Infinite Zombies

I don’t have much of a reading this week—in terms of an argument to make—because it’s been a very eventful week for me. But I do have some scattered thoughts I want to share, especially in light of how down I was on the book last week. As Daryl promised in reply to my post last week, there was some much, much nicer stuff this week.

Here’s a strange thing to say about an 800-page book: There are a lot of things here I wish we got more of! The compound, for instance. Jonboat turned a small neighborhood into his residence. They don’t even have outbuildings there, like, say, a studio—the production house is an entire actual house. It’s essentially a 26-room mansion, except each of its 26 rooms is a house. Although I suppose what I want isn’t a tour of the different houses (we get a listing of some of them), but more of the compound as a setting. That’s a weird environment! I would have thought, for example, that if security is a grave enough concern to prompt the construction of a compound with ramparts and everything, you wouldn’t then let whole crowds in like the audience for Triple-J’s Neo-Gratification spectacle. I also want to know more about the logistics of a distributed home life like that, and how it might/would warp a kid’s ideas of how to be a person.

Somewhat related, I want to know more about the Archons. It didn’t occur to me that Burroughs would have a family. (…Which is not a fun thing to think about, my having supposed his entire identity was “driver/mentor.”) Who is the woman who gave birth to these hulks? Did we hear about her? Is there an Archon who didn’t want to go into personal security to the wealthy at all, and rebelled by, I don’t know, becoming a sportscaster or a marine biologist or a day trader? They have a house at the compound—and I’m curious how closely it resembles a Spartan barracks.

I thought the opening sentence of “Certain Something” was genuinely excellent:

If Mike told Brenda he’d dreamed she’d died, she might let him kiss her, he thought.

That’s in ballad meter! It also has some almost Keatsian sonics, and some beautifully balanced syntactic embedding that covers, what, four time frames and one conditional statement with an extra removed level of speculative likelihood. In seven beats. I’d be happy if I’d written that.

I also found it hilarious that Paul and I were right on the money about Bam Naka’s name.

And as I mentioned in a comment on Daryl’s Proust post, I do generally like Fondajane. I think I appreciate her critical performativity—when she’s doing Fon with respect to art and Theory—a lot more than her libidinal performativity, but I’m pretty sure that’s on me, not Levin.

Actually, to follow up on me not especially responding to how cataclysmically desirable Fon is: If I do have an objection for this week, it’s how woefully straight this all feels. I know that sounds weird when we’ve got this whole section on fisting (and god help me, as soon as I read “the French power guy” I knew it was Foucault), but stay with me here. So I haven’t read it myself, but it appears that this whole notion of fisting as a revolutionary invention is truly Foucault’s—and not, as I thought Bubblegum was saying, Fon’s friend David Ballard’s application of Foucault’s thought. (Y’all have to read this whole thread. It’s a doozy.) But from what I can tell without going to the source, it wasn’t this free-floating conception of “revolution.” In fact, that’s a nonsense idea, that revolution can exist without a system to roll back. I appreciate the point that Trip is channeling the revolutionary energy he felt from reading Ballard’s paper, but I can’t miss that he’s also taking it out of its very specifically queer context. It’s not just that fisting was supposedly a brand-new way of using the body for pleasure; it’s that it was a defiant way of relating sexually, one that took the phallus out of the equation altogether and therefore—in this almost comically on-the-nose poststructuralist, French theoretical way—short-circuited patriarchal control over oppressed bodies and marginalized sexual practices.

Lots of buzzwords there, and I cannot overstate that I’m working from secondhand and partial knowledge. But to see the inescapable queerness of this idea translated into “I want to innovate” is…disappointing. Especially when everybody’s straight. I’m not calling it appropriation, because that’s another nonsense idea when it comes to scholarship (mostly). I’ll just stick with “disappointing.”

I do love where we end up from that spark, though. Fon’s instant dismay when she learns that Belt is the boy in A Fistful of Fists whose mother was dying—that immediate, reflexive empathy for Belt—was really touching, and a good ironic counterpoint to Trip’s profession that empathy is the root of good art. (Ironic, of course, because Trip’s idea of empathy means the viewer seeing things through the artist’s eyes. It’s empathy as a cover charge for experiencing art, not as a requirement for creating it.)

But Trip’s art project? I am one hundred percent totally on board. I love conceptual art; it’s one of the most purely unnecessary things, which, for me, makes it an absolutely necessary outpost out past the borders of “regular” art to pound stakes down and keep room open for other kinds of art to exist in. (Oh man, I feel a whole separate post coming on. The gist of it is: I want to argue that what characterizes art as separate from not-art is some kind of superfluity. And conceptual art, by maximizing superfluity, holds space for other kinds of art to be some degree less extra and therefore some degree more essential. This is not a considered argument yet, just a ghost of what I’d want to think about.) A Fistful of Fists isn’t even his artistic statement, it’s the performance of scarcity in a relatively post-scarce environment (DVDs are more or less trivially reproducible, especially with his family resources) and the manipulation of the art world’s construction of that performance as a kind of authenticity. OK, listen, if I get time for an extra post, I’m coming back to Trip’s art project, because the more I type about it the more excited I get.

And now that we’re about to get to “Jonboat Speaks” (not “Jonboat Say”—that was the first section of the first chapter, or first chapter of the first section), I’m really looking forward to seeing how the relationship between grown-up Belt and Jonboat compares to the relationship between adolescent Belt and Jonboat.