The Phrenological Journal & Haunted Typebox Blog

…would that all this were truly ephemeral! How dare it live? It surrounds us, defies us, demands categorization, display, analysis. In a fit of madness we nearly decided to throw it all away. Only then would it fit its definition as ephemera (even as we lose our place as curators!). Then would we be free of this desire to accumulate, to hold on to the past. In our most optimistic moments we say we are making peace with the past, but in our more honest ones? Well, we are opening wounds, suckling on nostalgia, escaping into a labrynth of ever more elaborate construction…

The Pequod, she is sunk. The whale lives, and all are drowned except Ishmael. This should come as no surprise, as all in Moby Dick is foretold. But never mind. For more reflections on that tome, reference the moleskin in my pocket. It’s all written there.

Lord Jim, the book, is another matter. As is Lord Jim himself. Lord Jim is rather like me, which is to say he’s rather like Don Quixote, filling his head with adventure stories, manufacturing his vision of himself out these legends. Lord Jim is caught in a moment of fear, out of that fear he salvages indifference, strong, wonderful indifference. An indifference that shall gird him, guide him in times of danger. I do the same. I count myself as above that howling mess (whatever mess that is), but am in fact subject to it, until it rears its terrible head. As is Lord Jim. Until Lord Jim can invent himself anew.

Oh sure, I’m mad to go to sea again, to sail again those same treacherous east Indian waters that I’ve only just come up from, ragged clothes barely dry. But as those who know me know, I’m rarely every dry (with the exception of my wit, which is nearly sun-baked).

Back to Lord Jim. Even if the waters are the same, the winds are decidedly different. Moby Dick, steeped as it is in a kind of agnostic fate, still shows a hand, some directing intelligence (maksed variously as pagan, Christian, narrative, mystic). Lord Jim (the person) is decidedly more his agent. His universe more at the whims of cruel irony, than any higher power. We the secularists, we prefer that cruel irony. But that is just the inverse of fate, of divine intelligence.

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Elegy, we’re told in the ending credits, is based on a Philip Roth novel called The Dying Animal. I haven’t read the novel, but I think the title is more apt and more honest than the one chosen for the cinematic adaptation. I suppose the producers thought that Roth’s title wasn’t marketable. Or that it might be too revealing of the story’s unexamined truth. Elegy is one of the most offensive and misogynist films I’ve seen in some time, made all the more so by its constant insistence on its own substance. It’s ironic that a film that chooses as its protagonist a man who deconstructs texts should be so unaware of its own subtext. Scrawling Roland Barthes across a blackboard as the film opens, Kingsley’s character namechecks the philosopher but leaves him there.

Not to ruin any surprises, but Kingsley seduces Cruz. They have great sex. He plays the jackass and then she disappears. Kingsley needs redemption for his whole life. His best friend dies, but that’s not quite enough. Kingsley must be redeemed by Cruz; she reappears stricken with breast cancer, asking him to redeem her body. That’s all he can redeem with her because that’s all she’s allowed: sickness and sex, a body that’s meant to be used (not just by Kingsley, but by us too). Sure, Kingsley’s friend (played predictably by Dennis Hopper in his perpetual role as philosopher) says that we never see beautiful women, never really see them. Except that film seems to want us to see her. In particular, it wants us to see her as a catalyst of change, as a turning point for Kingsley. Her body exists in the film as a kind of object lesson, her sickness a gift for the brooding Kingsley.

This wouldn’t be offensive if it was in some sense the film’s subject. But the film is less interested in examining the role of the female body as object of the erotic and morbid male imagination, then it is in giving Kingsley something to cry over, something to rise above. Instead her cancer is deus ex machina for his transformation. In essence her cancer never has a thing to do with her, but everything to do with him. The death narrative is just a sign for a kind of emotional connection that it never really earns. And Cruz is never allowed to get beyond the object. She’s a sex symbol in Act I, and even less at the end.

I was awoken from a fascinating dream last night. I was dreaming about Marlowe’s mighty line ( this sounds like a euphemism, but it’s not). I know I was reading Dr Faustus, but that’s about it. And near I was to making some discovery too, when I was brought rudely out of sleep.

It’s because lately I’ve been reading and attempting to write in blank verse. In truth, I know it shouldn’t be that hard. I used to write sonnets. Perhaps it’s the unrhymed lines which are causing the difficulty. Often such strictures as rhyming make it easier. Less freedom does that.

Or perhaps it’s something else. Blank verse was thought to be the perfect expression of human thought, as well as advantageous for rhetorical games. But it may be that the way we think is changing. Or at least the way I think: more punctuated, hypertextual versus rhetorical, or perhaps just less sucinct.

Maybe that’s what I was on the verge of discovery. I last remember a page of text, prosaic versus poetic with no line breaks, no appearance of Marlowe’s mighty line.

Would be about a man who dreams the world is flat.

“Isn’t his world already flat?” you ask.

“A man can still dream,” I say.

How beautiful

Oh, dreadful censorship of Erasmus, the great humanist (or so I’m told). And yet, how beautiful! How the lines which redact his text also obliterate his image, leave him blind in one eye. Yet, is not the entire Index Librorum Prohibitorum (in which this is housed) a kind of blindness? Is this not calling our attention to the very violence done by censorship? As if the censor is demonstrating that very line of Erasmus: In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king!

I was three different people to three completely different people, all within about three and a half hours. Each case of mistaken identity was in a slightly different and rather distinct mode, from the most banal (a wrong number) to the most fantastic (a woman asking, in all earnestness, if I was the scientist she was supposed to be meeting). The other one also bears mention, a man remarking how much I’d changed, only to find out that I wasn’t the changed man he thought I was. Maybe this one is my favorite—from a truly existential perspective. It’s true that I’m not the man I used to be; so he was really right, even if he was wrong about who I was.

Much like when my online bank suggests that I am not Kent, these cases suggest a possibility of bifurcating realities. Or at least simulate that moment we know from certain fictions (by Graham Greene, Rod Serling, and others). And it’s exciting and it’s an open question: why I am not these people (which recalls the opening lines from ‘Wings of Desire).

A brave man might pretend to be those other people. I love a good charade as much as the next person, but I can’t really go that far. I fear the moment of discovery. But I love the moment where I get to imagine that I am that pretender. This is another identity, not mine, not the mistaken one, but the one who can assume these identities. That’s the brave one. Still, who has the knowledge to do that? If I could fein the scientific knowledge, wouldn’t I be the scientist?

I’m talking myself down a messy spiral. I simply want to end on this question: What if we could be those people that other people sometimes mistake us to be? It’s a beautiful and terrifying thought.

Sometimes it’s a cycloptic picnic table.

Consider this a lost and terrifying telegram.

I’m a big fan of the Decemberists. Which is why my interest was piqued with the announcement that they have an open call for poster submissions for their SXSW show. I fired up Photoshop, and then went and checked out the rules. Here’s an excerpt:

8. SPONSOR’S RIGHTS TO ENTRIES: By submitting a Entry, each entrant: a. Irrevocably grants to the Sponsor, its agents, licensees, and assigns the unconditional and perpetual right and permission to copyright, reproduce, encode, store, copy, transmit, publish, post, broadcast, display, publicly perform, adapt, modify, create derivative works of, exhibit, and otherwise use the Entry (with or without using the entrant’s name) in any media throughout the world for any purpose, without limitation, and without additional review, compensation, or approval from the entrant or any other party. b. Forever waives any rights of copyrights, trademark rights, privacy rights, and any other legal or moral rights that may preclude the Sponsor’s use of the entrant’s Entry, or require the entrant’s permission for the Sponsor to use the Entry. c. Agrees not to instigate, support, maintain, or authorize any action, claim, or lawsuit against the Sponsor on the grounds that any use of the Entry, or any derivative works, infringes any of the entrant’s rights as creator of the Entry, including, without limitation, copyrights, trademark rights, and moral rights.

Really? Just by entering I give you the rights to use and reproduce this without even the guarantee of attribution? C’mon. This should be one-time use rights, and only for the winner. Given the recent facebook TOS kerfuffle, you’d think companies would be a little more sensitive to such things.

-Kent