Hey All, this week I decided to experiment a little with narrative and the nature of story-telling. Comments always welcome. Enjoy!

            I write a story that is a line in sand.  You follow it before it floats away on wind or water.  You follow it across the desert, laden with bricks of salt, which you trade for gold.  I write a story that is a dune.  You sit a top it and ride it along the shoreline to the sapphire bay, where you fish.  I write a story that is a tree.  You climb up the tree beyond its emerald leaves and then you climb the air until you reach the clouds and disappear; some say you reach heaven.

            I write a story that is the wind and you call me God or you call me blasphemer and burn me.  I write a story that is water and you forget I exist.  I write a story that undoes stories and you die and are reborn.

            I write a story that is a line in sand.  You follow it before it floats away on wind or water.  But this line meets itself and becomes a circle.  You follow it until you fall into your own mind and there you find yourself sitting on a beach at the edge of the world with the ever-roaring sea as company.

Before we leave last week’s reading too far behind, we have to listen to this:

This tricky piece comes out of the lavish tradition of artifice funded by the aristocracy of the duchy of Berry (modern-day southern France). Its composer is a man known to us only as Solage, and his rondeau Fumeaux fume represents the lengths to which a composer’s wry ingenuity could reach. To read the text aloud in the original language (which I assume is still Occitan down there; correction anyone?) is to get a sense of its artifice. The words fold back in on themselves, like the billowing smoke they represent. It is the type of playful prodding of language and meaning that reached such extremes during this period.

Fumeaux fume par fumee
fumeuse speculacion.

Qu’antre fummet so pensee:
Fumeaux fume par fumee.

quar fumer molt li agree
tant qu’il ait son entencion.
Fumeaux fume par fumee
fumeuse speculacion.

[A smoker smokes through smoke.
A smoky speculation.

Is, between puffs his thought:
A smoker smokes through smoke.

For smoking suits him very well
As long as he keeps his intention.
A smoker smokes through smoke.
A smoky speculation.]

pencil on paper
autumn 2009

Here, then, was a paradox of

picture taking that appeared 

from the start. Despite its 

promise of the ultimate

document, of a picture more

realistic than art could

achieve, the camera was also

an instrument of artifice

and posing, even fakery

and deceit. The invention

that enabled people to write

with the sun would blur the distinction between appearance and reality,

between the image and the event. 

Kiku Adatto

[Kiku Adatto is an author, scholar and commentator on American society and culture.] 

My sneakers are cuddled by the cobblestones

They callused the hands of 200 year-old East-Europeans

My fedora greets a dozen dormers

They framed the gazes of many sons and daughters of steel

I make my way to the lab,

hospital,

studio,

incubator,

robot,

bank.

I am challenged by the masses who built the Second Industrial Revolution

I am lifted by their presence

There is an abundance of bridges,

blast furnaces,

tanks,

railroads,

I-beams,

cars,

refrigerators.

My spirit is elevated

I envision worlds that do not exist

gadgets that hear

medicines that heal

buildings that live

energy that gives life

I am one with the pioneers of steel and artifice

I have callused hands,

money,

intelligence,

and the ingenuity of middle managers

I am  East-European and I am Far-Eastern

It is a beautiful abundant morning in the Burgh

© all rights reserved by Sail Anon, 10/10/2009 2:45PM

A sewer rat with greasy teats
sat pumping lumps into her brain.
A viscous sour fat that cools
her fears and soothes her pain.

Doris is trying not to notice the fourteen ticks on her head. they are numbing her higher faculties. stimulating her defence mechanisms.

With oily tongue of hook and bind
they mount the head of Doris,
caress her blind with sighs like knives
and feed upon her blockage.

I just got an email from Mike Eidson, editor of Eposic, informing me that he’s buying "Artifice" for inclusion in the Out of Order Anthology.

"Artifice" is an alternate reality story with post humans, Atlantis, some Pantheon gods, and the ancestors of the Olmecs.

notebook – mixed media

summer 2009

Now reading: White-Jacket, by Herman Melville.

It’s tough to read White-Jacket on its own terms, and not as The Book Before Moby-Dick.  Too much fun, for instance, to see how Melville’s approach to designing his narrative and combining his mini-essays, reminiscences, fictional events, and factual chapters into a cohesive whole changed from this book to his masterpiece.

Moby-Dick is, obviously, much more successful at this, but the earlier book is different in interesting ways.  W-J does not begin with a compelling narrative like the adventures of Ishmael and Queequeg, propelling the reader into the more various and philosophical chapters of the book’s middle; instead, it begins with a mildly humorous description of the eponymous white jacket, made of patches and scraps of fabric.  To the reader accustomed to Melville, the chapter and the device of the jacket are irresistible as a metafiction, a metaphor for the entire work, for his style in general: the patchwork, uncanny (“white as a shroud”), self-made, absorbent jacket is a fine symbol of Melville’s work.  Besides which, that whiteness: already creeping into (or back into, if such a coat actually existed) Melville’s mind, the pariah, mysterious whiteness.

(Also, as in M-D, the beginning of the narrative is not actually the beginning of the book.  Here, there’s a preface (in the English edition) or note (in the American) in which Melville states that he’s used his own “man-of-war experiences and observations” in the book.  Unlike the extravagant legend-building in the paratextual opening of M-D, here there’s an avowal of basis in fact and truth, in real life.  Melville still not over the sting of Mardi’s dismissal, not yet ready to write another giant piece of fiction.)

After this opening, W-J slips into the kind of observations of nautical life loosely joined to a fictional framework which occupy much of M-D’s middle — but without doing much of the work of helping us identify with the narrator or the other characters on the ship.  The observations are engaging enough, but the reader is left with a lot of unanswered, nagging questions about the narrator, and about how to read the book (interestingly, the preface in the English edition encourages the reader to read the book as fact-based fiction, while the American-edition note makes it seem a work of biography).

And yet the voice into which Melville is growing — has grown, it seems, by this point in his career — compels.  There’s a great section from chapters 16 to 19, including a furious chapter, full of complex, fascinating rhetoric,  about the injustice of war and worthless preparations for war; an ironic, contrapuntal chapter about the desperate attempts to save anyone fallen overboard on a man-of-war; a smooth segue into a beautiful statement of the man-of-war “full as a Nut,” a kind of floating city or world; and a gorgeous chapter, containing a premonition of the Icarus theme in M-D and a paean to sailors, who “expatriate ourselves to nationalize with the universe.”

Melville said he wrote Redburn and White-Jacket for the money, plain and simple; it’s a gross simplification, of course, because the man was full of interesting thoughts and interesting words, and got himself invested in whatever he was working on.  And yet (even a fraction of the way in, as I am into W-J) the difference is plainly there, between these works and M-D, or even between these and Mardi or Pierre.  To my own surprise, I find the difference is not so much one of sincerity, or deeper thinking, or even of finding a theme worthy of his best work.  No: the difference is one of artifice.  Melville was at his most rigorously artificial, his most fantastical and fictional, when he cared most, when he felt he was playing for artistic and aesthetic keeps.  For Melville, plain speaking could only lead to superficial understanding.