streaming consciousness…

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  hardie karges 8:32 am on July 3, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: America ( 59 ), DARK AGES ( 2 )   

  AMERICA BASHING 

  America-bashing is reaching new heights in the Iraq War aftermath. I know why people hate America. That’s obvious, because she’s arrogant. What I’d like to know is: why is everybody, particularly Europeans, so interested in poking around in America’s closet? The national debt, the savings rate, obesity levels, whatever, it’s like foreigners are keeping score or placing bets or something, mostly betting that America will lose, I assume. Americans are in the game also, though they tend to be conspiracy theorists rather than outright anti-American. Conspiracy theorists look for sinister plots and causal connections to explain the evil running rampant in the world. These they will definitely find, though more likely originating in their own imagination, than in some deep dark archives. Get lives, people! Admittedly America has lost her leadership position in the world, but this doesn’t mean everybody gets to take cheap shots whenever they want. Who cares what America’s debt is? If America had no debt, then the rest of the world would have no dollars! It’s not a perfect system, capitalism. Most systems aren’t. The European attitude is obviously disingenuous if not outright jealous. They had their chance to fuck up the world, of course, and did quite a grand job of it, before almost self-destructing in the World Wars. The United States sacrificed her radical roots to police the world and save Europe from the bear grip of Communism from which it might never have emerged, thereafter to be known as the Dark Ages, whose causes would never be known. The world is looking increasingly multi-polar with America, China, and Europe jockeying for first rights. Islam is making a play, but I doubt that the world is really ready for a new Dark Age. Life’s just too good for most people, giving the lie to conspiracy, and many can still remember the last Dark Age. Of course, it may happen whether we like it or not, literally, if the lights go out when the oil is all gone.

   

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  hardie karges 10:56 am on July 2, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: novels ( 2 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  The great American novel 

  is the great American travel book is the great American screenplay is the great American whatever, pretentious in concept, grandiose in scope. There’s no reason to write anything else, really. There’s no reason to do anything in life except contemplate the moment of your death. Everything else is just trivia, facts and figures, characters and plots. I can think of a few plots I’d like to put some of those characters in. They’re all fake, abstractions of abstractions, stories about stories. Not that I didn’t try the same thing myself. I did. I still do. I ran imaginary people through imaginary situations, sending them up trees, throwing rocks at them, then looking for ways to get them down. The only good parts were the digressions, the spontaneous emissions, slips of the tongue, slices of reality in an otherwise bland pound cake. I was just making it all up. There are no good novels anymore, just stories, fabrications coming out of thousands of tiny fantasy factories lining the back streets of New York, London, Paris, Rome, and Berlin, all screaming for your loyalty and your pocketbooks’ attentions. If there has to be some objective measurement of ‘what’s good’, then let it be money. Otherwise we swim in our opinions with no hope of resolution.
   
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  hardie karges 9:10 am on July 1, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Beat poets, novels ( 2 ), POETRY ( 12 )   

  The death of the novel 

  was proclaimed by a few pretentious college students a few decades ago. Strangely enough, they were probably right. Forget the ‘brilliant characterizations’ and all that crap. Every character in every novel not based on actual people is some aspect of the writer himself. Let’s drop the pretense of ‘objectivity’. It doesn’t exist. The only thing we know, if we indeed really even know that, is ourselves, our lives, our perceptions. Esse est percipi. The only real novels are the non-novels, reality bubbling through the filter of consciousness. Nothing really good’s been done since the Beats liberated the ink from the pen. Automatic writing is the best kind. If that’s ‘typing’, then this is word processing. Poetry is an inside joke, and as if it’s not bad enough, that the best modern art has to be explained in words to be appreciated (thank you, Tom Wolfe), then imagine the irony of poets having to hang their words from Christmas trees to be noticed. Forget dangling participles. Modern poetry closes a stanza with a dangling subject and starts the next with its almost-forgotten predicate, and loves every minute of it, almost reveling in the total and deliberate obfuscation of meaning, as if there were something quaint and entirely too old-fashioned about that.

   
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  hardie karges 8:16 am on June 30, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  A CALL TO LITERARY ACTION 

  Where is the great literature of Century 21? What will it be like? As challenging as it might seem to create something that can be equally a sign of the times and a map to the future, especially in an era as highly impressive as ours is technologically, the path may lie imbedded in that very fact. I think it’s time for literature, poetry, science fiction, and ‘action’ fiction storytelling to merge into a new form. Literature is largely uninspired and uninspiring story-telling, less compelling than its poor cousin, pulp fiction. Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists. . Poetry is totally divorced from the real world of politics and Pontiacs, farther still the cutting edges of subconscious and verbal innovation. Poetry has not had anything heroic since the Beats shook things up. Since then it has gone right back to where it was before, garden parties for the upper class and their mutual admiration society. Only ‘slam’ poetry has added some new force to the field, though it doesn’t hold up as well on paper as on stage with its bro’, rap music. Even popular music in general has stagnated, reduced to formulas and re-hash. The new literature should be a combination of new science, revived poetic cutting-edge language, action story telling, and broad vision.

  maximumfiction is discussing. Toggle Comments

   
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    maximumfiction 11:25 am on November 18, 2009 Permalink | Reply

    “Science fiction has yet to produce a real literary stylist, probably more impressive for its oblique purview and translation of the world of science for non-scientists.”

    Read the novel _Terrestrials_ by Paul West. Paul is an acclaimed stylist who, in _Terrestrials_, who bravely, if briefly, stepped into the genre. The result is stunning.

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  hardie karges 8:26 am on June 29, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  TO EACH HER OWN 

  One American author whose name will go unmentioned, not because of my higher ethics but because I’ve never heard of her, has got the ironic balls to declare that a large number of award-winning authors are masters of what she calls, with no apparent self-consciousness, ‘suckitude’. She’s talking about literature, mind you, something that I doubt her tidy little plots could even pretend to. Okay, she’s been published, so one up on many others, but that’s what defines ‘hackitude’, right? It’s like the old saying “shit happens”; “shit gets published”. She even pretends on her web site (surprise, surprise) to advise other writers on the dangers of literary agents while steadily plugging her own agent and her own contrived stories of international intrigue. It’s a sad day when authors denigrate the best of their lot to exalt the most mundane, as if Shakespeare were really all about the lives and actions of a lot of distinct individuals in specific situations. Shakespeare was all about immortal individuals in universal situations. Modern literature has a chance to do one better by liberating the situations from the characters, in short: stories about nothing, writing about everything, literature without stories.

   
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  hardie karges 9:21 am on June 28, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), wriing   

  Writing languishes behind the other arts, 

  especially painting, as if a picture were really worth a thousand words. Nevermind, it’s all the same really, the will to express forming scratches on the slate of experience directly or indirectly like drug-induced orgasm or the real thing in all the glorious lugubriousness of its meanderthal mess. You get the point regardless, if you’re lucky, if there really is a point, to all the lines holding hands forming meanings in the minds of men whether the critics approve or not.

   
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  hardie karges 8:05 am on June 27, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: life ( 33 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  Stories have convenient beginnings, middles, and endings; 

  life itself has nothing of the sort. Half thoughts and misfired synapses jockey for position in a bubble of consciousness defined only by memory and bordering on infinity. Stop re-normalizing equations; maybe mass is infinite at the speed of light. I sell my soul to sell my self, writing little stories to try to amuse the masses and still can’t get past the dead-letter file, so f%$# it. I’ll write what I want, maybe my unborn progeny will appreciate it some day, the ravings of a 21^st century lunatic, legend in his own mind, lover of women and brother of men. I try to create meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any. I try to do for paper what Picasso did for canvas, make love to it, then spurt my juices on its surface as my supreme gift. The only question is: do nouns and verbs accurately describe human existence? Is a picture really worth a thousand words? What are words worth on the open market anyway?

   
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  hardie karges 7:15 am on June 26, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: Add new tag ( 2 ), WRITING ( 13 )   

  The nice thing about ‘automatic writing’ 

  is that there’s never any writer’s block because there’s no structure anyway. It should be word-jazz like be-bop, open the gates and let out all the chickens and scaredy-cats that’ve been cooped up since consciousness sprouted from seed in the fertile soil at the crossroads where attraction meets imagination and the algebra of need meets the geometry of desire. I don’t even have my glasses on so won’t know most of my typographic errors until later. Forget centrality, theme, whatever, everything but meaning. The only worthwhile goal of writing, of anything for that matter, is to find meaning in a world that doesn’t necessarily have any.

   
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  hardie karges 12:22 pm on June 25, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: ART ( 8 ), life ( 33 )   

  Forget plot. Life is the plot. 

  Everything else is pretentious pretense. One’s obra maestra is one’s life. The only art involved is to express the various elements that comprise one’s self in new and original combinations. Combination is the essence of art. Nothing is truly original. The same ideas occur at similar times in diverse places given similar situations to work within in an ever-contracting world. The challenge is to lose your self in your work, like creating a child from bodies destined to die, the child itself destined to die, immortality only achieved in the long run from past to future viewed by a mind’s eye too myopic to know that the concept itself is its only limitation. Lose yourself and find the path, a path, any path with heart that embraces infinity without embracing its limitations.

   
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  hardie karges 6:35 am on June 24, 2008 Permalink | Reply
  Tags: WRITING ( 13 )   

  Nothing inspires like a deadline. 

  Just got to write it down while I still remember it; just got to write it down before the game ends. “Write what you know.” The only thing anyone really knows is his own life, the jumble of perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and memories that constitute the phenomena of a human existence, the internal half of one of the higher apes homo sapiens sapiens, walking this planet in the path of his ancestors, lost in self-reflection.