NYRB on Daugherty on Barthelme (and Barthelme on Capitalism, Balzac, and Laredo)

The new issue of The New York Review of Books has a nice review of Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Donald Barthelme, "Hiding Man." It sounds like a worthy read, a literary bio that achieves suspense in the life story you already know of 20th century Houston's most unlikely product, the man who blew the doors open on the opportunities of the short story for postmodern expression. From the review, which appears in full text at NYRB online:

In a way, Barthelme's work was all inner life, partially concealed, partially displayed. His stories are a registration of a certain kind of churning mind, cerebral fragments stitched together in the bricolage fashion of beatnik poetry. The muzzled cool, the giddy play, the tossed salad of high and low: everything from cartoon characters to opera gets referenced in a graffitti-like chain of sentences. Conventional narrative ideas of motivation and characterization generally are dispensed with. Language is seen as having its own random and self-generating vital life, a subject he takes on explicitly in the story "Sentence," which is one long never-ending sentence, full of self-interruptions and searching detours and not quite dead ends (like human DNA itself, with its inert, junk viruses), concluding with the words "a structure to be treasured for its weakness as opposed to the strength of stones."

The story "For I'm the Boy Whose Only Joy Is Loving You"—whose lilting title refers not to the Irish ballad "Bold O'Donahue," as Daugherty insists, but to an old Bing Crosby song called "Remember Me"—ends with a character's memory of Tuesday Weld turning from the screen to tell him that he was a good man. "He had immediately gotten up and walked out of the theater, gratification singing in his heart." When he is then physically assaulted, salt emerges from his eyes and "black blood from his ears, and from his mouth, all sorts of words." A belief in language and culture persists indomitably in Barthelme's sad, hip world and makes life worthwhile and deserving of what Thomas Pynchon has called "the radiant quality" of Barthelme's attention.

If you have never read any Barthelme, track down a copy of one of his collections — Sixty Stories is my favorite. Required reading for any contemporary fabulist, but somehow generationally neglected, notwithstanding the persistent adoration from the McSweeney's crowd.

Over at "barthelismo," they have a bunch of full texts of Barthelme's stories (with permission), full of amazing stuff — a voice simultaneously peculiar to its time (at least in terms of many of the referents -- see, e.g., the Vietnam War references in "The Indian Uprising") while resonating fresh power on every reading, eyeball kicking semiotic cryptomes loaded with potent feeling. For example, see "The Rise of Capitalism," excerpted below:

Honoré de Balzac went to the movies. He was watching his favorite flick, The Rise of Capitalism, with Simone Simon and Raymond Radiguet. When he had finished viewing the film, he went out and bought a printing plant, for fifty thousand francs. "Henceforth," he said, "I will publish myself, in handsome expensive de-luxe editions, cheap editions, and foreign editions, duodecimo, sexdecimo, octodecimo. I will also publish atlases, stamp albums, collected sermons, volumes of sex education, remarks, memoirs, diaries, railroad timetables, daily newspapers, telephone books, racing forms, manifestos, libretti, abecedaries, works on acupuncture, and cookbooks." And then Honoré went out and got drunk, and visited his girlfriend's house, and, roaring and stomping on the stairs, frightened her husband to death. And the husband was buried, and everyone stood silently around the grave, thinking of where they had been and where they were going, and the last handfuls of wet earth were cast upon the grave, and Honoré was sorry.

*

The Achievements of Capitalism:

The curtain wall
Artificial rain
Rockefeller Center
Canals
Mystification

*

"Capitalism sure is sunny!" cried the unemployed Laredo toolmaker, as I was out walking, in the streets of Laredo. "None of that noxious Central European miserabilism for us!" And indeed, everything I see about me seems to support his position. Laredo is doing very well now, thanks to application of the brilliant principles of the "new capitalism." Its Gross Laredo Product is up, and its internal contradictions are down. Catfish-farming, a new initiative in the agribusiness sector, has worked wonders. The dram-house and the card-house are each nineteen stories high. "No matter," Azalea says. "You are still a damn dawg, even if you have 'unveiled existence.'" At the Laredo Country Club, men and women are discussing the cathedrals of France, where all of them have just been. Some liked Tours, some Lyon, some Clermont. "A pious fear of God makes itself felt in this spot."

*

Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration. Unemployment obliterates the world of the unemployed individual. Cultural underdevelopment of the worker, as a technique of domination, is found everywhere under late capitalism. Authentic self-domination by individuals is thwarted. The false consciousness created and catered to by mass culture perpetuates ignorance and powerlessness. Strands of raven hair floating on the surface of the Ganges…Why can't they clean up the Ganges? If the wealthy capitalists who operate the Ganges wig factories could be forced to install sieves, at the mouths of their plants… And now the sacred Ganges is choked with hair, and the river no longer knows where to put its flow, and the moonlight on the Ganges is swallowed by the hair, and the water darkens. By Vishnu! This is an intolerable situation! Shouldn't something be done about it?

A Dream of Rorschach

With all the hoopla surrounding the premier of the new Watchmen film (which I haven't seen yet but will, and am getting conflicting reports on) I thought I'd get in on the excitement myself. Not with a review of the film, a mildly thoughtful essay or even my anecdote about how at Wizard World Texas I had the misfortune of encountering a fanboy who didn't think Watchmen was all that great, who then dismissed super-heroes and science fiction as "All the same thing."

No, I've written up a discussion of the one and only official Watchmen crossover published by DC Comics back in the day. What's that, you say? There was no such animal? Hurm. You must not have been reading Denny O'Neal's awesomely philosophical (and spectacularly violent) The Quesion back in 1988 then. Ponder this: Steve Ditko's The Question and Alan Moore's Rorschach sharing the pages of the same funnybook. Hilarity ensues. Check it out over at RevolutionSF.

Or, you can head over to PvPOnline, where Scott Kurtz's Ombudsmen satire is just about 57 kinds of brilliant.

Upside of the Zeitgeist

Over at Comics.com, the brilliant editorial cartoonist Andy Singer (who tends to comment more on culture than politics) manages to capture better than anyone I've seen the upside hidden within the spirit of the now, and the imminent future. An excellent visual recommendation for how to approach your weekend. And maybe next week...

Check out more Andy Singer here.

Chitlin Circuits

So, in looking at some material on Central Texas and the Brazos River bottomland area, I've been running across references to the Texas version of the chitlin circuit. If you've heard of the Orpheum circuit---the vaudeville-era system that parceled show business talent throughout the country from Broadway all the way down to the backwater 150 seat theatre--the chitlin version served (natch) as the African-American parallel. 

There seems to have been a triangle between Austin, Houston, and the Killeen area with its military bases. Once an act entered the triangle, it would get its money's worth by stringing through the towns that drift along the Brazos, tiny burgs like Rockdale, Thorndale, Gause. And while most of the acts were never heard of outside the state, others who came in--Ike and Tina Turner, B.B. King, Bobby Womack, Lightning Hopkins, were certainly well known. The interesting thing to me is that the towns themselves were irrevelant; it was the population out in the farmland surrounding them that made up the audience. The Brazos river and the rich cotton producing soil around it, served as the western end of the cotton belt that began back in Southern Georgia. In the sharecropping era, you had farmers who would come in to the county seat on the weekend. And an act from the circuit would be there to take their money. 

In Austin, the city had built the Doris Miller Auditorium in 1942, ostensibly to honor the memory of the sailor who'd shot down Japanese planes at Pearl Harbor, more specifically to provide a location on the east side for black servicemen to avoid racial intermingling. The little auditorium is still there today, along with the Victory Grill, which was another key spot in the circuit. In its way, the chitlin circuit still exists--only now it's used by rap groups coming out of Houston and gospel troupes and traveling stage plays and musicals.  

Besides the music and entertainment, in the absence of a media targeted to sharecroppers and other men and women in rural areas, with no equivalent to the Grand Old Opry or Pappy O'Daniel's Lightcrust Doughboys on the radio, the old circuit also must have acted as a mode of communication, of passing information within the triangle.  (One would think that the internet now would be the primary method to get the word out over the modern day chitlin circuit, but they still use old, old media--flyers, posters on light posts all over east Austin, late night interviews over low-watt community radio stations. Not sophisticated but the message hits its target better than throwing a pebble in the internet sea.) I'm sort of interested in that idea of messages being passed around in plain sight, in seemingly unsophisticated ways. 

Diamonds in the Sky

Now available on the Web is a new anthology of astronomy-based science fiction funded by the National Science Foundation and edited by astronomer and science fiction writer Mike Brotherton. Here's how Mike describes the Diamonds in the Sky project:

"If you’re looking for free science fiction stories featuring a range of astronomical facts and mind-blowing concepts, you’ve found the right place. This collection was pitched to the National Science Foundation (NSF) as a way of doing some public outreach and as a potential resource for astronomy teachers. Thanks to NSF funding and our contributors, editors, and web designer you can now read Diamonds in the Sky. Enjoy!"

My contribution, first published in Analog Science Fiction Magazine in the 1990's and re-edited for Diamonds in the Sky, explores radio astronomy. In "The Listening-Glass" I move the Arecibo Observatory's big dish to the Moon, but the test run of the Lunar radio telescope does not go as planned!

Secede?

Happy Texas Independence Day. When you live in Texas, the only state that has its own revolutionary creation myth (as well as its own music, cuisine, attire, and even vehicle), you can't help but get the sense that, 175-plus years later, the descendants would do it all over again. The mythology is deeply internalized in a state where all schoolchildren get a full year of Texas history every other year from grade school through middle school. Believe me, they have the guns and the off-road vehicles and the fuel and the attitude all covered.

And when you follow the events just across the Rio Grande, you can't help but wonder if some other Mexican states aren't about to devolve into their own quasi-independence, if more along the lines of 21st-century rogue states than a 19th-century exercise in imperial adverse possession. Chihuahua, Coahuila and Sinaloa all sound like they are on the brink, while on the gringo side the economic downturn takes anti-immigration hysteria to new heights (though not so much in Texas). Just take the microcosm of El Paso-Ciudad Juárez, where you have the imminent narco-city state on one side of the river and one of the largest collections of U.S. military installations on the other side, from Ft. Bliss north to White Sands and Alamogordo. It doesn't take much of a science fictional imagination to envision degeneration over the next decade into warlord mayhem with competing factions of Federales. Ejercito Mexicano, Cartel paramilitaries, West Texas sheriffs, U.S. Army, and citizen militia from both sides fighting it out for territory and order.

In otherwords, imagine some mutant melange of Black Hawk Down, Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, El Mariachi, and RoboCop. I would totally shell out eight bucks to watch that. Even more exciting, I may get to live it.

¡Viva!

NYT: March 1, 2009
With Force, Mexican Drug Cartels Get Their Way
By Marc Lacey

CIUDAD JUÁREZ, Mexico — Mayor José Reyes Ferriz is supposed to be the one to hire and fire the police chief in this gritty border city that is at the center of Mexico’s drug war. It turns out, though, that real life in Ciudad Juárez does not follow the municipal code.

It was drug traffickers who decided that Chief Roberto Orduña Cruz, a retired army major who had been on the job since May, should go. To make clear their insistence, they vowed to kill a police officer every 48 hours until he resigned.

They first killed Mr. Orduña’s deputy, Operations Director Sacramento Pérez Serrano, together with three of his men. Then another police officer and a prison guard turned up dead. As the body count grew, Mr. Orduña eventually did as the traffickers had demanded, resigning his post on Feb. 20 and fleeing the city.

Replacing Mr. Orduña will also fall outside the mayor’s purview, although this time the criminals will not have a say. With Ciudad Juárez and the surrounding state of Chihuahua under siege by heavily armed drug lords, the federal government last week ordered the deployment of 5,000 soldiers to take over the Juárez Police Department. With the embattled mayor’s full support, the country’s defense secretary will pick the next chief.

Chihuahua, which already has about 2,500 soldiers and federal police on patrol, had almost half the 6,000 drug-related killings in all of Mexico in 2008 and is on pace for an even bloodier 2009. Juárez’s strategic location at the busy El Paso border crossing and its large population of local drug users have prompted a fierce battle among rival cartels for control of the city.

“Day after day, there are so many horrible things taking place there,” said Howard Campbell, an anthropologist at the University of Texas at El Paso who studies Mexico’s drug war. “The cartels are trying to control everything.”

Nothing is surprising in Chihuahua anymore. Gunmen recently shot at one of three cars in Gov. José Reyes Baeza’s motorcade, killing a bodyguard and wounding two agents. The drug cartels routinely collect taxes from business owners, shooting those who refuse to pay up. As for the Juárez mayor, who has made cleaning up the notoriously corrupt police department his focal point, the cartel recently threatened to decapitate him and his family unless he backed off.

The handwritten threat that it issued went further than that. Like many people in Juárez, Mayor Reyes has homes on both sides of the border, splitting his time between El Paso and Juárez. The note threatening him made it clear that the assassins going after him would have no qualms about crossing into the United States to finish off the mayor and his family.

“We took the threat seriously,” said Chris Mears, a spokesman for the El Paso Police Department. “I’m not going to tell you what actions were taken, but we’ve taken actions.”

In an interview in his wood-paneled office overlooking the United States, Mr. Reyes, 46, whose father was mayor in the early 1980s, said he was not going to allow criminals to run the city, despite the inroads they are making. He said he initially opposed his police chief’s decision to resign because he did not want the outlaws to feel empowered. He acceded only as a life-saving gesture, he said.

“I’m not going to give in,” he vowed in an interview, welcoming the arrival of soldiers so that the traffickers will feel the heat even more.

Right now, the Juárez police are no match for the outlaws. Last year, the senior uniformed officer was killed, one of 45 local police officers killed since January 2007, and a former police chief pleaded guilty to charges of smuggling a ton of marijuana from Juárez to El Paso. Mr. Orduña, who lived at the police station to avoid being killed, had replaced another chief who fled to El Paso after receiving threats last year. If the army had not come in, the mayor would no doubt have had a difficult time finding somebody to head the department.

Introducing a nationwide police recruitment campaign, the mayor has raised salaries and benefits enough that he is attracting new recruits to replace the many officers being fired for their links to organized crime.

“I know the dangers and I accept them,” said José Martín Jáuregui López, one of the 289 cadets now being trained at Juárez’s police academy. “There are a lot of people afraid for me: my mom, my relatives. But this is what I want to do.”

As a sign to the traffickers that he was not running from them, Mr. Reyes appeared Friday to be like any other mayor, giving a speech at the opening of a shopping center, signing a memorandum of understanding with a developer, reassuring residents that he would keep loiterers from gathering in front of their homes.

But the bodyguards holding assault rifles who clung close to him made it clear that Juárez remained a city under siege.

“There’s no square inch of the city that has been untouched by the violence,” said Lucinda Vargas, an economist who works by day to remake the city as executive director of Juárez Strategic Plan, but retreats to El Paso at night. “There’s a lot of evidence that Juárez, in a micro sense, is becoming a failed state. But I still think we haven’t failed yet and that we could still rescue ourselves.”

This has been a test

For a period in the mid-90s, my principal means of transportation was a 1977 Chevy Nova that had previously belonged to my late grandmother. I called it the car that escaped probate. It was silver baked to the color of primer, with a maroon vinyl interior and a cardboard sleeve over the passenger-side sun visor featuring a drawing of a dude in a leisure suit demonstrating how to properly use the innovative shoulder restraint. With addition of a Bukowski bumper sticker, it was a perfect ride.

For in-flight entertainment, it had the basic Delco AM/FM radio, with the mondo tuner knobs and the mechanical preset buttons. And for some reason, it could only tune in three categories of transmissions: Zeppelin, Muzak, and Paul Harvey.

I have loved Paul Harvey ever since. Because I never kept much of a routine, I never managed to figure out exactly when or on what frequency he could be found. Rather, he would randomly insert himself into the ethereal fabric of my day, usually while I was out trolling the sludgy streets of a Midwestern suburb looking for a lunch counter that would serve a pretty good grilled cheese sandwich.

Paul Harvey evoked an unexpected weird sense of wonder in the most mundane everyday. He came from a slightly mutated variation on Middle America, his fifteen-minute daily broadcasts like David Lynch channeling Reader's Digest. Aqua Velva accidental performance art that elicited sense memories of forgotten great uncles with double-knit Navy suits and big-fisted magic tricks, with weird dissonant inflections and syntactical rhythms that held your attention like some bop variation on a Presbyterian minister.

I will heretically suggest that he also had a subtly science fictional sensibility, stringing together the headlines of the day in a formula that piled up little nuggets of wonder until the penultimate few seconds, when he would drop a Ray Bradbury-style surprise ending designed to turn your perception of the world upside down. Plus, his very existence, broadcasting daily news commentary well into the twenty-first century in the style of the 1940s was a daily dose of time travel and alternate history and slightly mutated perceptions.

So now it feels like radio has finally really died, gone the way of locally produced television shows and test patterns and thoughts for the day and the comics page of the local newspaper (DailyInk and Comics.com notwithstanding). Nostalgia is for chumps, but I will miss listening to Paul Harvey, who could kick the ass of Anderson Cooper and Matt Lauer and Wolf Blitzer all at the same time.

NYT: "Paul Harvey, Talk-radio Pioneer, is Dead at 90."

NYT (1988): "Paul Harvey's Sopabox of the Air."