Lovecraft Baby

H.P. Lovecraft is a difficult author to write about right now for a variety of reasons.  For one, his work was relatively obscure for quite some years outside of pulp circles and he has only recently garnered major critical attention.  But this attention has brought other, less savory elements to light, leading to number two: his work is incredibly racist and xenophobic.  This isn't the focal point of the majority of it, but it is an undercurrent through most of his works (https://lithub.com/we-cant-ignore-h-p-lovecrafts-white-supremacy/ is a great take on this particular topic).  Third, and not insignificantly, he was not a great writer.  He was imaginative, certainly, but he had a lot of difficulties getting his visions onto the page.  His writing is so heavy and repetitive that it is nearly impenetrable at times.
I am not interested in defending Lovecraft's legacy (or arguing against it for that matter), but I have two observations about his work that I think are significant.  One is a mainstay in his writing that, I think, is redeeming in his writing in some measure.  The other is something that makes me like his writing even less.  All of this came about during my latest reading of his work, a collection titled The Call of the Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories.
A lot of Lovecraft's stories are about isolation and trauma.  He writes many stories about a lone survivor who witnessed something that they are unable to assimilate into their normal frame of reference.  These witnesses are likely to have been present as violence was visited upon a friend or partner.  These witnesses often have difficulty reconciling their experiences with what they know of the world.  Knowledge of a certain kind sets them apart from others, and they often are distraught that others will now understand what they have experienced.  I actually find this element of Lovecraft's work to be sympathetic.  He understands the terror of isolation.  The trauma that his characters experience marks them in a way that we now understand trauma to mark certain people.
The other side of this is that knowledge is generally a bad thing for Lovecraft.  His characters go insane from their knowledge.  They kill themselves because they learn of things that others do not know and they make great attempts to hide knowledge themselves.  The whole mythos of Cthulhu rests upon the idea that knowledge of the the ancient alien race is enough to drive one insane.
One of the reasons that I like science fiction is that most of it wants to push the boundaries of what we know.  It can help us to look into ourselves to ask what is possible.  It can also look at the world around us and ask why it is this way.  Lovecraft isn't a sci-fi writer per se, but his weird fiction shares some elements with sci-fi that I came to it with some expectation of a similar ethos.  It wasn't there.  This collection of short fiction sought to teach me that the world around me was dangerous even to want to know about.  It tried to teach me that going to new places and exploring new ideas is dangerous.
I gave Lovecraft a few chances and I'm done.  He doesn't fill the bill for me because he wants to keep me fearful and small.  He can keep to his own small world with his likewise small-minded folks.  I want bigger ideas.
And better writing.

Here is a song by a band I really like about Lovecraft.  I do like this song (which is way creepier than anything Lovecraft wrote):
Lovecraft Baby

Return of the Screw

This post is a continuation of my analysis of ambiguity in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.  I will pick up with some textual analysis here.  Please refer back to part one of this analysis for introductory material and context.

In the governess' second encounter with the ghost James uses  triangulated lines of sight to create confusion and disrupt straightforward narrative.  This scene needs a bit more set-up, so please bear with me for a moment.  On a rainy day, the governess enters a room to pick up her gloves when she sees someone standing outside of the window looking in.  She recognizes this as the same person she had seen earlier.  Shocked at the sight, she rushes out of the house and around to the same window to, apparently, try to confront the man but she is unable to find him.  Outside the window, she has the urge to position herself where she had seen the man and peers back into the house.  As she does so, Mrs. Grose enters the room and sees here exactly where she herself had seen the man moments before.
This scene has always been puzzling to me because of the governess' reaction.  There are several things going on.  First, she sees the apparition and immediately attributes motives to it that she cannot know.  She also admits that she cannot clearly see the face but she is convinced that it is the same person she had seen on top of the house, even though she could not clearly see the face then, either.  Her impulse to run outside and then stand where the man stood is unexplained, and then, after this, she wonders why Mrs. Grose should be so startled by a similar image.
James uses the scene to continue to develop the governess' in/credibility.  She provides detail with great confidence that the reader may be prepared to accept on an initial reading, but that is really unsupported in the text.  For example, she claims: "On the spot there came to me the added shock of a certitude that it was not for me he had come there.  He had come for someone else."  She also admits that though she is seeing the man just through a pane of glass, his appearance to her is not with "greater distinctness" than her view from the garden when he was on the roof.  In the following chapter in conversation with Mrs. Grose, the governess calls the apparition a "horror" and expresses her belief that the children are in danger.  Again, these assertions that she makes are not supported by what actually happens in the text.  James uses dense, overwrought language to mask what is actually happening.  The governess seems to be purposefully abstracting her descriptions, so much so that it can take several readings through a passage to make sense of what she is trying to express.  I believe that the difficulty of the text is a deliberate choice that James makes to develop ambiguity in what is actually going on.

The third encounter that the governess has with the ghost is, again outside in the garden near a pond.  This time, though, the little girl Flora is with her.  James plays the similar trick of providing some narrative exposition from the governess' perspective, but he turns on his technique.  Instead of just relying on the reader's interpretation, James produces a second witness-of-a-sort.  James suggests, via the governess, that Flora also saw the ghost.  However, we have only the governess' word on this as we never hear directly from Flora.

The governess describes a few more encounters with the ghost that are similar to those already described.  In the meantime, the governess learns the story of Peter Quint and Miss Jessel, two servants who were involved with each other and had died premature deaths.  She becomes convinced that the ghosts that she has seen are these two and that they have been interacting with the children Miles and Flora.  Further, she believes that the children are lying to her about their interactions.

This all culminates in the final scene.  The governess has sent away Mrs. Grose and Flora.  She is alone in the house with Miles when she has her final encounter with Quint.  The ending passages are filled with the same sort of confusing text as the rest of the novella.  The governess uses elaborate description to create distance between action and narration.  For example, "I seized, stupefied, his supposition--some sequel to what we had done to Flora, but this made me only want to show him that it was better still than that."  Every action is qualified and described ornately.
The governess believes that she sees either Miss Jessel or Quint outside of the window and clutches Miles to her chest.  Here is the final paragraph:
"But he had already jerked straight round, stared, glared again, and seen but the quiet day.  With the stroke of the loss I was so proud of he uttered the cry of a creature hurled over an abyss, and the grasp with which I recovered him might have been that of catching him in his fall.  I caught him, yes, I held him--it may be imagined with what a passion; but at the end of a minute I began to feel what it truly was that I held.  We were alone with the quiet day, and his little hear, dispossessed, had stopped."

The governess wants the reader to believe that she saw either Quint of Miss Jessel outside of the window, there is some disagreement in the text which it is.  She intimates that Miles also sees the apparition.  This struggle, is meant to be her wresting Miles from the ghost's grasp, but he dies in her arms.  It is possible that he has died of fright, that he has been taken by the ghost, of that he has been smothered by the governess in her own panic.  The text leaves open the question of what actually happens.  Are there ghosts or does the governess just imagine them?  We don't know.  Do others actually see the ghosts or does the governess merely believe that others see them and are hiding this knowledge from her?  Again, we don't know.
The point of the story is not to solve the story but to create these moments of confusion.  The reader is confronted with deciding what can and cannot be known in the narrative.  This, like much of James' other work, points back to reliability and individual perception.  Whatever happens, the governess has her perceptions of what is going on and we are only able to base our judgments of the events on this version.  The construct of her narrative will always mediate our perception of those events.
To extrapolate from this: even if it is possible to have an objective view of events (something I do not believe is possible), the retelling, or narrativizing, of these events will always be colored by individual perception.  The reader cannot know what happens in the story and this is not just because the governess may or may not be telling the truth.  My own interpretation of the story is that the governess purposefully dissembles and describes events in a roundabout way for some reason of her own.  I don't believe hat there is enough in the text even to determine why she may be doing this.  I also believe that James does this purposefully be focalizing the narrative through the governess and by creating levels of mediation from the action.  He abstracts events from narrative through the frame and through the governess' own language.  This is an exercise to demonstrate the fundamental unknowability that is at the center of the story.

Spooky, spooky Henry James

I have found myself defending Henry James on many occasions in my life.  His work is subtle and often delves deeply into the inner lives of his characters, working to suss out the intricacies of who knows what and how characters perceive one another.  His work is generally profoundly psychological in the sense that he can recreate thought processes on the page: a rare talent for any writer, but something that James does consistently throughout his fiction.  I have taught The Turn of the Screw and Daisy Miller in a handful of classes in my teaching career because they are both shorter works that still convey the breadth of James' talents (Edith Wharton's short story "Roman Fever" pairs well with Daisy Miller for anyone interested).  Both of these stories can be hard sells, but I have always been able to convert a few students to seeing their merits.
The Turn of the Screw stands out from James' other work because, as far as I know, it is the only ghost story he ever wrote.  But it is typical in the way that he uses triangulated perception to create ambiguity in the text.  That is, James funnels characters' observations of one another through one another.  He nearly always shies away from providing exposition on a character's actions, preferring instead to allow one character to describe or think about the actions.  This means that the reader always gets these perceptions second- or third-hand, creating a distance between the action of the story and the reader's interpretations.  Each distancing creates greater ambiguity that the reader must wade through in order to put together the narrative or to make judgements about characters and actions.
In The Turn of the Screw, James uses a series of techniques to distance the action of the narrative from the reader and, thus, to create ambiguity in the text.  The greatest question that is left is whether or not there is actually a haunting.  From here spawn several other questions that James refuses to answer.
Here is a basic plot outline: James uses a frame narrative to introduce the main story.  In the frame, a group of people are sharing ghosts stories on Christmas Eve when Douglas reveals that he knows of a story involving two children and a ghost.  Douglas defers telling the story by claiming it is someone else's story and that he must send for a manuscript containing the story.  Douglas builds suspense on James' behalf.  After acquiring the manuscript, Douglas tells the story of the governess of Bly.
The governess is charged with caring for Miles and Flora.  At Bly she sees a couple of ghosts and then hears the story of Quint and Miss Jessel's deaths, two former servants at Bly, and reasons that they must be the ghosts that she sees.  The governess freaks out Mrs. Grose - another servant at Bly - and the two work each other up about the haunting.  Things continue to escalate until Miles eventually dies in the governess' arms, whether he dies of fright at the sight of the ghost or because the governess smothers him is left unknown.
What I want to focus on here are the encounters that the governess has with the ghosts and how she attributes these sightings to others around her as well.  In each of these encounters James builds tension in the story by creating doubt as to what is going on.  He does this by subtly leaving out certain attributions and by strategically ending scenes so as to give the impression of conveying one perspective, but that actually relies on the reader completing the idea on his/her own and believing that it is in the story.
Early in the novella, the governess walks through the gardens surrounding Bly thinking, "One of the thoughts that, as I don't in the least shrink now from noting, used to be with me in these wanderings was that it would be as charming as a charming story suddenly to meet someone."  She continues to imagine a sort of meet-cute with a handsome stranger in the garden.  While in this reverie, she is surprised to actually see someone: "What arrested me on the spot -- and with a shock much greater than any vision had allowed for -- was the sense that my imagination had, in a flash, turned real.  He did stand there!"  But rather than meeting someone face-to-face, the governess reveals that the stranger she "meets" is standing far off on the top one of the house's towers.
This scene begs a bit of analysis because it is a good encapsulation of what James does throughout the story.  First is the odd sentence construction.  The governess perpetually writes in these circuitous sentences that are filled with subordinated clauses and digressions.  These sentences serve to distance the reader from the action because they are filled with reflection.  They keep reminding the reader that they are not reading a progressive narrative (one that develops in time with the action of the characters), but a retroactive narrative in which the narrator has the ability to layer in their own take.  The phrase, "as charming as a charming story," builds on this same premise; the governess is distanced from the immediate action that she narrates.  The next bit is more telling, she has a sense that her imagination has become real.  However, she had just described the circumstances of her imagination and the reality does not match it at all.  She imagines turning a corner and running into a handsome stranger face-to-face, but in reality she sees someone very far off and cannot see his face.  So, the governess describes a scene in this halting manner, but is distanced from it by time and her own memory.  She then tells the reader that what she imagines seems to become real, even though the reality is quite different from what she experiences.  This has the potential to leave the reader taking the governess' word while still keeping the knowledge of the description of what is actually in the text.  These are the seeds of confusion that James plants early on.  The control over his prose is so masterful that he uses details, down to sentence structure, to sow the beginnings of ambiguity throughout the story.

This is getting to be a bit long, so I am going to leave off here and continue in a second post.  I have two more passages to analyze, so be sure to tune in next week for the spooky continuation of my analysis of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw.

Primal Screamer

It has been couple of weeks since I finished this book, but I will try to give it a fair rendering here.
My key interest in reading this novel is in the author, Nick Blinko, who was the driving artistic force and vocalist in the British punk band Rudimentary Peni.  I have been listening to punk for a long time and have met a lot of people who are likewise interested, but I have run into very few people who know or like this band.  Rudimentary Peni was a "Crass band" in the sense that they were lumped into a broader category of anarcho-punk that emerged in England the late '70s and early '80s.  Blinko's band is cacophonous and, at times, deeply disturbing.  The songs will often over-dub Blinko's voice many times on the same track, singing, chanting, whispering, speaking.  The instruments often drone in a way to underscore disharmony.  Blinko's lyrics can be political, but they are largely gothic.
Rudimentary Peni disappeared in the '80s, but I have always remained interested in Blinko's work.  Beyond the music, I was drawn to the artwork on the albums.  Nick Blinko himself drew all of the artwork, and it is intense.  The cover of Primal Screamer was designed by Blinko, using his own drawing.  His artwork is dense, predominantly monochromatic, and simply ink-drenched.  Everything that I have seen of his is intricately drawn and shows deliberation at every step.  He draws skulls, screaming faces, and knives into his hatchwork.  The blackened areas show deliberate and closely-knit crosshatching.  He draws endless overlapping contours to fill in space.
I have been so taken with his style that I have adopted many of his techniques into my own drawing.

 To the left are two of my partially-completed drawings.  Another one of my drawing is below.  My style tends more toward the geometric and layered.  I don't add the same gothic elements that Blinko does, but I feel an affinity toward it nonethesame.  I am very much drawn to the detail and neatness of Blinko's work.  Instead of screaming faces, I draw tiny boxes and cross-hatchings in mathematical progressions.

Getting back to the book, it is a semi-autobiographical novel written from the perspective of a psychologist treating Nathaniel Snoxell, a young man who bears a strong resemblance to Blinko.  The novel is written as case-notes, or a treatment diary of Snoxell.  The psychiatrist becomes interested in Nat's artistic awakening, eventually spurring his own awakening.  Blinko's writing is most impressive when he seeks to psychologize Nat's artistry and particularly his place in the punk scene.  Nat and Blinko are outsiders in an outsider genre.  Their music fits only because it doesn't really fit anywhere else.  Their aesthetic isn't quite right for the counter-culture they engage.
The novel is worth the read, the music is haunting and definitely worth the listen, and the artwork is beyond memorable and, for me, moving.  This is a novel that might be best enjoyed by those who are already familiar with Blinko and/or Rudimentary Peni, but I would encourage anyone interested in outsider art, in a forthright self-reflection, in genuinely macabre interests, and so on, to check this out.

Found Writings, Part 2

What follows is an analysis/love note that I wrote about the Generation X song "Kiss Me Deadly," a song that I still think is probably the best punk song of all time.  It moves around a bit and might not be my best criticism, but I think parts of it still have legs.  I made some minor edits to the post for clarity.

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Post 1 – Kiss Me Deadly

I have spent a lot of time thinking about the topic for the first post.  Even though I have already posted once, that was just a general introduction and was just about setting up the context of the blog.  This one is the important one, though, because it establishes who I am and what this is going to be about.  I thought originally that I would write about my first punk show or my first punk album.  I was also very tempted to write about The Clash.  I don't think that any of those things are quite right.  For this post, I am going to write about just one song.  This is my favorite song and it is one that I listen to every day.  

The best song I have ever heard is “Kiss Me Deadly” by Generation X.  This song has everything: great lyrics, buzzsaw guitar, complex layering of lead, rhythm, and bass guitars, an unostentatious solo that absolutely rocks, Billy Fucking Idol on vocals, and a great hook.  It begins with a slow guitar plucking out a descending melody that will repeat throughout the song.  Idol sings the first verse and chorus to just the opening theme on guitar and the drums and guitars kick in during the second verse.  At this point you really just need to go listen to the song, even if you know it.  

Generation X formed around 1975, which puts them before bands like the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Buzzcocks, and The Damned that are typically taken to be the first British punk bands.  Many of these bands were assembled by managers rather than forming organically out of groups of friends, which would be the norm later on.  Gen X has a big spot in punk rock history because of where the members came from and where they went.  Lead singer Billy Idol had previously been in a proto-punk band Chelsea and would go on to his successful solo career.  Gen X originally performed “Dancing with Myself” that Idol would go on to re-record and release to become a hit.  Bassist Tony James had played with eventual Clash members Mick Jones and Terry Chimes in a band called London SS, and would go on to play in Sigue Sigue Sputnik, the Sisters of Mercy, and eventually with Mick Jones again in Carbon/Silicon.

“Kiss Me Deadly” is a good illustration of the difference between the beginning years of punk rock and what it has become.  It is up-tempo but not particularly fast.  The music is fairly complex, displaying a level of composition that, with rare exceptions, would not resurface for some time.  What I like most about the song, though, is the way that it is heartfelt and uplifting while also being gritty.  Each verse describes a short story about growing up and being a punk in London.  

  The structure of the lyrics is quite poetic and is more complex than most punk songs (which tend to follow the verse/chorus/verse/chorus model but occasionally will also include a bridge).  After three verse/chorus exchanges and a solo, the song enters a bridge, which is a musical interlude in a different key than the verse and chorus.  Sometimes, but not always, bridges will include different patterns of lyrics: typically they will recall elements from the chorus and will have a different phrasing than in either verse or chorus.  What makes “Kiss Me Deadly” more clever than most is that the lyrics for each of the choruses differ slightly and these different parts run together in the bridge.  Musically, it is also interesting because the solo is performed in the bridge's key whereas solos are normally performed in the same key as the verse/chorus.  If this doesn't make sense, listen to the song again and pay attention to the key change after the third chorus.  The change is signaled by Idol's singing the last line of the chorus differently.  His voice almost sounds flat in comparison to earlier verses but this is because he has pitched his voice lower to transition into the bridge.  

At the end of the bridge, the song moves into an extended version of the chorus that brings different elements from earlier in the song together.  Each of the three choruses begin the same: “Having fun/Since I was six,” alter the third line, and end, “Kiss me/Deadly/Tonight.”  So the first chorus runs: 

Having fun

Since I was six

Hidden flick knife flicks

Kiss me deadly tonight.  

The third line for the next choruses are “Discovers teenage sex,” and “Violence for a fix.”  These altered lines each relate to the verses preceding them.  The extended verse at the end of the song pulls together these lines from each of the choruses:

Having fun

Since I was six

Having fun

Well hidden flick knife flicks

With violence for a fix

Discovers teenage sex

Try shooting up for kicks

Kiss me deadly

Of course I'm not the only one who loves this song.  “Kiss Me Deadly” plays in SLC Punk at the end of the movie when Steve-O leaves Heroin Bob's funeral even though Steve-O disdains British punk earlier in the movie.  The band Fifteen plays a modified version of the riff from the chorus in the opening to the song “Helter Smelter,” a song about blowing up cars and making everybody ride bikes.  Jeff Ott, the singer, comments that it “Sounds like Generation X,”  The rest of the song and the lyrics have nothing else to do with “Kiss Me Deadly” or Gen X (this is not an uncommon move for Fifteen, though.  In “No tion” (sic), the song after “Helter Smelter” on the album “Buzz,” the song opens with a copy of the opening to Operation Ivy's “Room without a Window” and, likewise, the rest of the song has nothing to do with OpIvy).  Green Day has been known to cover this song in concert (you can find videos of this on youtube if you look).  

Aaron Cometbus also writes about the song in #54 of his zine Cometbus.  In this issue, Cometbus is invited to go on the Asian leg of one of Green Day's tours (for those who don't know, in addition to writing the fantastic zine Cometbus, Aaron Cometbus also plays drums in a lot of other bands.  Some of the bands he has been in are Cleveland Bond Death Sentence with Paddy from Dillinger 4, Shotwell, Crimpshrine with the above mentioned Jeff Ott, and Thorns of Life with Blake Schwarzenbacher from Jawbreaker and Jets to Brazil.  Cometbus has performed with Billie Joe from Green Day and they have released many albums as Pinhead Gun Powder, so the invitation to travel with the band would not be unusual).  At the final party that Cometbus attends on the tour, he describes Mike Dirnt putting “Kiss Me Deadly” on at the end of the party:

“Over the speakers came the notes that never fail to give me goosebumps: the opening chords of the greatest song of all time, 'Kiss Me Deadly' by Generation X.”

In that moment, Cometbus describes the nostalgia that washed over him as he danced with Billie Joe and remembered their friendship over the years, marveling at the idea that, despite Green Day's wild success and his own relative obscurity, this song brought them back together.  

This is also what this song does for me.  I remember listening to this song with my friend JJ when we first discovered Gen X.  We traded the same CD back and forth hundreds of time because it was pretty hard to find at the time.  Eventually, when I moved away, I gave him that copy of the CD and went years without hearing that song.  I hadn't dubbed the album before I gave it to him.  But when I was in college, we talked on the phone and Gen X would come up.  More than once I asked him to put the album on while we talked so that I could hear their music in the background.  To this day I associate Gen X with one hot summer in Ohio when we drove around smoking cigarettes and listening to music that, twenty years old at the time was brand new to us.