Month: August 2024

I have an aversion to realism for esoteric (to me) reasons that I find justification for in an essay, Lemurian Time War, from the CCRU about William S. Burroughs:

Every act of writing is a sorcerous operation, a partisan action in a war where multitudes of factual events are guided by the powers of illusion….Even representative realism participates—albeit unknowingly—in magical war, collaborating with the dominant control system by implicitly endorsing its claim to be the only possible reality

I say this is a post-hoc justification because I don’t know exactly why I feel averse to writing realism. a story draft I just finished is more or less realistic; it takes as stylistic departure a certain kind of corporate HR language that lends the story a slight strangeness, but what “happens” in the story is normal everyday life stuff. for whatever reason, when I think of the kind of fiction I’d like to write, I imagine surrealism or magical realism, cartoonish burlesque, dream-logic narratives that defy clean categorization and play with the expected relationship of literature to whatever “reality” is. I like the story I wrote, but it also seems “small,” both for being more-or-less realistic, and for not being all that engaged politically or socially. (plus it’s short, only ~1700 words on first draft.)

relatedly, there’s probably some unresolved tension in my psyche that manifests in seeing my own life as “boring,” and that therefor the “things that happen to me” aren’t worth writing about. the one story I wrote isn’t about something that happened to me, though I can see where personal experience has been transformed into the emotional background of the story. the other story I’m working on is more closely informed by actual events of my life, but not related in the way I would tell the story to someone interested in the actual events of my life; things are exaggerated, characters are rendered unkindly, things are rearranged for effect. strangely, though, this story lends itself more to a surreal, unstable mode. so I guess what this post is about is, what exactly is art’s relation to reality, and what exactly makes something “realistic.”

the reason this question comes up for me is that the two artists—David Lynch and Thomas Pynchon—that I most admire and who I spend the most time thinking about do not tell stories that are “realistic.” and a lot of the time I spend thinking about their stories involves me wondering how exactly I can tap into the kind of dream logic they operate on. this line of thinking feeds on a kind of schoolmarmish, backwards undergraduate way of thinking about art, which conceives of artists as puzzle makers, cryptographers with secret correspondence keys for what their images, symbols, motifs “translate” into in “normal” terms. which is to say, it’s a conception of art as a purely intellectual exercise. Lynch himself says that the way he works is by intuition and revision, developing ideas, reworking, taking things out, putting new things back in, so that the symbols in his work are living, dynamic glyphs, not pure allegories.

there are two tangential concerns in this post, I think: one, that I need to allow myself to work at whatever I find engaging to work at, free of any preconceived notion of what’s “supposed to” be made. this might mean dropping the demand that I make something “weird” or “surreal” or “dreamy” in favor of making something at all, even if it’s closer to “realism” than I sometimes think I should be. and two, that to work in a dream mode, I have to be comfortable with not understanding exactly what the thing I make means, or at least not having a readymade account, were someone to ask for one. (worth noting that neither Lynch nor Pynchon [Lynchon, lol] ever deign to give an account of their work, despite there clearly being something the work means to them, personally)

and I guess, a third thing: that reality is stranger than anyone who demands realism from their art would ever admit. writing always requires contact with “real life”—even in the most effective but deranged stories, something resonates with our understanding of the world—but “real life” sometimes is surreal, or like a film noir, or a ghost story.

this all speaks to what I always want from art: making art ought to feel like getting away with something I shouldn’t be allowed to do. this is how I take Adorno’s declaration that “every work of art is an uncommitted crime.” art is an act of transgression, borne out of sublimated anger at a perceived lack of freedom (at least, it is for me).

which isn’t to say that the content of art has to be transgressive. but I have long been drawn to art that is transgressive. lately I’ve been watching more movies, but, not wanting to be someone who just watches what’s offered by a single corporation, I’ve been seeking out movies that aren’t offered by the good people at Criterion. if you’re someone who loves movies but doesn’t love mainstream movies, if you venture away from the hallowed halls of what Criterion collects, you’re bound to stumble upon a subset of movies that are broadly seen as “trashy,” “bad taste,” “lurid,” etc. I haven’t myself yet watched many of these genre movies, but as I’ve oriented myself in this section of the virtual video shop, there’s a thrill in realizing I can tell any kind of story I want. for whatever reason, it’s been immensely helpful to me to start thinking about the stories I want to tell as genre movies: crime thriller! erotic horror! paranormal noir! some of them I could actually even do treatments of as screenplays, but even if I don’t plan to make movie (I do), thinking of a story as a movie, to my broken 21st century brain, is way more exciting than thinking of stories in the Gordon Lish/Iowa Workshop way of words after words, plot’s not important, blah blah blah. using genre conventions is a way of swinging a crowbar against the confines of the Reality Control System.

even this post, I’m not sure I’m getting across what I mean, and I’m kinda just letting the ideas spill out without really knowing where it’s going, trusting it means something to me and sure I’ll draw connections as they come to mind but fuck you.

palm trees shade
valentine etched in concrete

flowers pressed 
—some other 
time, boot heel
crunches glass cracklings
a curbside shindig
no one was invited to

it's too much to wonder
what could be
what is
is this

the hills of Sanfrancisco
separate aeons
of possibility,
futures cancelled
to save the worst of all
it won't end 

the coda to The Phantom Empire, by Geoffrey O’Brien, touches upon a question I ponder from time to time: will we always have movies? won’t, at some point in the collapsing future, the tools necessary to make films become harder and harder to come by? most significantly, contemporary film stock is made from petroleum byproducts—and the components in digital cameras are extracted in processes that are also detrimental to the environment. the mechanism for distribution, the zigzagging of flights between locations, studios, and premieres, the state subsidies that launder the blood money of the American Experiment. “And will this empire indeed go on forever? Won’t the electricity run out, won’t the raw materials have to be rationed, won’t such practices fall victim to the impending war against pollutants?….[Maybe people in the future] would simply lose interest. Having evolved out of a world where the little living pictures were everywhere, perhaps the most exciting thing they could witness would be the screen going blank.”

movies, more than any other medium, inspire the deepest ambivalence in me. people can decry novels as “bourgeois,” reflections of a particular formation of subjectivity, relics of an era and a class with the leisure time required to read hundreds of pages. I’m not convinced by this, but it gives pause, and novels certainly can be used as a method of withdrawal from the world. nonetheless, stories, even those written on paper and bound in books, will not likely disappear, and they have been and will remain objects that beckon to the highest aspects of the human spirit.

painting has certainly become a little more than a barnacle on the flank of financialized capital. since at least the 1950s, what appears on a canvas is less important than how much money can exchange hands behind it. the most “valuable” paintings more often than not sit in Swiss warehouses or on Caribbean islands, hidden from the prying hands of national governments seeking to remove wealth from circulation, not to mention any eyes that might see something beautiful. but then we are confronted with those images on the cave walls of southern France, and we’re reminded just how mysterious this impulse is, to represent, in whatever material’s to hand, the forms that constitute the world.

movies, though. movies swallowed reality. movies promise a shared community experience, but only by turning each audience member into an interchangeable cipher. the movies colonize our memories, our dreamspaces; not just with their plots, but with the private lives of their actors, the business intrigue between their production companies. the movies are everywhere, too: television shows, advertisements, music videos, TikTok dances, YouTube essays, surveillance footage. and the movies operate by flagrantly manipulating perception: whether or not you recognize it as technique, or an illusion, the fact is that with movies we’ve managed the most effective means of mind control ever dreamt of. the Roman empire would kill to have movies, and perhaps that’s exactly what happened; Leni Riefenstahl, Ronald Reagan, Top Gun: Maverick.

but a world without movies? without the beauty, splendor, horror, or longing we’ve experienced through the screen? without these glimpses into a reality we inhabit but can’t quite realize? it pains me to imagine a world without movies. but perhaps that’s what exactly what the movies want us to feel.

watched “Crazeologie” last night, which is a student film directed by Louis Malle, who most people know as the director of My Dinner With Andre. on a technical level the short was competent, demonstrating a natural feel for how to work the camera, how to pace dialogue and block actors. as an attempt at making Cinema of the Absurd, hey, Malle tried at least, but not everyone can be Samuel Beckett.

i’m discouragemaxxing. hackcore. totally impostorsyndromepilled. it’s giving failed novelist. big poseur vibes. this blog is boring-coded. in short, he’s NGMI.

up till today, I’ve been pretty good about working here and there on this and that. today I haven’t written anything and don’t feel much like writing anything. the things I’m reading all make me feel less-than-confident in my own ability to write eloquently or poetically. it’s part of the problem with writing, I guess, feeling like what you yourself write reads as too obvious or trite, because of course if you’re writing your own thoughts which are always buzzing in your own voice in your own head, then it’ll sound uninspired to you. (really need to stop publicizing my doubts; I’m fucking talented, & no one has my perspective, & all my opps [who live in my head] are bitchass chumps).

feeling like I shouldn’t only be writing “watched this, read this, listened to this,” or if I’m going to do that, do other kinds of writing (my coworker once complimented the writing I do here but also said he would like to see more “day-to-day” kind of writing, something I very much struggle with, and justify away via projected disdain for autobiographical writing, though that all probably suggests it’s what I need to lean into the most, the area of writing I find most daunting; on this note, I rather enjoyed my friend’s latest newsletter which he characterized as too “dear diary”) or else do more rigorous critical writing. to resurrect my dormant newsletter, I’m planning a big multi-part project that’s probably actually a bad idea because it will have me thinking too much about someone else’s art rather than making my own, but it’ll be a good excuse to do a bunch of research I’ve been meaning to do anyway.

reading The Phantom Empire: Movies in the Mind of the 20th Century, by Geoffrey O’Brien. some of the most poetic, elliptical and evocative critical writing I’ve ever read. this is one of the things that’s making me feel like my own writing is flat & boring. support-anons will say “it’s a published book, it’s not a first draft, O’Brien didn’t land on those images or ideas without working them over.” shut up.

finished The Culture of Narcissism. ironically, given Lasch’s contempt for the “therapeutic” turn in our priorities as a result of the conditions of commodity capitalism, reading this book was actually pretty therapeutic for me. it helped me see certain habits of mine in a different light, namely that it’s a result of an underdeveloped ego that leads me to overvalue the esteem of others to the point of always tailoring my behavior to best present as whatever it is someone else needs of me. this is a pervasive problem among people nowadays—always behaving in such a way as to curry favor with a (largely imagined) audience. one of the most interesting aspects of Lasch’s analysis is in locating the neuroses of contemporary culture in a malignant superego. for me, personally, this manifests as a preoccupation with doing things the “correct” way—a view that is inimical to the creative process.

for all the book’s strengths, however, The Culture of Narcissism spends an inordinate amount of energy on lamenting the loss of certain values that seem, to my view, typical of more oppressive social arrangements: Lasch takes it on faith that the “family” is a unmitigated social good; that former gender customs a la chivalry, even with their shortcomings, helped restrain the worst excesses of patriarchy. his impulse towards rigorous historicizing is unevenly applied, in my opinion. the thrust of his argument is worth grappling with, but too many of his talking points, even if they are presented with more nuance, only echo typical conservative anxieties about the decadence of modern society.

if I were interested in being that kind of writer, I’d try to meld some of his arguments with a media ecology style exploration of internet pornography, but instead that’ll probably end up in some fictional creation instead.

picked Satantango back up again. I wouldn’t say I’m struggling with it so much as it’s something that forces you to let happen to you, and keeping track of the intercharacter dynamics takes a backseat to keeping your head afloat amidst the deluge of text. it’s a work that I’m sure would reward deep familiarity, and a first read does not provide anyone with deep familiarity. but the atmosphere of screaming desolation, and the grim absurdity that’s pressed out of the desperation these people seem so crushed by, is intoxicating. glad I picked it back up.

watched The Seventh Seal, always a delight. I should write something about Bergman’s belief that cinema has nothing to do with literature, because it’s an interesting question, especially for me, a writer who is always tempted to follow the siren call of filmmaking.

a new JPEGMAFIA album is out, which means that I want to make beats again. it’s honestly fucked up how great Peggy is at producing; it’s too bad his rapping can’t keep pace. ah well, we can’t all be renaissance men.