Beamish Boy - Albert Flynn Desilver (Book Review)

Desilver’s jaunty little memoir, “Beamish Boy,” settles on a pleasant narrative of twilight transformations, instructed by a voice both artful and untethered; there’s a whisper of pedantry, which, when given track, is willfully apparent – cigarettes, in particular, are gruesomely bedeviled, a tiny caveat of peculiar annoyance to this reader, whose unbothered predilection for these carcinogenic delights is almost ambrosial. The small scrapings aside, this is a good, well-manicured piece of writing. Desilver “wrestles the Jabberwocky,” here a manifestation of innumerable origins; a vice-bloated German governess, a history of youthful consternation, and, most audibly, a hellish bout with alcoholism and drug use. The poet recounts, in absorbing detail, maniacal mushroom journeys and apoplectic alcoholic scramblings, narrowly avoiding a collision with the booze-hungry turnout of Bukowski, or the washy, inebriated glimpses of William S. Burroughs. I’ll drink to that.

Child of Satan, Child of God - Susan Atkins (Book Review)

"Child of Satan, Child of God" is Sadie Mae Glutz' uncluttered entry into the curious storehouse of Mansonian literature. Atkins rhapsodizes on the psychical, crude beauty of the desert, a sprawling terrorism of sirocco hippie troupes, biker convents (Mother Superior Danny DeCarlo is, however much to the offense of historical courtesy, cheaply manumitted from the narrative, a questionable gesture on Sadie's part, and at most a signal displacement of pure epistolary facticity), watercolor toughs, backroads musicians, wizened old ranch-hands, and ibid. Though the prose is severe and shorthand, the mystic invitation of Sexy Sadie's story is deeply companionable. "Child of Satan, Child of God" is a cross-grained examination of the Tate-LaBianca murders clean of the rigid demagoguery of Bugliosi's account, though suffering from frightfully bloated spells of nearsightedness and revisionism, and the sobbing sweeps of a spiritually taphephobic young woman.

You & Me - Padgett Powell (Book Review)

“Life will not be explained; sweep away the evidence.” 

And as it were, Powell’s “You And Me” lumbers an amphetaminic tarantella through profuse, express-way aphorism and that indelicate gafflegab which instructs the pages of Lewis Carroll’s beloved relic of a sweetheart. Powell exercises, with unmolested profundity, a romanticism of the absurd quotidian go-arounds, bedecking his booze-soaped interlocutors with wit, pith, and a most sparkling cynicism – from Judy Garland to Julia Child, to crooked-nosed poets to the springs of morphine, the inherent biology of the story is cellular and celluloid, much delivered of the trappings of contemporary literary dilettantism. 

These “sloppy vampires” chat earnestly about the coiffures of nihilism, the prose tottering deliberately in benumbed stupefaction, as every moor of imagination is explored, though hardly remarked. The somnambulistic dialogue may feel awkward to some, but philosophically the work is nearly sick with the existential sexuality of Sartre. Powell indexes nostalgic fires with “halcyon” sureness, and, sometimes, prefigures all the purple ballyhoo with a methodical silence, for “disputing nothing is the first step unto miracles.”

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I received an advance copy of Mr. Powell's novel; the anticipated street date is July 31, 2012. ( Ecco/HarperCollins)

Aenesidemus' Skepticism

Aenesidemus was one of the earliest Greek skeptics who forbore to accept the putative distinction between the Platonic philo-class and the Stoics, ultimately divorcing himself from the former school in a rendering effort to define a stringent discipline of relative skepticism. The paling cohesion of content within the educating Academy loosed a noisome dissension on the ruling body - divisions were assumed in opposition to one standardized, core dogma, producing an antagonistic faction embodied in the much-inclusive philosophy of Antiochus, whose lectures condemned Platonism as falling into the coils of arbitrary Stoicism; he would foolishly attempt to reconcile the two systems, which led to a significant schism among the students. Recognizing the disparity, Aenesidemus eschewed all ontological knowledge as funding to the true discrepancy perfidious to all man. He would devise a construction of modes -or forms -  ten in number, which closely resemble the predicate of modern-day perspectivism; the tenets syllogistically refute knowledge, and to an infant extent causality, as being intrinsically impossible. Aenesidemus charged that relativism amongst species precludes a greater information than that which is arguably available to us, as reasoning creatures. Furthermore, he challenged the presupposition of the accuracy of the senses, offering as evidence the continual evolutionary variations of phenomena, resulting in a sensory-world of an expressly unreliable, and insupportable, medium. Sextus Empirucus relates the existence of a singular following of skeptics under Aenesidemus, remarking an obscure movement referred to as “Pyrrhonism.”

Matheson Through the Lens of the Absurd

Matheson's "Nightmare...", remembering a valid Kierkegaardian anxiety, imagines a soulful existential submission,  an exhibit of such frustration, such utter despair, that its fiction is valuable as an attestation to the horrible implication of the absurd - Matheson's character is impelled to faith in the blackest grief of his reason, madness stepping its quiet motions, beckoning some faraway mortal dread - his woe in the vacuum of close space refers to a stupidly erotic nihilism, an atavistic tendency so kin to humankind as to be incestuous - here we read the verses of the void as though to make a poet of oblivion!

That blessed insanity, which, as Kierkegaard would have, is the ultimate symptom of sublimity, an emphatic constitution of love, trust, commitment, so that the human being sings as though all the psalms of his soul cling to his tongue in exasperation of their freedom.
The insufferable facticity of the experience is, for Matheson's character, a cry to the absurd - for Heidegger, too, truth remains "disclosure," and, to the genuine horror of Shestov, "...truth is truth only because, and only in so far as, it is nailed to the cross." Matheson's character is a Christ in the skies of Golgotha, an Abrahamic personage suffering the lamentation of his faith.

Shestov would not see Matheson's gremlin as a conceptual unknown - as Matheson suggests - but a true, posited window toward the necessary absurd; Necessity, in Shestovian context, is knowledge: in Matheson's tale, the character is at once confronted with the irrational absurdity of apprehending the unknown, placing the thing in a context of the real (the worldhome); by systemically planting the gremlin into the world of the rational, the absurd is violently and necessarily "there." Immediately, the authenticity of the event is determined (by the narrator) as a "chimera worthy of the noblest lunatic."

By appraising the inviolable madness of the situation, Matheson's character probes the product of eternity, the mystic feature of deliverance, by his action of faith, the whole destruction of concern with Reason, which, for Shestov, is the real paradoxical experience. Like Kierkegaard, Shestov's salvation-formula presupposes a certain disinterest in the value of propositional enquiry - rather, it makes the purchase of faith as the end-all; Kierkegaard's Abraham is an exception to an ontological dread, and by offering Isaac as a token of faith, he (Abraham) removes himself from his temporal anxiety through a gesture of unguarded faith.
Because, as Shestov writes, "...if God never deceived us, if no man ever saw the blue sky but knew only an infinite space, empty or filled with ether, if, instead of hearing sounds, men only counted waves - it is probable that they could not have gained much. It may even be that they would have ended by feeling disheartened by their truths and would have agreed to recognize that God may violate His own commandment." (L. Shestov, Athens and Jerusalem).

That Matheson's character was narratively supplied oblivion is an interesting predicament - pressing through the escape door, the narrator is taking that pious leap into the heart of God, into that hateful, offensive unknown; for both Kierkegaard and Shestov hold the texture of faith is incomplete apart from its hideous teleological end - the necessary resignation to a perceived ontological extinction (Kierkegaard's Abraham is even knighted for his capacity to be foolish)!

Heideggerian World Disclosure Through the Proboscis of a 1/2 cc 28g Syringe

In Heideggerian parlance, world disclosure is the basic relation of aesthetic text into shapeable, transformative wholes - in a word, the "stuff" of our interpretation; such an event is a necessary investigation of the ontological, which, for Heidegger, is not merely a passing instruction, but a mandatory return to the skeptical intercourse between Dasein and the external world. The profundity of being emptied into the world, of all mentionable things erupting like small star-fires and expressing considerations of reality, is responsible for Dasein's immediate task as an authentic being; that hideous "geworfenheit,"  what Sartre would later describe as a mortal condemnation, singly justifies, or at the bottom least entreats, Dasein's ontological curiosity. Heidegger's concept of the affective worldhome is wrought with nauseous possibility, suggesting an utterly nihilistic circumstance for Dasein as a being-out-there. The ontic relationship between the world and Dasein influences a battery of potential distractions by generating a causal web of phenomena from which issue all models of metamorphic experience.
The heedlessness of the early aesthetes, with particular favor to Hegel and the phenomenologists, was, for Heidegger, a trying wound to the large of ontology; in Being and Time he writes, "...if it is said that "Being" is the most universal concept, this cannot mean that it is the one which is clearest or that it needs no further discussion. It is rather the darkest of all."
The history of philosophy has invariably strayed in the outer territories of phenomenology with small regard to the importance of the facticity, or perhaps more appropriately, the design or structure of "Being."
Heidegger's ontology is, to borrow Bachelard's terminology, the glimpse of an "epistemological rupture" of  the intelligence, the shape, of phenomena. For Heidegger, we must shed the ontotheological sickness, that unique blemish on the skin of the West, and too the source of a rabid idleness that stalks the tread of our ontological situation. To triumph over a rotten metaphysics is to recreate the life-element part and parcel, willfully re-imagining the human creature as an authentic expression of itself - collating the insterstitial spaces between Dasein's  intellectual habitat and the phenomenological chaos of the outer world, where the sense of being "at-home" is harshly confronted; the agoraphobic nature of Heideigger's ontology is a tragic waltz of the surreal - for Sartre, it meant a Dionysian romance of the life-dread, the true anxiety of the human being, with the flippancy of  simply being "free." Here, then, Dasein is consigned to an intuitive "being-there" - a hypostatized experience as of wagging in the abyss.

"Nothingness lies coiled in the heart of being - like a worm."

"I dreamed vaguely of killing myself to wipe out at least one of these superfluous lives. But even my death would have been In the way. In the way, my corpse, my blood on these stones, between these plants, at the back of this smiling garden. And the decomposed flesh would have been In the way in the earth which would receive my bones, at last, cleaned, stripped, peeled, proper and clean as teeth, it would have been In the way: I was In the way for eternity."

What does it mean, as Sartre remarks, to be in the way? In Nausea, Roquentin is a character of imageless import – a tea-cup dilettante strangled by small, uncomfortable moments. The narrative is sludgy and moribund, the French quarter lapping at the juice of fetishistic period-writing; a scrutiny of the work produces the fond knowledge that language, in subconscious audible Wittgenstein, is a mutinous impediment. Sartre’s characters play as witty little devices of churlish beauty, perhaps facile, sparingly dull. The danger of Roquentin’s being exists in his approach to the world as a backdrop, an incomplete still-life housing filthy smudged brush-strokes – in a word, human beings. Familiar to the pattern of crisis which acts the filter to each passing moment, each individual “now,” is the overwhelming shape of despondency – of little fingers running down the length of a hair-lock, gauging its brittleness, considering it. It’s purposeless to simply ignore the hair-lock, the “what’s-there,” as much as it is to pursue it. It’s nothing more than what it is, and it could never be what it isn’t – it isn’t able to not be; it’s in the way. The man on the train flicks his head back to create an aversion as you pass; the birth of an illusion: “I’m not here, in fact, I should like to say I don’t notice you.” But the ephemeral stranger is the ephemeral moment; the conduction of moments from causes, from things in the way. Freedom, for the man on the train, is truly impossible in that setting; he may close his eyes to the world, or hold his head back as to be disregarded, but he is certainly there – and we regard him, and take hold of him in our eyes, so that his existence features before us like an extraordinary tragedy; it is the choice of the stranger to surrender him. Or maybe the man on the train fails to shift his head at all, but rather focuses plainly into the eyes of the stranger – maybe the stranger reads the deadness of the man’s eyes, like a pair of swollen, swimming epitaphs. Maybe certain miserable words are exchanged – maybe nothing, but just enough so as to have something to put up with. Human experience is startling, and never so merciful as to be subtle.