it in an early poem: “REALITY’S GETTING ME SICK/I THINK I’LL BLAST THIS STICK/AND GO GET EDUCATED.”

C|S

Of the ancient Maximus “nothing more is known, than that he was by birth a Tyrian; that he lived under the Antonines and Commodus; that he for some time resided in Rome, but probably, for the most part in Greece; that he cultivated philosophy, and principally that of Plato.” Of Charles Olson, who cultivated “Projective Verse” and dubbed himself a Maximus in the genealogy of homo maximus, much the same could be repeated: that he was born in Worcester, Massachusetts in 1910; that he came of intellectual age under the four terms of FDR; that he early on resided in Worcester, but spent his boyhood summers, and probably, the most formative passages of his life, in Gloucester, the seaside Massachusetts city — site of “Tyrian Businesses” — that’d become his coronation place. Olson was privy to its entanglements and halibut, its salt airs and gull cries, and he set out to form the province in his image. But he encountered another poet, who had published in and of Gloucester shortly before him, and who presented Olson with a counter-image to his own: Vincent Ferrini.

Charles Olson

Ferrini — who’d become Gloucester’s first Poet Laureate only after Olson, his friend and master, had passed away — wasn’t born in Gloucester either, he was born in Saugus in 1913, the son of Italian immigrants from the Rome and Abruzzo provinces; Ferrini’s Massachusetts was also Sacco and Vanzetti’s Massachusetts. Olson’s papa was of Swedish stock, a letter carrier who taught his son the value of knowing one’s streets by heart, by walking them, imprinting their cartography into the soles of your step. Ferrini’s old man was a hard-drinking, aria-singing, atheist shoemaker, who indirectly taught his son the art of appropriating images from brick yards and trash heaps, from the rich refuse of everydayness and proximity. The story of Olson and Ferrini can be read as the story of magnitude meeting locality. The largeness of Olson — all 6-foot, 8-inches of him, the kingliness, the mythos, the spaciousness — contrasted with Ferrini’s sleekness, his sensuality, his qualities of tight and small composition. Their story climaxes with a self-appointed king leaving his homeland, like Alexander, to wrestle with the histories of other nations, other landscapes, so as to return and know his own place thoroughly; and it ends with a humble but prolific frame-maker who inherited a throne late from having stayed local (and loyal) all his life.

Vincent Ferrini

Ferrini moved to Gloucester in 1948 after a fan of his poetry, a painter living there, had invited him over for a visit. Back in Lynn, Massachusetts, Ferrini, self-taught and public-library-educated, had initially fashioned himself a proletarian poet baptized in “the Church of Politics” and Communism; whose first book No Smoke had earned some considerable fame for him. His first five books of poetry (published before Olson had managed to put out his first one) established Ferrini as a voice of political unrest and the working class. Settled in Gloucester, however, Ferrini began to find a different rhythm, inwardly motivated by his daily contact with the Atlantic spray and the fishcutters and “the triumph of the Soothsaying Waters”; this new relationship compelled the inveterately anti-doctrinaire Ferrini to quit what appeared to him as the falsified dogma of Communism, whose “roots… are in Russia, and… have an alien smell.” Nor was that break enough: Ferrini eventually quit his 9-year stint at a GE factory in Lynn (to which he commuted from Gloucester), and later took up a new vocation as a self-employed maker of picture frames, with a married domestic life withal. Ferrini’s life wasn’t truly changed however (and in some respects his craft wouldn’t have sharpened) if he had never encountered Charles Olson. Besides publishing plays, Ferrini continued to write and publish poems, one of which showed up in a local poem mag, Imagi. Olson Maximus, self-crowned Poet King of Gloucester (but at this time fairly unknown to his subjects), happened to read that poem, which set his hairs on end. The piece was good, not only good, but it said enough of Gloucester as any woman-born man could speak of it, who was born there, ate there, and slept there. Olson paid Ferrini a visit; he had his intel, he knew the streets and addresses of that sea town by heart, and he found Ferrini easy. The latter explains:

A man’s whole lifetime is affected by another person, who enters the stream of his days and years and stays in these waters. That’s how Charles Olson visited me, stayed, and keeps flowing, as in life so in death… We were living on Liberty Street near St. Ann Church when coming home one night from the General Electric Company where I had been working for the last nine years, Peg told me about a Poet who had almost broken his head getting through, and I could not fathom who it might have been and I was curious and sorry to have missed him. He came back the next night, a Giant! to pay a ‘fan call’ to another poet because he was smitten by a poem I had written and which had appeared in IMAGI. I was pleased by the size of the man and the compliment.

The largeness of Olson was the immediate thing one learned of him. Olson’s largeness, his magnitude, was felt in speaking with him, in seeing him, and if lacking that, in reading him. Ferrini sought out what Olson had mentioned of his that was available: Call Me Ishmael. “He told me about this book he had written, Call Me Ishmael, which I found in Cairnie’s bookshop. It was the second time I felt the girth of the man, the first was HIMSELF… Charles being by nature big, just took up and spread himself all over the pages as he did in his kitchen, his sleepingroom, and the house of any guest he was with.”

Olson returned the favor: “Then he dug me up. He ransacked my background and the early writings, he scoured Lynn, like the Archaeologist he is. Everything was stored for its uses in that mindbin of his. He never forgot anything and his memory was sleepless… He read all my earlier works in the Library and the first book, No Smoke…” A correspondence was thereafter struck up; the two began as friends, and the first Maximus poems, framed as “Letters”, originated in this friendship:

Off-shore, by islands hidden in the blood

jewels & miracles, I, Maximus

a metal hot from boiling water, tell you

what is a lance, who obeys the figures

of the present dance

This “metal hot from boiling water” that was Olson’s harpoon struck Ferrini deeply and irrevocably, in the way an old god’s torso tells the poet that “you must change your life“; something had to be reformed, reshaped, readjusted in Ferrini, something proximate to the movement (an arrowhead too fast to catch) and to the form (a space too vast to contain) that Olson pondered and played with, almost physiologically, in his projective girth. “How had he affected me as a working poet? By the way he used his harpoon, ACCURACY.” Most accurate when one has archived the radial immensities of space, of pure irresistible forwardness, in which all targets are hit because all targets are every compass point swollen to a cosmic fineness. One has only to study the constellations to know what their shapes are capable of, to make them lunge out of their shells; so also a city’s range, its depths and distances, to know what eternity should mean in the present case, on a map of spatial geometries, real centripetal forms; on one side the city and its hard, true-to-life projections, and on the other end the ocean (and lush oblivion). Gloucester was all this, for the two adoptees, a land at once splendidly physical, historical, walkable, the first phrase in a magnetic backward clause stretching out to the West and even further, toward the Pacific; but also a purview (the lighthouse!) of the farsighted mystic potentialities mariners and Ahabs know firsthand, sometimes tragically but always by their own lights. A division in space (land & land’s end) which could be called uniquely American. Olson:  ”I take SPACE to be the central fact to man born in America, from Folsom cave to now. I spell it large because it comes large here. Large, and without mercy. It is geography at bottom, a hell of wide land from the beginning.”

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAYxpSjkyAg&feature=related

But their friendship turned combative quick, and Olson, often a man keen and to-the-point, who feared no one since all feared his whale-sized intellect, wrote “Letter 5,” addressed to Ferrini, in which he excoriated the latter for staying too local, too small-minded, too peevishly concerned with the politics of favor. Gloucester was either too small a place for two poets, or Olson too large a man to accommodate another. Robin Blaser relates how he once hinted to Olson he would look into Gloucester’s history as one of America’s first fishing towns, but was quickly turned off the scent by the other: “‘Oh don’t do that! This is my place. You go do it for yours.’” But Gloucester also happened to be Ferrini’s place, and Olson was resolute to test this other man’s will & erudition, disappointed as he was with Ferrini’s lack of vision for his own circumference:

(I am not named Maximus

for no cause

Gloucester, circa 1915

But Ferrini was fortunately of an empathetic and resilient class, who took slights only slightly, and respected the “Maximus” in Olson as much as he venerated the “Polis” in Gloucester. “Letter 5″ was a harsh jolt to his pride, but Ferrini responded as only a man of some humility — as one who knows his limits — can: with an outpouring of love. Ferrini’s “response” was titled In the Arriving, a 32-page “love poem” that contains some of his very best work, a different strain from the “working class” poet of the 40s who wrote on smokestacks and union bosses and shoe-workers. This was a Ferrini who suddenly, like a man washed in a clear spring whose eyes are cleansed of smog-motes, starts seeing the recumbent forms etched on the x and y axes of the city; a new Ferrini, formally speaking, born from contact with a man considerably larger than himself, whose “maps followed him everywhere like budding poets wanting that water of his nourishment.” Rather than compete with a poet qualitatively different than himself, Ferrini foresaw that THE POEM was not what was at stake but perception itself; the Gloucester which Maximus had erected was just as much Ferrini’s as Olson’s property, because “There are no hierarchies, no infinite, no such many as mass, there are only / eyes in all heads, / to be looked out of” (Letter 6). Ferrini had only to reposition his stance, adjust his lens, refocus the principles of his craft:

I say this

so it sticks in the mind’s craw

each

in his own

weight

& specific

value

on his individual terms

to be hammered

out on the

anvil

of

experience

into his usable metal

thus

created

from his

ore

so each one

counts

(…)

love does not

judge

he

is

too busy

making

anew

(…)

As the keel of a

boat is submerged in water

so are we in death.

(…)

A prominent blogger friend was undergoing catharsis by unsubscribing from certain aggressive email lists when he received this phone call–

“Is this _____ of _____ (website)?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m _____ from ______ (organization). Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from our list? You will no longer be notified about our exciting x and y events!”
“Uh, yes? I’m sure. How did you get my number?”

This blogger thought it was funny that his stature had grown to such proportions as to warrant a personal call from this organization. “I made something out of nothing,” he mused. “I made something happen on the internet.”

And isn’t generating “something out of nothing” undeniably what the internet is best at doing? Writers and personalities emerge from the digital whirlpool, but so do memes, manufactured interest, and hysteria–the internet replicates and redistributes like wildfire, like cancer. A lot of the time this redistribution seems to be an end in itself. The more hits something receives the better. Degree of exposure becomes analogous to value.

The Architectural League’s Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7, “From Mobile Playground to Sweatshop City,” aims to dissect our perhaps unexamined concepts of value, labor, and mobility. Considering the endless hours we spend absorbing and generating blog posts, flicker uploads, Facebook profiles, and product reviews, it seems shocking that very few of us have stopped to think whether this “work” translates into labor or play. I think many of us operate under the impression that our hours still fall under “play”–but if we think what we do on the internet is labor, we must be expecting some serious remuneration if we believe it prompts such devoted attention.

In the pamphlet, media activists Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu attempt to section off digital labor into distinct camps to better understand how our definitions of labor, value, and mobility are evolving and overlapping. One of these separations is to put “data labor” on one end and “fan labor” on the other. Data labor is closer to the work done on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and fan labor closer to the work done by Amazon book reviewers. Fan labor is work we willingly do for free and post onto the internet out of sheer good will or freak compulsion. But the borders blur and bleed when one considers how little Mechanical Turk workers get paid, or how some workers testify that it is “entertaining” or “relaxing” to complete the mindless little tasks for cash. Or how book reviewers actually develop a reputation that translates into more significant material gains.

"Getting to Know Seven Mechanical Turk Workers"

Scholz calls what generates economic value on the internet “value fluency.” Here’s one kind of chart of how material and immaterial goods accrue on the internet.

VALUE GENERATED FROM FAN LABOR

Fan Labor –> Material Gain (i.e. getting a real salaried position, free fashion merchandise, a book deal, millions of dollars)

Fan Labor –> Increased Personal Fame (i.e. lifestyle bloggers, YouTube stars, Tila Tequila)

Fan Labor –> Increased Cultural Value (i.e. what we do here at Hydra, to inform people about things we love)

Unlike other forms of media such as newspapers and television, the internet hides its economic support systems–or rather, as Liu puts it, the way it generates profit is “embedded in the medium itself.” Because the internet serves multiple functions, what is commercial and what should be excluded seems less apparent. Unmonetized blogs aren’t generating economic value for the blogger, but the accretion of images uploaded to google increases google’s archive and thus increases its use value which then increases its stock value. Liu cites the fingerprinting of children as an example of a body of data that can be potentially exploited; I think a more cutting example would be the use of Facebook profiles as a source for marketers. Zuckerberg can genuinely believe that Facebook’s primary function is for social networking, but the fact remains that the information contained in millions of profiles is out there to be used in a way that is outside of that function.

Adrian Piper

The Possibility of Self-Exploitation

Scholz also asks a particularly terrifying question: Is it possible to self-exploit? Since it seems ridiculous to claim that posting on a blog or submitting a review of a product is a form of exploitation comparable to actual low-paid factory labor, Scholz rallies behind a less loaded term—what he calls “expropriation.”

According to Scholz’s statistics, 40% of all internet traffic is concentrated on 10 websites. Even highly trafficked websites don’t make that much money on AdSense, but the collective value of every user’s collective labor (like an ant hive) amounts to a lot of value for Google. YouTube works the same way–without the users that go to it to upload and watch videos, the site would have no value. By participating in the most basic way, by simply using the internet, we exploit ourselves.

As of now, the internet is a medium that demands its users to self-exploit. We exploit our own hours of the day, our attention spans, our privacy. The more we reveal and share and interact, the more our presence is valued in the digital world. Is this the only model out there, or does the internet have more redeeming factors?

Francis Alys "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002)

Before reading this pamphlet I can honestly say that I never gave much thought to what I was doing on the internet. Writing for Hydra for example, what was I doing this for? We believe we are generating value in support of the things we love, but is it really that simple? Does passion justify activity on the internet; should the right to publicize every impulse be a matter of morality? Last week Adri diagnosed chronic flattening via over-emphasizing of frivolous content re: n+1 in her “WTFC” post, but all we can do is just throw up our hands in a kind of “you caught me” kind of way, like–oh well, this is the way it is! We too, perpetuate this system of micro-blogging, emotional micro-management, and voluntary self-exploitation. The internet opens up myriad possibilities, knowledge is exchanged for free, people connect, things grow “organically” (or at least it feels that way), but what if the internet requires a whole new set of rules that is counter-intuitive, a morality that applies only to the internet and not to the material world?

Case Study: The Ethics of UbuWeb

In mid-October, UbuWeb, the  now indispensable avant-garde video, sound, and text art archive was hacked. UbuWeb has for years ripped hard-to-find and out-of-print materials to post on the internet, sometimes in downloadable versions. Ubu never asks permission to post an artists’ work, but if the artist ever wants their work taken down, Ubu will take it down immediately with no questions asked.

After the site was mostly back up and running again, there was a message by founder Kenneth Goldsmith explaining Ubu’s posting philosophy. The post was in response to a Frameworks community thread where someone declared, “Ubu is hacked? What good news!” which spurred a deep conversation both for and against the ethics of Ubu. “Because we have no money, we don’t ask permission. Asking permission always involves paperwork and negotiations, lawyers, and bank accounts,” Goldsmith explains.

I can’t help but think that most people in my generation would agree that nothing is wrong with Ubu’s system. I am sometimes almost morally offended if I can’t find something on the internet. We don’t think we are “stealing” from artists when we view or download their work for free, in fact, we expect that it be free.

Exposure now seems to be a greater “good” than money. To be known by many in many ways leads to more opportunities. (Fan Labor –> Personal Relevance –> Material Gain). A system involving professional contracts, copyrights, permissions seems stifling, especially for artists.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s “If it Doesn’t Exist on the Internet It Doesn’t Exist,” a controversial talk he gave in 2005, outlines the shifting ethics of our system. He declares in manifestoesque bravado that “it is our obligation as educators and intellectuals to make sure that the bulk of our production ends up [on the internet], preferably with free and unfettered access to all.” Good virtue and hard work and sharing stuff on the internet result in “oblique but substantial benefits.” Although he gets no money from Ubu, he now has fans, cultural relevance, honorariums, compensated travel around the world.

So now: is it ethical for Goldsmith to receive these perks based on his “exploitation” of other artists? Or is he actually doing the morally right thing by making their work available and these perks just reward? It will be interesting to see how our ideas change in another five years.

(Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Frederic Jameson!)

Darién Gap

Tuesday

November 23, 2010

The soul of the spy is somehow the model of us all.
- Jacques Barzun

Dear Lee,

Thirty-seven years ago this week, you were arrested at the Texas Theater in Dallas as a suspect in the fatal shooting of police officer J.D. Tippit. Patrolman 78, whose initials “J.D.” stood for nothing in particular, had pulled his squad car alongside a white male about thirty, of slender build, who matched the description of a man linked to “a shooting in the downtown area involving the President.” Confirming that he was in the Oak Cliff area, Tippit’s last words to the dispatcher had been a heedless “10-4.”

At 1:08 PM, patrolman 261, C.M. Barnhart, approached a man “drunk down at the end of the north end of Laws Street” who fit the shooter’s description. Joined by patrolman 243, B.L. Apple, the two 3-W motorcycle cops approached what turned out to be local rake and “3 time loser” Lonnie Ray Wright. They were arresting this suspect – who had “a loud color jacket on” – at the end of Laws near the railroad tracks, when at 1:16 they overheard a citizen using squad car 10′s police radio to report the shooting of an officer. Three minutes later, the citizen reported that the officer was dead.

The suspect fleeing the area where the officer had been shot was described as “a white male, about thirty, five eight, black hair, slender, wearing white jacket, a white shirt and dark slacks.” Known at this time as the “Oak Cliff suspect,” it was becoming clear that this suspect might be connected to the “downtown shooting.” But as it was still unknown what the connection might be, the police pursued the suspect in the slaying of a fellow officer while remaining alert for another man connected to the “downtown shooting,” who was potentially armed with a 30 caliber rifle. (As you were arrested, several officers continued to pursue a Pontiac station wagon that was spotted in a gas station with a rifle or shotgun in its back seat.)

So when you were taken in the police had two suspects in one person. One suspect was the man wanted in the shooting of officer J.D. Tippit. The other was the man into whom the world’s response to the events of that day in Dallas had begun to recede. Led astray from the possibility of a larger conspiracy in the assassination of the president, the television cameras zeroed-in on the presentation of a suspect as if it were the identification of the lone gunman. He was, in fact, informed that he was a suspect in the assassination of the president not by investigators but by reporters. And here begins the Gemini effect for those who enter the worlds of the men who killed Jack Kennedy.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaS-UV-BsdY

When the “Oak Cliff suspect” was arrested he had two names for investigators: a Selective Service card identified him as ALEK JAMES HIDELL and a Uniformed Services Identification and Privilege Card as OSWALD, Lee H. When questioned about the names, and what his real name was, you replied, “you have the card yourself and know as much about it as I do.” When police investigated the matter further, going to your rooming house in Dallas to better determine who the man in their custody was, he acquired another name; they found that he had been living there as O. H. Lee.

This Lee or Oswald or Hidell, initially charged with the murder of a police officer and not charged with the assassination of the president until the following day, would further disappear into this world of mirrors when theorists later speculated that the man who shot Kennedy was a Soviet agent who had swapped bodies with the original “Oswald” during “Oswald’s” defection to Soviet Russia, 1959-61, when he was known to the C.I.A. as Lee Henry.

Lee Henry had tried to kill himself with a piece of broken glass after he was denied Soviet citizenship. Having been asked to leave the U.S.S.R. by 8 PM, October 21, 1959, he wrote in his “Historic Diary” at “7.00 P.M.” that day:

I decide to end it. Soak wrist in cold water to numb the pain. Then slash my left wrist. Then plunge wrist into bathtub of hot water. I think “when Rima comes at 8 to find me dead it will be a great shock. Somewhere a violin plays as I watch my life whirl away. I think to myself, “how easy to die” and “a sweet death,” (to violins)

But not only do the medical records at the Ministry of Health, Moscow show that Oswald was admitted at 4 PM (three hours before he claims to have cut himself), the tone of the passage is itself colorful staging, dramatizing a resolution to a visa problem that he successfully translated to a real resolution: “Somewhere a violin plays… I think to myself… ‘a sweet death,’ (to violins).” Oswald’s purple suicide kept him in Russia past 8 PM when, as he wrote in his “Historic Diary,” he was found unconscious, “bathtub water a rich red color.” His blood, in a staged sacrifice to Russia, made the clear water a rich red — while, analogously, his performance guaranteed him an extended stay in that place. Oswald performed transformed the horizon of possibility for Oswald the real. And the blood in the water made it harder for us to see which was which, where one ended and the other began. Oswald looked in the bathroom mirror of his Moscow hotel room, sometime around 3 PM, October 21, 1951, and split himself in two.

Your self-splitting became a quality of reality that would calcify around you in the following years. Rather than solidify you as a person, the increasing amount of research on JFK’s killer has produced many Oswalds — that is, a matrix of multiplication for any person associated with this mirroring human, a seductive world to become lost in. Zygmunt Bauman has written that social control in the mid-20th century shifted from a model of repression to seduction. Rather than present, produce, or put forth arguments to logically dominate a discourse, the discourse of seduction, naturalized in an ideology of consumption, works by deflecting our desires to increasing invisibility. We reach out, in other words, by drawing in. And, as was the case with Oswald, we frequently draw in by harnessing the doubling power of the mirror.

The greater the multiplicity in which you are seen, the more invisible that you become.

And, in this the age of Gemini, we have a world full of corners. The southeast window of the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas, Texas, was such a corner. But Oswald’s duplications did not end there. As he shot down to a target receding to the southwest, the entire space relative to the events, time, and circumstance suddenly exploded in a self-proliferating population of strangers, plotters, theorists, hidden types and others reaching for the manufacturing power of the camera shot.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMtdotTD8lY

An example of this populating effect is Gary Mack‘s identification of a badged man hiding in the bushes photographed in Mary Moorman‘s Polaroid. The Badge Man theory was made public in Nigel Turner’s 1988 documentary, The Men Who Killed Kennedy. This is Mary Moorman’s Polaroid:

If you don’t see a badged man in the bushes behind the grassy knoll, perhaps you aren’t looking hard enough. Here is an enlargement by Jack White, followed by a diagram by Greg Jaynes:

Yes, of course he is there. And, just as certainly, of course he is not. In allowing myself to be seduced without any commitment to the logic of responsibility or even culpability, I can assume that you are guilty while presuming that there must be other men who participated in the assassination of Jack Kennedy. Oswald can and can not act alone–and we enjoy having it both ways. As my eyes follow the traced outline of the Badge Man, I have allowed the liquid world in which he lives to pour forth. I am seduced, declarified, invisible–and there are many others for me to see: the Babushka Lady, the Umbrella Man, Black Dog Man, the Oswald Double in the Doorway of the Depository During the Shooting, the Three Tramps, etc. The water, as it were, appears to us a rich, red color.

And the more that we look, the more that we’d like to see. An investigator goes rogue upon discovering that the factor of culpability is eliminated in the wake of their leads. Without consideration for where they might end up, they end up going everywhere. Researching the Kennedy assassination, one comes across strange outliers like Christian David, who in the mid 80s claimed to have been offered the job of eliminating the president by Corsican mob boss Antoine Guèrini. Serving a prison sentence for smuggling drugs into France from Brazil, he insisted on total silence until he was released from prison, hoping that he could use his information regarding the assassination to reduce prison time. Michel Nicoli, a former drug trafficker now under the American witness protection program, corroborated David’s story. But, although David was released in the 90s, upon release he said no more about the Corsican conspiracy. Stories like David’s (specifically by felons seeking to lessen prison sentences by offering groundbreaking information on the Kennedy assassination) abound; there have been at least two dozen similar claims. Actor Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, who was serving two life terms before he died at the Florence Supermax in 2007, claimed to have shot Kennedy–suggesting that he was one of the Three Tramps found in a boxcar behind Dealey Plaza minutes after the assassination. In 1982, he said to a Dallas radio station:

Do you believe that Lee Harvey Oswald killed president Kennedy, alone, without any aide from a rogue agency of the US govt. or at least a portion of that agency? I believe you are very naive if you do.

Do you believe? I believe that production of Other Oswalds is not only a permanent effect of the seductive conditions of the world of the Kennedy assassination, but such an inevitability that, just as Harrelson implicated himself by approaching the Plaza, every approach to the Plaza (the locus of the events) is necessarily productive of more Oswalds and implicated in production of more mirrors, evermore elaborate. And I, too, am now guilty. Because I have been seduced, I must seduce. And, in researching the events in Dallas on November 22, 1963, I can function by no principle except the observation of total proliferation and deflection. There will always be more gunmen. And, of course, you acted alone.

Sincerely,

Edgar

Gaza smuggling tunnel (image: Reuters)

More and more I feel that we live in a world of tunnels

Some evidence: the overwrought celebration surrounding the world’s longest tunnel, newly completed, in Switzerland. Also: the recent spike in illicit tunneling activity between the United States and Mexico, as reported by the New York Times.

The craziest thing about our tunnel-world (shall we say – our Tunelandia) is its mirror image quality. Above every tunnel runs a highway (kind of like the old joke about the cat-buttered-toast monorail). Just think: at the exact moment that two desperate immigrants were using a shoe-horn to tunnel from Belarus to Poland, EU passport holders were cruising through the gates into the Schengen region above them with the blink of an iris scan and the swipe of an ID card – a biometric booya, if you will.  And as drug cartels industriously burrow below Nogales and Calexico,  thousands of trucks coast across the NAFTA-highways atop those cities’ surfaces, their flatbeds laden with sneakers, tortillas, steel.

Herman Melville once wrote: In this world, shipmates, sin that pays its way can travel freely, and without passport, whereas Virtue, if a pauper, is stopped at all frontiers. I think about that quote a lot when I’m in Texas.

Highway | Tunnel

Here is a thought on the border: Where globalization has contracted distance and exploded movement, Control descends to restrict access; Where access is restricted, a tunnel will appear. “The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.”  These were the terms of the Web Wars of the early 2000s (e.g. Napster, Kazaa) – For what is a torrent but a tunnel from me to you, burrowing through the dark net beneath the Information Superhighway.

All this talk about how Arcade Fire is from Texas

Houston, to be exact, which is home to an extensive underground tunnel network and a eerie landscape of over and underpasses, toll highways built for the exclusive use of the paying rich. None of which seems to serve any function except to divorce particular streams of commerce and humanity from others.  Arcade Fire’s new album draws inspiration from the claustrophobic sprawl of Houston’s landscape, building on themes expressed in songs on its earlier Funeral album like this one:

… And if the snow buries / My neighborhood
And /  if my parents are crying
Then I’ll dig a tunnel / from my window to yours
Yea a tunnel / from my window to yours

You climb / out the chimney
And meet me in the middle / The middle of the town …

Arcade Fire – “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”

Beneath Gaza territory lines, smugglers herd cows through tunnels

These are tunnels that serve as lifelines during times of sanction and embargo for a kidnapped population while tanks sit atop its highways.  Other items trafficked through these underground channels (import and export) include:

• canvas sacks full of food
  

  Gaza smuggling tunnel (image: AP)

• beauty products
• second-hand clothes
• Israeli coffee
• blue jeans
• mobile phones
• cement
• fresh fruit (figs, lychees, mangos)
• chickens, pigeons
• hair gel
• popsicle sticks
• firearms

As covered here, here, and here.  And in this amazing piece in This American Life, featuring real-time conversation with a Gaza tunnel operator via cellphone on the trials and tribulations of his business.

What’s happening beneath Gaza is not unlike the situation along the Southwest border between the U.S. and Mexico, where law enforcement finds more than one new illicit tunnel a month.

Some are short, narrow passageways that require those navigating them to slither. Others are long, sophisticated underground thoroughfares strung with electric cables and ventilation hoses.

One high-end tunnel found in Calexico, Calif. originated in the master bedroom of a Mexican home and extended to a garage on the American side. It had a phone line and air conditioning…

In Gaza, tunnelling has become such a critical and lucrative activity that Hamas has started taking over the trade and taxing/licensing independent tunnel owners.  I am not privy to the details of the operations conducted by the traficantes probably under my feet right now – but in light of the the cartels’ increasing institutionalization, I would wager they are working according to a similar organized profit scheme — as they have done vis-a-vis hopeful migrants.

These tunnels are passageways created by and necessitated by coercive stoppages forced into the natural flow of social commerce. They are reminders that every misery has its resistance, its stubborn will to survive – but also its petty profiteer. Gilles Deleuze once said this: the coils of a serpent are even more complex than the burrows of a molehill. What he might have meant was this: even underground, the Man will be right behind you, shouldering his way into your excavations, levying taxes & installing keycard machines, asking you for your papers.

Sometimes I think about all the tunnels under Europe

Here are the tunnels I think about, off the top of my head:

1. the “Chunnel“
2. the new Swiss super-long-tunnel
3. the Large Hadron Collider
4. the “Tube,” etc.

How can one small “continent” have so many big tunnels? And apparently the EU hopes to connect all of Europe by tunnel sometime soon, starting with the Swiss supertunnel! Do they have enough earth left beneath them to support the ground they walk on? In my brain, the ground underneath Europe already looks like this:

actually a visualization of a leafcutting ant colony structure (image: Carol LaFayette, Texas A&M)

But with more water! Hugh Holub, former public works director in Nogales, Arizona wrote about the precarious vertigo of his superterranean city: “There is a joke in Nogales that someday its entire downtown will collapse into a giant sinkhole due to the many drug tunnels in the city.” And indeed tunnels in Nogales have been discovered because a bus abruptly sinks into pavement where digging has weakened the road.

One of these days Europe will wake up in the morning and find that this has happened to Switzerland overnight:

Guatemala City sinkhole, circa June 2010

Leaving only the highways and bridges standing, suspended from nothing, traffic(k)less.

Or before then all our highways will collapse from the weight of our commerce or a lack of subjacent support. And those who were commuters will have to join their smuggler step-brethren to live in the tunnels, with nothing but the extralegal economy and our collective proto-civilization spirituality to build upon. Like some post-apocalyptic ninja turtles.