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In the Mirror, Dreaming.
Jun. 2nd, 2006 03:51 amAs a general rule, I avoid Modern Literature. The majority of what's been written since 1960 or so seems utterly lifeless, and devoid of any sentiment or real creative impulse. One has the impression of English lecturers making cardboard characters do tricks to amuse their peers, the sort of milieu where naming the protagonist Gil Gamesh or Ron Konkoma is considered droll. Modern Lit strikes me as stilted, self-referencing parody, the 'Second City TV' of books.
All that being said, it's possible to exaggerate the genre's faults to the point where they become virtues, much as "Robot Monster" managed for bad SF movies. I just ran across a book review for "Lobster", and it gives every sign of having gone that far over the top:
Plucked rudely from the sea, Lobster finds himself in a tank in the Titanic's dining room, watching in horror as Angelina, a beautiful young opium addict, devours his father. Lobster himself is dropped into boiling water three days later, but is saved when the Titanic hits the iceberg and, red but alive, he's sent careening through the flooding ship. He finds Angelina trapped in the death grip of her male companion, frees her with his pincers, realizes that he feels human lust for her and, in a startling scene, brings her to her first-ever orgasm. They escape to a lifeboat, but Lobster falls overboard, and the book's next movement concerns the lovers' attempts to experience such ecstasy again. Angelina loses her clitoris to the pincers of the wrong lobster, and Lobster, feasting on Titanic dead, befriends Jules, a Newfoundland tattoo artist/fisherman, whom he hopes will somehow take him to Angelina. Meeting Angelina on a ship to France, Jules (who's brought Lobster along in a basket) falls in love with her too.
It's an art form to produce stuff so collossally fucked-up that it transcends judgement. This sounds promising.
*****
To some degree (perhaps to a very large degree) true art is the art that makes one cringe, that simultaneously attracts and repels. I've always liked Kafka's sentiment that art is the ice-axe of the frozen soul.
*****
I suppose on reflection that art can show two true forms. It can make one squirm by showing things that you really didn't want to discover within yourself. It can also awaken a longing for the things that aren't there, and for the numinous.
*****
"Black Beauty" did that for me when I was young. There was something so very attractive and so very right about the lives and attitudes of the horses. It's a heartbreaking book in many ways, but it manages somehow to be uplifting at the same time, and to make one aspire to live a better life. I'm not sure exactly how it's done. I've never shared the conviction of English teachers that picking a book to pieces increases one's enjoyment of it.
*****
I finally got "Inherit the Earth". There's a tremendous air of innocence about it, an innocence that will never come again to the fandom. A glance through the artists list is amazing - this is from back before the furry wars began, from before everyone had to choose sides. The game and the interface have a certain innocence to them as well, being bright and sunny, without that obsessive teenage 'darkness' that modern games always have to include. The characters just look loveable. I want to be friends with them. This makes me sad as well, in a pleasantly pensive sort of way.
We could do so much together, if it weren't for one faction always trying to pound another flat. There was a time when that seemed possible, but it seems so long ago now.
*****
I feel sorry in some degree for professors of literature. A story's meant to be perceived as a whole, and experienced in terms of its effect on the individual. That leaves nothing that can be taught, though, so they have to fall back on reductionist methods, trying to pretend that the art arises from the mechanics of the story, where in reality the mechanics are there simply to carry the art.
*****
Sunday was the Five Hundred. The Five Hundred, the State Fair, and Christmas are the three major passage points of my year. Christmas is a time of mystery, of light set against the darkness, and the old year ending. On the whole, it's a quiet and reflective holiday. The other two are loud and gaudy celebrations, the Five Hundred marking the beginning of Summer, and the Stoat Fair its end.
As I grow older, and especially after the awful past few months I've had the Five Hundred comes to represent having survived another winter and reached the good part of the year. There's a group of six old men who always sit in front of us, and one of them didn't make it through the winter. They've picked up a replacement for him. It's good to have that continuity with the past, and the expectation of the furutre arriving, even if one isn't there to see it.
Sunday may well have been the hottest race day in history. According to ABC television it was, although WIBC radio pegged it third, after 1953 and 1925. Regardless, it was the hottest I ever attended. People being hauled away right and left with heat exhaustion.
These fine pillars of the community were across the street from the main entrance, as they are every year, bellowing at us that we'd all most assuredly go to Hell for spending our Sunday at the Five Hundred instead of in church. I've dubbed them the HellBoiz, which I'm sure would not please them. One can't help but notice that they're not in church either. For what it's worth, His Excellency the Archbishop of Indianapolis does present an extremely short worship service before the race, although since he's Catholic that probably counts for negative worship points with the Hellboiz. The one with the megaphone was in an absolute lather, and people stopping to take his picture and pose in front of the group, and just generally treating them with good-natured tolerance (they really are a raceday institution) wasn't improving his mood. You could tell he saw himself as some latter-day Jeremiah, and if he couldn't have the fear and respect he deserved as God's appointed representative, then he at least wanted abuse from the Godless.
The Robot Guy was directly across the street from the HellBoiz. Unlike the HellBoiz, he's friendly and well-behaved. He's very into his role, with mechanical movements and sounds. He's raising money for his church group, and if you dropped cash in his bowl he'd say "God bless you!" in his robot voice. If the HellBoiz hadn't been on that corner for 15 or so years, I'd strongly suspect some sort of social observation experiment was taking place here.
The Marion County Sheriff's Dept. has this guy that can stand up on his motorcycle and ride it around the track. They've had a guy to do that since the 70s. I'm sure they've busted up any number of deputies and motorcycles in training, but it's a tradition.
Vitor Meira had a lovely car. It doesn't show to full advantage here - fluorescent colours never do. He was competitive early in the race, but began to fade about halfway through.
Dan Wheldon really deserved to win. At one point early in the race, he'd lapped most of the field, and led second place by half a lap. He led fully 3/4 of the race, but then cut a tire down and had to pit off-sequence near the end, just as a yellow came out, which reshuffled the whole field, and put the Andrettis and "Sudden Sam" out in front. Somedays luck counts more than skill. In the old days, the Speedway used to use a system where people maintained their track position, and didn't bunch up under yellow. That caused scoring issues, but I liked it better, honestly. The winner was generally several laps ahead by the end, and didn't lose his advantage on a yellow.
Helio Castroneves' day has come to an end. He collided with Buddy Rice, which may well mark the only time in 90 iterations that two former winners have taken one another out. In the foreground, Buddy Lazier cruises past, his nosecone and flaps having been replaced earlier with unpainted ones after he ran over debris from Thomas Scheckter's crash.
Post-race trash.
*****
Yesterday I farted so loudly that it startled the Qat, which deeply gratified my inner nine year old. Flaster, for his part, seemed mildly annoyed.
All that being said, it's possible to exaggerate the genre's faults to the point where they become virtues, much as "Robot Monster" managed for bad SF movies. I just ran across a book review for "Lobster", and it gives every sign of having gone that far over the top:
Plucked rudely from the sea, Lobster finds himself in a tank in the Titanic's dining room, watching in horror as Angelina, a beautiful young opium addict, devours his father. Lobster himself is dropped into boiling water three days later, but is saved when the Titanic hits the iceberg and, red but alive, he's sent careening through the flooding ship. He finds Angelina trapped in the death grip of her male companion, frees her with his pincers, realizes that he feels human lust for her and, in a startling scene, brings her to her first-ever orgasm. They escape to a lifeboat, but Lobster falls overboard, and the book's next movement concerns the lovers' attempts to experience such ecstasy again. Angelina loses her clitoris to the pincers of the wrong lobster, and Lobster, feasting on Titanic dead, befriends Jules, a Newfoundland tattoo artist/fisherman, whom he hopes will somehow take him to Angelina. Meeting Angelina on a ship to France, Jules (who's brought Lobster along in a basket) falls in love with her too.
It's an art form to produce stuff so collossally fucked-up that it transcends judgement. This sounds promising.
*****
To some degree (perhaps to a very large degree) true art is the art that makes one cringe, that simultaneously attracts and repels. I've always liked Kafka's sentiment that art is the ice-axe of the frozen soul.
*****
I suppose on reflection that art can show two true forms. It can make one squirm by showing things that you really didn't want to discover within yourself. It can also awaken a longing for the things that aren't there, and for the numinous.
*****
"Black Beauty" did that for me when I was young. There was something so very attractive and so very right about the lives and attitudes of the horses. It's a heartbreaking book in many ways, but it manages somehow to be uplifting at the same time, and to make one aspire to live a better life. I'm not sure exactly how it's done. I've never shared the conviction of English teachers that picking a book to pieces increases one's enjoyment of it.
*****
I finally got "Inherit the Earth". There's a tremendous air of innocence about it, an innocence that will never come again to the fandom. A glance through the artists list is amazing - this is from back before the furry wars began, from before everyone had to choose sides. The game and the interface have a certain innocence to them as well, being bright and sunny, without that obsessive teenage 'darkness' that modern games always have to include. The characters just look loveable. I want to be friends with them. This makes me sad as well, in a pleasantly pensive sort of way.
We could do so much together, if it weren't for one faction always trying to pound another flat. There was a time when that seemed possible, but it seems so long ago now.
*****
I feel sorry in some degree for professors of literature. A story's meant to be perceived as a whole, and experienced in terms of its effect on the individual. That leaves nothing that can be taught, though, so they have to fall back on reductionist methods, trying to pretend that the art arises from the mechanics of the story, where in reality the mechanics are there simply to carry the art.
*****
Sunday was the Five Hundred. The Five Hundred, the State Fair, and Christmas are the three major passage points of my year. Christmas is a time of mystery, of light set against the darkness, and the old year ending. On the whole, it's a quiet and reflective holiday. The other two are loud and gaudy celebrations, the Five Hundred marking the beginning of Summer, and the Stoat Fair its end.
As I grow older, and especially after the awful past few months I've had the Five Hundred comes to represent having survived another winter and reached the good part of the year. There's a group of six old men who always sit in front of us, and one of them didn't make it through the winter. They've picked up a replacement for him. It's good to have that continuity with the past, and the expectation of the furutre arriving, even if one isn't there to see it.
Sunday may well have been the hottest race day in history. According to ABC television it was, although WIBC radio pegged it third, after 1953 and 1925. Regardless, it was the hottest I ever attended. People being hauled away right and left with heat exhaustion.
These fine pillars of the community were across the street from the main entrance, as they are every year, bellowing at us that we'd all most assuredly go to Hell for spending our Sunday at the Five Hundred instead of in church. I've dubbed them the HellBoiz, which I'm sure would not please them. One can't help but notice that they're not in church either. For what it's worth, His Excellency the Archbishop of Indianapolis does present an extremely short worship service before the race, although since he's Catholic that probably counts for negative worship points with the Hellboiz. The one with the megaphone was in an absolute lather, and people stopping to take his picture and pose in front of the group, and just generally treating them with good-natured tolerance (they really are a raceday institution) wasn't improving his mood. You could tell he saw himself as some latter-day Jeremiah, and if he couldn't have the fear and respect he deserved as God's appointed representative, then he at least wanted abuse from the Godless.
The Robot Guy was directly across the street from the HellBoiz. Unlike the HellBoiz, he's friendly and well-behaved. He's very into his role, with mechanical movements and sounds. He's raising money for his church group, and if you dropped cash in his bowl he'd say "God bless you!" in his robot voice. If the HellBoiz hadn't been on that corner for 15 or so years, I'd strongly suspect some sort of social observation experiment was taking place here.
The Marion County Sheriff's Dept. has this guy that can stand up on his motorcycle and ride it around the track. They've had a guy to do that since the 70s. I'm sure they've busted up any number of deputies and motorcycles in training, but it's a tradition.
Vitor Meira had a lovely car. It doesn't show to full advantage here - fluorescent colours never do. He was competitive early in the race, but began to fade about halfway through.
Dan Wheldon really deserved to win. At one point early in the race, he'd lapped most of the field, and led second place by half a lap. He led fully 3/4 of the race, but then cut a tire down and had to pit off-sequence near the end, just as a yellow came out, which reshuffled the whole field, and put the Andrettis and "Sudden Sam" out in front. Somedays luck counts more than skill. In the old days, the Speedway used to use a system where people maintained their track position, and didn't bunch up under yellow. That caused scoring issues, but I liked it better, honestly. The winner was generally several laps ahead by the end, and didn't lose his advantage on a yellow.
Helio Castroneves' day has come to an end. He collided with Buddy Rice, which may well mark the only time in 90 iterations that two former winners have taken one another out. In the foreground, Buddy Lazier cruises past, his nosecone and flaps having been replaced earlier with unpainted ones after he ran over debris from Thomas Scheckter's crash.
Post-race trash.
*****
Yesterday I farted so loudly that it startled the Qat, which deeply gratified my inner nine year old. Flaster, for his part, seemed mildly annoyed.
