The Postmodern Documentary

Dear Readers:

It’s me again. No, not that Me, the real me. But how many me's can there be, and is there an autonomous, authentic me?

Practically speaking, we shift personas according to the social context: in church, school, tavern and home. But while our public and private identities may shift, we have a core value system on which we base our moral judgments. And, more importantly, these judgments are contingent on competing sets of values: I may think all life is precious, but I kill the Black Fly. One value, my comfort, outweighs the Black Fly’s life in this particular situation. Most ethical dilemmas are situational, and thus call for a flexible rather than absolute moral code. I don’t kill insects that don’t bite me, but an exception might be made if I were around someone with arachnophobia.

So it makes some sense to say that the unified-self is a mythical construct. My problem with this, which is a conservative view in contemporary academia, is that dispensing with the core self leaves nowhere to locate moral responsibility. Who is culpable if we say those who do evil are products of their environment? Mitigating factors must always be considered, but they must also be attached to the particular human agent who chooses a certain course of action.

Theoretically speaking, the conceptualization of the self has been a major preoccupation of psychology, philosophy, art, and politics. Here’s a thumbnail historical sketch.

One of the philosophical conceits stretching from the Enlightenment to the early 20th Century is the concept of a core, unified self. This intellectual trope, however, began to unravel with the onset of modernity. In the literary arts, the “stream of consciousness” mode (a phrase coined by William James) reflected this sensibility in novels by Proust, Woolf, and Joyce. Cubism and Surrealism presented pictorial abstractions that fore-grounded the limits of a unified perspective. Picasso, Braque, and others sought to depict objects in a way that encompassed all perspectives, and thus defined these limits in a metaphorical way. Musically, Stravinsky, Berg, Varese, and Stockhausen, de-centered conventional ideas about lyricism and tonality in a way that expressed the chaos of conscious and unconscious experience.

Postmodernism built on this emerging awareness by rejecting not only the idea of subjective perception, but the perceiving agent as well. Building on the existential dictum that “existence precedes essence,” postmoderns posited that, since language defines identity, the subject (us) is a linguistic construct. With language acquisition we enter into a pre-determined structure of thought that constrains any true freedom of being. Hence, structures of knowledge that reinforce the status quo require an intellectual deconstruction that releases the agent from the repression of the “Grande Histoire,” those ethnocentric meta-narratives that seek to control and marginalize the Other. The Other here being defined as those persecuted on the basis of gender, race, and ethnicity.

The postmodern aesthetic sees Culture as always co-opted by the status quo, and thus as intrinsically degenerate. Culture, as the representation of society gone mad, is the ultimate expression of nature’s decadence. As the source of culture, nature represents the primal corruption. Which allows me this imperfect segue into a discussion of postmodern documentary film making.

In a narrative sense, the alien character of Nature is a consistent theme in the work of Werner Herzog. Grizzly Man (2005) is no exception. Herzog, always interested in the “heart of darkness” tale where the protagonist must face the physical peril of journeying into the wild, as well as the psychological peril of confronting the demons within, uses Timothy Treadwell as a foil to promote his view of nature. We see Treadwell’s footage, but we hear Herzog’s voiceover that Treadwell held the “sentimentalized view that everything out there was good and the universe in balance and harmony.” Treadwell is thus the naïve transgressor of the “invisible” boundary between man and nature. But in many ways, Herzog’s voiceover is deconstructed by Treadwell’s footage. What we see is a patently American kind of obsessive optimism combined with a spiritual faith in the belief that the self can triumph against all odds, as is reflected in his pleas for rain to a religious and secular pantheon of gods. The beauty of Treadwell’s spectacular nature footage resists the Herzogian reading of man’s deep-seated alienation from nature. In a reverse of the Kantian, Treadwell’s sublime shots often trump the beauty of Herzog’s dramatic sense. What Herzog defines as surreal, Treadwell’s talking to the animals, is belied by the fact that we all talk to our pets. Herzog ‘s conclusion that “facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable” ignores the “inherent truth” in the immediacy of the images Treadwell gives us. Images that resist Herzog’s attempt to contain them with language. The “strangeness and bizarreness” of Treadwell’s self-perceived mission is only “believable” insofar as it conforms to the “truth” of Herzog’s interpretation.

For Herzog, the disharmony and chaos of society is mirrored in nature. On the set of Fitzcarraldo (1982), Herzog offered this commentary on nature: “[It] is vile and base….I would see fornication and asphyxiation and choking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away….There is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder….there is no harmony in the universe.” But if society reflects the “overwhelming indifference of nature,” as Herzog’s voiceover suggests, than what “line,” or boundary is there to transgress? If the gaze of the bear offers “no kinship, no understanding, no mercy,” what of his conviction that Treadwell’s “footage is not so much a look at wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature.” But if nature is truly “indifferent,” it is also ineffable in its resistance to the incessant anthropomorphizing Herzog visits upon it. So how can its depiction provide “insight” into the self? It may be that within Herzog’s co-optation of Treadwell’s footage inheres an insecurity about ceding control of the visual images. And while Herzog controls the editing, there is a surplus in Treadwell’s filmic text that escapes the seamless reading Herzog puts forth.

In terms of the formal aspects of the postmodern documentary, Herzog, like Errol Morris and Michael Moore, deconstructs the conventions of the documentary genre. There are no illusions of objectivity, but rather an oxymoronic kind of artificial realism. As Michael Corvino notes in Film Quarterly (Spring, 1980), “the viewer knows that the most realistic-looking documentary is never objective; although the viewer understands that the investigative film-maker, when all is said and done, still selects footage and adopts a certain editing style; although the viewer accepts, begrudgingly perhaps, that nothing is ever as it really happened; although the viewer knows all these things, he himself remains accustomed himself to viewing the realistic-looking documentary as though it were somehow real.”

Peace - Randy

THE BIG HOAX: sMokiNg iS bAd fOr yOu

Greetings!

It’s Me again:

“Dr. William H. Stewart, a surgeon general in the Johnson administration who put the first warnings on cigarette packs died on April 23 in New Orleans. He was 86. The initial warning, instituted in 1966 during Dr, Stewart’s tenure, said that cigarette-smoking “may be hazardous to your health.” (NYT, 4/29/08)

Call me the hoax hawk, but everybody knows tobacco is good for ya. My great uncle, who smoked five packs of non-filter Cool Menthols and drank two fifths of Jim Beam a day, lived to be a hundred and thirty eight. There’s never been no direct correlation between tobacky and sickness, just like there’s no connection between eatin and obesity. I loves my smokes, and I’ll give em up when they uncurl my cold dead fingers from my Bull Durham pouch.

Yep, roll my own, and when I can’t find loose backy I go with Basics. One reason I always like my smokes is the sex angle. Ya see, cigarettes don’t stunt your growth, they enhance it. The nicotine kinda puffs up the sacs, if ya know what I mean. Girls don’t call me the Marlboro man for nothin. All that movie stuff about havin a smoke after a little hoochie coochie’s got it backwards. A couple of drags before the dirty deed and I’m a regular Secretariat. Yahoo!

All the great Hollywood actors smoked. Take the Duke, for instance (don’t believe all that evil stuff about him and Rock Hudson), he was a man’s man. I can’t remember if he was a pitcher or a catcher, but what an actor. Who could forget him in “The Green Berets”? Legend has it that Old Dukie (that’s what Rock called him) was hung like a horse and could go the distance.

When someone can’t breathe right, it ain’t the cigarette’s fault. It’s all in the genes, ya see. You could go to church, never swear, and drink milk all your life, and still die a cancer, but they wouldn’t say milk caused it. It’s all in the genes.

I thought I’d ask one of my uncles, Buster Hackaloogie, what he thought about the tobacco hoax.

Me: “A, Buster, do you think those cigs are bad for ya?

Buster: “Hell no, my mammy used to put daddy’s used chew-cup drippins in my bottle when I was a baby, and looka me now, fit as a fiddle. Sure, I cough a little in the morning, but I’m good to go by lunch. Nothin better than a post-gustation smoke. In fact, the only time I like my smokes better than after eatin, is ridin in the car, as long as nobody makes me roll down the windows. Didya know that babies and children ridin along develop natchrul immunities to stuff like Mumps and diarrhea. Plus it’s easier for them to enjoy the backy buzz when they start smoking. That’s where those Chinamen are ahead of us, they preciate smoke and pollution, that’s why they don’t want that limpic torch blown out. Smoke’s good for you, makes ya smart, too.

Me: “Of course I agree, Uncle Buster, but what about the idea that smoking causes cancer?”

Buster: “Said the earth was round, too, but it still looks flat to me. Those high falootin politicians out in Washington just wanna scare people. They’re fear-peddlers. They’re even claimin other people’s smoke’ll hurt ya. That’s even better for ya, on account of it’s been humanly processed and carries natchrul anti-occidental properties to the retocillator cells. It’s all been science proven. Smokin even prevents some cancers, like medium squamous toenail sarcomas, especially when they’re sailing round the islets of Langerhans and squeezing off the valves of Houston. Din’t know I was that smart, did ya, Me?

Me: Holy smokes, thanks uncle Hackaloogie, once people read this, everybody’s gonna start smoking.

Smoke Em If Ya Got Em - Me

sULfiTe & bLuEbeRriEs: An Interview With M. Jagger

“The global run on food that has led to shortages and riots from Egypt to Haiti in recent weeks has made its way to U.S. shores. Concerned about rising prices and short supplies of staples such as rice and flour, customers have been cleaning out the shelves at big-box retailers including Wal-Mart stores Inc.’s Sam’s Club and Costco Wholesale Corp stores. On Wednesday, Sam’s club said customers no longer would be allowed to purchase more than four bags of jasmine, basmati and long-grain white rice per visit.” (Hirsch and Hsu, L.A. Times, 4/24/08)

This kind of news item is a sad testament to this great nation’s immigrant problem. Rice ain’t American food! You won’t see a run on Spaghettios and Mrs. Paul’s Fish Sticks. It’s the Indians, Asians, and Mexicans who are ruining our economy that eat these terrorist brands. Where’s the Uncle Ben’s? Any food you can’t cook in under 2 minutes should be banned. Rather than defer to some hillbilly expert with no street cred, I decided to talk to a local potato grower from Watson.

Me: “Mr. Jagger, what’s your opinion on the news that we’re facing a global food shortage?”

Jagger: “There’s no world food shortage, people are just eatin the wrong stuff. It’s just like global warming, a big hoax. And now you got these left wing conspiracy wackos saying that we shouldn’t make gas outta plants, that it takes away food from people. Well tell me this; what’s more important, food or fuel? We need our corn for Methanol! Last I checked, a person couldn’t live in this world without a car. Forget about food, we gotta stop those people that don’t live here from getting cars. That’ll mean plenty of gas for us.”

Me: “There’s a lotta talk about global warming, you live here in the middle of the U.P., what would you say about that?”

Jagger: “Lordamighty, we just had a winter to make ya pray for global warming. This planet is here for us to harvest. Don’t worry, God’ll renew everything. Ya take all this squawkin about sulfite mining on the Yellow Dog plains. What’ya need more, nickel or blueberries? It’s a no brainer, blueberries are just little tiny fruit, nickels used in batteries. Don’t get me wrong, when they tried to put a gravel pit near my tater fields I yelled like hell.”

Me: ”Ah…why?

Jagger: “Cos that was different. It was near my house, and I didn’t want it there. 'Twern’t just us, them flatlanders down below got snowed on hard, too. Those trolls deserve it, Satan lives under that bridge! Bad stuff happens down there. Look at this paper article. ‘Detroit police say they found the partially mummified body of a woman in her 80s on the kitchen floor of a house where her mentally troubled sister was living. Police say they believe the surviving sister had been living with the body for one to three years. The body was partially covered with newspapers and a cat and dog apparently ate part of it.’ Cities are jungles, same goes for Washington as Detroit. Judge Scalion and President Seney’ll steer us right, they’ll end queer marriages and abortions; but the rest of them liberal fudge-packers are making this country one big Sodom and Gomorrah.”
.
Me: “Thank you, Mr. Jagger.”

Jagger’s gotta good point. Why should we be responsible for the rest of the world’s problems? Weather goes in cycles, ya see, and we’re just hittin a hot patch. That’s why I say, “there is no global warming because there is no global warming,” scientifically and meteorologically speaking. Like Darwin says, animals have to adapt, and I hear Polar bears are great swimmers. The environment is small potatoes, the important issues are terrorism, same-sex marriages, and drugs. This is where a patriot faith in our government’s commitment to opposing these moral sins must be unswerving and unquestioned. When our trusted leaders, like Supreme Court justices and Vice-Presidents say, “because I’m right,” and “so,” we must have faith in their wisdom, just as we must petition our God in the war on terrorism.

Let Righteousness prevail! - Me

bumpersticker: DRUNKS DON'T LET CYLOPS DRIVE SOBER

“The Florida legislature is considering a specialty plate with a design that includes a Christian cross, a stained glass window and the words ‘I Believe.’ If approved, Florida would become the first state to have a license plate featuring a religious symbol.”
(AP, 4/24/08).

This is a plate you can put your faith in, and lord knows I needed some divine protection Friday night. After regaling a party of dog people about the time I Old-Yellered a once best friend, I had one more piece of Turkey Rhubarb quiche, and took leave with my esteemed companion and driver, Brigitte.

Notwithstanding the fact that neither of us are show dogs, at least I don’t tailgate. Rather than speculate on whether she was a pirate in a past life, let’s just say she has poor depth perception. Instead of the standard St. Christopher’s medal dangling from the mirror, a magnetized statue of Odysseus sits on her dash. No doubt a reflection of her pagan beliefs. Not to boast, but I look good to one-eyed dames. This one-eyed siren’s initial interest in me had much to do with a certain cardboard cutout quality I perfected while living under an overpass in the Florida panhandle (is that how you spell panhandle?). It was there that I met a toothless Sir Valhaladad. He was said to be a renowned thaumaturge, a healer who worked miracles on the sick and dying from a flea market stall in south Tampa (is that in the panhandle?). He taught me the virtue of shallowness, a character trait 98% of the population exhibit as a mundane practice, rather than the true art we 2% extol.

It was night. Traffic was heavy. I always thought she could see out of her ear. Given her constant preoccupation with facing the passenger seat while she talked, I just figured she had some special pagan power, like ear-vision. She didn’t. You think I jest, oh ye of little faith, Go there now. Go, go see the still fresh skid marks where the rubber from my new used car’s tires tell the near fatal tale. Go, go where 14 parts from 23, and see for yourself.

“Watch out,” I screamed into her good…errr…bad eye, I couldn’t be sure.
She looked up and jerked the wheel hard to the left, then to the right, then left. The car did a 180 and ended up facing the oncoming traffic.
“We’re dead meat,” I screamed.

Cars sped at and by us. Had a car hit us we would have been killed instantly, or worse, paralyzed. Somehow she got turned around, after which we repaired to her crib for food, drink, and TV.

Nancy and Bartleby

So how, you might ask, could Nancy possibly pass her defense? For too long this question had sorely perplexed me. I had to find out more.

Since I knew the name of her committee chair, Bart Bartleby, I decided to google him. What I found out would chill a snow wasp. Bartleby had once belonged to a self-help group called “Asperger’s Anonymous.” With this information, I went to their web site and posted a call for information on academics that had attended their meetings. Not long after I received a call from a certain Harvey Kennedy, who was down on his luck and had been reduced to trolling dumpsters for returnable emptys, and rolling middle class drunks with his trashy protégé, Lulu. Lulu, a once promising Yoga guru and figure skating prodigy, had python-like quads and carpish calves. Harvey would rouse them with satanic verses, at which point Lulu would pounce, crushing them into unconsciousness with her limbic constrictors. Once subdued, the hapless dipsomaniacs were quickly relieved of their money, keys, and credit cards.

Now Lulu was gone, and Harvey needed money. He showed up at my Devill Hall office wearing beach thongs, a bathrobe, and a rosary.

What he remembered was Bartleby’s confessions to his afflicted brethren. Bartleby spoke of the weird unhealthy bond that took shape between Nancy and himself. How they had stolen and shared food from the faculty-grad orientation, putting mayonnaise and ketchup in napkins, which they would bring out in his office hour. They would then smear the condiments on their faces and talk about Rogerian dialectics and the Detroit Red Wings. This didn’t surprise me, as Nancy had spoken more than once of her hockey days. Before she tore her transverse colon, she had showed much promise in the nets with the Adirondack Copralites, or so she claimed. It was Bartleby’s complicity in Nancy’s advancement that made this insane story possible.

The high functioning autism that defines Aspergers is well suited to the academic temperament. Aspergers Syndromites often have above-average intelligence (Bartleby was a M.E.N.S.A. member), a photographic memory and natural affinity with numbers (Bartleby could figure out 4 Rubic’s Cubes simultaneously with each of his arms and legs in under a minute), and are extraordinarily skilled at foot massage (it was said that Bartleby once worked exclusively for Miss Divine).

Engaging in ordinary conversation, making appropriate eye contact, and understanding body language present social problems for those afflicted with Aspergers. Bartleby confessed to all that sometimes he lived in his office for weeks and months, carefully sneaking out only when the janitors made their appointed rounds. He railed about his office not having a bathroom (he used an old Folgers coffee can for a bedpan), and complained that the quality of the furniture was beneath someone of his intellectual stature. He lamented that, when offered help, he reacted with rage and indignation. He once bragged of putting psychedelic mushrooms on the pizzas of underling secretaries who dared defy him, laughing as they rolled away a hysterical administrative grad coordinator.

For Bartleby, Nancy served as proof of his normalcy. Failing her would have been an admission of his inadequacies. While rudely dismissing anyone unable to measure up to his lofty standards, he fawned on Nancy and, like some kind of academic Frankenstein, created a freak of higher education. A collegial monster who instead of ravishing the countryside, inculcates shock and awe in the minds of those naïve freshmen foolish enough not to drop her class.

Bartleby once quipped that he sat in on a class where she conducted a simulated domestic crisis where a distraught live-in adult child gave his Alzheimered mother a torturously painful pedicure while plying her with Everclear. Bartleby saw this as amusing, and as perfectly acceptable at a university where someone like him had achieved lifetime tenure.

Who cares about the quality of instruction, having illiterate wackos like Nancy constantly reappointed ensures that crackpots like Bartleby can flourish. It’s pedagogical competency and commitment that threatens our universities Bartlebys.

Broyard, Adorno, Freud, and Dickinson

“Illness is primarily a drama and it should be possible to enjoy it as well as to suffer it.”
-- Anatole Broyard, 1989


Human life is conditional, we are born and we die.

Along the way yesterday I stopped at the “Scotch Palace,” where I was pulled aside by S., a kindly employee who only the day before had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Having seen me regularly through the Fall and Winter, he undoubtedly needed a sympathetic ear that might relate to hearing what we most dread. For him, I represented a sort of cancer veteran. He knew something was coming, but was unsure of what. He spoke of being unable to sleep with the thought of what might happen, and of trying to take comfort in the fact that we all die.

After reassuring him that the U-M cancer center, where he will be treated, is the best in the world, I got back in my car and thought about having cancer. In a way, our conversation involved two people who had moved beyond abstraction. He, faced with a traumatic adjustment, living with uncertainty; and me, trying to explain the wisdom that arises out of this painful process.

For me, having cancer has been an epiphanous, depressing, exhilarating, distressing, and, to coin a descriptor of Anatole Broyard, “intoxicating” experience. Broyard’s point is that the diagnosis is analogous to be inoculated with a dose of truth. The abstract, and untenable, idea that death comes to us all is banished and is replaced by the knowledge that existential enlightenment is only achieved by embracing our finitude. What Broyard calls, the ‘nausea of the uninitiated’ is replaced by the comfort of rejecting homely truths and ontological delusions. And with this curious comfort comes the intoxication of a heightened desire, which in turn produces a lightheartedness, and hence, reproach to reality. It follows then, that those dear to us who care, who rally around us like “birds rising from a body of water into the sunset” fumble with “pious and inspirational” conversation, with sobering responses to our refusal of seriousness.

Over time, the diagnosis directed my attention to the real, and has proved itself to be, as ironic as it may seem, salvific. My narrative has a beginning, middle, and end, and while I can’t predict future agonies, I am learning to accept that anxiety, like time itself, is ever fleeting. As the wisdom of the Lear’s Fool has it, the worst is never the worst as long as we can say it’s the worst.

But over and above the fact that we all must die lies the more important issue of how we face death. Do we confront our demise by seeking to understand it, or by flight and denial? More than one nurse in the MRI, CT, and PET scan areas spoke of patients who learned the worst and never came back. I might understand this were they in late stage disease, but to displace hope with delusion--the idea that ignoring the worst will make it go away—is a secular betrayal of the sanctity of existence, an existential folly.

A constant trope in the rhetoric of cancer has to do with toughness, courage, and attitude, and this is all well and good. But I think Broyard gets it right in saying that dealing with illness “has nothing to do with courage.” He sees ‘desire’ as a key coping mechanism. Broyard’s point is that facing our own mortality forces us to focus, to channel the awareness that forever always ends into a pressing desire “to live, to write, to do everything.” My idea of calling this blog “Disease as Performance” suggests that illness produces a mental state much like that of the artist, where, as Freud contends, “the unconscious is less repressed or hidden,” and where expression, artistic or otherwise, articulates “the fulfillment of concealed wishes.” Tripping the circuit of desire offers a model of immortality closely akin to producing aesthetic objects. As Adorno puts it, “art is a critique of the brute seriousness that reality imposes on human beings. Art imagines that by naming this fateful state of affairs it is loosening its hold.” Art represents “freedom in the midst of unfreedom.” The artist projects their all too human desire for immortality onto the artwork. What Wilde does with Dorian Gray is reverse the idea of the immortality of art.


There’s certainly no dearth of literature on the theme of our mortality. And at the end of the day (excuse the pun) we’re probably never ready to hop in the grim reaper’s hearse. So let’s end with the queen of eloquent death poems, Emily Dickinson.

Because I could not stop for death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.

We passed the school where children played
At wrestling in the ring;
We passed the field of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.

We passed before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.

Since then ‘tis centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses’ heads
Were toward eternity.

"A Day in a Life:" Schadenfreude, The Dalai Shama-Scama, Divorce Blogs, and Papist Pap

Schadenfreude (shad’ n-froi’ de’) n. Pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others.

Sunday: After a typical Saturday night of watching the NBA playoff games I bet on, I arose early (7:30) and made the trip from Plymouth to my house. On this particular morning I called my brother Paul in Florida to chat. Like myself, he’s nuts, and thus had a crazy Sunday morning story. On the way to church, he stopped and had a beer at a local Blind Pig. While there with an alcoholic buddy he drives for, he ran across the street and bought a twenty-dollar scratch off lottery ticket, won $500 bucks. He was so happy; he’s always broke. I says, “Paul, did you tell Donna?” He says, “hell no, she’d ask where I got it and go on a rant about the evils of gambling, drugs, and John Barleycorn. Ill gotten gains, that’s what she calls gambling profits.” Now there’s an oxymoron for you, “gambling profits.” I says, “I gotta go, my battery’s dying.” Which is the lie I use whenever I want to end the conversation, which is usually delivered very abruptly, on account of my A.D.D..

With that, I got off the highway, stopped at the Sunoco, bought the NYTimes and a glazed donut, and continued on to my domicile. Once there, I fed the dog (Shadow), cat (Satchmo), and parakeets (unnamed). Actually, the probationary lodger I gave my truck to knows their names, but she’s not here right now. She works at Houdini’s Dry Cleaners. Why no coffee, you may ask. Look, I’m from Ann Arbor, man. And as an A2 sophisto-snob-nazi (although I no longer shop at “whole Foods,” can’t afford it) I only drink cappuccino. And, of course, I have a beautiful Rancillio espresso machine (Brigitte bought it for me), in which I use only the best beans from “Trader Joes.” After an espresso and a smoke, I decided to walk the dog.

If there’s one thing that annoys my doggie, it’s this, the various blimps that hover over our route during U-M football season. Shadow barks and leaps at them. I don’t think she objects to the Fuji or Goodyear emblems on the side, although she can read, I think, rather, that the unnatural way they ply the sky and make whooshing noises is offensive to her poochy sensibilities. GRRRR! But it wasn’t football season. No, her nemesis yesterday was a long banner trailing behind the kind of Piper Cub that usually only appears when the “Big House” is full. It read, “PLEASE DALAI LAMA, STOP ATTACKING THE OLYMPIC TORCH.” I kid you not.

Did I mention that yesterday the Dalai Lama appeared at Crisler Arena. Last week someone asked me if I was going to see him. “Nope,” he’s in my doghouse.”

If accepting Bush’s invitation to the White House wasn’t enough, in an interview on 9/17, the old guru said “it was too early to say” when asked whether the war in Iraq was a mistake. The rama-lama-fa-fa-fa Dalai then added, “terrorism is the worst kind of violence, so we have to check it, we have to take countermeasures.” As Patrick French, former director of the Free Tibet Campaign in London, reports, “The Dalai Lama is a great and charismatic spiritual figure, but a poor and poorly advised political strategist. When he escaped into exile in India in 1959, he declared himself an admirer of Mahatma Ghandi’s nonviolent resistance. But Ghandi took huge gambles, starting the Salt March and starving himself nearly to death—a very different approach from the Dalai’s ‘middle way,’ which concentrates on nonviolence rather than resistance. The Dalai Lama has never really tried to use direct action to leverage his authority.” In yesterday’s interview he said, “Terrorism comes out of hatred, and also short-sidedness.” Ironically, the Dalai’s assessment, which he meant to apply to Osama bin Laden, is an accurate (and succinct in its brevity) description of the situation in Iraq, as well as the planning that preceeded this fateful decision. Pretty soon we’ll see the old Dalai wearing a sandwich board and hawking orange thongs in front of Starbucks, or perhaps Wal-mart (“Lowest Wages, [I mean prices] Always!”).

We kept walking. And that got me thinking about the confessional divorce blogs story I read in the Times. In it, one Jennifer Neal, who claims to have a readership of 55,000, bragged about exposing her ex-husband’s evil habits to the general public. As I recall, she accused him of being a bed-wetter, smelly farter, and poor househusband. My question is this, how many of these hits are confirmations from her own incessant, and obsessive, posts? Is this what I should do, excoriate my ex-wives, gay boyfriends, unhappy bestial trysts, pained vacuum cleaner liaisons, failed calves liver masturbatory episodes, and insincere flagellations, as a way of expanding my audience? Not on your life, not while I have Nancy! As An expert on privacy boundaries, I could not in good conscience pander to my readers in such a despicable fashion.

After completing our walk, I showered and headed for the casino. As is my habit, I stopped to get a large bottle of Canadian style Belgium ale, “La Fin Du Monde” 9% Alc., and a miniature tequila. While exchanging pleasantries with the Chaldean Christian owner, I noticed he had the Pope’s Mass (60 thousand in attendance) at Yankee stadium on the big screen T.V. Wow! What luck, the Pope and the Dalai Rama Lama Fa Fa Fa in our country on the same day. Praise God! (Happy birthday Iggy, he’s 61)

In his homily, the Pope emphasized that we should respect all life, even the unborn (see South Park episode, 'Bloody Mary'). One thing we don’t have to worry about are any priests seeking out abortions for their lovers, they’re all little boys. Why can’t we Catholics take a clue from the Mormons, you wouldn’t see Warren Jeffs fooling around with little boys, not when he’s got his Louisa May Alcott posse of wives to serve his libidinal needs. Girls over 14 need not apply. What kind of country is this? Our forefathers, (why aren’t there any foremothers?) and their foreskins, came over here to escape religious persecution. Where’s the tolerance, a guy can’t even live in freedom with his 80 little Hannah Montanas?

I’m glad the Pope is so concerned with human life. He also met with the Bush White House, which isn’t surprising, since the Papal See during WWII was in collusion with the Nazis.

DEEP GULLIES AND TREE SHROUDED SWAMPS (fiction)

"Our last garment is made without pockets."
-- Italian Proverb

The car drove north against a backdrop of dull gray sky and jack pine hills. It was that time of year when snowdrifts comb the highways, shaped by the winds off the frozen swamps and plains of the northern Lower Peninsula. When they left Midland, Stosh Pelto thought it might be a good day for driving, and it was south of that invisible line that delineates northern and midwestern weather. As they approached the snow-belt, that band of weather between Gaylord and the Bridge, Stosh noted the scenic beauty: sandstone outcroppings that paralleled the expressway; the occasional massive white birch peppered with black pin-dots; and the Christmas tree farms that formed rows of green lace-work against the snow.

Mody Pelto was reading Mad magazine while her mother, June, exhausted from the 12 hour nursing shift she had just put in at Mott Hospital, snored loudly in the back seat.
"When are we gonna get to the bridge, dad? I don't wanna miss the Mystery Spot."
"If I were your age I’d enjoy the scenery, instead of reading that trash," Stosh shot back, pointing at no one in particular.
"Its all the same after the first five miles," Mody said, "and besides, I'm gonna move back to the U.P. someday, so I'll be seeing it all the time."
As they passed the Cheboygan exit, June readjusted her position in the back seat and resumed her asthmatic wheeze.
"I wish your mother would quit smoking, Maureen." Pausing a moment he added, "it's bad."

Just past Black river they passed an open field punctuated by old grave stones, an island of black and white ribbons against an ivory backdrop. Probably an early French burial ground, Stosh thought. When Mody was bored with reading, she opened her lunch and picked at the tuna fish sandwiches. Seeing this, Stosh took up a cold smelt pasty and threw the wrapper out the window.
"I gotta go to the bathroom dad," Mody said impatiently, as they neared the Black River exit.
"Can you hold it till the bridge," Stosh said, his jaw clenched in that focused grimace inherent to one who is considering a possibility while concentrating on something else.
"Maureen, have you noticed that we're in near white-out conditions? Do you really need to go?" he continued, squinting intently at the road in front of him.
"I can't hold it." Mody said, squirming incessantly on the seat next to him.
"All right!" Stosh shouted as he pulled off on a stretch of deep gullies and tree shrouded frozen swamps.

Furrowing her brow intently as she squatted near the guardrail, Mody suddenly noticed what appeared to be a half submerged car about 50 feet down the embankment. If it were a car, it would soon disappear under the onslaught of the all-consuming whiteness.

"I see a car, Dad," Mody squealed softly, with an almost tangible sense of relief in her voice.
"Hurry up. It's probably an old wreck," Stosh answered, gazing northward toward a series of fast approaching, even darker, more furious squalls.
"Dang it, I dropped my rosary," Mody yelled into the deafening wind.

There was no way that Mody would leave without her grandma Jessie’s rosary, which had more sentimental than spiritual value. Which is why she was so insistent on her dad helping find it.

Son of a bitch, Stosh thought, as he moved to help find his dear mother's gift to his only child.
"Look for a delicate opening in the snow where it might have dropped," he said impatiently.
"That's the key to finding something small in the snow."

His words had that tone of cautious optimism that invariably prefaces an impossible task. While they were carefully pawing at the snow, Stosh noticed what looked like steam coming from where the icy water line met the car's front passenger door. The light snow cover on the car told stosh this was a recent accident.
"Hmmm. Mody, I'm gonna check this out. We might have to report it at the bridge."

Swiping the snow from the window, Stosh peered in. "Mody," he screamed in shocked disbelief. "There's a child down here!"
Staring back at him with a look of horror stricken panic was a young girl. Just beyond her, in the front seat, the upper torso of Don Merryweather lay slumped across the front passenger side--face down in the rising water, surrounded by a rapidly congealing sheet of crimson ice.

Feeling a rush of adrenaline, Stosh opened the rear door and pulled the child into the snowy whirlwind.
"Are you O.K.? We'll get you to where it's warm."

Upon hearing this, the child stared at Stosh with that look of measured expressionlessness that articulates the ineffable grief accompanying a profound, and incomprehensible, sense of loss; no doubt an attitude of emotion borne of agonizing hours staring helplessly at her father's lifeless corpse. Fighting the whipping wind, Stosh slowly moved the girl up the embankment.

"Mother, wake up," Mody cried, "someone needs help." The fact that Nancy Pelto was a nurse mattered little. No succor, materially or psychologically, could ease Nicole Merryweather's pain and sorrow. As the car pulled away, Mody's rosary swung wildly from the guardrail in the unrelenting storm.

English 325.102 Essay Writing

Dear Readers:

Having been informed yesterday that I've been assigned a theme based writing course in the Spring, and given that this class begins in one week, I've been researching and developing a syllabus for the last ten hours. Moreover, since I now need a drink, and am not quite done yet, I've decided to post what I have in lieu of my usual stuff. I hope it's not too boring.

Love - Randy

PS: The format looks completely different on paper.

“To learn to write is to have ideas.”
- Robert Frost
________________________________________________________________________

English 325.102: Essay Writing
Course Syllabus
Spring 2008

Instructor: Randy Tessier Office Location: 3122 Angell Hall
Office Hours: TTH 12:00-2:00 p.m., & by appt. Email Address: rlt@umich.edu

English Department Mailroom: Angell Hall 3161, Hours: M-F, 8 a.m.-4:30p.m.
NOTE: All materials left in my mailbox MUST include my name.
________________________________________________________________________

Greetings!
Your participation in this course signals a desire to exercise a degree of self-direction in choosing and developing your own topics. While analysis and argumentation may be key aspects of your writings, you will also be encouraged to take risks with exploration and style. Interdisciplinary improvisation as well as experimentation with different genres is welcomed. Personal essays, aesthetic critique, memoirs, argumentative and persuasive essays, as well as various combinations and blendings of these forms are appropriate to our mission. Unlike English 125 and 225, there will be greater latitude given to individual voice, tone, nuance, and rhythm. To this end, we will look at twelve documentary films as writing prompts. While the course has been designed for maximum flexibility in terms of topic choices, the films will fall into five thematic categories: individualism, health care, the environment, politics, and economics. Creativity is encouraged.

My take on this is as follows…
My role is to foster a collaborative learning environment in which we explore the rhetorical methods of various authors as a way of developing our own voice. This requires that we privately, and collectively, examine ours, and the authors we read, beliefs and assumptions. Developing this attitude of critical thought is an indispensable process in adopting the values and opinions that make us who we are. Deciding how to best do this will be our ongoing/overarching goal/aim/pursuit.

What is Essay Writing?
Like other forms of written discourse, essays are irreducible to simple definition or classification. The sheer volume of subject matter essays might cover makes it impossible to give one, authoritative description of what constitutes an essay. It’s no wonder then that Sylvan Barnet’s 1960 Dictionary of literary Terms simply says, “A composition having no pretensions to completeness or thoroughness of treatment.” Notwithstanding the examples of essayistic styles found in the Classical period, the modern essay first appeared in the European Renaissance. At a time of free expression in the pictorial and literary arts, Michel de Montaigne started to experiment with a different kind of prose. Seeing that this newly flexible and personal discourse defied conventional categories he coined the term “essais,” loosely translated in English as “attempts,” “trials,” or “experiments.” For our purposes we might want to consider Justin Kaplan’s modernistic description of the essay: “How like an eel this essay creature is. It wriggles between narcissism and detachment, opinion and fact, the private party and the public meeting, omphalos and brain, analysis and polemics, confession and reportage, persuasion and provocation. All you can safely say is that it’s not poetry and it’s not fiction.” In this class, what we inform or explain to one another in our writings will be left to the form of self-expression we choose to adopt. Given that this is an upper-level writing course you are encouraged to give free rein to your creative ideas.

Course Goals
English 325 will afford you the opportunity to:
1) Write 20-30 pages of revised, polished expository prose;
2) Meditate on your own reading, writing, and thinking processes;
3) Consider traditional and unconventional forms of essay writing;
4) Collaborate with others as a way of understanding the concept of audience;
5) Apply interactive constructive critique as a writing-in-process strategy;
6) Understand the rhetorical power of language;
7) Recognize the force of literacy as a key to self-empowerment, both privately and publicly;
8) Consider the ethical issues inherent to language as a form of empowerment.

Required Texts
Readings will be available on course tools.

A Pocket Style Manual, 3rd edition, by Diana Hacker, published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2008.

Course Policies
Attendance: Attendance is mandatory. Our class’ collective success is only possible through your commitment. Three misses are allowed without consequences. If you are tardy I mark you as absent and circle it when you arrive. Three circled marks equal one absence.

Conferences: You will meet with me twice over the course of the semester. These conferences will aim to address any questions you might have and provide you feedback on your writing. A missed conference equals an absence.

Class Participation: Participation will vary according to the character and disposition of the student. Active listening, oral/verbal engagement, reading and formulating questions on the assigned subject matter, entering into on-line discussions, and making critical observations of your peers work all constitute modes of intellectual interaction. While a person’s degree of participation may vary from class to class, our goal is to achieve a comfortable academic environment for all.

Office Hours: Should we need to meet outside of our mandatory conferences and regularly scheduled office hours, we can set up another appointment.

Late Work: Late work will not be accepted. Should unforeseen events arise, you will be afforded one extension during the semester.

Format: You are expected to turn in all finished work in double-spaced, typed, Times New Roman, 12-point typeface format. Please staple your papers and keep all work in a portfolio.

Plagiarism: Plagiarism may be defined as “Submitting a piece of work (for example, an essay, research paper, work of art, assignment, laboratory report) which in part or in whole is not entirely the student’s own work without attributing those same portions to their correct source.” This would include submitting assignments you have done in one course to fulfill the obligations of another course. Do your own work! If you plagiarize you may be expelled from the university subject to the findings of the LS&A academic judiciary board.

Disability Accommodations: The University makes allowances for students with physical and/or learning disabilities. Should you require special accommodation we can set up a confidential meeting to discuss this. The University of Michigan also has Services for Students with Disabilities Office (SSD) that addresses these concerns.

Evaluation: Not counting unexcused absences and missed assignments, my grade calculations are as follows:

Participation 10%
Rough and Final Draft Essay #1 10%
Rough and Final Draft Essay #2 15%
Rough and Final Draft Essay #3 15%
Rough and Final Draft Essay #4 20%
Portfolio 30%

I will provide rubrics for each assignment that provide some estimation of the grading criteria. Additionally, as a way of de-mystifying how your grade is arrived at, we will stop along the way and discuss the evaluation process.


Education is not a product: grade, diploma, job, money - in that order; it is a process, a never-ending one.
- Bel Kaufman, 1967

Assignment Schedule
Aside from occasional handouts on current affairs, the readings can be found on course tools, which is also a useful source for keeping track of the assignments.

Week 1 INDIVIDUALISM

04.29.08 Introductions
In-Class Writing Assignment

05.01.08 Read: “Harpers,” 12/06, ‘The Secret Mainstream,’ Tom Bissell
New York Times Movie Review 8/12/05, Manohla Dargis
“The Spectator,” 6/9/06, ‘Steve Irwin’s Death by Stingray,’ Rod Liddle
Film: Grizzly Man (2005) Werner Herzog
In-Class: SIGN UP FOR CONFERENCES

Week 2

05.06.08 Read: “Film Quarterly Review,” vol. 33, no. 3, Spring 1980, pp. 47-50, ‘Gates of Heaven,’ Michael Corvino
“The Believer,” March/April 2008, Conversation between Werner Herzog and Errol Morris
Film: Gates of Heaven (1978) Errol Morris
Write: ROUGH DRAFTS OF ESSAY #1 DUE
(Bring 3 Copies)

05.08.08 In-Class: Discussion

Week 3 HEALTH CARE

05.13.08 Read: New York Times Movie review 6/22/07, A. O. Scott
“New England Journal of Medicine,” 8/23/07 #8, vol. 357, ‘Healing Our Sicko Health Care System,’ Jacob S. Hacker, P.h.D.
Film: Sicko (2007) Michael Moore
In-Class: Discuss Critique Content and Format
In-Class: Distribute 2 Student Drafts

05.15.08 Read: New York Times Movie Review 10/3/07, Manohola Dargis
“L. A. Film Weekly,” J. Hoberman
Film: Lake of Fire (2006) Tony Kaye
Bring: 3 1-2 Page Single-Spaced Critiques
In-Class: Workshop 1, Essay 1
Write: ROUGH DRAFTS OF ESSAY #2 DUE
(Bring 3 Copies)

Week 4

05.20.08 Read: Kenneth R. Morefield, Lake of Fire Review (Google)
Tony Kaye Interview, about.com
Film: Lake of Fire (2006) Tony Kaye
In-Class: Critical Thinking and Claims with Reasons
In-Class: In-Class: Distribute 2 Student Drafts
Write: REVISED ESSAY #1 AND REFLECTIVE COMMENTARY DUE
Bring: 3 1-2 Page Single-Spaced Critiques
In-Class: Workshop 2, Essay 2

05.22.08 ENVIRONMENTALISM
Read: “Jump Cut: A review of Contemporary Media,” #49, Spring 2007, ‘Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth: A Case of Environmental Nostalgia, Robin Murray and Joseph Heuman
“Harpers,” 5/08, ‘Hell Hath No Limits,’ Wendell Berry
“Harpers,” 10/07, ‘Toxic Inaction,’ Mark Schapiro
“Harpers,” 8/07, ‘The Idols of Environmentalism,’ Curtis White
Film: An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Al Gore/Davis Guggenheim
Write: REVISED ESSAY #2 AND REFLECTIVE COMMENTARY DUE

Week 5 POLITICS

05.27.08 Read: “The Journal of Popular Culture,” vol. 24, issue 4
Spring 1991, ‘Leatherstocking in ‘Nam: Rambo, Platoon, and the American Frontier Myth,’ Harold Schechter and Jonna G. Semeiks
“Atlantic Journal of Communication. Summer 2005, ‘Separated by Birth: Argument by Irony in Hearts and Minds and Fahrenheit 9/11, by Carol Wilder
Film: Hearts and Minds (1974) Peter Davis
In-Class: Close Reading and Rhetorical Strategies
Write: ROUGH DRAFTS OF ESSAY #3 DUE
(Bring 3 Copies)

05.29.08 Read: New York Times Movie review 7/27/07, A. O. Scott
New York Times Book Review 3/30/08, ‘War on Error,’ Barry Gewen
Film: No End in Sight (2007) Charles Ferguson
In-Class: Distribute 2 Student Drafts

Week 6

06.03.08 Read: “Harpers,” 3/06, Notebook: ‘Terror Alerts,’ Lewis Lapham
“Alternet,” 10/1/07, Seymour Hersh Interview
Film: Baghdad E. R. (2006) HBO John Alpert and Matthew O’Neill
Bring: 3 1-2 Page Single-Spaced Critiques
In-Class: Workshop 3, Essay 3
Write: ROUGH DRAFTS OF ESSAY #3 DUE
(Bring 3 Copies)

06.05.08 ECONOMICS
Read:
Film: Okie Noodling (2001) Bradley Beesley
In-Class: Connecting and Comparing
In-Class: Distribute 2 Student Drafts
Write: ROUGH DRAFTS OF ESSAY #4 DUE
(Bring 3 Copies)
In-Class: Distribute 2 Student Drafts
Bring: 3 1-2 Page Single-Spaced Critiques
In-Class: Workshop 3, Essay 3

Week 7

06.10.08 Read:
Film: What Would Jesus Buy (2007) Rob VanAlkemade
Write: REVISED ESSAY #3 AND REFLECTIVE COMMENTARY DUE
Bring: 3 1-2 Page Single-Spaced Critiques
In-Class: Workshop 4, Essay 4
In-Class: Portfolio Review

06.12.08 Read:
Film: Maxed Out: Hard Times, Easy Credit, and the Era of Predatory Lenders (2006) James Scurlock
Write: REVISED ESSAY #4 AND REFLECTIVE COMMENTARY DUE

Portfolios due by 4:30 p.m.

Adjunctivitis & Ethics

“School is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society.”
-- Ivan Illich

I suppose any good fiction about academic skullduggery should include some high seriousness, some vague nod to moral scruple and such. Why would a teacher abandon his ethical principles and stoop to write someone else’s dissertation? Filthy lucre, money you say?

Consider the plight of the adjunct, those academic nomads who man the oars of the research barges that fund the social apparatus’ that masquerade as institutes of higher learning. Those same overseers (tenured professors) who are closer to touching the sun than consorting with the barely literate freshmen that fund the cash cow, pass their distracted judgment on we peons who dole out the necessary remediation that allows them to gloat and fawn over how remarkable indeed their students are. They who hold court on how we should best impart an imagined pedagogical (theoretical) sophistication totally foreign to the fledgling undergrad. They who labor under the illusion that teaching is something more than a last desperate attempt to stamp out ignorance at the twilight of a decadent culture. They whose brilliance and erudition are irreconcilable with the idea that their colleague could be Nancy, and make no mistake about it, every university has its Nancies. Praise God!

Would that we could live on 35 to 40 grand a year, and shame on us for seeking to pick up side jobs editing bad writing. After all, the privilege of working at an esteemed university like BSU should be enough to inoculate us from the temptation of taking profit in a less honorable way. I suppose I should have explored male stripping rather than exposing (excuse the pun) myself to the perils of Nancy. Now that I think about it, there were times when she reminded me of a coiled reptile, a boa constrictor that had just swallowed one, perhaps two, suckling pigs.

Yes, I took the money, and much like Hardy’s “Ruined Maid,” consoled myself with the fact that being rich and ruined was better than lighting myself on fire, jumping off an overpass, and being hit by a car.

That poor woman, you say. How could you take her spanking new, ATM disbursed, Ben Franklins and not feel a twinge of guilt? It was easy. I should have charged more. Working with her was akin to spraying-agent orange over the jungles of Viet Nam. I still have an uncontrollable tic that began shortly after our time was finished. Psychically bruised and battered, I licked my cerebral wounds and resigned myself to kind of never ending Nancy induced post-traumatic stress syndrome. Oh how she owes me!

Poor woman, yeah right! She was an only child, and heir to a fortune amassed by her father, who was the chief leasing agent, globally, for Studebaker Truck Division. I remember her carrying her pecuniary wads in a kinder garden pencil case from which she dispensed my measly pittance, just as I recall tossing Petronian journals in such a way that I could raid her pouch of crayolas. Never taking much, mind you. I’m no golden goose killer. Only enough to pay my faithful therapist Joe Micheals, and to quench the alcoholic fires lit by this cognitive arsonist intent on sapping me of my vital cognitive fluids.

If only this weren’t a fiction. I might then resort to extortion, and spend the rest of my days tempting the Ivory Towered high and mighty with Spitzerian call girls and exotic intellectual canards.

"She makes speaking be much more easier."

Rate my Professors.com

This is the administrator, THIS RATING IS TEMP. concerning the message below this one. If you click “report error with this professor” and leave me a name and BSU e-mail address so I can verify that you are a student with a normal request. I have noticed that any negative rating for Nancy X. has been requested to be deleted and this is suspicious.

Wow Nancy X. is the most unprofessional teacher I have ever had. She was unwilling to listen to her students and she also picked favorites. She needs some communication skills herself because in order to be a good speaker, you must be a good listener as well. She does not belong in a college classroom.

She’s horrible! She’s very biased and favors students. If she doesn’t like you then you’re screwed! She’s very unorganized and did not prepare you AT ALL! She makes public speaking harder than it should have been and she expects alot from you.

And then this…

Professor Nancy X. is an excellent teacher. She makes COM 2020 so interesting and fun. She makes speaking be much more easier. She demands a lot of work and perfection. Stick with her for COM 2020. Other professors that teach this class are horrible. Prepares you heavily for the final exam.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Oh my God! “She makes speaking be much more easier.” The awkwardness of the students’ comments I can understand, they’re in college to learn. But what about that last entry. The teacher makes the class “so interesting,” “stick with her,” and finally, “other teachers that teach this class are horrible.” What kind of student would know, let alone say, that all of the other teachers are horrible. “Prepares you heavily for the final exam” is, of course, not a sentence. I’m surprised she didn’t add “rubber ducky you’re the one, you make bath time lots of fun.” Did I say “she?” I guess I did.

Gee, I wonder why?

Here’s something really scary. In winter 08 Nancy taught Com.666, 101, and Eng.151. And something even more horrifying, as of right now, in the winter semester coming to a close, she is teaching two classes, Oral Communication, and Business and Professional Presentation, which she describes this way in the course catalogue: “persuasive speaking, informative speaking, speech writing, multi-media presentation, and business and report writing.” Unbelievable!

Call this blog entry a teaser for the next chapter of the Nancy saga.

THE WEAKLY STANDARD

Dear Readers:

Today I will address a number of topics. I’m never sure of what they will be, but here goes.

Yes, Les, it is a “major stretch,” so let’s go with 98.6% the person described in the article you refer to. Regarding classifying what was written “as a work of fiction,” that depends on the reader and to what degree they can contextualize what they read. I guess when one sets the wheels in motion that “trigger our memories,” like your kind gesture in sending along the CD, the recollections that follow can’t be predicted. For me, my recent obsession with blogging has put me on a constant hunt for things to write about. Delwin’s story, while sad and gruesome, is probably more interesting to read about than a discussion of our good times playing music. While that might make for a nostalgic e-mail exchange, most readers would probably have a “who cares” response. Would that I had that rare and genteel sense of humor that offends no one, as in your gore/Al Gore joke/comment.

I found it a little surprising that you thought the second anonymous comment was directed at you. I certainly don’t think your disputing the dismemberment implication was a defense or apology for Delwin’s actions. I also think her comment was meant for me, and I think I know what she meant. The way her sentence was written, however, suggests that what I/we didn’t “notice,” because we are men, is that he was ”ill.” What I think she really meant, is that “as men,” we would be less sensitive, if not completely oblivious to his misogynistic nature, and she’s probably right on the second count; but this isn’t because we would ignore it if we saw it, as much as it was that we rarely saw Delwin in situations where his attitudes about gender would be in evidence. Because the Dr. Jekyll side restricted its beastliness to the private realm, behind closed doors with the women he knew, and by all accounts this behavior manifested itself in all of his close relationships with women, there was no way we could know that side of him. Given your gentility and sensitivity, and notwithstanding my macho tendencies, I can say unequivocally that neither one of us would have tolerated or condoned this kind of behavior, nor would we have overlooked this for the sake of furthering any sort of musical collaboration. We all knew the guy was nuts (who isn’t), but not in this insidious and tragic way.

Speaking of nuts, I assume they only let William Kristol out of the psych ward on Mondays, that way he can go to his New York Times office and produce the drivel that masquerades as serious journalism. What next, a Rush Limbaugh column? Kristol has the temerity, the unmitigated gall, to chastise Barak Obama on his assessment of why attracting small town, working class voters to his cause is a difficult task. The quote he cites is this: “It’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment to explain their frustrations.”

The problem here is that Kristol makes the assumption that having guns is a good thing, religious bigotry and intolerance is an inalienable American right, and that rabid xenophobia is a noble quality. Fact is, Obama is right. It’s no accident that 70% of the public, of which a vast majority are “small town and working class” are bitter and frustrated. They made a huge mistake in voting Bush into office, and so, like Kristol, don’t want to hear that they are complicit in creating the sad state of affairs they now find themselves in. The truth hurts, and Obama speaks truth to power. It’s easier to hate on illegal wetbacks than to demand that Bush be held accountable for our situation. It’s easier to lament having our AK47 taken away from us than to consider the outrageous levels of gun violence in our society. And finally, it’s easier to hide behind the skirt of our God than to extend our understanding to other peoples and deities.

Since guilt by association is Kristol’s stock in trade, he links Obama’s ideas with Karl Marx. It’s no accident that he, chuckle, chuckle, mentions his “spending a little time once again with the old Communist.” I suppose he thinks that by painting Obama with the Communist brush, he can resurrect old phobias about the “Red Menace” and the “Godless” threat it poses to our Rockwell Nation (but does he mean Norman or George Lincoln?).

Given the intractable folly of the current administration, it’s not surprising that Kristol finds having the “intellectual pedigree” of a German thinker as incompatible with the political philosophy of an “American presidential candidate.”

The most ridiculous quote from Kristol’s column, and there are many, is this: “If he [Obama] were a war hero, if he had a career of remarkable civic achievement or public service—then he could perhaps be excused an unattractive but in a sense understandable hauteur.”

If we juxtapose this assessment of Obama with the quality of leadership now being displayed by our president and vice-president, we can only hope that Kristol’s “mask slips” some more, since it’s painfully obvious that it has no eyeholes.

Best - Randy

WRITING & REDEMPTION

…better far write twaddle or anything, anything than nothing at all.”
-- Katherine Mansfield, Journal, 1922

“Technique alone is never enough. You have to have passion. Technique alone is just an embroidered potboiler.”
-- Raymond Chandler, Notebooks, 1977

“All writing is garbage. People who come out of nowhere to try to put into words any part of what goes on in their minds are pigs.”
-- Antonin Artaud, Selected Writings, 1976

“Writing is a cop-out. An excuse to live perpetually in fantasy land, where you can create, direct and watch the products of your own head. Very selfish.”
-- Monica Dickens, 1976


Dear Readers:

Two of you brought my attention to the fact that Delwin Biaggio didn’t dismember the body. While the person you may be talking about didn't inflict this final indignity, not so in the case of Delwin Biaggio's fictive persona. You see, my dear friend Les, there is no such person as Biaggio. Delwin is a fictitious character, as is Nancy in the dissertation story. Whatever I, the author, have them do is the “truth” of the story, but it has no obligation to be faithful to any non-fictional history or reality.

The dismemberment angle, while it may seem unpleasant to some, is simply a story device, as in a Stephen King tale, to engage the reader. While some don’t relish, or welcome this kind of engagement, there are others, like R.J., for instance, that like gore, horror, and other weirdness, like H. P. Lovecraft, Charles Bukowski, Thomas Harris, Antonin Artaud, or Patricia Cornwell.

To the second anonymous commentator, aside from the allowance to take poetic license with a made-up character, I’m not clear on what I don’t understand because "I’m a man," his illness? Will he always be ill? Can he get better, see the light? Is he, or anyone, beyond redemption? Should being a woman, or a man, preclude one from striving to transcend gender, and even if this is an impossibility shouldn’t we pretend to a higher awareness? Should I assume there are things you “can’t notice” because you’re (not your) a woman?

As Les commented, it is a sad story, murder most foul; but as close as they may seem, that’s not the story I’m telling, and it’s not a story that most of the 10,198 readers who have hit this blog would know.

I know my stories, like the Nancy tale, are sometimes sexist, sensational, and gruesome, and I’m not sure why. I suppose I could blame my baser preoccupations on environment, or upbringing, but I think that’s a cop out. We all have our cross to bear, and how we carry that weight, no matter what that historical baggage and dysfunctional freight might be, determines how we are thought of, as well as why we are loved and who loves us.

I think that a person, namely me, can try to be kind, sensitive, generous, and understanding, in spite of sometimes backsliding into bastard mode. For me, personal integrity is an existential struggle, a constant effort to be a good person in a world of moral imperfection, a world that only those rare few more saintly than we/I, can rise above.

As for the material on this blog, it’s all over the place. Why, because I’m trying to make it interesting: sometimes titillating, sometimes informational, sometimes profane, sometimes sad, sometimes outrageous. I often envy those who couldn’t say the things I do, they who would never risk offending others. In another life I would want to be the one described as not having a “bad bone in his body,” one that never lies, and one that everyone likes and never generates a discouraging word or adverse comment, but alas, that’s not me.

Sincerely – Ydnar Reisset

PS: My prodigal daughter is moving back in with me tomorrow.

Stop All The Clocks

“…knowledge without measure, knowledge that the human mind cannot appropriately use, is mortally dangerous.”
-- Wendell Berry


Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest.
My noon, my midnight, my talk my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
-- W. H. Auden


“The problem with us is not only prodigal extravagance but also an assumed limitlessness. We have obscured the issue by refusing to see that limitlessness is a godly trait. We have insistently, and with relief, defined ourselves as animals or as ‘higher animals.’ But to define ourselves as animals, given our specifically human powers and desires, is to define ourselves as limitless animals—which of course is a contradiction in terms. Any definition is a limit, which is why the God of Exodus refuses to define himself: ‘I am that I am.’

…That human limitlessness is a fantasy means, obviously, that its life expectancy is limited. There is now a growing perception, and not just among a few experts, that we are entering a time of inescapable limits. We are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one. Nor are we likely to believe much longer in our ability to outsmart, by means of science and technology, our economic stupidity. The hope that we can cure the ills of industrialism by the homeopathy of mor technology seems at last to be losing status. We are, in short, coming under pressure to understand ourselves as limited creatures in a limited world.”
-- Wendell Berry, Harpers, May 2008


Why is it that we say (I’m speaking to readers my age now, 8 in dog years), “lordy, lordy, it seems like more and more of my friends are getting cancer.” It’s not that cancer rates are increasing, as much as it is that our demographic cohort is aging. Aging is the primary cause of cancer. Why? As we get older, particularly after the age of 35, the risk of being diagnosed with cancer increases exponentially. We all age, and this inevitable biological process puts us at greater and greater risk of hearing that most dreadful of bad news. I guess hearing you were dead would be worse, but thankfully we’re never here to bear that burden.

Song Suggestions:

Dave Douglas, two CDs, “Freak In,” and “Strange Liberation.” (these two specifically)
Eric Satie, (Classical)
Magic Sam, ‘lookin Good,’ off of “West Side Soul.’
Byrds, David Crosby, ’Everybody’s Been Burned.’
James Taylor, ‘Close Your Eyes,’ off of “Mudslide Slim and the Blue Horizon.”
Buffalo Springfield, ‘4 Days Gone,’ off of “Last Time Around.”
Joni Mitchell, ‘Blue,’ off of “Blue.”
‘I Am a Child,’ Neil Young, off of “Buffalo Springfield.”

CANCER, ORGASM, & MURDEROUSLY GOOD MUSIC

CANCER, ORGASM, & MURDEROUSLY GOOD MUSIC

HEALTH

As some of you may recall, early on in this blog I addressed the topic of radioimmunotherapy (see Ann Arbor Observer article ‘Saving a Cure’ by Eve Silberman, March 2008). Much of what I wrote concerned the promise this alternative to the traditional R-C.H.O.P. treatment held for non-Hodgkins lymphoma patients (see radioimmunotherapy post 7/18/7). Along the way, I questioned the drug companies’ contention that Bexxar (and Zevalin), the key drugs used in radioimmunotherapy, were more expensive than the standard Rituximab (the R. in R-C.H.O.P) treatment (see “Chemo Gangsters” post 8/16/07).

The subject of “Chemo Gangsters” has to do with the rapacious nature of the drug companies, and how the doctors, wittingly, or unwittingly, foster a climate of consumptive profiteering in a medical setting that serves as a conduit for the cash that lines the pockets of the health industry’s fattest cats. Consider the drug, Kytril. Granisetron hydrochloride, trade name Kytril, made by GlaxoSmithKline, works by blocking chemicals in the body that may cause nausea and vomiting.

Going through my 2007 medical receipts, I noticed that rather than the standard $7.00, the Kytril co-pay was $22.00. Hmm…why? I then called CVS pharmacy and asked how much 20 Kytril would cost if I didn’t have insurance: the price, $1458.00. Not coincidentally, on 11/08/06, Glaxo paid $70 million to settle a number of civil lawsuits filled in the U.S., which accused the company of price-fixing.

Here’s my point. Since Kytril is prescribed as a prophylactic measure to counter nausea, one can never be sure whether they need it or not. The fact that it is prescribed at the outset of the chemotherapy ensures that it will be taken throughout the infusion regimen. In my case, I only filled it once. After taking it for the first two days, I decided to see if I really needed it. I didn’t, and as it turned out, nausea was never a problem for me through six rounds of chemo. Those, however, who take it as prescribed, regardless of whether they need it or not, contribute mightily to the profits of the drug companies. After all, for the insured, the costs are minimal.

You might ask, doesn’t the insurance company, then, take the bite? That’s where the higher co-pay comes in. As conspiratorial as it may sound, the co-pay reflects an amount that the health providers and drug companies have agreed on to make it profitable for all involved, except the insured who struggle with the co-pay, and, of course, the 45 million uninsured who can’t afford the $1458.00 per script.

ORGASM

“Sex seems to obliterate language, and [language] is merely a kind of foreplay that terminates in the grammarless grunt of orgasm. During orgasm there is no linguistic or cultural identity, no sexual orientation, no above or below, no method or means; there is only stupendous arrival in the infinitely enduring present indicative where time is demolished and the self becomes a contained universe. Because procreation is orgasm’s primary task, it isn’t speech and sex but pleasure and sex that are engaged teleologically. If man were capable of indefinitely prolonging the sex act, he would, and we would still be waiting for the birth of syntax and the invention of the wheel.”

Harpers, (May 08) Letters, Robert Lewis, Longueuil, Quebec

MUSIC

Many thanks to Les B. for the cool 70’s “Incognito” jams. Incognito was a jazz leaning fusion band that predominately featured original tunes by Les and R.J.. Les is an accomplished saxophone and clarinet player, as well as a highly original composer. R.J.'s link is on this site. R.J. is that rare thing in today’s world, a renaissance man. He can play the guitar, all woodwinds, and is an amazing guitar player. He is also a thoughtful human being, articulate, kind and understanding. The world-renowned Perry Robinson (google him), perennial winner of the Downbeat Poll for best clarinetist, and way cool Manhattan beatnik hippie world bizzarro, is on clarinet. These particular Hamburg sessions sound like a mix of Sun Ra, Pee Wee Russell, Hendrix, and Bitches Brew Miles. I know I’m name-dropping, but that’s how I’d describe it -- funky, out fusion. This is all fine and good, but as you know, there’s gotta be a hook, something where the reader goes wow, and as Paul Harvey would say, “Now, you know the rest of the story.” So, here tis!

The drummer was killer Biaggio, full name Delwin Biaggio. Delwin, while not a rock drummer (think Ben Riley and Rashid Ali), excelled at celestially spacey new age jazzy world beats. Whew! Delwin lived a sort of a double life, but instead of time being the distinguishing factor in when he acted a certain way, gender was. This guy I knew to be a mystical, eastern leaning, incense burning, guru-peddling swami was an ultra-violent misogynistic domestic abuser when he put the chapati down.

Thus it was, Delwin, whose real job was reading and writing computer code, shot his girlfriend in a jealous fit of silicone valley rage, put her chopped up body in the trunk of her car, and parked it on a downtown San Francisco street. It was a sensational story up and down the California coast. The girlfriend was reported missing after leaving for work from her Marin county apartment. San Francisco police found her body eight days after her death in the trunk of her 1973 Mercedes, parked in the South of Market warehouse district. Before being dismembered, she had been shot in the head and chest. The Police Chief said that investigators had enough evidence to prove that Delwin shot her in his kitchen the day she disappeared. Evidence included a spent bullet detectives found inside Delwin’s washing machine, as well as blood splatters that matched the victim’s type. Interestingly, investigators at the time called it a “1990s-style murder case.” The 6 months of e-mail exchanges gave the detectives a new kind of insight into the relationship—insight that was previously unavailable in an age when few people write personal letters and police are forced to rely on hearsay. The lead investigator said, “What we had was a very classic love relationship that turned sour—he wanted to continue it, but she didn’t and he killed her, triggered by learning about another man.”

The jams sound good. Thanks Les!

NANCY & The Book Squirrel

“Without lies humanity would perish of despair and boredom.”
-- Anatole France, 1922

For a brief time Nancy and I met in my office in Deveel Hall. Max Deveel, scion of a Porta Potty fortune, was a rabid Angel College booster who had been instrumental in luring Roderigo Dickson away from East Egg Tech, a perennial football power in the Mosquito Coast conference.

On this particular evening, there came a soft knock on the door. Given the unpredictability of Nancy’s psychotic moods, it wasn’t surprising then that she grabbed my arm with a look of bewildered terror. The knock came again, and as the last muffled rap fell on our ears, her mood quickly changed to anger. Her visage ominously morphed from panicky wildebeest to rapacious hyena. She couldn’t know that lurking behind that door was another bottom feeder in the halls of academe, the “book squirrel.” Now the book squirrel is the academic equivalent of street people who prowl the halls and auditoriums for empty bottles and cans. Similarly (a term Nancy stubbornly refused to believe was a word), the book squirrel moves from department to department, and office to office, in search of new textbooks (they must be the latest edition). The shelf life is short (about 1 year), and so the harvesting and sales must be quickly facilitated.

Not only are instructors solicited door to door, but also on line. Text book buyers, like vultures circling dead deer our nation’s highways, instinctively know when the major companies, like Norton, Bedford, and Prentice Hall, for example, will make their various stops on the college circuit.

The book peddlers typically arrive in the morning with boxes of brand spanking new books, as well as milk and cookies (gourmet sandwiches and pastries from the finest upscale caterers in the area they happen to be in) to encourage that first cautious perusal, which is invariably followed by a gorging frenzy in which the Professors, lecturers and teaching assistants load up on as many tomes as they can. This ‘loading up’ fosters the illusion of intellectual sophistication and professional seriousness, as well as provides salable commodities for instructors that live on the edge.

The ‘edge’ here specifically refers to the lot of those vagabond adjuncts whose meager subsistence salaries allow the subsidization of the important tenured research (on subjects like Victorian underwear as text, for example). They ensure that the important scholarly pursuits of top-notch academicians are not undermined by that mundane task of actually providing instruction to witless undergraduates.

He was a book squirrel all right, tall and wispy, with the gaunt, thin haired look of a character right out of “The Wind and the Willows.” Nancy looked at him like a Bull Mastiff ferociously guarding her territory (remember, dear reader, this was MY office).

“Whatta ya want,” she cackled.
“I’ll handle this, Nancy.”
“No you won’t, I’m paying you.”
“Good God, Nancy, some civility, please.”
Now, Mr. Rail-splitter, what can I do for you?”
“I’m a book buyer, kind sir, and I’m looking to buy any unused text books you might have.”
“Show us some I.D,” Nancy snarled.

With that, this meek, little man fled the scene without another word. On seeing this, Nancy turned to me with that Gila-Monster grin, and says, “you make your money with me pal, and if you try any other extracurricular funny stuff, I’ll cut your balls off.”

I mean, how to respond to this, this, this, Kathy Bates misery troll I now found myself working for?

I said, “Nancy, can you say ‘pepper spray’, because if you keep hiding my cell phone, monitoring my calls, acting like a baboon in estrus, chasing book squirrels, and generally behaving like a rabid goat, I’m going to have to take executive action.”

Upon hearing this, her Miss Piggy face and Twiggy eyes shot me a look so sad and forlorn that, suddenly, deep within me, I felt the slightest twinge of sympathy for this sad, cabbage patch creature.

But then it passed.

Cults, Plutonism, and the Coming Apocalypse

By 2010, the Plutonists were ruthlessly persecuted, by both political and cultural forces. At the upper levels of virtually every major political and theological regime in the world the Plutonists were condemned. Precisely how many Plutonists were martyred at the hands of reactionaries in the winter and summer of 1999 remains, as in all such slaughters, unknown. Hundreds of these killings were documented in news reports like the one above, but these were only the recorded massacres. The anonymous souls who were burned, drowned and beheaded--not to mention those who died of exposure in remote, inaccessible backwaters is estimated at 750,000 to one million. These mass executions, however, did not stop the general spread of Plutonism.

Quite the opposite, with the political and religious mainstreams' censure of the insurgent lower working class, the white collar professional managerial caste turned away from the party line politically; and it was Plutonism that came to symbolize the plight of the poor, of the downtrodden and the desperate.

The United Kingdom's minister of culture, Roderick Johns, complained of the Plutonists in late 1998, "their following, these 'Marginalistas, as the younger ones call themselves, their numbers swell even as the crackdown intensifies. They worship Pluto as a living saint."

Abraham Clinton of Liberia was reported to have exclaimed, after incinerating 2000 Platonist corpses, "this fuel we will never run out; where do they all come from?" The unrelenting pressure did have a powerful effect, though, on the Plutonist movement: by eliminating the mid-level functionaries, the under-Signifiers, particularly the academic class mystics, the authorities caused the political power, and perhaps more importantly, its ideological focus to be increasingly dictated by Pluto's inner circle.

There were, however, enclaves of Plutonist settlers in central Africa and southwest Asia where self-authorized Signifiers like Clayton Beaudry, a staunch follower of Bokasan Plutonism, preached that the "the Plutonists had a duty to," as he put it, "euthanize" the uninitiated. Whether the victim had a choice in the matter was of little concern to Beaudry. Some were even more terrible. Louie Ducas, for example, organized the extermination of a New South Wales Boy Scout camp in the belief that he was providing the innocent boy children with a better life in the sweet hereafter.

Many who called themselves Plutonists, were little better than criminals. In the Southern United States, for example, a serial killer named Hickock Speck murdered 70 people and raped over 200 women who had refused to submit to Plutonist initiation rites. The mass executions of Plutonists also affected their followers' beliefs. The Plutonists had never adopted a unified doctrine: the unique significance of all believers and the autonomy of each congregation formed part of their creed. Now the arcane and ambiguous dynamics of their faith was tested by their persecution and dispersion. What was meant to be an unfathomable quality, the ephemeral source of their belief, was now that very characteristic that undermined the solidarity of their clandestine sect. Some Plutonists accepted the use of force, while others insisted on non-violence; some preached strict piety, still others were extremely libertarian; some demanded a sharing of all material wealth, while others confined their largesse to the succor and aid of the poor; some believed that "Anarchies of Reason" was the revealed truth; the fundamental explanation of how western metaphysics should address both moral affairs and material issues; while others passionately believed in dreams and visions and other manifestations of the Plutonic Paraclete. As various enclaves were left to adopt their own doctrines, the number of Plutonic autodidacts increased. It is estimated the about 400 such sub-sects appeared.

Central to this ideological dispersion was an increasing emphasis on the End of the world and the second coming of Christ. At the core of this strand of Plutonist dogma was the belief in an imminent apocalypse, for Christ had foretold it. But if Christ had refused to set an exact time, the Plutonists desperation for a day of reckoning became so overwhelming that they began to follow anyone who promised, as Beaudry did, a definite date of deliverance.

One of the most famous of these prophets of doom, Swabian Furrier, an orthodox cyber-mystic whose web-sites reached a world-wide network, published a 2005 zine explicating The Illuminati trilogy and determining the world would end in seven years, at Christmas of 2015. Furrier saw this time period as being divided by an epiphanous event: that moment when Koresh's Branch Davidians along with the followers of Jim Jones' People's Temple and Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven's Gate would come to earth to violently assault and assassinate the reigning Pope. After which they would be re-martyred, as described in Anarchies of Reason, and all of the saints in Heaven would descend to Hell for 40 days and nights. This period of religious persecution would then give way to a period of revelation which would end in the second coming of Christ.

When asked to leave Mexico, Furrier simply set up headquarters in nearby Nicaragua. The Catholic authorities reacted fiercely. One of Furrier's baptizers, the under-Signifier Edward Nesbitt, was siezed and beheaded along with 500 of his converts. Furrier was forced to flee for his life from Managua and was subsequently expelled from Costa Rica, but in the spring of 2008 his flock finally found temporary sanctuary in Honduras. In Tegucigalpa, a city known for its political and religious tolerance, Furrier's views kept changing. He insisted that Christ was not of human flesh and that no prayers be addressed to him. To Furrier, however, the rite of Plutonic re-baptism was secondary to the importance of the coming apocalypse. Furrier openly declared himself as the new Elijah, passionately preaching his views that the divine Christ was not born of woman, that the free will Adam ceded through his Edenic transgression could be recovered by celestial illumination and re-baptism, and that Christ would soon appear in the Mayan ruins at Lubaantun, Belize. His views earned him life imprisonment in a windowless cell in San Lucas.

In the wake of the mass unemployment of the late nineties, gangs of the jobless poor roamed the hills and forests of Central America. Floods, earthquake and hurricanes struck in 2009. The devastation was the worst in the region since Hurricane Mitch in 1997. And now came the Plutonists predicting the end of the world.

Furrier's preachings were too pacific for his heir apparent, Patrick Valhala, a personal student of Pluto and a protege of Regis Bokasa. Valhala was a violent man, filled with egomaniacal dreams. He had been diagnosed as a chronic sociopath since the late eighties, when he was chemically castrated for participating in an outbreak of deviant sexual iconoclasm. When his wife showed a lack of faith in his visions, he had her murdered and married a beautiful young model named Ravishina, a former Franciscan nun.

Although a strong believer in Furrierian Plutonism, Valhala saw re-baptism as central to apocalyptic readiness. Even under threat of persecution he sent forth his apostles to re-baptize converts and murder the skeptical. His closest acolyte, Jacob Hutmeyer, would soon become his deputy, his heir, and his ideological wraith. Valhala's psyche was made up of those latent and diverse evils of zealotry, cruelty, and violence that any mainstream Platonist would recognize as a covert manifestation of their core beliefs. In another historical time and place, Valhala might have existed in relative anonymity, maniacally obsessed, but his evangelical compulsion coincided with a time of spiritual, political and physical upheaval in Central America. At a time when the maw of cultural crisis yawned wide, Valhala stepped into a tragic void.

On January 16th, 2009, two wandering under-Signifiers named Herbert Boogren and Sante Mallet, appeared in Tegucigalpa. They proclaimed that the Supreme Signifier had designated a new prophet to herald the coming apocalypse. He was known as The Valhala of Fon du Lac, but for the Plutonist faithful in Honduras he was truly the Enoch of scripture. According to Boogren and Mallet, Tegucigalpa was the New Jerusalem, and all should be re-baptized into the Plutonic fold.

One week later, Jacob Hutmeyer arrived. Just 22 years of age, handsome and eloquent, Hutmeyer was the bastard son of a Russian diplomat and Dutch chanteuse from Mexico City. He was ambitious, liked women and had a talent for demagogic rants, didactic performance art installations and street dramaturgies that he composed and directed himself.

The staunchly, and politically entrenched Catholic authorities as well as the Protestant minority were disgusted by the Plutonists antics. When a confrontation occurred between a local Lutheran Synod and the Furrierian Plutonists, the city council ordered Plutonism banned within Tegucigalpa's city limits. Not only did the Plutonists persist, they also staged a squatter’s rebellion and occupied a key sector of the city's downtown section. Seeing this confrontation as a watershed moment in determining the future survival of their movement, Plutonists from all over the world descended upon Tegucigalpa.

Patrick Valhala himself, a short man with a razor goatee, arrived with the breathtaking Ravishina. With the Plutonists came those persecuted for extreme religious and political beliefs as well as the unemployed, destitute and certain criminal elements. The Plutonist faithful saw this as a time of omens and portents.

As the Plutonists flooded in so the local populace abandoned that section of the city, leaving the precinct’s political party to the insurgents. In short order, Sante Mallet, the newly elected mayor, became the official head of the Plutonist majority on city council, the Plutonists thus achieved a kind of precarious and fragile sanctuary.

Following the "Influx", as it is commonly known in extant Plutonist archives, mobs of zealots ransacked the museum, destroying pricless artifacts and burning rare books and manuscripts. Valhala ominously warned all heretics, blasphemers and dissenters that they should be converted or leave. In the stifling tropical heat everything left behind was confiscated by the Plutonic elite. Thus began the Honduran People's Militias' siege of what would come to be known as the Zeit-Enclave.

Plutonist agitator’s staged calculated and shocking testaments to the faith, garish street operas offered witness to the beginning of a Plutonic Utopian future, and the authorities mandated illegal judicial codes and summary executions.

At the vortex of this ideo-religious maelstrom was the image presented to the rest of the world by the zealotry of the Plutonists on the Yucatan, a hotbed of religious anarchism and animist spirit deities.

In Southern Mexico, the Ixtapan seer, Juan Demery, prophesized that the major saints would take human form at the vernal equinox. Fancying himself to be one of this chosen few, he led 100 of his faithful in a naked march down the malecon in Cancun waving crosses and warning all to, "repent" and "accept their doom," shouting, "you are the curse of the godless." 70 of these ordinary saints were arrested, 25 tortured, and one electrocuted by cattle prod. To escape the persecution, the Plutonists fled to Havana, Cuba.

Plutonists from all over the world gathered that spring in Havana, where they expected the prophet Jeremiah to lead them to Tegucigalpa--the New Jerusalem. On schedule, an armada of freighters carried the lost tribes, about five thousand Plutonists, toward the Mexican coastal port of Tampico. They were greeted not by the prophet Jeremiah but by the local Vera Cruz police. 1500 were secretly executed in a massacre the Plutonists were said to have inflicted on themselves. The rest were first robbed, assaulted and raped before they were deported back to Cuba.

Meanwhile, the escalating standoff and bloody covert skirmishes around Tegucigalpa continued unabated. Inside the Signifier's compound, Valhala organized a lavish last supper. As was Valhala's wont, it was high drama at its best; although the consequences speak to the unswerving faith Valhala placed in his delusions. After a preamble of speaking in tongues, in the middle of this absurd farce, Valhala, his eyes rolling in his head, ventriloquized Matthew's version of the garden of Gethsemane, "O Father, not as I will, but as thou wilt."

On the following morning, he collected a gang of the fiercest Plutonist zealots and attempted a terrorist assault on the perimeter. A slaughter ensued. A Honduran S.W.A.T. team took out the fanatical Valhala, and the rest of his operatives were cut to pieces. Rios Mont, the Honduran minister of security, had Valhala's head cut off and hung from the parapet of the Bokasan Temple in San Lucas.

Inside the Zeit-Enclave, Mallet took this as a sign of his own heavenly ordained ascendance. "Valhala's death is God's wish," he railed to the Plutonist faithful. "God's will and replaced the old Signifier with a new prophet even higher and mightier than the Arch-Signifier. Mallet was this new visionary.

Over the next two months, according to a divine design revealed to Mallet only, a regime of unparalleled cruelty was instituted. Mallet himself reserved the right to order secret executions, typically beheading or immolation, depending on the severity of the sin. Those found guilty of blasphemy, scandalous gossip, adultery, avarice, fraud, lying and even criticism of Cult Elders could be subject to a death warrant. Terror was sternly administered to those Plutonist faithful who failed to live by the decrees of Plutonic doctrine. After numerous disappearances, Mallet's orders were obeyed to the letter.

Believing the standoff couldn’t last much longer, Mallet reinforced the Zeit-Enclave's perimeter. As the pressure from Rios Mont mounted for a military solution, Mallet's psychotic imagination seized on a new, Biblically inspired, strategy. In keeping with the scriptural injunction to "be fruitful and multiply," and following the prescripts of the Torah, polygamy was reconstituted as less a choice than a duty. Those who were unmarried were given 24 hours to find a spouse. Mallet's marriage to Valhala's voluptuous widow, Ravishina as well as two other beautiful young girls, was meant to demonstrate the spirit of this order. When all was said and done, Mallet would go on to have 18 wives, none over 23.

World opinion saw this polygamy as proof of a collective psychosis under the veneer of Plutonist altruism. As if to confirm this diagnosis, Mallet declared himself King, not just of the Zeit-Enclave but the whole world. Following in the tradition of Valhala, the event was epic in cinema. A poor street urchin, legless and scuttling on a plywood roller board, appeared at a rally and claimed he was a celestial cipher, a medium through which God's message that Mallet should be ordained King of the world was now made manifest. With this, Mallet installed himself after the fashion of the bloodiest viziers; Amins, Pol Pots, Mobutos and Papa Docs. He consigned that a celestial corona and terrestrial circlet be made for him, both of platinum and diamonds that had been siezed at the start of the "Influx".

The under-Signifier, Herbert Boogren, one day proclaimed that a divine order had instructed him that the Plutonists had too many clothes. Upon which Mallet immediately dispatched armed squads to implement the sacred decree in a house-to-house confiscation, 100 cargo bins of surplus clothing was thus collected. Through the autumn of 1998 the standoff continued.

From mid-October to early December, electronic pamphlets were sent out under the heading, "Retinues of Armageddon," that warned of the dangerous precedent being set in Central America. In a world wide panic, local and regional authorities reacted to the idea that the Plutonist insurgency was fomenting a global revolution aimed at rebirth, like a Phoenix that rises from the ashes, through mass technological destruction.

Inside Zeit-Enclave, supplies were rapidly dwindling. As Horst Jones, a survivor of what has come to be called the "Zeitclasm," recalls, "dogs and cats, paws and snouts. That was our breakfast, lunch and dinner. Then it was the insects, reptiles, amphibians and birds, anything we could get, until finally it was our old shoes. The fat of the street, you might say."

Mallet talked of fighting his way to the coast, but the only escapees were summarily executed in secret and hung in the Bokasaville Plaza by Mont. Inside Zeit-Enclave the situation became desperate. Hoarding food was a capital crime. Ten women were beheaded for denying their new husbands sexual advances, seven others for rebuking an under-Signifier. On one hot August night at the height of the fervor there were no fewer than 100 public executions. Mallet had two of his own wives publicly garroted for spousal insolence, which caused the rest of his connubial slaves to flee the immediate compound for the shelter of the alleys, leaving only Ravishina behind.

The famine and pestilence worsened in the late summer heat, people boiled and ate leather, grass and tree bark. What finally broke the siege, and opened the floodgates of anti-Plutonist sentiment worldwide was a conceit of the human condition as old as history itself--treachery.

Two dissidents, John McGuinness and Stefan Duer, the latter a trusted leiutenent in Mallet's retinue, defected and gave the Honduran Secret Police, Mont's elite brigade of paramilitary commandos, an in-depth blueprint of Zeit-Enclave, pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of its near impregnable perimeter.

On the night of September 1, during a tropical monsoon, Mont's special forces stormed the checkpoints, overwhelmed the guard, and cut their throats. From one they learned the password, "Lina," the alleged name of the Supreme Signifier's biological mother. By mid-afternoon the once fierce fighting became a rout. The last stronghold, the Cathedral of San Sebastian, was overrun, and the defenders macheted to death. It was dusk, October sixth, 2010, the 666th day of the siege. With the end of the battle, the atrocities commenced.

Mont's troops were turned loose. They murdered, raped and plundered at their leisure. Mallet was captured and brought to his place of execution two days hence. But not before he was subjected in secret to Mont's sadistic whims. Mont's chief interrogator had Mallet bound to an upright gas fed grill by an iron collar. Thereupon red-hot pokers and tongs were applied to stimulate the intensity of his immolation. His body was then placed in a cage and put on display so all would understand the price to be paid by fundamentalist heretics.