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.

A Pornographic Christmas Carol

One Christmas Eve, Ebeneezer Splooge is visited by three spirits--The Ghost of People He's Fucked, The Ghost of People He's Fucking Now, and the Ghost of People He's Going to Get Around to Fucking Someday. He learns that he's always been kind of a lousy lay and really needs to work on his technique.

Thoreau

Thoreau's Journal, edited by Lawrence Stapleton in the Dover edition, begins with one of the best comments I ever read on journal-keeping:

We should not endeavor coolly to analyze our thoughts, but, keeping the pen even and parallel with the current, make an accurate transcript of them.

-March 7 1838

Other Thoreau quotes I'm compiling for use in class (from "Walking," "Life Without Principle," "Civil Disobedience"):

A town is saved, not more by the righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more than I would have every acre of earth cultivated.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which the corn grows.

Really to see the sun rise or go down every day, so to relate ourselves to a universal fact, would preserve us sane forever.

All good things are wild and free.


We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.

In proportion as our inward life fails, we go more constantly and desperately to the post office.

The opportunities of living are diminished in proportion as what are called the 'means' are increased.

The ways by which you may get money almost without exception lead downwards.


There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we may obey.

Is democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government?

Can there not be a government in which majorities do not virtually decide right and wrong, but conscience?

Let your life be a counter friction to the machine.

And from Walden:

A stereotyped but unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind.

I wish I'd thought to include that as an epigraph to Mythomania.

And finally:

The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.

This last is much on my mind lately, and the major theme in what it occurs to me to write in fiction and plays.

Fame

This morning I learned (ego-surfing) that a high-school student in North Dakota made it to the state forensics finals performing "I stopped writing poetry . . ."; a student in Florida did the same a couple of years ago and either won or came very close. And that you can order Mythomania at web pages headed "Travel Guides - Florida" and "Acne Treatment Options."

It's hard to say what makes The Host such a great movie--for me, much more of a classic than many cult favorites, especially in horror. Mostly, it's utterly brilliant graphic composition and a great eye for details of character, and character interaction; whoever said it was "a cross between Jaws and Little Miss Sunshine" had it exactly right, except that it's better than either at what each tries so hard to do. It works extremely well as parable without saying something specific about anything like US imperialism, environmental disaster, or the lunacy of bureaucracy.
Actually, add some Italian neo-realism to that: a cross between Jaws, Little Miss Sunshine, and Bicycle Thieves. And some E.T. and Jurassic Park, which now makes me think it's a lot more rooted in Spielberg's parental-responsibility themes than I saw while watching it. Best crowds fleeing monster scenes ever, I think.

I'll probably find I have a lot of random notes on Prague to transcribe soon. A lot are on a kooky idea for a novel, and I may have said enough already about novels I haven't actually gotten to writing. Meanwhile:
I'm enjoying The Coasts of Bohemia by Derek Sayer, not only because he gives a lot of detail on Czech history, but also because I like his ideas about identity, language, and nationhood (they're not congruent, basically). And he says this in the introduction:

From the vantage point of London, or Paris, or New York--or, not so very long ago, Moscow--it is possible to identify history with progress, to ascribe to it providence, directionality, and meaning. It is possible to write modernity in the singular, and to prattle about "the end of history." Such fables are believable precisely so long as the Bohemias of this world are forgotten. Their dislocation is the condition of our coherence. Viewed from Bohemia itself, the modern condition looks somewhat different. It is a chiaroscuro of beauties and terrors, whose colors are invariable more vibrant, and whose depths are much darker, than our anemic narratives of progress are apt to acknowledge. Modernity was never either singular or simple. It was always a "postmodern" polyphony, in which fragile stabilities of location and identity rested on the uncertain vicissitudes of power.

That's very well said, though there's more. And much more significant when you consider it isn't just true of "modernity," but of all cultures and histories: not only do periodic accounts always exclude indigenous peoples, who continue on in the same actual present as the academics and ideologues who consign them to "the past," but for every age, the view of cultural historians remains narrowly focused on the most prestigious voices and views. Who knows what else might have been going on during "the age of Athenian greatness"?
Aside from (kind of) clearing up what all those defenestrations were about, Sayer provides lots of seductive details--as with the Renaissance mural discovered during a renovation project of 1919, depicting
a Talmudic legend in which the youngest of three sons, by refusing to join his brothers in an archery competition in which his father's exhumed corpse is the target, gains the inheritance.
It seems to me that has Lear beat all to hell.

March 7 2007 - Jean Baudrillard Pretends to Believe in the Reality of Death

Shakespeare in Prague II

Rudolf II was also deposed by his brother in 1611 after a reign notable not only for his shift in attitude toward the Jews and his personal interest in Rabbi Loew, but his absorption in religion, mysticism, and alchemy. He is the person who brought the British magicians John Dee and Edward Kelly to Prague. Shakespeare probably wrote The Tempest in 1611; the scenario involves a similar situation and is the only plot of Shakespeare's not traceable to an obvious source. This parallel is probably well-known to scholars of the play but I'm not sure I've ever come across it; at least it hasn't registered till now. What interests me especially is combining this with the theory that Shakespeare received his background on Jews from Jewish Italian Musicians (as in Shakespeare and the Jews). The stuff I've been reading says that the connection of Rabbi Loew with the Golem is a 19th-century invention, a piece of spurious folklore like so much else--although that's an interesting topic in itself, as with Irish, Scottish, and other folklore of the uncanny that turns out to be inventions of modern nationalist revivals.
If I were to do The Dybbuk in a course on the Uncanny, that could be a focusing topic--the functional equivalent of trick photography, say, in artfully manipulating the audience's response so that they feel a connection to the speciously authentic, numinous, or archetypal. It's relevant to The DaVinci Code and contemporary Christian movements like Pentecostalism, too, that use contemporary media to pretend to present something both ancient and "spiritual." This is worthn considering more as a serious topic for the course.
By the way, here's a quote from Stewart Klawans I filed away years ago:
An archetype is merely a cliche as seen by someone who lacks a sense of humor.
That's from his review of The Doors, appropriately enough.

Shakespeare in Prague

The last part of Rudolf II's reign and Rabbi Loew's tenure in Prague coincide with the period in which Shakespeare wrote Macbeth and Hamlet which makes it interesting to think about how the Golem legend would come across in a play like Marlowe's Dr. Faustus--or for that matter, The Merchant of Venice. I always want to see what the flip side looks like in some moral situation that there's been universal agreement about--which is why I've always been interested in retelling the story of Salem with the witches real and malevolent.

This week there's been some passing back and forth of the first chapter of the dream education book for the final (maybe) version of the proposal, and it makes me feel like once I get my notes together, my section should not frighten me too much. After that is drafted, I can track down informants and work in the stuff that comes from interviews. During April, I should spend some time in the Library of Congress researching Winsor McCay for the talk I give at Sonoma in July, which is intended to be an early chapter of the book on dreams and movies.

How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth?

How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? is the title of an article that famously argues that speculation about characters outside of what the fiction tells us is futile in criticism. In Shakespeare it can lead to the bizarre insistence that there is an underlying reality, a true interpretation, to be uncovered. But in theater, that kind of speculation is just the backstory; it's just what actors and directors do need to know to give the characters life.
I usually think how I'd depict something when I read the plays; in fact, it's hard for me not to push students toward my own favored images and stick to soliciting theirs. If I produced Macbeth, I'd make use of the fact that we know Lady Macbeth has had at least one child, though we see and hear nothing of their children in the course of the play (despite the fact that the sons of every other major male character figure in the plot). I'd covey the death of Macbeth's son or children, maybe by setting I,7 by the graveside--the moment Lady Macbeth urges Macbeth to kill Duncan. Then when she says,
I have given suck, and know
How tender 'tis to love the babe that milks me;
I would, while it was smiling in my face,
Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums
And dashed the brains out, had I so sworn as you
Have done to this.

That would covey--in very melodramatic fashion, but the play is full of over-the-top touches, so it's in keeping--the real horror Macbeth feels when he hears this from her.

O Horror!

"O horror, horror, horror! Tongue nor heart
Cannot conceive nor name thee!"
-Macduff

Shakespeare class moves on to Macbeth today. This is where I introduce historical considerations: Does the contemporary audience/reader really need to know anything about who Shakespeare was, what was on his and his contemporaries' minds? I argue that in some cases it immeasurably enriches the play (as when recognizing the religious around ghosts and purgatory, revenge and justice, in Hamlet gives the perspective of a very different worldview and opens the mind to new (because old) ways of conceiving of reality, selfhood, morality. In other cases, it simply offers the play as evidence of an issue of interest to historians and not to theater audiences, or worse, becomes a mere test for licensure in criticism.
Today I do a background talk on the biographical Shakespeare and on what we know of the historical circumstances that affect our understanding of Macbeth: the succession crisis, the Gunpowder Plot, equivocation and the position of Catholics in James I's world (including the role of the papacy and emergence of a concept of a real national church, which, as an editorial in the NY Times today explained, is entirely relevant in the current controversy about the American Episcopal church's ties to worldwide Anglicanism); witchcraft; gender issues "the female body"; original performance conditions; and Nicholas Brooke's great discussion of Macbeth as a baroque play.
Brooke's introduction to the Oxford edition of the play and Marjorie Garber's book Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality are two primary sources for the way I've been thinking about the Uncanny. I've been keeping some notes on what's most important to me. The first thing is to examine and to some extent challenge the fad ion the last 10 or 15 years to base discussions on Freud's one essay on the topic--a really unhealthy effect of the continuing influence of Freud and Lacan in the academy. Even when the ideas are good, it's stultifying to have all discussions go back to some classical, revered source in Freud or Marx or Althuser. There's a lot I don't know about this topic and I will obviously start by going back to Todorov on the Fantastic and getting to know Nicholas Royle and Marina Warner's books; there is probably something in Bakhtin that is relevant. On topics like this the writers are usually more inspiring than the critics, and writers like E. F. Benson and M. R. James--or Lovecraft, I guess, wrote essays on the ghost story and horror that are probably good places to start; so did Henry James, for that matter, but his ideas are always so quirky.
I have been thinking about the stories and books that would matter most to me. I'd probably introduce the topic with scenes from:
R&J, Macbeth, Hamlet
(In R&J, for example, I think of Juliet looking down on Romeo and seeing him as if in his grave--it beings up first of all the idea of the uncanny as an unpredictable surge of perception beyond the presentation of the ordinary senses, and it's important tyo start with such a basic idea in order to demystify it and locate it within theories of how we acquire knowledge of the world. One has to remember that a problem in teaching a course on The uncanny is the number of people likely to believe in the objective existence of supernatural phenomena, as opposed to looking at them as products of our epistemology.)
Romantic poets: Keats, Isabella or the Pot of Basil, or St. Agnes' Eve or one of Byron's eerie poems like Darkness or The Dream. Coleridge, Christabel.
One of the things students won't know--an amazing number of theorists of the postmodern seem to ignore it, too--is how much German Romanticism set the tone for everything that later gets considered self-reflective, disjunctive, uncanny and "postmodern" in art. Schiller on the sublime is more interesting and readable than Kant.
I would think a major emphasis on E. T. A. Hoffman, The Sandman--still a story so weird it's hard to theorize--and on Poe.
Maybe The Manuscript Found at Saragossa, which is ambitious for a class but very enlightening, and maybe recognizably a precursor to some of the fantasy literature they enjoy (as well as to the plot structures of films like Memento or The Matrix that self-consciously play with timelines and levels of reality).
James, The Turn of the Screw along with The Innocents is the best possible opportunity to discuss the conditioning of the sense of the uncanny by the possibilities of the particular medium. Sometimes that movie looks strangely like Days of Heaven in its way of telling the story.
A lot of possibilities: Gogol, Dostoevsky (The Double), Dracula, Borges, Calvino.
The topic makes me want to think about Pirandello, too. The recent film Stranger than Fiction is clearly Pirandellan; I don't know yet if it's any good.
It's an opportunity to think about the whole career of Philip K. Dick as an exemplary author, and especially Ubik or The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, books whose subject really is the experience of the uncanny as an authentic dimension of our experience of the world, which is what I'd like to get at.
But that would have to be severely cut down cause I'd want to give a lot of attention to the uncanny on film, particularly the early influence of the topic, as part of the whole thing of challenging the realist paradigm. Especially:
The Golem
Student of Prague
Vampyr
Dybbuk (It'd be great to finally have a chance to use it in a class)
Cat People
The Uninvited
Ugetsu
Rashomon
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
Total Recall
Ring vs. Ringu
The Box: Twin Peaks, X-Files

Off to Prague on March 10 and I have no idea yet what we'll do there. I'm sure there's some kiind of Golem tour available, and plenty of Kafka tours.
By the way, I showed the Simpsons Golem in class with excerpts from the 1920 German film.

Speaking of the uncanny:
Go over to: Dennis Cooper's blog and scroll down to yesterday, Feb 28, to look at the pictures from Dennis' collaboration with a dance ensemble, Kindertotenlieder, premiered in Brest last night.

Emily Dickinson moment

Dashes, dashes, dashes--it's all about the dashes. A lot of times I feel the most interesting thing about writing is the punctuation--making decisions about how to fit the words together with the non-word elements--I love commas and I love leaving commas out--and there's nothing I love so much as figuring out where verse lines should end, how to finesse a stanza break, how to make a paragraph break cover more distance than it really should--I don't know that there's much poetry I'd still read for content but I can still be amazed at some writers' construction of lines--although I still think the contemporary experimental and avant-garde tend to be actually less interesting in this respect than more conventional verse, when it's really good--I would love to try to explain why stringing observations together with dashes seems to me so interesting and running sentences together with semi-colons seems puerile--if that's the word . . .

and then there's ellipses . . .

I Wrote a Joke Today

The Polish government announced today that, as in the US, sex education programs for teen-agers will emphasize abstinence. They will encourage girls to wait until they're pregnant to have sex.

The Strange Love of Martha Ivers

After hearing about this film for years, I finally ran off on a whim to see it at AFI Saturday. Later that evening, sweating through a really terrible play, I distracted myself by writing notes for an opera libretto for Martha Ivers on my program.
Scene breakdown:
Act I
1. Drawing room. Aunt, O'Neill, Walter - Word of Martha's escape and capture, O'Neill's attempt to ingratiate Water with Aunt. Martha enters and rejects Aunt, appeals to her father's memory.
(The boxcar scene could make a prelude--but in some ways, the set-up is more dramatic without it--the drama depends on Martha before she arrives--and on the invisible presence of her father. What clued me in that there was something great and operatic about the film was the resonance of Electra in Martha's entrance in this scene--so it works better without the conventional, naturalizing introduction in the boxcar. The opera can dispense with the Hollywood interest in the childhood romance in favor of myth and allegory. The thing is to highlight how Martha and her father stand for something repressed that drives capitalism and corrupts it, if that's not too trendy.)
2. Bedroom. Walter and Martha, Sammy enters through window.
What's great in this scene is the erotics of the triangle--Walter's blind loyalty and masochism, Martha's alternation of adult power and adolescent submission (she's a bit like Juliet, as she reads in the text and almost never is played), Sammy's clueless, masculine belief in his own rectitude.
3. The stairs. Aunt, Martha, Walter, then O'Neill (Sammy slipping out).
The darkness is a great opportunity for effects. The role of the cat is a problem. You can see how this is a great set-up for film--though it's actually handled kind of clumsily in the movie.

Act II
1. Sammy's return. Can be set in the car with hitch-hiking sailor, or in the garage--but it's not necessary to show both.
2. Stairs. Sammy and Toni. Lizabeth Scott manages to be both bizarre and uninteresting. Toni has to speak very little and be all about what she doesn't say.
3. Bar, hotel. Sammy and Toni. The bar scene need not be elaborate, it's there to set up the hotel scene. But the exchange of rooms is a nice detail. Again it is cinematic, though: it's set up by the shower each takes. On screen, it's a bit of a waste of time; on stage there ought to be a more economic way to establish their relationship (as based in their both looking for a fresh start, and Sammy's failure to understand Toni's passion) within a couple of brief scenes.
4. Bedroom. Sam, Officers.
5. Office. Sam, Walter, Martha. This way Martha does not appear as adult until about half-way through. This could be nice. The only way to avoid it is to collapse the Toni story, effectively into one scene, establishing first her relation to Sammy, then her violation of probation. Which would work pretty well.
6. Toni, Walter, detective. This is like the scene of Sammy and the detectives--it exists only to advance the plot. Unless it can tie into some other purpose, it'd be nice to collapse it.
7. Bar. Sammy, Toni, "Joe." Moving things along would get to Toni's betrayal sooner. It would be good to get Act II down from seven scenes to four.

Act III
1. Sammy's return. Sammy and Toni. Bus station or bar. Opening Act III this way has nice symmetry with Act II. Sammy's forgiving Toni establishes keynote in their relationship in contrast to Martha, and to Martha and Walter.
2. House or office. Sammy, Walter, Martha. Sammy's besting Walter opens opportunity for an understanding between the. Walter sees everything in terms of conquest and submission; Sammy in terms of a kind of moral code, or honor. Whereas Sammy begins to understand Walter through empathy, Walter adopts an ironic distance--he's already lost the battle and will watch to see how it plays out. (These are probably two of Klein's neurotic positions, if I thought it out.)
3. Hillside. Sammy and Martha. We have to not know whether Sammy is falling for it.
4. Hotel. Sammy and Toni.
5. House. Walter, Sammy, Martha. The real dramatic problem is getting the audience close enough to see what happens between Martha and Walter, then enlarging the perspective to Walter. Maybe it's enough to show him leave, then run back. Then some kind of coda with Toni.

The first thing that occurs to one to cut things down to size is to get rid of Toni, but that doesn't work because her presence motivates major plot points, but also because she provides contrast with Martha. A more interesting idea is to streamline the plot so it's clear Sammy is motivated by her, but cut down her lines so that the audience feels that Martha is a figure of more power and weight.
There must be a ton of gender criticism on this film--although the plot turns on a Freudian point of the damage done to Martha and Walter through repression, and a political one about class, the strange theme that pops up is the choices for women in their relation to men--the punishment of Martha for bucking the system, and of Toni for submitting to it. (The perfect material of melodrama--the inevitability of the sufferings of women.) So you don't want to lose sight of the Big Points--that Martha identifies with her father, not her mother (this also is very Greek, in the argument that Aeschylus makls in the Oresteia), that Martha wants to trade in Walter for Sammy, that Toni wants a husband, or more properly, wants to be a wife. The More that irony can come out, the better.

The Queen II

I'm dropping everything to work on my new screenplay: The Queen II. In the days following the tragic and untimely death of Anna Nicole Smith, a bunch of closety cable news reporters try to cash in on her death by showing tons of pictures of her wiggling her ungodly huge enhanced breasts, thus subtly attempting to validate their pathetic claims to heterosexuality. One solitary queen stands out from the crowd, insisting we should all mourn for Anna Nicole in our private way, with the restraint and dignity she would have wanted. He is, of course, killed and eaten on national television.

I Love Paris

Here is the opening paragraph of Caroline Weber's review from yesterday's NY Times Book Review of a book I hope to read, Andrew Hussey's Paris: The Secret History:

Years ago, while strolling through a Parisian flower market, I was accosted by a man with a posy in his hands and a poem on his lips. “Here are some fruits, some flowers, some leaves and some branches,” he declaimed, quoting the poet Paul Verlaine, “And here is my heart, which beats only for you.” At which the stranger dropped his bouquet, unzipped his pants and presented me with an organ quite different from his heart. In Paris, I reflected as I hurried away, the boundary between lyricism and squalor is as fragile as a rosebud, and as permeable as a man’s fly.

I have Hussey's biography of Guy Debord--which looked to be largely about his drinking--around here somewhere, unread. I wanted to put parts of Society of the Spectacle on my Humanities course reading list this semester, but didn't fit it in; I find that when I need to choose between "theory" and actual facts, sociology, or literature, theory doesn't seem nearly as important.
We are going to Prague in March. But not Paris.

At Hemphill

If you're looking at this at all, you probably already know that Colby Caldwell's show runs til February 24 at Hemphill on 14th St. and that audio files of me reading three poems can be downloaded at:
www.hemphillfinearts.com
You can put them on your iPod as you walk through the gallery--there are supposed to be a couple available at the gallery, too--though I do not suggest listening to them as you work out. They're not exactly upbeat.
"Amnesia: A Memoir" was originally written for a show called "Remembrance of Things Passed" at the Long Beach Museum, at the invitation of Lane Relyea. The reason I thought to make it available for Colby's show is that it's probably the first thing I wrote that went into the themes Colby and I have shared for some time, especially the unreliability of common accounts of memory.
"Songs" was written for a previous show of Colby's, and I guess the reason we both wanted it to be available was that this show is something of a retrospective for Colby.
"How to Survive Your Own Death" is a re-working of material from an old poem I was never that happy with.

Theater of the Absurd

Hollywood, Jan 4, 2007 -- Following the success of Jackass Number Two and Wildboyz, MTV announced plans for a film version of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, featuring Chris Pontius and Steve-O as Vladimir and Estragon, with Johnny Knoxville as Lucky and Bam Margera as The Boy.
Estragon: Nothing happens. Nobody comes, nobody goes, it's awful.
(Vladimir reaches into shorts and pulls out six-foot-long python, waves it in Estragon's face. Estragon leaps back in terror, falls on ground, gathers up handfuls of red fire ants and force-feeds them to Vladimir. And so on.)