Monday, March 24, 2008

Concept: Two Plugs: Sunday Salon and Tuesday Funk.

No kidding, those are the names of these two sweet series.


FIRST, I will be reading at Sunday Salon, a Brooklyn-based reading series that has sprouted offspring here in Chicago. My co-readers will be Elizabeth Wetmore and Mary Anne Mohanraj... that's right, I'm being trusted to stand among the tall-trees this time.

I will be reading a chapter from the first part of Hungry Rats.

March 30th, Sunday
7:30 P.M.
@ the Charleston bar in Bucktown:
2076 N. Hoyne Ave.
(773) 489-4757

This is really a very exciting opportunity for me, and I will be excited if
there are some familiar faces in the crowd.


SECOND, Tuesday Funk is a reading series has been organized by Reinhardt
Suarez, Hallie Gordon, and myself, with help from Barbara Swem. It will
debut on April 2nd. See the attached flier for more info (or the text
below).

Fig. 2
Tuesday Funk
ILLUSTRATING THE
Natural Language of the
GOTHIC FUNK NATION
A reading series to stimulate all parts of your mind.

Tuesday, April 1st, seven o'clock PM
Ennui Cafe, 6981 N Sheridan Rd.
(at the corner of Sheridan and Lunt Ave. in Chicago)

Labels: CONCEPT, Gothic Funk Nation, Reading

Saturday, February 16, 2008

Concept: GOTHIC FUNK PARTY #10: The Fete of the Unseelie Court

*~*~* * * * --> The GOTHIC FUNK NATION <-- * * * *~*~*
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ presents ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

* * * * An Event *** An Exhibition *** A Party * * * *



* Gothic Funk Party #10 *
THE FETE OF THE UNSEELIE COURT
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 23rd from 9 PM
"Moomers" @ 5509 S. Hyde Park #3
$5 sacrifice



*** Shadow Puppet Theatre: THE TALE OF THE THREE SURGEONS ***
*** Live Performances by: HOUSE AND BIRD and RED LETTER KILL ***
*** Mysteries: THE GHASTLY LEGACY and THE CHAIN-LINK PARADE ***
*** Murder Ballads and Murder Salads ***
*** Complementary Refreshments ***



* THE UNSEELIE COURT
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unseelie_Court#Seelie_and_Unseelie_courts

* HOUSE AND BIRD can be found at
http://houseandbird.com/index.cfm

* RED LETTER KILL can be found at
http://www.myspace.com/redletterkillband


* Party Information at
www.hereisnowhy.com/gothicfunk/party10.html

* Gothic Funk fashion tips at
www.hereisnowhy.com/gothicfunk/party3.html

* Information on the Gothic Funk Nation at
www.hereisnowhy.com/gothicfunk

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk, Gothic Funk Nation

Friday, February 01, 2008

Concept: The Gothic Funk Triannual is Live!

THE GOTHIC FUNK TRIANNUAL

. indeterminacy is not the end
. we are people of the 21st century: what is next?
. we want your IMAGES, SOUNDS, and WORDS.

. SUBMIT

gothicfunk.org/triannual

END OF POST.

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk

Tuesday, November 20, 2007

Concept: Guerrilla Lit reading a week from tomorrow (your last chance to hear me read in New York).

I will be reading at this month's installment of the Guerrilla Lit series. Barring sudden and inexplicable fame, this is the last time I'll be reading in New York, inasmuch as I'm moving to Chicago two days later. The reading is:

7:30 PM Wednesday, 11/28
170 Ave. A (@ 11th St.)
Bar on A

The reading will also feature Erik Rhey, Dani Grammerstorf, and Bernie Kravitz. I know these kids, so seriously, it's going to be a *killer* evening. Bar on A has a *sweet* happy hour to boot, which I will employ to warm up for the event.

I will be reading from either:
A) The Silurians - A short story starring an alcholic middle-aged New York economist mother trapped 400 million years back in time with a motley crew including a politically idealistic college prof and her woe-is-me ex-husband.
B) Beowulf - A hyper!weird novel I'm drafting that, for all its bizarreness, has already managed to inspire a feature film with Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, not to mention a 1000-year Olde English poem.

If people show a strong preference for A or B, I'll follow their wise suggestions.

Otherwise, I'll maybe make up my own mind, or maybe leave it to the whims of the crowd.

Labels: CONCEPT, Reading, Writing

Concept: Chicago vs. New York in 21 Subjectively Determined Categories.

1. WORK
NEW YORK.
Easier to find, easier to keep.


2. HOUSING
CHICAGO.
Easier to find, won't rob you blind. Although you aren't as likely to be able to make a cassarole while sitting on your bed.


3. PUBLIC TRANSIT - EFFICIENCY
NEW YORK.
One late Sunday night, not long after I'd started living in New York, I got annoyed for waiting fifteen minutes for a subway. Then I remembered that in Chicago, I'd be blessed to have a train arrive after so long at such a time. Likewise, my apartment is a twenty minute walk to the subway, and a further twenty minutes to Union Square; my New York friends consiter this forty-minute public transit commute a great inconvenience. Now it does have to be acknowledged that New York stations are much dirtier than those in Chicago, but who cares? You're not spending as much time in them.
Exception: Chicago has two airports and two trains serving them. New York has two airports and zero trains serving them. What gives?


4. PUBLIC TRANSIT - ELEGANCE
CHICAGO.
Of course, I've read plenty about the train wreck that the CTA has become. And, of course, it is the job of public transit to be "efficient," not "elegant." But let us consider the potential here, for what could be if both systems were fully updated and maxed out on efficiency. On the one hand you have New York's bewildering spaghetti plate of letters, numbers, colors, dashed, solid, and dotted lines, and geographic morphing... it's taken almost two years to figure all this out, and I still make mistakes from time to time. Chicago's transit map, on the other hand is a work of art. Bright colors radiate from the core of the city like bicycle spokes, intersecting between the center and the periphery with the neat, solid black lines of bus service. Together, on a to-scale map that (shows streets and major features to boot), it presents a service that is immaculate, accessible, and seemingly comprehensive. If only the reality were so!


5. NEIGHBORHOODS.
CHICAGO.
New York neighborhoods are more conspicuously different from each other; they look different... the Brownstone isn't endemic to New York like the Brick Tenement is endemic to Chicago. But in Chicago the roots are deeper and more penetrating, more lasting, so that the difference between Bridgeport, Canaryville, and McKinley Park might as well be the difference between day and night.


6. PIZZA
CHICAGO.
Frankly, I don't even know why this is a debate. I once heard a compelling argument that New York style pizza is celebrated around counters by commuters on their way to work, and hence a source of camaraderie. A nice thought, but doesn't reliance on such an argument instead of the taste of the thing betray the point in the first place? New York style can be a soupy sweet snappy crunchy treat, but it is literally and figuratively crushed by the dense, rich, complex, and visually mighty Chicago-style.


7. MAYOR
NOT-A-TIE.
Now this is a difficult call. Since I've been reading Medieval history lately, I'll ask a comparable question: who do we like more, Charlemagne or Emperor Justinian of the Byzantines? Charlemagne was a able diplomat and something of the maverick true believer. His efforts managed to create a short-lived cultural Renaissance among subjects locked into mutual acrimony, but they also led to the creation of that most illogical and aberrant of all political institutions: the Holy Roman Empire. His greatest contribution in the long-term was probably the lower-case alphabet, and Bloomburg's will probably be Midtown traffic tolls. Whereas Emperor Justinian (and his successors, and theirs) integrated religious orthodoxy with state theology, autocracy, and political purges. He reinforced one of Byzantium's chief weaknesses: that provinces existed only to pay homage to the glittering capital. In doing so he was able to preserve a civilization that, by all logical rationales, ought to have died out eight-hundred years sooner than it did. J. Daley destroyed much of what was great about Chicago in the name of keeping it peopled and thriving, and his son is doing the same. If you read between the lines, I think you know both who I favor, and the massive reservations I have about that choice.


8. MUSEUMS - ART
NEW YORK.
I did expect New York to walk with this one, but I didn't expect it to be such a rout. The Met (which it took me six days to take in) has four times the square footage of the Art Institute and ten times the collection. Though what really hurts my feelings is the diversity and expansiveness and eclectiveness of the Met... after all, the Art Institute's pride and joy are their Impressionist works, which comes as close to boring me as any school of art really can. Also, just as Chicago has three museums to go toe-to-toe with the Museum of Natural History, MoMa has a right to take on the Art Institute, and doesn't do poorly in the contest. Both cities have, of course, numerous smaller collections of quality, but those in New York (the Frick, the Guggenheim, the Whitney) appear to be somewhat better endowed. I have to confess: I think I will miss this about New York more than any other single thing.


9. BASEBALL TEAMS (AND THEIR FANS) THAT I OBJECT TO
CHICAGO.
The Cubs have the most obnoxious fanbase on the planet, but Yankees fans are almost as obnoxious, with the added penalty of being frequently psychotic.


10. BASEBALL TEAMS (AND THEIR FANS) THAT I KINDA DON'T MIND.
NEW YORK.
If Cubs fans are frequently obnoxious, and Yankees fans are frequently obnoxious and psychotic, then White Sox fans are a generally decent non-obnoxious bunch, who nevertheless tend to go a little bit psycho. Whereas I've never even met a Mets fan I didn't like.


11. MUSIC
TIE.
To be fair, this, more than anything (for me, at least) comes down to a few key battles. Blues vs. Jazz, for instance (I go with Blues, and therefore Chicago). Or House vs. Hip Hop (which just rips me apart). I would have to go with the idea that New York does, in the end, represent a more diverse array of music on the whole, but the kinds of music that I love the most were perfected (and remain so) in Chicago. So there is no way to resolve this. It is a tie.


12. MUSEUMS - SCIENCE
CHICAGO.
Decisively, though not overwhelmingly. The comparison has to begin with the American Museum of Natural History vs. its equivalent, the Field Museum. Not only is the AMNH larger, but its execution is fresher, bolder, and its exhibits are more astonishing. The Cladographic exhibition of fossils is brilliant, and the Rose Space Center is visually striking and intricate. But unfortunately, that's the bulk of what New York brings to this question. The Museum of Science and Industry steps in on Chicago's behalf. As does Adler. And together, these three institutions, any of each could easily absorb one or several days exploring, do trump the AMNH. As for Shedd vs. the New York aquarium, there's simply no comparison. It's ironic that an aquarium so far from the ocean could display sea life with such panache. But then, it is situated on the world's most colorful deposits of Silurian marine life.


13. GRAFFITI
NEW YORK.
Unless one wants to lean heavily on Pilsen murals (which might be against the rules), this particular comparison is probably the worse spanking Chicago gets. In New York, there's graffiti everywhere, and a lot of it is awesome.


14. THEATER
CHICAGO.
I've seen some great theater in New York. But what I've never seen in New York a brilliant blackbox multimedia political parody of Scooby Doo in which $5 buys admission plus all the PBR you can drink.


15. SKYLINE
TIE.
Too different to compare. Early and changing building ordinances in New York imposed many different requirements on buildings for setbacks and spacing. This, combined with Manhattan's density, its irregular streets downtown, topographical variation, and the lack of alleys has created a rugged, craggy skyline that looks like mountains eroded over hundred of millions of years. Chicago, by comparison, is stark, austere, monolithic. There appears to be more of a plan to its layout, with the neat grid and fixation with clean rectangles. At the same time, Chicago has managed to avoid a lot of the explicit commercial construction that plagues New York, and despite the recent construction of (what a friend calls) "architrocities" on the periphery of the Loop, the Loop itself seems more quintessentially American: sharp and angular. Mountains rising from the prairie.


16. PARKS
NEW YORK.
Millennium Park is a marvel... let's just admit it. It looks like one of those awesome computer-generated cities-of-the-future we saw in the early 90s. And all of Chicago's flagship parks have something to offer. It's just that New York offers a lot more of this. How many worlds have been driven into and through Central Park? And how has Prospect Park been impacted so thoroughly by rolling meadows right there between Park Slope and Crown Heights? Hell, even Corona Park, with its lakes and lagoons and the Unisphere seems like this dreamy thing that half-Queens and half-Martian as envisioned by Ray Bradbury.


17. COFFEE
NEW YORK.
I'm sure the cities are neck-and-neck for fancy schmancy gooey deluxe coffee treat stuff. But I've never cared about that. Small coffee black no sugar is my poison. You can get it on any busy street corner in Manhattan for about a dollar. You don't even get it that cheap in Flint!


18. WATERFRONT
CHICAGO.
Now this is perhaps the most obvious of all. In fact, the New York waterfront has a nice level of diversity, being some 1 part pretty park space, 3 parts industrial sprawl, 3 parts highway/roadway, 4 parts other. What is truly objectionable about the New York lakefront is the lack of access in most cases. Not only does Chicago have twentyish miles of beautiful parklike setting, with dripping grass and black oaks, beaches, rocks, waves and sky, but most importantly, it's all public! For the last two years I've lived about two blocks from the East River, but I have to walk over a mile if I actually want to touch the water.


19. NEW YORK'S LEGITIPAPER (NEW YORK TIMES) VS. CHICAGO'S LEGITIPAPER (CHICAGO TRIBUNE)
NEW YORK.
No contest.


20. NEW YORK'S RANKING TABLOID (NEW YORK POST) VS. CHICAGO'S RANKING TABLOID (CHICAGO SUN-TIMES)
CHICAGO.
No contest.


21. CITY.
CHICAGO.
What can I say? I'm a Midwestern kid. More on this tomorrow...

Labels: Chicago, CONCEPT, midwest, New York City

Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Concept: NaNoWriMo

My profile.

My 2007 novel? Beowulf. There will be plenty of cheating and shenanigans this time through.

Labels: CONCEPT, Writing

Monday, November 05, 2007

Concept: If I'm Posting Seldom...

...it's because I'm busy applying for jobs.

Labels: CONCEPT

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Concept: I Mean It This Time.

Read this!

This article will make you feel better... or at least it did me.

Labels: CONCEPT

Wednesday, October 24, 2007

Concept: Where Is That Deep End Of Which You Speak?

I've been having dizzy spells lately.

I hadn't had one in years and then about a month ago, at a reading, during an almost claustrophobically erotic piece by a friend of mine, I suddenly saw stars and felt like I would pass out. I remember being worried that I would collapse and people would think it was in response to the very visceral imagery.

A few days ago, I had another spell, and now I'm having a third.

It sucks, and slightly concerns me.

---

I've been writing some friends copious emails talking about a wide range of subjects including: academia, literary theory, art, society, blah blah blah. It all comes down to the fact that, while there are a number of outstanding projects, I've spent the last several years developing a battery I can fall back upon. A novel (Hungry Rats), short stories (including The Silurians), and plays (including Canaryville Blues). I'm still working onthese, but part of this battery is that I can work on such writing for a few hours a week and continue to submit it while dividing the rest of my attention between two projects in which I'm investing the greatest hopes for my career. They aren't strangers. They are Urbantasm, a novel I drafted when I was seventeen and eighteen, and the Gothic Funk Nation.

I'm getting ready to swim in these deep waters again, and I'm looking for some advice as I do so. Next week I will write about Urbantasm and follow up with Gothic Funk.

I will be very interested to hear what you think.

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk, Urbantasm, Writing

Thursday, October 18, 2007

Concept: Plaigiarism.

Eveready. Super Heavy Duty. Then why do you burn out after a couple hours in a smallish Memorex Discman? Whatever happened to the Walkman? Go for a walk, man. Guarantee: We will repair or replace, at our option, any device damaged by these Eveready(R) batteries, if the device and batteries are sent to: Eveready, PO Box 6056, Cleveland, OH 44101. It wasn't that long ago, just a few years in fact, that people worshiped Cleveland the president. The stars and stripes, they'd been swiped, washed out and wiped and replaced with his own face. But today, once again, people worship the president Cleveland. Some say that until the bugs appeared, it was a really frustrating game for the Indians. Picture me giving a damn. I said "Never. What, the bugs didn’t land on the Indians or fly in their face while they were trying to hit a 98mph fastball?" They swing and hit without a pause. I'm lowering my level. I'll never stoop to yours. Action is of the mind. The mirror of the mind is the face. Its index the eyes. Nihil est incertius vulgo, nihil obscurius voluntate hominum, nihil fallacius ratione tota comitiorum. O puer, qui omnia nomini debes. En el kyrie elysion. Because I didn't see the abyss of vileness. My obesity has swollen, swelled, strained at the seams, and burst out. Because it had gotten too fat. Baiseach! Aughwaighiea!

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk

Concept: Dirty Magazine Published.

As I mentioned before, "Nogood Boyo" wrote a dirty limerick that was slated to be published in the Dick Pig Review.

Well, the magazine has been published and you can read it here. While NSFW, it is nevertheless the most aesthetically pleasing and challenging dirty literary magazine you'll ever read. Seriously. I'm impressed. This isn't just smut; it's smut infused with the potent tea-bag of Artistic Vision. The illustrations are quite disturbing and beautiful.

Labels: CONCEPT, Poetry, Writing

Concept: The Most Addictive Music Ever.

Is Ragtime.

Labels: CONCEPT, Music

Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Concept: Semi-Pro.

1-800-TROPICS

Labels: CONCEPT, film, sports

Concept: Help: Run a Reading Series for the Gothic Funk Nation.

Next February, the Gothic Funk Nation will launch two monthly reading series (staggered two weeks apart). For the moment we are calling them the Informal Series and the Formal Series. We want you to volunteer to help (and pick out better names for them).


THE FORMAL SERIES (Earshotesque or Bookslutesque):
Needs 3-7 Chicago voluteers who will: Determine a submission protocol, review submissions, solicit "featured readers" and other artists for their involvement, help find and negotiate a venue, schedule readers/performers, promote the reading. We are likely to meet 1-2 evenings per month, plus the reading. We will also have to read/consider submissions outside of our meetings.


THE INFORMAL SERIES (Open-micesque):
Needs 1-3 Chicago volunteers who will: Determine a sign-up protocol, help find and negotiate a venue, schedule readers/performers, promote the reading. We are likely to meet 1 evening per month, plus the reading.


We will not meet as a group before December.
In December we will meet, brainstorm, and hammer out details (submission policies, venue, promotional strategy, etc.)
In January we will coordinate and promote the first installment for February.


This can be a lot of fun... if you like to read, and are looking to get involved in the Gothic Funk Nation in an active but not-too-time-consuming way, this is ideal.

Information on Gothic Funk is available at http://www.hereisnowhy.com/gothicfunk.
Subscribe to the Gothic Funk mailing list at http://hereisnowhy.com/mailman/listinfo/gothicfunk_hereisnowhy.com.

Reply to this post and let us know what you think!

= Connor and Sky

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk

Concept: The Visual Arts: A History, by Hugh Honour and John Fleming.

As part of my development of Urbantasm, I've been attempting a complete-as-possible review of the history of the West... generally speaking I'm up through the end of the Roman Republic, but since New York has such an unparalleled array of Art museums, I've actually gone ahead in the history of visual art, and I'm almost done with The Visual Arts: A History, by Hugh Honour and John Fleming.

It has unexpectedly become one of my favorite reads this year. So far as there is a sense of dramatic tension and suspense, there is no reason in my mind not to read nonfiction, and even a college survey, as a narrative exercise. Of course, I've been mostly reading to learn about art, but the sense of social and critical progression, the way the authors describe the undulation of schools, and the way one artist reacts and responds to another reads to me as a story.

A friend has pointed out to me that this particular textbook is treated by art historians with a certain amount of frustration. The response seems to be not one of contempt but resignation, and the problem is that Honour/Fleming is too short, that is, unequal to a fair and general explication of its subject. I was surprised by this, personally, because the book is the size of two Bibles. It's big enough and cumbersome enough that fellow subway riders would shoot me dirty looks and sidle away when I'd try to read while standing, holding the book open on one arm and turning the page with the other. It's almost 900 pages long, two inches thick, slightly oversize, has small print, and probably weighs enough to kill any small, furry animals it's dropped upon.

The brevity is made clear, though, as the complexity of the story becomes apparent. For example, four chapters spanning 140 pages attempt to cover the last 2000 years of non-Western art. While the book is able to explicate and discuss well-known and documented trends such as Chinese Landscape Paintings, these have to be treated very briefly. Moreover, the fact that there is any discussion at all requires many ommissions. There is no, for example, discussion of Korean art, or art from Southeast Asia beyond the 16th century. Meanwhile, the last 100 years of European and American art is compressed into 110 pages; in short, a heavily abbreviated sequence of the big guns (Picasso, Pollack, van der Rohe) marching across the pages in more-or-less single file.

I'm not saying this by way of criticism. I suspect that more meaningful analyses of this textbook would scrutinize the disparities it posits between Western/Nonwestern art, and possibly the stability of boundaries it establishes between different schools and artists. I simply don't know the field well enough to have an opinion as to whether it succeeds or not on these levels. The two greatest impressions for me, however, as a layperson, are 1) the majesty and diversity of the physical artistic historical record, and 2) the immensity of history as a whole. It's just one more example of that double-edged sword: that the world is full of interesting things. In fact, there are so many interesting things that we'll die before we've ever experienced enough of them.

Then again, maybe just one is enough.

Labels: CONCEPT, literature, visual art

Monday, October 01, 2007

Concept: Correction re: Schizophrenia.

So earlier I lumped Adolph Meyer in with the psychoanalysts. Certainly their stance on laboratory science had a similar impact on the development of psychiatry. Nevertheless, the conflation is incorrect, because the "Meyerians" were at odds with the psychoanalysts as often as with the Kraepelinists.

I'm adding Bayard Taylor Holmes, socialist, Chicago mayoral candidate, and one of the nations more prominent Kraepelin supporters to a list of people I have to learn more about. The glimpses I've caught here and there are very exciting.

Labels: biology, CONCEPT

Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Concept: Announcing the GOTHIC FUNK NATION.

GENERAL ANNOUNCEMENT

For the last six months, Skylar and I have been having an ongoing discussion about the future of the Gothic Funk, and it's involved a lot of mulling over the epistles, manifestoes, parties, events, and casual conversations and emails that this group has produced. There's been splicing and recombination, addition and subtraction, sublation and condensation. In the final argument, we decided that in order to be truly efficacious (and, as Artaud would say, "affective") we need to situate ourselves within any Gothic Funk Movement as a self-conscious and self-defined organization.

Originally, Gothic Funk was a mode of thought that emerged in conjunction with a series of parties in 2004 and 2005. Today, it is not an attempt to bring about change where there is none, nor to those who do not welcome it. Therefore, it is not an entity capable of disaster, but rather is a means to observe changes taking place everywhere, to discuss where these changes most likely are leading, and (most exciting of all) to create opportunities for the distilling, channeling, and magnifying of these changes, with the fundamental belief that all of this is directly contributing to the establishment of a new, yet to be named worldview. Our collective writings have engaged and explored this process.

A GOTHIC FUNK NATION

The Gothic Funk Nation is, at this point, basically a project conceived by Skylar and myself. But we want to spread out and fill it up with brilliant people, and create a government worthy of our membership. We have, in fact, developed a prototype for what positions are essential and what their functions will be. At this moment, we are acting as executives. The more people are interested, and the sooner, the more completely we can more towards a democratic setup. Think of it as Ancient Rome moving from Autocracy toward Principate toward Republic. Our goal is to fill most of these positions by next February.

The Gothic Funk Nation will exist as a self-conscious entity, capable of establishing consensus, making decisions and statements, mounting events, raising funds... in short, all the activities undertaken by any formally organized group. It will be erroneous to simply describe it as an "artistic" or "social" or "political" group. It will be the Gothic Funk Nation, and other labels must be applied against this standard.

This keeps with the de facto "tradition" of wrangling over nettlesome fractal definitions of "gothic funk" and "Gothic Funk" and "Gothic Funk Movement" and "Gothic Funk Project."

This also offers an antidote to the real-world paralysis implied by such ambiguity.

COUNTDOWN TO FEBRUARY 2008

February 2008 will be the "birthday" of the Gothic Funk Nation.

Everything is going to happen in February.

The events we are planning at this time include:
- A Gothic Funk Party*
- A Gothic Funk Journal**
- A Gothic Funk Reading Series #1***
- A Gothic Funk Reading Series #2****

*besides which all other Gothic Funk Parties will pale
**online, featuring creative and critical submissions as words, images, and sounds
***monthly, casual and informal
****monthly, formal and fancy

If you want to help plan these events, or suggest others, you should "sign up" using the following email.

A FEW PRACTICALS

This phase (phase #3, I think) of the Gothic Funk project will be Chicago-based. Non-Chicagoans can definitely get involved, but the more intense involvement will require access to the Windy City. Likewise, for longer-term positions, we will seek out those who expect to be in Chicago through the end of 2008. (But don't worry; we won't have a tantrum if your plans change).

Our plans are now officially ambitious, meaning that there will be some grunt work involved. We'll need to raise funds, place phone calls and send emails to secure space for events, promote events, and so on. People who want longer-term positions should also expect to take on some of these less glamorous tasks.

Between now and February, Sky and I will be sending out periodic updates on these projects and the Gothic Funk Nation.

If, at any time, you feel bewildered by all this, go to the website and look at the party pictures, and maybe read an epistle.

http://www.hereisnowhy.com/gothicfunk/

THIS IS GOING TO ROCK!

~ Skylar and Connor

---

"SIGN UP"

Fill out and return.
The more you can tell us, the better.

Name:
Live in Chicago in 2008?:
Phone?:
Email?:
Address?:
Website?:
Willing to host large party/event (12+ people)?:
Willing to host small party/event (11- people)?
How many hours (on average) do you think you would like to work on Gothic Funk each month?
Gothic Funk involvement so far?:




General comments / suggestions?




Are you Interested ('x' all that apply) in*?:

A LONG TERM POSITION (ie. through 2008) ___
A SHORT TERM OR TRANSITIONAL POSITON ___
FUND-RAISING ___
ADMINISTRATIVE ORGANIZATION ___
PARTY-PLANNING ___
READING SERIES PLANNING ___
LITERARY MAGAZINE PLANNING ___
OTHER EVENTS PLANNING ___
CREATE MUSIC FOR EVENTS ___
CREATE VISUAL ART FOR EVENTS ___
CREATE PERMORMATIVE ARTS FOR EVENTS ___
PROVIDE OTHER SERVICES/GOODS FOR EVENTS ___
POLITICAL DISCUSSION ___
SCIENCE DISCUSSION ___
CRITICAL (ARTISTIC) DISCUSSION ___
CRITICAL (PHILOSOPHICAL) DISCUSSION ___
OTHER DISCUSSION ___

* There is a *lot* of overlap here, so don't worry. We'll find opportunities we think you might like, and ask if you want to get involved.

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk

Thursday, September 20, 2007

Concept: Schizophrenia?

So I've mentioned off and on that I'm working on The Encyclopedia of Schizophrenia and Other Psychotic Disorders at work, and am also developing an outline for a novella Notes For Students (and/or) White Swan. (I decided that combining the two titles might mitigate their negatives in an interesting/funny way). Well, the two subjects have become intertwined. So this is the part where I ask if anyone has had personal experience, or experience in the family with 1) schizophrenia or 2) any other psychotic disorder. If you don't want to reply in the comments you can send me an email or contact me here.

Labels: CONCEPT, science, Writing

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Concept: Graffiti. What do we think?

Graffiti from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Queens, Chicago, Detroit, and Flint.

What do we think?

I think I have to go with the Bronx and Detroit.

If you like, you can post a link to graffiti art in other cities.

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk, visual art

Monday, September 17, 2007

Concept: The Voluntary Maniac Says, "I'm Having An UberEgo Moment"

Just think. In a couple years when I'm mind-defyingly successful and famous, you'll all be able to say you knew me back in the DIY days. I don't think I really need to sleep anymore. It wastes hours every day.

Labels: CONCEPT, Writing

Concept: Stairway to Heaven, by Led Zeppelin lyrics: English -> Chinese -> English -> Greek -> English -> Spanish -> English

So these are the lyrics of Stairway to Heaven Altavistad from English -> Chinese -> English -> Greek -> English -> Spanish -> English, and then punctuation added and arranged in stanzas by me. What do you think? Could Robert Plant sue me for sharing this? The original lyrics are here.

It has. Is regularly.
The lady all radiates;
it is the gold,
and it buys the scale in the sky.

And when it knew him,
if the company of stores is stopped word,
nobody [the one that can receive
from that purchase comes for

(and this) scale (for has in the sky
a mark)], but the one. That wishes in the wall.
It is also knew (regularly)
that the two sometimes word.

He has significances that are goatlike.
In the tree of the current
has our idea, there sometimes
the singer and for him it buys the scale.

Towards him must, in the sky, to receive
the perceivable I of the west,
did in front also examines.
My intellectual sob stops

in authorization that examined
the tobacco of the ring inside,
with the idea, my, that unemployed
via the cautious tree (and these sounds),

and buys the scale in the sky.
And his whisper, very fast, if all our games
(prosody of the telephone) flout for us.
He lead it then, for also supports

a new dawn of the day, for represents
this lasting one and forest echo,
and for makes my wonder of the laughter.
If he has assets, is not essential.

Now worries to this, in yours.
the bisector fence is the clean means.
The street, that king, you.
You will have for the Power King.

In order, her is in place, goes from two courses.
But for her he has, in the long operation,
the quiet time. You who it replaces to him
stops for the snores. Also, this you.

You are not – if you did not know – you.
You will touch flutes, for you opinion,
in you, for you connection.
Your lady wanted for you.

You are not in place.
You, to hear air for you,
to blow to him, also, for you.
You know that its fame of scales

in the air, of the whisper. And who,
because we delayed in the street,
our curtain above you? You compare
with our soul, that everything knew.

The lady of the long walks, for them, there,
we shone the white light and they wish them.
For demonstrate how all those
of gold still money changers.

And if you hear exceptionally difficult,
that prosody, that it is moved to you,
finally, when it is everything and is.
He is totally the rock and roll

and this for purchase.
The scale that he has in the sky,
that she is regularly the lady
who everything radiates.

Is the gold.
And buys the scale in the sky.
And when it knew him there,
if the company of stores is stopped word...

Nobody.
The one that could receive
from that comes the purchase for
and the scale in the sky.

Labels: CONCEPT, Music

Thursday, September 13, 2007

Concept: Accidental Poetry?

Entertainment Weekly's review of Pearl Jam's No Code:

Trapped somewhere between purgatory and bliss, the album leaves you with the vaguely unsettling feeling that Pearl Jam without pain are like a pretzel without salt, or Seattle without rain.

All it wants are line breaks.

Labels: CONCEPT, Music, Poetry

Concept: Psychoanalysis and American Psychiatry.

Up until now I've offered a one-sided criticism of psychoanalysis, all the way back to its roots in Freud and Jung. I always took the angle that Freud was a gifted observer who formed some highly faulty models of psychology based on speculation as to how the human brain worked. This I am willing to stand by. In other ways, however, I have to reevaluate my opinion. Many of my friends in the arts and critical fields rely heavily on psychoanalysis. I've been more skeptical, but my criticism has been kind of free-floating; I haven't read broadly enough for my opinion to be as informed as I thought it was. Now I am coming to the further conclusion that, not only were Freud and Jung's ideas fundamentally flawed, but they did not serve to improve the fields of psychiatry. Psychology, perhaps. Psychoanalysis certainly contributed the notion that careful discussion and analysis of the cause of a disorder could be therapeutic. This was possibly useful for the society at large. But for those with mental disorders (roughly 1-2% of the population), and especially in America, psychoanalysis was a disaster.

Emil Kraepelin was born in northern Germany in February 1856, less than four months before Freud. By the time he was thirty he'd compiled a set of empirical studies to publish the first edition of his book Psycologie which would go on to be published in nine editions. The differences in methodology and results are difficult to go into here, but Kraepelin discovered that psychotic forms of mania and depression were manifestations of a single spectrum of disoders (bipolar disorder). More importantly, he used longitudenal studies to combine superficially divergent symptoms into a definition of "madness" as dementia praecox or premature senility. In its American form, this condition is known as schizophrenia. Kraepelin revolutionized psychiatry by defining the terms of a more rigorous inquiry and setting the groundwork for establishing prognosis. He identified a genetic component to these conditions, but also believed in limited penetrance. At the time, he was recognized as the master of his field, but who learns the name of Kraepelin in high school? I took a semester of Psychology in high school and the Humanities and Sociology sequences at the University of Chicago. I never heard about Kraepelin until assigned to work on his bio at work.

The book I'm working on doesn't give a complete account of the posthumous dismantling of Kraeplin's legacy. He was a German nationalist (as opposed to Freud, who fled the Nazis) and monarchist, staunchily opposed to socialism and, while he died in 1926, before the rise of the Nazi party, an advocate of eugenics during his lifetime. It stands to reason that his legacy might have (deservedly?) floundered in the postwar climate. But that never hindered Werner von Braun in the postwar era. It was probably, more than anything else, the pro-psychoanalytic stance of prominent American psychiatrists that shouldered Kraepelin's studies aside. And frankly, this trend had been going on since the turn of the century (eg. Adolph Meyers, Eugen Bleuler). The psychoanalytical angle went something like:

The problem of psychoses would be simple and perspicuous if the ego's detachment from reality could be carried through completely. But that seems to happen only rarely or perhaps never. Even in a state so far removed from the reality of the external world as one of hallucinatory confusion, one learns from patients after their recovery that at the time in some corner of their mind (as they put it) there was a normal person hidden, who, like a detached spectator, watched the hubbub of illness go past him.

It's very poetic. I can easily understand the appeal to writers and literary types. However, it is not provable, is almost not disprovable, and is dangerous to consider as a science. Why? Because science is not science if it lacks a mechanism to confront error and subjectivity. That is, to scrutinize hypotheses for signifiant bias. As a result, the mid-20th century psychiatric literature is littered with references to "schizophrenogenic mothers" and "narcissistic neuroses," concepts which are not only patently (and demonstrably) wrong, but which lead to equally misguided treatment. It is not, I think, coincidental that this was the also the era of lobotomy and chemical convulsive therapies, solutions that were, in many ways, both less humane and hardly more scientifically sound than the surprise baths and bed saddles of the 19th century. Nor did the psychoanalyically informed therapies – group therapy and mass deinstitutionalization – have a positive effect on contemporary prognoses. This is largely why there are so many homeless schizophrenics today.

The psychoanalytical approach to psychiatry held out through the seventies before giving up the ghost. The model of schizophrenia that we use today is derived almost directly from Kraeplin. Certainly this has continued to have been revised, and many concepts (autointoxication, degeneration theory) have been discarded. But diagnostic and progress in treatment is made through revision; an advantage that psychoanalysis substantially lacked.

In short, before working on this assignment, I felt that Freud was a gifted genius whose work helped build psychiatry, but whose persistent influence is damaging to the arts. Now I feel that Freud was a gifted genius whose persistent influence is damaging to the arts, but was perhaps even more damaging to psychiatry.

Labels: CONCEPT, health care, psychology

Wednesday, September 12, 2007

Concept: Earshot Reading this Friday.

I will be reading from Hungry Rats at this Friday's debut of Earshot's 2007-2008 series.

I will also be selling (for $3) a limited number of The Hungry Rats EP, featuring readings of Part 1, Chapters 1 and 2, and music by Elisabeth Blair, Mr. Automatic, and Nova Moturba.

It's going to be sweet.

Here's the info:

Earshot @ The Lucky Cat
September 14 // 8 PM
245 Grand Street (b/w Driggs & Roebling)
Nearby Train Stops: L (Bedford Ave), G (Metropolitan/Grand), J/M/Z (Marcy Ave)
$5 + one free drink

Also reading: Aaron Fagan, Allison Shaloum, Filip Marinovic, Sandra Hurtes

Labels: CONCEPT, Reading, Writing

Thursday, September 06, 2007

Concept: Limericks: I Plead the Fifth.

Imagine a writer, unnoticed, unrecognized, pushing thirty without a major publishing credit, but who knows that his offhands pack more finesse than most others' spit-shined epigrams. He sees a dirty limerick contest (a redundancy) with the prize of a T-Shirt, a chance to post on a lit-porn weblog, and publication in a burlesque ezine. He's pretty sure that he can win this contest and double the number of publications on his resume. Of course he enters! Of course he wins! I would never do such a thing, but you better believe that if I did, I wouldn't admit it here.

---

The prosodic term "limerick" only dates back to the end of the nineteenth century, and may have referred to the frequent use of that Irish town in examples from the time. The poems themselves date from considerably earlier, classically following the metrical form (often with enjambments and other variations):
/uu/uu/(A)
/uu/uu/(A)
/uu/(B)
/uu/(B)
/uu/uu/(A)

John Newberry may have provided the single best-known example for a childrens book in the 1770s:

Hickory Dickory Dock.
The mouse ran up the clock.
The clock struck one.
The mouse ran down.
Hickory Dickory Dock.

A more recent example that I enjoy is the Beastie Boys song, The Negotiation Limerick File:

We're giving you soul power.
I like it sweet and sour.
When it comes to rhymes
and beat designs,
I'm at the control tower.

Of course, this kind of poetry has always flourished off the written page better than on, and part of the reason has to do with the typical subject matter. I can only guess why the form is so persistantly used for sexual innuendo. The pseudosynchopated cadence and emphatic rhyming is probably involved: limericks are insidiously catchy and easily memorized. Because they are easily memorized, they are perhaps ideal for an illiterate and religious peasantry composing poems they wouldn't necessarily want committed to posterity. For better or worse, everyone from George Bernard Shaw to Gershon Legman has stipulated that a limerick is, by definition, naughty:

A well-endowed seamstress named Robin,
Caught her nipple down under the bobbin.
She tugged and she jerked,
But still nothing worked.
Now she has one boob with no knob in!

To her boyfriend, a girl from New Trier,
Who was living in France for a year,
Sent a photo, quite lewd,
Of herself in the nude.
On the crotch she wrote, "Wish you were here!"

To Dublin, that town on the Liffey,
To Janet, Jim wrote: "I've a stiffy.
I'll just have a shag
In this wee padded bag.
Be there soon. I'll come in a jiffy."

These are all, incidentally, anonymous.

There literally thousands of these at here.

---

Anyway, here's Nogood Boyo's victorious blog post, and here's the winning limerick. (Yes, it's a dirty limerick). It will be published in the next issue of the Dick Pig Review.

Labels: CONCEPT, Poetry, Writing

Wednesday, September 05, 2007

Concept: Tomorrow.

I'll strongly imply why I haven't posted today or yesterday.

Labels: CONCEPT

Thursday, August 30, 2007

Concept: Is Trans-Postmodernism the next "Big Thing"?

This month I'm returning to Baz Luhrman's Red Curtain Trilogy as my original inspiration for Gothic Funk. But I'm really thinking about developing a more proximal and intuitive definition, a clearer sense of to what extent we need to relate justify the project critically, and to decisively differentiate our efforts from what has come before.
Anyway, examples of "gothic funk" have been easy to find in the last few years – Epistle #1 argues this – and occasionally in conversation we have resorted to a specialized (if somewhat improvised) vocabulary to deal with concepts.

For me, the most important example of this occurred in 2006 as part of the discussion that produced the Conversational Manifesto. We referred to the "big thing" as the larger, possibly global, perspective that included and exceeded Gothic Funk (and gothic funk). Gothic Funk, in fact, is simply one possible articulation of the "big thing."

It is interesting to me that, while we were talking about what is (often derisively) called post-postmodernism we intuitively avoided that label ourselves. And while "big thing" is vague and subjective and applicable to anything – completely wanting except to differentiate a larger framework from Gothic Funk – I'm now starting to think that the choice was significant.

Post-Postmodernism is essentially a Postmodern term, and its use implies an inability to escape from Postmodern conceits. This is literally true in the actual composition of the names: both are defined fundamentally by their relation to Modernism. Not simply a striving for objectivity, but even causality is removed by such a terminology. All that remains is the sequence or chronology of perspectives. What separates Post-postmodernism from Postmodernism? By the name, nothing, except order. Post-postmodernism would be similarly meaningless with respect to presumed successors (Post-post-postmodernism anyone?) and the Pomo taste of the implied infinite regression of these figures should be painfully obvious.

More significantly, however, is that Post-Postmodernism is a teleologically Postmodern term. (Of course Postmodernism is confrontationally "non-teleological," but that contradiction is part of the reason the whole ship won't float.) "Postmodern" as a word gives a special status to Modernism/Modernity as the decisive moment of transformation. Within the critical framework of Postmodernism (and not necessarily its most reductive extremes), Modernism was an endpoint. It represented the moment at which language/art/semiotics, in an extreme effort to obtain objectivity through abstraction, failed to achieve objectivity at all. All movements/perspectives which follow this semantic approach therefore have to absolve themselves of such a quest, or at least any hope of its reasonable fulfillment. Terminologies that embrace the split accept, by default, the most fundamental precept of Postmodernism: the irrelevence and impossibility of objectivity.

This is not indended as (yet another) attempt to rip down Postmodernism. I've done that elsewhere. Rather, I wonder what might be a better term for a movement/perspective that does successfully address the issues raised by Postmodernism. What we have called Gothic Funk so far has certainly included many Postmodern techniques, if not a Postmodern philosophy. Iterative art, self-conscious art, art that incorporates its environment and allusions both elastically and irreverantly all come into play. These tricks are so common in our parties/letters/manifestoes that a clean break (which I do not believe is what we seek) is out of the question.

But the model of naming convention by simple succession is equally out of the question.

A major premise of the Gothic Funk project is that Postmodern dilemmas can be addressed; that there are solutions, even if they are not absolute.

Because this is our understanding of the discussion – the opportunity to move beyond or through issues of negation/subjectivity – I'm inclined to use the term "Trans-Postmodern." At least until someone can rigorously argue in favor of an even more descriptive term. "Trans-Postmodern" is obviously more descriptive than the "big thing." It is also more accurate than "Post-Postmodern" because it presents both a struggle with Postmodern conceits, and (at least the partial) resolution of that struggle.

Labels: CONCEPT, critical theory, gothic funk

Concept: Question of the Day #2.

What do you think of Thomas Hirschhorn and his work?

Labels: CONCEPT

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Dada. Da?

The Onion: Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not.

Unfortunately, the actual Wikipedia article is much more prosaic.

Labels: CONCEPT, critical theory

Wednesday, August 15, 2007

CONCEPT: What's a better title?

Notes for Students

or

White Swan

?

I should say, it will be:

• Overtly political.


• Oh so Gothic Funk.


• Weird.

What title would you use?

Labels: CONCEPT

Monday, August 13, 2007

Concept: Cenci Preshow.

This morning I re-rediscovered the Cenci preshow CD that Travis burned me back in 1/2000. Almost every track plays. In fact, I almost jumped right out of my seat the moment that the trumpet blast from the end of the murder scene came on.

Correction: Screeched into existence again.

Labels: CONCEPT, theater

Concept: Countdown.

108 days to the Thanksgiving Post.
115 days to the End-of-November Post.

Labels: CONCEPT

Friday, August 10, 2007

Concept: Exploring the South Bronx.

I had my camera, but since I mostly just take street shots anyway, and there are plenty online (for example, through the Bridge and Tunnel Club, I've tried just to walk and take in the scenery. I started out at Yankee Stadium, since the main reason I'd come up here was to exchange last years rained-out Tigers tickets for this years hopefully-sunny Tigers tickets.

I didn't get to see as much of the Bronx as I wanted; my original plan was to follow 161st street to Southern Blvd., take that north and poke around Crotona Park, then follow Third or Boston back to Melrose. But the Bronx is a bit more complicated than Manhattan, and after following 161st for almost two miles, I though I had passed Southern, and turned around and headed back. Most of what I saw on this stretch was, as I understand it, the boundary between Melrose and Morrisania.

The South Bronx was more hilly and craggy than what I've seen of the other burroughs, and this area was split between government buildings (to the west) and public housing (to the east), with some residential and commercial strips intersperced. It was very mysterious... probably a lot like historic parts of Detroit or Chicago where the urban wash has overpowered the gloss we're used to finding in historical plaques. This area developed very quickly in the 1930s, and then declined just as rapidly, and the Bronx has had the most troubled reputation of any of the burroughs. That said, the South Bronx specifically, was where hip hop was born (known by me in the form of Kurtis Blow and Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five), and we all know what a driving cultural force that has become.

When I'd gotten back to Grand Concourse, which was just as grandiose as anything in Brooklyn or Manhattan, but on a more intimate scale, I continued onto Jerome street, where I found a tall serpentlike stairway climbing to some apartment buildings above.

I counted about 130 steps. There was a nice view up top.

Labels: CONCEPT, New York City, visual art

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Concept: Occlusion Neighborhood, Part 1.

If you run a Google search on "occlusion neighborhood" there are actually two results, facsimiles of each others.

They are as follows:

Buyers shifting to a strange infinite metropolitan area may cleanly be doubts really confused over morose the best area decelerate to live Cunard in electricity , unless there is falls a desirable and reasonably priced occlusion neighborhood near their archangel place of work.

A "desirable and reasonably priced occlusion neighborhoods near their archangel place of work." I like that.

I Googled this today, 8/8/2007.

---

On 12/18/2006 I attempted to define for the GoFuShiLi what exactly an "occlusion neighborhood" is. I described it as follows:

1. 'Tis GhEtTo.
2. Weird mixture of 1920s and 1950s housing stock. Ranches and
wood-frame things.
3. Geographically isolated. Physically by lakes, rivers, train
tracks, expressways, and in combination when possible.
4. Not generally known by people. Tucked away.
5. Only acknowledged in the news *ever* due to crime, though there is
very likely good music here it will never get the credit it deserves.
6. Bright colors... either in the form of murals, lawn decor, gardens,
graffiti, or whatever. Again, in combination when possible.
7. Lots and lots of trees. Seems on the verge of being retaken by nature.
8. Not close to city limits. Buried somewhere well within the boundary lines.
9. Scores of abandoned buildings. Parks are a little loopy.
10. Feels spooky, enchanting, sugar sweet, and a little like winter.

I should have added, for the benefit of the morose, that it is just as likely to be near your work with the archangels.

---

Do you know of any Occlusion Neighborhoods?

I'm always trying to find them, but by their nature, little is written about them.

I'm listening to Plainsong by The Cure.

Labels: CONCEPT, gothic funk

Concept: Proposed: Notes for Students.

PROJECT NAME: Notes for Students

GROUP: Third Family.
FORMAT: Prose Novel.
STRUCTURE: Cups, Part I, Part II, Part III, Platter

ANTECEDENTS: William Burroughs (writer), Italo Calvino (writer), Anne Carson (writer), Cicero (writer), The Cure (band), Depeche Mode (band), Ladytron (band), Orbital (band), Smashing Pumpkins (band), Underworld (band).

CONCEPT: Still largely undefined as of 8/7/2007.
The novel is presented as a series of guides and advice columns recommending methods of study, exploration, experimentation, seduction, and abduction. As case studies, it follows a collection of students (of wide-ranging ages) through their first semester of enrollment at various schools in the neighborhood of West Wickersburg in an anonymous big city.

This project will attempt to address three abstract objectives.
First, to embody as completely as possible the themes and strategies of the Gothic Funk aesthetic. This is specifically a "practice round" for the next revision of Urbantasm.
Second, to push myself toward a greater prosodic experimentation than I've attempted before.
Third, to evoke the essence and appeal of the (inherently?) solipsistic student's life.

SCHEDULE: Draft during 9-10/2007.

Labels: CONCEPT, prose, Writing

Tuesday, July 31, 2007

Lost, Season 2, and its O.C.ish tendencies.

I've now watched through the second season of Lost. It was certainly weaker than the first, although everyone had warned me of a decline, and I was expecting it to be much worse than it was. The strengths continue to be, week-to-week, a tight, imaginative, well-paced narrative, engaging, plausible characters, and mysteries that make my mouth water.

One weakness is a lack of payoff-for-expectations on some of these very-promising mysteries.

An even bigger weakness, though, is the need to make characters act like juvenile delinquents in order to push the plot forward. This often happened several times in each episode, and the most egregious offence is the old "do what I want or I'll wave a gun in your face" trick. With 21.6 such incidents per season, how can you take any of these people seriously? And why can't they ever call the bluff? These repetitive/sloppy/strongarm tactics reminded me a lot of latter-day The O.C.. In Lost's defense, the writing is better than it ever was on The O.C. post-season-one. In The O.C.'s defense, its characters actually were juvenile delinquents. At least they had an excuse.

I'm looking forward to when Season Three comes out. Then I can catch up with everyone else.

Labels: CONCEPT, television

Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Concept: Harry Potter as Great Literature.

CONTAINS NO SPOILERS.

After finishing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, I wasn't quite ready to separate myself from the subject yet, so I went to a number of websites reading reviews and the like. Among these I came upon the AV Club's blogged-as-read report by Genevieve Koski and Tasha Robinson. It was replete with comments like "These books aren't great literature, they're just kind of fun, and I'm more interested in the whole phenomenon than in deifying Rowling as a great writer," and "a lot of people, on this site and elsewhere, have complained that the Harry Potter books aren't great literature and don't deserve the kind of attention and devotion they've gotten."

This is a common criticism – certainly among my New York friends – and I think it is absurd. Instead of conceding that someone isn't a great writer and then cortorting our argument into all sorts of weird shapes to justify why we love it so much (because I can't believe that there's any reason for people to be fascinated by the Harry Potter phenomenon as opposed to, say, the Titanic or Pokemon phenomena), doesn't it make more sense to admit that we do find someone a great writer, and then examine our definition of "great writer"? We can either find our emotions or our assumptions in error, but either way I think the examination is more honest as a result.

The conclusion I've drawn is that such backhanded complements to Harry Potter are first and foremost a product of academia and the sort of literature it has sought to produce and endorse: that which we euphemistically call "literary fiction," and which is supposedly distinguished from genre writing by its lack of "conventions" and popular writing by its appeal to individual examination over universal sentiment. I don't buy these distinctions. "Literary fiction" is embodied by oh-so-reliable tropes of political ennui, childhood remeniscences, extramarital affairs that are prompted by assorted personal vacancies, and obsessions over prosodic minutae. These are all as present as the conventions of genre fiction, and their most convincing effect could be (almost) agreed upon as in accordance with an organizing principle, if not universal sentiment. Literary fiction isn't bad for that fact; it is simply conventional. It is literary by virtue of the fact that an academic community has named it so. It are not deprived of craft or novelty or relevance for this reason; it shares with popular and genre fiction the opportunity to extend relevance beyond a simple application of convention.

I'm not saying here either that I think that Rowling's work is flawless. Each book has had its flaws. Books One and Two lacked the complexity and intrigue of all that followed. Sometimes they've suffered from too much exposition, perhaps, and who can forget the angry (and annoying) ALL-CAPS HARRY from Book Five. But even great writers have peccadilloes. Samuel Beckett is essentially a one-trick pony; his trick is good enough that we forgive him. Vladimir Nabokov has many tricks up his sleeve, but only one plot, and if you've read Lolita and Pale Fire you've gotten the gyst of it. Getrude Stine is startling and magnetic with the power and beauty and majesty of her voice, but not in her off-putting theories on personality and nationality.

Rowling is a master storyteller. She makes an economic use of narrative inflection and description to establish setting and characters as both subtle and rawly imaginative, and immediately kicks into plots with myriad intersecting arcs. Like Dantè's terza rima the atoms of this device overlaps and stagger. This means that there is never a comfortable resolution until the end of the book, and maybe, ultimately, the series. It's as effective as good noir for page-turning, and given the manipulation of information from earlier books, the abundance of both red herrings and legitimate clues, it's authentically a masterful creation.

My problem with reviews such as the AV's is that they make automatic provisions for and distinctions between good writing and good storytelling. And yet: between these two modes of writing – if the social and political situation of the text is just as interesting, if the prosodic and thematic vocabulary is just is sophisticated, if the modes of creation and the distribution of the work are essentially identical – is there any objective basis on which to prefer "good literature" over "good storytelling"?

I don't think so, myself.

This week and next I will be writing three posts on this subject. In each I will choose an element, theme, or device that Rowling uses in the Hally Potter books generally and Deathly Hallows particularly. I will try to argue that these deployments are can be well-argued to be as nuanced and deliberate as those used by "master writers" of the last century. We have begun a process by which writing indigenous to the non-Western world – Ferdousi's Shahnamah for example, or the stories of Rabindranath Tagore – is being critically explored as equal in nuance and deliberation to our Western canon. We ought to examine our assumptions within the field of Western literature itself.

Labels: art, CONCEPT, Harry Potter, literature

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Concept: Rolling Stone agrees with me too.

The other day I talked about how I thought Zeitgeist was pretty sweet, and today Rolling Stone agrees with me. It's nice not to be entirely in the minority on an artistic opinion for once.

Labels: CONCEPT, Smashing Pumpkins, Zeitgeist

Tuesday, July 17, 2007

Concept: Zeitgeist, by the Smashing Pumpkins.

The cardinal sin that almost every review (positive and negative) of Zeitgeist has committed so far is interpreting it strictly as a referendum on Billy Corgan and his other efforts to date. Certainly that history is significant (you can read it all here), but it is an oversimplication to simply denounce the new album as Billy Corgan's personal hand at work, or to rehabilitate it because the same has always been true.

What ought to be interesting about Zeitgeist, and what's been scarcely mentioned