CONSIDER THIS 4

Fiction does not need theory to be written. First, the fiction written, the artistic moments, and the theory, or theories, arises as a consequence of critical reading. Theory is a coherent statement of known and verified material facts, in this case, works of fiction, and the formation of theory, if it's to be interesting, comes after the appearance of a primary source.  Critics and erstwhile gutter-snipers of ill reputation seek to have a theory on the same level as fiction, literature, but in terms of actual practice, theory is a secondary activity, a delayed reaction to fiction, not a simultaneous occurrence. Changing tastes and fashions have more to do with novels falling off the radar, not an absence of theory. And a philosophy without a theory, to begin with, is not a philosophy at all, only the same said more fashionable chatter. For real philosophies that get dropped into our dirty bin, it's most likely that their systems and suppositions have supplanted, discredited and sufficiently critiqued into submission, which is just the happenstance of intellectual shelf life. All bad writing comes from writers who are writing badly, even normally good writers who've undertaken bad projects. There are many tangible reasons for bad writing, not the least of which is the plain truth that the world is full of bad writers who manage to get their scams published. Modernism cannot get "less modern", I think, because the modernism seems, in itself, only a tidying up of Romantic impulses before it, as postmodernism seems only a refinement, an updating of some essentially modernist tropes and stylistics. Each age takes the conventional set of dreads and sagas and makes their contours conform to the constructed world of the current moment. What counts is the individual talent that becomes the substance worth talking about.

CONSIDER THIS 3

Greatest American novel is a subject that exists alongside such topics YouTube topics who the fastest guitarist is, or the fanboy delights of slinging invective at each in the course of ruminating on the image of Superman v The Hulk. The fun in all that is that it inspires everyone to put on their Expert Pants and invent conditions, causes and criteria for their favorite --guitarist, Super Hero, novel--and use them as bludgeons against a legion of other equally engorged enthusiasts who, in turn, have their individual favorite and wield rhetoric devices no less bludgeoning. Even Norman Mailer, who was honest enough to admit that he actually wanted to write something called the Great American Novel admitted, after decades of brilliant books, that such a thing, a single entity, does not and cannot exist. The American Experience, or any historically collected National Experience, is too complex and changing too fast for one set of qualifications to set permanently. The greatest American novel, I think, will only be decided, finally, when we are extinct and someone else, something else assumes the job of figuring out who we were, what we did, and what of that is worth a damn thing.

CONSIDER THIS 2

One of those questions came my way, as in a friend asked me which mystery writer would I prefer to read, Robert Parker or Dick Francis. Honestly, I don't care for either, mostly because I generally don't read mystery novels. Crime fiction is another matter; in the case of classic writers of pulp fiction, the likes of Jim Thompson, Cornell Woolrich, James Crumley, and more recent artists like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake, the writer is crisper, snappier, the characterization of heroes, so-called, and the bad guys rich. That is to remark that the psychology, the worldview of the dank environment of criminal enterprise and the ethics therein, are sufficiently complex and twisted. At its best, crime fiction is a condensed form of the Tragedy: flawed heroes and crooks who upset the balance of the universe that contains will inevitably and irrevocably be taken out of commision. Ironic conclusions to one's career are not often a reward. To answer my friend's question, who would I read, I would select Robert Parker, in as much as he attempts to emulate a class act, Raymond Chandler. Dick Francis , I find, is unengaging. I had no interest in the world in which his mysteries took place. The sport of kinds be damned and the murder mysteries that occur within its snooty confines. Parker, though, is no Chandler by far. Even at best, he seems like a beggar wearing clothes he stole from a dead man's closet.

CONSIDER THIS

Existentialism is when I discover that I'm the private joke that hasn't been shared with me.I think Beckett would appreciate those who are able to pierce through that psychic prophylactic against comprehension and grasp the humor he observed and recorded. I have the idea that Beckett permeated the membrane that separates this reality from the metaphysical one, in Plato's sense of the term (and Wallace Stevens as well with his theories about the Supreme Fiction) and instead of finding Ideal Types as promised, he found an empty room. In the Ideal World, Ideas never changed and neither did their representations in the material plane. 

Maybe they didn't, but I imagine that the kind of fatalistic assumptions that existentialism brings us too--that we are always free no matter what the limitations upon us are, that we are always free to make a choice, even without arms or legs locked in a cell in a bunker fifty miles under a mountain of Bad Faith--but we soon enough get bored with the certainty that matters in the world, the objects of God's main made visible to us, and we go back to fiction, to poetry, to insanity if need be to imagine new ideas. 

This world needs to move and we need to believe that there is an agency in this discussion, that we can destroy what God had wrought or create something new and previously unthought of from the raw stuff we find ourselves born into. We want to transform ourselves by transforming the dirt under the fingernails. Smart folks, the cynics, the nags, the braying chorus of told-you-so-ers will inform you that nothing can be created nor destroyed but merely transformed into a different form of energy. So does Plato's Cave endures? Or are we our own Christ and push the boulder away from the cave entrance and walk to to the stream and wash our faces, not fearing the water might flow through the holes in our hands as some of us might fear. It goes on. It is another night when the music stops playing and the chimney smoke as dissipated in a stiff evening breeze.

 There is only the sound of cats brawling in bushes and shadow-cloaked homeless rummaging through the dumpster. Neither gives much thought to how nothing ever changes even as all alliances come loose and we invent more words, ideas, sentences to put them in. What matters is who owns the bush, who gets the half-eaten sandwich and the carton of soured milk.

LONESOME OR LOATHSOME ?

BLUE AND LONESOME
--The Rolling Stones

Yes, yes, I realize the Rolling Stones started out, under the behest of belated founding member Brian Jones, as a blues band, more or less, with Chicago style as their touchstone. Blue and Lonesome, their new blues tribute album, is awful. Never a good blues singer--technically, he's a horrible singer, in fact--Mick Jagger's better to refer to as a "vocalist, distinct from someone who can truly carry a tune and remain on the pitch. His best vocals are studio-made performances, masterful assemblages of grunts, yowls, mewlings, and sundry other bull noises. In the context of great songs like "Satisfaction," "Shattered," "Start Me Up," or "Driving Too Fast," it has allowed him to still sound like a 19-year-old punk after all these decades. It was the perfect foil for the fire-fight guitar cross-rhythms of guitarists Keith R. and Ron W. As a soul man and bluesman. However, Jagger honestly sounds like a parody of blues singing, to no avail. I realize others will argue that what he does here extends the vocal genius I've already described, but that does not wash. Rock and roll vocals can get by on attitude, but blues, I think, requires vocal color, a bit of range, and a field that can twist the lyrics to emotional suggestion as much as a good guitarist or harmonica player could. Jagger obviously tries to channel Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf among other brilliant blues icons, but his vocal attributes, or lack of them, betray him fiercely. Jagger's harmonica work here is weak, goddamned awful, in fact. The band had the good sense to bring in Eric Clapton for a couple of tracks to give the session the needed fret-gritting it needed, but why didn't it call in an old hand like harmonica genius Sugar Blue to handle the harmonica parts. Jagger's harmonica work wheezes, honks, hits the marks but does nothing memorable once he gets to them. All that said, the band itself cranks it along just fine, what you expect from the Stones, a sturdy, ornery, crackling set of leg-breaking in 4/4 time. They may take a bow. The pity is the band's most famous member is this album's most significant defect.

BILL MAHER : a man who can't step away from the megaphone

There more pressing matters to argue about in this uncooperative existence, but the recent claptrap comedian and gadfly Bill Maher wrote about the recently departed comic book maven Stan Lee reveals a man who has an opinion on everything, including matters he hasn't, it seems, given much thought to. The short form is that Maher is tired of fans cooing that the comic book writer, co-creator of many of the Marvel comic book heroes who dominate the box office with their movie adaptations, was a genius on a par with Shakespeare, a true literary master of the universe. It's easy enough to deflate those claims with a more level-headed approach to appraising the artistic worth of comics as an art form, but Maher is no centrist on the matter. Cuing up his familiar dumbing-down-of-America riff and order coughs up the equation that Donald Trump is President because someone decided that Comic Books Are Important. I am increasingly irritated with Maher's smug egalitarianism even if I agree with him on many issues. The slam against Lee wasn't insightful or revealing of anything other than Maher's cheerful willingness to be mean-spirited. He was cruel. I will leave more detailed and historically astute counter-arguments to Maher's claim that superheroes have seduced the American population into believing violence and rugged individualism solves our problems, democratic traditions are damned, to others. On the matter as to whether comic books have made us collectively dumber, there is not much, if any data, to support the assertion. Anecdotedly, I have never met a comic book fan, in my 66 years of life as writer, musician, artist, bookseller, who was dumb, illiterate, or unaware of what was happening in the news. Anecdotedly, I would say the legion of comic book fans I know are a smart bunch of folks. Not everyone is an Einstein or a Gore Vidal or a Susan Sontag, or a Neil Tyson DeGrasse, nor do they have to be. Maher, who ought to know better, denies them their humanity and implicates them in the origins of the "Slow moving coupe" of the Alt-Right merging with the American mainstream. Maher's hot take on the passing of Lee and his cultural legacy is controversy created where none need to have existed. Other matters about Lee need to be discussed, debated, researched, a longer view of his work needs to be done, but equating him with a growing trend toward strongman politics is the rant of a blister brained dumbfuck who spends his life yelling from the bus stop, a man with no bus fare and no direction . 

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Barry Alfonso:
Maher wouldn't know how to count the change for the bus fare if it dropped into his hand. He is a bronchial punk who has been lingering at the free lunch bar of public opinion for way too long. I remember him saying years ago what a nice pal he found Ann Coulter to be. I am all for trans-ideological comity and all that, but she is an anal wart upon the body politic. Bill and Ann should hang out together behind the Velvet Hammer waiting for the wet laundry to dry by the septic tank.

HAMMERED SHIT

Save your cash on and skip the slow-moving, turgid and criminally inane Thor: The Dark World. It is an improvement over the first Thor film, but there is a lethargy in all the action scenes. Nothing seems crisp or crucial in the physical battles, although there is some good GGI of London smashed to pieces by the invasion of the Dark Elves. Chris Hemsworth as Thor talks like a bad High School drama student who is trying to force his voice into a lower register--he sounds like he's trying to suppress a burp while he speaks--and there is a frown on his face through the film that makes him look as though someone gave him a shot of castor oil. Tom Hiddleston as Loki is inexplicable anyway you look at-- he fluctuates between glee, sorrow, and rage raggedly, scene to scene. Plus he is incapable of not looking like Data from Star Trek: Next Generation. They've thrown a lot of things in the air for this juggling act, and too many things hit the stage they're playing on.our money on the visual laxative otherwise known as Thor: The Dark World. Anthony Hopkins appears rumpled and ready for a nap, while Natalie Portman, consistently the least charismatic actress I can think of, moves through this movie in a variety of self-loathing postures, as though in pain realizing everyone she knows will see her in this expensive, flailing wind-up toy of a film. I think a Thor movie could be entertaining if there was the right cast, director and script, a crew that had a feel of the source material, ie, the Marvel comic book, not the original Norse legend. This is an efficient, professional bit of filmmaking and does provide a moment or two of entertainment, but the cast is so indifferent--either phoning it in or gnawing the scenery--and the plot points so diffuse, distracted and pitifully predictable, in blockbuster terms, that what we have is an expensive, noisy apparatus utterly without charm. What's missing is the grace, energy and, yes, basic good humor and humanity of the original Kirby/Lee comic book tales. Jack Kirby had an extraordinary visual imagination and a capable rendering of his version of Asgaard could have been simply magnificent, magical even. The comic book version of these characters, with and without Kirby, had a verve that seemed to sock you in the face straight from the page. As fine as this movie's production values might be, there never seems a time that the enterprise seems to rise above a very competent reenactment ritual. What they settled for were computerized variations of Shangri La from Lost Horizon. Worse, the make-believe city resembled a cross between Hearst Castle and an M.C.Escher painting. That, combined with the sluggish momentum this movie is barely capable of, is quite enough to make you calculate how much you worked to make the money for the ticket you bought to see something that finally made you feel like a moron for seeing.