drowning in the why, starving for the how

This is a feeling I often have when teaching my “modernology” class–which is about how people in Japan have developed ways to understand and get to being modern. Modern in a myriad of ways–from sitting on street-corners and drawing people in kimonos and putting them in bar graphs compared to people wearing “western” clothing, to measuring the GNP, to listening to insects to hear if they still sound like they “did” in 11th c. imperial manuals of poetry, to tracking who practices inter-racial international marriage with whom.

The “5 Ws and an H” stuff is hard to come by, and I can understand why, given the focus on stereotype that drives what seem to be the same 5 stories about Japan, written in the rapidly dwindling number of papers that have foreign bureaus.

Students–I mean undergrads here–are often remarkably stubborn about releasing their a priori judgements. Many if not most of which come from  ideas derived from wartime and Occupation-era military anthropology–all those “shame” versus “guilt” studies, the mandatory kissing in movies to show democracy, and on and on. So this statement, in a book I’ve been reading about the Free Software and Open Source software movements, rang true, recommended by my friend J. This is from Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software.

It would be interesting to apply this to, say, cell-phone novels, or video-game music like Katamari Fortissimo Damacy, whose plot is driven by a breakway incident of binge-drinking…

… it is in Free Software and its history that the is-
sues raised—from intellectual property and piracy to online po-
litical advocacy and “social” software—were first figured out and confronted. Free Software’s roots stretch back to the 1970s and crisscross the histories of the personal computer and the Internet, the peaks and troughs of the information-technology and software industries, the transformation of intellectual property law, the innovation of organizations and “virtual” collaboration, and the rise of networked social movements. Free Software does not explain why these various changes have occurred, but rather how individuals and groups are responding: by creating new things, new practices, and new forms of life. It is these practices and forms of life—not the software itself—that are most significant, and they have in turn served as templates that others can use and transform:
practices of sharing source code, conceptualizing openness, writing copyright (and copyleft) licenses, coordinating collaboration, and proselytizing for all of the above. There are explanations aplenty for why things are the way they are: it’s globalization, it’s the network society, it’s an ideology of transparency, it’s the virtualization of work, it’s the new flat earth, it’s Empire. We are drowning in the why, both popular and scholarly, but starving for the how.

her version of the sherwood forest

In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. The huge number of books confirmed how much magic she’d been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on the shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks.

From Sherman Alexie, “The Search Engine,” p. 5, in Ten Little Indians.

There are nine stories in the book. “Nine is a much funnier number than eleven.” True enough. Eleven is dogmatically prime and kinda tries too hard, whereas nine is two primes, like his character Jackson squared, someone also down with the idea of ceremony (a word that appears frequently in characters’ internal monologues).

Also great: more than one absurdist love story about basketball.

adventures in japanese literature–the flower of sublimation

From Ishida Rokurô's depth psychology analysis of Ishikawa Takuboku

A book of lit-crit from Japan in the 1970s- is not complete without a chart of either a baffling and cryptic variety, or a soothingly grid-like abstraction or a nenpyô, or lengthy chronology featuring a year-by-year account that resolves such questions as “what color was Soseki’s dog, purchased in 1911?” or “when did Hayashi Fumiko leave her sixth elementary school?”  Meet Exhibit A, of the former variety–the flower of sublimation.

Sure, the Lacanians had their equations and formulae, but left much to the imagination. This illustration breaks down the psychic topography of ISHIKAWA Takuboku, one of Japan’s most noted early 20th century poets. He is typically known for his socialist fervor, living passionately and dying young like many Meiji-era poets, of tuberculosis; also, for writing many tanka, or short poems (commonly, if sort of wrongly, known in English as haiku). But Ishida, a psychoanalyst medical doctor, gives insight to what drove all of Takuboku’s (we are allowed to call him by his first name because he is beloved) artistic endeavours–not politics, but doomed love. Here is how it blossoms.

The upshot of depth psychology, as Ishida practices it, is you use literary materials and texts to gather a portrait of an artist’s psyche. Character and persona and narrator and author end up being inter-changeable, and life and work inter-mingle. Basically, the volumetric space that is someone’s inner mind is the source of all meaning, and that person rarely if ever grasps his or her own contents or traumas, though that 3-D space compels him/her to act in a consistent manner all through life.

Above ground is conscioueness; the fertilizer-looking underground part is the unconscious. Each petal represents a result–an aesthetic product, or character trait–of sublimation, routed through the “complex,” as indicated in the text box at the bottom. These are comprised of (from the top, clockwise) unrequited love, religious philosophy, Socialism, longing, furusato/hometown, and new-style education. And the “complex,” in turn breaks down into individual, society, nature, and child-spirited-ness.

When I say,
I believe that a new morning will come,
I do not lie, but ….

from Sad Toys

like “befriending a porcupine”–Trout Mask Replica, 1969

Another beauty from the 33 1/3 people. I was at Skylight, looking over the wares, and got to talking to the other guy doing the same thing. He recommended this one.

It’s a bit different than many of the series. It does start with the “conversion narrative” beginning–how the world was forever made different, and given a direction, even a misguided one, by the acquaintance with the particular record. Writer Kevin Courrier recounts how the album was given to him by a speed dealer, earlier maimed by a train (it gets better in his version, trust me). Rather than meditating on the difference between trapped/stuck/mobile that such an opening sets up, and going into grotesquerie and irony, he turns to an exploration of the metaphorics of “fish”–as in Don Van Vliet’s persona, the trout–and “pond,” as a broad concept for the larger world and the world-lets within it.

The chapters follow how Van Vliet fashioned himself as a weird fish, a small fish, in the smallish pond of So-cal suburbia, “jumped” out of the pond, met and tangled and worked and collaborated with Zappa, and how in the end “everybody drinks from the same pond.” It’s not the most eco-friendly of ponds, but, hey.

Courrier succeeds in grounding Van Vliet in American/primitive/surrealist/blues counter-circles, at the same time he really conveys how the Trout Mask Replica album was just really out there. It was simply not devoted to being a “tissue sample” of its day and age, but is actually “an art album which actually forces the desert island experience on a listener, whether the listener wanted to retreat or not.”

Lester Bangs got at the extroverted anti-social-ness of Beefheart’s Lick My Decals Off, Baby pretty well. Typical of Bangs’ style writ large, his review is full of generative words, which in this case fit the affirmative desperation of DVV’s particular brand of freakiness. The Courrier book got to me in a different way than Bangs’ headlong apreciation, because it effectively dramatized how yo-yo’ing a feel it is to swim in DVV’s world. One minute you’re immersed, the next, because of some over-the-top control freak move, like twenty sleigh bells full of syncopation, you’re cast out by over-saturation. True story from TMR rehearsal history: you’re living in a communal house in the San Fernando Valley where your food is rationed, and you find yourself crawling into the kitchen under cover of darkness, to filch yourself a little something to eat: pancake syrup squeezed from a bottle into a mug, which you drink, sip by syrupy sip.

Indeed, the album is, as Courrier says, like “trying to befriend a porcupine.” Cf DVV’s description of a watch: “you see, a lot of people put this little circle on their wrists, which is really amusing: keeping time.” You see, such circles are for squares: in the DVV universe, you can sneak into the rhythms of time, outrun it, get people lost in it, but you can’t, literally, keep it.

I have this album on LP. While I find it a bit too polarising to say “Zappa was shrewd. Beefheart was a visionary,” I see why Courrier included this 1971 breakdown as a representative point of view. There is no doubt that a song about a girl who sits on a burning waffle iron may indeed have a hard time finding mainstream success. A bit of Crumb-style fear of cooties streams through the blues moans, but then again, 1969 was a mixed-up year.

The social context cross-over that I actually found most jarring and pinpointed that yo-yo effect, to illustrate the “cast out of the pond” feel of the record, was the song “Pachuco Cadaver.” I know the 60’s had an affection for metaphor. In general, we’re supposed to read the maximalist hostility as a kind of devotion, at least in the case of the girl/big-mama songs. She’s glam and can kick his ass, so she has to be a bit overwheming, preferably in a way that has a delicious payoff (as do most of the romances in DVV’s songs).

But this one seemed a bit too referential, for someone growing up in Southern California as DVV did. Courrier sees the title as misleading, that it is actually a “surreal love letter” to “the Zoot Suit era of the 40’s and 50’s.” (I think he means the WW2 era, especially between Pearl Harbor and the summer of 1943, but he is writing from Toronto, and might not have the micro-view of So-cal histories.) It is indeed truly a joyful song, like happy Swordfishtrombones. But in my listen, despite the loopy imagery and wild-westy story-telling voice that strive for intimate folksiness, the “pachuco” figure is purely decorative, and very much sidelined.

I get this impression because while the singer gets the girl, the other guys are left out: “pachucos got the blues.” Turning to the lyrics, in the form of the song, I heard what Courrier hears as tribute more as triumph.  The singer (DVV) casts the patchwork surrealist girl as a hybrid of people and objects (she is 99, she wears a bolero, and “She looks like an old squaw indian,” all at the same time). She is an inaccessible figure, even if she is tempting in her gaudy display of experience (“She wears her past like uh present”). And what she wears is a predatory belt-notching past that has not been easy on soldiers (“Got her wheel out of uh B-29 Bomber”). But in the end she goes, if in fantasy, with the folksy but ultimately white singer.

Drives uh cartune around
Broma’ seltzer blue umbrella keeps her up off the ground
Round red sombreros wrap ‘er high tap horsey shoes
When she unfolds her umbrella pachucos got the blues
Her lovin’ makes me so happy
If I smiled I’d crack m’ chin

Not quite the moral panic that was called up in the Zoot Suit riots of 1943, when, as Luis Alvarez writes, “As Chicano/s historians have demonstrated, hundreds, if not thousands, of young Mexican American men were violently attacked by white servicemen” (155). I know we’re not supposed to take loopy stream-of-consciousness surrealism at face value, but still, the song does stage a competition between the singer and the “Pachuco cadaver” left in the dust, a kind of drama of the (white-but-curious?) woman let loose to drive her own “cartune” during wartime, whose dalliances are now over, when the singer shows up.

I recently read Ken Gonzalez-Day’s history and photographic history  Lynching in the West, a history of unofficial justice between 1850 and 1935. Long story short, frontier justice was multi-cultural in its reach, and more executions and vigilante killings of Mexican Americans were conducted than of any other ethnic group. (The book contains some of Gonzalez-Day’s own photographs, a series he did of the “hang trees” where lynchings took place. It is a compelling outline of an under-known map of the city of LA and larger parts Californian/western.) So while I know “Pachuco cavader” is one of DVV’s “colorful” psychedelic throwaways, it bugged me, given the history.

Courrier does a great job of micro-mining the journalism and interviews for phrases such as this. The understatement and “blank space” he finds in descriptions of DVV the maximalist, who left room for virtually no “negative space.”  As a book that set its own terms, a system of metaphorics that goes way beyond the “conversion”/production/track-by-track structure of many of the books, I found it quite awesome.