Bibliodeath

photo of Andrei Codrescu by Eduard Koller

Andrew Codrescu is a poet and NPR commentator and the editor-in-chief of Exquisite Corpse, whose very title should clue you into the fact that he works in the great tradition of artistic literary modernism with a capital M. His collection of poetry So Recently Rent A World: New and Selected Poems 1968-2012 was recently published along with Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes), an autobiographical narrative that deals amongst other things with the fate of the book, as we know it. Unlike some Cassandras, for Codrescu the digital age harbingers not the death of the book, but rather what might be called “the transmigration of text” into a new an equally vibrant form--though at one point he does comment, “One of my darker thoughts about the new technologies of storage and production is that they are designed to contain the record of the past (under the guise of preserving it) in order to destroy it.” As a book Bibliodeath is a great deal since you are really getting two books for one, a memoir and a series of digressions in footnote form reminiscent of the style employed by David Foster Wallace, Nicholson Baker and Mark Danielewski and if one is talking of provenance ultimately Lawrence Sterne, the Ur digressor and the posthumous leader of a blossoming literary movement. Codrescu's narrative proceeds diachronically, but the footnotes function on a synchronistic level telling a totally separate story which puts the reader in the position of a traveller who is pleasantly sidetracked from his destination onto a beautiful backroad. Here for instance is a wonderful digression about the introduction of a kind of virtual cellphone in Romania. “There was a two to three years' waiting list for landlines when cellphones came into use. At first, the cellphones communicated only one way. Romania was the world’s greatest market for fake cellphones in l991-1993; they were an accessory, a way to pretend communicate with the world they eventually did communicate with when real cellphones became affordable. The interim was glorious, the young rehearsed their conversation with the 'West,' without the annoyances of interruption by the other party.” And here is Codrescu on discovering Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and the Psychopathology of Everyday Life as a young man. “The titles alone were a comfort. I was confirmed in my belief that every daily occurrence had meaning and that it was sick from something, a pathology that was my lot to describe and confront, and I felt reaffirmed also for paying attention to my dreams, not only for what they contained, but for what they meant, and for the range of their influence, which extended to the daily La vida es sueno, indeed, a phrase that before Lope de la Vega must have at some point passed the lips of every mortal.” Codrescu is like one of those old-fashioned medicine men who traveled through the old west with varying tonics and cure alls. In his case the cure is the vastness of the central European or Mitteleuropaishe tradition, but he is not a name dropper, nor is his tone ever arch or condescending and the energy of the writing is infectious. Well, it’s poetry.

History is a Nightmare

In a Times opinion piece that has attracted a good deal of attention, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology at Emory, argues that, like little children, the electorate needs a good bedtime story. Obama, in his mind, is a bad storyteller (“What Happened to Obama, NYT, 8/6/11). “When Barack Obama rose to the lectern on Inauguration Day, the nation was in tatters,” Westen writes. “Americans were scared and angry…. In that context, Americans needed their president to tell them a story that made sense of what they had just been through, what caused it, and how it was going to end.” In his address at the 1936 Democratic Convention, FDR said, “This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.” Fiorello LaGuardia was famous for reading comic strips to the denizens of his beleaguered city. But ultimately the subject is not storytelling but history. Do great historical figures still create history, with Roosevelt and Churchill being forces of good and Hitler and Mussolini representing the axis of evil? Or has the world become so complex that there are no simple stories to be created by men? Lately, history seems to be making the decisions, with men merely taking credit or being assigned blame. Computer-generated stock market programs are capable of causing huge gyrations in markets that have little relation to industrial productivity. In a world in which information can become a virus that takes on a life of its own, it’s becoming apparent that the objects of man’s creation have beat him to the punch. It would be nice if Barack Obama had been able to create a reassuring narrative that would satisfy what Professor Westen calls the brain’s expectation for “stories with a particular structure, with protagonists and villains, a hill to be climbed or a battle to be fought.” However, if President Obama were to tell a story that could explain what is actually occurring outside our windows, it might be written in the ironic postmodern style of Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace or Nicholson Baker, or even in the complex, poetically reticulated prose of Joyce. And it would not likely be consoling or even understandable. In Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus presciently states, “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”

Twilight Time

Two Twilight Zones shown during the annual New Year’s marathon hearken back to literary past and foreshadow, in line with the Sci-Fi mythos of the series, inventions of the future. “The Little People” is Gulliver’s Travels with Swift’s satire of human nature in a space-age context. Two astronauts crash land on a far-away planet. Fletcher, the captain, is all about working to get the ship back into orbit again. His despondent subordinate Craig wanders off and discovers a civilization of microscopic people who treat him like a god, even going so far as to erect a statue in his honor. Convinced that he can become the one and only God, Craig orders Fletcher off the planet as soon as the ship is repaired. The only problem is that enormous Brobdingnagians also appear on the planet. In a climactic scene, the little people pull down the statue they have erected, much the way the statues of Stalin and Lenin were be pulled down at the end of the Communist era. “A Kind of a Stop Watch” introduces the garrulous character of Peter Thomas McNulty, who abuses the gift of time. This episode introduces a device like the one that would become the centerpiece of Nicholson Baker’s erotic novel The Fermata. McNulty wants attention, but no one listens to his ideas and he is soon fired from his job at a lingerie company. However, given a magical stopwatch that puts time on hold, McNulty realizes he can rob all the banks and get everything he wants. The problem is, the stopwatch breaks, and though he has all the money in the world, he can’t start life up again. The denouement is reminiscent of the famed Burgess Meredith episode (“Time Enough At Last”) about the book lover who finds himself in a paradise without people until his glasses shatter on the ground.

The Lonely Crowd II

Erica Jong coined the term “zipless fuck,” but the desire for instant intimacy obviously has a storied history, from Catullus to The Canterbury Tales, from Rabelais to Sexus, Nexus, and the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, to Nicholson Baker’ s brilliantly erotic Fermata.  However, the sexual passages from these works can be so stimulating that we forget the more profound desire to connect that lies at the heart of even the most perverse scenarios. It might be worth our while to interject E.M. Forster’s famous words from Howards End—“only connect”—into the discussion, though that work is hardly noted for its sexual content. Inevitably, even the most promiscuous fantasy about a hot sexual encounter with an anonymous partner has everything to do with connection. If the orgasm is, as the French have termed it, a little death, then the birth of consciousness, the child’s entry into the world and separation from the womb (and what Freud termed its “oceanic effect”) represents a displacement, an individuation that is purchased at the price of isolation. If ego can be defined as the literal and symbolic boundary of the material self, then that demarcation constitutes a prison. Furtive browsers of Internet porn sites might convince themselves that they are engaging in little acts of rebellion in which they only want to see gonads or sexual practices that would normally be hidden from sight, but ultimately the obsession with intimate acts emanates from a more profound search for intimacy. The wandering ego is an exile from the paradise of oneness with nature. Humans, and indeed all organic matter, even molecules, demonstrate a tendency to differentiation, together with a countervailing tendency to dissolution and finally unification with the whole. Isn’t that what the peasants are after in the famed orgy sequence in Bunuel’s Viridiana? The Lonely Crowd is the name of a classic work of sociology, but the title may have even more universal implications than its authors, concerned with the world of post-war strivers, ever intended.

Punctuated Equilibrium

Can Stephen J. Gould’s notion of punctuated equilibrium be applied to human sexuality?  If evolution doesn’t conform to a smooth pattern, how do we determine what sexual congress will be 500 years from now? For instance, rather than being a period of repression, the Middle Ages were a very sexy time. The Canterbury Tales is one of the most ribald works of world literature, easily competing with Frank Harris, Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Going back further in time, there’s Sappho and the great erotic poet Catullus. It’s odd that the swingers club of the ‘70s was named Plato’s Retreat. Shouldn’t it have been Caligula’s Retreat, for a time when the vox populi was urged to carpe diem?  In fact, sexual expression seems to move by the principle of devolution rather than evolution, with advances in man from his earliest prehensile form, homo habilis, leading to the predominance of mind over matter.  In the ‘60s there were love children, but homo is often not erectus by the time he reaches his adult state. He’s too sad.

   

Still there’s the notion of progress.  In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud discussed the compromise that man must make between his instinctual drives and his social nature. The mind is rather inventive. If fetishism provides a detour that allows the discharge of sexual energies that might otherwise have been inhibited, then perhaps progress can be described as the movement from merkins (pubic wigs) to hot waxing, from girdles to thongs, from pantyhose to the scene in the appropriately named Basic Instinct where Sharon Stone startles her interrogators by revealing the absence of any undergarment at all?

  

But what does the future hold?  If the sexual drive derives from procreation, then Viagra has helped to make sex a gratuitous act that persists far beyond the procreative years. Will there be some drug in the next century that makes sex possible for consenting adults who have already passed away? Nicholson Baker created a character in his novel The Fermata who has the futuristic ability to undress women with little or no consequences. Now this fantasy has become a reality with the new generation of security devices to be used in airports around the world.  Do these devices herald the prospect of a kind of parthenogenesis or immaculate conception—at least in airports—in which the voyeuristic impulse can impregnate another mind? What about timeless erotic passion, what the Germans called Liebestod, or love-death? And what about Wagner? Will there still be a Bayreuth Festival in 2500?