Food/Sex/Death: Edition Beth

Shake and shake
The catsup bottle,
None will come,
And then a lot'll.
-Richard Armour

Food: Tomatoes and other Fruits and Veggies and Tom Robbins
As a kid my mom served up a lot of sliced tomatoes on our sandwiches. I remember she diced tomatoes for the bean tacos that were mostly refried beans and Crisco-based tiny corn tortillas that were prone to disintegration upon first touch.

At least I thought those were tomatoes mom bought from the big corporate grocer. One day, just out of high school, I got a day gig painting a guy's parents' house. As I remember, the guy who hired me seemed to put out an "I'm a low-level mobster" vibe. His parents were very Italian and his father - who I will call "Mario" - didn't speak English, except for the word "fuck." He liked to say "A fuckeen..." a fuckeen something; I could never quite make out the rest. He'd then look at me and laff, like we were two guys sharing a guy moment with him swearing. He could have had no idea about the sort of language my fellow musicians and I were using in the evening.

Anyway, this guy grew his own tomatoes, and his wife - a little firecracker who was always cooking killer-ass italian food and spoke English fluently and was about 4'6" - gave me a big bag of Mario's tomatoes each day before I went home. That first day was a revelation, and you saw it coming with my foreshadowing: it was the first time I ate REAL tomatoes, and crikey! they were ridiculously tasty-good, and constituted a minor variety of religious experience. I had friends over and held out a tomato:

"Here, check this out. Eat this thing."
"Uhh...looks like a very red red tomato to me, what's the catch?"

I said, just walk over to the sink there and eat it plain; if you want to put a little salt on it it's next to the sink. And in moments they knew too: we'd all been had: tomatoes were not the watery vaguely tomato-ish things we'd been led to believe. I now think those fake tomatoes were merely meant for texture. 

And now at farmer's markets all over Unistat you can get these goddess-sent delicious things, if you don't already grow them yourself. What a simple, life-giving, unadulterated joy to eat REAL tomatoes! The "little things in life" can loom large at times.

After that, anytime I went to the corporate grocer and saw the tomatoes all piled up I had to stifle the urge to corner the manager and personally indict him for conspiracy to foist faux tomatoes on the unsuspecting public.

Now, as I said, you can find flavorful tomatoes all over Unistat. It almost cancels out that whole Iran-Contra Scandal, in my spacial hemisphere's moon-logic...

One of our greatest poetic prose writers, Tom Robbins, has been riffing on fruits and vegetables in a psychedelic way throughout his career. Here he is in a slightly more sober mood, commenting on our topic:

"Without apparent guilt or shame, supermarkets from coast to coast regularly post signs reading VINE RIPENED TOMATOES atop produce bins piled high with tomatoes that have never ever experienced the joys of ripening; that, in fact, are hard, usually more pink than red, often streaked with yellow, orange, or even green; and when cut open will reveal pectin deposits of ghostly white. Back when one of those babies last saw a vine, it might have passed for the viridescent apple of Granny Smith's eye. Merchants who through ignorance, indifference, or outright chicanery untruthfully promise 'vine-ripened tomatoes' could and should be prosecuted under truth-in-advertising laws."
-pp.69-70, "Holy Tomato" from Tibetan Peach Pie

Robbins tried LSD in 1963 and soon after quit his day job by "calling in well." He moved to Manhattan looking for the Others, and attended a talk by Timothy Leary at Cooper Union. Afterward Robbins found himself at the same vegetable stand as Leary. Uncle Tim asked Tom Robbins (then a totally unknown writer) "how to tell which brussels sprouts were good." Robbins told Leary to choose the ones that "were smiling."
p.244, Aquarius Revisited, Peter O. Whitmer

Here's Robbins riffing on the ubiquitous blackberry brambles found all over the Pacific Northwest, and even down into my San Francisco Bay Area:

"And the fruit, mustn't forget the fruit. It would nourish the hungry, stabilize the poor. The more enterprising winos could distill their own spirits. Seattle could become the Blackberry Brandy Capital of the World. Tourists would spend millions annually on Seattle blackberry jam. The chefs at the French restaurants would dish up duck in purplish sauces, fill once rained-on noses with the baking aromas of gateau mure de ronce. The whores might become known, affectionately, as blackberry tarts. The Teamsters could try to organize the berry pickers. And in late summer, when the brambles were proliferating madly, growing faster than the human eye can see, the energy of their furious growth could be hooked up to generators that, spinning with blackberry power, could supply electrical current for the entire metropolis. A vegetative utopia, that's what it would be. Seattle, Berry Town, encapsulated, self-sufficient, thriving under a living ceiling, blossoms in its hair, juice on its chin, more blackberries - and more! - in its future. Consider the protection offered. What enemy paratroopers could get through the briars?"
-Still Life With Woodpecker, p.130

It would be easy to index a gaggle of vegetative riffs in the Robbins oeuvre, but I'll leave us with this one:

"Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun. Of our trees, the palm is obviously the stand-up comedian. Among fowl, the jester's cap is worn by the duck. Of our fruits and vegetables, the tomato could play Falstaff, the banana a more slapstick role. As Hamlet- or Macbeth - the beet is cast. In largely vegetarian India, the beet is rarely eaten because its color is suggestive of blood. Out, damned mangel-wurzel."
-Jitterbug Perfume, p.76

Bonus Track: Here's sociologist Lisa Wade on the history of tomatoes being thought of as "vegetables" and not what they "really are" according to botanists: fruit. I like this short article because we're reminded of the longstanding scientific dipshittery of the Unistat Supreme Court, that fruits are like "ovaries," and that social constructionism may be the most important part of what people now seem to dismiss (stupidly) as "postmodernism." My labeling of dipshittery was hasty: the unanimous SCOTUS in the late 19th c were merely basing their opinion on their preferred social construction; scientific classification seems also largely a social invention.

                                     an erotic money-shot from the vegetable world

"Of all sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest." - Anatole France

Sex: Gender 
Speaking of social construction...

A few months ago I was re-reading an old Robert Benchley book, The Early Worm, from 1927. In one comic essay he begins joking off something he'd read by a German biologist named Max Hartmann (<----curiously paltry Wiki, eh?). Benchley had read that Hartmann's sexual determination studies revealed that no one was purely 100% male or female. The Wiki here says Hartmann was later critical of the Nazis, but some source I neglected to mention in my notes revealed that Hartmann had continued to do research in Germany under the Nazi regime. Anyway, Benchley had a fine time with this idea - Hartmann (as filtered through Benchley) thought that if 60% of your cells were male, then you were "male." And so on. Benchley wondered how this might pertain to the Broadway stage:

Roger: Ever since that night I met you at the dance, my male percentage has been increasing. I used to register 65%. Yesterday in Liggetts I took a test and it was eighty-one.

Mary: You had your heavier overcoat on.

Roger: Please, dear, this is no time for joking. I never was more serious in all my life. And that means only one thing. Haven't you - aren't you - do you register the same as you did?

Mary (looking at her finger-nails): No. I have gone up seven points. But I thought it was because I had cut down on my starches.

...Benchley goes on for a couple of pages here. What a different time. Now, in 2016, if you're a transgender person you are subject to being followed into public restrooms and outed...but that's North Carolina, and I'm sure their battle with sexual fascism will turn out okay.

I do think parts of Unistat are horribly behind. Not just North Carolina, either. The Swedes have been talking about abolishing gender for at least five years now. In Australia you can declare yourself male, female, or "nonspecific," which seems like a start to me. As of early 2013 in Nepal they added a third gender, if only for "ease of legal documents." Indonesia has had a non-binary conception of gender for hundreds of years. Here's a link to a documentary (Two Spirits) about a Navajo "boy" who was also a "girl" and was murdered. The Native American/First Nations had, for probably a thousand years at least, not constructed a gender binary.

Here's an article by a person named Cory Silverberg that discusses how the concepts of "sex" and "gender" are different.

Lately, my own cis-male problem with gender has been with book clubs: for some reason - which, the more I delve into it, seems darker and darker in its implications - men don't "do" book clubs in Unistat. Which I find depressing. I've had my problems in this female-gendered world of book clubs, and it's really touchy; I don't know how to address it. I've been forced out of book clubs in which I was the only male, and I was convinced that nothing I'd done was sexist, obnoxious, or unpleasant in any way. Right now I'm in one, and it's in a very progressive community, and the group is fairly large, and there are often two or three other guys at the monthly meetings, and the women seem accepting of us. So far. I'm sorta paranoid. But what's so overwhelmingly female about reading books and discussing them? I found a short piece by Jesse Singal - a male - who nailed it pretty well for me, and I sent it to the group email for my current book club, saying "this is sorta 'meta' but Singal speaks for me here," and wrote that I was open to hearing the opinions of anyone who cared to chime in. So far one female answered and was as open-minded and sweet about males expressing themselves emotionally without having to fear being labeled as gay or whatever. I assume other guys in the group identify as gay, but I don't know and I honestly don't care: I'm just glad they're there. I like reading books as a group and discussing them; it's very pleasurable. I ask open questions, I listen, I give opinions, I try to get a laff or two. The Man Book Club referred/linked to in Singal's article is something I do not want to join: too toxic in its Unistat social construction of male-ness, cis-male gendered. I get that already, everywhere.

This seems like a huge problem to me, but I don't think it will capture much attention space for a long while, as we seem much more taken by our relatively new (and felicitous, to me) acceptance of homosexuality, and we're now grappling with transgendered people.

What a utopia if people could just openly be as they feel they "are" and not be subject to violence or discrimination! I know I've had my mind expanded by my personal experiences with gay males, lesbians, the professed and apparently bisexual, and a couple of times I have experienced the mild and bracing shock that I'm currently talking to someone who has transitioned from one sex to another...or wanted me to think they had.

It has always been like this. We're making progress, but it's too slow.

"If I could drop dead right now, I'd be the happiest man alive!" - Samuel Goldwyn

Death
I was recently reading in Clifford Pickover's delightful Strange Brains and Genius: The Secret Lives of Eccentric Scientists and Madmen, about the some of the more bizarre ideas of the great utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Get a load of this:

"Bentham had a peculiar interest in the rituals of death. For example, to Bentham, cemeteries and burials were a waste of money. Instead, he suggested that embalmed corpses be mounted upright along stately drives and busy thoroughfares. I can just imagine his pleasure at seeing corpses planted like palm trees along Santa Monica Boulevard or affixed to lampposts along New York's Fifth Avenue, for as far as his eye could see."

Pickover reminds us we can all go visit University College in London and see Bentham's lifelike corpse and mummified head, but warns us that his artificial eyes "stare at you like Linda Blair's in The Exorcist." 
-Strange Brains, Pickover, p.103

Hey, you out there: don't go gently into that good night. Good night!
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PS: I had forgotten I'd planned to do 22 of these Food/Sex/Death thingies. I hardly ever look at the stats for this blog, but the other day, stoned out of my wig, I checked to see who was reading me at that moment. It appeared someone in Japan (really?) was reading the sole Food/Sex/Death spew I did way back in December 2013. So I tried another. Hey, better late than never to spew again, no? Wot?

                                 まばゆいばかりのボビー・キャンベルによっ て当

Sirius the Dog Star in Some Poetry and Prose of Note

As I write, in Northern California, 'tis the Dog Days. The days are still, long, and marked by heat and, lately, drought. In yin-yang fashion, the heat can be modeled physically as atoms moving faster, with more energy. We're exposed all day by Earth's tilt to direct sun, and we're closer to our star, too. Correspondingly, our own atoms seem to slow down. Small exertions bring panting and sweat, and we crave the couch, a ceiling fan, whatever's in the fridge. While no doubt our ever-accelerating capital treadmill will keep many exercising and working to "get ahead" <cough>, the general run of things compass lethargy, languidness, longing.

And yet, this seems a time of supreme weirdness for our species, though this seems underreported.

                            Sirius A and B, simulated by Chris Laurel's 3-D imaging tech
                            named Celestia. Wikimedia Commons.

Here's W.H. Auden, around the Fall of 1949, nailing the listlessness of these days well:

Under Sirius

Yes, these are the dog days, Fortunatus:
The heather lies limp and dead
On the mountain, the baltering torrent
Shrunk to a soodling thread;
Rusty the spears of the legion, unshaven its captain,
Vacant the scholar’s brain
Under his great hat,
Drug though She may, the Sybil utters
A gush of table-chat.

And you yourself with a head-cold and upset stomach,
Lying in bed till noon,
Your bills unpaid, your much advertised
Epic not yet begun,
Are a sufferer too. All day, you tell us, you wish
Some earthquake would astonish,
Or the wind of the Comforter’s wing
Unlock the prisons and translate
The slipshod gathering.

And last night, you say, you dreamed of that bright blue morning,
The hawthorn hedges in bloom,
When, serene in their ivory vessels,
The three wise Maries come,
Sossing through seamless waters, piloted in
By sea-horse and fluent dolphin:
Ah! how the cannons roar,
How jocular the bells as They
Indulge the peccant shore.

It is natural to hope and pious, of course, to believe
That all in the end shall be well,
But first of all, remember,
So the Sacred Books foretell,
The rotten fruit shall be shaken. Would your hope make sense
If today were that moment of silence,
Before it break and drown,
When the insurrected eagre hangs
Over the sleeping town?

How will you look and what will you do when the basalt
Tombs of the sorcerers shatter
And their guardian megalopods
Come after you pitter-patter?
How will you answer when from their qualming spring
The immortal nymphs fly shrieking,
And out of the open sky
The pantocratic riddle breaks –
‘Who are you and why?’

For when in a carol under the apple-trees
The reborn featly dance,
There will also, Fortunatus,
Be those who refused their chance,
Now pottering shades, querulous beside the salt-pits,
And mawkish in their wits,
To whom these dull dog-days
Between event seemed crowned with olive
And golden with self-praise. 

Longing for the earthquake that would astonish reminds me of Kathryn Schulz's recent article in The New Yorker, about the Cascadia fault line/subduction zone, that will leave Seattle in ruins and render, according to one expert, everything west of the Interstate 5 highway "dust." Now that would bring any one of us out of the doldrums, eh?

I marvel at Auden's ability to render the listless, sluggish mental and bodily states brought on by the Dog Days. And "On the mountain, the baltering torrent/Shrunk to a soodling thread" is so Joycean-trippy I'm envious of anyone who writes a line like this... 

Astronomers tell us Sirius begins to rise in conjunction with the sun, for those larks who like to wake with the Sol. For the Egyptians, Sirius's appearance meant very soon the Nile would flood their fertile fields: irrigation from the gods! To the naked eye, only Alpha Centauri is brighter, and Sirius (we're not yet addressing Sirius's cosmic brethren: soon) is the fifth-nearest known star to Earthlings. It's 8.7 light years from us, but let's let Tom Robbins flesh that out in poetic prose.

Tom Robbins

The afternoon lasts approximately as long as fourth grade. However long it takes a wuf of light from Sirius the Dog Star to reach its reflection in a puddle of tar on the Dog House roof, that's how long it takes the afternoon to go by. The afternoon is a million-car train rattling at half-speed through a crossing in a prairie town. - Half Asleep In Frog Pajamas, p.83

James Joyce

In the Ithaca chapter of Ulysses, the style has switched to a series of catechism-like questions, which  are posed regarding the interactions of the young, drunk artist Stephen Dedalus, and his symbolic father, Leopold Bloom. It's around 2AM in Dublin, June 17th, 1904:

With what meditations did Bloom accompany his demonstration to his companion of various constellations?

Meditations of evolution increasingly vaster: of the moon invisible in incipient lunation, approaching perigee: of the infinite lattiginous scintillating uncondensed milky way, discernible by daylight by an observer placed at the lower end of a cylindrical vertical shaft 5000 ft deep sunk from the surface toward the center of the earth: of Sirius (alpha in Canis Major) 10 lightyears (57,000,000,000,000 miles) distant and in volume 900 times the dimension of our planet: of Arcturus: of the precession of equinoxes [...] - p. 698 in the old Viking ppbk version.

Bloom was an Everyman of 1904, but he was interested in everything. By 1905 Sirius was measured at 8.6 light-years away from us; Bloom seems to remember it as 10. So, the number for light-years is low and so is the volume: it's not 900 times that of Earth but closer to 2,834,000 times more voluminous. The important thing here is that Bloom is filled with wonder about such things and wants to share his knowledge with the younger man. 

Ezra Pound

The following passage was written under the most extraordinary circumstances: Pound had been captured by the Allies for broadcasting Fascist propaganda (Pound seemed to think he was doing what Thomas Jefferson would have wanted[?], although the broadcasts are filled with disgusting antisemitic remarks; Pound seemed to have some sort of "sickness" I know not what) to the Allies from Italy, with Mussolini's imprimatur. On May 22, 1945, Pound was taken to the Disciplinary Training Center (DTC) at Pisa where he remained for six months, as a political prisoner. At first he was kept by the Americans (Pound was born in Idaho) in a wire and concrete cage six feet by six and a half feet, open to the sky, no protection from wind and rain.  Most of the other prisoners were murderers and rapists. Pound had thought he was exercising free speech with his broadcasts. Two guards watched him at all time, and weren't supposed to speak to Pound. Pound cracked after three weeks. Under these barbaric, insane conditions, he continued with his lifelong work: writing his Cantos, encyclopedic/epic poetry, polyglot, profoundly erudite, a poem with his own version of history as he had made it from his readings. By the time he'd been apprehended, his ideas about how Modern poetry should be had largely "won" with other poets and intellectuals. With the intervention of those he'd influenced and helped (Hemingway and William Carlos Williams were disgusted by what Ez had said, but were committed to defending him should he come to trial for treason): cummings, Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, Amy Lowell, Auden, Katherine Anne Porter, Allen Tate and many others later awarded the section of Cantos that Pound had written while in captivity the Bollingen Prize. He received this award while housed in St. Elizabeth's Hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, DC. Here's a bit with Sirius in it; Pound is in the panther cage and the moon is coming up, along with Sirius:

the water seeps in under the bottle's seal
                Till finally the moon rose like a blue p.c.
of Bingen on the Rhine
                round as Perkeo's tub
then glaring Eos stared the moon in the face
       (Pistol packin' Jones with an olive branch)
       man and dog
                               On the S.E. horizon
               and we note that dog precedes man in the occident
               as of course in the orient if the bloke in the
               is proceeding to rightwards
      "Why war?" sd/the sergeant rum-runner
       "too many people! when there git to be too many
                      you get to kill some of 'em off."
-Canto LXXX

Water seeps through into his cage while the moon rose like a blue postcard. Bingen is a city on the Rhine located near a whirlpool. "Perkeo" was a jester in the court of Karl Phillip of Heidelberg, and an elaboration of this very Ezratic allusion can be found here. Eos is Venus at dawn. Jones is an officer at the DTC. Man and dog refer to Orion and Sirius. Then Pound makes an observation about syntax in chinese writing vs. Indo-European. After "bloke in the" we are supposed to see a Chinese character that shows the characters for "dog" and "man," which, in the text, is shown in the margins. This tiny section of Canto 80 ends with overheard conversation illustrating the almost idiotic level of political understanding by Unistat military; my impression is that not much has changed since 1945.

W.S. Merwin

Heavily influenced by Pound, Merwin won his second Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2008 book The Shadow of Sirius. I read this luminous book and, while there are no poems "about" Sirius, reading Merwin we must keep in mind that, for him, creativity comes from something inside us that we didn't know about: our Shadow. So, his poetry comes from the "shadow of Sirius," as Sirius is a strange star system (more later). Here's a section from a transcript of an interview Merwin had with Bill Moyers, after Merwin won the Pulitzer:


BILL MOYERS: He does leave his island reverie from time to time to read his work at universities and libraries — and to pick up his Pulitzer Prize. Here's the book that won, THE SHADOW OF SIRIUS. Its author is with me now. W.S. Merwin, welcome to the Journal.
BILL MOYERS: You titled this new book, the one that just won  the Pulitzer Prize, "In The Shadow of Sirius". Now, Sirius is the dog star. The most luminous star in the sky. Twenty-five times more luminous than the sun. And yet, you write about its shadow. Something that no one has ever seen. Something that's invisible to us. Help me to understand that.
W.S. MERWIN: That's the point. The shadow of Sirius is pure metaphor, pure imagination. But we live in it all the time.
BILL MOYERS: How so?
W.S. MERWIN: We are the shadow of Sirius. There is the other side of-- as we talk to each other, we see the light, and we see these faces, but we know that behind that, there's the other side, which we never know. And that — it's the dark, the unknown side that guides us, and that is part of our lives all the time. It's the mystery. That's always with us, too. And it gives the depth and dimension to the rest of it.

(for entire interview see HERE.)

In Voltaire's Micromegas he's invented a giant from the planet Sirius. It's a proto-science fiction story. This giant promises to give men - "infinitely insignificant atoms" - the secrets of nature in a large volume of philosophy. When the Society of the Academy of Sciences opens up the book, it's nothing but blank pages. "Aha!," says the Secretary: "Just as I expected."

Which...

"Well, Lew angled his thumb aloft and eastward, where sure enough a very bright, luminous object had been slowly on the rise all evening, "it's a good one to get, all right." It was the Dog Star Sirius, which ruled this part of the summer, and whose blessings, tradition held, were far from unmixed." - Against The Day, Thomas Pynchon, p.901 

Reading David Foster Wallace and Tom Robbins Concurrently: Utter Incommensurability For Me

As a temporary detour from one of my reading projects - the entire Tom Robbins oeuvre, chronologically - I went back and re-read a bunch of sections from David Foster Wallace's works, because  I'd recently had a conversation about DFW's suicide in 2008, and it occurred to me that Tom Robbins - as "passe" as some readers feel his work now ( I certainly do not feel he's passe), "knew" something about life that DFW didn't.

                                                 David Foster Wallace

But this may be too facile: my diagnosis, after reading a couple of books of interviews with DFW and a terrific piece by Maria Bustillos, is that DFW may have been doomed from childhood: too much genius, too much self-consciousness and depression. In the last year of his life he tried to get off Nardil, which he'd been on since a suicide attempt, around 20 years before. Nothing else worked, he spiraled down, even with the resumption of Nardil and 12 rounds of electroconvulsive "therapy," and hung himself in Claremont, California, September 12, 2008.

In one interview he said he did LSD and "a fair amount of psilocybin in college," and smoked pot from age 15 or 16 until he got out of grad school. Why did he stop smoking pot? "I just, it wasn't shutting the system down anymore. It was just making the system, it was just making the system more unpleasant to be part of. My own system." (See Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, pp.137-139.) Wallace also had had a major alcohol problem, but "I was a sort of joyless drinker..." (op.cit, 142, and italics in original)

I cannot relate to the idea of smoking pot or drinking as a way to "shut down" my "system." I am nothing if not a joyful drinker. DFW is such a compelling figure to me that I will always know that there are people far smarter than me who are nonetheless haunted, and nothing from Big Pharma will allow them to feel unalloyed joy in simple things.

One of the many things I grapple with when I think of DFW is this feeling of the insistent, constantly surging intelligence coupled with what seems to me a horrifying level of self-doubt. I heartily refrain from armchair dipshit psychoanalysis here; in other words: I won't speculate further on the deepest levels of the source of DFW's misery.

Both DFW and Tom Robbins will be found in fat books that talk about "postmodern" American writers. Both used surrealist elements in their prose to engage their readers. Robbins was born 30 years before DFW, and perhaps many of you know about DFW's "puritan" backlash regarding Irony in our culture. (The seminal statement is probably his essay on TV, "E Unibus Plurum," collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again.) Although I don't see TR as an ironically-minded writer, I do see him as a psychedelic writer. DFW too, oddly, for reasons touched on above.

DFW thought irony had become toxic to our culture, but while it had been an effective mode of rhetoric for authors from the 1960s in their attacks on post-WW2 assumptions about social relations, class, conformity, and "reality," by the early 1990s it was so pervasive that it was like the old fish-don't-know-they're-in-water thing: the educated young were so ironic and hip and miserable they couldn't even see that in their constant resorting to irony, they were crying out, in effect, "I'm trapped! Help me out! This is miserable!" (5 Second clip from The Simpsons for the win!)

I consider both DFW and Tom Robbins (TR) as novelists of ideas. TR imagined a character who was so well-defined as a mouthpiece for radical environmentalism and the dangers of rampant technology that the FBI questioned him in the Unabomber case before the G-Men caught up to Ted. DFW dreamed up a character that ran an academy for tennis-playing excellence, and he was a fascist. The character jumped off the page and ran around my house, in one ear, out the other.

TR put in with unalloyed Tibetan-tinged "crazy wisdom" long ago, even before he met Joseph Campbell and toured Mexico and Central America and later even more far-flung regions of the globe. He still celebrates July 26, 1963 - the day he first did LSD - as the most important day of his life, so much so that it actuated him to quit his job by "calling in well" and saying he was staying home, and that prior to that day he had been ill.

I am holding back on willy-nilly speculations about naivete, "belief" and especially, the albatross of Ego...

I'm not sure if DFW ever got out of the country, much less his own head. And yet: he seemed to believe some of his characters had come alive and spoken to him. I believe he had tremendous capacity for empathy. Certainly DFW's forays into psychedelics did not bring about any sort of psychic "breakthrough" that they had for TR, whose overall prose style seems to represent a form of mimesis of the mind on psychedelics.

While a recurring line in TR, "The world situation was dire, as usual" doesn't indicate a non-engagement with world politics, TR still seems one of the foremost exponents of change-yourself-first in order to change the world. I see his novels as literary LSD. The difficulty, the incommensurability of this is: I see DFW's novels (and much of his non-fiction) as psychedelic too. This may have to do with the sheer burst of information-per-page encountered in DFW, and let us recall Aldous Huxley's image of "normal consciousness" as a firehose with a crink in it, so water only comes out in dribs and drabs, while on psychedelics, the crink is undone and the brain is flooded by the hose, gushing full-on, overwhelming, consciousness-expanding.

Meanwhile, DFW thought something like Freud's Pleasure Principle was a threat to Unistat minds. TV and other media and "low art" were so effective and polished and easy - giving us a constant stream of comfortable, predictable shows that didn't challenge us but still felt really good that we've become divorced from "reality" and are setting ourselves up for fascism. He was saying this in the early 1990s. In the mid 1990s he predicted ever-better viewing situations, ever-better shows - by then he'd said the commercials were better than the shows, as far as sophistication of knowing the viewers' desires - and he predicted something like Netflix. In his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, there's a film that's so entertaining - called "Infinite Jest" - that people literally cannot stop watching it, and they become comatose, and figuratively lobotomized. And Quebecois terrorists want the film to use as a terror device, but I digress...

DFW could be hilarious. TR makes me laugh out loud, too. Their innate temperaments, or dispositions, or the happy and sad exigencies of their lives larded on top of those predispositions...makes me feel the personalities of the two seem quite far apart. I find I love both men's writing, and have an idealized picture of how each guy "really is" (or was) and that I like both personalities quite a lot. I don't expect to get to know TR, who is 82 this year; I never knew DFW. I know I cannot read DFW without knowing he was always in pain, and that he killed himself at age 46. Suicide haunts the background of every reading of DFW for me. This just makes me sad.

I may be pissing some DFW fans off here, but I assert that, while he considered himself a sort of avant-garde fiction writer (who wished to redeem avant-garde too-cool-fer-skool exercises with a sort of earnest and non-ironic spiritus) first, and a writer of non-fiction pieces second, he was a better non-fiction writer. And his fiction is marvelous. NB: while he was in grad school he was smoking pot, watching tons of TV, and doing psychedelics, all the while producing his first novel, The Broom of the System, and a Philosophy thesis that had to do with Wittgensteinian ideas titled "Richard Taylor's Fatalism and the Semantics of Physical Modality." What a freaky, wonderful, genius (MacArthur "Genius" Award 1997)! What a loss!

TR thought a good TV show would be "Queer Eye For the Fungi":

DFW thought the logical endpoint of our involvement with "reality" TV shows would be something called "Celebrity Autopsy," where we watch a coroner eviscerate an actual celebrity who died, while above his/her friends and family talk about the kind of person the celebrity really was.

I end this ramble - and let's face it: it's one - with a restatement: the goofy-wise joy behind TR is infectious and makes me love life. And academia pretends he's not serious. DFW did...all that (I did not mention he wrote a math book on Cantor's transfinite sets, which led to Godel...) In premature death, young academia acted like their own Kurt Cobain figure died, and maybe that's an apt analogy. But I do think the overall worldview and tone and sentences and ideas of TR deserve more nuanced reading in this, our year of the NSA 2014CE. But they won't. And so: why? Perhaps the serious Mind of our Academy considers a brilliant, "absurdly educated" (DFW's phrase) as one of their own; TR's offerings of ways Out still just seem silly, outre, irresponsible?

It could be that something in TR's overall project may be something like the "redemption" that DFW was looking for, for us. Or not. Or...sorta? (Maybe?)

Incommensurability. I'm not sure if DFW and TR would've liked each other. I like to daydream that they would hit it off.

Pynchon's Bleeding Edge: Antici...pation

Being of perennial impecunious means, I managed to land myself way up on the library lotto: I'm number 10 in line when Bleeding Edge comes in, and they're ordering a mess of copies. It won't be renewable, so I'll have to hunker down and read the entire thing in three weeks. I think I'm up for it, tanned, rested and ready...

Another of my dispersed Tribe alerted me to the Gothamist printing the first page. Because of the inherent mindfuckery surrounding Pynchon (he was once rumored to be The Unabomber, if he wasn't really J.D. Salinger or "Wanda Tinasky"), I suspected a possible hoax, but when the sentence "At the corner by long-implanted reflex she drifts into a pick..." I knew this was legit. "Drifts into a pick" matched my impression of Pynch's uncanny style/mind. Gawd, I can't wait.

In Conversations With Tom Robbins Robbins says that the FBI interviewed him after his book Still Life With Woodpecker came out, 'cuz the main character seemed like The Unabomber to them. (If you've read the book: Bernard Mickey Wrangle, AKA The Woodpecker, man!, see p.103) Robbins, on Pynchon's Mason and Dixon: "[It] knocked my socks off and I was barefoot at the time. Basically, it's an account of the professional problems of a couple of eighteenth-century surveyors. Yet Pynchon turns it into something thrilling and glorious by dint of his language and countless acts of his dare-deviltry. Mark Twain said the difference between a perfect word and a word that's merely adequate is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Pynchon generates one lightning flash after another." (see p.112)

Hey: now we find out another American genius novelist who has also written info-dense, 800-plus-paged works was under suspicion by the FBI as The Unabomber: William T. Vollmann, who I have yet to read. See his "Life as a Terrorist: Uncovering My FBI File." Sorry about the steenking paywall, but maybe that's enough. HERE's the LA Times on Vollmann's story. The FBI harassment of Vollmann is something I find extremely disturbing and deserves to be more widely reported. I also suspect Vollmann readers (one of the books at that Amazon link is over 1000 pages long, others 800, 600...) are a rarified class, and Vollmann's story in this, The Snowden Era, is yet another hint that we are approaching something between "Disneyland With The Death Penalty" Singapore (<---that line from William Gibson), and the old East Germany under the Stasi. Do structures such as we've found ever reverse towards something...saner? Give me one historical example.

Now I'll get darkly glib: I really don't think Vollmann is the sort of writer who'd go for this idea, but maybe the edgy, talented and still under-reviewed author should try falsifying some FBI documents that show that (s) he too was under suspicion by the FBI for some sort of Interesting Crime. Write a press release, call for a conference, announce your next book is about the deep structure of authors/publishers and publicity in the Information Age, and make sure you have all kinds of things to say about J.T. LeRoy and James Frey, Lee Israel, Mike Daisey, and AD Harvey and his series of fake academic identities and how he got many "experts" to believe his bogus claim that Dickens had met Dostoevsky. Talk about how, rather than being "outraged" we ought to consider The Trickster, human longing for public notice, and our accelerating susceptibility and vulnerability to the Hoax. There are relatively benign hoaxes, and there should be a reconsideration of their epistemic role in an age of not only information, but of rapid, no-end-in-sight income inequality, and furthermore there are plenty of very smart people who could not or would not make it in the Corporate State, and...well, you can see where I was going with this.

In The Essays of Leonard Michaels he writes of Spinoza, Shakespeare, Montaigne and Miles Davis as examples of artists-writers who want to "absent" themselves from their work, but their name is blaring due to this very fact. The totality of style and presentation, even without their signatures, seems like their face or fingerprints. How and why Michaels includes Montaigne there is beyond the scope of this blog, so you may have to check for yourself. (Sorry!) Thumbnail: these few artists seem to want to let the work speak for itself, without the built-up detritus of trivia and the gossipy-soul of People magazine. Or fer crissakes: TMZ. How disembodied Spinoza's mind seems when you read him. How radically multi-vocal Shakespeare appears. Miles famously played with his back to the audience. Etc. See Michaels, pp.176-178

A Salinger biopic is upon us; a few months ago Salon listed a Pynchon biopic as highly desirable, and I agree...but who - among those who really read Pynchon - would believe any of it? Do you mine his old friend Jules Siegel and flesh out the thesis that Pynch, like Kaczynski, was a product of an out-of-control CIA LSD experiment to sideline the counterculture in yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog's eye, while incense and peppermints scream across the sky? And then: the guilt over working side-by-side with Project Paperclip Nazi scientists at Boeing on ICBMs? The idealism he shared with Richard Farina thoroughly squashed, Pynchon retires to a shed deep in the redwoods overlooking the Pacific, smoking high-powered weed for two solid years, making notes, singing folk songs at small gatherings, having books sent in by odd couriers like something out of Tristero, flashbacks to his time in Manhattan Beach and Mexico. I see a Unabomber-like cabin deep amidst the ancient coastal redwoods in Humboldt County, with a table, a poster of Porky Pig, makeshift shelves with a few hundred books on them, including Helen Waddell's The Wandering Scholars of the Middle Ages and Kirkpatrick Sale's books and William Gaddis's The Recognitions identifiable for the freaks like us. Lots of notebook paper taped up on the walls with illegible notes, a page torn from the too-popular A Beautiful Mind. Another wall is covered with a gigantic map of the Louisiana Purchase, and the known routes of Lewis and Clark. An Olivetti on a table with a big bag of weed and a coffee maker. A voice-over of a phone call from a truck stop with Pynchon's voice as we heard it on The Simpsons "Yea the FBI was out here asking me some questions about my feelings about technology. The what? Did you say 'you're the bomber?' We have noise in the system here, they're probably tapping this. What unabomber? Who? Jeez, I need to read a newspaper I guess...(laffs) You mean you think they think maybe I'm blowing up park rangers? Doesn't anyone in the Bureau know how to read?(click)"

Get Oliver Stone to direct, what the fuck. I'm not saying a fascinating movie could not be made of such things, I'm just saying no one would believe it.

If Pynchon's Dys came out I'd probably even read that. Also see Michael Chabon's Maps and Legends, in which a Pynchon novel titled Blitz Nurse is cited.

And I'm still on the fence about the Candida Donadio story, because the name seems too Pynchonesque. Yea, yea, I know: how could "she" put one over on NYT, plus Heller, Roth, Gaddis, Stone and Puzo and all those other writers had to have been in on it. Yea, yea: I've heard it all. I'm still not buying 100%.

Books and Articles Consulted:
On fugitive writings by Pynchon
William Pynchon
Angela Bishop Asks Paul Thomas Anderson A Really Stupid Question
Rodney Gibbs's essay on Pynchon's and Sale's musical Luddite satire Minstral Island
Schrodinger's Cat Trilogy, pp.364-365; 427
Pynchon likes The Daily Show
Pinch Thomas, major league baseball player from the Deadball Era
Chaos and Cyberculture, pp. 172-176
1996 TV interview: Kirkpatrick Sale on the Luddites
Proverbs for Paranoids:
1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
4. You hide, they seek.
5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
-- Collected from Gravity's Rainbow, V237, 241, 251, 262, & 292

Promiscuous Neurotheologist, vol.6-ish

[Due to the concurrent State of the Union address on one side of a split-screen, and the real-life film noir shoot-out of a disgruntled ex-LAPD on the snowy mountainside 90 minutes outside Los Angeles, we join another episode of the OG already in progress.]

...about a passage from Tom Robbins's first novel, Another Roadside Attraction:

Jesus: Hey dad.

God: Yes, son?

Jesus: Western Civilization followed me home this morning. Can I keep it?

God: Certainly not boy. And put it down this minute. You don't know where it's been.

Darwin Day From Here On Out: Feb.12: Pass It On!
As I write this, it's a few minutes Pacific Standard Time after Darwin Day has passed. February 12 was Charles Darwin's 204th birthday, and it's the latest volley by those who seek to push-back against the Creationists. (Those of us persuaded by scientific thought may be aware of others who do not - 46% of Unistatians in one poll said they believed in a "Young Earth" theory of creationism: God created the Earth about 10,000 years ago. The article linked to earlier in this 'graph seems mostly about a Creationist from Australia named Ken Ham, who is largely responsible for the rather clueless folk among us seeing pictures of Adam sitting next to his vegetarian dinosaur...in case you are interested in that reality tunnel..)

Karen Armstrong Enlightens Me
As Karen Armstrong wrote in A History of God, "Science has been felt to be threatening only by those Western Christians who got into the habit of reading the scriptures literally and interpreting doctrines as though they were matters of fact." (p.379) Ms. Armstrong then goes on to cover a period of theology I hadn't known much about before: the radical theologians of the 1960s who embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea. In a book I have not read, Thomas J. Altizer's 1966 The Gospel of Christian Atheism, Armstrong quotes Altizer: "Only by accepting and even willing the death of God in our experience can we be liberated from a transcendent beyond, an alien beyond which has been emptied and darkened by God's self-alienation in Christ."

This reads like mumbo-jumbo to me, but then I'm no trained theologian; the lucid thought and prose of Ms. Armstrong unpacks it for me. There had to be a silence around God before He could become meaningful again. Altizer had gone on, mystically, about the pain of suffering and the dark night of the soul. Yes, but...why again? Armstrong: "All our old conceptions of divinity had to die before theology could be reborn. We were waiting for a language and a style in which God could once more become a possibility. Altizer's theology was a passionate dialectic which attacked the dark God-less world in the hope that it would give up its secret." (p.380)

I'll note that this book came out one year before Derrida made his first big splash in Unistat. I mention Derrida here because this Altizer dude, as filtered through Armstrong to my reading eyes, seems well-fed enough of an intellectual to entertain such ideas about "god." Armstrong mentions that the 1960s "death of God theologians" were criticized for their affluent, middle-class white America perspectives.

From my perspective, the idea there were intellectuals with the theology degree who had embraced Nietzsche's "God is dead" idea is marvelous enough. Armstrong also cites Paul Van Buren's 1963 The Secular Meaning of the Gospel, which argued that we can't talk about God acting in the world anymore because science and technology had become a myth that had superseded God. The best we can do is hold on to Jesus, and forget God; Jesus at least taught us liberation, and how to be free.

                                                       Karen Armstrong

Yet another 1960s theologian who embraced God's death was William Hamilton, whose contribution to  a book of essays, Radical Theology and the Death of God (1966), co-written with the aforementioned Altizer, found no God in the world of Unistat in the Sixties. Furthermore, Unistat had never had a great theological tradition of its own, and was always more utopian. Hamilton noted that Luther abandoned his cloister and went out into the world of people, looking for... not God but the spirit of Jesus among them. Hamilton says this was the way to be a theologian in Unistat in the Sixties: find Jesus in the City, among his neighbors and among technology, power, money, and sex.

Easy Remarks: Sure, these guys were white, privileged and steeped in...I'm guessing Heidegger. But they sure make a hell of a lot more sense than whatever sort of "Hate thy neighbor and the poor/Rich Folks are where it's at and by the way science and rational thought is for godless heathens and I can't wait to see 'em fry in Hell" that I see in far too many Unistatians these days.

A Brief Word On Fred N.
Nietzsche's "God is dead" seems to have become his most popular catch-phrase, but the one that's always seemed more interesting - almost zen koan-ish - is his notion and phrase "Will to power." So far my favorite definition of it is from (surprise!), Robert Anton Wilson, who parsed it out thus:

"The spirit of abundance and creativity, which is not One, not a final principle or a God-in-disguise, but the resultant of the forces that make up the mesh of Chaos." - from "A New Writer: F.W. Nietzsche"

[We now join As The World Turns, already in progress.]

More On Translations (NOT: "Moron Translations")

Searle and Future AI Robots

In the previous installment here, I briefly alluded to Prof. John Searle, and it was because his philosophical invention of the "Chinese Room" still is, for me, a Thought Experiment that I've found exceedingly stimulating. As I see it, as of today's date, I think he makes a strong case for the impossibility, in principle, of the Machine Language translation to have anything like a human mind behind it: it only executes algorithms; no matter how accurate and seemingly human-like its responses, it doesn't truly understand.

                             One of my favorite living academics, John Searle of Berkeley

                             Photo from, as much as I can glean, 2005, Mexico. Not sure

                             who took it, but I'd guess Dagmar?

Nevertheless, I'm also drawn toward the eerie converse: maybe all we're doing is executing mental logical algorithm-like strings of thought-stuff when we're operating, on all our levels of Being. One strand of thought about AI that extrapolates to some future Singularity sees the AI robots (probably fairly attractive and somewhat "graceful" in bodily movement?) as very adept intelligences in some ways that are far beyond ours, while we Humans are still able to do things (with humor, irony, and empathy?) that the AIs don't - and won't - quite get. Intuitively, this line of prognostication makes sense to me.

So, the experiment I ran using Michael Chabon's line from a recent essay in the New York Times on Finnegans Wake and H.P. Lovecraft was AI "machine mind" attempting a series of translations. I wonder what it would look like if a series of humans who were skilled enough to translate English to Chinese, one who could translate Chinese to Arabic, another person Arabic to Spanish, one rare wily one for the Spanish to Ukrainian, a Ukrainian to Dutch person, and then someone taking from that entire series of translations, with Dutch in hand, translating it back to English? At present I lack the funding, the research grant, or lots of Dad's money to conduct such a whimsical experiment, so I must be happy with the ease of something like Babel Fish. 

What Was the Damned Point?

I've not blogged on this stuff before, but for the past three and a half years, I've been enmeshed in something I think of as the Neo-Whorfian Model, which derives from the classic Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and which seemed to devolved to a rather robust debunking by anthropological linguists and others roughly in the cognitive sciences of Hard Whorfianism: that each language creates a different worldview. What has been labeled Soft Whorfianism was given its due (despite some rather overweening Chomskyites): the language we speak shapes the cognitive "realities" we find ourselves in. 

                                Lera Boroditsky, one of the most fascinating researchers

                                      in the revived field of linguistic relativity 

The Neo-Whorfian stuff seems to be waxing now, and I'm currently in thrall with people like Lera Boroditsky and George Lakoff. I think language seems a strong part of a total environment, and neurologically it's instantiated/"mapped" on neural circuits that other parts of our brain seem to think "are" the "things" that are wired in as circuits there, in brain-matter. But maps deceive. They also give different, abstracted-from-existential/phenomenological "reality" perspectives, depending on the intentions of their makers. In my playful experiment, I imputed intentionality and mind to the Machine. This seems analogous to trying to communicate in a foreign country and not quite having the adequate language, a situation I've been in many times, one which seems always sobering if bracing. With all the pantomiming, pointing, mispronunciations, and frenzied attempts to use the Phrase Book in real time, I don't know if the future AI-bots will be better than us, or we'll have augmented ourselves to keep up with them. Maybe they'll just kick our asses. (I just now recalled a brilliant book I read that speaks to this. I read Slaves To The Machine right after it came out, and it had a drug-like effect.)

Finnegans Wake and Translations: Strange But True

Simply put: I find the very idea confounding. And yet there it is: Finnegans Wake was translated into French, Dutch, German, Polish, and wildly (and absurdly?) enough, Japanese and Finnish! I have no comment, but wonder who, how, why, to what end, what do readers get out of these...?

I must surmise that this proves there is no limit to what a certain sort of linguistic freak will attempt. Which I find totally wonderful.

Next thing you're gonna try and tell me is that they're going to get a Chinese version of it. Yea, right...

Possibly the Wake represents a Third situation, juxtaposed with the two alluded to above (humans and AI using language to translate/communicate). To briefly play with this idea, let us see Joyce's book as the apotheosis of extremely dense wordplay in the Novel. Many devices the Novel (and its writers) has/have developed are used therein. It requires above all Time, but pays off in overflowing information flow-through in the nervous system and its wetware architecture; the Novel's ability to create Other Worlds in the minds of its readers may still be unparalleled. So might the Novel's ability to develop empathic circuitry be nonpareil. Whether any one given reader of the Wake sees this limbic tropism occur within themselves seems peculiar to that reader; for many others Joyce's "claybook" appeals to the musical sense, and the frontal cortex and its abilities to Solve Problems...Not to mention something variously labeled "The Creative Self" or "Artistic Mind."

Short Commentary on the Wiki for Books Most Translated
I take it the Jehovah's Witnesses see translation as a major strategy. Pinocchio comes in at number three? It still needs to be translated into another 152 languages to surpass the Witness tome. No one's catching The Bible. I checked the Vegas odds on Pinocchio  or any of the others in the Top 10 surpassing The Bible by 2050, and they'll give you 300 to 1 odds for The Little Prince, but I really don't have a dog in this fight. Verne's 20KLeagues is a truly fantastic book, but what makes it so much better than any of his other stuff, much less anything by H.G. Wells? I can't account for those who translate for the rest of the world, and looking at this list makes me feel awfully parochial for some odd reason. The various translators themselves? Worldwide? Bless them with fine drugs, fantastic sleep, transcendent sex, and much laughter, for what they do is an act of love towards humankind...(Yes, even the army of Jehovah's Witnesses translators. I mean what the hell, right?)

Finally, I must confess that Paulo Coelho's 1988 book The Alchemist, tied with Harry Potter (!) at 67 languages? I'd never heard of it. Now I feel I must get to that book before the newly minted summer's up.

Re: Tom Robbins

He said Robert Anton Wilson turned him on to the idea of reading Finnegans Wake. Robbins has kept a copy bedside for years, has only read a few pages before nodding off, but for him, the Wake engenders wonderfully weird dreams. He said something like this in a documentary film on Robert Anton Wilson titled Maybe Logic. 

In the previous blog on translation, I ended with Robbins. In his book Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins there's a short piece called "Lost In Translation" in which he gives a passage from his 1984 book Jitterbug Perfume in its original (it's hilariously, tomrobbinsy surrealistic in its anthropomorphizing of vegetables), then a "back-translation" from the Czech (something analogous to my weirdo experiment with Babel Fish), and Robbins seems quite okay with it. Some of the "meaning" from the original surrealistic vegetables' attributes and aspirations (especially the beets!) has been altered. But what of it? It still swings!

Robbins thinks some translations are "more precise" than others. It seems no one can judge this more accurately than the writer of the original, although I've seen some fascinating arguments that question this. Here's the end of TR's piece on "literal back-translation":

I've been told by bilingual readers that until recently, when the insensitive publisher unduly hurried the translator, I've been reproduced in Italian with scant loss of meaning or intent; but that the Mexican version of Even Cowgirls Get The Blues is quite "sleazy," a description that probably doesn't displease me as much as it ought.

Incidentally, Jitterbug Perfume in Czech back-translates into Perfume of the Insane Dance. I'm not sure but that I don't prefer that title to my own. So, if much is lost in translation, something on rare occasions may also be gained. (pp.209-211)

Translations? A Mid-Sized Armful of Disparate Riffs OR: Does Any Of This Make Sense?

"Many addicts HP basic entry in the work that the reader can't help noting that the formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if they were linked to related/human skin. -Michael Chabon (Chinese) (Arabic) (English) (Ukrainian) (Dutch) (English)"

               Novelist Michael Chabon, who just happens to live in Berkeley too


In my previous blogspewage, Prof. Eric Wagner responded in the comments section with a quote from Michael Chabon, which related Joyce's Finnegans Wake to something almost sinister or evil or menacing, as HP Lovecraft's Necronomicon was meant to make us feel. The latter book, while fictional, "is" real on some ontological level - it has some ontological status, I will argue. But this isn't my point, of course. You're reading the OG and you know he digresses like Laurence Sterne on bad acid.


What "is" the first paragraph, above? "Many addicts..."?


It was an experiment in machine translation using Babel Fish. Here's how the first paragraph was derived: I cut Prof. Wagner's quote from Michael Chabon, pasted it into Babel Fish's box, and translated it into Chinese, with a nod to Prof. Searle. I then cut/pasted the Chinese (which I understood exactly zero of, looking at it) into the original translation box, chose the Chinese to be translated into Arabic (more weird characters I didn't have a clue about), and then repeated these iterations, from Arabic to Spanish, Spanish to Ukrainian, Ukrainian to Dutch, and finally, Dutch back into English.


The original quote from Chabon, as given by Wagner, was this:

"A reader steeped in the work of H.P. Lovecraft could not help observing that, to many educated people, there was something unmistakably loathsome about the Wake, a touch of Necronomicon, as though it had been bound in human hide. - Michael Chabon"

                                                       H.P. Lovecraft (d.1937)


I'm guessing the Machine thought "Lovecraft" - at some point - was really "basic entry." Anyway, the translation by Babel Fish was, I thought, ironic, in that, the original subject matter had to do with a novelist's take on Joyce's novel, which most people find the most difficult book to "translate" from Joyce's own Dream-Wake-Language (at times I've called it "Wicklang," for reasons readers of the book might understand) into their own understandings. Chabon further related Joyce's book to Lovecraft, whose profoundly extra-terrestrial, transdimensional forces of appalling indifference to human understanding or suffering suffuse his books. It's as if the Transhumanist's Artificial Intelligence Machines, from the year 2030, combined with Genetics and Nanotechnology, had reached their "singularity," and come back to haunt us with a stark omen for us all: "formation of the people after the end of the road, which leads to death, hitting something disgusting, as if there were linked to/related human skin." But then my ma always said I had a very active inventive complex...

                             Supposedly the small print is the first page?


For the translation going on in my own nervous system (i.e, "speaking for myself"), Chabon's observation has, via an iterated polyglot Babel Fish peregrination, been made far more..."eldritch," to use a word Lovecraft himself used often. And thus, what I see as ironic. 


The Reader (translation: you) may see it differently. If we keep looking at the translated passages, back and forth, we can see where the Machine got its ideas. "Bound in human hide," via its commodius vicus of recirculation via Babel Fish becomes "linked to related/human skin." Readers steeped in HPL's work became "addicts" at some point. Where the Machine got "formation of the people at the end of the road" seems somewhat less clear to me, and therefore qualifies as my favorite part of the translation.


I was actuated to think/write about translation by Prof. Wagner's answer to my question.

                               Russian structuralist linguist semiotician
                               Roman Jakobson (1886-1982) I interpret
                               his expression here as something like:
                              "Wait a minute...did I forget to turn off the 
                               stove before I drove to the library?"


Moving On
Professor Roman Jakobson, the great, great structuralist, said there were three basic types of translation, and I'll give my riffs on each, after you look at Dr. Timothy Leary for a second:

1. Intralingual: This looks like re-wording. Hope I'm not giving Dr. Jakobson short shrift here. I would give many examples I've gleaned from academics, but I'd rather sit here and wonder about the scads of translations of the Tao Te Ching, supposedly by the Chinese person who history has (at times) named as "Lao-Tzu"...how much has THAT book changed via translation down through the years, travels, languages, changes in semantic understandings, writing systems, etc? To go back to Prof. Wagner's answer: How can I not agree? Let me give perhaps an extreme example, but I think it nevertheless fits my purposes here: Timothy Leary wrote a book called Psychedelic Prayers and Other Meditations. In some definite ways, it's a "loose" (what the hell does that mean?) translation of other previous English translations ("intralingual") of "Lao-Tzu," who was known to have been translated very early on circa 300BCE by syncretists who wished to lessen political factionalism among warring Chinese states. Leary didn't know Chinese. And furthermore, he's using his own syncretistic ideas derived from ethology, psychedelic drug experimentation, diverse religious knowledge and metaphors derived from them, and his PhD in Psychology to concoct a "guidebook" for people in the late 20th century English speaking world...to prepare for psychedelic drug trips. Leary re-worded much of prior English translations of the Tao Te Ching and translated/interpreted for an assumed audience. I think if Jakobson were in my room right now he'd be screaming at me for mis-interpreting what he meant by "intralingual," but then Roman would've been missing the point, my point. I'm a hermeticist anyway! This is what we do...<cue: canned laughter from 1960s TV sitcoms>
2. Interlingual: I think Jakobson means "translation proper" here. Sorta like what you non-native English speakers are doing right now, as you read this blog. If you were to look at my text here and re-write it "in your own words," - in whatever language - without trying to do "damage" to what you think the OG means, I think you're having at Interlinguality. But then, as Professor Carlin said, when he noted that often in the court of law, a lawyer will tell someone on the witness stand to "tell the court...in your own words..."...this is absurd! No one has their own words! We're all using the same ones everyone else is using! But if you must use "your own words," just go ahead and say them: "Fringly cragit ponchee flooo!" (I suspect Roman would again be all frowny were he here.)
3. Intersemiotic: As I understand it, Roman Jakobson meant "an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems." Hell, that's the interpretation by one of his colleagues that I copied into my notes from some highfalutin' book on Semiotics. I'm not sure and don't remember, but Jakobson may have been able to speak English, and may have actually written those words himself. I don't know. Do you know? Anyway I think he meant something like reading a book of poetry (in translation?) and then doing something like making a painting out of how the poetry made you feel. I'm not entirely sure. You come up with a better interpretation!

Ending The Blog Post
I harken back to one of my favorite living writers, Tom Robbins. In an essay collected in his book, Wild Ducks Flying Backward he writes about how his novels have been translated.  Now, most writers tend to assert something substantial got lost in the translation from their native tongue to the translated one, but Robbins goes on (see pp.209-211) about how he thinks that, sometimes, "literal back-translation" into English has improved his work. Say what you will, but I must applaud Robbins here for his cosmic sense of humor and overall non-graspingness. 


Q: Can loose translations of texts give rise to edifying misreadings? And if so, why? (You may choose to take this course for non-credit.)

                               Tom Robbins, one of my favorite 
                               living prose stylists. Born: 1936. Died: NEVER