American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, Phillip Lopate, ed.

Vachel Lindsay, "The Photoplay of Action" and "The Artistic Position of Douglas Fairbanks and The Thief of Bagdad Production"
Lindsay seems like the definitively outdated, time-bound poet--those rhythmic incantations high-school students memorize--but his judgments on film are incredibly subtle, broad-minded, and far-seeing. The D. Fairbanks essay is a defense of Entertainment against the demands of Art.

Robert E. Sherwood, "The Ten Commandments" and "Greed"
"The Ten Commandments may not exercise as much influence as they should, but they are certainly good theater."

H. L. Mencken, "Note on Technic"
"What afflicts the movies is not an unpalatable ideational content so much as an idiotic and irritating technic. . . . How can one work up any rational interest in a fable that changes its locale and its characters ten times a minute? Worse, this dizzy jumping about is plainly unnecessary: all it shows is the professional incompetence of the gilded pants-pressers, decayed actors and other such half-wits to whom the making of movies seems to be entrusted. Unable to imagine a sequence of coherent scenes, and unprovided with a sufficiency of performers capable of playing them if they were imagined, these preposterous mountebanks are reduced to the childish device of avoiding action altogether. Instead of it they present what is at bottom nothing but a poorly articulated series of meaningless postures and grimaces. One sees a ham cutting a face, and the one sees his lady co-star squeezing a tear--and so on, endlessly. . . . If, at the first attempt upon a scene, the right attitude is not struck, then all they have to do is keep trying until they strike it. On those terms a chimpanzee could play Hamlet, or even Juliet.
"To most of the so-called actors engaged in movies, I daresay, no other course would be possible. . . . They are engaged, not for their histrionic skill, but simply for their capacity to fill the heads of romantic virgins and neglected wives with the sort of sentiments that the Christian religion tries so hard to put down. . . . The worst of it is that the occasional good actor, venturing into the movies, is brought down to the common level by the devices thus invented to conceal the incompetence of his inferiors. It is quite as impossible to present a plausible impersonation in a series of unrelated (and often meaningless) postures as it would be to make a sensible speech in a series of college yells. So the good actor, appearing in the films, appears to be almost as bad as the natural movie ham. One sees him only as one sees a row of telegraph poles, riding in a train. . . .
"All this is ingenious. More, it is humane, for it prevents the star trying to act, and so saves the spectators pain. But it is manifestly a poor substitute for acting on the occasions when acting is actually demanded by the plot--that is, on the occasions when there must be cumulative action, and not merely a series of postures. . . . In the movies they are dismembered, and so spoiled. Try to imagine the balcony scene from "Romeo and Juliet" in a string of fifty flashes--first Romeo taking his station and spitting on his hands, then Juliet with her head as big as a hay-wagon, then the two locked in a greasy kiss, then the Nurse taking a drink of gin, then Romeo rolling his eyes, and so on. If you can imagine it, then you ought to be in Hollywood, dodging bullets and amassing wealth. . . ."

This is very interesting to read in conjunction with Noel Carroll's A Philosophy of Mass Art, as I'm doing. Clement Greenberg and Adorno and Horkheimer's arguments against mass forms like movies turn on the idea that they make the audience intellectually lazy--Greenberg hilariously insists that the reception of real art should be hard work--where do they come up with these things?--while Adorno and Horkheimer more sensibly fear the cultivation of the habit of passive reception. An essay like Mencken's, coming relatively early in the history of film, clarifies the obvious point that the claim that mass media are easy or passive is bogus. (Carroll is very good at showing that the key terms in most of these arguments are incoherent, biased, or entirely artificial. He's also very good at briefly showing how Kant's ideas about aesthetic judgment are illegitimately extended to art--as if the objects of judgment should display the same characteristics as judgment does. I'm so poorly educated I never realized this before, but my excuse is that the arguments based on this mistake--like Greenberg's--always seemed to me so ridiculous that they were not worth considering in detail.)

Then there is this extraordinary diatribe:
"A successful movie mime is probably the most admired human being ever seen in the world. He is admired more than Napoleon, Lincoln or Beethoven; more, even, than Coolidge. The effects of this adulation, upon the mime himself and especially upon his clients, ought to be given serious study by competent psychiatrists, if any can be found. For there is nothing more corrupting to the human psyche, I believe, than the mean admiration of mean things. It produces a double demoralization, intellectual and spiritual. Its victim becomes not only a jackass, but also a bounder. The movie-parlors, I suspect, are turning out such victims by the million: they will, in the long run, so debauch the American proletariat that it will begin to put Coolidge above Washington, and Peaches Browning above Coolidge. . . ."

American Movie Critics: An Anthology from the Silents Until Now, Phillip Lopate, ed.

Incoherence is the new coherence.

This appeared in Dennis Cooper's blog yesterday:

Bernard presents ... Michael Daniels' Watchword Technique
----


I use the Watchword technique in class to introduce Jung and offer a practical example of free association. Since it isn’t a good idea to try free-associating out loud in front of a bunch of people—yes, I know, there are plenty of folks who visit this site who would do it, but you all are special—Watchword is a fast way to demonstrate that free association can quickly lead to the individual’s characteristic patterns of thought—that is, complexes.

Michael Daniels, a British psychologist, created the technique by adapting Jung’s ideas on word association, archetypes, individuation, and personality types. Here’s what he says:

“Watchword is an aid to psychological understanding. Its purpose is to help you to identify your psychological type and to examine important psychological forces and tendencies operating within your own being. Watchword is not a system of fortune telling and it does not offer advice about problems. In providing a description and interpretation of your psychological situation it may, however, assist your choices and decisions.

“At one level, Watchword may be considered simply as an amusing party game or form of psychological solitaire. At its most profound, it is a system that may be used to guide you along the path towards self-fulfillment.”

Whatever. What my students and I like about it is that, like a Tarot or I Ching reading, the results can be spooky and right on. Daniels is undertaking a research project and says that if you send him your completed “Watchword matrix,” he’ll send you his reading of your personality type. If you play his game, you may want to contribute to his research. But I think your personality type is pretty easy to read yourself, and the fun in Watchword isn’t in categorizing types, but in the eleven “Key Words” that are the result of the game, according to Daniels’ directions.

Before you try the game, though, let me tell you:

------1) This is better if you don’t know too much about what’s coming, so fill out the Watchword Matrix before you read on about what you’re going to do with it.
------2) It’s easier to focus if you have someone else administer the game/test, or administer it to someone else, at least the first time (but you can do it yourself if you like). Watchword depends on maintaining a relaxed attitude for entirely free association and that’s hard to do while you’re reading directions and surfing from page to page.
------3) This will take 30 minutes or so the first time.

So read this first:

START by downloading the blank Watchword Matrix, which you can print out in Landscape format to fill out

THEN download the sequence of the game
which you can print out or just look at online.

THEN follow these directions

“Try to clear your mind of any current preoccupations. Close your eyes and focus gently on the sensations of breathing slowly in and out. Relax any obvious tensions in your body, adjusting your position if necessary. Try to forget what you are about to do.

When you feel ready, take a copy of the Blank Matrix Form and proceed as follows:

Step 1 Place the form horizontally and write eight different words, from left to right, in the boxes along the top of the sheet. You may write any words at all - just the first words that come into your head. Try not to censor your thoughts in any way and don't spend too long thinking what to write. Also, don't write a sentence or grammatically connected sequence. Simply write eight separate words.

Step 2 Write another eight different words, from left to right, in the boxes along the bottom of the sheet. Do not turn the sheet upside down to do this. Again, just write the first words that come into your mind.

Step 3 Refer to the Sequence of Connections and consider the two words that you have written in boxes 1 and 2. Now think of another word that, in your opinion, somehow connects the two words that you are considering. The connection can be of any kind at all as long as it makes sense to you. Don't worry if another person might not understand the association you make. If you think of more than one connecting word, choose the one that provides the link which, in your opinion, is the most personally meaningful. The word you choose must be different from the two you are considering but it may, if so desired, be the same as a word written elsewhere on the sheet. If you cannot think of a single word that makes an appropriate link, you may use a short phrase instead. Now write the connecting word (phrase) in box 17.

Step 4 Repeat Step 3, using the Sequence of Connections. Do not run ahead of yourself - make sure that each connection is written down before proceeding to the next. Also, once you have written a connecting word, do not change it.”

COMPLETE THE ENTIRE MATRIX BEFORE READING FURTHER, HERE OR AT THE WATCHWORD SITE.

After you complete the matrix, Daniels suggests you consider these questions:
“1. Did you feel that, as you progressed through the exercise, you seemed to be tapping deeper and more psychologically meaningful layers of thought?
2. Do the eleven words that appear within the rectangular outline seem in any way significant to you, perhaps when understood as metaphors or symbols?
3. Do the central three words in particular seem to encapsulate or symbolize something very basic about your personality or present situation?”

STOP TO CONSIDER THIS AND ASK YOURSELF IF THESE WORDS MAKE YOU THINK OF A PARTICULAR SITUATION OR ASPECT OF YOUR LIFE.

NOW INTERPRET YOUR WATCHWORD KEYWORDS

Daniels’ site, as I said, emphasizes using Watchword to ascertain your personality type. But my students and I enjoy it more as something like a Tarot reading. Daniels believes that the inevitable emergence of complexes in word-association tests, coupled with our archetypal associations with directions (up and down, left and right, inner and outer), lead us to fill in the Matrix in ways that reflect our self-assessments, aspirations, and fears according to the system you find under “Watchword Keys”

Each of the keys has a sort of Lord-of-the-Rings-ish archetypal designation, suggesting its function. You can see that they match up with the eleven boxes in the inner box of the matrix, and Daniels suggests you look at them in this order:

31 Giant – Driving forces
32 Dwarf - Inertial tendencies
29 Soul – Basic inner personality
30 Persona – Basic outer personality
25 Guide – Higher self
26 Imago – Ego-ideals
27 Shadow – Repressed material
28 Spectre – Anxieties and fears
33 Station – Sense of basic selfhood
34 Battle – Personal quest
35 Destiny – Realized self

Check his explanations for quite a bit more on each of the Watchword Keys. You can also see an example of a Watchword self-analysis at: http://www.mdani.demon.co.uk/wword/example.htm
But my students have mostly enjoyed just seeing how their own Keywords match up with Daniels’ designations and ideas, and sometimes the results are a little uncanny.
If you want to know more about Watchword, you can buy the ebook.

If you want to, you can reply to this Day with your eleven keywords for a symbolic Watchword self-portrait. Then we can all consult the list ourselves and know all your secrets.

Ellenberger

Henri Ellenberger, The Discovery of the Unconscious
53-74 Gassner and Mesmer. Enlightenment rationalism emerging in challenge to Gassner's "preternaturalist" explanation of "possession"; Mesmer's "rational"explanation of "animal magnetism." Mesmer's obscure involvement in politics 1785-1815. The notion that slave rebellion and thus Haitian independence were inspired by a mesmeric fad.
(Curiously, I dreamt of Haiti last night before reading about this this morning:
I am sitting in on a class at the Corcoran. The instructor doesn't know I'm also an instructor, and I'm appalled by her behavior: She keeps the class waiting while she finishes a personal phone during class time; she seems unsure and unconcerned about requirements and due dates; she seems to have a superficial grasp of her subject. Cory Hixson, Bob Devers, and Richard Wilkerson are sitting there, too, and all sort of acknowledge this isn't good but also "what can you do?" The instructor switches on a television for us to watch a video. On the screen I see a report about poverty, hunger, and political unrest in Haiti. There is an image of a kind of sculpture: a wooden board that has a largish metal bomb mounted on it pointing downwards, a bullet-shaped bomb with a tail, like a cartoon bomb dropped by a plane, very rusty, surmounted by a smaller bomb of the same shape, also pointing downwards. Mounted above the bomb are some leaves and vines, other things like twine, making a pattern that suggests a loincloth, like the bombs represent a cache-sexe holding a very large penis. The title is "Il met son front sur le fronton," and I understand that this means that the sculpture is a daring political joke about the military dictator, who has a phallic idea of power.
BTW, I immediately associate the loincloth with watching Walkabout last night, and the dictator (partly through the leaves and vines) with Bush, and my feeling that he is all balls, all nerve, with nothing else to back it up.
After I wake up, I don't know what the French phrase means. I have to look it up to get the sense it could mean "He puts his face (forehead) on a monument."
77-101 German Romantics - Clemens Brentano's book of the visions of Katharina Emmerich - The Seeress of Prevorst (von Eschenmayer?) - Kerner's inkblots (which could be a key precursor of the uncanny use of photography) - spiritualism - Bernheim against Charcot
Chapter 3 110-174 Multiple personalities, doubles (dipsychism)
Chapter 4 The philosophical and ideological background

The point of this is to depict the growth of cinema and psychoanalysis not just as coincident and changing the cultural conception and place of images in similar and related ways, but to see both as growing out of changing assumptions in the previous centuries--about the nature of perception, imagination, ansd representation--and particularly to emphasize the contribution of "fringe" phenomena - hypnotism, spiritualism, secret societies, esoteric knowledge, the faddish ideas both Freud and Jung took up - as a kind of popular avant-garde in signifying and even bring about change.
(It's just because of the failure to recognize the significance of such movements that liberal democrats and academics failed to understand the power of Christian fundamentalism, or that a fathead like Fukuyama was able to declare history done with even as Islamic fundamentalism was gathering momentum. The issue is a continuing profound inability to appreciate the role of the irrational in political and cultural life, and thus to understand cultural change in terms of the role of the unconscious. What is usually done is [still] hand-wringing over reason confronting unreason, as if one side were more reasonable than the other, as if one side was not subject to unconscious motivation, as if [with Freud] the id could be replaced by ego.)
As with politics and culture generally, a real appreciation of the unconscious changes understanding of the nature of cinema fundamentally, and not according to the specious models of Metz, Baudry, or Eberwein.

I'm Marrying Lana Turner

I'm marrying Lana Turner as some kind of publicity stunt, as part of her planned comeback. The wedding is going to also be a press conference, but it's on the stage of a high-school auditorium, which makes it sems chintzy. It seems the reason they want me to marry Lana Turner is that I'm big and strong and this will somehow make her look good. (Lana Turner is wearing a modish white dress and a white turban.) It goes without saying that I see this marriage as a practical arrangement; it'll be nice to be rich, but mostly I'm doing it to help her out, because they asked me to. The thing is, I'm already married, to some other Hollywood star, and I can't remember the details so it'll be difficult to find the papers etc and find out if I'm still married to her; it sems like it was a long time ago, like as long as as from now back to the '40s, when my first wife's films appeared. At this point, it seems, as it didn't before, very much like an old movie. Still in color, though.

Special Pleading

I'm thinking about the rhetoric (the spin, really, the marketing) among artists and critics. The declaration that art is "conceptual" usually means that it is just that kind of art not likely to engender new concepts.

I dream about . . .

Sitting in a Metro car--which doesn't seem to be moving. Someone, I don't know who, is sitting to my right; the two people in front are turned around to talk to us. They're a young, college-ageish couple; the girl is like the ingenue in a European movie, although she speaks unnacented English, the boy is blond with fair skin. She's telling us that she's noticed that since he's Jewish, his skin is sticky, she always has to wash her hands after touching him. This is clearly intended to embarrass him. He looks perplexed. I'm surprised he's Jewish, and also surprised that she apparently doesn't know that I am. I say, "You know, we're not so much sticky as greasy."

* * * * * *

An open-air tent in which some kind of catered lunch is being served. Each tent holds about eight people. The caterers come to each tent and describe the choices, but only half the people in the tent can hear. It's like ordering in a restaurant in which there's no printed menu, the waiter has to tell you everything verbally, and only half the table can hear at a time. Then the caterers have to go back and get the sandwiches etc. for the first four people before serving the rest. It takes forever and we feel we can't talk until they're done or we'll miss the part where they tell us what's available. When they come back, I'm extremely irritated but try to just hang on and listen carefully to what's offered, but before they can start, one of the people from the first half asks if he can get a beer, and the caterer regards him with suspicion and asks him to stand up. He won't. I can see from my angle that he has a beer behind him (some bad American beer in a can); he's trying to get an extra beer. I am supposed to understand that the caterers think that's why there's this complicated, difficult, frustrating system: because the customers break the rules, hoard stuff, like sneaking stuff off from the buffet to take home.

What I Do All Day, It Seems

From the IASD group on Dreams, Creativity and the Arts:

I mostly haven't answered on this stuff, because I'm not sure what Juan is asking about. I have a feeling that this has something to do with the fact that Juan is asking a question from the standpoint of critical scholarship on the analysis of film, while most of the users of this list are practicing artists. If critical theory bores you, p l e a s e skip this message.
Another issue may be that Juan is, I think, in South America, where the critical discourse in humanities scholarship has a very powerful influence from Lacan, whereas in the United States, while that influence has been very significant in film theory, it has also much abated in recent years. I also hesitate to start recommending books etc. when I have no idea whether Juan is already thoroughly familiar with them. I can't tell whether he is starting out in this topic or already steeped in it.
Juan speaks of the interpretations of psychoanalysts, and that can mean a lot of things. I suspect he means the interpretations offered by psychoanalytically-oriented critics of fictional dreams in artworks, and of the artworks themselves as wholes. In South America particularly, these are likely to be the statements of Lacanians, which may be very different from what a traditional Freudian would say--and on top of that there's the fact that it is entirely legitimate and may even be clarifying to refer to Jungians and objects-relations therapists as "psychoanalysts," as it is not a proprietary term.
As for actual psychoanalysts' interpretations of actual dreams, most of us simply have no experience of them at all--very few people inthe United States see a psychoanalyst, and you are much more likely to encounter a Jungian than a Freudian, and almost never encounter a Lacanian, whereas there are many Lacanians in practice in Central and South America. I wonder if what Juan means by psychoanalytic interpretations, then, are those offered in books, and especially by Freud himself. I have been considering the relation between psychoanalytic theory, dreaming, and film for a long time now, and I have almost never encountered anyone who uses, or feels content with, the projection of any orthodox psychoanalytic theory on to real people's actual dreams. I think there is a consensus among therapists in the US that into the 1960s, the use of dreams in classic Freudian therapy was a means to convert the analysand to the Freudian system rather than a helpful means of addressing the analysand's issues, and thus dream analysis was to a large extent abandoned in actual psychoanalytic practice.
The use of psychoanalytic theory as a tool to explore a fictional dream--as Juan says, either a dream sequence, or an entire film or novel that structures or portrays itself as a dream--is almost always, in something like the same way, simply a use of the artwork as rhetorical support (illegitimately, pretty obviously) for a concept in psychoanalytic theory. A good example is Zizek's use of Hitchcock movies to make a claim for Lacan's theories; I'm not sure even Zizek would insist that they teach us something about the films and how they work, as opposed to making clever illustrations of theoretical points which are actually about the culture that produces and consumes films, rather than the films themselves.
Again, I'm only guessing and I'm not sure what he is asking about, but academic film theory in the United States, Europe, and I suspect elsewhere, has been very much influenced by two authors, Christian Metz and Jean-Louis Baudry, who take a very narrowly Freudian/Lacanian approach to art. What is interesting is that they do not offer "interpretations" of fictional dreams, or films, at all; they offer a whole view of cinema that is based on Freud's dream theory. I'm kind of partisan about this, but I certainly think many, many film theorists would agree with me: the application of Freud's theory of dreams to art has been very misguided, and Metz and Baudry, though influential, are just wrong in a variety of ways. (For example, they are mistaken about the empirically verifiable responses cinema audiences have to being in a darkened theater--as Freud is mistaken about patterns of dreaming.) The classic objections to Metz and Baudry are in Noel Carroll's book, Mystifying Movies. Another book very much influenced by them is Roger Eberwein's Film and the Dream Screen, a fascinating curiosity which summarizes a lot of psychoanalytic theory about film, and which I also happen to think is very mistaken. I emphasize though that Eberwein does not offer "interpretations" of either dreams or films; he writes about the phenomenon of cinema.
My feeling is that Juan wants to explore further the phenomenology of dreams, but I am not sure what exactly, in his view, this has to do with the phenomenology of cinema. For what is "dreamlike" in cinema, generally, the first classic statement was by Suzanne Langer in "Feeling and Form," but it's pretty rudimentary. Filmmakers like Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage have written about how their work tries to approximate or learn from the dream state; Parker Tyler's writings on experimental cinema are very smart about the same topic. Gaston Bachelard's book, "The Poetics of Reverie," is a good guide; as is, as Richard W. might have mentioned, Bert States' book, The Rhetoric of Dreams. (Richard, by the way, put together a formidable introduction to a lot of relevant matters at the Postmodern Dreaming site.) I think Gestalt psychology and object-relations theory still have a whole lot to teach us about what happens when we experience a film and enter a state much like dreaming, reverie, or fantasy (and understanding this better might undermine a tremendous amount of sloppy politically or morally-oriented criticism). I do not know ifJuan has mentioned or is familiar with Medard Boss and existential psychiatry's view of dreaming; George Devereux kind of applies it toGreek tragedy in "Dreams and Greek Tragedy," and more centrally, Ludwig Binswanger does in "Dream and Existence." Finally, Michel Foucault's introduction to Binswanger, "Dream, Imagination, andExistence," is something I think Juan would enjoy if he's not already thoroughly familar with it. I apologize if I am rehearsing material that is already familiar.
By the way: I also think Wittgenstein's criticism of Freud's theory is very much to the point, and his general comments on Freud are witty and insightful. Interestingly, Jung's criticisms of Freud are very similar to Wittgenstein's. I think people may overlook this because they do not expect Jung to so rational.
And I think Mario Levrero has not been translated into English.
Bernard

Phrases I Haven't Had a Chance to Use Yet

"Mr. Ed, founded on a conceit worthy of Gogol . . ."

Winsor McCay

We decided this morning to shift some sessions around at the IASD conference in Sonoma in June and I won't do the paper on Dead of Night, etc. after all, though it's still the basic idea for a chapter in a book, and I might do it in Lincoln UK in September. Instead we're moving my Winsor McCay talk into that session. I don't think I posted my proposal for it here:

Winsor McCay: An American Artist in Slumberland

Winsor McCay (1867-1934) created not one but two of the most influential of all instances of dream art: Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend and Little Nemo in Slumberland, which ran concurrently in American newspapers from approximately 1903 to 1914. Their astonishing and often radically anti-authoritarian celebration of the bizarre and grotesque, barely masking violent and sexual material beneath the surface, reflects the same cultural concerns we see in the contemporary rise of psychoanalysis and rapid growth of cinema as a popular art form. In this presentation, participants will analyze and discuss selected McCay strips to isolate the key stylistic features and psychological concerns characteristic of McCay’s cartoons and thus of his distinctive stance as an under-recognized American artist. For this purpose, we’ll focus on Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend: each strip economically represents a single nightmare, so a dominant metaphor, anxiety, or theme may be identified in each one. On the basis of our analysis of these two influential strips, we’ll consider McCay’s early contributions to the American animated cartoon tradition, arguing one significant thesis: the comic cartoon tradition built on inspiration from McCay’s early work in taking mutability as its defining convention and metamorphosis as its outstanding trope. Although mutability of image seems an inherently available feature of animated drawing, the realist tradition rejected it, while cartoonists like Max Fleischer (Betty Boop) and Chuck Jones (Bugs Bunny) took up the example of McCay’s authentic dream aesthetic.

So what I'll work on in St. Mary's while teaching the class May 14-June 1 is the chapter I have to do for the book on dreams and education, the McCay talk, which I'll supplement with work at the LoC when I get back, and randomly revising old poems.

Introducing Sandy Belle

It takes a minute for it to kick in.

I dream about . . .

A bust of Dvorak that talks and has really exaggerated facial expressions. It's in the same place as the statue of Dvorak in Prague, in front of the Rudolfinium, right by the river bank. Dvorak's head, or bust, is talking to me but also a crowd of onlookers, like he's partly a crazy person, partly a guy who does a spiel as street entertainment. He gets a queasy look on his face--his skin is like gray-green metal--and he says, "I don't feel so good."

This is a bit like the talking busts and portraits in the Disneyland Haunted Mansion. I was very disappointed to hear last week that the Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean Rides were updated to shill for the movies.

My body is a temple. As a matter of fact, it was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD.

I Go Shopping

"Like it? I couldn't love that shirt more if it had a dick."

"What is this shit? Linen?"

"Can I show you something in men's underwear?"
Alternatively:
"Men's underwear is half off today."

Art said in the car this morning--after I subjected him to a monologue on my planned courses for the next two years--that my business card should list my specialties:

the dreamy, the spooky, and the sexy

"Spring, Your Magic Spell is Everywhere"

This sentence appears in today's New York Times:


In the fall, the genitalia will disappear, only to reappear next spring.


In the article "In Ducks, War of the Sexes Plays Out in the Evolution of Genitalia" by Carl Zimmer

The Emptiness of Dreaming

Last night I got an email asking if I could propose another 20-minute presentation for the IASD conference in Sonoma because someone had dropped out, and I realized pretty quickly I wanted to do this:

The Emptiness of Dreaming: Transcendental Fantasy in Three Films

The use of the dream plot or dream sequence in cinema in the manner of a Zen koan, to subvert the prevailing assumptions of realism, arouses intense anxiety even as it induces an experience that transcends rational understanding, as exemplified in three films: Luis Bunuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001), and the British anthology film Dead of Night (1945).

Images from Discreet Charm, Dead of Night, and Waking Life. Below them is the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, who said he awoke from a dream in which he was a butterfly and asked, "Am I Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi?"

Strange but True

This beautiful lake, which for years has had a reputation as one of Maryland's most popular outdoor cruising sites for men looking for sex with other men, is called Lake Needwood.

Panopticism

Doing 1984 in class, which I always think people overlook as a really great novel because it's so widely read at such a young age--and because it doesn't appear experimental in form. In graduate school, I used to enjoy discussions of why Orwell's literary reputation was subordinated to that of Joyce or Woolf.

This line from Foucault shows especially well the relevance of his analysis of panopticism to Orwell's telescreen:
By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. . . .


From Foucault, Panopticism, in Discipline and Punish
(I've placed in bold what I want to ask students to comment on in class)

This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre and periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every possible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down for each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted way even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline brings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, bodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different truth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetration of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were put on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his 'true' name, his 'true' place, his 'true' body, his 'true' disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of 'contagions', of the plague, of rebellions, crimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder. . . .

Hence the major effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architectural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a power situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should be visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, so that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions that intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a half-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without ever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen.

It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle not so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individuals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign's surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, disequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his family, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those anonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvellous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power.
A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not necessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regulations. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old 'houses of security', with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geometry of a 'house of certainty'. The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends to the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation and which is always decided in advance. . . .


It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients, to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in relation to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used. It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable 'to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or commanded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection' (Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is because it has many different functions to fulfil - safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour and instruction).

In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise of power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength is that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives 'power of mind over mind'. The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtaining from power 'in hitherto unexampled quantity', 'a great and new instrument of government . . .; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institution it may be thought proper to apply it to' (Bentham, 66). . . .

There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade, the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the formation of what might be called in general the disciplinary society. . . .

But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only the most visible aspect of various, more profound processes.
1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed populations, to avoid the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals. Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable the army to exist, not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase in its forces; discipline increases the skill of each individual, coordinates these skills, accelerates movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, increases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the workshop, while remaining a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a moral influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. When, in the seventeenth century, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up their children left them 'in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are unable to communicate a sound upbringing that they themselves never had'; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, larceny, brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready to stir up public disorder and 'virtually to exhaust the funds of the Hotel-Dieu' (Demia, 60-61). Now, at the beginning of the Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to 'fortify', to 'develop the body', to prepare the child 'for a future in some mechanical work', to give him 'an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits' (Talleyrand's Report to the Constituent Assembly, lo September 1791, quoted by Leon, 106). The disciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most important, most central and most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production,~the transmission of knowledge, the diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary institutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses.

2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms have a certain tendency to become 'de-institutionalized', to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a 'free' state; the massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a role of external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it possible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories that penetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and question the neighbours, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to find out whether they know their catechism and the prayers, whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children, how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrangements are; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or the provision of additional beds (Demia, 39-40). Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of as a base for the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and so disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert to any endemic or epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed ,of the sanitary state of the region.

One also sees the spread of disciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation disseminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long played this role of 'disciplining' the population. From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their aims were religious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against discontent or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example the regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and the members of the associations divided themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas regularly. 'They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming house, public scandals, blasphemy, impiety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.' They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the information to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments, knowledge of a trade, morality (and 'whether they have not fallen into poverty through their own fault'); lastly, 'one must learn by skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there is peace between them and their neighbours, whether they are careful to bring up their children in the fear of God . . . whether they do not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and with them, whether they do not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their marriage certificate'. . . .

What is now imposed on penal justice as its point of application, its 'useful' object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body of the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The extreme point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite segmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest criminal, whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with the ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement that strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under 'observation' is a natural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it surprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons?

My own notes on this may be stupid but:

Note 1:
It’s a funny thing that Foucault doesn’t seem to relate this panopticism to European believers’ ideas of God—especially the “disindividualization” of “the seeing/being seen dyad.” Indeed, the idea of God is partly due to the capacity, the necessity, of imagining the separation of being seen from seeing, of abstracting vision into the concept of the all-seeing (which Freud would attribute to Oedipalism). That is, Europeans always experienced this panopticism in their worldview to some important extent; the panopticon just realized it in technical form. To allocate to the state powers imagined previously to belong only to God is just the point of not only panopticism, but also sorts of technical enhancements of power; and the fact that the power is imaginary in the case of God and real in the case of the state is a mere detail.
It is exactly the same issue in Baudrillard, it always seems to me: French post-structuralists appear to imagine this pre-modern world in a fundamentally different way than people must actually have experienced, because they leave out of their accounts central features of the belief system. I’m not the first person to say it, but what Baudrillard is known for addressing mostly sounds to me like magic and myth described by someone who is unaware of how significant they are in any culture.

Note 2:
Foucault is talking about the change from “the discipline-blockade” to the “discipline-mechanism” as an historical change. But like any historical change, it is just a result of different material circumstances. It is a breath-taking irony of history that just as we are expressing our concern about the discipline-mechanism in developed countries like the US (the controversies over surveillance speciously justified by “the war on terror”), the spectacularly ineffective discipline-blockade approach is urged in Israel, US borders, and now Iraq. The discipline-blockade responds to an insoluble problem of control in a supposedly practical way—as Foucault says, the segregation of populations or prisoners is the most fundamental discipline-blockade—but it’s obvious that it derives from a kind of primitive symbolism and wishful thinking rather than practical consideration of the calculus of benefits and consequences.

Freaking Out

I almost never get into that paranoid state of mind that reads coincidence as meaningful, but I had a very weird moment when I learned that Freud's Interpretation of Dreams was published on November 4--my birthday.

A Social Theory of Violence Looks Beyond the Shooter

The most pertinent--probably the only really relevant--thing I've seen in a newspaper on violence since the Virginia Tech shootings.
I have to try to find out more about Black.

I Dream About My Hair

I am in some kitchen when I realize my hair feels long and straight. I go look in a bathroom mirror and it has the same texture as now, coarse and thick, but it's long and black now, and cut in front with bangs. My face gets thinner, too, and looks drawn and thin. I think this makes me look like Frankenstein's monster or someone from the French revolution.

Wild Strawberries

This will appear in the next issue of DreamTime, the membership journal of the International Association for the Study of Dreams:

Most serious film critics who attempt to sort out relation of dreaming to cinema start with an obvious distinction, inferred from the conventions of the fiction films they study: There are films that are relevant because of their celebrated or notable dream sequences, like Hitchcock’s Spellbound or Vertigo, and films structured as dream visions, like The Wizard of Oz, or Richard Linklater’s underrated metaphysical fantasy, Waking Life. The latter is an ancient form, with a history in many media, and a tradition of critical interpretation as allegory, supernatural revelation, or philosophical statement on the nature of being in the world; the former is usually approached in the terms of twentieth-century psychology—especially Freudian—as a mystery to be decoded for clues to the dreaming character’s state of mind.

Very rarely does a film transcend this useful distinction and treat dreaming both as a device to present a glimpse into a character’s psychological state and as a means of elevating cinema to the condition of spiritual quest—considering, like the great artistic dream journeys of the past, the existential questions of authentic being, full engagement with the human world, and confrontation with one’s own developing and incomplete identity. Certainly no other film has integrated these two approaches to the cinematic use of dreaming with such consummate artistry as does the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman in Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957), a kind of modern Pilgrim’s Progress, but executed with the complex understanding of character of the dramas of Ibsen or Strindberg.

One of Bergman’s greatest insights was to recognize that the transcendent aspects of life—the sources of the religious experience he so often made his subject—could be addressed in film not through stylized attempts to depict the supernatural but by bringing the audience progressively further into a single character’s mind. The game of chess played with Death himself in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957) remains justly famous, but largely through parody of its heavy-handed symbolism. By contrast, Wild Strawberries achieves profound impact in a scene in which a character simply recites a poem about finding God in nature, while dining in the open air.

The plot of the film, too, is simple—Isak Borg makes the long car trip to the university town of Lund to be honored for his life’s work as a doctor. Accompanying him is his daughter-in-law, who’s estranged from her husband, and along the way they encounter characters who all raise variants on the same question: Has Isak lived so cerebrally, so rigidly adhering to his own code of rectitude, than he has failed to experience the real humanity in himself and others? The incidents are mirrors that reflect his own failings to himself, though sometimes they comfort him with knowledge of the good he has done.

Yet Isak Borg is a character who lives as much in dreams, fantasies and reveries as in his present reality. His day begins with one of the most famous dreams in film history, loaded with symbolism of clocks, coffins, and empty streets that many critics have labeled “Freudian,” though Bergman himself has only hinted that it is an homage to the German expressionist films that impressed and disturbed him in his youth. It is—not to spoil the experience for readers who haven’t seen the film yet—a classic confrontation with mortality. The dream disturbs Isak enough that he determines to drive all the way to Lund instead of flying, the film’s first indication that its theme will be Isak’s growing awareness that he must accept rather than avoid life.
His second dream comes during a rest stop, as he wants to show his daughter-in-law the house where he spent summers as a child. This seems a kind of reverie, exactly recapitulating scenes from his early years, concerned with the petty jealousies and infidelities of adolescence, especially his unsuccessful pursuit of his cousin Sara, who ultimately prefers his more playful and lively brother.

His third dream, as he sleeps in the car while his daughter-in-law drives, returns to the theme, beginning with a fantasied conversation with the young Sara in which she explains just why she rejected him, and ending with a scene—remembered or imagined—of his wife’s adultery some years later. The intervening scene is another great exercise in convincing dream symbolism, an extraordinary achievement of capturing the real feel of a dream: Isak is required to take an unexpected examination, in an unknown language, in which he seems to fail completely in the elementary skills required of a doctor.

Two points become very clear as one examines these dreams: First, the tendency of the mainstream of American film criticism, from the intellectual establishment of the 1950s to recent post-structuralist theories, to ground all consideration of symbolism in Freudian terms seems especially misguided and inadequate here. All of Borg’s dreams so vividly illustrate Jung’s concept of compensation—that the content of the dream compensates for an unbalanced view of self and life in waking existence—that they might be used as textbook examples. Second, the complaint made by a few critics (and more viewers) that Isak’s dreams are haphazard, aimless interruptions of the narrative manifestly misreads the real structure of the film. Bergman—the writer as well as director—clearly considers carefully the different nature of each of Isak’s extended side-journeys into the subjective view. Though a Jungian reading of Wild Strawberries is convincingly neat, the Swedish director is after something larger. By emphasizing not only dream, but memory and fantasy, he goes beyond the illustration of concepts established in depth psychology, and subtly influences the audience’s ideas about the capacities of cinema itself. (Considering that his career as a screenwriter and director stretches from 1943 to the present—more than half the history of the artform—at least in hindsight he ought to qualify almost uniquely to do so.)

There are many tantalizing themes to take up in Wild Strawberries: the tension in Protestant theology, and this in western ethics, between the value of works and faith; the two characters named Sara, who appear in Isak’s old age as well as his youth, suggesting a notion of the anima or Eternal Feminine at the heart of the film; even the slight hints that Bergman is quite aware of the film’s indebtedness to Dickens’ A Christmas Carol—itself a modern dream vision never fully appreciated by literary criticism. But the uniqueness of this film—consistently appearing on critics’ lists of the ten greatest masterworks of cinema, even as they frequently condescend to its “old-fashioned” and “literary” character—is truly in its structure. In the heyday of documentary realism—which has its own virtues but became a dominating paradigm squeezing out other approaches to film—Bergman took up the most foundational questions of cinema, the ones that require constant reinvestigation, by exploring not technique but representation itself, the relation of cinematic images to lived experience, and he did so, in Wild Strawberries, by showing us the continuity of dream, fantasy, and memory, and how much of our lives may be absorbed in them, and in meaningful subjective experience, in the course of a single day. The most significant function of art, as of dreams, is subversive—to show us that the words we use in the day are inadequate to our real experience, and that we must always remain open to new ways of framing and understanding that experience—new images, new subjective events, that can deepen our limited understanding of the world. Wild Strawberries constitutes its own theory of representation, and whatever else we find it, it teaches us something just be holding that our accustomed account of the relation of the individual to the world, and of the nature of perception and memory, is inadequate to our lives —and this is the most important work that the fictional worlds of cinema can do. Wild Strawberries thus stands as the distinguished forebear of virtually every recent film that challenges the metaphysics of everyday life—Memento, Pi, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and even such as apparently anti-Bergmanesque spectacles as The Matrix.

Wild Strawberries is available on DVD in a beautiful print from Criterion. Extras include a great documentary on Bergman’s life and work by Jorn Donner.

The Dream Body of George W. Bush

This was written at the turn of this year and just published by Elizabeth van Fleet in Spot, a magazine she edited at St. Mary's College of Maryland.

I wake up—I wake up inside the dream, you understand—and I’m in my freshman dorm room, in my bed. It’s a narrow bunk bed; I couldn’t sit up without bumping my head. Sometimes when I got into it, it felt like I was climbing into my coffin. Anyway, I wake up—inside the dream—and my roommate, F---, is just standing there in the semi-dark, turned away from me, in his pajamas. My freshman roommate was a very dorky guy, who wore pajamas and picked his nose right in front of me. He turns slightly toward me and I can see he’s got a hunting knife, a big, scary-looking, slasher-movie kind of knife, like you’d gut a deer with.
Then he smiles down at me and he hasn’t got a knife in his hand anymore. He’s a got this unworldly big hardon tenting his jammies, like a fireplug, thicker than a guy’s dick could possibly be. He rubs it just a little, smiling. Then it’s like there’s a close-up of his face, or maybe he’s leaning in over me, and I see he’s got blood in his mouth, like his gums were bad or he bit his tongue or something, but he’s still smiling, and he’s turned into George W. Bush, like he looks in those pictures from his Texas Air National Guard service, grinning like he knows exactly what I’m thinking.

* * * *

My friend M--- and I are on an assembly line, in chef’s hats and smocks, like Lucy and Ethel, and there are candies coming by, we’re trying to roll them in chocolate but of course they’re coming too fast, so instead of freaking out like Lucy and Ethel in the show we just laugh and laugh like we’re stoned, and the guy in charge comes out like he does in the TV show, only it’s George W. Bush, and he looks at us in disgust. Then he reaches over and takes my friend’s chin, but gently, into his hand, and then he suddenly spits, hard, into my friend’s face, like a cobra spitting venom. And my friend’s head explodes. And then he turns to me and says, “Now you clean this mess up,” and leaves, and I start trying to clean up, and then the assembly line starts again and a coffin comes down the line and I have to drape an American flag over it and salute it as—the assembly line is like as long as a football field now—as it disappears out of sight.

* * * *

The night before my wedding two years ago, I had this strange dream: I’m back in the high-school locker room, and I’m stripping off my football uniform. There are a couple of other guys around doing the same. But beyond, I can see a very brightly lit white space, like a typical Chelsea art gallery, with people standing around. I recognize people I’ve seen on TV: Condoleeza Rice, Dick Cheney, Nancy Pelosi, Antonin Scalia. They’re all holding drinks and laughing. And then I see the guys and girls I knew in high school, the football players and cheerleaders, in typical Manhattan cater-waiter outfits, serving them.
For some reason, even though they can see me, I don’t mind at all walking past them completely naked, just carrying a towel, on my way to the shower. When I enter the shower room, the perspective gets all weird, like in Carrie: there’s only one guy there, but it’s like my field of vision has narrowed so he’s all I see, even though he’s all the way across the room from me. His back is turned, but I can see it’s an older guy, and I figure it’s the coach, who it always seemed to me, was in the showers more than he really ought to be. I mean, nobody thought there was anything funny actually going on, that I know of, but we knew that teachers weren’t really supposed to shower with students, and he always did. Anyway, I have this ominous feeling, like something’s going to happen that I’m going to have to deal with, to make a decision about, to act or fail to act.
I wash, he washes. And nothing happens. It’s not like I want something to happen, but I can’t believe I’m just standing here taking a shower with this guy when it feels like something’s supposed to happen. So finally I say, “Hey.” And the guy turns around. And it’s not the coach, it’s George W. Bush. He’s a lot shorter than I thought, really short, like 5’2”, though he’s got a dick on him like 6 inches soft, and his entire body is hairless, almost like a little boy with a huge cock on him. So he just nods at me, like, “How ya doin’?” and continues to wash. And I can’t stand not knowing what’s on his mind now, and I say, “Are you here for the party?” and he just looks at me, like, “Why would someone like me want to go to a party like that?” So I say, “I haven’t seen you here before. Do you teach here or something?” And again, he looks at me like why would I ask such a stupid question, only he seems more sorry for me than superior. Then I ask, “Are you here for the football game?” and he smiles kind of sadly and says to me, “To tell you the truth, I don’t really pay that much attention to sports.”

* * * *

I dream I’m Colin Powell and I’m standing at attention at some kind of ceremony, in my uniform. I’m saluting and there are flags and a lot of Marines in uniform; I think it’s a funeral at a military cemetery, or maybe a memorial service; I can see Washington-type monument buildings around. And there’s this weird little buzzing noise, really bothering me. It’s a voice, saying something; I can’t hear what it’s saying. I look to my right, and there’s no one standing there. Then I look down and it’s George W. Bush, only he’s the size of a kid, like three feet tall, and he’s got a tiny, buzzy little voice and he’s talking the whole time. I try to tell him quietly to simmer down, just hang on, be quiet while whatever it is is going on. But he starts plucking at my trouser leg, and then he’s pulling at it it, and he pulls my pants down and I get tangled on them and fall on the floor and he’s attacking me, digging into me with sharp fingernails, going for my face. And he’s still the size of a little kid and I’m still Colin Powell, by the way.

* * * *

I don’t know about this, this dream really shook me up. All it is, is we’re sitting in a rowboat, me and this old friend of mine, from home. I can feel the water rocking the boat gently, I can hear the insects and the birds and the fish occasionally breaking the water; I can see the sunlight filtered through low-hanging branches. And we’re fishing, you know, with poles, out of the boat. On the bank of the river, in the sunlight, I can see some guys playing touch football. They have their shirts off, and they look like those pictures you see in an Abercrombie & Fitch store, like they’re just pretending to play football, just pretending to have a good time. And somehow, my friend turns into George W. Bush; he’s looking quiet and intense, like he’s thinking all seriously about something, and then I notice that the base of the pole he’s using is rubbing against his crotch, he’s rubbing himself off against it, and suddenly I’m really anxious, I mean I’m pretty terrified, like what’s gonna happen here. And he doesn’t feel like my friend anymore, but different, like a grownup does, when you’re a kid. And Bush grins at me, but that don’t make me feel any better, and he reaches across me, like to get at the tackle box, but his hand grazes across my crotch, and when the side of his hand brushes across it, I feel that my dick is rock-hard, and that’s when I . . . I mean, if you’d a told me I’d wake up from a dream about George W. Bush with a fresh load in my jockeys, I just don’t know what.

* * * *

I go through this doorway in like an ancient pyramid with Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, guiding me, holding a torch. Before me is a mummy in one of those mummy-container things, and it opens slowly, you know, like in a movie, and standing there inside the thing is . . . Laura Bush. Her skin is like painted porcelain, and she seems as much like a statue as a person. She is beautiful but scary for some reason, and I draw back and look to Lara Croft for help. But now it isn’t Lara Croft there any more, it’s George W. Bush, and he’s wearing a long white Arab-type and one of those little white caps, like a fez, I guess. And then he says this weird thing: “Kneel. Kneel before the goddess of necessity.” He isn’t holding the torch any more, but the room is glowing with light and I realize that the light is coming from within him. I do kneel. “What am I supposed to know?” I ask, because I realize that I can learn a really big secret here. And he says, “When you come right down to it, it isn’t what you do that matters. It’s what you say.”

* * * *

I wake up in a cabin in the woods, and I hear noises, like someone rattling around in the kitchen. I walk down a hall, a carpeted hall, way too long and fancy to be in any cabin, and through a doorway I see that I’m looking into the Oval Office—in the White House, you know? The President is standing, turned away from me; it’s like there’s a stove at the window, and he’s cooking eggs and bacon or something, he’s wearing an apron and humming a little tune, like a TV sitcom theme song. He turns towards me—it’s George W. Bush—waves me over, scoops breakfast onto two plates, and sets them down. I come over and look at the plates and there’s a little dead dog on one and a little boy’s head on the other. And he’s smiling, smiling, and now he looks sort of more like Alfred E. Newman from Mad magazine.

* * * *

I get hired by this creepy old guy to be a male prostitute. I mean, I’ve never had a sexual experience with a guy or felt any desire to, but it makes sense in a way, because the whole scene feels like it isn’t about sex in any normal sense at all, but about a task or ordeal, something distasteful to me I have to go through to prove myself. The guy who hires me is like a parody of sophistication in a bad old movie, wearing a smoking jacket, drinking a glass of white wine, and he has this ridiculous snotty British accent. Anyway, I have to strip and get in bed and wait for him, and when he comes in, he’s a little old man now, wrinkled and bald and squinty, and he’s taken his teeth out. I lie back on the bed and he “services” me, and all I can think about is, is my dick big enough, is it hard enough, is he going to like it, and I’m disgusted, yes, but really I mostly feel like it’s a job interview and I’m anxious about how I’m coming across. Then I’m on top of him and he’s got his thin creepy white arms around me and my cock is in, I guess, his hole and I’m pumping, pumping . . . It doesn’t feel tight, it feels loose and slimy, like I’m fucking into mud, like I’m sinking into a morass. It’s scary and depressing. I stop in a kind of shock and the old guy opens his eyes and looks up at me, and now suddenly, he’s George W. Bush. And he looks up at me, like “Why d’you stop?” but smiling that weird smirk of his and he says, “You’re doin’ a heck of a job, man, a heck of a job.”

* * * *

In this dream I’m running through a futuristic city. I run along some rails way up high, like the rails of an elevated tram line. I run through alleys, I run on empty desert roads, I run through crowds of Asian-looking people in some third-world type marketplace. And at some point, I realize that I’m Tom Cruise and I’m running to save the world from something, I have to get somewhere, I have to stop some catastrophe from happening, some supervillains are going to destroy our way of life. I run out on a pier, and this is the part that really looks like a movie, with edits and everything: I run towards a boat, with a huge flat deck, like a battleship, that is pulling away, and I run toward the end of the pier, and I just keep running, I fly through the air—I’m still Tom Cruise—and I land, gently as a feather on the deck. I’m surrounded by thousands of men in uniform, simple uniforms, chambray shirts and blue pants, and they’re looking toward the sky, gesturing and shouting, full of hope and expectation, transported by their excitement, and I see a form floating down through the sky. There’s no plane or anything, he’s just drifting down as if from heaven, but with a parachute, and he lands on an upper deck, men are stripping his parachute away and he stands revealed to the crowd below, holding his arms up like Rocky, and grinning, full of confidence and vigor, and I see that it’s George W. Bush, looking incredibly virile and youthful, like a guy in a ‘50s war movie. There’s a banner behind him but I can’t see what it says, and this is very frustrating for me, because I feel that, if I just knew what the banner said, I’d know how everything is going to turn out.

Yowl

Little Bears and William James

Walking through the fields outside a really lovely country house. I see bears here and there but they’re small, like cubs, and seem playful, not threatening. They begin to approach, like kittens, looking to play, and we are aware we shouldn’t fool with them too much; it’s not good for the bears to get too accustomed to humans. As we approach the house, the bears want to come in with us, and we have to make sure the doors and windows are secure and they can’t get in. A couple do, though, and we have to catch them and out them outside. As I look at the doorway, I se a few extremely tiny bears—I think I am supposed to call them “pups”—trying to wiggle under the sill; they’re only an inch or two long. I wonder if I’m supposed to step on them and pick them up and fling them away.
It is the house of the philosopher William James—though he’s a very contemporary middle-aged man—and I’m there with Donald and some other people; I don’t know who. I am trying to be a very good guest, but I feel I’m irritating William James and he is just politely tolerating me, which I find very disappointing.

I Overhear One Side of Cell Phone Conversations

"The next thing I know there's this huge pink ass in my face. . . .
All I can see is this huge pink ass. . . .
Yeah, she's really in trouble now . . .
Yeah, she's such a pain in the ass--which I guess is kind of ironic."

Jesus

Every year I forget I'm on the route of a Good Friday procession for a big Hispanic church until it actually arrives. First I hear this lament, like something Carmen Maura would sing in an early Almodovar movie. Then two trucks proceed several dozen marchers; a lot seem to try to dress in red. Then there's a roped-off section. First a number of adolescent children in purple carrying a very large, heavy-looking cross; then people in "Biblical" dress (sheets draped over their heads held in place by cords). Then Jesus surrounded by centurions in red, with realistic plastic helmets and spears. This year they stopped right in front of my house to abuse Jesus, the worst this year that I've seen. They shoved him around, and one of the centurions seemed to knee Jesus in the stomach pretty hard. Then another 40 or 50 people in Biblical dress, and then several hundred people following; it took them almost ten minutes to pass. Most of the time I was looking to kind of see if anybody was banging into my car or destroying my yard.