Monthly Archives: June 2012

Comiks and Kreative Empowerment (CAKE)

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Quoth Slavoj Zizek: “True art has nothing whatsoever to do with disgusting emotional exhibitionism.” The Slovenian philosopher-provocateur may have found much to dismiss at the Chicago Alternative Comics Expo (CAKE), where earnest expressions set off by poignant design choices were on proud display from wall to wall, presented with disarming and/or cloying plainspokenness. “And if 80 tables chocked full of the greatest comics being made today is not enough for you (jeesh, really?),” the press release exclaims, “our Slate of programming presents 14 events that range from conversation to presentation to demonstration to documentation.” Indeed, it was an enormous and well-programmed affair, and this urgently casual tone, while it reminds one of the new “aw, snap!” informality infiltrating internet commerce, is, I feel, forgivable.

Forgivable ultimately because, despite the forced lack of guile, there’s absolutely no misrepresentation. Chicago art-comics virtuosos were on hand, like Lille Carre, Grant Reynolds, Anya Davidson, Anders Nilsen, and Edie Fake, (a primary CAKE organizer), all of whom generate delicately crafted works that invest personal experiences with shimmering magical nostalgia. Local publication The Land Line, and the freeform comics-based collaborative (one might even say improvisational) endeavors Brain Frame and Trubble Club, were all broadcasting their effervescent brand of playful artistic interchange. And their compatriots from around the U.S. (and Canada, the CAKE promo reminds us, “woooooooooo”) echoed the same kind of jubilant communitarian introversion. From table to table, whether it was small publishers, identity-based projects, creative collectives, or individual creators (with plenty of gray areas in between), everyone was thoroughly congenial, sincerely happy to talk about their books, their art, or anything related to small-press comics or indie print culture. I made it to two panels– one on the Chicago comics scene, and one on queer comics anthologies, both of which were lighthearted, enthusiastic, and informative.

Zizek also said that “culture is the name of a belief which is no longer taken seriously.” While he rejects the notion that at any point there were more “authentic” forms of belief, it does seem reasonable to look at the massive production of “culture” today, especially in a grassroots milieu like comics, as the place where devotion can be focused, without the embarrassment of commitment (embarrassment being, for Zizek, the original source of culture). But the unfortunate formal shortcomings of some confessional artwork is compensated for in the collective act of goodwill required for a congregation of gifted reflective aesthetes to create a fun and memorable celebration of pleasant, occasionally provocative fantasies- right here in Chicago, an important center for independent comics and animation.
 
Illustration from Rebecca Mir’s Apostrophe in the Ocean, which debuted at CAKE.
 

Weirdness and Conscience in the Work of Craig Norton

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Craig Norton’s recent show is a different beast than what you’ll find in galleries around Chelsea and the New York art scene. Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore, at Jim Kempner Gallery until June 23rd, is an emotional and explicit rendering of the schizophrenic divide between America at war and at home, and the egregious neglect of veterans. Norton is also a hyper-realistic and self-taught draftsman who makes narrative art. These factors are not the taboos they were fifty years ago, but they are no longer typical in contemporary art either. To compare, the famous Gagosian Gallery is showing a famous photographer’s gargantuan, historic prints of other famous people. I’m currently writing this piece next door, in a miniscule gallery called Family Business, where we are exhibiting a group show entirely comprised of sticks.

Conceptual strength and skillful execution are crucial to the success of any art work, past or present, even if the faces of these terms have changed. In Tim Came Home… concept and skill manifest in ways the wider public would expect them to—ironically, this quality makes him an outsider in today’s art world.  I hope Norton’s pop-out, transfixing murals can function as a gateway for casual viewers into contemporary art, and a call for artists to consider the perspective of those unversed in it.

Norton’s work rejects the idea that art is by nature morally and politically apathetic, ineffective, and/or isolated, ideas that philosophers, artists and critics have argued for centuries. Artists periodically challenge this claim, but perhaps no population rejects it more often than those outside of the art market, whose faith that art ‘matters’ may be the art world’s most regular misguided compliment, (and art has suffered for it through many censorships and its co-option by propaganda.) Along these lines, many still believe that art is a showcase of technical skill, and that virtuosity isn’t inherently absurd.   Norton caters to these ideas, but in doing so, his work also fulfills conservative expectations about ‘art’ that we have a good reason to question. Tim Came Home… is a riveting, provocative show, but it lets the art-world context essentially “talk behind its back,” rather than directly address the inherent weirdness of politicized art in the contemporary gallery.

Today's Enemy, Tomorrow's Friend

Norton’s work is not only political, but fascinatingly journalistic. Reminiscent of the Wall Street Journal portraits, Norton renders faces, hands and firearms out of tiny marks and stipples. Oftentimes the hands and faces are blown out of proportion, which distorts the figures into punchy homunculi, and brushes caricature without slipping into it. The clothing and bodies are made of boldly colorful wallpaper collages. He ‘draws’ folds with wood-relief style incisions. This mimicry of print illustration is bolstered by the fact that he designed the installation to tell a story. Instead of accompanying a news article, Tim Came Home… could be read as the article itself, or as a history museum exhibit where the story is told through the dioramas alone.

Detail from No Welcome Mat

The effectiveness of the hanging contributed to the shows emotional resonance, but also to what is problematic about it. From a strictly “graphic narrative in the gallery” perspective, I was thrilled to see the show explore the layout’s control over the narrative. Tim Came Home… was hung two different ways, which created two different ‘stories.’

Initially, the viewer would walk into the gallery and encounter a crowd of happy, urban passerby. Viewers would then typically start over to the left, with No Welcome Mat.

No Welcome Mat

 

This crowd scene erupts into the first, with injured veterans parachuting down into the unworried crowd. Moving to the right, around the front desk, the second act focuses on the tragic integration of these two worlds. The first is a military funeral. The second is called My Daddy is A Decorated War Veteran, where a young girl claws at her face, before a crumpled man and a shotgun.

My Daddy Was A Decorated War Hero

The forceful disruption of the “side scrolling”, frieze-like perspective allows you to peer straight through the wall, to the scene behind the girl, and at an impossible angle inside the coffin. The effect is very moving.

 

Another Casual Casualty of War

 Unfortunately, gallery visitors sometimes didn’t notice the “second act” around the desk.  The Jim Kempner Gallery rehung the show so that visitors first emerge to see My Daddy Is… No Welcome Mat still begins the show, but the scene doesn’t bleed into the urban passerby. Instead, the warfare peters out into negative space, and a small pocket of the passerby lead back into My Daddy Is…. Around the desk, the two parts of the military burial flank the rest of the happy-go-lucky city-dwellers. Life goes on, and no one is the wiser—the second hanging, while a compromise of the original vision, is rhythmically more complex, less melodramatic, and damning.

various figures

Norton’s past work focused on the Civil Rights movement, and he was challenged about his right, as a white man, to depict moments as iconic as Martin Luther King Jr.’s arrest. Norton responds in his personal statement, “I make art about mankind. Lots of people care only about their own identity groups… and I’m not going to sit back and do nothing because the victims are different from me. It’s a human issue.” He goes on to say “Art is the way I bring about awareness and dialogue—and hopefully inspire change.”            

This statement plays into the editorial feel, where a piece documents and somewhat universalizes the particular. Norton doesn’t comment on the role or the effect of the gallery context on his plea. The gallery is treated like a culturally heralded space, where people seek meaning, information, and often go to look at pretty things. This is not untrue, but it ignores other currents too. At the risk of being grotesque, art is a luxury commodity, and fetishistic, which the neutrality of the gallery amplifies. The art world is also a complex and hierarchical social scene that partially takes place in the gallery, transforming openings and installations into sets to act inside of. A truly thorough contemplation of a work will consider the historical context and precedents of the piece. Norton’s work is a little strange in that it appears to be descended from editorial illustration more than anything.  This does not mean that Norton’s work doesn’t belong there, but that the conditions of its “immigration” are unusual and inextricable.

Is the art gallery a useful place to encounter Tim Came Home…? Ultimately, yes— it does raise awareness for an important social issue, even if the scenario is ironic. But is a private collection a useful place for this piece? How about an art museum? Is Norton’s work best designed for public spaces?  If Norton’s wish for awareness and dialogue attaches a use-value to his work, certain environments could be more successful than others, and Norton’s work would also violate ‘art for art’s sake.’ No big deal: art pour l’art has been rejected before, and chances are it’s a mental illusion, (people use art without admitting to it, and for reasons they can’t articulate.) Finally, Norton’s arresting photorealism individualizes the subjects, but it is also hypnotic, exciting the eye with spectacle of torment, violence, and artistic wizardry. Norton’s process receives a paragraph of the artist’s statement before the political component is even discussed.

I apologize: I won’t attempt to answer these questions in this review, but the questions themselves are illustrative. An artist doesn’t have to have a fully elaborated concept to start working. Here, the ideas and context don’t dovetail together to create an Eureka moment—instead, Tim Came Home highlights the mess of understandings about what art is and what it does. Which are, more than ever, important questions to ask.

All photographs are courtesy of the artist and Jim Kempner Gallery

 

Tim Came Home From the War and Isn’t Timmy Anymore

Jim Kempner Gallery, May 12th – June 23rd, 2012

Old Wine in New Wineskins: The House on the Borderland

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Reprinted from text scans of The Comics Journal #234 (June 2001)

History appears to indicate that William Hope Hodgson was not a particularly lucky individual. Rejected hundreds of times during the course of his literary career and finally blown to bits in Belgium towards the close of World War I, he could not have hoped for more in death. As such, he has largely been forgotten: his books have long gone out of print and even his finest works have been edited to eliminate excessive sentimentality by his literary supporters. Poor precedents indeed for Richard Corben and Simon Revelstroke’s pioneering adaptation of one of his works.

Born in Essex, England, into a family with an Anglican clergyman at its head, it has oft been pointed out that Hodgson’s family was frequently transferred to various removed locations including that of Galway in Ireland where The House on the Borderland (1908) is set. At various times in his life a sailor, a body builder, a photographer and an author, Hodgson’s works include The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907), Carnacki, The Ghostfinder (1913, originally published as short stories in various magazines), and The Night Land (1912).

That tower of the horror genre and bane of elitists everywhere, H. P. Lovecraft, is frequently quoted (in cover blurbs) in defense and praise of Hodgson’s most fatuous book. He called it “a classic of the first water” and “perhaps the greatest of all Mr. Hodgson’s works.” Further, with regard to its place in literary history, he considered the “wandering of the narrator’s spirit through limitless light-years of cosmic space and kalpas of eternity . . . something almost unique in standard literature.” Others, such as Clark Ashton Smith and C.S. Lewis, have followed suit with praise for the imaginative elements found in Hodgson’s other novels.

Reason enough, one might think, for an adapter to create an unsullied version of this seminal work. To no avail. On the contrary, Corben and Revelstroke have chosen to adapt Hodgson’s novel in a way that makes the editor’s decision to label such changes “an original framing sequence that taps a contemporary vein” nothing short of diabolically disingenuous.

Here are the facts of the novel which do remain intact. While on a trip to West Ireland, Messrs. Tonnison and Berreggnog discover a manuscript detailing the final days in the life of a recluse and his sister, Mary, in a large house with a reputation among the local villagers of having been built by the devil. Almost from the outset, the narrator is plagued by feverish dream-like states compelling him to drift in disembodied fashion to arcane locales, sometimes encountering dangers in the form of swine-like creatures and at other times traveling through the millennia to witness apocalyptic visions of the end of life on earth itself. And that’s about it. Apart from these bare facts, very little else remains intact.

Some of Corben and Revelstroke’s changes are easily explained, though perhaps not as easily countenanced—their substitution of the original narrator’s almost placid defense of his house and sister against the swine creatures with a 20-page hammer and tongs affair involving a slew of blunt weapons and firearms, for instance. The former account is suspenseful and full of pent up energy while the latter simply revels in violence, not an unfamiliar predilection in Corben’s other works.

Less explicable is the authors’ decision to slice off thc entire first section of Hodgson’s manuscript which sees the protagonist floating across a plain of desolate loneliness into a valley of murderous gods in half-slumber. Hodgson’s writing here is energetic and effective and the protagonist’s first encounter with the swine creatures in this section of the book, a most useful cap to the almost signature dreamscapes he creates. One can only guess at the reasons why such a key sequence was excised. It does allow for delay in the introduction of the swine creatures which grow to dominate the book and it might have been felt that the portrayal of such unearthly elements so early on would not have served the rhythmic crescendos of the comic. Yet these are sorry excuses for such vandalism.

Equally dissatisfying is the comic’s tendency toward logic and cozy explanations, features with no place in Hodgson’s novel, which revels in its utter obscurity, failing at every turn to apprise the reader of its true meaning. As it happens, the comic comes close to a complete rewriting of the text stopping only to preserve some of the main points of the novel, while adding elements with a rampant disregard for its sexually innocent strains. In relation to this point and as their centerpiece, the authors present us with a mildly perverted 20th century interpretation of Hodgson’s work: the swine beasts who hardly even touch Mary in the original, are now doing the needful and have procured an “intent which is hideously clear” (the panel in question shows Mary two legs thrust in the air and spread wide in deference to those readers who have not divined this clarity.)

These elements do not reside in Hodgson’s book but are a kind of freeform interpolation on the part of the adapters, taking the mysterious seclusion of the siblings and extrapolating this to its ultimate late 20th century conclusion. I can only surmise that they felt free to do so since any thinking reader glancing through Revelstroke and Corben’s adaptation would realize that Hodgson would probably have been pilloried and sent to Reading Gaol if he had undertaken such an offensive stance.

These sexual shenanigans may have their origins in some of the vague plotting Hodgson resorts to two thirds through his novel. Here he introduces the hitherto unknown aspect of the protagonist’s former fiancee. Hodgson’s protagonist writes in an elliptical way about his former love and his sister’s increasing withdrawal and distance from himself, almost as if she were possessed of greater apprehensions about her own brother than the swine creatures lurking outside the house. These enigmatic relationships are twisted into a secret lust for his own sister in the adaptation; the swine creatures now symbolic of the protagonist’s own fears.

The creatures take on the role of his sister’s manhandlers and rapists, opening her up (by means of a feral bite) to the carnal delights of incest. Later in the comic, she strips brazenly for him and caresses him in a most vile yet delectable manner. These sexual feats bring Mary to the forefront of a story in which she is curiously absent — and in which she was certainly not the deranged, gun-toting, buxom Rambette of the comic.

It might be best to see the comic not as an adaptation in the purest sense of the word but a combination of adaptation and homage comparable to the wealth of fan and professional fiction that has sprouted up around the Cthulhu Mythos (and to a considerably lesser extent the prose-form House on the Borderland). Nowhere is this better seen than in the final section of the book where there are musings on the nature of fear, wherein the author of the manuscript becomes a makeshift replacement for Hodgson himself speaking of the “Outer Dark,” “Watcher[s]” (references to Hodgson’s The Night Land) and the guarding of portals between unknown nightmarish lands and our own.

It is interpretive in a way that echoes Alan Moore’s musing upon the source of the novel’s magical qualities in his introduction to the comic adaptation: the Jungian landscape of the house and the porcine quality of the men Hodgson may have come across in his travels during his youth. The borderland is seen as a place between “waking thought and the night-land of the unconscious.” In this sense, Corben and Revelstroke’s idea of the shifting nature of the house, at once a gateway, an asylum, and a state of mind, is not without justification.

It is also possible to surmise that the adapters have combined the ideas found in Hodgson’s short story, “The Hog” (a story from the Carnacki, The Ghost Finder cycle of stories), with those in The House on the Borderland producing a fusion of forms. Various themes in the adaptation may be seen to have their genesis in concepts articulated by Hodgson in “The Hog.”: the notion of being transformed into something less than human by contact with the swine beasts; the heightened terror of the protagonist in the basement cellar of the house (which mirror those of the hapless Bastion and the pit); the concept of the Hog as a “cloud of nebulosity,” an “Outer Monster” residing in an outer psychic circle—these ideas do not have as firm a basis in the original novel as they do in Hodgson’s short story. It will also be evident to readers of Hodgson that the explanations foisted on the strange events in the comic are more in keeping with “The Hog,” in particular the motif of unearthly intrusions and the ravenous feeding of those alien creatures on the fears of mankind. This may be compared with Carnacki’s thoughts towards the close of Hodgson’s short story:

“They plunder and destroy to satisfy lusts and hungers as other forms of existence plunder and destroy to satisfy their lusts and hungers. And the desires of these monsters is chiefly, if not always, for the psychic entity of the human.”

Clearly the adapters have taken the author of Borderland at his word, for Hodgson himself exhorts his readers to uncover the “inner story” according to personal “ability and desire.”

Of course, horror and science-fiction adaptations of this ilk are nothing new to Corben. There is the reasonably faithful adaptation of Harlan Ellison’s “A Boy and His Dog” in Vic and Blood for example. More relevant is Corben’s reworking of The Fall of the House of Usher, which demonstrates many of the idiosyncrasies which mar the comic Borderland: the bosomy lady phantoms; Madeline Usher traipsing about half-naked; and the fervid sex betwixt Lady Usher and Poe. The current adaptation of The House on the Borderland seems almost restrained by comparison. If anything, middle-age, Revelstroke and perhaps the sheer “respectability” of the Vertigo line have resulted in some of the reining in we find in the new work.

There is no doubt that the hard money at Vertigo has done wonders for the reproduction of Corben’s artwork. The slightly muddy printing of some of the Fantagor color books have been replaced by sharp, clear reproductions. What is missing and has been missing since the late 1980s has been Corben’s beautiful palette, which has been historically varied, rich, and at times subtle. The color work which Corben produced in the early 1980s and which probably reached its final flowering in some sections of his Children of Fire series has been described by the artist as “time consuming” and “highly evolved,” words which have no place in an age of quick fixes. Corben commented on his difficulties in an interview with Heavy Metal magazine in 1997:

“My style, although I have several styles, I used to do a fully-rendered, in-color style, but everything has to be done too fast now, so I’m doing a line style and then it is colored in. My attitude is different. When I started doing comics, I did them because I wanted to and if I made money, that was good. If I didn’t, well, I did them anyway. Now, I feel like I have to meet a financial quota.”

I mention this not as a criticism of Corben but of an industry which virtually compels its best artists to produce less than their finest efforts if they are to find a reasonable living within the industry. Even so, it must be said that The House on the Borderland represents something of a high point in Corben’s art. It also demonstrates that he is still holding firmly to many of the old values of naked big-breasted ladies, balding men, and free-wheeling literary license. It is, in the final analysis, entertaining and remains a good if not wholly truthful advertisement for Hodgson’s famous novel.

 

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction, Part 2

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In part one I discussed how the existence of the internet complicates and modifies many of the ideas laid out in David Foster Wallace’s “E Unibas Pluram and in particular how our transition from a nation where human labor is engaged in making objects to one in which it is engaged in making images is a key societal change that a recent crop of novelists are trying to address. Today, I’ll talk at length about Jonathan Lethem’s recent novel Chronic City as an example of this.
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It’s hard to summarize or even introduce the plot of Chronic City, as its gradual unfolding and the realizations that come with it is an important part of the experience of a first reading, but as Hooded Utilitarian is a pro-spoiler kind of place, let’s give it a shot.  Chronic City concerns the (mis)adventures of a washed-up former child star named Chase Insteadman who enjoys a mid-thirties second celebrity due to his engagement to a doomed astronaut named Janice Turnbull. Janice is stranded in a space station behind a line of Chinese mines, a series of letters she writes to Chase her only communication with the Earth (or the reader). Chase meets and befriends a washed-up cultural critic named Perkus Tooth, who is one of contemporary literature’s great eccentric side-kicks. Perkus, who made his reputation posting hand-scrawled broadsides on the walls of buildings all over New York, now lives in a rent-controlled Upper East Side apartment where he does lots of drugs, eats cheeseburgers and muses about the hidden connections between various pop culture ephemera.

Perkus and Chase’s crew is rounded out by two other friends: Richard Abneg and Oona Lazlow.  Abneg, a former tenant-rights radical, now works for New York’s billionaire mayor undoing rent stabilization laws. Oona, Perkus’s former protégé with whom Chase begins an affair, ghost-writes celebrity autobiographies.  Together, they discover and begin chasing after quasi-mystical objects called chaldrons, odd sparkling urn-like containers that they’ve only glimpsed images of on Ebay.

The novel moves with the episodic rhythms of a difficult friendship.  There are bursts of and gestures towards an overriding narrative involving a conspiracy that remains thoroughly in the background until the final few chapters. In its place, are many many conversations about pop cultural artifacts, soirees amongst the elites of Manhattan and ongoing searches for capital-t Truth.

Wallace talks about us being one big audience, but Chronic City is after something a little bit different. Through Chase’s eyes, what we see is an age where we are spectators and consumers, yes, but we’re also performers. We’re also the ones making the very culture we’re the audience for. Via YouTube, Facebook, Blogs, Tumblrs, Twitter, Pinterest, through Vimeo and Etsy and Soundcloud and countless other outlets, we are audience and performer at the same time. We can no longer claim—as Wallace does— that a culture is being imposed on us, one that’s simultaneously delightful and infantilizing and isolating.  We are both halves of the equation now.  Whatever happens, we are complicit in it.

Complicity is the big wrinkle that Chronic City brings to this issue. And it turns out that once you start looking for it, the word complicit appears all over the book[1].  The word first surfaces on page 13 when Chase is trying to explain his newfound friend Perkus to the reader, when, after a litany of different cultural subjects Perkus would rant about, Chase sums it up thusly:

 

In short, some human freedom had been leveraged from view at the level of consciousness itself.  Liberty had been narrowed, winnowed, amnesiacked.  Perkus Tooth used the word without explaining—by it he meant something like the Mafia itself would do, a whack, a rubout.  Everything that mattered most was a victim in this perceptual murder plot.  Further: always to blame was everyone: when rounding up the suspects, begin with yourself.  Complicity, including his own, was Perkus Tooth’s only doubtless conviction. (emphasis mine)

 

The tone here is not moralistic. Chronic City is not saying—and never says— that we are evil for our participation. If anything, it views this participation that we all do (including Perkus, including Jonathan Lethem, including me, including you) as a fact. The book may be trying to make us see this participation, but it’s not scolding us for it. Instead of judging us as Perkus does, Lethem tries to make us aware of the ways that we all make our bargains, have our scripts and have to pay a price for being in and enjoying this society we’ve made.

And we do enjoy it. Let’s not bullshit each other. Like Richard Abneg screaming that he wants to fuck a Chaldron the first time he sees one, there’s something very ecstatic about all of this.  It’s not without joy. But it’s not without its price either, particularly for us artistically-inclined folk.  The internet has both devalued creativity and enabled it.  There’s more writing—and reading—going on than at any point in human history, and much of it is for free. Facebook is able to have a small staff because its users make its content for them.

That content is worth pausing to consider. I find it striking, for example, that the first major internet meme most people I know encountered involved baby talk gibberish scrawled on pictures of kittens, and much of the writing we generate is poisoned with reflexive bad-faith and a kind of unquashable rage. And there’s a constant feedback loop of participation, anger and trollery begetting anger and trollery like the two warring factions in The Butter Battle Book.

I’m complicit right now, come to think of it. I am writing this post for free on the internet. Generating more content, some of it fueled with internet skepticism, a skepticism that is immediately defanged because you have to get onto the internet to read it in the first place. Indeed, I don’t watch DFW’s six hours of television a day, but I spent a great deal more time than that staring into my computer screen, interacting with people online, passing along memes and hashtags, doing a lot of things that feel like work but aren’t, participating in this culture I also try to critique.  What choice do I, do any of us, have?

Chronic City is examining this world built on complicity, built on active—if often unwitting—participation in the very systems that we are angry at and want to overthrow. And it examines that world through the very specific—and very odd—eyes and words of narrator and protagonist Chase Insteadman.

Chase is a retired act-or.  He no longer acts.  That’s the key aspect of his character. Within the book there are only a handful of moments when Chase consciously commits some kind of action in pursuit of an objective (or, in other words, acts the way we expect a protagonist to act). Instead of being an actor, Chase is imbued with a kind of monstrous self-awareness. He might be blind to the realities of his life, but he knows he’s blind. One of the great pleasures of the book is reading Chase talking about himself, which he does with some regularity.  Pay particular attention to the way he phrases the following on 63 and 64:

 

The only role I ever played to anyone’s complete satisfaction was Warren, on Martyr & Pesty… The show itself was avowedly “dumb” and we all (writers and actors, network, critics, audience) flogged ourselves those days for our complicity in its runaway success, but I, the exception was unaccountably “soulful.”… I no longer act, that is unless you’d call my every waking moment a kind of performance.

 

Or this on 66-67:

I’m outstanding only in my essential politeness.  Exhausting, this compulsion to oblige any detected social need. I don’t mean only to myself; it’s frequently obvious that my charm exhausts and bewilders others, even as they depend upon it to mortar crevices in the social façade…. But if beneath charm lies exhaustion, beneath exhaustion lies a certain rage. I detect a wrongness everywhere. Within and Without, to quote a lyric. It would be misleading to say I’m screaming inside, for if I was I’d soon enough find a way to scream aloud.  Rather, the politeness infests a layer between me and myself, the name of the wrongness going not only unexpressed but unknown. Intuited only. Forbidden perhaps.

 

It is a very curious thing for a protagonist to be someone who doesn’t act. Doubly curious when that person is also the narrator. We are used to our protagonists wanting things and then taking certain actions to get them. But other than sex with Oona, we know very little about what Chase wants. Chase has little inner life, and is open about this. To drive the point home, Insteadman’s apartment is basically empty, devoid of any belongings worth describing. Instead, what he wants to describe to the reader is the view outside of his window, a view being slowly eclipsed by a high rise going up in front of it.

Chase’s mix of self-awareness and blindness, politeness and rage results from his transformation prior to the book’s beginning from a subject into an object. He understands that his existence is predicated on being used by other people. His life is lived as an extra man at a series of high-society functions; his politeness, sit-com childhood and newfound fame as the fiancée of a doomed astronaut get him invited to various soirees where he sings for his supper by discussing his love of his lost Janice Trumbull, whom he cannot even remember anymore.

Via Chase, Chronic City shows how we are losing pieces of our subjectivity in all our constant performing for other people; we are instead becoming—and treating others as—objects. As our culture moves from making things to making images of things—a subject Chronic City turns to overtly in the second half of the book—we in turn objectify ourselves. Chase talks about this frequently. As he goes to a fancy dinner with the richest couple in New York, he remarks that his “presence for an evening, or at least the duration of an elegant dinner, had been auctioned off as a premium, at a benefit for one of Maud Woodrow’s charities. I couldn’t anymore recall which.”  Six pages later, he says that his face is a mask. Chase has turned himself into an object to be sold by one person to another and he can’t even remember for what cause he’s doing it. Is it any wonder that, in the midst of the dinner, he comes down with a crippling flu?

I also don’t think that it’s a coincidence or authorial oversight that both Chase and Richard Abneg treat the women in their lives as objects. We know Oona has large incisors, heavy glasses, a black bob haircut, that she’s very skinny and that she has peach sized, impertinent breasts.  We don’t know who her parents are or where she comes from. We don’t know what she desires. Chase says he loves her, but his love largely boils down to trying to investigate her, to solve the problem of who she is against her own will[2].  Abneg, meanwhile, gazes upon the sleeping form of his lover Georgina Hawkmanaji and intones to his friends, “Such an amazing shape. How can anyone ever sit in a meeting, or make a plan, or add up a column of fucking numbers, when there’s a shape like that somewhere out there, a shape like that with your name on it, coming to get you?” The Hawkman, as she is called in the book, is a shape rather than a person.

The novel situates these people, these shapes, these performers in a very particular environment, for the Manhattan of Chronic City (and I hate to spoil this, but the book is undiscussable without this knowledge) is not our New York. It’s an alternate one, a kind of Earth-2, one where instead of 9/11 a great, never-ending fog descended on lower Manhattan, one where film directors Morrison Groom and Florian Ib have directed movies starring The Gnuppets and Marlon Brando or where people listen to groundbreaking post-punk band Cthonic Youth.

There’s a heavy emphasis within the novel on spaces-within-spaces.  Chase meets Richard at a party that takes place in a Brownstone within an Apartment building. A restaurant might hide a secret room. Perkus’s apartment, like a TARDIS is “a container bigger on the inside than the outside.” An installation artist named Laird Noteless’s signature artworks involve huge chasms dug into cities.

Children’s stories often begin with a kind of familiar cadence.  Once there was the Land Of _______ and in the Land there was a forest, and in the forest there was a house and in the house there was a room and in the room there was a cabinet and in the cabinet there was a drawer and in the drawer there was a box and in the box there was a….

What’s delightful about this for children (and adults) is that you are waiting to get to this end of the chain, because at the end of the chain is what really matters. It’s the magic ring. Or the truth. But on the internet, when you follow the series of boxes within boxes, you always hit another link in the chain, another rabbit hole to go down. You are always going deeper and deeper into new boxes and the truth, if it exists, becomes destabilized.  After all, in a world in which editing a Wikipedia article can change Marlon Brando from dead to alive, who knows what’s real and what’s fake?  Chronic City takes this idea and spins a world of it.  Its central trio of men—the brain, the body and the raging erection of Perkus Tooth, Charse Insteadman and Richard Abneg—seem to be on a search for truth. But the truths they eventually discover—I’ll leave them unarticulated here— might not even be true, and might not be actionable even if they are.

This all comes to a head once chaldrons show up and Perkus, Chase and Richard begin a series of mad scrambles to get their hands on one. Their first attempt leads to one of the book’s great setpieces, a mad Ebay-and-borrowed-credit-card pursuit fueled by high grade marijuana and the improvised guitar stylings of Sandy Bull (who, it turns out, actually exists).  It takes quite awhile for the trio to figure out why they even want a chaldron so badly in the first place.  It’s a perfect locus of desire… but a desire for what?:

“For something so warm… it casts a sort of … brusque… watery…. Shadow… over so much else… that I took for granted…”

“Despite sounding like a retarded Wallace Stevens I actually get you,” said Richard.  “That thing’s the ultimate bullshit detector–“

“Sure, and what it detects is that your city’s a sucker[3], Abneg.” Perkus spoke with a startling insistence, but his tone wasn’t needling. “Your city’s a fake, a bad dream.” This was somehow the case, the chaldron interrogated Manhattan, made it seem an enactment. An object, the chaldrone testified to zones, realms, elsewhere. Likely we’d lost the auction because one couldn’t’ be imported here, to this debauched and insupportable city. The winners had been rescuing the chaldron, ferrying it back to the better place.

 

And so we return back to Perkus’s essential truth: that somehow a fast one has been pulled on the world by the world, leaching everything real out of the universe and, to coin a verb, ersatzing it. Perkus responds to this perceived conspiracy in two seemingly contradictory ways.  He both attempts to reject the world that he views as corrupt and looks for vibrational evidence for his one truth in pop cultural ephemera.  In this, Marlon Brando serves as Perkus’ Space-Coyote-Spirit-Guide, a human signpost revealing hidden truths. Or rather, the same truth, over and over again.

Whether or not the secret Perkus has uncovered is, in fact, true is an open question within the novel. Chronic City is suffused with contradictory moments, ambiguous clues, impossible moments. The reality of the novel—like the reality of Wikipedia— is too unstable to permit anything like an objective truth.  As a result, the book avoids the kind of modernist and romantic clichés about outsider artists. All of Perkus’s ideas could just be a bulwark against his sense of failure, a way for him to sabotage any chance at a recognition he claims to not want but also craves[4].

The tone of the novel, as mentioned before, eschews judgment for a satirical, wise-cracking humor that covers over—and eventually gives way to—despair. For when you are trapped in a world where all is image, and those images may not even have real-world referents anymore, when the closest to freedom you can come is to realize you are a puppet, where hidden conspiracies are ever-present yet might simply be nothing more than the tacit acceptance and perpetuation of the world as it is, it’s hard not to despair.

Chronic City isn’t the only recent work to take this state of affairs as subject matter. Jennifer Egan’s Look At Me, the recent film Shame, Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply, even Dash Shaw’s recent Bodyworld are all suffused with information-age anxieties about identity, reality, and image. Obviously, these themes are not new—they’re present in work as diverse as Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and much of Philip K. Dick as well as the Image-Fictioneers that Wallace celebrates— but in this new crop of information age literature we see these themes and anxieties jumbled and replayed in new ways.  If previously we were concerned with loneliness, now we’re concerned with a kind of alienating hyper-sociality. If before we wanted to penetrate surfaces to get at the realities underneath, now we’re worried there might not be any reality to get to. If before we were victims of a system imposed upon us, now we are creators and perpetuators of that very system.

Of course, maybe it’s always been thus. Perhaps it’s just more visible now. After all, Perkus can’t point to the time when we got amnesiacked. It exists outside of consciousness, fueled by the endless money of the inescapable Manhattan, a world rendered so insular in the book that the reader is likely to wonder along with Chase if the rest of the world even exists.  Of course, it does and it doesn’t. As Fozzy says in this clip, uttering the essential truth of his Gnuppet brethren, I do understand that I am not a real bear. But I know what I am… I’m a real puppet.


[1] Not for nothing, as well, are two of the four main characters sell-outs. Abneg has sold out his political beliefs and Oona has sold out her talents. Yet, and it’s a testament to the book’s charms, they remain loveable to us.

[2] There’s another essay to be written about how Oona is in many ways a response to all of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl/ Mysterious Woman Shaman clichés of early 21st century literature and film, particularly in her refusal to indulge or take care of Chase at his most immature and vulnerable moments. That’s for someone else to write.

[3] It’s not really germane, but this is one of the book’s many references to LCD Soundsystem, which joins a whole host of things that Lethem references with pithy one-liners.

[4] Perkus, we learn, turned down a book deal once because the book was going to be marketed as rock criticism and he hates rock critics.

Your City’s a Sucker: Chronic City, Complicity, and Internet Fiction Part 1

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(Note: The following is adapted from a talk given at the University of Minnesota)

Here’s a fun trick, if you happen to be teaching a college level class: Squint out from behind that big desk or lectern or black treated-rubber-covered laboratory table on which you are banging your fists in a desperate attempt to keep your students paying attention to you instead of to Facebook and say unto them, Alright, raise your hands if you can remember the first time you ever used the internet.

Try it. Not right now, obviously, as I’d prefer you read this, and if it happens to be in the twilight hours going and getting a bunch of kids together might get you in trouble. Should you ever be amongst a large quantity of the yoots of America, try it.  It’s an edifying experience.

And then, if you want to blow their minds, tell them that in ten years, none of the eighteen-to-twenty-year-olds you ask this question of will raise their hands. You’ll get lots of those mmms you hear from the audience during TED talks when someone has said something that feels profoundish.

I remember the first time I used the internet, of course. I had been logging onto BBSes—and even running one—for years.  In fact, I considered myself (mistakenly) a fairly techno-savvy person.  But I had never used the internet before the last week of August, 1997, when Joe Dickson showed me how to plug my computer in to Vassar’s Ethernet system, load up Netscape Navigator and go to visit a then obscure online bookseller called Amazon dot com.

Don’t worry. This isn’t going to be about nostalgia, even if nostalgia is one of the dominant modes of the internet.  No. I’m far more interested in the ubiquity of the web and in the ways webbiness has begun to infect and affect the narratives we consume and create.

Twenty two years ago, David Foster Wallace was thinking about similar questions with his essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction. Noting that people spend more time consuming television than doing almost anything else, Wallace inquired into what happens to us when we spend the plurality of our hours as spectators as an audience staring, as he points out, at our furniture.  What, he wonders, does it do to us when we stop interacting with the real world and spend most of our time not interacting with but rather absorbing fictionalized narratives about the world?

My guess is that a lot of HU readers have read the essay, and it’s way too long and complicated to summarize here. But to broad-stroke it for you, what Wallace ends up at is looking at the ways that “irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive of those features of contemporary U.S. culture… that enjoy any significant relation to the television whose weird pretty hand has my generation by the throat.”  Along the way he notes that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture,” while calling TV a “malevolent addiction,” because it holds itself out as the solution to a problem (loneliness) that it is abetting.

What Wallace is really after is the ways fiction could (and does) respond to all of this. To do this, he describes what he calls “Image-Fiction.” This term is a bit slippery. Wallace seeks to unite many aesthetically divergent writers (such as Don DeLillo, AM Homes, Mark Leyner and himself) under a banner that’s more defined by core values than actual noticeable artistic commonalities:

 

If the postmodern church fathers found pop images valid referents and symbols in fiction….the new Fiction of Images uses the transient received myths of popular culture as a world in which to imagine fictions about “real,” albeit pop-mediated, characters….The Fiction of Image is not just a use or mention of televisual culture but an actual response to it, an effort to impose some sort of accountability … It is a natural adaptation of the hoary techniques of literary Realism to a ‘90s world whose defining boundaries have been deformed by electric signal. For one of realistic fiction’s big jobs used to be… to help readers leap over the walls of self and locale and show us unseen or –dreamed-of people and cultures and ways to be. Realism made the strange familiar. Today, when we can eat Tex-Mex with chopsticks while listening to reggae and watching a Soviet-satellite newscast of the Berlin Wall’s fall… it’s not a surprise that some of today’s most ambitious Realist fiction is going about trying to make the familiar strange. (all italics in the original)

 
One of the problems with reading E Unibus Pluram today is that it’s a bit dated.  This essay was written prior to both The Sopranos and widespread internet use, and so it’s tempting to say that everything has changed.  Which, to some extent it has; the problems he’s discussing are true, but they’ve also radically shifted.  Nevertheless, it provides a rather nice lens through which we can look at Jonathan Lethem—one of Wallace’s near-contemporaries—and how his latest novel Chronic City assays American humanity in the age of the internet[1].

Wallace is worried about what happens to a culture when it moves from being A Nation of “Do-ers and Be-ers” (his words) to a nation of spectators and consumers.  We watch television, we buy things on QVC. Wash, rinse, repeat.  This is not exactly true anymore.

Many readers of this post have likely heard someone on the radio or the teevee say something akin to “We used to make things. America doesn’t make anything anymore!” as a way of tracing our decline as a nation.  Pretty much everyone who comments on the economy or politics, regardless of political ideology, ends up saying this at some point.

That statement—America Is Broken, We Don’t Make Things Anymore—is sort of true and sort of misleading.  It’s not true in the sense that it’s actually meant.  It turns out many many things are still manufactured in America. But—and this is an important but—not that many Americans are employed making them. Many of them are made, instead, by robots. So the statement “we used to make things” becomes true, even if the statement “we used to make things” is false.

It’s also worth thinking about the other word in that sentence: Things.  We. Used. To. Make. Things.  We don’t make things anymore. We have robots for that. So what do we make? We make cultural output and in particular, we make images.  And many of us are doing this all the time.  For free. On the internet. We are making animated .gifs and publishing them on tumblr. We are making memes of Ryan Gosling going “Hey Girl.” We’re writing long blog posts doing close readings of novels. We’re making short films and posting them to YouTube.  And we love these images we create so much that we will go to a festival to see a hologram of a dead rapper perform.

This is having a profound effect on who we are, what the world is and how we perceive and navigate it. This is what, to me, Chronic City is about.  As we’ll discuss in part two (now up!), It’s about these forces, ones that affect all of us, ones we don’t think about anymore because they’re the New Normal.


[1] NB: Chronic City is a large, long, thematically dense and at times deliciously contradictory and ambiguous novel. It’s also clearly meant to be read more than once.  So please take this as A reading of the book rather than The One True reading of the book. If you haven’t read it before, I hope this provides you some sign posts for your own explorations within its streets and boulevards.

Nonentity In the Holy Land

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This first appeared at Splice Today.
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In one sequence from Guy Delisle’s autobiographical Jerusalem, the artist attends an exhibition of his own work at Nablus University in the Palestinian West Bank near Jerusalem.  In the opening panel of the sequence, we see a long shot of the gallery. Mostly (literally) faceless people stand around chatting while in the distance the artwork hangs on the wall.  The pictures are so far away you can’t make out any of the drawings; just tiny blank squares.

It’s an image breathtaking in the aggressive blandness of its narcissism.   There’s no effort to pretend that we’re looking at anything interesting; no suggestion that there’s a worthwhile story. We’re here solely because Delisle was here, and he was here because it’s an exhibit of his own work.  And just to emphasize the banality, Delisle has us explicitly looking at images of his own images which he hasn’t even bothered to draw.  It’s as if the effort of creating  a picture worth viewing would distract from a celebration of his own gloriously quotidian essence.  He’s made himself tiny so that he can block out everything else.

That one panel may not exactly be typical, but it is emblematic.  Jerusalem is in the well-established autobio comics tradition of low-key slice of life nothingness.  It chronicles the year French-speaking Canadian Delisle spent in Jerusalem with his family while his girlfriend worked with Doctors Without Borders.  Maybe if said girlfriend had written it, it would have had something to say, but, as it is, Delisle is basically a tourist, and he’s got little to tell us that we didn’t know coming in.  The Israelis treat the Palestinians badly — check.  Jerusalem is a giant mess — yep.  Caring for small children in a foreign city where you don’t know the lay of the land is exasperating — not something I’d necessarily thought through before, but not exactly earth shattering either.

Early on in the book, there’s a whole page explaining that Israel considers Jerusalem its capital but the international community places its embassies in Tel Aviv, and that there are similar disagreements over borders and territorial claims.  It’s not rocket science — I’m no expert on the Middle East and I’ve basically heard it all before.  But Delisle has himself sitting there acting like he’s being presented with some sort of complex multi-layered revelation.  “So we’re in Israel, right?”  “But Jerusalem is the capital of Israel, right?”  And then he finishes up by declaring: “I don’t really get it, but I tell myself I’ve got a whole year to figure it out….”  Either he’s stupid or he thinks his readers are.

If this were a book or a documentary titled Jerusalem, the creator’s lack of even rudimentary knowledge or insight would generally be a bug.  But  it’s autobio comics, so the less intelligence and insight on display the better.  How else to explain the studious ugliness of the color scheme?  Though there are dashes of other colors here and there, for the most part Delisle has chosen drab browns and washed out grays; combined with his blobby, undistinguished character drawing, you end up feeling like you’re staring into a mud puddle.

The blah art and the blah thinking are of a piece.  Both are in the service of an aw-shucks (hopefully) faux naivete.  Delisle is a humble seeker, drawing without flash, seeing without knowledge, letting us know the truth without the distracting accretion of talent or insight.  It’s just one man’s impressions of Jerusalem.  We learn that it’s awfully hard to find a good playground in East Jerusalem; that traffic is awful; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are intolerant and unpleasant; that the Palestinians in Delisle’s comics class hadn’t read Tintin or much else.  Doesn’t that tell us something, after all, about Jerusalem, about Israel, about the Middle East — about, humanity?

And sure, I suppose it tells us something.  Mostly it tells us that the most banal of insights can be justified by dumping a ton of human misery somewhere in their general vicinity.  Also, and relatedly, it tells us that tourists suck, and that autobio comics suck, and that, if you put them together, they suck doubly.
 

Voices From the Archive: Dirk Deppey on Lost Girls As Reactionary Art

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Dirk and various Utilitarians had a long discussion about the manga YKK. By the by, Dirk wrote this brief discussions of Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s Lost Girls.

Indeed, Lost Girls itself strikes me as a reactionary work of art. Moore clearly approached its pornographic goals from an almost Calvinist left-wing-Anarchist perspective that viewed the enormity of sex through an inflexible set of rules and dogma that would have made any bondage disciplinarian proud. He further piled all of the sexual imagination’s strawman-style villainies upon the characters who Don’t Share Our Values — the bit about soldiers secretly wanting to fuck each other wasn’t exactly what I’d call a nuanced observation. Lost Girls seemed less like an exploration of Dionysus than a series of checklists ticking off the Various Correct Ways To Think About Sex, intent on bringing order to chaos with a determination that Cotton Mathers could only dream of maintaining. Modern porn and its appeal to our baser instincts — this is the future that Moore fears, and he damn well means to roll it back. You could practically feel his anus clench as he plotted Lost Girls out.

Unfortunately, your average Buttman video is almost certainly a far more accurate vision of the libido — certainly the male libido — than is Lost Girls. Sex isn’t a series of wholesome, socially liberating poses; it’s the monkey part of our brain in its purest essence, with all the good and bad that this entails, which is precisely why we have so many taboos surrounding it. Lost Girls had no sense of surrender to the Animal Inside Us, a necessary component of good erotica/porn, as well as an essential part of the explanation for why men and women alike so often do things in the pursuit of sensuality that strike others as utterly insane.

Lost Girls had all the eroticism of a Presbyterian sermon on the joys of the marriage act. Nevermind the catalog of kinks and positions that Moore assembled; the story’s biggest flaw is that his sense of imagination never left the missionary position. Lost Girls is a retreat into rigid dogma, which makes it reactionary regardless of the fact that said dogma is left-leaning in nature.

(Adding insult to injury, Lost Girls is also a virtual catalog of unquestioned assumptions once you stepped outside of Moore’s need to present sex correctly. I especially loved the way that Dorothy fulfilled every hick-farmgirl stereotype available to Moore at the time. Kinda dumb? Check! Jacked off a horse? Check! Fucked her dad? Check! I’m surprised that she didn’t come right out and state that her mom was also her dad’s cousin before marching off to lynch her some neegruhs while she was at it. I’d call Lost Girls any number of things, but “progressive” is the last term I’d use.)