Books
I've been polishing up my literary
journalist skills for some years now. Fact is, I'm getting
to be quite good and could fool the casual reader into mistaking
me for a real writer. You know, the kind with all the big
words and long, complicated paragraphs where you keep having
to stop for a breath and rereading bits you didn't quite get.
Recently I've been contributing to the Canadian journal Books
In Canada (www.booksincanada.com). In the dim past I've also
chalked up a few notches at Paragraph and Word and some others
I'd rather you didn't know about. Only a few pieces are relevant
to the mystic mumbo-jumbo of this site, but I'm right proud
of it all and "will now proceed to bore you for four
or five minutes" (Jimi) with the products of my fabulous
and furious critical intelligence. Of course, having top notch
books to review certainly raises the bar, and I'm certainly
obliged to Olga Stein for (mostly) making sure I'm regularly
supplied with them. Here's one of her picks right here: The Road
of Excess By Marcus Boon (Harvard 2002) ISBN 0-674-00914-2 You might
not know it, as you go about your daily business as an honest
and upstanding citizen of the state, but indulging in and
singing the praises of intoxicating plants, herbs and liquors
has been one of mankind's favourite occupations. While it
is only in the last twenty decades or so that our educated
scribes have been furiously scribbling their schematics of
bliss, the tribes down through the ages have rarely refrained
from their holy frenzies. Whether partaking of some Bacchic
or Dionysian agitation, absorbing the mysteries either Eleusian
or Rosicrucian, or journeying shamanically throught the nether
regions of nature and spirit, men and women from every era
have pushed at the envelope of normal consciousness with an
uncommon zest. Ancient cave
scrapings in southern Algeria depict numbers of dancing fools,
hands clasping mushrooms, and that unmistakable shimmy of
ecstasy in the eyes. The nomadic peoples credited with this
late neolithic artwork lived in the area, it is estimated,
between seven and twenty thousand years ago. Whether the fungi
pictured are the forerunners of Soma, the fabled concoction
of the 3,000+ year old Hindu Vedas, is a matter for the scholars,
but the Rig Veda, a collection of a hundred or so hymns to
Soma, is undoubtedly the first written peaen to intoxicated
transcendence to survive: "Thy juices, purified Soma,
all-pervading, swift as thought, go of themselves like the
offspring of swift mares, the celestial well-winged sweet
flavoured juices, great exciters of exhiliration, alight upon
the receptacle." Connoisseurs
of high society will immediately recognise a certain tone,
one that is often tolled by writers on, what Marcus Boon likes
to call, The Road Of Excess. That was certainly the path of
one Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose literary achievements can,
it would appear, only be equalled by his relentless quest
for drugged adventure. On top of his noted dependence on various
over-the-counter opiated beverages, the poet of Kubla Khan
was not unfamiliar with bhang, hashish, or nitrous oxide,
some of which were consumed in an atmosphere of jovial experimentation
with friends and colleagues, both scientific and literary.
These were not doomed romantics, gamely flailing against soulless
modern society in dingy damp rooms, but brave explorer boys,
trying to map the antipodes of consciousness to see where
reigning philosopher kings like Kant could be followed and
maybe faulted. Invited by
letter, with his friend Robert Southey, to try out the new
gas at Humphrey Davy's research facility just outside Bristol,
the writers duly arrived, ready to party. Surprisingly, it's
the discoverer's impressions which remain the most vivid:
"I felt a sense of tangible extension, highly pleasurable
in every limb, my visible impressions were dazzling...I heard
distinctly every sound in the room....by degrees I lost all
connection with external things; trains of vivid visible images
rapidly passed through my mind, and were connected with words
in such a manner, as to produce perceptions perfectly novel...I
exclaimed to Dr. Kingslake 'Nothing exists but thoughts! The
universe is composed of impressions, ideas, pleasures and
pains!'" Even more remarkable experiences are detailed
in his unpublished notebooks of the period, but we'll get
to that later. For now we'll
wonder who would have guessed that such ecstatic reverberations
would have linked the worlds of 18th century science and 20th
century urban shamanism? I had my suspicions, but when I discovered
here that a group of 19th century French psychiatrists had
taken a lively interest in the therapeutic uses of hashish,
probably eased into the country by Napoleon's famous swipe
at Egypt, thinking it capable of mimicing the altered states
experienced by the chaotically unstable citizens under their
command I was taken aback, for this is precisely what Tomothy
Leary and his merry men attempted in the early messianic days
of LSD therapy. Of such fascinating additions to the patchwork
quilt of fringe cultural history is Mr. Boon's work made up.
With seemingly encyclopaedic and virtually impeccable research,
not to mention a bibliography to die for, he conveys the reader
delightedly through the labyrinths of phantasmagoria and elaborate
paranoia digested and duly noted by that seemingly inexhaustible
team of high flyers that populate our literary pantheon. Boon's suggestion
that "the transcendental impulse, the desire to go beyond
matter and mind and experience the whole, forms one of the
principal reasons that people take drugs" is well taken.
We are always trying to get out of ourselves, it would seem.
And in our efforts we will use every conceivable concoction
to do so. We will smoke, sniff, swallow, rub and inject. We
will dabble and deal and wallow. We will do everything, it
seems, but stop. The projected palace of wisdom, ever the
haven in our paths of dutiful overindulgence, continues to
stretch, mirage like, slightly above and ahead of its seekers.
And if they arrive, they find their blissful visit almost
indescribable and usually, despite the requisite immersion
in eternity, soon over, their fuel soon depleted and their
carcass complaining. Some drugs quicken, some deaden; some
expand the consciousness, some contract; some lead to an experience
of luxurious profusion, others to a desolate emptiness. Perhaps
all are versions of the same palace, modeled on different
assumptions and constructed from the variable economies of
language. Who's really
to know, when you're out there in space cadet munchkinland,
with everything glowing and vibrating and talking at the same
time? Some would say that to speak of the ineffable is to
profane it. The mysteries, they say, are for the few not the
many. And perhaps they are right, transcendence is not for
the common man, especially if we are to keep him kicking in
the economy, but writers and artists, slackers to the max,
have always been adepts at skipping the queue and becoming
the select who explore and map the scintillating chaos ingestion
releases. They will neither take no for an answer nor moderation
as an operating manual. Of the rugged explorers Boon quotes,
and there are many, there are few who did not flood themselves
with fabulous sensation. Jean Paul
Sartre, lord of the post war undergraduate growing pains,
gobbled amphetamines for breakfast, lunch and dinner as he
carved his many weighty titles, cramming in downers to relax
and sleeping pills to escape, yet few would call the Critique
of Dialectical Reason the ravings of a stoner. But addicted
he was, as deep in the rush as Kerouac and Ginsberg across
the pond. As he said to Simone de Beauvoir, "While I
was working, after taking ten corydanes in the morning, my
stae was one of complete bodily surrender. I perceived myself
through the motion of my pen, my forming images and ideas."
The down side, as Boon notes, of excessive stimulant use,
is an infatuation with the very speed and flow of words which
leads to loss of control "over the size and scope of
his later projects, which are often large but incomplete (ie
the five volume life of Flaubert), with ideas proliferating
without reaching closure or conclusion." Certainly all
the Beats suffered from this type of hyper-ventilating: they
may have justified it as a fusion of "jazz and Buddhist
aesthetics" but the jam sessions end up as often in the
emptiness of boredom as the void of bliss. Of course,
in such ecstatic dissolutions of identity, it is often difficult,
if not well nigh impossible, to differentiate one from another.
As Paul Simon once memorably sang "One man's ceiling
is another man's floor". If heaven can indeed be discovered
in a grain of sand and all eternity in one hour, it would
appear that the base camp of rationality is the morse code
of those condemned to three dimensions. Such morose speculations
would seem inevitable in this world of self medicating mysticism,
and as each class of drug spawns its own brand of awareness,
it boasts of yet another brave new world to be infiltrated,
and secretes new metaphors as models of system management.
The metaphor
of technology: Employing Heidegger's definition of the word,
Boon suggests that all drugs are "technologies"
because "they posit ends and procure and utilize the
means to them." Thus we can speak of the opiates as "technologies
of pleasure, cannabis as a technology of dreaming, and anesthetics
as technologies of transcendence". The metaphor of speed,
quoting Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari: "All drugs
fundamentally concern speeds, and modifications of speed".
The metaphor of disembodied dictation, where with a variety
of stimulants, including opium, which was thus considered
until De Quincy, "the writer's body disappears as his
mental faculties accelerate and the paper covers itself with
ink." The metaphor of need/control, defined by William
Burroughs as the "algebra of need", centred in the
human body inside, where desire is birthed and baited by the
economic structure outside, which thrives on control. The
metaphor of excess, which Boon works over as a kind of uber-metaphor,
a psychic umbrella which keeps the cosmic miscreants safe
from the rain of boredom and restraint. One feels
a bond of gratitude to Mr. Boon for carefully composing what
is tantamount to a reviewer's dream: a scrupulously researched
and splendidly written tome that is a joy to read and a challenge
to digest, and leaving just enough loose ends for the amazed
commentator to be critically constructive. While it
might have ballooned this trim exercise in source and exposition
into the kind of unwieldy door stopper professors are justly
famous for, his extrapolations of the altered state repeatedly
abutt onto two other areas of anomalous experience, those
of channeling and out-of- body experience. As he notes,"Kubla
Khan gave first expression to one of the fundamental tropes
of literary drug use, that of dictation: the sense that thoughts
are being dictated by some unknown agency without conscious
effort". Although he is far from the first commentator
to ignore the vast literature of automatic writing on the
customary grounds that it is more inspirational than literary,
he could be the first to acknowledge and explore that the
two share an identical compositional mechanism. Perhaps Jon
Klimo's Channeling could be added to his already bulging bibliography.
He also notes that because "the ultimate reference point
for transcendence within modern paradigms is death" then
the literature that "most resembles the literature of
anasthetics is that of near death experiences". To this
he might have added out-of- body travel. If this sounds like
reaching, consider for a moment the notebooks of Humphrey
Davy, the discoverer of nitrous oxide, edited by Molly Lefebure,
where he describes "experiences of interplanetary space
travel, in the course of which, as he flew or floated amongst
heavenly universes, he encountered all manner of incredibly
strange beings". Hallucination
one might be tempted to harrumph, but as Boon elsewhere comments
on the phenomenological problems posed by psychedelics, "In
the hallucination the only thing that is not supposed to happen
to materialist consciousness happens: one sees that for which
there is no sensory data." And although this exemplary
study employs that same sensory data to illustrate the exquisite
traumas of writerly transcendence, it provokes the reader
to realms where such data are superfluous. Only this world
is limned in language. Bonking books are always fun,
but the bonus is usually in what taboos they reveal. God knows,
as a society we 've sure got plenty. As is obvious from below,
they're pretty much like any other genre: it can be done well
and it can be done badly. I'm reminded of a quote from Lorne
Michaels, "Guy comes home from college to find his mum
sleeping with his uncle and a ghost banging about the house.
Do it well and you've got Hamlet, do it badly and you've got
Gilligan's Island". Exploring
The Erotic Memoir Risking It
All by Heather Ingram, (Douglas & McIntyre 2003) ISBN
1-55054-980-4 Sometime
around 1971, that long ago era of literary nationalism and
government largesse, when Leonard Cohen was the only Canadian
writer with an international reputation, an Englishman not
long in Montreal published a fictional portrayal of a love
affair between a high school teacher and one of his brighter
female students. Beneath what was to become known in later
years as his standard quota of holier-than-thou aestheticism
and scads of Evelyn Waugh-ish satire, John Metcalf's first
novel presented a tender retelling of an ancient tale: the
battle weary and cynical adult revitalised by the beauteous
and imbibable energies of youth. Though far
from successful, the book did establish Metcalf, especially
amongst the few cognoscenti not seduced by the nationalist
fervours then sweeping CanLitland, as a name to watch. People
seemed not only charmed by his then-remarkable sophistication
of style, but also the daring choice of subject matter. In
the wake of the perversely surreal Beautiful Losers, it was
actually rather tame, but in the wake of our current enslavement
to political correctness, it now seems positively risque. The frisson
of such liasons is, these days, so shamefully charged one
suspects the archtype has been forced to migrate to the memoir
form, where any outrage is embraced as long as the trash culture
esthetic of transgression/confession/redemption is rigorously
obeyed. The sinner must sin and the guilty grovel, before
a public, well oiled in sanctimonious shock, will attend to
the psychic flogging ahead of the pardon administered. This ineluctable
glamour of scandal seems to be why the brisk trade in confessional
memoir continues unabated. For some reason, which may one
day be unveiled by psychiatry, militant feminism, or aliens
with a kinder, gentler agenda, the female of the species is
especially keen on kissing and telling. Transgression, it
would seem, remains ever so tempting, the season of indulgence
it generates quite irresistible, while the lure of hard won
redemption vies with public acclaim for the big prize. While
guys, when not boozily unemployed or dreaming of fly-fishing,
seem keener on the debilitating effects of war on the testosterone
charged psyche and the paranoid phallocentric cultures it
upholds, gals still much prefer to gore that virgin/madonna
ideal with the kind of carefree sluttishness previously the
preserve of the indolent rich. It sure looks like brazeness
has supplanted modesty in the panoply of desirable attributes.
And apparently discretion, decorum and restraint have been
a cheesy sham all along. Carefree immediate indulging of desire
is definitely what the doctor ordered. Perhaps even stuffed
shirts will soon be in short supply. If the current
deluge of mediocre fiction shows us how to sport our skeptical
umbrellas even on sky blue sunny days, then the relentless
barrage of memoirs reminds us that souls with an overwhelming
urge to put their searing stories on paper are not necessarily
artists with even the dimmest of visions. Witness Heather
Ingram, a high school teacher in small town B.C., seething
with impotent rage at a society that dare place her under
house arrest for sexual improprieties with a minor under her
scholastic jurisdiction. Jeez, she coulda lied and gotten
away with it! Heck, he was nearly eighteen and had his own
car! And boy did he have a nice set of buns! And let's not
forget, she's a paragon of virtue compared to that Mary Kay
Letourneau, who had two babies with a thirteen year old, not
to mention all those scummy men teachers laying seige to innocent
girls. The relentless
tackiness of the whole enterprise wearies even the casual
reader. Twenty pages after "We kiss, and I think my heart
will break with longing" she's pouring herself into a
one night stand with the love of her life's best buddy, also
verging on jail bait. Her assessment: "I will use this
night as a piece of the puzzle in finding myself." And
on it goes, psychic damage magnified by deafeningly poor prose.
Ingram is not the first woman to carry her mewling inner child
into the wretched complexities of adult society, and of course
she will not be the last, but her insistence upon the oh-poor-me
syndrome, with its recipe book of tawdry arias from the soap
opera repertoire effectively insulate her very high school
drama from the serious consideration afforded the more thoughtful
entries in the field, such as Jane Juska's A Round Heeled
Woman and Catherine Millet's The Sexual Life Of Catherine
M. Juska, a
retired school reacher of 67 from Ohio, for whom you'll be
pleased to hear, "Art compensates for life," had
the cojones to place a personal in The New York Review Of
Books, advising of her love of Trollope and her imminent need
of some serious rolling in the hay. Her memoir, which comprises
the cross country adventures resulting from the most appealing
replies, is living proof that bonking books need be neither
brassy nor boring. Displaying as deft a touch with the psyches
of her respondents as the tangles of her own childhood and
failed marriage, she brings to the genre a refreshing breath
of refinement and culture. When she submits that "participating
in art and sex allows us to transcend the certainty of our
own death and the destruction of all that is beautiful and
good," one feels like cheering: In praise of older women
indeed. After the
white trash dramatics of Ingram's Sunshine Coast, where illicit
sex, drugs and home renovations are the major pastimes as
mortgages get paid and families unravel, one arrives at Juska's
round heeled pilgrimage with a palpable sense of relief. She
is the possessor of not only a soft heart, but a sharp eye
and fine wit, not to mention a vocabulary blessedly beyond
the functional. She too oogled the rear ends of boys in high
school hallways, but had the great good sense to unhitch her
fantasy from her hands and hover until her anticipation ripened
into daring exploits on the right side of the law. And when
she emerges from the wistful shadows into the light of erotic
committment, later in life than most perhaps, she is able
to usher her readers into the secret empires of sex and culture
with equal facility, proving once again that the life of the
mind can and should be the life of the body, and that all
experience is conjoined by the energies of eternal delight.
This unfettered and cosmically tinged joy is shared by Catherine
Millet, a middle aged Frenchwoman of quite singular enthusiasm
and enterprise, who manages to push the envelope of erotic
abandon quite beyond all previous estimates. The editor of
the Paris journal Art Press and the author of eight books
of art criticism, her disturbingly eloquent disquisition encompasses
the most energetic romp through the life libidinous yet encountered
by this reviewer. From langorous
afternoons in sunny back gardens with old friends, through
less than fussy mate swapping, threesomes with new acquaintances
culled from club and bar, innumerable quickies in orchard
and forest with car engines idling nearby, to full blown orgies
in private homes in the blessedly anonymous acreage of sweat
slicked flesh, Millet turns her memoir into a liberine's manifesto,
thankfully minus the sadism of the renowned Marquis. She envisions
"an easing of human relations, an easing facilitated
by an acceptance and tolerance of sexual desire" which
her tales recount in a "clearly utopic, fantastical way",
and she encourages us to take pleasure as "we rejoice
in the vision" That this vision includes spontaneous
eruptions of intercourse against the walls of busy railroad
termini while commuters cast their eyes elsewhere seems not
to trouble Ms. Millet one whit. I guess you just have to be
French. It is one thing to be in societal denial of sex trade
workers and their continued travails, but bringing the grab-ass
esthetic of the bordello into the street reeks of the usual
anarchic overkill to me. Let's keep the orgasm safely tucked
up in bed, shall we? While these
three memoirs undoubtedly go the distance in matters erotic
and literary, charmed and damned by both pleasure and discontent,
I felt more than a twinge of regret that none could equal
what for me was the crowning achievement of the genre, if
not so far then at least recently, Kathryn Harrison's 1997
The Kiss. An almost pefectly pitched meditation on
the psychic bondage engendered by her minister father's erotic
obsession with his daughter, the writer, whose finely wrought
and disciplined prose exposed the weighty normality of neurosis,
denial and justification, shorn of the pleading Freudianisms
and frantic finger pointing which tabloid psychologising provokes.
Exquisitely literary, with nary a trace of an extracurricular
agenda she gave the reader the crux of the matter, free of
pathos and full of radiance, the glory of the moment, whether
gruesome, righteous or generic. The Persistence
Of Humbug: a review
of On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt (Princeton 2005,
ISBN 0-691-12294-6) and Your Call Is Important To Us
by Laura Penny (M&S 2005, ISBN 0-7710-7042-x Surprising
as it may seem, a seventy page essay by a moral philosopher
from Princeton has become something of a best seller. Originally
a paper presented at a Yale faculty seminar twenty years ago,
Harry G. Frankfurt's "On Bullshit", eventually made
its appearance in a journal, then in a 1988 collection of
Frankfurt's work, "The Importance Of What We Care About",
along such sober entries as "Coercion And Moral Responsibility",
and now, as a handsomely bound pamphlet, it can be found almost
anywhere the printed word is held in high regard. >As a brief
reprieve from the endless reams of ChickLit, Harry Potterisms,
DaVinci Code-itis and this week's masterful dissection of
militant Islam, its calm, clear-headed deconstruction of everyday
deceit is without parallel, unless you'd care to throw in
my uncle Jim's all-purpose "an acute case 'o nae brains"
as a counter balance. The perfect antidote to our culture's
daily dose of garish scandal and scatterbrained ideology,
it can be happily devoured in an hour or so and its insights
mulled over for weeks. >For a western
intellectual, a clan not often noted for clear diction and
direct thought, Frankfurt performs small miracles of deft
deliberation, moving smoothly from the notion that bullshit
is basically what folks used to call humbug, through the understanding
that the bullshitter is not, per se, a liar, seeking to deceive
us about "the facts", but is concerned about "concealing
the nature of his enterprise", towards a radically smart
denouement concerning the modern world's loss of faith in
any absolutes and the resultant retreat from achieving correctness
to achieving sincerity. But for Frankfurt, since our natures
are "elusively insubstantial", we cannot actually
come up with honest representations of ourselves, and thus
our ideal of sincerity "itself is bullshit". And
a lovely tour-de-force it is, despite the uncredited dependence
on dear old David Hume. And Bravo! say I. Almost as
incisive as Frankfurt's tiny diamond is Jim Holt's recent
New Yorker essay on the whole shebang, "Say Anything",
which not only includes a discussion of a little known critique
by G.A. Cohen of Oxford, "Deeper Into Bullshit",
but also a slew of historically relevant chatter, from St
Augustine to Wittgenstein, and an admiring reference to Laura
Penny's "Your Call Is Important To Us - the truth about
bullshit". To share such hallowed halls with a cast like
that in the venerable New Yorker is no mean feat for a first
time Canadian author and one wonders how she will ever top
it. Although
she claims to admire Frankfurt's work, Penny displays the
one quality he ultimately derides, sincerity. Her version
is the usual earnest lefty conviction of outrage, striking
blows against the omnipotent and uncaring empire. Through
the book she faces down her Goliath with a canny admixture
of slander, righteous anger and satire. Throw in a few ad
hominem insults, the trash talk of tabloid journalism, unseemly
lapses into barbarism (recommending the Enron execs for "stoning
in lieu of jail time") and the by-now standard chorus
of anti-capitalist anti-globalist rhetoric, and by golly you've
got a book. The bearer
of several degrees from institutions of higher learning, Ms
Penny has also, fortunately, been seconded into the labour
pool from time to time, and it would appear that this aspect
of her existence has powered both attitude and argument. What
those poor schmoes have to put up with really is beyond the
pale. She never actually thumbs her nose at the hoi polloi,
but one does get the unmistakable flavour of relief at the
prospect of college and publishing placing her safely beyond
their grubby reach. Penny is
a sharp and effective stylist, whose slash and jab technique
deflates many a pompous and pretentious target in public life,
but who, like several of her Gen X culture critic comrades-in-arms,
retains a dreary ability to parrot the obvious and pander
to cliches. That politicians prevaricate, corporations connive,
and the military make waves only they can control, is nothing
new. Everyone, from Mothers Against Drunk Driving, through
Greenpeace, CSIS, McDonalds and the Anglican Synod, propagandises
to prop up their agenda, impress their superiors, and to keep,
if not increase, their market share. Being committed to your
cause does not obviate the need for a paycheck - or a rationale. The marketplace
has always been the stage for lewd trade and sharp practise,
power has always, without exception, corrupted, greed never
fails to tempt and fear has always, without warning, invaded.
And the most useful tool arising from such exchanges has usually
been wilful deceit. Fortunately, during the same span, for
all us keen adherents to systemic checks and balances, sympathy
and the charitable impulse have gained a sizable toehold.
Of course, personal acts of empathy and kindness tend to lack
the wicked thrill of the seven deadly sins and doubtless go
undereported in the media. Penny's vague
but tempestuous sloganeering ("Most of what passes for
news is bullshit") is initially tempting as a joyously
anarchic meltdown of all things pompous, pretentious and imperious,
but it eventually wears down the attentive reader as it turns
inexorably toward the demonising of all public utterance,
an endgame as determinedly nihilistic and self-defeating as
the onslaught of bullshit it attempts to disarm. Now while
the tear away success of such works as the DaVinci Code has
allowed the world view of gnosticism a return through the
back door, where it can easily cavort with the puritanism
of fundamentalists of every persuasion, I suggest we should
remain firm in our reluctance to will-nilly embrace its vision
of demons behind every earthly manifestation. Even the occasional
practise of a well-tempered rationalism can show that there
is more to public life than political maneovering and public
relations, although one who daily immerses herself, as Ms
Penny repeatedly confesses, in the murky melodramatics of
the media, may lose the ability to make that distinction. But being
full, as they used to say, of piss and vinegar, at least as
much as her sixties forebears, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman
(Penny tags John Ashcroft as "that loon", Hoffman
wrote "President Johnson is a bastard") and certainly
not reluctant to sprinkle in a goodly share of insult and
cuss word to her brew, she's pretty well guaranteed a warm
and uncritical reception on the youthful left. But for those
of us who have already sat through cycles of disgust, rebellion,
denial and sullen acquiesence and have tired of hair dye and
painfully fashionable footwear, the parade of usual suspects
(Multinationals, Agribusiness, Big Pharma, Banks, and pretty
much anything American) seems all too predictable and overly
familiar to generate much more than a slightly shameful world-weary
shrug. Yet despite our shame we recognise that piss and vinegar
only go so far, and after all that chirpy vaudeville the critic
must offer guidelines for reconstruction. But Ms Penny fails
on that count, cheerfully admitting she has zilch to offer,
"I've got nothing. I'm not a problem solver. I'm a crank."
Such frank confession, I'm afraid, does not constitute a defense
of any credibility. Finally she is little more than ironic
observer of her own futility. One returns
from her vehement irritations to Frankfurt's calm deliberations
with a palpable self of relief. Her itch of perpetual annoyance
is contagious and the afflicted reader reaches for the balm
of philosophical reflection. I found mine in Felipe Fernandez-Armesto's
1997 "Truth - A History", for I realised at some
point in Penny's frenzied assault on the bastions of bullshit,
that there exists for her, and indeed anyone of her righteous
ilk, an assumption that there exists a shared vision, a community
reality, which is regularly and rigorously filleted for all
indications of untruth and misrepresentation. Unfortunately
for idealists of the sincerity school, there is no actual
ground floor agreement amongst all participants on the parameters
of honest and ethical banter. To successfully detach the false
from the true (or the wilful exaggeration from the plain spoken)
is a planetary wide project with a predictably sad history
of temporary consensus salvaged from the wrecks of last year's
much vaunted paradigms. Fernandez-Armesto
does as fine a job (terms like "marvellously compact"
and "brilliantly incisive" come to mind) as I've
seen tracking this endless enigma through the fields of anthropology,
theology, philosophy, history and science, yet he can come
no closer to his grail than suggesting that despite all language
being caught in some self-referential trap, the subjective
limitations of perspectives can be overcome in the craft of
rigorous compilation, the result bringing us at least "a
little closer to the truth". Only a little closer? Perhaps
the compilation of all partial viewpoints is a task fit only
for a non-sectarian god and those who would subsume themselves
in his speechless being. gordon
phinn Now here's one that tapped all
my hidden depths of passion and self-righteous articulation.
Book was written by a couple of canadian academics who seemed
suspicuously GenX to me, and by that point I'd seen more than
my fair share of that generation's post-punk spoilt brat whining.
Even when they managed to get themselves a life and indulge
their lust for expensive trainers/racing bikes/ratatuoille
in Paris, all they could really do was moan about society
in a manner reminiscent of ten year olds moaning about the
weather. There's something about that cappucino/cellphone/blackleather/ecstasy
platform that seems to perfect the trendy nihilism of the
post-punk no-future nod-out they sucked up from the late seventies
and forgot to spit out. Poison's like that, it gets in your
system and stays there until forcibly ejected or consciously
transmuted. They likely see me as some kind of burnt-out RamDass
granola-yogi, wafting incense over brown rice, but actually
I'm a Scottish malt whiskey and roast-lamb loving sixties
graduate, who actually saw the Beatles sing "All You
Need Is Love" live on that first world-wide simulcast
in 67 and carried that seed in his heart through the decades
of Vietnam, Cambodia, the collapse of communism, the imperially
funded slaughters in Africa and Central America, and the rise
of religious fundalmentalist intolerance on all fronts, to
have it blossom into a garden lovely multidimensional flowers
which can, and do, inspire on several of the planes of form
where souls explore the limits of their paradigms, and gordon
and others like him lend a hand in the pushing of envelopes. The Rebel Sell By Joseph Heath and
Andrew Potter (Harper Collins: 2004: ISBN0-00-200790-8) Finishing The Rebel Sell,
possibly the most overwraught bit of cultural handringing
encountered this past decade, the perplexed reader looks about,
in the stupefaction reserved for the suddenly contrite, for
the raison d'etre, the joie de vivre, the lost tab of lsd,
the memoirs of Tomothy Leary, the original vinyl of Sergeant
Pepper, the great poem your buddy wrote when he was really
cooked, that lovely piece on Jimi Hendrix by Germaine Greer
in The MadWoman's Underclothes, Grace Slick singing
"You, you are the crown of creation/and you've got no
place to go", anything really, anything that will remind
you that the Sixties really did lay seige to the death and
authority worshipping culture, replacing its grey James Bond
phallocentrism with a diffuse cacophany of colour, joysounds
and aimless sensuality. But since I'm fifty-two, and can
remember both the Russian tanks rolling into Prague, Paris
paralysed by riots, and the Beatles singing Hey Jude for the
first time live on the BBC, I would be doubtlessly considered
a prime example of the debilitating counterculture myth that
inhibits all attempts at constructive change by Messrs. Heath
And Potter, whose sole mission in life seems to be a ravaging
desire to debunk every cultural theory other than their own,
which after three hundred odd pages of piteous bleating, post-punk
irasibility and bald assertion masquerading as argument, seems
to ammount to not much more than Three Cheers For Capitalism!
Yipee! These lads have done their homework,
well, about seventy-five percent of it, the rest they fake
with that sniffy aplomb polished in the glare of anxious undergraduates,
the kind of haircut philosophising that Mark Kingwell and
Hal Niedzvieki figure they've got under wraps, where you emboss
the magasine cliches of any topic under the sun with a smorgasbord
of ideas pinched hither and thither, - the Economist, Foreign
Policy Review, McSweeneys - it matters little, spice it up
with quotes from the canon, something along the lines of Homer,
Kant, Aristotle or Wittgenstein, you know, just enough to
smarmily include yourself in the supposed inner circle, dethrone
the main players with some refurbished Freud and dish out
another feast of prattle and pose. You have to wonder, you really do,
about chaps who'll readily admit to wearing trendy but useless
and uncomfortable shoes for the duration of high school, all
for the holy grail of being cool, and then insist that "everyone
has a story of this type". Well I don't, and I've got
plenty of friends that don't either. Maybe I should squeeze
out a tome called The Myth of Peer Pressure. I'm sure if I
look the right evidence will follow my lead. Not it's not as if the will to intelligence
and the urge to research have not been put to some use in
the positioning of opinions: leading thinkers in the field
have been surveyed and absorbed, with more than a few of their
conclusions carefully grafted on, but far too often an academically
respectable section is followed by a contemptuous dismissal
of some person or movement the authors find beyond the pale.
Abbie Hoffman and John Perry Barlow in particular suffer this
fate. While one might effectively argue that the anarchic
clowning of Hoffman's Yippies was a more than appropriate
response to the grim political deadlock of their day, and
that Barlow's poetic, eloquent "Declaration of the Independence
of Cyberspace" will come to be lauded as a founding testament
to the new era of personal sovereinty in cultural and political
expression, the body politic pronouncing rather than merely
reacting, each is summarily dismissed as little more than
deviants "reeking of bongwater". In fact a virulent
strain of anti-counterculturalism runs through the entire
text, contaminating the project with a pugnacious vengefulness
which sours even the few original conjectures in a welter
of 'insights' as cliched as yesterday's columnists. So the counterculture promoted "self-discovery
through the arduous search for the other", "Cool has become the central
ideology of consumer capitalism" they insist, reminding
the reader of "the last time you bought something you
couldn't quite afford". I balked at the first two items
on their confessional list: a raincoat at $800:00, and a silk
jacket at $500:00., but I could've gone on to the two leather
chairs at $2,200 each or the Mini Cooper at $32,000. Ah, the
ineluctable pleasures of tenure! If only I could afford the
bicycles so bravely waved overhead by Heath and his chums
at the Eaton Center during their annual "Buy Nothing!"
Fest. Most folk don't actually require the theatre of "Buy
Nothing!" days, because they've got plenty of them already,
plenty of tense debate over new boots or groceries, the oil
bill or the brake job. Hey lads, come down to Tim's sometime
and I'll do the introductions. No problem. But alas, I'm no Gen-X er, I can't
afford the price of admission. In my status anxiety- free
cocoon I happily cruise their sea of cultural theories and
contemplate the cascade of other's ideas, while chomping at
the bit for any sign of intelligence beyond the usual Douglas
Coupland- with-a-college-diploma attitudinising. Oh, they
can quote Debord and Baudrillard with ease, throw in enough
references to Mailer, Kerouac, Huxley and Watts to make you
think they've actually digested them, but they keep coming
up with such incredible clunkers (like, in reference to the
film American Beauty, - "Why would the American Government
want to genetically engineer dope?") that terminal naivete
seems to be the only reasonable answer, for that statement
alone encodes perhaps the most potent symbol of post-war political
history, drug running to support covert operations, - covert
operations which ensure the continuation of corrupt oligharcies,
repressed workers and hassle-free money laundering - that
the term 'neo-con naivete' falls remakably short of the mark.
David Frum was not a reseach assistant on this project, although
it sure as heck looks like it sometimes. The three of them
could make a nice axis of idiocy together. What's really going on here is the
guilt-tripping drama of two post-punk adolescents buying into
the rage-against-the-machine ethos of their generation but
finding their career-struck selves as well placed profs with
money to burn on real estate and world travel and only their
burnished intellects to separate them from the hoi-polloi
who actually live out the trends they so peremtorily dismiss
("Ever notice that the masses have incredibly bad taste?").
Maybe what Heath and Potter really need to do is quit their
jobs and get a life. Or, as Frank Zappa once so memorably
sang, "Gonna move to Montana and raise me some dental
floss". There, maybe they can find the time to discover
what the rest of us old hippies know: the dream lives on,
with a smile, in your heart, and not in the analysis of transactions. Gordon Phinn faked his death
decades ago, denounced all ideology in his suicide note, got
his chick to collect the insurance dough, and lives out his
lie quietly in Hawaii. ( to be continued...)
The author explores each of these models with what can only
be described as exhaustive aplomb. No stone is left unturned
in his quest as to "why literature and drugs came to
be associated". As an ethnographer "studying how
a society came came to believe certain things" he sees
that "the histories of religion, literature and science
all intersect in the production of the artifact of the writer
on drugs." From Sir Walter Scott to Michel Foucault the
pantheon expands and contracts, depending on mood and its
concomitant modifiers.
gordon phinn is a writer whose works are vivified, in the
main, by the convivial cult of caffeine.
A Round Heeled Woman by Jane Juska, (Villard 2003)ISBN1-4000-6011-7
The Sexual Life Of Catherine M. By Catherine Millet, (Grove
2003)ISBN0-8021-392-8
The Kiss by Kathryn Harrison, (Random House 1997) ISBN 0-697-44999-x
gordon phinn, of course, is chock full of dirty secrets
just aching to be exposed.
You might have noticed a small
handsome volume in your local big box bookstore lately with
the disarming title "On Bullshit". I did and was
rewarded for my curiosity. And what a fine little exploration
of what your grandad called humbug it is too. Splendid bit
of clear thinking there Harry, and so glad it garnered the
appropriate praise (and sales). Around the same time, a young
turk named Laura Penny put in her two cents worth, subtitling
her book 'the truth about bullshit'. I couldn't resist the
obvious comparison, nor the remarkable, and little known,
volume "Truth, a History", which seemed to tie up
every loose end available at the time. Had fun with this one,
I tell ya.
Ms Penny, like her colleagues, and many a child still shiny
from kindergarten, has duly noted that the Emperor hath no
raiment, and that his standard bearers themselves are somewhat
threadbare. In this she is spot on, and often charmingly so.
But to advance beyond her romantic cri de coeur, she must
see over the wall of anti-establishment cliches, personal
prejudice and high priced education to that formal, and perhaps
stuffy, garden of eternal verities in which it is apparent
that little has changed during the last several thousand years.
I guess we must have been just stupid hippies who didn't know
any better, playing frisbee in the sunshine and laughing.
And for a few years it looked as though the joy of fun might
replace the grinds of guilt and fear. But the self-inflicted
genocide of Cambodia soon overtook the imperial slaughter
of Vietnam just as efficiently as the enslavement of cocaine
replaced the liberation of pot, and we were back at square
one with our ideals in tatters. Then came Reagan, Thatcher
and Mulroney, officiating at the funeral.
And though "we all want diversity, it is often our own
consumer preferences that are driving homogenization",
and "the cool job has become the holy grail of the modern
economy"? Well, those beachheads have already been well
established, guys, lets move on. Let's be finished with hacking
away at Marx and Marcuse, that's so five minutes ago. Let's
not be satisfied with glib analysis, cribbed from a melange
of contemporaries. Let us see that chuckling at alternative
medicine is not critiquing it. Let us not slip in unsupported
anecdote as verifyable fact. Let us not invoke such inane
standards as "What if everyone did that, would the world
be a better place?", sounding like anyone's impossibly
square parents. And let us please not put forward "the
business trip" as the "only true authentic and non-exploitive
form of travel." So the mainstream actually does not
"co-opt the counterculture, it merely adapts", and
corporations will actually sell anything to anyone once a
profit is perceived? Well, no shit Sherlocks, but was it worth
the 350 odd pages you devoted to it? All that tortuous wrangling
to say let's "plug the loopholes in the system, not abolish
the system"?
Oh, I could go on and on, their analysis of Theodore Roszak's
The Making Of A Counter Culture, Charles Reich's The
Greening Of America or Vance Packard's The Hidden
Persuaders, their support or otherwise of Thorstein Veblen
and a dozen other critics of various hues, but it will never
cut to the chase because these guys are so basically clued
out I can hardly believe it. It's like they never recovered
from Kurt Cobain's suicide (or Adbusters' launch of their
own runners), freighting it with such absurd levels of symbolism
it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Lotta
folk were upset when Rudolf Valentino died too. It's such
a pivotal drama for them they have to begin the book with
it, concluding in a few lines that he was a victim of a false
idea, - the idea of a counterculture. That he had absorbed
the anti-hippie ethic of his generation and saw himself becoming
the sell-out he so despised. If he was merely the victim of
a psychotic, money- grubbing girlfriend, as some suggest,
that's too bad, because it just doesn't fit the Heath and
Potter mold. When you're torching idealism, dumb-ass junkie
slaughter just doesn't make the grade.