Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce

The final paper for Gothic Disturbances class was an argument essay. The way the teacher (I only name teachers on here who I am almost certainly never going to have again to avoid issues of favoritism or some lame finger-pointing game as that, and also for their own privacy...and, if you notice, I have not named teachers with whom I've had problems, only those I toss complimentary remarks about) explained it to class:

Imagine you're at a cocktail party with the author of the work you're using as primary source. Also present are at least one opposing critic of that work and one or two critics who agree with your argument thesis.

Following class I asked the professor if I could take him literally. My friend Sean Kilburn and I have long imagined a barbeque at the end of all things in which only those people worthy to sit at a table and break bread with are invited. So I wanted to set this argument paper at the barbeque... The professor responded with, "Most people I'd say no to about that, but if you think you can pull it off, go for it."

I received the mark of an A++ and commentary that more academic papers should strive for a readable narrative. Even with the flaws I leave showing in this, it's still a damn fine idea manifested in word.


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
April 27, 2009

Kippled Logic in Barbeque Sauce

The entire planet had begun to disintegrate into junk, and to keep the planet habitable for the remaining population the junk had to be hauled away occasionally . . . or, as Buster Friendly liked to declare, Earth would die under a layer—not of radioactive dust—but of kipple. (8:87)

That's not a very cheery note to read at a cook-out, but this is a Phildickian barbeque, and, as Phil Dick reads from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I fill my plate with ribs and sauce, pull a draught of beer, and sit down at the picnic table with Kim Stanley Robinson, Stanisław Lem, and Dr. Sigmund Freud. We eat barbeque ribs. The kipple eats at the corners of our shared reality. We each have a few questions we want to discuss, but don't have long to share this time together.

"Kipple?" Dr. Freud asks.

"A sort of Escalation of Chaos," Kim Stanley tells him, "The First Law of Kipple is 'kipple drives out nonkipple.'" (DADOES)

Phil obliges by flipping the pages of his book, staining the edges with dark red sauce, and continuing our journey into his text with all the fervor of a speed-addled pulp writer.

"Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape. When nobody's around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there's twice as much of it. It always gets more and more." (6:65)

"But what is the etymology of this word, 'kipple'?" Dr. Freud asks.

"There really is none," Stanisław says. "Phil made up this word."

Dr. Freud arches an eyebrow. "How very interesting. Do you often make up words to signify what you intend to say? A replacement for something deeper, perhaps?"

"The way Mercer is a Christ-like character in this novel?" I ask in return.

Phil grumbles at us, "Transcendental despair. Without empathy," Phil tells us, "we would stand detached, spectators, acting out by our indifference John Donne's theorem that 'No man is an island,' but giving that theorem a twist: that which is a mental and moral island is not a man." ("Man, Android & Machine")

"I'm not a peace officer," Rick said. "I'm a bounty hunter." From his opened briefcase he fished out the Voigt-Kampff apparatus, seated himself at a nearby rosewood coffee table, and began to assemble the rather simple polygraphic instruments. [...]
"I'd like to watch," Rachael said, also seating herself. "I've never seen an empathy test being administered. What do those things you have there measure?"
Rick said, "This"—he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires—"measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so—called 'shame' or 'blushing' reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can't be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate." He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. "This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small but detectable movement of—" (4:46)

"Phil, you squander your talent by using these brilliant ideas and inspirations to keep up a game of cops and robbers." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"You're just being a contrarian," I tell Stanisław.

Dr. Freud leans forward over the picnic table, "I would like to hear more about this, Voigt-Kampff apparatus."

"It's named after the German physicist Woldemer Voigt," I tell him, "Known for, among other things, the Voigt profile in spectroscopy—associated with a Doppler broadening. Quite relevant, considering the empathy box and mood organs. I suspect the word 'doppler' is linguistically connected to the doppelgänger which you wrote about." ("Empirical fits")

"No, no, no, young man," Dr. Freud says admonishing me. "Not the same word at all. Doppelgänger means 'double-goer,' while the Doppler effect is named after my fellow Austrian, Christian Doppler. A sound-alike word—a homonym." (OED)

"Hmm," I feel embarrassed, but quickly recover, "Homonym, a sound-alike word. Android, a look-alike human. Interesting connection all the same. And, synchronistically," I add, "I believe Doppler was a professor in Prague when he wrote a number of his theories." (Doppler)

I'm met with mostly blank stares, but Phil's groan indicates he catches the connection between Doppler and the doppelgänger of the Prague Golem. But Phil doesn't comment, only reads another passage from his novel.

The Nexus-6 android types, Rick reflected, surpassed several classes of human specials in terms of intelligence. In other words, androids equipped with the new Nexus-6 brain unit had from a sort of rough, pragmatic, no-nonsense standpoint evolved beyond a major—but inferior—segment of mankind. For better or worse. The servant had in some cases become more adroit than its master. But new scales of achievement, for example the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, had emerged as criteria by which to judge. An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism— (3:30)

"To play the—What's that you called it? Contrarian?—to play the contrarian again," Lem says, "If the androids are programmed with the information that they are human, I cannot see why they are persecuted; if the androids are intended to represent a model of discrimination, such as the Jews under the label of a 'final solution,' then the androids are innocent victims and should not be depicted as insidious creatures, something the novel does in places." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"The androids as Jewish victims, Stanisław?" I say, "I don't see that at all."

"No?" Stanisław asks, with a tone that prods for more from me.

"Still," I finally say, "Voigt-Kampff. With such an austere name such as that, it's easy to see why it could conjure images of fascist goose-steppers in a national socialistic Germany—no offense, Dr. Freud."

Dr. Freud shakes his head and I continue.

"Luba Luft singing before Deckard goes backstage to kill her is certainly reminiscent of the Nazi officers having Jewish performers sing for them before being sent to the showers and ovens. They had no empathy for their victims, and Deckard shows none for Luba Luft."

On the stage Luba Luft sang, and he found himself surprised at the quality of her voice; it rated with that of the best, even that of notables in his collection of historic tapes. The Rosen Association built her well, he had to admit. And again he perceived himself sub specie aeternitatis, the form-destroyer called forth by what he heard and saw here. Perhaps the better she functions, the better a singer she is, the more I am needed. If the androids had remained substandard, like the ancient q-40s made by Derain Associates—there would be no problem and no need of my skill. I wonder when I should do it, he asked himself. As soon as possible, probably. At the end of the rehearsal when she goes to her dressing room. (9:99)

"What follows backstage is a key scene which illustrates that Phil is not writing about politics, he's writing about ontology," Kim Stanley says. (Novels of PKD)

Stanisław comments, "But these reality breakdowns create a confusion between androids as a wronged lower class and as inhuman menace—" ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

"I think Phil deliberately creates this confusion—androids as victim or menace," I tell him, "He always refers to them as 'he' or 'she', never as 'it', thus, leaving the matter ambiguous. The humans in the novel feel alienated to themselves, as well as the world around them, preferring to withdraw into the artificial worlds of the Penfield Mood Organ, the empathy box, and the false religion of Mercerism. They don't—and seemingly don't want to—interact with the 'real' world."

"And why do you think that is?" Dr. Freud asks.

"Because the real world involves responsibility and emotional feeling."

"Ah, but isn't that too simple a formulae?"

Kim Stanley offers more clarification than I do, "The more contradictions there are in the androids, the more the novel succeeds in unravelling our easy biological definition of humanity, replacing it with a difficult spiritual and moral definition. Phil gives us two oppositions—Human/Android and Human/Inhuman." (Novels of PKD)

A pause and then Harry Bryant's face appeared on the vidscreen. "What's doing?" he asked Rick.
"Some trouble," Rick said. "One of those on Dave's list managed to call in and get a so-called patrolman out here. I can't seem to prove to him who I am; he says he knows all the about hunters in the department and he's never heard of me." He added, "He hasn't heard of you either."
Bryant said, "Let me talk to him."
"Inspector Bryant wants to talk to you." Rick held out the vidphone receiver. The harness bull ceased questioning Miss Luft and came over to take it.
"Officer Crams," the harness bull said briskly. A pause. "Hello?" He listened, said hello several times more, waited, then turned to Rick. "There's nobody on the line. And nobody on the screen." He pointed to the vidphone screen and Rick saw nothing on it. (9:107-08)

"Like the superimposing of Herr Freud's heimlich and unheimlich over virtually every theme in the novel—from the casual mention of designer lead codpieces to the twisting of the real and unreal when Deckard is accused of being an android with implanted memories working for a department that doesn't exist by an android working in a police department that doesn't exist," I add, not sure if my theory is true or even if that pretzel-logic even made sense. Nevertheless, what someone reads into the text is, in many ways, just as important as what the author intended to be there. We're all just offering our personal reading of the words Phil strung together for us to follow.

"As the novel begins," Kim Stanley says, " but the action of the narrative first forces the two apart, and then leads us to conclude that the first one is inessential, the second vitally important." (Novels of PKD)

"So by that context," Stanisław grudgingly admits, still not feeling it is so, "The contradictions I mentioned dissolve. You are saying that it is not illogical to think that androids can be at once innocent and malicious, on different levels conscious and unconscious of their own natures." ("SF: A Hopeless Case")

Dr. Freud nods. He makes a rare statement, speaking aloud what I am thinking, "Beings both human and threatening to human society. Much like we all are."

Phil himself mumbles, "What is vitally important is the theme of mystical identification via empathy..." but none of us are listening to him at this point, "When the Deity takes a trashy or even fake form, it says something about man's present, unredeemed state—his ontological condition—not an aspect of his state but is—esse—his condition." (Exegesis)

With his laser tube, Rick systematically burned into blurred ash the book of pictures which he had just a few minutes ago bought Luba. He did the job thoroughly, saying nothing; Phil Resch watched without understanding, his face showing his perplexity.
"You could have kept the book yourself," Resch said, when it had been done. "That cost you—"
"Do you think androids have souls?" Rick interrupted.
Cocking his head on one side, Phil Resch gazed at him in even greater puzzlement. (12:135)

The kipple at the edges of imagination consumes the cook-out of our shared reality. Kim Stanley Robinson and Stanislaw Lem have already disappeared—were they ever here at all?—and Dr. Freud licks the barbeque sauce from his fingers burning away like an drug-induced electric dream.

Before Phil disappears he tosses me his sauce-stained copy of the novel and flashes a cryptic smile. "One day, I'm going to write a book that will reach people outside the science-fiction ghetto. Something more than a recycling of life into a novel..." ("Horselover Fat & the New Messiah")

I look to where the novel has fallen open in front of me.

"No one can win against kipple," he said, "except temporarily and maybe in one spot, like in my apartment I've sort of created a stasis between the pressure of kipple and nonkipple, for the time being. But eventually I'll die or go away, and then the kipple will again take over. It's a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization." (6:65-66)

Many years after Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was written—about the time the film Blade Runner was released—author William Gibson compared Dick's novels to taking a hit of some furious unknown psychotropic drug and spending 48 hours trying to find some way back to Base Reality. ("With a Strange Device")

The Base Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is one in which reassures you that you've made it safely back home, only to reveal, when you open your front door, that home isn't where it was last time you were here.

The recursive layering of the heimlich and unheimlich juxtapose one other to the point that there is no differentiating one from the other, until, reaching some temporary penultimate truth, a static-stasis is reached wherein reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

In the years since this novel was written, what is commonly accepted as the Base Reality has seen environmental destruction and awareness on a scale Dick himself would likely be surprised by; the world's first cloned animal being a sheep named Dolly; our own personal versions of Penfield Mood Organs and Mercer Empathy Boxes in the form of small handheld devices with Phildickian names like iPod and BlackBerry (is it so far-fetched to say these machines control our emotions by their induced sensations and even generate a electronic empathy?); and daily accounts of false reality being perpetrated upon us by the Mercerian façades that are our spiritual and political leaders (sometimes in the same persona) to the point that is is difficult—if not outright impossible—to determine what is reality and what is the simulation of reality.

...he saw the dust and the ruin of the apartment as it lay spreading out everywhere—he heard the kipple coming, the final disorder of all forms, the absence which would win out. (18:212)

Our journey to discover meanings in this novel is akin to an attempt to answer the question posed in its title: "Do androids dream of electric sheep?"

To make that journey of discovery we must first determine who the androids are, what the difference between being an android and being human is, and empirically verify that the sheep in question are indeed electric.

Again, recursively turning back to author William Gibson drug-addled comment, at this point in our post-Androids world, we could all use a strong dose of the PKD drug to shake the scales from our withered eyes. But—alas!—we have a limited supply of that now, while the layers of pseudo-reality—environmental, scientific, religious, pop-cultural, emotional, spiritual, artistic, reflected, and re-reflected—are increasing and unlimited. Our machines become more important than reality and reality becomes less than our machines.

My own journey through this bewildering reality finds me sitting in front of my own empathy box—my scrying mirror that connects me with the world—I sit before my computer and write this. I sit. I write. I wait. Hoping to feel something real.

This is real. These words. Subjectively, anyway. So long as I hit SAVE on my machine; my empathy box. But eventually even this created reality will fall, like Deckard's love for Rachael, into kippled-oblivion of recycled electrons.

•

Bibliography

Dick, Philip K.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey.

—. In Pursuit of Valis:

Selections from the Exegesis.

Underwood-Miller.

—. "Man, Android and Machine."

In Science Fiction at Large,

ed. by Peter Nicholls.

"Doppelgänger." Oxford English Dictionary.
Freud, Sigmund. "Das Unheimliche."
Gibson, William. "With a Strange Device."

In Wing Window (Seattle fanzine).

"Horselover Fat and The New Messiah."

Interview with John Boonstra.
Hartford Advocate.

Lem, Stanisław. "Science Fiction:

A Hopeless Case—With Exceptions."

In Philip K. Dick: Electric Shepherd,
ed. Bruce Gillespie.

Olivero, J.J., R.L. Longbothum.

"Empirical fits to the Voigt line width:
A brief review."

Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy
and Radiative Transfer.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick.

UMI Research Press.

Štoll, Ivan. "Christian Doppler—

Man, Work and Message".

In The Phenomenon of Doppler.
The Czech National University.

· • ·

The Horns of Dilemma

The second in a trio of papers for Gothic Disturbances class.

The night before this was due, I was at someone's house with my then-wife, and, around midnight, I said I had to go since I had this 5-7 page paper due in the morning. "How much have you written so far?" I was asked. "About a paragraph."

I finished it about three hours later and received the highest marks in the class. A fête I would repeat with the third paper in the class. Both the writing it in the last hours of its deadline as well as highest marks. But with the third one, I knew quite well what I would write about. With Orlando, I made it all up as I went along...

I love the way referenes to Phillip José Farmer (via the Donne quote), William Burroughs, and Lou Reed pop up in this.


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
March 24, 2009


The Horns of Dilemma


At the round earth's imagin'd corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scatter'd bodies go;
―John Donne


On Thursday, May 10 (year unknown), when Orlando was in the seventh day of his trance, he dreamed (hallucinated/envisioned) his own demise—

Would that we might here take the pen and write Finis to our work! Would that we might spare the reader what is to come and say to him in so many words, Orlando died and was buried. (133-34)

Like so much in Virginia Woolf's Orlando: A Biography, this death is only an affected circumstance in which the male Orlando metaphorically dies while the female Orlando will rise from the sleeping trace. What Woolf may intended with this analogy is that the male Orlando's death is his trance, and his body is not buried in a grave beneath six feet of earth, but in a bed beneath the sheets.

In directly addressing the reader, Woolf once again breaks the proverbial "third wall" between audience and performers (or, in this case, the author and her readers), which creates a sense of immediacy and an informational tone of conversation, almost like a friend relating a news article they had just heard.

Woolf then invokes her first trinity, which are named for three things which her text ironically obscures to a great extent:

But here, alas, Truth, Candour, and Honesty, the austere Gods who keep watch and ward by the inkpot of the biographer, cry No! Putting their silver trumpets to their lips they demand in one blast, Truth! And again they cry Truth! and sounding yet a third time in concert they peal forth, The Truth and nothing but the Truth! (134)

When she cites Truth, Woolf is calling forth the single most important content of this scene—perhaps the novel—yet a perspective which cannot be subjected to absolute analysis. Truth, in this case, lacks any veracity and is not entirely correct nor accurate. Even so, the truth here could still be seen as something of a troth, a betrothment of Orlando's aspects to each other; an alchemical marriage between him and herself (to mix the pronouns with which we can truthfully describe hir (sic)). And truth, in the case of Orlando, means not only different things at different times, but contradictory things at the same time.

(As we shall see in these examples, the juxtaposition of paradox is commonplace in the world Woolf shows us with the hermaphroditic Orlando.)

Candour is a truthful openness which also means to shine, (this latter definition is quite likely, at this point in the scene, the most intended meaning). Shining an austere light upon this confusing satire is much needed to critically analyze the state of flux Orlando hovers in amidst this cacophonous delirium of his transformation from him to her.

The use of the word Honesty in this context, like the original meaning of the word itself, has more to do with honor than being honest, represents Orlando's sense of worthiness to transcend his gender. So worthy in fact, that in his dream-state, the onset of change is literally heralded by a refrain of silver trumpets blowing forth their tintinnabulation.

But why silver trumpets in particular; why not gold?

Silver trumpets would indicate a certain civility, a certain delicacy that gold does not represent—silver requires more refinement in its smelting process than does gold, and Orlando is, at this point, in a state of refinement, a state of sublimation between being a male in his past and a female in her future.

Woolf continues, with her tongue placed firmly in cheek, to introduce her second trinity, which take the semblance of the Three Graces, or, considering the outcome their appearance has upon Orlando, they could be closely likened to the Moriae of Greek myth.

At which--Heaven be praised! for it affords us a breathing space--the doors gently open, as if a breath of the gentlest and holiest zephyr had wafted them apart, and three figures enter. (134)

They appear very much like the cloaked witches in Shakespeare's Macbeth, although these three Ladies have a very different agenda. They are not here to prophesy, but to obscure, and yet in obfuscation, they act as a Greek chorus does, and tell far more than they disguise.

The three are the Lady of Purity, the Lady of Chastity, and the Lady of Modesty. Each speak over Orlando's sleeping form, and their three speeches are followed by a pealing of trumpets which seem to banish them.

Our Lady of Purity speaks first:
[...] I cover vice and poverty. On all things frail or dark or doubtful, my veil descends. Wherefore, speak not, reveal not. Spare, O spare! (135)

Purity is defined as that which is clean or unsoiled. So the veils of Purity hiding the dark and doubtful are perhaps the only things her nature is capable of hiding. And even as she covers the vice and poverty of the world, the Lady of Purity entreats us not to speak or reveal these things.

But are we not suppose to speak of her actions, or are we not to reveal that it is she who does so? Like so much else in Orlando, we are left with impressions of answers, and the intentional ambiguity which is an integral theme of the work.

As if sensing that the reader—the viewer of this dance of veils—wishes to ask questions of the Lady of Purity's enigmatical comments, Woolf dismisses the first sister and brings on the second.

Here the trumpets peal forth.
'Purity Avaunt! Begone Purity!'
Then Our Lady Chastity speaks:
[...] where my eyes fall, they kill. Rather than let Orlando wake, I will freeze him to the bone. Spare, O spare! (135)

The trumpets peal, she tells us, which is a loud summoning—peal being the shortened form of appeal—and then says "Purity Avaunt!" which, like so much else Woolf shows us in this quandary, means opposite things simultaneously; avaunt being a word that means both "to call forth" and "to send away," which is a paradox that was certainly not lost on Woolf in writing this.

The Lady of Chastity speaks of stones and stars, of dancing and the Alps, of lightning, eyes, and bones. Whereas the Lady of Purity spoke of covering vice and poverty, the Lady of Chastity tells us that she kills all she looks upon, and would rather freeze Orlando's bones rather than let him awaken from his fevered dream.

The connection between chastity and ice is entirely metaphoric—as so much else has been—involving the sexual frigidity of being chaste. Regardless of Orlando's physical experiences of sex, in the moment he is in the depths of his dreaming, Woolf is telling us, completely pure and sexually unsullied. Rather than allow him to awake back into a body that has been—in the eyes of the Lady of Chastity—defiled by sexual desires and encounters, she would just as soon freeze his bones.

But once again, there is a clamor of horns and the Lady of Chastity is banished, bringing forth the third sister.

Here the trumpets peal forth.
'Chastity Avaunt! Begone Chastity!'
Then Our Lady of Modesty speaks, so low that one can hardly hear:
[...] I let my mantle fall. My hair covers my eyes. I do no see. Spare, O spare! (135-36)

Modesty is self-control, a freedom from exaggeration and excesses; moderation and even measures. Sober. And the Lady of Modesty speaks of virginal things, as well as fertile things such as vineyards, flocks of sheep, apples, and fields of ripened fruit. The sort of things that are known to be associated with the very acts that show no modesty—once again displaying the paradox and contradictions contained within this scene and this story.

The Lady of Modesty lets her mantle fall, her long and sleeveless cloak that is wrapped around her. Her hair covers her eyes because, of course, she must be too bashful to even look about the sleeping form of this man (soon-to-be-woman). She too, like her sisters, ends her dialog with the repeated phrase, "Spare, O spare!"

The word spare could mean extra, additional, or even frugal, but in this case it is more likely to be associated with the definition of "to refrain from harming" and "to allow to go free."

Despite the threat of harm the sisters may appear to be harbingers of, none of them will, or, (since they may well be apparitions springing from Orlando's fevered trance) can harm him.

But what they do bring about is a profound and immediately noticeable change in the man.

Again the trumpets peal forth:
'Modesty Avaunt! Begone Modesty!' (136)

With the paradox call of come forth and be gone, the Lady of Modesty has spoken her piece and now, all three sisters begin to dance in unison, performing a sort of pavane around the sleeping form of Orlando.

And, again (a common refrain of our own in this discussion) we can liken an aspect of this scene to previous literature, this time it resembles that of Salomé's Dance of the Seven Veils, which both reveals and occludes the subject it addresses—

With gestures of grief and lamentation the three sisters now join hands and dance slowly, tossing their veils and singing as they go:
'Truth come not out from your horrid den. Hide deeper, fearful Truth. For you flaunt in the brutal gaze of the sun things that were better unknown and undone; you unveil the shameful; the dark you make clear, Hide! Hide! Hide!'
Here they make as if to cover Orlando with their draperies. The trumpets, meanwhile, still blare forth:
'The Truth and nothing but the Truth.'
At this the Sisters try to cast their veils over the mouths of the trumpets so as to muffle them, but in vain, for now all the trumpets blare forth together.
'Horrid Sisters, go!'
The sisters become distracted and wail in unison, still circling and flinging their veils up and down. (136)

They dance, and in singing about concealment, even as the trumpets blare in counterpoint about truth. This conflict shows us the conflict Orlando has concerning his gender, and the difficulties of understanding what is to be done about this.

Truth, in this as in most cases, is not an unchanging law, but something that is variable, circumstantial, and most times, hidden. Truth is something to be unveiled; revealed. Just as Orlando's nature and gender is a hidden truth that must surely be offered for display.

The circling dance of the sisters represents the yonic powers of women, smooth and supple and calm (feminine actions). The trumpets are described as blaring or pealing or blasting (all masculine verbs), and the very musical instrument itself is phallic in its design and appearance.

This is the internal battle raging within Orlando as he sleeps and dreams, until finally—

They retire in haste, waving their draperies over their heads, as if to shut out something that they dare not look upon and close the door behind them.
We are, therefore, now left entirely alone in the room with the sleeping Orlando and the trumpeters. The trumpeters, ranging themselves side by side in order, blow one terrific blast:--
'THE TRUTH!
at which Orlando woke. (137)

With a blast of the trumpets, Orlando's seven-day trance comes to an abrupt end. From the narrative, it would seem the trumpeters are real while the three sisters were not, but again, this is a metaphoric description drenched in the pheromones of paradox.

The phallic trumpets herald the awakening of a new Orlando, one that, it would seem, is minus a male appendage.

He stretched himself. He rose. He stood upright in complete nakedness before us, and while the trumpets pealed Truth! Truth! Truth! we have no choice left but confess--he was a woman. (137)

With this unusual and disconcerting paragraph, Virginia Woolf issues a statement about feminism, transgendered ideals, and a forerunner of sexual perversity that would not be matched for thirty to forty years when literature and music would once again take up the challenges of transgendered ambiguity, and such conflicts would arise (no pun intended) in the sexual ambivalence of William Burroughs' novels and Lou Reed's songs.

Like Orlando slipstreaming through time without apparent reason, we can connect the 1970s influences on Lou Reed from the likes of Virginia Woolf ("shaved her legs and then he was a she"—"Walk on the Wild Side") to the Jacobean poet who wrote the epigraph used at the onset of this discussion:

Orlando imagined these trumpets from the four rounded corners of his world (a combining of male and female geometric shapes), with the three graces of Purity, Chastity, and Modesty being like angels to him, he arises from a slumbering "death" back to his single body that is scattered between possible genders.

Conflict, paradox, and dualities overlay each other like veils upon this scene.

And here we, at last, write Finis on our own work.


· • ·

Sense and Antisense

The first assignment from the Lyric Essay class was to define what a lyric essay is, something which has not been definitively done since the term was coined more than a few years ago by the Seneca Review.

After reading this, if I were me, I'd say, "So let's hear your lyric essay you little contrarian complainy pants." To which I reply, I'd share it with you, but not publicly at this point since it's under submission right now (having already garnered a personal rejection from SR; to which I wish I could reply to answer their question about the gist of the piece).

Anything else I could say about this paper would just be repeating what the paper itself says. And I'm just not that tautologically repetitive.


~•~
(Draft 1.5)


CRW 315 – Lyric Essay
March 2, 2009

Sense and Antisense

It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article. It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation. It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine. It is not a soft doctrine nailed to the door of an empire and accompanied by a daring refrain that echoes through the centuries—Here stand I, I can do no other! It is not bureaucratic Endlösung meant to redact an ethnicity from the genetic collective.

It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.

But it can be any of these things.

The it, in this case, is an ephemeral collection of words called a lyric essay.

Unlike a more formal writing, a lyric essay does not necessarily state clearly its subject, with introduction and thesis statement, then outline references and arguments that compare or contrast view points or facts, it instead might not even mention what its true subject really is, talking, as it were, around that point. In other words, it is based entirely on the subjective and not the objective.

If a metaphor for all writing is a river flowing along its course, then technical writing (such as scientific papers or an instruction manual) would be a fairly direct, smoothly flowing stream, in which one could reach at any time with being swept away by rapids (which might be adventure fiction), poetry could be seen as a babbling brook of pleasant cascades that shimmered over smooth rocks and glittered in dappled sunlight (haiku being droplets of water clinging to the leaves and flowers growing along the shoreline), and the lyric essay then would be an oxbow in a meandering river plain—a place where the stream once flowed regularly, but a variance in course left this bend in the stream separated from where it once ran. Like the subject in a lyric essay, to describe the oxbow, one could tell of what the river used to be, but is no longer.

•

―It is not a prose poem. It is not an informative article.

In his piece, "The Theory and Practice of Postmodernism: A Manifesto," David Antin tells a story about shopping with his wife for a new mattress because she has back troubles. On the page, his words appear much as a poem would, breaking like verses in modern, unrhymed, poetry. But, as the title suggests, this is a postmodern piece, and uses its form to call attention to itself, and, as a lyric essay, really isn't about shopping for a mattress at all:

"so i felt there was no reason to get rid of this
mattress that had been promised to us by a salesman who said
it would last the rest of our lives i figured we were going to live
long lives i didnt think we were anywhere close to dying so
neither was the mattress" (113)

Antin, then, is discussing holding onto things of the past, aging, and the vacuity of language, especially in regards to consumer sales and goods. At the end of the piece, he and his wife have purchased a new mattress and have been sleeping on it for a while. His wife still has her back troubles, but they are not as bad as they used to be. Antin concludes,
"if youre lost in a forest and you have no idea which way
to go go for it straight ahead because its not likely to be
any worse than anything else" (122)

On the surface of his context, what Antin probably intends here, is that having been overwhelmed by consumer choices for a mattress, one is likely to be about as good as any other, and that a mattress—or any thing—is not likely to impact your life to the point of irrevocably altering it in any significant manner. Whereas, if this excerpt was from a "formal" informational article, one could easily argue that walking lost in a forest, a given direct can most certainly be much worse than another.

•

―It is not a memoir. It is not a dissertation.

In Joan Didion's essay "The White Album," she weaves her own life in among those of many notable people in the late 1960s, but never quite elucidates exactly what it is she's attempting to reveal. "We tell each other stories in order to live," she says at the beginning, but then the story she relates becomes an exercise in pretzel logic in attempting to decipher it. At least part of this is touching upon the more familiar ground of memoir, as she reveals early in the piece psychiatric information which might be her way of offering the reader evidence that she is an unreliable narrator.

This, on one level, would lend an emotional gravity to the piece, but her narrative becomes convoluted to the point that it is not, indeed, memoir nor dissertation, nor even an argumentative tract about the era of the 60s, the personalities of the famous names she constantly mentions, nor even, really, herself. She offers almost random bits of information—like jig-saw pieces with which we are perhaps supposed to put together to figure out what it is she's telling us. With the promise at the beginning that we tell stories in order to live, it seems worthwhile to assemble these jig-saw pieces. With a more formal essay, such as that of a memoir, we might do so. But this is a lyric essay, and so the jig-saw pieces are randomly collected from a number of different puzzles, and a logical assembly is not possible. Didion implies that she knows this is the case, "writing has not yet helped me to see what it means," she tells us at the end of the piece. And that is, one could argue, the point: the era and its people did not make sense—neither at the time nor in hindsight when we try to understand what happened—and so her telling this story is not supposed to be pieced together and figured out with logic and reason, however Escherean the staircase we follow may be.

•

―It is not an argumentative tract. It is not a recipe of exotic cuisine.

Reason and logic are definitely inapplicable to the essay by Harry Mathews, "Country Cooking from Central France: Roast Boned Rolled Stuffed Shoulder of Lamb (Farce Double)." Evidenced by the word-play in the title, this essay gives the appearance of a exotic recipe from the land of renowned cuisine. But the dish described in the piece would be infeasible to prepared—bordering on the physically impossible—thus being a farce, as well as the essay being an example of a story-within-a-story, creating an entendre because the essay, as well as the fictive dish he details, is double stuffed.

Not only does Mathews use the recipe of a meal to tell a story on one level, in the middle of the cooking instruction, he unravels a story about a song that should be sung at one point in the preparation.

"It tells the story of a blacksmith's son who sets out to find his long-lost mother. She is dead, but he cannot remember her death, nor can he accept it." (187) Mathews continues with his tale about this fictitious song that is sung in the middle of preparing an impossible dish traditional to a fictitious town in France (which, some may say, hardly exists in reality at all). The connection, we are told, between this song and the farce double being made, is "an analogy between the stars and the holes in the lid of the roasting pot." (90)

On the surface—ignoring the fictitious nature of the dish, the town, and the song—this essay is about cooking a rural French dish. On another level, it concerns the loss of tradition and the willful forgetting of the past. And it is done so with the humor of irony, and a lyricism that combines traits of folklore, ballads, and cookbooks.

•

―It is not a story, with plot and conflict and resolution.

Of all the lyric essays read from D'Agata's collection, few contain the elements that are usually considered integral to clear written communication. In many, there is no thread of causality, either in plot, narrative, or theme; that is, some connection between one idea and the next which, linked together in some manner lead the reader to a conclusion. There is little that could be designated as conflict in many of these essays. And conflict in any written work, be it article, poem, or story, is commonly thought of as being essential to drawing a reader through from beginning to end.

This is not to categorically state that anything described as a lyric essay doesn't have causal relationship or conflict, as we have seen in Mathews' piece, some of them display these characteristics. But without some sense of what it is, the lyric essay rests at a dangerous point in the spectrum of the written word.

At its best, a lyric essay—like poetry (to steal a line from William Rose Benét)—suckles honeyed words from the poisoned lips of life. It can be use form and content to share information or impart emotion where a more linear, traditional form of the written word cannot. At its worse, it becomes muddled self-indulgent nonsense.

Without a more clearly defined realm for the lyric essay, the dangerous is present for an unintelligible written work to be declared a lyric essay and suddenly take on meaning where no existed before.

On the other hand, one might argue, that, like the Tao, any definition of the lyric essay confines and constrains it, and it no longer has an ambiguous quality that the lyric essay now possesses in a non-possessive way.

•

―It is not a soft doctrine . . . It is not bureaucratic Endlösung . . .

In postmodern literature—which is certainly a phylum the lyric essay is taxonomically related to—a great deal of emphasis is placed on what the author of a piece intends or considers the work to be. If the author's sensibilities are such to declare a work art, then it is art.

But a reader's sensibilities are just as important to a work as is the writer's. Once it is written and sent off into the world, it no longer belongs to them. The writer is not available to every reader to explain what was meant or intended—nor should they be—and the author of a written work is probably the last person who should be given quarter to explain what their work signifies or what should be inferred by it. They wrote the thing, therefore, have had their chance to explain, define, instruct, cajole, solicit, impart, sway, compel, or share their joys and sorrows, miracles and tears. At that point, a work must stand on its own to be whatever a reader of it chooses or decides are its merits and/or flaws.

The author and poet Charles Bukowski (whom I do not much care for) wrote, "An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way." By this definition, I think a number of the authors of the lyric essays John D'Agata has collected are not artists, they're intellectuals.


· • ·

"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."

Here's a paper I wrote for Books & Publishing class about plagiarism. I framed it around the controversary of Dr. Brad Vice's Flannery O'Connor Award, but included a few other public cases.

In a comment on a semi-public forum, Vice commented about the passing of the author and his mentor, Barry Hannah.

I'm proud to say that you can find my name and a little blurb on the paperback copies of Yonder Stands Your Orphan. Later it was used to make me look like some sort of criminal when my book controversy hit. It really made me depressed. I can't even find the review on-line now as there are more so ... many articles about the review that the review is lost. You could find it on the SFC page if you were interested. I even told my editor when he gave me the book--Look, I've read everything by BH, and I love it all --so if you give me this book, I'm likely to write a good review. He said, "You sound like your qualified for the job." Anyway, it made me so angry that they tried to smear Barry through me. I still can't get over the Lucifarian villain who looks like Conway Twitty--too concerned about his hair to play high school football.

I have no reason to believe he's actually referring to Robert Clark Young being a prissy pansy and disrespectable no-account lying jealous sack of excrement or anything of that nature. No reason at all to associate that person with those traits.

If I ever rewrite this—or write again on the subject—I think I shall bring into the conversation the legal criminology term of "larceny," that is, theft by stealth, and equate it to the Twain attribution. Steal it quietly, make it your own, and wear your influences as evidence of the literary stream which has washed down from those who came before you. Or something poetic like that.



~•~



CRW 321 - 001
February 24, 2009
Wild Card Essay


"Bad writers borrow from other writers; Good writers steal."


This quote is often attributed to Mark Twain, T. S. Eliot, or Oscar Wilde. It's witty and deeper than it seems at first, and completely apropos to our discussion. Without absolute veracity of such an attribution, for the sake of this argument, we'll leave the source of that quote with Mr. Twain.

Does this comment mean that Twain encouraged and condoned plagiarism? Although it may not be immediately apparent in this statement, we can be fairly certain that, indeed, Twain (nor Eliot, nor Wilde) was not encouraging anyone to plagiarize another's work. But let us take a closer look at what defines plagiarism before picking apart what Twain might, or might not, have meant by that.

In examining this subject of borrowing and stealing other people's work—focussing exclusively on the written word and not on intellectual theft in the other arts—we will discuss ideas and intellectual property rights, touch briefly on copyright law, and take a look at three cases involving the accusation of plagiarism, and find evidence that in the world of literature, stealing is not as readily evident from borrowing as one might expect. Following that, we will return to Mark Twain's (attributed) quote and have another look at what it might really mean.

Before we get into our three specific cases, let us take a moment to define some things. Intellectual Property, to put it simply for our use in this discussion, is considered to be—as stated by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO)—"Intellectual property refers to creations of the mind: inventions, literary and artistic works, and symbols, names, images, and designs used in commerce." The term is used to denote the legal rights of a work and not the work itself. Under intellectual property laws, the creator, or rightful owner of a work, are granted certain exclusive rights to their work in any medium. Copyright, trademarks, trade secrets, and patents are just a few examples of intellectual property rights. For the purposes of this discussion, however, we will limit our commentary to copyrights, and not touch upon any of the other defined forms of intellectual property.

So what is involved with copyright law?

A comprehensive answer to that would involve a firm of lawyers and more pages of explanation than a small room could hold—this is why there are specialized attorneys to deal with the complexities of copyright law—but we will try to offer a very brief description of what it covers in relation to our purpose.

The intent of copyright in the United States is based on Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 in the U.S. Constitution, which states: "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries." This is intended to give the creator of a substantive and discrete idea—that is, an idea that is seen to fruition in an extended written work, and not merely the idea itself, nor titles, situations, or characters without their placement in a substantive, discrete work—certain exclusive rights (as we said about intellectual property) to publish, distribute, or adapt their work for a reasonable amount of time. That reasonable amount of time is currently given to be 50-100 years following the death of the creator of the work. This complexity is further muddled by "fair use."

The fair use doctrine does not specifically define "fair use" but rather gives a four point rubric to discern if use of copyrighted material is able to be used fairly by another party. The factors given to consider this are: the purpose and character of the use; the nature of the copyrighted work; the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. Thus there is a legitimate right to use excerpts or quotes from a copyrighted work "for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching […], scholarship, or research," (U.S. Code) which means book reviews can use portions of a work for purposes of illustrating an opinion; schools can use copyrighted work so long as they are not charging a fee for its use in an educational manner; and very brief quotes can be used as epigrams by others in their own work.
Confused by that? You begin to see how quickly complicated this matter can become; especially when copyright/intellectual property right laws differ from country to country. The entire matter is about as clear as a lecture on theological nuclear physics recited by Carl Sagan, backwards, in Pig Latin.

My sarcastic analogy is silly, but is meant to illustrate the complexity of this point. We are three pages into a discussion of plagiarism and we have only now reached the examples.

Our first look will be at the case involving the accusation that in The Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown plagiarized the work of Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh, and Henry Lincoln (although Lincoln's name did not appear on court records in this accusation) in their non-fiction work, Holy Blood, Holy Grail. This is a case of fiction appropriating material from non-fiction, which is not as common as fiction appropriating from other fiction, as well as the fact that the accusation hinged upon the direct use of ideas and framework of the earlier material. As author Richard Leigh stated, Dan Brown "lifted the whole architecture—the whole jigsaw puzzle—and hung it on to the peg of a fictional thriller." (Day)

So the accusation of Brown's plagiarism did not involve direct use of phrases and word choice, but on the framework, background, and general idea of Baigent's and Leigh's intellectual property.

To many in the literary world, the case Baigent and Leigh brought against Brown looked to be a clear case of copyright infringement; plagiarism. Myriad ideas put forth in Holy Blood, Holy Grail (HBHG) were present in nearly identical form in The Da Vinci Code, including a character who physically resembled the third author of HBHG, Henry Lincoln, and whose name, Leigh Teabing, is lifted directly from authors Leigh and Baigent (anagram of Teabing). The Justice who heard the case in UK Court disagreed with the accusers, and the verdict dictated that the ideas depicted in non-fiction work could not be plagiarized.

As a work of historical research, HBHG was often criticized as being faulty and venturing into the realms of fiction. So, ironically, if Baigent's and Leigh's work had been fiction, they would have likely won their plagiarism case against Brown. As it was, copyright precedent had been set for works of fiction to be able to use non-fiction ideas without infringement.

Our next example involves a case of fiction borrowing from other fiction, coming from a first time author and young student at Harvard University named Kaavya Viswanathan. At the age of 19, she had her first novel published to notable acclaim. How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild and Got A Life garnered Viswanathan a large advance along with a two-book deal, praise from the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, The Boston Globe, and many others. An film deal with Steven Spielberg's company DreamWorks SKG had been signed. Her academic and literary future seemed bright (Bailey; McGonigle; Memmott).

Then The Harvard Crimson ran an article claiming Viswanathan had plagiarized 12 passages in her book from two novels by Megan McCafferty. The passages were more than merely similar, they were virtually identical (Zhou). Both the author and her publisher denied the accusations, but things got worse quickly. By mid-May of that year, the New York Times had covered the story with several articles, and the evidence of plagiarism expanded. From 12 passages to 29 passages to more than 40 passages of almost identical phrases had been used by Viswanathan, taken from the two novels by McCafferty, as well as novels by Sophie Kinsella, Meg Cabot, and Salman Rushdie. As it turned out, more passages from Viswanathan's debut novel were copied from previous works than were not (Zeller; Smith and Moto).

Soon the publishers, Little, Brown and Company pulled the book from stores—at first to republish it with the offending passages removed—but as the scandal grew, they cancelled republication and Viswanathan's book deal (Crimson).

When the initial accusations were reported, Viswanathan appeared on The Today Show with Katie Couric, were that she commented that she must have "internalized" the details of McCafferty's books without realizing it. Following the expansion of the accusations, neither Viswanathan, nor her publisher, offered further comment directly concerning the issue. Viswanathan has since left Harvard and is currently attending Georgetown University (Atwan).
Our third example is perhaps the most difficult to deduce facts from accusation since it involves the overlap of academia, professional publication, and the sometimes uncomfortable meeting between fiction and non-fiction narratives.

In 2005, Brad Vice was an assistant professor at Mississippi State University when he was awarded the 2004 Flannery O'Connor Award for his short story collection, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not long after this announcement, a library advisor at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa (where Vice received his B.A. and where the story of contention is set) contacted the publisher of the award alleging plagiarism in one of the collected stories. Based on this single allegation, and without questioning the author, the University of Georgia Press rescinded the award to Vice, and ordered copies of his book to be pulled from distribution and pulped (Media Bistro).

Following this, Robert Clark Young published an article in the New York Press attacking not only Vice's short story collection, but extending the plagiarism claims to other short stories and articles Vice had written, but also calling into question Vice's Ph.D dissertation at the University of Cincinnati. Young's allegations went beyond Vice's work, but to his academic career, both as a teacher and a student, and made inflammatory comments about a number of another writers—all of whom were graduates of the Sewanee Writers' Conference—including Barry Hannah (Young; Sanford).

"Tuscaloosa Knights" was the story at the center of these allegations. It contained two sentences that were very similar to those appearing in a non-fiction book by Carl Carmer called Stars Fell On Alabama (It would be another year before a British court would offer an opinion as to the validity of fictional work using non-fiction source material, so a case of fiction "plagiarizes" non-fiction had not yet had a ruling in court). Carmer's work is quite famous around Tuscaloosa, as the author had been a professor at the university for a number of years in the 1930s, during which time he wrote his book (York). Vice stated that his use of Carmer's words and setting was an example of intertextual postmodernism, and an homage to Carmer's work. Indeed, previous version of the manuscript, including that of his Ph.D dissertation, contain epigrams to Carmer (Vice).

Critics, particularly Young, argued that it was deliberate plagiarism. Vice's supporters—who included other authors, editors of magazines where Vice's work had previously appeared, and Vice's former professors and advisors—leveled their own claims against Young, stating the latter man was bitter at Vice, Hannah, and the Sewanee Writers' Conference because Young's work was widely panned at the conference, and in his article accusing Vice of plagiarism, there are numerous factual errors concerning the Sewanee Conference and unfounded allegations against its sponsors and organizers.

The context in which Vice used a few sentences of Carl Carmer's work places the appropriated phrases in a very similar setting—that of a nighttime Ku Klux Klan rally in Tuscaloosa—but with different characters and a different outcome. Carmer's "Flaming Cross" chapter of Stars Fell On Alabama, was a description of an actual event (Carmer; Cobb). Vice's story is fictional, although keeps the setting of several people discussing, and then attempting to attend out of curiosity, the Klan rally (Vice).

The result of these allegations against Brad Vice resulted in his loss of the Flannery O'Connor Award (although another publisher picked up the book and made a few minor editorial changes) and eventually his dismissal from his position at Mississippi State University. He now teaches at the University of West Bohemia in the Czech Republic (ZČU).

These tales of caution bring us back to the quote we've attributed to Mark Twain, "Bad writers borrow from other writers; good writers steal," and our question at the beginning as to what such a volatile statement as that could possibly mean.

Twain is almost certainly not condoning nor encouraging plagiarism. What this quote is taken to mean is that if an idea or phrase or concept appeals to a writer, they shouldn't borrow it, as in merely using the words of another to make their own piece seem stronger or more literary or more legitimate, instead stealing an idea, concept, or phrase, means to take it and use it in a manner unique to the voice of the "thieving" writer; to re-engineer, deconstruct, improve, fold, spindle, and alter it into a manner fitting the voice and setting and framework of a new piece.
If all literary theft was plagiarism, Byron could sue Poe, Petrarch could sue Shakespeare, and Shakespeare could sue almost everyone else. T. S. Eliot called such appropriations "verbal kleptomania," and practiced such himself.

In other words, if you are going to liberate material from another writer—from another source—don't just rent it and make a copy; turn it into something of your own.

The moral of this story may well be: Be aware of where the words and ideas you use have been before they showed up on your page, but when they do—and here I steal a comment from Martin Luther—"sin bravely."

•


Works Cited

Atwan, Greg. "Kaavya Emptor."

02138 Dec. & Jan. 2008-2009, Vol. 3, No. 1.

Bailey, Marilyn. "HOWMTF:

How 'Opal' will make teen famous."

The Boston Globe 17 Apr. 2006.

Cobb, Mark Hughes.

"Book's passages raise questions of plagiarism."

TuscaloosaNews.com.
21 Oct. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

The Crimson Staff.

"'Opal Mehta' Gone for Good; Contract Cancelled."

The Harvard Crimson [Cambridge]
2 May 2006.

Day, Elizabeth. "Two Academic Writers

Assert 'Da Vinci Code' Is Plagiarism."
Sunday Telegraph [London] 3 Oct. 2004.

"Department of English."

Západočeská Univerzita v Plzni,
ZČU. Apr. 2008. Web.

McGonigle, Thomas.

"The Saturday Read;
Oh c'mon, getting into Harvard isn't that easy:

How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild,
and Got a Life: A Novel."
Los Angeles Times 8 Apr. 2006.

Memmott, Carol.

"Charming 'Opal' shows smart can be funny."

USA Today 29 Mar. 2006.

Sanford, Jason.

"The literary lynching of Brad Vice."

StorySouth. 18 Dec. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

Smith, Dinitia, and Moto Rich.

"A Second Ripple in Plagiarism Scandal."
New York Times 2 May 2006.

The Today Show. NBC. New York, NY. 26 Apr. 2006.
"U. of GA Press Recalls Stories, Revokes Prize."

Media Bistro. 27 Oct. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

17 U.S.C. § 1-107 (2007).
U.S. Constitution. Art. I, § 8, cl. 8
Vice, Brad. The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.

1st ed. Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005.

Vice, William Bradley.

The Bear Bryant Funeral Train.
Dissertation. University of Cincinnati, 2001.

York, Jake Adam.

"Fell In Alabama: Brad Vice's Tuscaloosa Night."

StorySouth. 13 Nov. 2005. 22 Feb. 2009 .

Young, Robert Clark. "A Charming Plagiarist."

New York Press 7 Dec. 2005.

Zeller, Jr., Tom.

"In Internet Age, Writers Face Frontier Justice."

New York Times 1 May 2006.

Zhou, David.

"Student's Novel Faces Plagiarism Controversy."

The Harvard Crimson [Cambridge] 23 Apr. 2006.

· • ·

Terminal Point of a Cul-de-Sac

This course, this paper (and it's following siblings) profoundly changed something inside of me from where these sort of ideas become formulated into words. Breakthrough papers.

Of course, that's a subjective viewpoint. But I do think there is something noticeable in the trio of papers for Gothic Disturbances.

If nothing else, it was the course that lured me to the wondrous dark side of the English Department. And there I have found almost everything I hoped to find when I came here seeking knowledge...

It all clicked with the windings. They peeled off from my literary criticism blind eyes and suddenly I could see!

[This essay seems now to end curiously abrupt. I wonder if the file I have is an early save...? Hmm...]


~•~
(1st draft)


English 490 - Gothic Disturbances
February 17, 2009

The Terminal Point of a Cul-de-Sac

"The ascent is precipitous, but the path is cut into continual and short windings, which enable you to surmount the perpendicularity of the mountain. It is a scene terrifically desolate. In a thousand spots the traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived, where trees lie broken and strewed on the ground, some entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning upon the jutting rocks of the mountain or transversely upon other trees. [...] The pines are not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene. I looked on the valley beneath; vast mists were rising from the rivers which ran through it and curling in thick wreaths around the opposite mountains, whose summits were hid in the uniform clouds, while rain poured from the dark sky and added to the melancholy impression I received from the objects around me." (Frankenstein, Vol. II Ch. II)

When Mary Shelley introduces us to this precipitous ascent of Victor on an Alpine peak facing Montanvert, she is doing more than telling us about the steep mountainside and the felled trees along the path of avalanches. Indeed, this is the sixth time in the text that Shelley has used a variance of the word "precipitous," and, in all, the word is used 14 times in the novel.

Given this frequent usage, the word must carry with it some importance; seemingly connected with Victor's perception of the world around him, and the reader's perception of Victor himself.

At the point in the novel where Victor is ascending this precipitous, winding path, he has already brought life to his creation and abandoned it as something hideous, and William has been killed and Justine has been executed because of Victor's "unhallowed arts". Victor seeks some sort of solace in wandering the barren and starkly beautiful landscapes which bring to Victor's perception some calm reassurance that an omnipotent God must exist. He alternates these thoughts with suicidal considerations.

The word "precipitous" itself appears in various forms throughout the novel--most commonly as "precipice" (9 times); "precipitate" (3 times); and once each with "precipitation" and, in this passages, "precipitous". Of its meanings, perhaps the only definition not directly intended in any of these usages is the most apparent, that of meaning rain, mist, or snowfall; moisture. In this excerpt, "the ascent is precipitous" literally means the path Victor walks is extremely steep, but the word could also be used to represent his headlong ascent into unhallowed knowledge, and the way he abruptly ended his work upon successfully bringing life to a monstrous creation.

In chemistry, to precipitate something is to separate it, as in a solid form divided from a solution. In this sense, too, do we find a connection to Victor and his work, for he is seeking to separate himself from the substance--the thing--he has created.

Shelley describes the path Victor walks as "cut into [...] short windings" which is literally seen as being a treacherous path with many cut-backs crisscrossing the mountainside. But "windings" could also refer to Victor's meandering to avoid his responsibilities connection to playing God as a creator of life, his seeking to receive some sort of information about what he should do--to come to a conclusion about his uncertainty--as well as referring to the winding sheets used to wrap a dead body in.

All of these meanings could be found to have meaning in Victor's twisting, turning, walk through this landscape of his solitude. This landscape--where "traces of the winter avalanche may be perceived"--is described as an area where "trees lie [...] entirely destroyed, others bent, leaning [...] transversely upon other trees." An "avalanche" is, of course, a place of abrupt descent, or to suddenly go down, and to "traverse" is to barricade against, or to cross or thwart something. Victor feels like he has descended abruptly from his knowledgeable heights--that of becoming a life-giving God and then, falling from such a deified height in abandoning his creation--and feeling like he has been thwarted by the very thing he has created--that it is the creature's own fault that it is not a thing a beauty and perfection.

There is also a connection between "transverse" and crossing a bridge or passing through a gate. Perhaps, in wandering the Alpine mountains and valleys, Victor hopes to pass through a gate, or cross a bridge, that would allow him to shirk his past work and deeds, leaving them behind without having to ever deal with them again. This could then mean that the description of the trees should conjure images of broken limbs and other body parts that Victor would have seen in picking out the pieces to construct his creation, and he would have his creation scattered about in disarray like the mountainside in the wake of an avalanche.

Victor views these trees as "not tall or luxuriant, but they are sombre and add an air of severity to the scene." All at once, Shelley is revealing to us keys to Victor's nature and attitude with her choice of words. "Luxuriant" means to to have excesses, or to indulge, associated to Victor's unquenchable desires for knowledge that exceeds his reason; "sombre" and "severity" together displaying his gloomy and dark attitude, his austerity, and almost complete lack of kindness towards most anyone or anything. Descriptions which show him to be uncompassionate and selfish in the extreme.

His view of the peaks above him, shrouded in "thick wreaths" of "uniform clouds" where the rain falls from a "dark sky and added to the melancholy impression" also reveals to us his "black bile" of his irritability with the world surrounding him and his narcissistic sullen perception of how nothing he sees or has done is worthwhile. His creating life out of something dead is not a bright accomplishment, but a foul, deplorable thing, not because it is a creation of life from dead parts, but because it is, to Victor's eyes, not a thing of aesthetic beauty.

From his vantage point high along the winding path of the mountainside, where Victor has been wandering in philosophical circles, he looks down to the valley below where "vast mists were rising from the rivers". Aside from being a case where the word "precipitate" could have been used to indicate the falling moisture, it is a moment when Victor reaches a terminal point in his vicious circle of thought.

He looks back--and down--upon the world around him, knowing that he cannot forever stay in the solitude of the mountains, but must, eventually, descend back to the world below him, crashing like an avalanche upon those around him, shrouding a world he feels is, literally, beneath him.


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"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"

In Books and Publishing class we had to write a bio paper on a living author. Since most of my favorite authors are dead (Hjortsberg, Shiner, and Crews a few among the living), I picked ol' Harry Crews, which I would. The complete first draft of this had about four more pages of his actual biography, but that made it far too long to be turned in. A quite chop-chop job and it was left to this.


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(1st Draft)


CRW 321 - 001
January 27, 2009
Author Case History


"How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?"


Harry Crews is an unusual author who is linked in an essential manner to the particular place of his youth. This is immediately evident in the title of his published memoir, Childhood: The Biography of a Place. Harry was born in Bacon County, Georgia, a place where men would shoot each other over disagreements about fence lines and coon hounds. At a time when the rest of the country was just beginning to suffer the effects of the Great Depression, folks in Bacon County had been living that way for more than a few generations. Prospects looked bleak, and, if the crops failed, families were destitute.

At the age of 5, Harry suffered from a debilitating illness, one that would influence the rest of his life, and deeply reflect in his fiction. He contracted a fever accompanied by severe muscle contractions which would leave the county doctor to declare that Harry would never walk again. This declaration brought family and friends to his bedside, all staring at him in a disturbing way that would give Harry a unique perspective on how society viewed its peripheral elements, the people mainstream society called "freaks." The characters in Harry's fiction almost always displayed some deformity or grotesque trait (Crews, Childhood).

Harry described his father--a man who turned out to actually be his step-father--as a good man but a brutal drunk (Crews, Childhood). His mother eventually grew tired of his drunken tirades and packed up her family one night and made her way to Jacksonville, Florida, where Harry lived until he graduated high school.

He enlisted in the Marines, later commenting:

"Being good, southern, ignorant country boys, we did the good, southern, ignorant country thing: we volunteered as quickly as possible, anxious as we were to go and spill our blood in the good, southern, ignorant country way. (Introduction, Classic Crews 12)

It was during his three years in the Marines that he began to read everything he could.
Following his discharge he attended the University of Florida, where he first began writing fiction. He took a creative writing course with Andrew Lytle--formerly the teacher of Flannery O'Connor. Looking at one of Harry's early stories, Andrew Lytle told him he should burn the manuscript, saying, "Fire is a great refiner." (Goss, Pop Culture Florida 16)

A number of years later, after Harry had his first published novel, The Gospel Singer, he returned to the University of Florida as a teacher in the English department, where he taught for the next 29 years. During those three decades he published a total of 17 novels, a collection of fiction, an autobiography, and 4 collections of nonfiction. He was known by students and faculty alike as a hard-drinking, cantankerous man, who taught with the same fire and passion with which he wrote and displayed in his work. His life was always on the verge of overshadowing his fictional creations. He embodies the term Flannery O'Connor used to describe her own Southern characters, "a large and startling figure." (O'Connor)

The novels of Harry Crews could perhaps best be described as a sub-genre of the Southern Gothic. "Grit-Lit," as some critics have termed the work of Harry Crews, Larry Brown, Dorothy Allison, and early Cormac McCarthy. Works that mix great amounts of violence, dark humor, salacious subject matter, and grotesque characters. Although not all of Harry's novels have these elements, they certainly all have at least two or three of them.

Having a life that seemed to be straight out of his own novels caused Harry no small amount of conflict with the academic hierarchy, as well as more than a few publishers, editors, and agents. His first five novels were all published by William Morrow, the next thirteen would be published by a total of seven different publishers. Only three of those seven were major houses; Alfred A. Knopf, Harper & Row, and Simon & Schuster. The main factors of his conflicts with publishers and editors could be seen in his refusal to cut particularly violence scenes or graphic subject matter such as rape, castration, and brutal dog fighting ("A Writer's Face", Georgia Review).

With his nonfiction work, Harry fared no better with publishers. In 1976, while on assignment to write an article for Playboy, Harry began one of his infamous drinking binges. When he woke up a few days later, he found a tattoo on a hinge in the the fold of his arm. He included the tattoo in his expenses billed to the magazine, much to the dismay and anger of the editor (Dennis Miller Show).

It has been almost three years since Harry Crews's last book. An American Family: The Baby with the Curious Markings was published in 2006 by Blood & Guts Press, a tiny publisher in Los Angeles. It was printed in three editions: 26 lettered and signed copies hand-bound in goatskin; 300 numbered and signed copies in quarter leather with handmade paper boards, and then 2,000 copies in trade hardcover (Sauve).

This small number of his latest book belies the cult following Harry Crews has generated over his career. He has been sought out by such Hollywood luminaries as Sean Penn (who Harry dedicated Scar Lover to), when he was married to Madonna. Punk legends Kim Gordon and Lydia Lunch named a short-lived side-band after Harry, using his novels as titles for most of their songs. Harry Crews was also featured in the 2004 documentary, Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus, in which he relates three stories from his youth in archetypal Crews-style; that is, grim and gruff and full of unsettling humor.

Even if American Family is to be the final published work in his lifetime, the impact Harry Crews has made on modern American literature will be felt far beyond the range of those who have actually read, or even heard of him.

Another of his tattoos features a quote from the poet e. e. cummings, capturing perfectly Harry's bold attitude and brash outlook on what remains of his life: Beneath a grinning skull are the words, How do you like your blue-eyed boy, Mr. Death?

When it comes time to meet him, I don't know if Mr. Death will really want to find out.


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A Selected Bibliography

Novels
An American Family: The Baby With the Curious Markings (2006)
Celebration (1998)
The Mulching of America (1995)
Classic Crews (1993)
Scar Lover (1992)
Body (1990)
The Knockout Artist (1988)
A Feast of Snakes (1976)
The Gypsy's Curse (1974)
The Hawk is Dying (1973)
Car (1972)
Karate is a Thing of the Spirit (1971)
This Thing Don't Lead To Heaven (1970)
Naked in Garden Hills (1969)
The Gospel Singer (1968)

Non-Fiction
A Childhood: The Biography of a Place (1978)
Blood and Grits (1979)
Florida Frenzy (1982)
Madonna at Ringside (1991)

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Works Cited

"'A Writer's Face': The Letters of Harry Crews."

The Georgia Review Winter 2007.
Crews, Harry. Classic Crews.
New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

---. A Childhood: Biography of a Place.

Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1995.

Goss, James P. Pop Culture Florida.

Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press Inc, 2000.

Cummings, E. E. "Buffalo Bill's/ defunct."

The Dial Jan. 1920. Print.

O'Connor, Flannery.

Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose.

New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1969.

Sauve, Damon. "Fiction: Novels."

A Large & Startling Figure:
The Harry Crews Online Bibliography.
Jan. 27, 2009.

Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus.

Dir. Andrew Douglas. 2003.

DVD. Anonymous Content, 2005.

The Dennis Miller Show. Fox Network. 4 Feb. 1992.
The Rough South of Harry Crews.

Dir. Gary Hawkins. 1991.

Videocassette.
North Carolina Public Television.

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