There is something fascinating in the western. Something of America; the southern states, of Mexico and the legend of the cowboy, of the caballero; something about the spirit of the horse and the bleak, rugged landscape has a grand power to capture the imagination. There must be something in the western philosophy that appeals and transcends the genre because you find the same themes, the same spirit, in other kinds of books. The classic American road novel, for instance; in Jack Kerouac and his tales of outsiders and sub-cultures, whole groups of people with histories and lives somewhere just outside of common law; there’s something of the western in these, too. It’s in accordance to this fascination that I have read and now  present two classic but contemporary westerns: Patrick de Witt’s The Sisters Brothers and Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing; second in his Border trilogy, and sequel to the perhaps better known All the Pretty Horses.

These are two tales of two brothers, and two novels each in their way true to the spirit of the western; but different works. As the synopsis and the comments by reviewers suggest, The Sisters Brothers is a wry take on the traditional western road and revenge tale. Two brothers, killers by trade, set out across America in search of their mark. The novel, narrated by Eli Sisters, one half of the murderous brothers of the title, follows their adventures and Eli’s ponderous, changing attitude to a profession he has not entirely happily found himself in. There are many things that make this novel an enjoyable read; it is frequently funny, and frequently also sad. There are some excellent pieces of violence, well described and played out like a scene from any classic western. The narrative is consistent and the writing of a good quality, and the climax in particular is unexpectedly moving and exciting.

The ending of the novel really is fine; however it’s a shame that I really do have to use the word ‘unexpectedly’, as in ‘unexpectedly moving’. But I do, because ultimately I found that I had very few feelings towards the rest of the novel. Perhaps because of the noir, knowing style in which the novel is written, I found The Sisters Brothers to be a novel out of step with itself. It is narrated from the first person, but Eli’s thoughts and observations do not feel authentically his; I felt the machinery of the genre and the author’s intent obtruding into the narrative from the first page, and as a result was never fully convinced. The episodes, adventures and people that the brothers encounter are not quite cursorily or lazily described, yet they feel somehow a little predictable, a little caricatured, but it’s not quite sharp and smart and witty enough to achieve the noir, or to live up to its reviews. Eli simply doesn’t present a strong enough voice to convince you that he is a real character; it was almost always the voice of the author’s own intentions that I heard in the narrative. This may be one of the dangers inherent in using the first person narrative. If the voice of the narrator is not convincing, nothing will be, and then it is impossible for the story to come fully alive. Such a story can still be an enjoyable affair, which The Sisters Brothers certainly is, and there are some brilliant episodes, the ending in particular, where the sheer pace and drama of the unfolding action carried me away, and then for the first time I felt really engaged.

 –

-Then Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, which tells the story of sixteen year-old Billy Parham who one day, seemingly on the spur of the moment, is moved not only to spare the vicious wolf he has caught in a trap, but then to return it himself to the mountains of Mexico, from where it must have come. This whole episode makes up perhaps a third or a quarter of the novel, while the remainder more or less sees Billy and his younger brother Boyd returning to Mexico to reclaim some stolen horses. Very much road and revenge, indeed. Despite a degree of similarity in plot, however, The Crossing is quite a different story to The Sisters Brothers. With ferociously accomplished prose, McCarthy achieves with this novel that wonderfully rare thing of taking his reader right into the heart of the protagonist and to the settings he evokes, as I really wish de Witt had done. In this case I was hopelessly engaged from the beginning; The Crossing retains the romance and the legendary, fabulous quality of the genre without alienating the reader by making her feel too aware of the machinery. If The Sisters Brothers was light and ultimately unconvincing, The Crossing on the other hand is a serious novel, and more than anything, it is authentic.

It’s also quite a curious novel; atypical, it piqued my interest. Although driven by some kind of a direction and a forward motion, the novel, like its protagonist (inseparable), does not appear to follow any determined plot. Billy bounces from one episode to another, acting and reacting to situations that shape themselves around him beyond his control; the direction of the novel wends and winds unpredictably. The conflict between the disorder and chaos of a life in the present tense, and the order imposed retrospectively and prospectively in the telling of a life is met masterfully by McCarthy in this novel. The brothers have runs of good and bad fortune as I’ve already mentioned; the brothers gain everything and then lose it again. People die unexpectedly and others are equally unexpectedly allowed to survive. It is not a predictable novel. The novel repeats itself in motifs which spin out and interconnect quite naturally because McCarthy allows the reader to make the connections herself. While never quite understanding or inhabiting the reticent protagonist, I felt even so that I beginning to know Billy and to understand his journey, even at the same time as he, in the novel, is learning the same. So you reach a degree of intimacy with Billy in McCarthy’s novel that you never grasp in de Witt’s, and in achieving this subtlety I do rather gape at McCarthy’s technique.

If I’m honest I feel that I cannot praise this novel too much: not only technically accomplished, more importantly it is beautiful, evocative, and moving. Admittedly I always cry at endings, but especially when they are this good. I might mention that the endings of both de Witt’s and McCarthy’s efforts involve horses. Would they be westerns if they didn’t?

In part, McCarthy’s The Border trilogy is a series about men uprooted and without a home in a changing world. The Crossing, however, does not fall into nostalgia. Use of the third person perspective allows the narrative to maintain a certain philosophical, almost cinematic distance. The modern in these novels does not necessarily relate to a specific point in time but is something always encroaching upon the landscape. The modern is the inevitable, change and technology always rising up to replace the older ways of doing things, but it also represents something brittle and transient, while the old – the ancient, mysterious landscape of Mexico, the spirit of the wolf, the horse, and the wisdom shared by the characters Billy meets – is not so much old as timeless; unknowable, and so unconquerable. I’m in no doubt that McCarthy is in full control of this work, so it’s no accident that I had a strange sensation inside every time Billy got into a car, and when, at one point, he has to buy breakfast cereal from a shop to feed his horse. McCarthy commands sorrow; The Crossing is not nostalgic but a contemplation on time, and a work of mourning for something already lost.

I have already remarked that there is something essentially fabulous in the western, which I mean in the most literal sense; i.e. of the fable, and especially of the oral tradition of storytelling. The western genre is a genre of storytelling and the tellers of stories; as in The Crossing, much of the novel is comprised of the stories of other characters Billy meets on the road. In this, individual histories are woven with the fabric of mythology, a certain philosophy which is bound inseparably to the collective history and the story of the landscape itself, and the people who occupy it and tell it. There is a preoccupation with mapping in the novel, or rather the impossibility of accurately mapping out a journey: the journey is a story that can only be told once, and the map is not the journey. The road alone is. This particular story, The Crossing, likewise, is not a map, not something that can easily be made a plot of; it must be read, or since the story tells itself, it must be listened to.

I think it is the philosophy at the heart of it that makes the western a more malleable and dynamic genre than many might suspect. At the heart of this western philosophy, as in all philosophies, is a certain understanding of the world and our position in it. In the western the protagonist is in a certain sense a relic of a time past; a lone caballero in an age of cars and cities. He does not belong to the world as it is, so he sets out alone but for his horse, on a voyage through unknown and precarious land. Perhaps it is the foreignness of the country or the solitude that causes us to think in Waldenesque meditation, to return spiritually to a more primitive and atavistic state where the landscape itself and the texture of the earth attain a kind of pagan divinity, and the animals; the horse and the wolf, are purer and older and wiser than men. In any case I think the western does speak to our more primal instincts, a buried core of understanding (from our collective history?), perhaps; if at least Freud was somewhat right. If not this, then at least the sense of being displaced in or from the world is an idea that resonates, and appears a theme in stories across many genres. Stories concerned with time and the journey, the road; protagonists moving against the time of modernity, at least as I have rather briefly described it, and a story approached rather through the landscape than through a plot; these for me are all essentially stories of the western genre.

 ‘I do not think I am looking for a man, but for a God. I am beginning to feel a void which must be the absence of God. I have called for a father, a guide, a leader, a protector, a friend, a lover, but I still miss something; it must be God. But I want a God in the flesh, not an abstraction, an incarnated God with strength, two arms, and a sex.’ (p. 261)

It is impossible for me now to read only as a reader, I read as a reader, writer, student; frustrated to be able to be only the one at a time. Once were days when I could read purely, sentence after sentence in the unadulterated pleasure of reading, but now, as I read The Diary of Anaïs Nin, my head is already filling up with notes, if my pen or pencil scribbles a few notes in margins or in notebooks, and I essay also in my head as I read on.

Impossible now for me to write about Anaïs Nin in an objective fashion. Reading her diary I say, I love her and would have liked to have met and known her – I feel I have much in common with her. But then again, no; no because just as she might once have lived close to D. H. Lawrence but never called on him, likewise I have nothing to offer; I am very pale still, and still unformed. Yet reading her I feel that I do know her, that we are friends here between the lines in what lives on, and that reading her is conversation. I feel her diary is a book that I might read many times because it is very deep and I haven’t the capacity to absorb and properly reflect on all of it this first time, and who could? I feel that she would be pleased to know that her diary has the power to penetrate still, that she gave it life, and words with no concern for time and space and even death.

This time, reading, I enjoy particularly the vibrant descriptions of her milieu and the exotic characters who comprise it. As I writer I wonder how I could possibly give such life and depth and subtlety to characters that I will write. Then, in an academic way, I enjoy her engagement with psychoanalysis, and notes on fate, coincidence, translation, deferral, the unconscious, the oceanic (masculine and feminine?) sink quietly into the outer layers of my mind, like they did in the best seminars when I was aware that I was not yet ready to understand all or make sense of it, but that one day I would. No fully formed thoughts then; only fragments waiting to be assembled in the right conditions to go from something nebulous to something else more concrete.

Meanwhile I enjoy reading, understanding, between the lines, her love for Henry, and his for her – a love that she does write but does not name specifically.

I think about how we can see only what we are ready, already able to see. I looked at the stars one night, where they are bright in the country, and thought that my favourite constellations were firstly the Pleiades, best seen only indirectly, they appear to me like a diamond, and then Orion, the hunter, whose bow and arrow point to the Pleiades, it seems to me. Then I remembered that in fact I knew the names of only two other constellations than these, and I thought how many others are whose names I do not know, and how we are able to see only what is named, and only to love what is named and seen. How strange. I think that what I felt and feel in common with Anaïs is that we want to see it all.

 —

 ‘I do not think I am looking for a man, but for a God. I am beginning to feel a void which must be the absence of God. I have called for a father, a guide, a leader, a protector, a friend, a lover, but I still miss something; it must be God. But I want a God in the flesh, not an abstraction, an incarnated God with strength, two arms, and a sex.’ (p. 261)

Nin’s diary a rebellion against oversimplification, romanticism, the fairy tale, lies. Her friends considered it to be truly her greatest work, and in some ways greater than a novel can be. The form of a novel is coherence, pattern, meaning. Literature pales beside the tragedy of human life, she writes somewhere; I paraphrase, didn’t mark the page! The diary reveals inconsistency. The deepest love turns to apathy, disappointment, or violence, and then may return to love, as quickly and without consequence as the changing weather. One moment she is wonderfully generous, the next she is jealous and fearful that she has given too much.

‘While I was working, I was in despair. I discovered that I had given away to Henry all my insights into June, and that he is using them…I feel empty-handed, and he knows it, because he writes me that he “feels like a crook.”’ (p. 128)

I remember that when I read Henry & June, Nin’s inconsistency at first frustrated me. But in the end it must be admired because honest, and impossible not to love the character Anaïs Nin because of this weakness which after all, all of us recognise. In novels we the reader request consistency, coherence; but here the diary reveals that life is fragmented, people are changeable, nothing is for certain. Apathy, disappointment, violence, love happen. Anaïs Nin wonders which self to bring before Dr. Otto Rank; which will be of sufficient interest that the eminent psychoanalyst will take on her case, her quest to be made whole.

 —

“We know very little about woman. In the first place it was man who invented ‘the soul’…” (Otto Rank. p. 276)

Men and women not ‘created’ (if you will) differently in essence, yet are creations and more than this, are self-creations built into towering and seemingly timeless edifices out of cultural symbols, mythologies (illusions). But while man took control of his destiny, woman relinquished her own creation and role of creator (she was made out of Adam’s rib!)

To seek the truth, to find God, we must tear down these monuments and build ourselves new, both man and woman. Perhaps, though, this is why woman is traditionally seen to be closer and more inclined to spirituality than man. Because man is in love with what he  created, with his self-creation, while woman is not – she never created herself only accepted what was given, was subdued for many centuries. She is aware that she is only playing roles. And she [Anaïs Nin] wants to break down the roles she finds herself constantly playing for others, to discover what the truth and the core of her is. It’s a possibility for the modern woman. Beneath those roles, however, she discovers only more roles, and we her readers are witness to the repetition. She searches for God, in man and in men, in love; in Henry, June, Allendy, her father, and Rank. She is looking for a master, an infallible father, someone who will teach her what it is to be Anaïs Nin and who will explain to her the lies she tells and the roles she plays – more than this, to make the lies and the roles unnecessary. But each attempt fails; eventually she overpowers them all; she sees more than they do, and they are transformed from god and father, to child. The only god she finds, and the only truth that is sacred, is her own self. Nin’s quest for god, the quest for a true self, consistent and whole.

Impossible to live without the roles, though; her quest is doomed from the beginning. What lies beneath all that is too small, too fragmented, too oceanic, to be seen or understood. She finds that the lies are necessary, translation required. With her father:

‘We both started out with the desire to be devoted, complete, human, noble, faithful; but our passions broke the damn, and forced us into lies.’ (p. 238)

To be in the world amongst others the monument and the name is necessary. Oceans of space lie between us, and we can only see and love what we have a name for. Rank’s words are telling when he says that ‘all of us would like to live on an island’. (p. 335) In Black Spring, Henry Miller postulates that we do already all live on islands of our own creations, each one of us a neurotic Robinson Crusoe (BS pp. 41-2). The only possible work is invention of the self. To tear down first all of what was created out of ideas that were not our own, and to build anew in authenticity. And we will build ourselves structures that will look strange to the world, but delightful also.

—

Finally, then, the first volume closes with the most moving, terrifying passages on childbirth I’ve read. I cried on the floor of the crowded train by the loo where I read and finished the diary, where an old lady watched with curiosity or sympathy. Listen:

‘These legs I opened to joy, this honey that flowed out in joy – how these legs are twisted in pain and the honey flows with the blood. The same pose and the same wetness of passion but this is dying and not loving.’ (p. 344)

 —

Notes:

the copies I used are The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. One: 1931-1934, ed. Gunther Stuhlmann, (New York: Swallow Press, 1966)

and Henry Miller’s Black Spring (St Albans: Panther, 1965)

For further reading, apart of course from Henry Miller (have already started re-reading Black Spring, much mentioned in the Diary) and the other works she cites, including the works of Otto Rank, Nietzsche, Proust, Lawrence, many others… the name that springs foremost into my mind is Hélène Cixous, for her explorative works into writing, dreams, the feminine, influenced by psychoanalysis and the work of Jacques Derrida, which seem to me incredibly appropriate to Anaïs Nin.

For a taste of Cixous and a little shameless self-promotion on my part, you might try DISTANCE & INTIMACY: Cixous on the telephone

And you pause a while, caught wondering, but the memory isn’t even a memory but only the sense that there was a memory, and that you have known this once before. And by the time you’re realising or rememering this, the moment has already departed, and it no long feels like the summer, and the sun is setting.

But the moment seemed realer and bigger than all the summers passed, and you’d remember it, and you’d spend your life trying to remember it again.

For one who has long very much enjoyed living according to the Wilde philosophy – i.e. ‘anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination’ – Henry David Thoreau’s Walden presents rather a problem. For those unfamiliar with the book, it is more or less a collection of thoughts and observations from the two years in which Thoreau built himself a house and lived in the woods beside Walden Pond. The spirit of the book is a call toward a simpler life, and a eulogy to nature that evokes its subject with dazzling and earnest description. And between these two, a challenge to the notion that modernity, all our material advance, has advanced the heart of man:

‘While civilisation has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.’

p. 21

Though first published in 1854, Walden is an important book for the time we’re living in. We’ve lived an age of excess, an age of plenty like humanity has never known before, but just as Thoreau suggests it doesn’t seem to have made most of us happy, or made mankind any better. The life of simplicity that Thoreau in Walden calls us to is based on the idea that accumulation of wealth and property only restricts us: owning a house is something that in England most people as far as I know aspire to. Owning a house, however, entails a mortgage which commits us to a life of work, and ties us to a particular place and way of life – restricting in us the possibility of change and growth; restricting us also from contemplating and participating in the things that really matter to us. This sentiment reminds me of the thought of Albert Camus in A Happy Death that’s stuck fast with me – that freedom in our age really means freedom from money. In A Happy Death this meant having money: ‘having money is a way of being free of money’; in Walden it is the renunciation of wealth that makes one free.

If you read or have read Walden you may find yourself thinking as I did that it’s all very well for Thoreau, but most of us will find it impossible to live in a shack in the woods sustaining ourselves by the land. Well I think that it’s one of those things that needn’t be taken literally. In Thoreau as in Camus it is freedom that is striven for, and money only the obstacle; that thing which comes between man and happiness, freedom or betterment (pick your own philosophical goal) whether by lack of it, or excess and overvaluation. If this is the case, it appears a distortion and a sad thing that material wealth has gained a (completely self-referring) value all of its own and really come to override those other three. So I think that at the heart of Walden is an important reminder that dependence on money is a piece of savage trickery; the more we accumulate the tighter we are bound. After all, we seem to have forgotten that the luxuries available to us these days which we really think we need – they’re luxuries; we’ve forgotten how much we can do without. Living in post-student poverty allows me to speak personally on this. It’s depressing having no money, I can tell you, but it reminds you how much you can do without.

I’m not an economist, nor particularly political. However, with constant news of recession on one hand, and the growing dissatisfaction with the status quo that can be seen in the Occupy protests – I think or at least hope that books like Walden will resurface in popular culture and inspire their readers to the kind of philosophical reflection that will allow mankind to look forwards to an age of wisdom, not excess. I also don’t think this will be at odds with Oscar Wilde’s thought. I’m pretty sure Wilde would have found the excess and worship of money inherent in the way in which we today ‘live beyond our means’ to be ‘vulgar’ and every bit as dull as an over-serious abstinent and ascetic life.

Finally, because this is intended to be a comment on a book, and not a political commentary or polemic, I’d like to leave some passages that I loved, which I hope will persuade you that this is a beautiful book, as well as challenging.

‘Man was not made so large-limbed and robust but that he must seek to narrow his world’
p. 17

‘All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise. To him whose elastic and vigorous thought keeps pace with the sun, the day is a perpetual morning. It matters not what the clocks say or the attitudes or labours of men. Morning is when I am awake and when there is a dawn in me … To be awake is to be alive.’
pp. 58-9

‘I rejoice that there are owls. Let them do the idiotic and maniacal hooting for men. It is a sound admirably suited to swamps and twilight woods which no day illustrates, suggesting a vast and undeveloped nature which men have not recognised. They represent the stark twilight and unsatisfied thoughts which all have.
p. 82

‘However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you are. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, poor as it is. You may perhaps have some pleasant, thrilling, glorious hours, even in a poor-house. The setting sun is reflected from the windows of the alms house as brightly as from the rich man’s abode; the snow melts before its door as early in the spring.’
p. 212

* All quotes from Walden are from the Dover Thrift Edn.
Please excuse lack of reference for Camus and Wilde – I don’t have the texts at hand so I got ‘em off the web.

On July 12^th of this year I was lucky to attend a seminar at Sussex University given by Peggy Kamuf, Geoffrey Bennington and Michael Naas, on Jacques Derrida’s Death Penalty Seminars of 1999-2001. Lucky because I didn’t have a clue it was happening until about an hour before when I bumped into a friend in the library who was going, lucky because the three speakers are legends of the discipline, and lucky because they were speaking on a text not yet available. The full papers on which they were speaking will, I believe, be published in the Oxford Literary Review, and so the following will not be an attempt to rewrite those papers for academics far (far, far, far) more eminent and clever than myself, only to share some of what I heard with the hope that it might be interesting. I remember I intended to write this just about straight away, but I got swept away with the dissertation season and an internship with a literary agency in London, and so rather went on hiatus.

In any case I don’t think this will be entirely untimely, especially in the UK, with the recent call for debate on bringing back capital punishment, and the publication of a government e-petition to retain the ban on capital punishment. It is my personal feeling that debate is always welcome over any subject. Incidentally, only a couple of weeks prior to my semi-accidental attendance of this seminar I was having a debate with my dad over whether or not the death penalty was ever justifiable. I was firmly in the negative, while he thought – possibly. Our conclusion (just so that you know that my dad isn’t finally pro-death penalty) was that as long as there is the possibility that an innocent person could be condemned by the state to die, it is not. But it disturbed me that beyond this I was having trouble defending my position. Since the above conclusion will not be enough to satisfy all theoretical death penalty proponents, it is important that those who care about retaining the ban fully understand their own position, that they have coherent and reasoned arguments, and do not rely only on their personal moral inclinations.

There are plenty of good reasons to oppose the death penalty apart from the possibility we can never be clear of the possibility of killing an innocent person: its almost certain failure to act as a deterrent, the propagation of inequality in the justice system (since it is almost always the already vulnerable in society who receive the harshest sentencing, at least in the US), and the propagation of a revenge culture. Despite this, there remain a number of people who nevertheless oppose the ban, arguing perhaps that the law-abiding tax-payer should not have to bear the cost of retaining a life-sentence prisoner, that life in prison is too gentle a punishment for those who have committed the most heinous crimes, and indeed the question of deterrence does remain debatable. This is the job of philosophy: to look past subjectivity and sentiment (no matter how noble), and also beyond the practical reasons for our most valued principles. Philosophy concerns itself with the questions, what we are as human beings and, perhaps more importantly, what we want to be. If it digs away at the foundations of our beliefs to uncover their (sometimes) questionable roots, it is only to more firmly establish the structure of our thinking around these most important principles.

This was the intention of Derrida’s death penalty seminars. Michael Naas opened the proceedings by asking why, since the death penalty had been abolished for twenty years in France and was now almost completely abolished in the West, should Derrida devote two years to the question? Another question. Is it possible that after the death penalty has been abolished it might nevertheless somehow remain? It is a question of roots – for Derrida, the Judeo-Christian thought at the roots of the death penalty – and beyond this, in our concept of the human – that remains in our thinking even in a secular age. Derrida argues that this thinking endorses both the death penalty and its abolition, and his seminars will focus on a deconstruction (or criticism) of the abolitionist position, but in order to strengthen this position. What Derrida calls for our thinking to be less theological and more philosophical, not because he is anti-religion but so that our discourse around the death penalty can be more universal. If he is right in saying that no philosopher or philosophy has yet been anti-death penalty, it is because the same discourse that argues against the death penalty argues equally in favour of it. It is a hard position, because if Judeo-Christian thought has marked all discourse and philosophy in the western tradition, then deconstruction is not excluded either. Deconstruction itself will need to be deconstructed.

Michael Naas spoke of the context around the death penalty seminars and the idea that a discussion of the death penalty is a discussion of the possibility and limits of discourse/thought itself. Geoffrey Bennington then turned more concretely to the death penalty. Philosophy concerns itself with logic, with reason. Derrida suggests that Kant’s argument – which is in favour of the death penalty – remains the most rationally sound and coherent position on the death penalty, and is, therefore, the one to be toppled. I am no Kant student so I am afraid all I can do is repeat the thrust of the ideas Bennington spoke of without criticism or analysis. Kant’s argument is based on the Talionic Principle (i.e. ‘an eye for an eye…’). His position that in the interest of human dignity – that of the criminal as well as the law-abider – this is the only measure of justice that will satisfy: it is ‘the best confirmation of human dignity’ we have. (To my understanding,) Derrida will attack on the grounds of an ambiguity between objective (i.e. legal) right versus subjective (i.e. moral) right – a disparity Bennington illustrated with the example of the shipwreck survivor who pushes another off the last piece of wreckage in order to live. Objectively, he is innocent, since the law of necessity will say that we have a right to survive, and the survivor will argue that ‘I would have died otherwise’. Morally, it is rather more ambiguous. Derrida also raises the question, who dictates right? Revolution, he argues, is never ‘right’ – because it is the sovereign who dictates what is ‘right’. If the revolution succeeds, then it is sovereign and it will dictate what is right. Sometimes, the ‘sovereign is the beast, the height is the depth. What is more right is less just’. Again, Derrida has taken us beyond the question of the death penalty. But the death penalty is at the heart of these ideas: it is the death penalty ‘where these problems show up most saliently’.

Peggy Kamuf, in contrast to the other speakers, and rather to my surprise, spoke most prosaically about the death penalty. She asked: What if the death penalty were a drug? What if the death penalty was an anaesthetic?  What if the death penalty was a drug, an anaesthetic called Sodium Thiopental?

She was speaking of the chemical composition of the lethal injection, as it is comprised in the US. Sodium Thiopental (STP) is the primary agent, the anaesthetic component of the cocktail of the lethal injection, and perhaps the centre of the struggle against the death penalty in the US. Without this anaesthetic, the lethal injection would be excruciatingly painful, and since this drug has now become unavailable in the US, because of a ‘raw material availability problem’, the process has, apparently, had to be halted. What is curious is that STP is a generic drug that could in theory be produced by any pharmaceutical company, but because the compositional protocol of the lethal injection are extremely tight, STP is necessary. So why has it become unavailable? Kamuf explained that Haspura, the company that manufactures STP, has moved its production to Italy, where export of the drug for use in capital punishment is Illegal. It seems that the production of STP was not economically worthwhile for Haspura, so, as Kamuf says, it ‘cost them next to nothing to grow a conscience’. STP is illegal to export for use of execution in much of Europe, including the UK, so it seems that the face of the death penalty question is no longer about morality and right – it is about import-export laws, and economics.

This will be an unsatisfactory article for many. It does not offer any answers, but, in fact, only raises more questions (and perhaps questions too abstract for many to stomach) – alas, this is philosophy! My intention was never to close the question or complete the arguments of these thinkers (even if I could), but only to repeat something of what I felt lucky to have the opportunity to hear, and hopefully it will be interesting to some.

SEE:

Petition to retain the ban on capital punishment: http://epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/1090
The Oxford Literary Review: http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/olr
The Derrida Seminar Translation Project: http://derridaseminars.org/volumes.html

I first saw Thousands performing in a living room in Brockley, London just over two weeks ago, supported by Wildeflower and the brilliant Free Peace. Thousands are two lovely fellows with guitars from Seattle: Kristian Garrard and Luke Bergman. With songs that sound maybe like Fleet Foxes meeting Simon and Garfunkle (here I go trying to write about music again, apologies), the music played in that living room floated through the hazy air like it was coming from another world; I think we all felt far away and deeply privileged to be there. Needless to say, the gig at the Haunt could not match the intimate atmosphere of that crowded living room, neither did I expect it to, but it was still great to see Thousands again and those of us who had been in that living room were also gratified to receive a shout out, and my dear housemate received rather more than this, taking home Luke’s beard in a crisp packet (we know how to make the fans jealous). Best not to wonder. It was only a shame that the stage at the Haunt could not be higher, so that anyone more than two or three people back would not have been able to see the band, who were sitting to play, and really no wonder that their music had to be played against a backdrop of voices from the crowd.

Tune Yards, or Merrill Garbus, is an artist I admit I had only heard of through Thousands, but from the reviews I had seen through the course of my pre-gig research I was expecting some pretty great things from Merrill’s live performance and was not at all disappointed. With music I would probably best describe as a wonderful androgynous cacophany, a tribal undercurrent agreed by her warlike facepaint, Merrill is undoubtedly a force to be reckoned with. What struck me then and now sticks in my mind a week later, even more than her ability to hold a pretty or a growling note, was Merrill’s ability to hold the crowd. For me it was in those moments of powerful silence, commanded and momentary. You forget how powerful the silence of a crowd can be.

The UK leg of their tour is over, unfortunately, but I recommend absolutely that if you ever have the chance to see either of these bands play, that you seek them out.

For something closer to hand and closer to home (if you live in Brighton) I tentatively recommend a visit to the Haunt, just opposite Brighton pier in the coach station. It seemed to be full of attractive and friendly people, it puts on a lot of live shows and appears to have a relaxed atmosphere. This being my first visit I don’t want to commit a full report, but as far as first impressions go, it was a good one, and I will return.

SEE:

Thousands
http://www.facebook.com/mobileprotection#!/pages/Thousands/363152360345 (facebook group)

http://thousandsband.com/

Tune Yards
http://www.facebook.com/mobileprotection#!/tuneyards (facebook group)
http://www.myspace.com/tuneyards
http://www.tune-yards.com/

The Haunt, Brighton
http://www.thehauntbrighton.co.uk/home

]]> http://gullsofbrighton.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/tune-yards-thousands-how-did-you-spend-midsummers-day/feed/ 0 gullsofbrighton http://gullsofbrighton.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/distance-and-intimacy-cixous-on-the-telephone/ http://gullsofbrighton.wordpress.com/2011/06/09/distance-and-intimacy-cixous-on-the-telephone/#comments Thu, 09 Jun 2011 16:24:39 +0000 gullsofbrighton http://gullsofbrighton.wordpress.com/?p=110 ]]>

On Tuesday I was lucky to attend a telephone conversation between French writer and thinker, Hélène Cixous, and our own Professor Nicholas Royle of Sussex University. I’m aware that a telephone conversation does not sound so very thrilling and it was certainly a shame that Cixous could not be there in person, as was originally intended, yet even so, everyone I have spoken to about the event agrees that it was a very curious and special thing indeed, something that even now I’m not sure I’ve caught the full meaning of, and to which my thoughts have kept spiralling back.

What I’ve got here are the notes I took from the conversation, and I was scribbling away as fast as possible trying not to miss anything. But of course it’s inevitable that I would miss some things and mishear some things. Maybe this is me joining the conversation, or extending the conversation, another act of translation and preservation; but maybe also creating something new again, and I thought my notes might be interesting for those who attended and hopefully for some who did not, those who already have some interest in Cixous, or language. It might be of no use to anyone, but I thought that in a way it might be interesting as an extension of the performance that was.

[EDIT 3rd January 2012] Hear the original conversation between Prof. Nicholas Royle & Hélène Cixous on the University of Sussex website: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/video/schools/english/HeleneCixousOnTheTelephone.mp3

On the telephone
transports across sea and sky
telephone connected to metamorphosis; the telephone is in a state of metamorphosis; a ship, a butterfly, ‘telephant’ with large ears … mythological
living vs. dead
is the telephone a living object or a figure of death?
as a figure of undeath
the solitary beings we surrounded by death, the telephone a lifeline, we hang on the telephone … a thread of life. The telephone is help.
God in Eden calling Adam on the telephone…
a seagull calls, yes I am here,
‘Here I am.’
Psyche and the figure of the telephone. Psyche too good to be loved, too beautiful to be loved. She is given to death and carried away by a terrible monster
Carried to the other side.
And an invisible lover; to be blessed with not seeing
(Tiresias, Orpheus)
is she in Paradise or is she the toy of a treacherous monster?
Betraying her vow, breaking the promise she sees that her lover is love itself
but beholding him she loses him
love must be without sight
Faith and the sightless voice: doubt and faith
‘Faith is doubt, is our way of escaping doubt, a strange couple, faith is always trembling, it cannot lie.’
Return to the seagull
to hear and see the seagull … A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
to see the voices
literature is the place where you see voices.
Literature cannot be destroyed, it is protected by distance, the distance it creates and the distance within it.
In writing literature you are always asking .. what am I, am I good … the telephone by contrast is direct: question
answer
distance and closeness
Invention of the telephone and psychoanalysis
Freud’s work as an act of telephoning, to a voice within
invisible
a way of being with the other without the other being there; the best relation.
When in a room with another we beg and are distracted by the face, the eyes, interference…
the telephone is pure, direct line.
On the telephone with Jacques Derrida
everyday, almost, early in the morning before the world is awake
not coded, but this communication creates its own rites, and telepathy
catching moods before a word is spoken; hypersensitivity to breath, the linguistics of breath, an intimacy which is lost communicating face to face.
Answerphone, the ability to leave messages that play with time
tragedy and comedy, the theme of being out of time
(the time is out of joint)
telephone, coincidence, and literature
when not calling we are in-between calls, a journey of a kind
there is no interruption for the telephone, in real friendship and real love, like a whale, and sometimes it comes to the surface.
A dream.
I woke up startled. Dream, I tell you; I wrote it down.
Ophelia’s dream, getting lost, old clothes, a cat (grey and white flecked … seagull?) – metamorphosis
but how can we telephone if you are already here?
An exact replica of what is happening now, prophetic
Cixous’ cat listens, an extended telephone
Tea with exotic herbs. T. Telephone.
Ophelia, communicating through Shakespeare, another language. And in the medical school, where we are, while Cixous home become a hospital (Coincidence)

The fallibility of translation (Lauren’s question)
translation, telephone to the text; the possibility of mishearing or misunderstanding
‘mockeur’, for instance, cannot be rendered in English, it laughs but also speaks of words (mots) and heart (cour)
suffering requires the analysis of/beyond analysis, requires the analysis to come, a movement
the untranslatability of texts: a text, as we say it, is untranslatable… the danger and pleasure of reading
(Dulcie)
Motherhood and blindness; mother being too close to see her child clearly; and the child cannot see the mother because she is too close. Love and blindness. Create distance by unchilding and unmothering oneself. (What is it to do this; what is it to be a role, a mother, a child)
Not ‘I write’ but ‘they write’ and
a writer must be humble because she cannot pretend to master the thing, the inside, outside.
(?)
‘Love itself in the Letterbox’
‘Love loves me in the letterbox’ (the untranslatable, the French) in the plural of plurals; as plural as possible, is love(s) and writing(s)
H.C. says, I have never written a novel, doing away with storytelling, which is much more common in French writing than English. The impossibility of telling a story, of rendering a collection of scenes (dramatic scenes) rather than the stories; and not a collection, she does not collect, rather they gather (a gathering of ghosts) And she does not write to genre, but chases, and the loosening of (and in?) knots
‘Had I not written my poems in English would you have loved me?’
Fiction. ‘English’ is a fiction. Nothing truer than fiction.
An accident, that it be English and not another language.
The moment a French person writes in French, the language becomes foreign; always write in a foreign language, although there is a difference in the level of foreignness.
Is English more, or less, foreign to a French person than French?

hands of a clock, the seagull.
pins, in French.
(Lucy Ella)
telephone and the possibility of death, as inscribed with death.
Answerphone messages from beyond the grave (9/11 victims, famously) … the ringing or the dialling tone of the unanswered telephone, haunting, or hopeful, suspense, a void.
D had a tragic sense of life and death; the thought that things do nost last was death itself for him.

And clapping to the telephone
like running heels on a stairs.

–

An event, a performance, the theatricality of a telephone conversation… and clapping.

good girl from Max Kinghorn-Mills on Vimeo.

Football duties meant missing a couple of bands, unfortunately, but from what I did hear I was deeply impressed by the eclectic mix of sounds from folk to dubstep to reggae which seemed to be, more impressively, equally appreciated by all who attended. Perhaps the greatest achievement of the night was the wonderfully friendly atmosphere impossible to imitate or manufacture, that comes from everyone being in a good mood and wanting the same experience, helped of course by the excellent quality of the bands and the lovingly decorated club – very homely (if your home is a tree, and let’s face it we all wish it were; that or a boat) indeed, and ‘lovely’, in the word’s best sense, was the word most bandied around that night.

The night of bands was closed by reggae band Zion and the White Boys, which was an inspired and inspiring end. Not that it was the end of the night by any consideration, although in honesty apart from a stint sitting watching Patrick get his face painted and the vague recollection of talking animatedly (and undoubtedly about absolutely nothing) to Zion, those hours are Lost to me. After Hector’s House shut up for the night at 3am or so we were led to a secret party on the seafront where the good times were continued until sunrise; not for me regrettably, since by four the freezing cold plus exhaustion set in and a four thirty (or so) taxi homeward was the most blissful luxury, then to another lost day spent listening to radio 4.

The other bands playing at the ALAN event undoubtedly deserve a better write up or at the very least a mention; music review, however, is so far out of my capacity. I can barely talk about music without flinching, let alone commit to writing. Instead I would only heartily recommend your having a look at those bands’ web pages, if you want to hear something new.

Finally, I strongly recommend that if you can be in Brighton, that you don’t miss next year’s Brighton Takeover!

For a full set list and links to band pages see:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=146410308763463

See especially:
http://wildeflower.co.uk/

Plus:
http://www.facebook.com/THE.ALAN.RAVE and
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000664032598 (Mad Dash on FB)

(It began one night)

—

humid and green smelling
the whisky cat stretched out, fell asleep in front of
the window in the shabby garden room
where skin is sticky, socks, feet
hair sticky, palms sweaty, nails, knickers and
eyes are hot
darting swifts birds you can hear but not see
shrieks like sonar, like bats piercing
the sound of the silence of the laughing gulls
from their rooftops
and chimneypots, wherever white on purple
lavender dove grey indigo
ice cream van moment
the air of moisture; breathing steam
sweat, dew on arms, chests, legs
evaporates from the damp leaves and thunder
groans from vaults above
where the buckled ceiling expects;
the nestling violent cloud whose sighs
move so prettily with a song, in the flowers.
on either side of ours, where families came,
patios clean and pleasant
not this one.
tangled mess overgrown grass, weeds
even the rose not a real rose but a
dog rose
looking at
gaps in the pointing
wrinkles in flaking white wood of the pane
decking of old pallets
rotting breaking treacherous underfoot
wooden chair, cheap, sliver of wood
curling, cracking upwards but
I can see over walls
where the whisky cat sitting there looks back.

garden room where jewelled lights and silent gulls
hats furs clothes, shoe crammed floor
and red little toenails on the ends of legs
says,
the wind always rises before the rain.

***

nothing separates us from the garden
not glass, not space between us
the chipped old red bricks
so favourably and fortunately keep us dry
warm in the red light crystalline garden room exotic where
whisky cat comes in because the window is wide open
but how to bear closing it when
the garden in the room the room in the garden
the sweet rain that falls on wood making it slick, shiny
first summer rain
falls like first snowdrop, daffodil, bluebell, dandelion
first dog rose to bloom

—

Don’t hesitate to tell me what you think. This doesn’t really feel like ‘my’ work – that is, I can’t appropriate the words. It’s become like a horse and I’m looking at it and I get on to ride, but it’s risky business – the horse is not yet broken; it’s doing what it wants to do and I just sit tight and try to get somewhere (anywhere).

April.

Charles Bukowski, Notes of a Dirty Old Man
Martin Amis, The Pregnant Widow
Jean Christophe Valtat, Aurororama
Jacques Derrida & Maurizio Ferraris, A Taste for the Secret
Jacques Derrida, The Ear of the Other
George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London
George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier
Charles Bukowski, Post Office
Howard Sounes, Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life
Charles Bukowski, Factotum
H. G. Wells, Men Like Gods

It’s amazing what you can accomplish with a rapidly approaching deadline. Fairly evidently, the majority of this list belongs to my term paper bibliography. I should mention, Bukowski was called into service only to prove characteristically difficult.  I spent two fevered days reading that entire biography, along with Post Office and Factotum with a very good idea to use him in my essay on Utopia, only to discover that by the time I got there with the essay I had all of about 500 words left to use, which is clearly never going to be enough for Bukowski. On the other hand, I did get to revisit a fantastic writer I’ve not encountered for several years now.

For those unfamiliar with the genius of Bukowski, I would recommend you to read Post Office first of all; his first novel and possibly his finest. His writing can be very stark, shocking, vulgar, ugly; he writes about ugly and arbitrary things. But Albert Camus is counted amonst Bukowski’s literary heros, and proves an influence that does not hide. Bukowski is a writer of the absurd and his frank, unflinching, semi-autobiographical style captures it. He has the ability to make pages shake with hilarity and rebellion, a rejection of this other-people’s world of ridiculous and spurious convention. He also has an almost uncanny knack to capture the tragedy and beauty of existence; particularly when he writes about the character Betty in Post Office; a recurring character based on his first proper girlfriend, Jane Cooney Baker, who was also his first love. I was particularly struck by this wonderful and unexpected – wonderful because unexpected – tragedy in Notes of a Dirty Old Man. This is a collection of some of the columns he wrote for the underground journal Open City, and fairly lives up to what you’d expect from the title, until, what, the second to last story I think it is, which deals with his relationship with his father. It’s a blow that comes out of nowhere. What makes his writing the more poignant is that you can never tell how far any of it is fact or fiction – Bukowski reckoned 93% of what he wrote was pure autobiography; the remaining 7% ‘improved upon’. Then there is the meeting between Bukowski and Neal Cassady, also in Notes, I think, where Bukowski gets to experience some of Cassady’s legendary driving skills immortalised in Jack Kerouac’s On The Road. Bukowski tells Cassady that ‘Kerouac has written the main chapters of his life, but that maybe he would write his last one.’ (Quoted from Sounes.) Prophetic, Neal Cassady died in Mexico only a couple of weeks later.

If you’re not yet convinced that you ought to read Bukowski, I can tell you that he was a contemporary (and published alongside) Henry Miller and William Burroughs. He was contemporary with the Beat poets but didn’t have much time for them; he considered their way ‘phony’, although Cassady was something of a hero to him, and Bukowski’s Cassady story is a beautiful eulogy.

Bukowski gets a look in here because he did not in my term paper. Not so for Mr Orwell, whom I do appreciate, and who you probably ought to read if you’ve not done so already, but I can’t find the same vitality in his writing, so forgive me if I skip over two very classic texts. Derrida, too, isn’t going to have an ear – in the last few weeks I’ve done too much violence to his name already. I will say, however, that if you are interested in Derrida/deconstruction, A Taste for the Secret is an excellent place to begin; it’s far more accessible than most of D’s texts and still covers some of the most important ideas that recur through his work.

Now Martin Amis I was curious about because he’s one of those writers who are very prolific, from a fine legacy (so I hear: Kingsley has not done well by me either yet), who you tend to hear about. So when I read about his latest novel, The Pregnant Widow, and thought it sounded like my sort of thing (decadent youths spending summer in an Italian castle; love triangles abound, some hints of Utopia) and bought it. I was very unsure when I started the book; could not tell if I was reading holiday literature or something serious, you know you’re an English Lit. student when you start worrying that what you’re reading is lowering the tone of your bloggable reading list. I was unsure of it, in fact, for the entire novel. Which is not to say I did not enjoy it; I rather did, the character of Gloria in particular was inspired, or perhaps I just felt I could relate to her; and Keith was a pretty believable fellow. This is why I’m not really a reviewer – my gut reaction was, it was okay, I enjoyed it for what it was, I probably won’t be reading it again.

There was one idea in it that stuck, which made me wonder; not so much a literary idea:
beauty is related to happiness, and also
infectious.
This seemed true to me.

In contrast to the whim on which I read The Pregnant Widow, Jean-Christophe’s Aurororama was a book I’d been longing to read ever since I read a review of it in the Guardian Review, which described it as ‘stylish’ and at least one character as ‘louche’. Louche and stylish are the foundations of a good novel, if you want my opinion, and should I ever finish a novel I should hope it would be as lithe-hipped and snake-eyed as a panther, but only as sexy as it was in equal measure, unspeakably louche. I can testify that Aurororama was definitely stylish. Steampunk is a genre or an under-cultural moment that’s always appealed to me in gentle way, but I rarely see it done justice. It’s aesthetic often comes across brilliantly; particularly in the work of Studio Ghibli, whose adaptation of Howl’s Moving Castle was without doubt an aesthetic masterpiece. Yet so often the glorious exterior lacks a heart, lacks any real substance. Never more so than with Howl’s Moving Castle which was the sappiest most Disneyfiedly cheese-and-sugar production and ruination of a book I’ve ever seen (Diana Wynne Jones’s novel is seven leagues ahead of the film).

Aurorama, however, I felt did a pretty good job. I was amused by the way steampunk met contemporary Shoreditch culture, replete with ‘scenesters’ and experimental bands, prolific use of psychadelic drugs and a subversive underground culture. And zepellins: another thing all books ought to have, at least one zepellin per novel. It was very accessible. And yet, it did lack something in the way of grit. The climax was far too easy to be genuinely satisfying, especially after I thought the main characters had not really suffered quite enough, or developed as characters. Gabriel was not quite louche enough for my taste, perhaps. All this said, it was a breath of fresh air from my usual stuffy bookcase, and the cover of the hardback edition is truly rather beautiful – it was worth buying just for that, I might hazard – and, I probably will read it again. At Christmas, in front of a fire.

H. G. Wells’ Men Like Gods. A good read; in fact, one of the only really intelligent Utopias I’ve read. Shoot me for that; sorry Huxley… BUT

not as good as Zamyatin’s We. This is from We, via my fellow Utopian (or, more likely, ‘anti-Utopian’) Robbie Jones:

‘My heart was light and fast as an aero, and it was carrying me up and up. I knew that some sort of happiness was waiting for me tomorrow. But what sort?’

We has that rare poetry that makes me write about it in the review of another book, so I will end there and hopefully you’ll go read some Bukowski and read We.

***
SECRET REVIEW OF FAST FIVE:
HAN LIVES!
But how? We all saw him burn to death in that horrific wreck at the end of Tokyo Drift, yet here he is with nary a scar nor an explanation, with his laconic drawl and getting it on with the hot chick from Fast and Furious. It doesn’t really matter, we’re just glad to have Han back.
Meanwhile, I did like the cross-film gathering of characters, that was very pleasing indeed; and Vin Diesel vs. The Rock was clearly an inspired bromance. The poor favela chick doesn’t really get a look in. And she knows it.

Did you know? Han’s full name is Han Seoul Oh
http://blogs.ocweekly.com/heardmentality/2011/04/han_seoul_wtf.php
Well done for that one, Fast and Furious team.