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White Tower Musings

~ This blog will be an attempt to explain the significance of various works of great writing, the authors that create them, and some effort to understand correlations between great writing and contemporary events.

White Tower Musings

Tag Archives: Les Miserables

Boobs, Boobs, Boobs: The Catharsis of Parties, Shit, & Death

26 Tuesday Apr 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Academic Books, Film Review, Literature, music, Philosophy, Sexuality

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Academic Book, biology, Boobs, booooooooooobs, Carinval, Catharsis, Clappy the Sad Clown with Clap, Clopin, death, Degredation, excrement, farting, fertility, Film, film review, Francois Rabelias, Les Miserables, Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edition, Literature, M.M. Bakhtin, music, Nicki Minaj, Pound the Alarm, Rabelias and His World, sexual display, Sexual Rhetoric, Sexuality, solstice, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Topsy Turvy, Victor Hugo

Nicki-Minaj-Pound-The-Alarm-Explicit-019

–Life’s a laugh, and death’s a joke it’s true (Eric Idle, Life of Brian)

I watched the Pound the Alarm music video because of Nicki Minaj’s breasts.  I’m gonna be honest here.  I’m a horrible liar, even in prose, and so moving forward it just seemed like a bad idea to try and bullshit my way through this one especially when shit’s going to become so important later on.  Back to Boobs.  Pound the Alarm came on the FUSE network on one of the numerous “Best of [INSERT BAND NAME HERE]” series, I think it was “Videos of the Week,” but that’s not really important.  The video caught me immediately because it began with a small island drum with a few HD shots of the Caribbean, a man hacking a melon with a machete, people on a beach, a few guys playing football (soccer to my American readers, one day we’ll join the club), before a siren begins as the viewer sees a sign that reads “Trinidad and Tobango The Home of Carnival.”

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Not long after that I found myself transfixed by an electronic beat that severed me from my will power, and a pair of breasts constantly surrounded by other breasts decorated with gold beads, feathers, and curly blonde locks.  I bought the song on itunes, when I still had an itunes account, along with the video which I watched over and over again.  I should probably footnote this story by letting the reader know I was still a teenage boy at the time and I had yet to meet my wife.  I wish I could honestly say that my first initial viewings were some intellectual effort on my part, but aging has a way of cutting through that bullshit and your previous actions take on a painful lucidity.  I watched the video over and over again because the visuals of the song, and for the fact that the lyrics spoke of nothing but sex, and Nicki Minaj was gorgeous, and had breasts I’m not sure if that’s been made apparent.

My hormones calmed down eventually and I was able to manage the song over time to the point I listened to it at the most, three or four times a year.  It became something I stumbled upon when I was searching for the right song, after a long shitty day or else something I needed to satisfy a “song-craving.”  When I got to my first semester of graduate school however, I was finally able to justify my regular viewings of the video, principally by looking at it through the lens of a Stalinist era Russian Literary Theorist.

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I’m beginning to recognize more and more why no girl ever went out with me in high school.

Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin was a writer, philosopher, literary critic, Semiotician (someone who studies how human beings make meaning out of things) and remains one of the most respected and influential minds of his generation.  His most prominent work remains The Dialogic Imagination, four long-as-fucking-fuck essays that probe into the language structure of the novel and how they are able to re-shape said language to reflect the ways in which humanity uses language to define reality, define “others,” and order theclown-with-drink-and-smoke structure of the novel as an institution.  Point being the dude was a real riot at parties and if you can get him to perform at your kid’s birthday party instead of a clown.

Kid’s dig Russian philosophy, and its way less creepy that hiring Clappy the Sad Clown with Clap.

Bakhtin principally worked with novels, often with Dostoyevsky, however for this piece I will focus on his work with François Rabelais, specifically his book Rabelias and His World.  I should let my reader understand, I’m being awfully honest in this essay, that I haven’t read the book in its entirety.  The first semester of grad school I took a Literary Theory course thinking that it would help me as I progressed further in my academic career and let the record reflect this was one of the few serendipitous moments in life when this wound up to be true.  The class exposed me to great minds like Judith Butler, Karl Marx, Jaques Derrida, Jaques Lacan, Gayle Rubin, Bakhtin1-16044Michel Foucault, and Ferdinand de Saussure.  We might also have talked about Freud at some point.  Bakhtin was not in fact a required reading but my professor, whom I had taken at least three times as an undergraduate, required an in-class presentation and so I wanted to sign up earlier for the first round of presentations so I could get it out of the way.  I didn’t know dick about Bakhtin but the name sounded Russian and so I leapt into the passage printed in my Literary Theory: An Anthology, 2nd edition.

It was a wonderful moment when I began to realize that this wonderful essay about parties and shit would fit perfectly with Pound the Alarm but also with The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

Bakhtin’s essay explores a facet of Rabelais’s novels, specifically the instances of Carnival, a seasonal party that traced back to the solstice and the changing of the seasons.  Many Americans would probably recognize their own form of the event in Mardi Gras or Spring Break, though the Carnival of Rabelais’s world is distinct for its own reasons.  Bakhtin observes:

As opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary 9780253203410_medliberation from the prevailing truth and from established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchal rank, privileges, and prohibitions.  Carnival was the true feast of time, the feast of becoming, change, and renewal.  It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed

[…]

On the contrary, all were considered equal during carnival.  Here, in the town square, a special form of free and familiar contact reigned among people who were usually divided by the barriers of caste, property, profession, and age.  (686)

It’s hard, as an American at least, to really process how profound such a situation or gathering would allow for something like this, given the fact that there isn’t an established nobility in America.  I suspect however that they might understand it in economic terms.  If the same people who gather in private country clubs joined you for a beer at a Honky-Tonk their presence would have an effect upon you, likewise if you were allowed free access to private golf courses and five star restaurants without a reservation or uproar from the clientele there would likely be some kind of culture shock taking place.

The song Topsy Turvy was my first choice to compare Bahktin’s ideas to Minaj’s video and I wouldn’t realize until I was well into it that I had made the right choice.  Looking at just the opening lyrics it’s clear how this dynamic of power and social disruption is dominating the people’s consciousness:d-top-reversal

Once a year we throw a party here in town
Once a year we turn all Paris upside down
Ev’ry man’s a king and ev’ry king’s a clown
Once again it’s Topsy Turvy Day
It’s the day the devil in us gets released
It’s the day we mock the prig and shock the priest
Ev’rything is topsy turvy at the Feast of Fools!

The Hunchback of Notre Dame is loosely based, emphasis on loosely based,  on the novel by Victor Hugo, the man who wrote Les Miserables and was one of those authors who could d-top-clopin-2never write a happy book.  Because of this watching the film and reading the book are entirely different experiences, but that’s for another essay.  The point is that looking at Clopin’s song, yes that was his name but I had to Google it so don’t be that impressed, many audiences were able to understand and recognize Carnival because we celebrate Madri Gras in America which on the surface seems similar.  We wear masks.  We act goofy.  There’s Pole dancing.

Wait what was that?

I’ll come back to that one.  The problem with this mindset is that it isn’t accurate to the true spirit of a medieval Carnival, or at least the presentation that Rabelias covered in his novels which tended to employ, what Bahktin often refers to a “grotesque realism.”  He says:

The essential principle of grotesque realism is degradation, that is, the lowering of all that is high, spiritual, ideal, abstract; it is a transfer to the material level, to the sphere of earth and body in their indissoluble unity…

[…]tumblr_morghsQ1Te1s7dwyno1_500

Degradation here means coming down to earth, the contact with earth as an element that swallows up and gives birth at the same time.  To degrade is to bury, to sow, to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better.  To degrade also means to concern oneself with the lower stratum of the body, the life of the belly and the reproductive organs; it therefore relates to acts of defecation and copulation, conception, pregnancy, and birth.  Degradation builds a bodily grace for a new birth; it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one.  (688)

If you didn’t follow all of that don’t worry I’m about to get back to boobs here in a minute.  Bahktin in this passage is just trying to lay out a concept of what degradation is so that he can analyze Rabelias and show how that concept is present throughout the entire work before explaining why it’s important.  From afar this passage may just sound like the typical, esoteric bullshit that academics tends to peddle in, and in many ways it is, but, it should be noted that Bahktin never becomes so complex that he becomes incoherent.  The man has something to say, namely that Carnival is not just about craziness and boobs.  Carnival being a seasonal holiday wrapped up in the solstice, and the changing of the earth’s seasons would create a need for human beings to understand the death of the world as well as its rebirth.  Because human beings are a meaning making species that favors rituals over psychological probing, they began to create parties and celebrations that would revel in death as much as life in order to cope with this seeming absurdity.

s85fd24The problem is that somewhere along the line the idea of life became far more entertaining, specifically sex.  This development is understandable because after all, sex is fun.  When you’re having sex you’re not thinking about dying, you’re not wondering why the world dies and is reborn several months later.  In fact you’re not really thinking at all, you’re just behaving and acting.

Looking at the song Topsy Turvy the sex may not be apparent at first sight, but going back and watching the scene there an extended scene of Esmerelda pole dancing.  The scene’s easy to miss when you’re a kid, but then again so is Frolo’s sexual frustration that manifests in many well-hidden boners, and then one obvious symbolic one that sends him falling into the fiery pit of molten lead.  It’s not enough though she simply grabs a spear and spins around in a motion your step-mom tries to imitate for her friends when she’s drunk, it’s also the regular hip pops, the hair twirls, and the endless series of her breasts jiggling in her red dress.  The fact that at the end of her dance the people throw gold coins onto the stage doesn’t exactly help either.

But what’s missing from the scene is any kind of physical degradation.

Looking to Pound the Alarm it fares no better.  The lyrics of the second verse alone suggest that Nicki likewise is pushing the idea of carnival as an erotic spectacle rather than one of earth, death, and rebirth:

I wanna do it for the night, night
So get me now, and knock this overnicki-minaj-pound-alarm-video
I wanna do it like you like, like
Come get me, baby, we’re not getting younger
I just want you tonight, night
Baby, we won’t do it for life, life

Music, makes me, high

Oh, oh, oh, come fill my glass up a little more
We ’bout to get up, and burn this floor
You know we getting hotter, and hotter
Sexy and hotter, let’s shut it down

Pound the alarm!

When I mentioned to one of my coworkers my desire to write about this song she had never heard of it, and after pulling up the video of Nicki dancing around, waving her butt and boobs, and more butt, and more boobs, her only response was “Pound, the alarm.  Pound it.  Pound.”  She essentially did all the work for me.  Anyone looking for death and rebirth within this song will not only be disappointed, they will be actively rebuffed, most likely against Nicki’s curvaceousness,  for this song represents a growing trend in most popular music.  The visuals of the video are enough to try and cancel any thought of death for Nicki’s body is endlessly presented in a vibrant and fertile display of breasts,

Breasts,

NM 1

More breasts,

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Breasts,

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Boobs,

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Boobs,

NM 3

Breasts,

Nicki-Minaj-Pound-The-Alarm-Explicit-019

And…Booooooooooooobs.

Boooooooooooooooobs

Allright I’ve made my point.  One more.  Boobs.

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Nicki Minaj becomes a kind of fertility goddess as her body is presented with round…luscious…fleshy…Yeah I think you get it.  Her lyrics present her body as the site for sexual interaction, but the way she directs most of the visuals in the video she recreates it as a kind of fertility symbol, allowing her large breasts and butt to become part of the fertility ritual that is in fact a desperate attempt to escape death.

venus-of-willendorf

At this point there’s really only one important question: if either of these songs involved references to, or displays of people taking a crap, would they retain the popularity they currently possess?

The answer of course is…of course not.  Why did you even pause?  Weirdo.

Obviously the sight of Nicki Minaj taking a dump on stage is enough to kill most of the boners currently existing on the internet, but this question is important when you consider the original intent behind Carnival as a festival of life.  Life is meaningless without death and Bakhtin observes this in Rabelias’s work:

It would be a mistake to think that the Rabelaisian debasement of fear and suffering was prompted by coarse cynicism.  We must not forget that the image of defecation, like all the images of the lower stratum, is ambivalent and that the element of reproductive force, and renewal is alive in it.

[…]tumblr_mbxzkz8iif1rw1tkoo1_500

Excrement is gay matter; in the ancient scatological images, as we have said, it is linked to the generating force and to fertility.  On the other hand, excrement is conceived as something intermediate between earth and body, as something relating the one to the other.  It is also an intermediate between the living body and dead disintegrating matter that is being transformed into earth, into manure.  The living body returns to the earth its excrement, which fertilizes the earth as does the body of the dead.  Rabelias was able to distinguish these nuances clearly.  (691)

I tutored biology for four years and the woman who taught the class had a charming LYw4POpFexpression concerning cellular respiration and photosynthesis.  In a nutshell plants breath in our carbon dioxide to make sugars and produce oxygen as a waste product.  In return human beings inhale the oxygen to make ATP (a chemical most species use for energy) and produce carbon dioxide as a waste product.  This would follow with the statement: “So plants breath in our poo and produce their own poo, oxygen, which we breath in.  Take a deep breath.  You just breathed in plant poop!”  This of course created the expected reaction, many people would groan or else gag, and as I’ve noted before in a previous essay this reaction is based in human beings paranoia about death.

Poop is gross and sticky, loaded with germs, and of course it smells awful.  This is not up for debate.  Nor am I calling for everyone to stop saying that poop is gross and seeing it and smelling it is gross.  What is important to recognize however is that the inability to laugh at poop and fart related humor is the real conflict, and ultimately a key part of Bakhtin’s claim.  Rabelias as a novelist captured the spirit of Carnival because the festival was about death, and poop by its nature is concentrated waste which amounts to the “death” of millions of cells, food particles, bacteria, and chemicals that the body simply cannot digest.  When human beings observe this waste it unnerves us because recognize Nicki-Minaj-Pound-The-Alarm-1that at some point our lives are going to end and become waste that in turn will return to the earth.  Being a narcissistic species this terrifies us and so we’re left scrambling to combat this realization often through intense displays or carnality.

Carnival was always a carnal affair (oh my god I just got that), and sex was certainly an important component to it.  As the earth was dying or being reborn human beings felt an overwhelming desire to procreate and bring new life back into the territory that seemed to be dying or else being reborn.  Most contemporary displays of Carnival, including contemporary re-imaginings, also touch upon this idea but what is missing is the acknowledgement of death.  Every person on earth is going to die, and Carnival was not about escaping that fact, it was about 1embracing it.  Human beings gathered together to drink, eat, tell jokes, fuck, and revel in their humanity as a way of achieving some kind of catharsis.

Laughing at a joke about poop allowed people the chance to laugh in the face of death even when it was all around them.  Nicki Minaj’s breasts are nice to look at, and Esmerelda certainly looks lovely as she rocks that stripper pole/spear, but neither of these displays of wild and liberating sexuality really tries to embrace death for the sake of defeating it or at least coping with it.  Both films ultimately try to run from death, hoping that sex and youth will ultimately win out the race, but death is patient and always returns man to the ground.

In the face of our own mortality the way to beat death is not trying to outrun it, but instead to laugh at a cheap fart joke when you can.   Life is far too short and absurd not to.

1

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve included a link to Pound the Alarm below.  I tried to find Topsy Turvy but all of the editions on the internet cut out the Esmeralda dance sequences.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdrqA93sW-8

 

**Writer’s Note**51lrpi2XzvL._SX343_BO1,204,203,200_

All selections from Bakhtin’s analysis were cited in Literary Theory: An Anthology 2nd Edition.

 

***Writer’s FINAL Note***

Let’s see if you learned anything.  Enjoy the following poop related jokes:

I ate four cans of alphabet soup yesterday.

Then I had probably the biggest vowel movement ever.

 

What’s brown and sticky?

A stick.

If you didn’t laugh at either of those, you’ve got some attitude buster.

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Ulysses in Chinese and the Writer’s Ego: A White Tower Review

29 Friday Jan 2016

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, Literature, Politics, Ulysses

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

'Merica, Anthony Comstock, authorial freedom, Cait Murphey, censorship, Christopher Hitchens, Essay, Fun Home, James Joyce, Judge John M. Woolsey, Kevin Birmingham, Language, Leopold in Bloom, Les Miserables, Literature, Molly Bloom, Richard Nixon, Stephen Dedalus, The Atlantic, The Executioner's Song, The Most Dangerous Book: the Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses, translation, Ulysses, Ulysses in Chinese, United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, Wen Jieruo, Xiao Qian

41V57-jMhbL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_

Around a year ago I found myself obsessed with the novel Ulysses despite the fact that it’s now been over five years since I actually read the book. I don’t have an actual explanation for the pop-up obsession except perhaps it was because I’d been reading Fun Home, which references James Joyce often, and also Joyce in Bloom, an essay by Christopher Hitchens about the novel and it’s lasting cultural impact. There was some idea, as I had just started Grad School, that I would become a Joyce scholar, dedicating my thesis and eventual dissertation on Joyce’s book. I would also teach the novel, wearing my tweed blazers and my eccentric bow-ties. I would be the fun professor, or at the very least that weird guy who probably suffered from ED and masturbated to Woody Allen movies, though only the second part would be accurate. There’s something about Diane Keaton in Annie Hall…(*Sigh*).

Realistically my Joyce obsession was a fallacy, a fancy pants way of saying that I was deluding myself. Ulysses had been a pain to read, and often times I found myself, much like Alison Bechdel does in her graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, muttering the phrase:

images2

It’s not that at the time I didn’t recognize ANY importance of the work. Ulysses helped me grow tremendously as a writer by showing me what could be accomplished with prose, and as a reader I developed a patience and skill, but more importantly I grew a necessary strength to read long works. If there is any book as long as Ulysses I have yet to really find it. The reader may protest throwing down books like War and Peace, Don Quixote, Les Misérables, and The Executioner’s Song thus shattering my glass coffee table not mention my impression of them (won’t see you at the Christmas party Doug), but I would argue that, with the exception of possibly War and Peace, Ulysses may be shorter, but what it lacks those tomes in page count it supersedes them in density. The final 45 pages of Ulysses are nothing but eight sentences of stream of consciousness by Molly Bloom and just to put in in perspective the final 45 pages of Les Misérables describes the self-exile of Jean Valjean before his death.

Looking back at my dreams of becoming a Joyce scholar I recognized my adoration of Joyce 01_I03AT1_1203286kwas not so much a genuine desire to spend the rest of my life teaching his novel, but was actually more an ego trip. I enjoyed being the only person in my classes who had actually read the novel from cover to cover, but more so it was disheartening to reach class early each night, talking to my fellow English majors, and hearing from too many of them that they had not actually read any of their assignments for classes. Joyce became an opportunity to show off a little, and hopefully encourage some people to participate in conversations, though it never actually did. I might be overly harsh on myself, and since then my appreciation for the book has achieved more depth, I’ve just gotten to a point where romanticizing my past is a dangerous habit.

In my research however I did find one or two interesting articles, but it was one essay published in The Atlantic that still resonates after a year. It’s the ambition behind the story of the article that still remains impressive.

Xiao_QianXiao Qian, a Chinese war correspondent and a literature student, stood over the grave of James Joyce in 1946 in Zurich and mourned, “Here lies the corpse of someone who wasted his great talents writing something very unreadable.” Forty-nine years later Xiao still thinks that Joyce carried his virtuosity too far. He has earned the right to his reservations: he and his wife, Wen Jieruo, have just finished a labor that might have humbled Hercules–translating Ulysses into Chinese.

Now a reader who has ever attempted to read the novel from beginning to end most likely uttered a wretch in the back of their throat that sounds like a bullfrog’s death gurgle. The reason for this charming noise is because, as stated before, Ulysses is almost unreadable when it’s written in English.

The reason for this is Joyce’s genius.

The conflict with James Joyce was that he bought into the idea of his own genius and felt the need to demonstrate it, and the reader should not want to recognize there is nothing so threatening to human comfort as a genius wishing to wave his dick around in the air. The article Ulysses in Chinese is written by Cait Murphey, a New York writer with at least two books to her name (one about baseball the other about lawyers) who demonstrates this facet of Joyce’s personality with a brief description of the novel and Joyce’s artistic cait_murphy83decisions in the composition:

Joyce masticates Homer’s Odyssey and spits it out in his saga of a day (June 16, 1904) in the life of two Dubliners, Leopold Bloom (Ulysses) and Stephen Dedalus (Telemachus). Penelope is represented by Bloom’s not-so-faithful wife, Molly. Ulysses does not slavishly follow the Odyssey, though each episode in the ancient tale has a counterpart in the modern one. For example, in one Homeric episode Odysseus descends to Hades, the world of the dead; in Joyce’s version Leopold Bloom–a Jew and therefore, like Odysseus, an outsider–goes to a funeral. If Homer marks the beginning of Western literature, Joyce suggested, Ulysses was its culmination. “The task I set myself technically in writing a book from eighteen different points of view and in as many styles,” he wrote to his benefactress, Harriet Shaw Weaver, “all apparently unknown or undiscovered by my fellow tradesmen, that and the nature of the legend chosen would be enough to upset anyone’s mental balance.”

Murphey’s essay does not concern itself with praising or criticizing Joyce’s artistic decisions however, for in fact Joyce has little to actually do with the meat of the essay. Murphey’s concern is with Xiao Quian and Wen Jieruo and their story of translating one of most important books published in human history. The reader may immediately question whether this was really an effort worth the time and pain. Ulysses is a book few people in their lifetimes will ever actually read, and fewer will even finish, yet despite this it continues to be translated into at least, as Murphey says, twenty different languages. Whatever magic Joyce managed to capture there is an aura that surrounds the book and Xiao and Wen are only the latest to tackle the monster.

What’s so particularly impressive about a Chinese translation is revealed in a brief history:

Much of the delay can be attributed to the antipathy of the Chinese Communists toward Poster-CulturalRevolution-Mao-RedSun01bourgeois liberal Western culture. Joyce’s work became caught in the Chinese government’s straitened view of literature’s role–that it should extol the morally upright deeds of workers, peasants, and soldiers. Ulysses–bawdy, irreverent, and anti-heroic–hardly suits. Nor did the Maoist cultural commissars appreciate the literary merits of Ulysses, considering it too pessimistic, subjective, and personal. And perhaps worst of all, it was not concerned nearly enough with the great theme of class struggle. Even with the end, in 1976, of the Cultural Revolution, in which China tried to purge all foreign influences (except Marxism) from the land, Xiao and Wen were confined to translating only what was deemed to be safe material, such as the work of Henry Fielding, Charles Lamb, and Arthur Schlesinger Jr.

So when the two were just about ready to publish their translation, Xiao took the precaution of writing a series of articles for the Chinese press describing the American trial in 1933 that established that Ulysses was not a dirty book. China would look backward, he argued, if it were to ban or censor the book six decades later. Xiao also pointed out the book’s “progressive” stance: it was anti-anti-Semitic and _C14050PictPowHndsOfMass50anti-imperialistic.

The strategy worked. Published last year, with no interference, the first edition of the three-volume translation sold out its 85,000 copies; a second and a third edition were rushed into print. “We publishers had to be brave to take this kind of risk,” says Li Jingduan, the editor of Yilin Publishing House, in Nanjing. “I never imagined this book would be so welcomed by the Chinese reader.” Considering the price–about $15, or roughly a week’s wages for a high school teacher in China–the sales are phenomenal, and the couple have become modest celebrities. They keep clippings about their work in two thick albums in their book-cluttered four-room apartment near Tiananmen Square, and clearly enjoy the fuss. Wen positively purrs as she recalls a book-signing in Shanghai that attracted a thousand readers. “Five police officers had to come to keep order,” she says. “Very excellent.” The story made the front pages of Shanghai’s newspapers.

Xiao and Wen both have traumatic personal memories of times when China was not nearly so accommodating, and see their translation as a major advance for China’s cultural life. “I feel that this translation of Ulysses signifies that China at last has opened herself not only in technology and science but also in literature,” Xiao says.

It’s difficult to truly appreciate, for those of us living in the Western Hemisphere in the twenty-first century, how powerful is the freedom to enter our local bookstores, what few remain in these dark days, and purchase any book that we want regardless of our political e5db5a80-f003-0132-f0cc-0ed54733f8f5opinion. I don’t intend to make this essay a nauseatingly preachy rant about “’Merica” and “freedom” and all that jazz which was a movie starring Roy Schrieder that delivered, though only the first hour. Americans have a rather conflicted relationship with their civil liberties for always there is the balance of what “I can do” and what “I should do.” While many appreciate their rights, some exercise them simply for the sake of exercising them. Marilyn Mansion can wipe his ass with the American flag and the NRA can walk around with automatic rifles strapped to their backs, whether or not they should is up for debate, though, the reader may want to walk carefully with that NRA guy because he’s a crazy-ass white guy with guns while Mansion is currently just an engorged pumpkin with bad skin. Just sayin. This attitude of possessing rights to behavior and actions tends to foster a solipsism, to the point, few recognize the real violations of censorship that actively remove those liberties.

The case of China only fuels this idea because in the last two decades, at least since Nixon opened up diplomatic relations with the nation (one of the man’s few positive achievements though even that’s up for debate), China has assumed the boogeyman status. It’s China that will steal American jobs. It’s China that will bankrupt America. It’s China who will infect American children with communist ideals. And, of course, it’s China, with their sour record of human rights violations, that will censor books.

The problem with this, as is so often the case with Americans, the real history is ignored. Before book burnings had become something only priests with silly mustaches did to the Koran, there was a real existence of censorship in the United States. The Postal Service, an1429725412461 institution now just a daily dimming shadow of its once great figure, once controlled and exercised the “morality” of the public, for ultimately it was the post office that moved and shipped about reading material, therefore they possessed the right to censor any and all works deemed “obscene.”

Kevin Birmingham in his book, The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, describes this power before telling his reader of a character by the name of Anthony Comstock:

The history of U.S. Censorship regime began in earnest in 1873, when Anthony Comstock bordered a train to Washington D.C., with a draft of a new federal law in his pocket and a satchel filled with the dirtiest pornography. Comstock was the head of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, and because he understood the power of words, he understood the power of the Post office.

[…]

Comstock wanted the government to ban not just immoral books and pictures but also circulars and advertisements—everything that kept pornographers in business. A book like Lord K’s Rapes and Seductions wasn’t the only problem. They had to outlaw the catalog listing the book for sale and newspapers printing the ads that told people where Anthony_Comstockto find it. The law also had to ban contraception and abortion related articles—birth control, after all, was part of the same avaricious business of lust. Pharmacists and smut peddlers profited from the same fantasy of sin without consequences. (111-2).

Comstocks ideas were eventually accepted by then President Ulysses S. Grant (marvelous coincidence aside) and the Postal Service, alongside police, were given tremendous power, perhaps a little too much:

This federal patchwork of obscenity laws had perverse effects. A man was free to visit a brothel, but if he wrote a story about visiting a brothel he could go to prison—immoral words became more punishable than immoral acts. An office clerk who mailed an obscene book faced a heavier sentence than the book’s author, publisher and seller because the Comstock Act wasn’t about raiding bookshops. It was about raiding the nation’s most powerful distribution network. (113).

Censorship was not invented by Communists, but Americans have an enormous capacity for self-bullshitting that this brief history is necessary before I continue.

Xiao and Wen struggle was a twofold effort, not only because of the political realities they face in their country, but also for the real obstacle that is Joyce’s writing which Murphey explains using several examples:

Translating Joyce is no party game in any language, of course. Even a simple sentence like “And going forth, he met Butterly” presents dangers. In fact in the book BuckRevolutionary_Joyce Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus meet no one named Butterly. Mulligan, Stephen’s roommate, is just tossing off a clever remark as he and Stephen leave their residence south of Dublin. He is referring, crudely, as is his wont, to the biblical description of Peter after his betrayal of Jesus: “and going forth, he wept bitterly.” In English the allusion is obvious enough. In German, though, after much cogitation, the thought has been put this way: they went forth “und weinte Buttermilch“–or “and wept buttermilk.” In Chinese it is translated for sound: they “went out and met Ba Teli,” meaning “to hope earnestly-special-inside,” but in context signaling a group of foreign sounds. Well, okay: the reader is clued in that the phrase is more than it seems. But a lot is lost in translation.

She goes on noting the complications of the Chinese language:

Many languages at least share the Roman alphabet, and therefore, to varying degrees, a common corpus of sounds. The name Leopold Bloom looks and sounds much the same from Dublin to Detroit, from Harare to Hanoi.

Enter China and the rules change. To begin with, there are only 404 possible phonetic combinations in Mandarin, far fewer than in English. Wordplay is inevitably distorted. 18158And Chinese is ideographic, not alphabetic; “home,” for example, is represented by a stylized picture that has traditionally been interpreted to be a pig beneath a roof. Ulysses is not pictorial but aural, and comes alive most vividly when read aloud.

To make things more difficult, Chinese is a tonal language. In Mandarin, the official national tongue, there are four possible tones to each sound: high level, rising, falling rising, and falling. The tones make a difference. For a crude example of the sounds, consider using the word “Ma” in these different contexts: “Oh, Ma!” in surprised anger at seeing your mother where she shouldn’t be, “Oh, Ma!” in exasperation, “Ma” in sober conversation, and “Oh, it’s Maaa” in warning at an unexpected phone call from the matriarch. In Chinese, tones change the meaning of a word, not just the emphasis. The four tones for “ma” mean, respectively, “mother,” “hemp,” “horse,” and “to curse.” (A fifth tone for “ma,” which is actually atonal, turns a sentence into a question.)_65612290_65612285

There are a number of obstacles that plagued Xiao and Wen but it does little good to quote by quote, every single one for that would deprive the reader the opportunity to read the essay and understand the significance of their labors. Murphey does not accomplish great things in terms of prose in Ulysses in Chinese, but looking back at this article that doesn’t matter. It could be said that her essay was just journalism and so her job is merely to convey the events, the who-what-when-where-how-why of any seasoned journalist or historian, but for myself there’s a deeper meaning behind taking the time to looking at Xiao and Wen.

In many ways I envy them. They possessed a strength that I didn’t have when looking to the future of my graduate school career. I enjoy the story of Ulysses, I understand the artistic choices as well as anyone can, and I adore the legends and folklore that surround this novel…but not enough to dedicate my life to it, or at least ten or more years of my life to it. Looking then to Xiao and Wen I see two people who accomplished an impressive feat, and contributed an enormous gift to their culture and society.

In my paperback copy of the book there is the final statement made by Judge John M. Woolsey who decided the fate of Ulysses in America:

“Ulysses” is not an easy book to read or to understand. But there has been much written about it, and in order properly to approach the consideration of it it is advisable judge_john_m_woolsey_c1931to read a number of other books which have now become its satellites. The study of “Ulysses” is, therefore, a heavy task.

[…]

In writing “Ulysses,” Joyce sought to make a serious experiment in a new, if not wholly novel, literary genre. He takes persons of the lower middle class living in Dublin in 1904 and seeks, not only to describe what they did on a certain day early in June of that year as they went about the city bent on their usual occupations, but also to tell what many of them thought about the while.

Joyce has attempted — it seems to me, with astonishing success — to show how the screen of consciousness with its ever-shifting kaleidoscopic impressions carries, as it were on a plastic palimpsest, not only what is in the focus of each man’s observation of the actual things about him, but also in a penumbral zone residua of past impressions, some recent and some drawn up by association from the domain of the subconscious. He shows how each of these impressions affects the life and behavior of the character which he is describing.

If the point of art is to recognize the feelings and thoughts of other human beings, whether they be of different sexes, genders, races, and nationalities, then Ulysses in Chinese is more than just one article published in The Atlantic. It’s a testament to what art should be, and what it should encourage us to be. Art should not be easy, nor should it aspire for best seller lists and four star reviews. Books should, first and foremost, aim to capture the impressions of human beings that read them, so much so that, even if they are almost unreadable, and their reader’s drop an occasional “what the fuck?” like I did, they still resonate in the reader’s mind long after they have been read.

Xiao Quan and Wen Jieruo have given their culture and their nation a gift, and the reader of Ulysses in Chinese will recognize it.

ulysses

 

 

 

*Writer’s Note*

I’ve included a link to the original article by Murphey below:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1995/09/ulysses-in-chinese/376454/

I’ve also included a link to the Court Decision made by Woolsey if the reader is interested in his full remarks:

http://www.leagle.com/decision/19331875FSupp182_1148/UNITED%20STATES%20v.%20ONE%20BOOK%20CALLED%20%22ULYSSES%22

Anyone interested in the essay Joyce in Bloom can follow the link below:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2004/06/hitchens-200406

 

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It’s Only Evil If You Don’t Recognize The Title

19 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Literature, Novels

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A Clash of Kings, A Game of Thrones, book burning, Book Covers, censorship, Don Quixote, Epic Novels, Harry Potter, Individual Will, Knights, Les Miserables, Literature, Master Nicolas, Medieval Romances, Middlesex, Miguel de Cervantes, Rocinante, The Journey, Ulysses, War and Peace, Wishbone, Written Language

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Don’t ask me why I began Don Quixote with only two weeks left before I start my next to last semester of Graduate School. It’s a game my brain plays to fuck with me. I spend most of summer taking small bites out of various books, starting many and finishing only a few, well, not a few, but not nearly as many as I begin. I waver. There’s so many books in my collection, how can I choose only one to actually read. In the mountain of knowledge that is my library, there are always the books my eyes drift to. The heavy tomes. Crime and Punishment, Napoleon Bonaparte, which I also started, War and Peace, Middlesex, The Executioner’s Song, etc. The unifying quality of each of these books if their dense page count. The day of the 1000 page novel seems behind us, yet still there is that drive to prove to the self that you possess the strength to challenge such a monster. In the Summer of 2009 I tackled Ulysses, summer of 2013 was Les Miserables, and summer of 2014 was A Game of Thrones and A Clash of Kings. It seemed appropriate, as I near the end of graduate school, that I journey with the idealist knight as my days of Sancho Panza are most likely on the wings. I’m thinking next summer will be either Gore Vidal’s Lincoln, of Fydor Dostoevsky’s Wishbone Don QuixoteCrime and Punishment.

It was Wishbone that finally pushed me over the edge. I discovered the other day that the show comes on PBS Sunday mornings, and last week’s episode was the Don Quixote episode which was one of my favorite’s growing up. There’s always just been something about knights. Don Quixote has been sitting on my shelf for only a few months. The Mermaids sang their song, and two weeks be damned, I’ve begun the book.

Now obviously trying to tackle Don Quixote in one essay would be monstrous, it cannot be done, and it should not be done. Instead I have elected to turn my attention to one chapter of the novel dealing with the destruction of Don Quixote’s library by his family, barber, and priest.

The chapter in question is the sixth in Part One of my edition, the Penguin Classics. I know this sounds superficial and violates the oldest cliché in all of bookdom, but I chose this Quixoticedition for the cover. Don Quixote looks out over the fields of Spain, his lance pointed upwards to the heavens, his body wrapped in armor (which is inaccurate but forgivable), and his steed Rocinante is lazily sniffing the grass a stark contrast to his masters idealism. Just looking at the cover, which is a painting by Adrian Louis Demont and which also cuts out Sancho Panza slowly working his way up to his master’s side, there’s a wonderful sense of possibility. I feel like there’s a chance for a real journey, and not just another opportunity to read about stoned kids writing Dada and talking about Easy Rider like they’re actually seen the movie and not just the trippy parts on YouTube. The problem with the Journey narrative today is that it’s all so superficial. What is occurring on the external level is all meant as symbolic significance to the experience and wisdom of the protagonist, meanwhile any and all secondary characters are stripped of a chance to become full human characters. My problem, is that too often Journey narratives today fail because there isn’t an idea that people can honestly experience the world, they can only experience their perceptions of the world.

Don Quixote 4Before chapter six takes place Don Quixote has donned his faux-armor, mounted his horse Rocinante, and tried his luck as a knight. He is knighted by an innkeeper who is aided by two prostitutes, he has interrupted the whipping of a young field hand and rectified the situation before he leaves and the poor soul continues to suffer the lash, and he attacks a gathering of merchants who leave him flounced after Rocinante trips during his attack and they flee. He is discovered by a local who recognizes him and returns him to his house prompting his niece and housekeeper to call for the aid of the local priest.

It is after careful discussion that Don Quixote’s madness can be attributable to one factor alone: books.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra is writing satire first and foremost, that must be understood to any and all who approach this thick but wonderful book. Many people would be amiss of the tradition of the Romance, and why Cervantes’s work would have been so subversive for the time. With the rise of the printing press and mercantilism people began to have more and more time on their hands. Since this is an age that pre-dates HBO-GO, I don’t really care for Amazon they’re planning on using drones for delivery in the future and I’m sorry I still believe in fucking Mailmen and UPS fuck you Amazon. Apologies, chased a Donquixoterabbit. Because human beings are driven by a need to create, to imagine, and to desire comfort, the middle class demanded entertainment and entertainment meant books. Now often the books would be works of poetry, especially complex works such as sonnets. Because these were dense and laden with aesthetic language the reader had to read and read and read in order to dig into the ideas found within. Along with books of poetry were Romances, stories of knights performing great feats against mythical beasts and falling in love…at least from afar. Many of the romances, particularly the Arthurian legends, are riddled with barbarism, rape, murder of innocents, divine intervention that would render the Old Testament God reeling in horror, and general depravity. It is this subject then, to which Cervantes is plying his ability as a writer. He is mocking the image of the knight and the institution of the romance, but the brilliance of the book is Cervantes’s ability to reinvent the knight as someone worth knowing.

My sister has confided in me recently, and I’m sure she’ll love me revealing her secret to the internet, but she admits that she never made it past chapter six.

Perhaps if you’re a book lover you may feel her pain. Don Quixote’s niece, housekeeper, Priest, and barber have amassed in his wonderful library convinced they are the source of his madness and begin to purge it. May all forgive me, but here we go:Don Quixote 1

The Priest laughed at the housekeeper’s simple-mindedness, and told the barber to hand him the books one by one so that he could see what was in them, since he might find some that didn’t deserve to be committed to the flames.

“No,” said the niece, “there’s no reason to let any of them off, they’re all to blame. Better throw the whole lot of them out of the window into the courtyard, and make a pile of them, and set fire to them, or take them to the backyard and make the bonfire there, where the smoke won’t be such a nuisance.”

The housekeeper said much the same, so anxious were both women to see those innocents massacred, but the priest wouldn’t agree without at least reading the titles. (52).

There are few moments of perfect farce in literature. With the exception of writers like Don Quixote 2Voltaire, Twain, Heller, or Wilde, few possess the real ability to present the absurdity of human ignorance in its accurate nature. The reason for this is due chiefly to the fact that wit, precise intellectual criticism, is damned difficult. If wit were easy anyone could do it.

I don’t want to just analyze Cervantes’s ability with language however, so I’ll return to my original point. The entire affair of burning of the books is established in these three small paragraphs and the reader is then shown the execution of the thesis. The books of Don Quixote’s library are studied and judged by the merit of their titles, and in some lucky cases, their reputation. Following this scene the first book is selected.

The first one that master Nicolas put into his hands was The Four Books of Amadis of Gaul, and the priest said:

“This is a strange coincidence: I’ve heard that this was the very first chivalry romance to be printed in Spain, and that all the others have their origin and beginning in it; so it Censored_Spanish_bookseems to me that, as the prophet of such a pernicious sect, it should be condemned to the flames without delay.”

“No, no,” said the barber. “I’ve also heard that it’s the very best of all the books of this kind that have ever been written; and so, being unique in its artistry, it ought to be pardoned.”

“You’re right said the priest, “so its life is spared for the time being. Let’s see the one next to it.”

“This, said the barber, “is The Exploits of Esplandian, Amadis of Gaul’s Legitimate son.”

“Well, to be sure,” said the priest, “the excellence of the father isn’t going to be any avail to the son. Here you are, ma’am, the first faggot on the bonfire we’re going to make.”

Suns Burning Books.png

The housekeeper was delighted to do so, and the good Esplandian flew out into the courtyard, where he patiently awaited the flames with which he was threatened. (52-53).­

The great massacre to follow is at times both repugnant for the reckless abandon and desire to burn, as it is peppered by inconsistency. That of course is a fancy-ass way of saying that the book gathering is at times hilarious and then painful to book lovers. Master Nicolas weeds through the books in a haphazard fashion reading only the titles and often damning them simply for their reputation. At one point he becomes so inured to this activity that he abandons his careful inspection. It says:

And not wanting to weary himself any more reading chivalry romances, the priest ordered the housekeeper to take all the big books and throw them out into the yard. His command didn’t fall on deaf ears, because she’d rather have been burning those books than weaving the finest and largest piece of fabric in the world, and, seizing the about eight of them, she heaved them out of the window. But becayse she took up so many of them together, one fell at the barber’s feet and, curious to know what it was, he saw: History of the Famous knight Tirante the White.

“Good Heavens!” cried the priest. “Fancy Tirante the White being here! Give it to me, my friend: I reckon I’ve found in this bbook a treasure of delight and a mine of entertainment. In it you’ll discover Don Quirieleison de Montalban a most courageous knight, and his brother Tomas de Montalban, the knight Fonesca, together with the fight that the brave Tirante had with the mastiff, and the witticisms of the maidens Placerdemivida, and the amours and the trickery of the widow Reposada, and the lady Don Quixote 3empress in love with her squire Hipoloito. Let  me tell you this my friend: as far as its style is concerned this is the best book in the worked, In it knights eat and sleep and die in their beds and make wills before they die, and other such things that are usually omitted from books of this sort. But in spite of all this I do have to say that the man who wrote it deserved to e sent to the galleys for life, for not knowing what he was doing when he was writing such nonsense. Take it home and read it, and you’ll see that what I say is true.” (55-6).

Such testimony would appear beautiful, were it not for the fact the Priest was pilfering another man’s library and burning the books he doesn’t like or else doesn’t have time for. And what of the seven books that fell into the courtyard? Did not they deserve their times to be read? It becomes clear as the reader moves through chapter six that only the books that are known and appreciated by the priest deserve to remain, though of course not in the hands of Don Quixote. Before I conclude one final passage needs to be observed.

“But what’s this other one by its side?”don quixote-illustrationaf41

“Galatea, by Miguel Cervantes.”

“That fellow Cervantes has been a good friend of mine for years, and I know he’s more conversant with adversity than with verse. His book’s ingenious enough; it sets out to achieve something but doesn’t bring anything to conclusion; we’ll have to wait for the promised second part; maybe with correction it’ll gain the full pardon denied it for the time being; so while we wait and see, you keep it captive in your house my friend.” (58).

Cervantes winks so obviously to the audience it might be unforgiveable, were it not for the fact his own self-promotion here is so self-depreciating it could be a joke by Woody Allen. His book is spared the flames.

I’ve written about censorship before and the effect that it has upon the discourse because bannedbooksthe written word possesses an incredible power. Early societies treated written documents with awe and authority because words are the bridge between immaterial thought and concrete reality. By taking that which is mundane and transforming it into written narrative, mankind achieves a kind of immortality. There’s a reason runes were treated as both a script and religious bridges by ancient peoples. Even in today’s society when the aura of books seems diminished in the face of billions of screen pages, blogs, online articles, and opinion pieces, people gravitate to communicated language. Our attentions are fixed to titles, and meaning becomes constructed before one even digs deeper into the actual meat of the writing. Master Nicolas in this small chapter seems both odious and ridiculous, but his haphazard censorship of Don Quixote’s library assumes a real humanity, for often human beings will reel from perceived threats until they actually experience something for themselves.

tumblr_m6x64peohK1r2dbhio1_540When Harry Potter was first published there were book burnings and public outcry for fear that the novel would turn a generation into sorcerers and godless heathens. My mother, being the wonderful person that she was, said, “Let’s buy the book, read it, and decide for ourselves whether the book is bad.” She read me every Harry Potter book after that, usually while I would play video games, but often when I would just sit and listen, thrilled and entertained. It was only by actually reading the books for ourselves that we determined whether something possessed a wickedness. None of them did.  Though I am an atheist so maybe that stuff about godless heathens had some merit after all.

Chapter Six of Don Quixote may pain an avid collector of books, for the library’s collection is burned and the door bricked up, leaving Don Quixote forever separated from his books. Despite their best efforts however, Don Quixote continues his quest leading to the real conclusion, much to the pain of the censor. Human initiative cannot be squashed, and those with conviction will find a way to outlive or outsmart those that would dominate their will. In the end, all Master Nicholas does is reveal himself to be both a hypocrite and incompetent.

Cervantes’s tongue stings deep and true, and the Knight carries on his way.

Don-Quixote-and-Sancho-xx-Alexandre-Gabriel-Decamps

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Happy Birthday White Tower Musings!

11 Saturday Jul 2015

Posted by Joshua Ryan "Jammer" Smith in Essay, Happy Birthday, White Tower Musings

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Alison Bechdel, Ave Maria, Batman Arkham Asylum A serious House on Serious Earth, big black dicks, Blood Meridian or the Evening Redness in the West, Christopher Hitchens, corgi, Crime and Punishment, Don Quixote, encomium, Essay, Freedom, Fun Home, If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome, Johann Sebastian Bach, Les Miserables, Literature, Loony Tunes, Moby Dick, Nine Stories, progymnasmata, Sexual cannibalism, spider sex, The Marriage Plot, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, Ulysses, William L. Shirer, Writing, Years of Upheaval, Yo-Yo Ma

Photo_00171

The last year saw me write at least forty essays, each designed to highlight some aspect of literature, yet I can’t shake off the feeling that I really haven’t accomplished that much. No seriously, hear me out. What exactly does it mean to be a blogger?

Johann_Sebastian_BachStop. Before I continue, let me give you this link so you can listen to this while you read, if you’re even still here and haven’t stumbled onto my blog because you were looking for fish sex or big black dicks. It’s a compilation of Bach on YouTube. I’ve always preferred Bach over the other classical composers. Even Mozart. Especially Mozart. I ain’t haitin, it’s just, Bach has complexity and presence that isn’t trying to prove its genius. Anyway here it is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6JQm5aSjX6g

Now like I asked before, what exactly does it really mean to be a blogger? I call myself a writer, because along with the book reviews I write here, I also write short stories, poetry, and novels. Especially novels. Novels speak to me, yet I find lately I have a devil of a time Writtingreading one by itself. I’ve developed this system where I read ten pages in a book and then put it down. It’s a way of getting reading in and still being able to get things done. It works too; I’ve read Moby Dick, Ulysses, and Les Miserables through this system. Don Quixote is next as soon as summer school, fall semester, spring semester, and life is over with and I can find three goddamn minutes to myself. But what is a blogger? Can a blogger really call themselves a writer? I’ve seen blogs that are nothing but photographs, often a half naked women, but also of rusty cars in black and white, of little girls wearing white dresses, close ups of naked girls covering their nipples with one hands while green paint has been smeared across one cheek. These are blogs I have seen. Can you call these people writers?

I had this thought earlier and I believe it to be a good thought, I would like to start a blog about cheese. Spend the rest of my days trying various samples of cheese and write a review about them. Not just about how they taste, but the history of that brand of cheese, where it’s typically made, how it got its name. I think that’s a good idea, but I could I still call myself a writer? And what would the title of the Blog be?

cheese-types-31579-1920x1080

A writer is what I am, it’s all that I can be because, at this point in my life, I’ve passed the point where I’m really fit to do anything else. It’s starting with my back. I’ve woken up three times this week with a pain in my back. That’s how I know I’m a writer because I can’t imagine doing anything else, and it’s too far to go back, but the problem arises: the only manuscripts I have ever published were on this blog, and   there again, can you really call what we write on blogs writing?

update-yo-yo-ma-applauds-morgan-nevilles-oscar-nomination-for-the-sound-of-silk-docWhat I spoke before about Bach is true. I prefer him over the other composers. I don’t know anything about the man. I know he’s German but that’s about it, and it could be wrong. Classical music for many people is just noise, like Heavy metal. Both varieties of music are similar in its auditory components that people ignore them thinking there’s no variety when any musicologist or dude wearing a Slayer t-shirt will be happy to show otherwise. I think I like Bach for two reasons. The first is because of a scene in the movie Hannah and her Sisters where Michael Kane’s sister-in-law plays a record. Bach F minor concerto. It’s a beautiful song, and one of my favorite scenes in a movie. The other is because Yo-Yo ma performs Cello Suite No.1-Prelude and I’ve actually seen Yo-Yo Ma perform in person. The man is a machine; he was poured into a cellist. You can’t watch the man play without being moved. I’ve included a link here as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PCicM6i59_I

Now why all this questioning and randomness. I’m a year old today. White Tower Musings began a year ago as part of a romantic ambition. What I wanted to do is convince people who hate literature and believe that it has no point or purpose to shut up and see that it has all the purpose and meaning in the world. Books can change people’s lives, when given to them at the right time, in the right way. Selling a book is hard, and feels often like prostitution . The downside is you don’t get paid like a prostitute does however, so it’s a thankless job with no fucking.

While I’m thinking of it here’s a cool random GIF (is it gif or jif, peanut butter?) of Godzilla.

tumblr_n1prato4of1qcga5ro1_500

While I’m thinking of it, I want to make sure you don’t feel like this was a waste of your time, so here’s a list of books I think you should read before you die because people love lists, if only so that they can disagree with them, because after all, what would the internet be if not a place for people to share their bullshit opinions with one another:

  1. 22716_lgThe Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William L. Shirer—Haven’t actually read this one, but I recently borrowed it from my little sister who’s studying history so I’m pumped.
  2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky—Haven’t read this one either but I’m going to. Dostoyevsky is my man.
  3. Freedom by Jonathan Franzen—This book annoyed and depressed me, but I haven’t read a book that has reminded me where we are as a culture right now.
  4. The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides—Is one the greatest living American Writers.
  5. Blood Meridian: Or, the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy—There’s a tree with dead babies tied up by their jaw bones.
  6. Years of Upheaval by Henry Kissinger—It’s Kissinger’s memoirs as his tenure as secretary of state during the Nixon administration.
  7. The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens—Fuck Kissinger! Use his fucking memoir as a doorstop!
  8. Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger—Because you need to see what a good writer the 22000-1man was. And because Phoneys need to die.
  9. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic—Because there needs to be one book on this list by a woman that is not just for the sake of having a woman in the list. This book will floor you.
  10. Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison and Dave McKean—This is in my mind the greatest graphic novel behind Fun Home, filled with detail, and one of the most honest examinations of insanity you’ll ever read.

It’s been a year and over 4000 people have visited this blog, though to be fair, that number is probably closer to 3000 since I know most people only found me because they were looking for porn. And what does that say about career as a writer if people are only finding me because they’re looking for sex? But this fact isn’t as concerning to me as the title I’ve given myself, because certainly nobody in the public did. After a year of writing book reviews, movie reviews, and hopefully in the near future, art reviews, what have I actually accomplished?

writer-typingI do not believe someone should call themselves a writer unless they can point to a finished product and say, “I wrote that.” I have that here, in this blog, but there again does this count as self publishing, in which case is this a vanity press?

Before I continue let me tell you a fun fact. My wife is a biologist and came to me one night telling me about a paper she had to give a presentation on. She chose it for the 2269929_origtitle. Sexual cannibalism. The article was an experiment done by scientists observing the mating behaviors of black widows and several insects. I’ll stick to the black widows though because that’s what I remember best. The researchers found that males that were aggressive in their mating dances and displays tended not to be eaten following coitus. Anyone who doesn’t know anything about spider sex is about to learn something cool. Black widows get their names because after they mate with the males they typically eat them. Sex, especially for female arthropods, is exhausting and they need nourishment for the incubation of eggs and the creation of eggs sacks. The man’s right there, so…fuck it, why not. Free eats. Well, as it turns out the males that acted like horny frat boys saying “HEEYYY BABAY!!!” were less likely to be eaten after sex.

Lesson of the day boys: Confidence is key.

Second lesson of the day: Fuck fraternities.

Third Lesson of the day: Never wear ladies underwear in public…unless you can pull it off.

My first article for this blog was actually a paper written for a class. The teacher arranged the course following something called the Progymnasmata. It was the 02/11/1999 - NYK04: SPECIAL, NEW YORK, 11/FEB/99 - British journalist Christopher Hitchens in his publisher's office in Manhattan on February 11. Special number: 048188 pm/Photo by HELAYNE SEIDMAN FTWP. 02129Y02.IPTclassical (in the sense of ancient Greece) model of teaching young men how to be orators and writers. The Progymnasmata was a series of exercises and one of them was the Encomium. What the encomium does is ask the students to praise a person, object, institution, etc. focusing on the positive effects it has upon society. Christopher Hitchens being the writer I most wanted to kill and wear his skin for the rest of my life (too much?) I decided to write what the man had done for me. I got an A, and that was that. But a few months later I was battling with the idea of starting a blog. My thought was, I’m always talking to people that aren’t around, thinking of arguments against people I hear randomly talking about “this book is stupid” or “this book is weird” or the classic “What does this have to do with what I want to do for a living?” After a while not being published, and having to listen to the voices in my head for so long, I thought a blog might help.

The internet seems like a place where we’re allowed to explode and unmask our true selves. I worry though about the people who choose to live their entire lives in it when bikinis and corgis exist in the real world.

One essay leads to another. That’s another thing. Hold on. My favorite Loony Tune is Bugs Bunny. I envy his confidence.

latest

I call my posts essays because I’ll give myself that. Most of the blogs I randomly scan through have 300-800 word posts describing the writers emotions, their feelings, explaining why they photographed seven hundred bunny rabbits humping in the DNC convention, but nobody ever calls what they write essays. I can’t think of anything else to call them. I put too much time and energy and sweat into them to call them anything else. It can’t be posts. Posts are something you do on facebook, if anybody still uses facebook.virgin-mary-0108

Here’s another video if you’re tired of Bach. It’s Ave Maria by Shubert in the original Latin. I’m an atheist but this song always stops me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bosouX_d8Y

I think the problem with most writers is we all feel like we’ve got nothing to really contribute. We’re told nobody reads books anymore, and we’re all plagued either by the image of the penniless writer drinking himself to death, or else of the hipster wannabe at Starbucks composing poetry but really just looking at pictures of Bob Dylan on Google images while wondering why nobody takes him seriously. The writer is plagued by a poor self image in the Post-Hemingway, Post-Cobain, Post-Dylan, you know what I changed my mind it’s definitely Daffy Duck that’s my favorite. Bugs is cool, but Daffy has character.

Daffy_duck_cartoom_wallpaper-normal5.4

I guess what’s bothering me, what my mind is wrapping around, is the typical human question: did anything I do matter? I admit, a year is not a great judge in the great scheme of things, and my ambition is too often checked by the limitations given by reality, but I do want this blog to matter. And to be fair, in the course of a year I have managed to write reviews for at least thirty to thirty-five books and films that I felt were worth people’s time. And even if people find me only looking for all male Mandingo parties, I at least taught them where the word Mandingo comes from before they decided to say fuck-it and go back to tumblr.

This essay was really written for me. I thought I would be quirky and funny and try to get in a few good points, but I’ve found at the end of this writing to be dissatisfied. I began this blog because I wanted to show people that books and creative writing can change people’s lives. A book can be the difference in a person’s life.

Am I a writer?writers-write

That’s the only question that really matters to me after a year of doing this. I write, and I publish my work, and people (seem) to read what I write. That’s where I hang my hat after a year of working and promotion of this site. A year in, and I have 50 followers and 4000 views. There’s a bottle of Jameson that sits on my bookshelf between The Vagina Monologues and The Male Nude. I think I’ll take it down, enjoy the deep burn of great whiskey. After all, that’s what writers do.

Thank you all for a year, thank you for bothering to show up. Thanks.

As a parting gift here’s a picture of me wearing a dress.

20151118_181139

 

 

**Writer’s Note**

Since you were patient enough to listen to all my boring classical music here’s a fun video of Goofy trying to ski. Enjoy.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E2NovM22D04

**Writer’s Note**

Definitely, definitely Taz. Taz was my man. Do you know he was only in five actual shorts? It’s crazy but Taz was actually just a minor character in the canon of Loony Tunes. Fun facts here. That’s all folks.

147269-33148-taz

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I'm Tired I've Been Down That Road Before I, Claudius Icarian Games Icarus Ice Cream that ISN'T Ice Cream Ida Tarbell Idealism identification Identity Identity Crisis Idris Elba If a woman is upset it's not because she's on her period it's because you're being a dick If they ask if you want Pepsi throw over the table throat punch the shit out of them and then proceed to burn that motherf@#$er down If you're reading this pat yourself on the back because you can read and that's awesome ignorance I have Measured Out My Life in Coffee Spoons and K Cups I know too many Michaels I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings I Like It Like That I Like it Like That: True Stories of Gay Male Desire Illuminated Manuscripts illusion Illusion of choice I Love Lucy I Love Lucy Mug I Love Penis...Mug iMac Imaginary Time imagination Immanuel Kant immigrants imperialism Imposter Complex Impressionists In Bed with David amd Jonathan incest Incorporation of images in Pedagogy Independence Day Independent Comics Indie Fiction Individual Initiative Individual Will Industrial Nightmare industry infidelity Infinite Jest Infinite Jest Blogs Infinite Possibility Infinity Informed Democracy Inherit the Wind Injustice innocence vs ignorance In One Person Inquisition insanity Insects Inside Out inspiration integrity intellectual Intellectual Declaration of Independance Intellectual masculinity Intellectual Parent Inter Library Loan internet interracial relationships Interview Inu Yoshi invert Invisible Man Invitation to a Beheading Ion IOWA iPad Ipecac iPhone ipod IRA I Racist Iran-Contra Irish Breakfast Tea Irish history Irish Writers I Ruck, Therefore I Am Isaac Asmiov Isaac Deutscher Isabel Allende Isabella St. James Ishmael Islam isolation Israel Issa Rae It It's an Honor It's illegal in the state of Texas to own more than six "realistic" vibrators It's time to adopt the Metric System in America for crying out loud It's truly truly difficult to find good coffee and by good coffee I mean the type that leaves you feeling as if you've actually tasted something beyond human understanding close to the furnace of all Italy Ivory Tower of Academia ivy I wandered lonely as a cloud I Want a Wife I Was a Playboy Bunny I Will Fight No More Forever I work at a Public Library J.D. 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