cody frank

this morning I read an essay written by Jay Isaac, a painter and instagram mutual of mine. in the essay, he discusses the situation of the fine artist under the capitalist ruling class, how the job of contemporary artists is essentially the creation of luxury consumer products, and how that task requires complicity in the neocolonialist genocide and resource extraction that buttresses the global capitalist system. Isaac succinctly lays all this out so as to provide a foundation for rallying workers in the creative industries to imagine ways of noncompliance outside that framework.

since I’m not a painter or any other kind of fine artist, the particulars of that problem, while of interest, and cause for solidarity, don’t exactly translate to what I face as a writer. but as I’m striving to in some way participate in the business of publishing, since I believe an artist does have a duty to at least try to interface with the public of their time, it would be useful to particularize, since I am not interested in either allowing my work to legitimize The System or in bending myself into the shape demanded by such a System, as so many careerist writers do nowadays.

the visual arts have long been entangled with the desires of the ruling class. one need only think of the paradigmatic patronage of the Medicis to see how entwined the history of painting and sculpture are with the highest stratum of society. literature, and specifically novels, have a more complex relationship to social class. in theory, reading is a widely accessible form of artistic engagement; in practice, the ability to read novels, especially those novels that partake in the high cultural tradition (value neutral: not saying these novels are necessarily “better,” not right now at least) requires, at minimum, literacy, and usually a working familiarity with the history of (western) ideas, which, prior to (and after) the middle of the 20th century, was unavailable to the vast majority of people. not to mention the leisure time to read them. if painting is the emblematic artform of the highest social classes, then novels are the bourgeois artform par excellance. and like the bourgeoisie, novels occupy an ambivalent position, equally liable to undermine traditions as they are to cozy up with power when it suits them.

that’s all very philosophical, and not where I’m trying to go right now. in practical considerations of the nature of publishing nowadays, let us consider Penguin Random House, the biggest, by a big margin, of the Big Five publishing houses. Penguin Random House is owned by Bertelsmann, a German multinational media conglomerate. “German multinational conglomerate” should be setting off alarm bells in your head, and rightfully so here: despite painting itself as a Christian publishing company that aided resistance to the Nazis in order to be granted a publishing license by the Allies after the war, C. Bertelsmann Verlag was the number one supplier of printed media to the Wehrmacht. the man in charge of Bertelsmann at the time, Heinrich Mohn, was a supporting member of the SS; his son, Reinhard Mohn, was responsible for transforming the company into the international behemoth it is today. the number one book publisher in the US is owned by a conglomerate that lied about its support for the Nazi war machine as late as 2002, when Bertelsmann was forced to apologize.

(tangentially, another subsidiary of Bertelsmann, BMG, recently cut ties with Roger Waters over Waters’ criticism of Israel. Bertelsmann really loves running cover for fascism.)

that’s all only one example of course, but an illustrative one. HarperCollins is, as everyone knows, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp. Macmillan is owned by Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, another German company with a Nazi past. it is only natural that corporations trend towards a corporatist vision of the world.

none of this is to say that everything published by these companies is inherently fascist. I might argue that there are certain ideological inertias that would work to prevent something truly revolutionary from being published—it’s here that I should acknowledge that I haven’t yet read Dan Sinykin’s recent Big Ficiton, about the effect that the conglomerate era has had on what kinds of works get published. but fiction, done right, is elusive, tricksterish, undefangable, a double agent in the offices of publishing executives. Pynchon calls it “the ever-subversive medium,” a characterization I want to believe in, despite the myriad works being published nowadays that seem so eager to legitimize the corrupting influence that corporate agendas have on the human spirit.

there are many small independent publishing outfits putting out what I assume is interesting work: I admit I’m not very good at “keeping up” with what’s being published. perhaps I should change that; perhaps I should also try my own hand at publishing, at building alternatives to the corporatist model that’s dominated literature for the past 70 years.

this week I’m practicing what Julia Cameron in The Artist’s Way calls “reading deprivation.” a while back my therapist half jokingly recommended that I take a break from reading, because while it is important for an artist and especially a writer to read a lot and widely, reading also has a narcotizing effect, or maybe more like a benzodiazepinizing effect. too much engagement with what others have written tends to cloud the awareness, and to write with anything like power requires acute awareness with what’s going on in my own psyche. plus, I’m trying to get out more, and cultivate experiences, and the time I use to read amounts to plenty of opportunity to fuck around IRL.

but w/r/t delving into the material of my own psyche, I’ve been thinking a lot about surrealism lately. if you’ve read my newsletter essays, you know I’m pretty good at clearly articulating information; in a different life I would have been a very good technical writer. but all my fiction writing efforts in the past few months have left me cold, because what I’m writing isn’t very evocative, and the narration is boring, and the plotting is plodding. there’s no energy in any of it. literature gets its power when it’s dug out of the writer’s soul, when it deals with those aspects that don’t lend themselves to “explanation”—what can’t be articulated via technical writing. (though I’d argue even technical writing betrays itself and can suggest Mystery, but that’s a different subject). plus, dealing with reality by means of Techne is why we find ourselves in the dire straits of Modernity in the first place; privileging Magic and Mystery and Poetry is an existential necessity at this moment in history.

surrealism, in theory, offers a method for devaluing the rational in favor of the irrational, a rebalancing of the scales between the ego and the subconscious. complicating this, though, is that surrealism as it was practiced by many of the official Surrealists was boring, contrived, an evasion of the actual potential of the movement. Breton was a coward, Dalí was a fascist lapdog, Magritte treated art as a parlor game.

that being said, Dalí’s method for surrealist creation, the paranoiac-critical method, nonetheless promises a way of evoking the situation of terror that the postmodern subject finds themselves in. Rem Koolhaas describes it thus:

Dali’s Paranoid-Critical Method is a sequence of two consecutive but discrete operations:

1. the synthetic reproduction of the paranoiac’s way of seeing the world in a new light — with its rich harvest of unsuspected correspondences, analogies and patterns; and

2. the compression of these gaseous speculations to a critical point where they achieve the density of fact….

imagining that there are connections unseen by the everyday person and striving to convey those connections on a level beneath (or sur-, ie “above”) the perfectly rational is the task of any artist, even ones who believe themselves to be depicting “reality.” if you wanted to be perfectly rational, you would write journalism, not fiction.

it is here that I admit I miss the practical use of marijuana for inducing such a paranoid state of mind, but before I get back to smoking fat doinks, it would benefit me to first cultivate the skills for creating from this perspective on the natch, because back when I smoked too much weed I often mistakenly thought doing so would help inspire me, when more often than not it only inspired distraction and horniness. so having practice and discipline with writing while sober would set me up to actually seize upon weed’s ability to help its users be taken by surprise by unexpected connections: exactly what the act of writing does for me, at its most potent.

what I’m doing now to try and get at that is “automatic writing,” another surrealist method. for a set period of time, 25 minutes in my case, I try to write nonstop, as quickly as possible, in an effort to bypass or short circuit the conscious reasoning faculty and give vent to the process of thought unfiltered. it is a good exercise, but it doesn’t necessarily lead to anything effective as art. sometimes it does, sometimes an image or a striking juxtaposition emerges, but this is the trouble with a lot of surrealism: it’s not enough to throw together at random elements for the sake of weirdness. in an interview about Inland Empire (the one Lynch movie I haven’t seen), David Lynch says:

[You] need to have ideas. You can’t sit down and start writing—I guess the Surrealists did, they’d just start writing anything: you, know, “The kiln is silver, and it has red.” Or whatever you see, you write down, or whatever just starts flowing. But when it starts flowing, that’s the flow of ideas, just a flow, but it may be total baloney. So, yeah, you can write pages of baloney, but you need ideas.

(interestingly, despite his status as the most widely popular Surrealist in film history, David Lynch doesn’t much care for Surrealism as such. elsewhere he admits to not even having seen many of Luis Buñuel’s films.)

compare Thomas Pynchon on surrealism:

Having as yet virtually no access to my dream life, I missed the main point of [Surrealism], and became fascinated instead with the simple idea that one could combine inside the same frame elements not normally found together to produce illogical and startling effects. What I had to learn later on was the necessity of managing this procedure with some degree of care and skill: any old combination of details will not do.

all of which is to say that automatic writing can be a useful exercise (David Lynch says as much elsewhere), but it’s only useful as an exercise. what’s produced by it can be mined for “ideas,” or can provide “access to my dream life,” but it won’t in itself create anything with power or energy. power and energy being somewhat mystical concepts I’m using to describe writing that I think taps into whatever it is that feeds the greatest works of art.

the utility (or necessity) of surrealism is something of an open question for me still: the world we live in now, with the media landscape acting as a kind of electrified miasma permeating the ether, schizophrenizing reality, makes us all paranoid subjects locked in personalized solipsistic hells. here’s Rob Horning on the matter:

The “false facts” we might spontaneously generate in interacting with social media — whether we are feeding our paranoid fears or indulging in their flip side, unrepentant self-aggrandizement — are no more or less false than the ideological interpretations of reality that pass as “real facts,” the ones convenient to power and the reproduction of existing distributions of privilege and so on. In fact, they fit that ideology’s individualist bias, the belief that it is our duty to aspire to fashion a private reality for ourselves and that our social status hinges on the success of that project.

a reactionary tact to take against the individualized surrealist thrust of electronic mass media would be to reassert, in a High Modernist way, some contrived metanarrative, to derive from Tradition the Source of Ultimate Meaning despite the waste lands created by a fractured reality field. surely there’s value in seeking new meaning from sources of old meaning. but rather than turn away, paranoiacally, from the general motion of the world as it futher splinters, is there not the possibility that running with that trend might lead to some hitherto unglimpsed wholeness? perhaps ahead lies only disintegration: it’s what the laws of thermodynamics suggest anyway. I have no answers, and I no longer wish to provide coherent analysis. instead I’ll skip above the widening cracks in the melting ice of reality until I inevitably slip down into whatever abyss lies beneath.

a thing I hate is when people think of me as someone who “likes books.” not because I don’t, obviously I do, but because it reduces it to the level of like, “being a gamer,” or of “liking coffee.” it sounds like it’s merely a consumer choice, designating which market demographic I belong to. people have even bought me novelty socks with stacks of books on them.

to be sure, plenty of people do “like books” in exactly this way. people who participate in library book clubs, most high school literature teachers, even many academics. all people who “love books.” I would say I don’t begrudge them this, but I do, because it cheapens the power of books.

reading Nietzsche or Shakespeare or Flaubert or Plato can and should push someone to radically examine what it means to be alive. taking seriously what reading does to you, how it alters you, forces you to confront fundamental truths of the human condition, this can and should inspire commitment to living more fully, to treating your life not as something to slink through, making as little trouble as possible, but as an opportunity to experience the drama of the cosmos as directly as possible, as a bodhisattva would, or a Romantic would.

I say all this not because I’m particularly good at burning burning burning, Kerouac-style, but in the hopes that I don’t end up as someone who merely “likes books.”

today my friends announced something that I knew they’d been working on for a while, a new series of episodes about Mad Men for their podcast. Erikk told me that I am personally responsible for this idea, because I suggested to him that they do something a little lower stakes than their last series of episodes, about Henry David Thoreau and Ted Kaczynski, since that project, uh, sort of got the better of them, with an entire year gap between the time the first several episodes were released and when the last few were. what I suggested was they watch The Sopranos, or at least this is what Erikk tells me I suggested. Mad Men is more suited to what they’re trying to get out of this new series, so I don’t begrudge the change, even though I haven’t seen Mad Men beyond the first two episodes. if you’re interested, I’ll let them tell you what it is they’re trying to get out of this new series, because this is my blog, not theirs.

what I’m doing now instead of watching Mad Men is rewatching Twin Peaks, the original run, the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, the deleted scenes from the feature film The Missing Pieces (which I’ve never seen), and the limited run reboot Twin Peaks: The Return. the announcement of the Relentless Picnic’s rewatch/reevaluation makes me think it might be worthwhile to do something similar myself, for Twin Peaks. though I wish I had had this idea before watching the first six episodes of the show, because I would have been more deliberate with my viewing.

no matter. instead, what I’ll do is prepare for some kind of critical project centered around rewatching Twin Peaks: The Return, because, as great as the original run of the show is (well, about half of the original run, excluding the nosedive season 2 takes after we find out who killed Laura Palmer), the Showtime limited series is of an entirely different breed, different even from the rest of David Lynch’s directorial work.

besides, if I were to comment at length on the original run of the series, a lot of what I’d say would be resentment over the fact that the writers swerved away from what would have been the most interesting aspect of the plot: the romantic entanglement between Cooper and Audrey. fuck you, Lara Flynn Boyle!!!!!!!! i’m saying this now because i’m vowing to not dwell too much on this in whatever it is i do end up putting out, even though it goes some way towards understanding what’s going on with Cooper in The Return. but that’s all metatextual and therefor not open for interpretation.

retyping a story that I’m very pleased with. feeling better about my writing efforts than i was a few days ago. it’s good for me to post something here every day, i think.

Manhattan district federal judge Loretta Preska ordered a trove of files from two court cases pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein, from 2015 and 2016, unsealed this week. several of those documents have been made public now, and naturally a lot of sensationalist reporting promises to detail all the names listed in these documents. from what I’ve seen, not much of the info is all that new. many of the names included in the depositions are only mentioned in denials by the accusers, as in “no I never met George Lucas/Leonardo DiCaprio/Cate Blanchett.” there are obviously also plenty of incriminating mentions, of Bill Clinton and Marvin Minsky and Stephen Hawking and Tom Pritzker and Alan Dershowitz, but if you still trust any of those people wrt their connections to the late “disgraced financier,” may you find the light of God someday.

more shocking to me is news that Stephen Deckoff, founder of Black Diamond Capital Management, unveiled the renovations he’s had done on his recently purchased property Little St. James, the US Virgin Island better known as Jeffrey Epstein’s Island aka Pedophile Island. Deckoff’s plan is to turn the location of an untold number of horrific acts of violence and child sex abuse into a luxury resort.

if you can find a better metaphor for the liberal imagination, I will give you enough money to buy your own island.

it’s january, so i’m taking a break from alcohol. it rained last night, so january’s not exactly “dry” though, is it? ha ha ha. i didn’t sleep well. as i was drifting off my girlfriend awoke me asking “what was that??” i only caught the last mental impressions of some kind of tap sound, or banging sound, according to my girlfriend’s characterization. but our dog hadn’t reacted so it must not have been anything? as i lay in bed i convinced myself that lurking in my kitchen was a ghost or some other malignant entity. the only thing to do with such a presence is to banish it, which i did by telling myself “that’s ridiculous,” as though i don’t suspect that such things may occur.

then i awoke again after what felt like a long, convoluted, involved period of dreaming. what the dream was i don’t remember. i’m working on keeping a dream journal, as a way of bringing my subconscious and my waking conscious more in alignment. but last night was a difficult, fragmented visit to dreamland. because it felt like so much had happened already, i was sure it was nearing morning, perhaps an hour until my alarm was set to go off. nope, it was only about 130am. i spent much of the rest of the night tossing and turning, sweating, slipping in and out of fitful drowses and disjointed dreams, the only details of which that i remember involve me sing-shouting olivia rodrigo’s “get him back,” and purchasing a leather joint holder for my girlfriend’s friend, who doesn’t smoke, while longing to be able to smoke myself, which i haven’t done in about six months now.

when my alarm went off at 6, the finer details of all this REM sleep dissipated, leaving me disoriented. usually when i dream and wake up i feel refreshed and aware, even when the dreams aren’t pleasant. but last night black bagged me, kicked me in the gut, and dumped me on the side of the road, a road i knew i lived on, but couldn’t tell in which direction i lived.

so i was tired. and because my day job situation is all fucked up, since the library where i work flooded, things are generally unsettled. and when things are unsettled and i’m tired, every self-defeating, discouraged thought i’ve ever had returns with a vengeance. i’ll never finish anything worthwhile. if i do, i’ll never get it published. if i do, no one will ever read it. because no one reads this blog. because i never finish anything worthwhile on it. because i don’t have enough time, because writing something worthwhile requires losing yourself a little, being Deep in the Shit of my subconscious, something that’s hard to do when i know i have to be at work in an hour. david lynch quoted someone, a childhood friend’s dad who was a painter if i remember correctly, as saying that in order to get one good hour of painting done, you need four hours of free time. now, this is also about the fact that painting requires a lot of set up and materials, which doesn’t translate to writing, but the spirit of the point still stands.

i told my friends, who number among the few consistent readers of this blog, that i was discouraged, that i didn’t think blogging was doing what i need for it to do, namely get attention for the thing that i believe myself highly capable at, namely writing. there’s no easy way around getting eyes on the art; it’s been a problem for artists for at least two centuries, when art became an expression of an individual’s subjectivity. it requires a considerable amount of luck, but also “shameless persistence,” a phrase i came across in, i think it was, a blurb from percival everett, on a book i don’t remember the title of. “shameless persistence” is now my mantra (though i don’t do mantra meditation, i “just sit” zazen). “brazenness” is the energy i’m bringing into 2024.

in addition to those things, art also requires sacrifice, and what i’m realizing is that what’s most readily sacrificed, and most valuably sacrificed, is being reliable at my day job. and it’s looking like i’ll be afforded a considerable leash here in the next few months, being allowed to “work” from home for several hours a week, mostly putting together orders for new books. that means i won’t “have to be” anywhere for work a lot of the time. and my boss was spread thin before our library flooded, so now he’s too preoccupied to worry much about me, because he trusts me, because i’m reliable.

there are stories i need to edit, stories i need to draft. there’s a mess of notes i need to decide what to do with. i need to stop placing too strict demands on myself and just play around and have fun because having fun and playing around is what gets you chicks dude.

what’s up with all my dreams about smoking weed?

the library i work at flooded extensively. the building is 15,064 square feet, and damn near every single one of those square feet of carpet was sopping wet. last wednesday night/thursday morning, the oxnard area was inundated with four inches of rain in a single hour. local senior living apartments near the harbor saw the worst of the flooding. whoever said it never rains in southern california usually is right, but in case you haven’t heard, things have gotten a little weird, weather-wise, around the world.

in addition to the carpet, up to two feet of the drywall was saturated with water. the library administration team told staff that it will take at least two weeks to remediate the building, and the library will be closed indefinitely. my boss told me, “off the record,” that it will be five to six months before we can open up again. he also mentioned, “candidly,” that he’s trying to avoid this leading to furloughs.

i’m currently sitting at a different library branch, one that’s much smaller, only open in the afternoons, and, for most of the day, quiet as the grave. i’m still waiting to find out what the next few months will look like for me, and desperately hoping that my life isn’t terribly inconvenienced by it. and, “candidly,” “off the record,” a furlough wouldn’t be the most inconvenient for me, so long as i can get unemployment.

this all’s been an opportunity to reflect on how i feel about the library i work for (not great), how i feel about public library work in general (better than i thought), what i want to focus my attention on more actively (writing), whether i want to stay in ventura (to be determined). i’ve applied for a few other librarian positions. i’m slowly gathering notes for some kind of work about Ventura, this placed i’ve lived for eight and a half years now. i’m toying with maybe doing renegade local journalism, and embracing the idea that ventura can be like kafka’s prague, or pessoa’s lisbon, or wcw’s patterson.

there’s a lot of time to use while i’m here at this empty library. i better get to writing.

a while back, my friend angie messaged me about a nabokov novel she was reading at the time, i don’t remember which. “occasionally while reading nabokov i’ll feel pynchon like, ghosting across the page. and then i go a little cross eyed trying to figure out how u teach that particular style.”

lore has it that even if pynchon didn’t take nabokov’s lit class at cornell, he at the very least sat in on it. vlady doesn’t recall young tommy, but vera nabokov claims to remember reading his essays, which were written in half-printing, half-script. independent of that, it’s obvious that nabokov looms large as an influence on pynchon; there are overt references to lolita in the crying of lot 49, and a particularly shocking sequence in gravity’s rainbow is likely intended to be in dialogue with lolita as well. to say nothing of both writers’ affinity for word games and structural derring-do; compare pale fire with the SEZ WHO revelation halfway through gravity’s rainbow, or the “woman abducted by jesuits” side plot, as told by the teenagers, that melts into the primary plot, as told by cherrycoke, in mason & dixon.

anyway, i asked angie how she would characterize the resonance between the two writer’s styles, and she said “sentences will have like, 5 turns of phrase that should make u stop and gawk but an internal propulsion prevents you from pausing. feeling ranges from a pleasant tension to total sub/dom dynamic.”

an effective, and illuminating, characterization, i think. the idea of writer as dom is a useful one, and one i’ve thought about a lot since this conversation. a dom expects acquiescence, even to outlandish demands. but a dom also has to earn the obedience of their sub; in sartre’s formulation, the sadist/dom is ultimately dependent on their subject’s willingness to submit, an uncertain prospect, given the abyss of knowledge between consciousnesses. in terms of literature, the work has to earn the reader’s willingness to submit to the whims of the writer, which makes for a delicate interplay between the expectations of the reader, the compulsions of the writer, and the demands of the muse. (i’m working out a theory that further complicates this, where the artist is actually submissive to the domineering forces the drive the artist towards creation, but that’s for another time.)

so in this sense, a novel is akin to the rarefied time/space of BDSM sex, with the appropriate building of tension, cresendos of intensity, and choreographies of ego-stripping eroticism.

to map this onto a different coordinate system, one could also conceive of a novel as a sequence of yoga asanas. chapters place emphasis on secondary and tertiary aspects circling some central concern. similarly, a yogic sequence will have ebbs and flows, spikes in difficulty along with periods of recovery, a focus on specific muscle groups or an “intention,” stretches of nigh unbearable discomfort, a gradual and conscientious progress towards certain “peak” poses, and a denouement that symbolizes death, with the suggestion of rebirth.