Musemathematics

Numbers it is. All music when you come to think. Two multiplied by two divided by half is twice one. Vibrations : chords those are. One plus two plus six is seven. Do anything you like with figures juggling. Always find out this equal to that, symmetry under a cemetery wall. He doesn't see any mourning. Callous : all for his own gut. Musemathematics. And you think you're listening to the etherial. But suppose you it like : Martha, seven times nine minus x is thirtyfive thousand. Fall quite flat. It's on account of the sounds it is.

--James Joyce, Ulysses

Ah, Joycean mathematics

2 x 2 ÷ ½ = 2(1)

1 + 2 + 6 = 7

7 x 9 - x = 35 000

where, x ≠ -34 937
since symmetry lies under a cemetery wall

The word bothered him

He began then, bewilderingly, to talk about something called entropy. The word bothered him as much as "Trystero" bothered Oedipa. But it was too technical for her. She did gather that there were two distinct kinds of entropy. One having to do with heat-engines, the other to do with communication. The equation for one, back in the '30's, had looked very like the equation for the other. It was a coincidence. The two fields were entirely unconnected, except at one point: Maxwell's Demon. As the Demon sat and sorted his molecules into hot and cold, the system was said to lose entropy. But somehow the loss was offset by the information the Demon gained about what molecules were where.

--Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

He wanted to sin with another of his kind

Such moments passed and the wasting fires of lust sprang up again. The verses passed from his lips and the inarticulate cries and the unspoken brutal words rushed forth from his brain to force a passage. His blood was in revolt. He wandered up and down the dark slimy streets peering into the gloom of lanes and doorways, listening eagerly for any sound. He moaned to himself like some baffled prowling beast. He wanted to sin with another of his kind, to force another being to sin with him and to exult with her in sin. He felt some dark presence moving irresistibly upon him from the darkness, a presence subtle and murmurous as a flood filling him wholly with itself. Its murmur besieged his ears like the murmur of some multitude in sleep; its subtle streams penetrated his being. His hands clenched convulsively and his teeth set together as suffered the agony of its penetration. He stretched out his arms in the street to hold fast the frail swooning form that eluded him and incited him: and the cry that he had strangled for so long in his throat issued from his lips. It broke from him like a wail of despair from a hell of sufferers and died in a wail of furious entreaty, a cry for an iniquitous abandonment, a cry which was but the echo of an obscene scrawl which he had read on the oozing wall of a urinal.

--James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Boy, was she crumby!

I think if you don't really like a girl, you shouldn't horse around with her at all, and if you do like her, then you're supposed to like her face, and if you like her face, you ought to be careful about doing crumby stuff to it, like squirting water all over it. It's really too bad that so much crumby stuff is a lot of fun sometimes. Girls aren't too much help, either, when you start trying not to get too crumby, when you start trying not to spoil anything really good.

--J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Our Patron Saint on Plays

Donald Barthelme, our patron of patrons and saint of saints on Plays, Bombs, Operas, Politics.

"Sir Percy Plangent has writ a new opera attacking Arthur!"

"It is called The Grail, and in it the Grail is a bomb that will make everyone happy forever!"

"A bomb that will make everyone happy forever! Is this the same bomb that the Blue Knight was speaking of, some time ago?"

"In the opera the device does not use cobalt, as the Blue Knight projected, but bold euphonium!"

"What is euphonium?"

"It's a compound of europium and eurekium. In Act One, it is discovered. In Act Two, it is refined. In Act Three, it explodes!"

"In the first act, everybody denounces Arthur for not having a wonderful bomb like this. In the second act, everybody decides that something must be done. In the third act, the bomb goes off!"

"A powerful parable of political praxis!"

"Precisely! The bomb is a metaphor for the unhappiness of those groaning under the yoke!"

"Who is groaning under the yoke?"

"The folk are groaning under the yoke!"

-- Donald Barthelme, The King

J.G. Ballard Death Watch

As regular readers well know, I contemplated buying J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition back in April.

Now comes word that Ballard has written his last book: his autobiography Miracles of Life, published in this year of our Lord two thousand and eight. However, all of his work has been vaguely autobiographical. This is what makes him such a fascinating figure, for me at least. The idea that one could draw a line from Jamie Graham of the 1940s Japanese-occupied Shanghai of Empire of the Sun to the automotive paraphiliac James Ballard of the transgressive new wave sf Crash. Either that, or its all one big joke.

Miracles of Life is Ballard's last book because frankly, he is dying. Terminally. Of advanced prostate cancer.

I still hope to get my hands on Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition. And Crash. And The Drowned World. And Empire of the Sun. And High-Rise. And anything else, and there is plenty else.

The Atrocity Exhibition famously, or infamously, includes the short story "Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan." Reagan at the time of writing and publication in 1967-8 was, of course, still just Governor of California and a politician-to-watch. Here best to remember the man, a living memoriam, is an excerpt:

THE CONCEPTUAL ROLE OF REAGAN. Fragments of Reagan’s cinetized postures were used in the construction of model psychodramas in which the Reagan-figure played the role of husband, doctor, insurance salesman, marriage counselor, etc.

The failure of these roles to express any meaning reveals the nonfunctional character of Reagan. Reagan’s success therefore indicates society’s periodic need to re-conceptualize its political leaders. Reagan thus appears as a series of posture concepts, basic equations which reformulate the roles of aggression and anality. Reagan’s personality. The profound anality of the Presidential contender may be expected to dominate the United States in the coming years. By contrast the late JFK remained the prototype of the oral subject, usually conceived in pre-pubertal terms. In further studies sadistic psychopaths were given the task of devising sex fantasies involving Reagan. Results confirm the probability of Presidential figures being perceived primarily in genital terms; the face of LB Johnson is clearly genital in significant appearance--the nasal prepuce, scrotal jaw, etc. Faces were seen as either circumcised (JFK, Khrushchev) or uncircumcised (LBJ, Adenauer). In assembly-kit tests Reagan’s face was uniformly perceived as a penile erection. Patients were encouraged to devise the optimum sex-death of Ronald Reagan.

Twelve minutes to midnight.

Bonus Memoriam: A shot from the David Cronenberg's film adaptation of Crash. Here we see the vulva-like scar on the back thigh, an automobile accident-caused leg wound, of a character before the main character penetrates it sexually, liberating-ly so. These cars, this "perverse technology," this reshaping of the human body by modern technology," all brought to the forefront, the new flesh:


Bon appétit.

And I believe she loves him, too

“How’d’st rain rule here?” says I to Evelyn to show her what a big poet I am––She really loves, used to love me in the old days like a husband, for awhile there she had two husbands Cody and me, we were a perfect family till Cody finally got jealous or maybe I got jealous, it was wild for awhile I’d be coming home from work on the railroad all dirty with my lamp and just as I came in for my Joy bubblebath old Cody was rushing off on a call so Evelyn had her new husband in the second shift then when Cody come home at dawn all dirty for his Joy bubblebath, ring, the phone’s run and the crew clerk’s asked me out and I’m rushing off to work, both of us using the same old clunker car in shifts––And Evelyn always maintaining that she and I were really made for each other but her Karma was to serve Cody in this particular lifetime, which I really believe and I believe she loves him, too, but she’d say “I’ll get you, Jack, in another lifetime... And you’ll be very happy”––“What?” I’d yell to joke, “me running up the eternal halls of Karma tryina get away from you hey?”––“It’ll take you eternities to get rid of me,” she adds sadly, which makes me jealous, I want her to say I’ll never get rid of her––I wanta be chased for eternity till I catch her.

- Jack Kerouac, Big Sur

Running Joke II: Racism I

Racism: It's Not Just For Black People Anymore!

This is a joke I try to make often but opportunities tend to be few and far:

"Why don't you guys take me along next time? I'll show you how to get some snatch."
"What do you know?"
"I've been around. Just last week I had a Chinese girl. And you know, it's just like they say."
"What's that?"
We hit the basement and the doors opened.
"Their snatch doesn't run up and down, it runs from side to side."

- Charles Bukowski, Ham on Rye

Weekly Wikipedia Find: New Jerusalem

Well, Wikipedia has failed me. Okay, technically not. But I'm disappointed. I couldn't exactly find what I wanted. It's there a little, but lacks the depth, the depth of argument, that I wanted.

What I'm talking about is New Jerusalem. But not any New Jerusalem, but what Wikipedia has filed under secular New Jerusalem. Thus, this week will be rather terse.

New Jerusalem is the city of the future, the ideal, the utopiate (I portmanteau'ed the shit out of that; "utopiate" is mine, bitches).

I was looking for something more, though. I swear there's a New Jerusalem associated with American Politics, if not here, then in my mind. I will find you. My Camelot. The American Camelot.

Until then, here's a Crime and Punishment reference to satisfy my painful hard-on for Crime and Punishment:

"[M]asses set these criminals on a pedestal in the next generation and worship them (more or less). The first category is always the man of the present, the second the man of the future. The first preserve the world and people it, the second move the world and lead it to its goal. Each class has an equal right to exist. In fact, all have equal rights with me -- and vive la guerre éternelle -- till the New Jerusalem, of course!"

--Dostoevsky. Translation by Constance Garnett.

Wikipedia by Week

Week Fifteen: Technological Singularity
Week Fourteen: Numbers Station
Week Thirteen: Culper Ring
Week Twelve: Mary Sue
Week Eleven: Byford dolphin diving bell accident
Week Ten: Deep-sea gigantism
Week Nine: Bloop
Week Eight: Rat king
Week Seven: Gustave Doré
Week Six: Tomorrow
Week Five: Borscht Belt
Week Four: Swampman
Week Three: Chinese room
Week Two: Ambrose Burnside
Week One: Lolita fashion