A Joycean Jinx!

“Being humus the same roturns”
JJ, FW Pg. 18

The sensationalistic tabloid story of Robert Durst, which regularly re-surfaced on print and digital front pages the world round, reached its most ludicrous form in a documentary called “The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst.” (Bear with me on this!)

If you’re unfamiliar with the story, in short, what happened was an extremely rich man’s wife disappeared under mysterious circumstances in the 1980’s, then a close friend of his (Susan Berman) was murdered 2 decades later when she was about to be questioned about the wife’s disappearance, and then he admittedly killed and dismembered a neighbor, but successfully claimed self defense. He was generally regarded as having gotten away with at least 3 murders.

He then agrees to participate in a documentary about himself, proclaiming his innocence and bad luck coincidence throughout, which aired to great interest, and concluded by bringing about new evidence, resulting in his arrest.

What was the new evidence? A misspelled word.

After Susan Berman was killed an anonymous letter was sent to the police informing them of the body’s location.

In the anonymous letter, presumably sent by the killer, Beverly Hills is misspelled as “Beverley Hills.”

The documentary crew then discovers a letter that Durst sent to Berman with the exact same misspelling and indistinguishable handwriting.

The documentary crew confronts Durst about this, and he appears to have strange involuntary reactions, all while still maintaining his innocence and bad luck coincidence. And then in a truth is stranger than fiction moment, Durst excuses himself to the bathroom, and forgetting that he is still wearing a microphone, engages in what sounds like a pathological rambling confession.

But it’s really the misspelled word that’s the more concrete evidence, and doesn’t this scenario sound familiar to ye Joyceans?

The Phoenix Park murders of 1882, which features prominently in the dreamscape of Finnegans Wake, along with the attempt of Richard Piggott to frame Charles Stewart Parnell as being involved in and/or supportive of the murders via a series of forged letters.

Parnell was cleared of the charges because Piggott’s misspelling of the word hesitancy as “hesitency” identified him as the author of the letters.

“Hesitency was clearly to be evitated”
JJ, FW Pg. 35

Joyce makes much of this incident and the theme recurs throughout the book, playing into the ambiguity of HCE’s guilt/innocence of the indistinct crime he is accused of.

Curious that in both cases of forensic linguistics it was the letter “e” that did the trick.

So it goes, around and around and around again.

ERIS’ NEW DRESS

A wonderfully Discordian media virus recently ran its course through the simultaneous resonance of our social networks, a meme so efficient and contentious that it became ubiquitous almost immediately, and can be invoked simply by saying “The Dress.”

Like the mythic Apple of Discord, thrown by Eris’ to instigate a fight amongst the gods, the ambiguously hued picture sparked immediate conflict amongst its viewers, who vigorously argued about its contents.

A media virus, as defined by Douglas Rushkoff, consists of a protective & sticky outer shell, and a hidden payload of memetic code. (A Trogan Horse for ideas.) The outer shell is the surface issue/face value of a meme, in this case, the question: “What color is this dress?”

The adhesive shell becomes attached to a host medium and thence its memetic programming gets injected therein. This meme was particularly sticky because people could not understand how anyone could possibly disagree with, what was presumed to be, their objective observation.

The memetic programming contained within the argument of “Black & Blue vs. White & Gold,” amongst all the science of perception, seems to be something akin to the zen koan: “Who is the great magician that makes the grass green?”

Without really realizing it, the internet just got a crash course in Maybe Logic :)))

DAN ON THE MOON

A single Q&A with Dan Harmon from a Reddit AMA

bc: Hi Dan!
Amongst everything else I really enjoy your story structure ideas, and am curious if you’ve ever read Joseph Campbell’s “Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake”?
(If not, it’s the first iteration of JC extracting the monomyth idea from James Joyce’s FW, a modernist version of the story circle, eternal return, etc.)
Similarly, do you like James Joyce at all?
Joyce influenced Campbell as much as Campbell seems to have influenced you, so in a sort of transitive property telephone game, you seem to me like one of the most Joycean writers around. (Intended as high praise!)
Sincere thanks for all the great work!
Also, here’s a drawing of you on the moon: http://i.imgur.com/7GUCwFo.jpg
bc

Dan Harmon: Ha, thank you for that art. I love it. And no, I haven’t read a single word of James Joyce and you’re right, I should, because you’re right, Campbell was obsessed with him. But unlike Campbell and probably James Joyce, I’m a lazy, shitty, self-satisfied blob of rapidly fading pop cultural influences and video game addictions.

RED STATE

A single Q&A with Kevin Smith from a Reddit AMA

Q: I had a really awesome time at the Red State premier at Radio City Music Hall! So much so that I drew this when I got home. Wd love to go to an event like that again!

A: Nicely done, sir.

Next SModcast Pictures Presents tour is with the Slamdance winning flick BINDLESTIFFS – which is about three high school kids who go ape-shit when CATCHER IN THE RYE is banned in their school.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qahkCMIJzeU

Easily one of the funniest flicks I’ve ever seen.

Next year, SModcast Pictures will do another RED STATE USA-type tour with our first animated feature, JAY & SILENT BOB’S SUPER GROOVY CARTOON MOVIE. We’ll show the flick then Q&A after, all of which we’ll eventually podcast. We learned a lot touring RED STATE, so we wanna put it to use on BINDLESTIFFS and the cartoon JAY & SILENT BOB flick.

Digital Prophets

“These people, Joyce, to some degree Pound, McLuhan, they were the prophets of the world in which we now stand, the world of integrated interactive media, extraordinary data retrieval that erases the 17th century notion of the unconscious. Nothing is now unconscious if your data search commands are powerful enough.”
Terence McKenna in Riding Range w/ Marshall McLuhan

CHERRY ISLAND

I was once asked to explain the meaning of this here scribble, w/ interesting results!

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Bobby Campbell
Date: Jun 26, 2007 1:53 PM

Hello J!

Cherry Island is a landfill where I often work in my job as a land surveyor. I’m outfitted there w/ the tools for to set fill limit grade stakes. By which the workers can determine how much more garbage a given area can house before reaching capacity.

The quote is from Terence Mckenna, re: his fractal spacetime model.

Have a Good’n!

bc

—————– Original Message —————–
From: J
Date: Jun 28, 2007 12:45 AM

Isn’t that a 24″ gauge & a common gavel?

You a travelin man?

—————– Original Message —————–
From: Bobby Campbell
Date: Jun 28, 2007 11:28 PM

From the west and traveling to the east, in search of light!

Actually I had never heard of any of that until I googled “24” gauge & common gavel” a minute ago. They’re really an extendable prism pole and a sledge hammer, but I see what you mean!

My first read through of Finnegans Wake was done mostly at Cherry Island, sitting in my work truck, amongst the trash heap landscape, which is wildly appropriate, as Terence McKenna explains, “I mean, Joyce is so dense with technical terms, brand names, pop references, localisms; the way to conceive of Finnegans Wake is like a midden, a garbage dump — and there is, in fact, a garbage dump in the Wake that figures very prominently.” Surfing on Finnegans Wake

“Where in the waste is the wisdom?”
JJ, FW Pg. 114

“The bird in the case was Belinda of the Dorans…and what she was scratching at the hour of klokking twelve looked for all this zogzag world like a goodish-sized sheet of letterpaper”
JJ, FW Pg. 111

A plot point in Finnegans Wake concerns a letter dictated by Anna Livia Plurabella to her son Shem the Penman, which may or may not exonerate Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker (her husband, his father) of the vague and ever changing crime(s) of which he is accused. The letter becomes lost, and then is unearthed by a hen named Belinda (sometimes called Biddy) in a garbage dump, and then taken by the other son, Shaun the Postman. It turns out that anywhere the letter would have spoken definitively on the character of HCE the hen’s beak has poked a hole in the paper.

That is at least one overly simplified way of reading one level of a small part of FW!

A bit of Joyce’s conceptual punning is illustrated above. Anna Livia Plurabelle’s character is identified through Finnegans Wake by the initials ALP, which is an abbreviation of Aleph. The first letter/number in the Hebrew alphabet/numerals. The search for Anna Livia Plurabella’s letter is in some ways a search for Aleph, the initial state.

All of which forms the background of an old comic strip of mine: BEACH/DUMP USA: A Drama of Comparisons (NSFW)

COMING ROUND AGAIN

Written by Toby Philpott W/ Illustrations by Bobby Campbell

Don’t talk to me about journeys to the Underworld. I think of myself as one of those people who doesn’t dream. Oh, sure, ‘Everybody dreams!’ they say, with a knowing smile, ‘it’s just that some of us remember them’.

But I forget, I forget.

They tell me this stuff, these people who remember all their serial incarnations. Seriously, they emerge into our daily world from some curious realm that reacts directly to their thought, and calmly step into this entirely different reality – finding me haggard, hung-over, habitual – and they seem neither excited nor scared. Why? Because they not only remember their dream interludes but they also remember their continuity from the day before. Despite all the picaresque adventures of their nights, they seriously rejoin this apparently stable place I call ‘reality’ with quiet resignation. Maybe their consciousness is virtually continuous.

I can go no further. At this point I feel blind. When I finally shut my eyes I drift awhile then I vanish into the black – not for an eternity because as soon as I open my eyes again the world continues. It often seems as if no time had passed. When I felt frightened of the following day I used to stay up – waking hours last longer – if I fell asleep then OPENED my eyes I would face the feared morning (oh, I don’t know, dentist, exam, interview, opening night). And yes of course, sometimes the anticipation felt great – how do you think I ever let go into sleep then OPENED my eyes to another day?

But here I just refer to the good days. After all, I often seem to only get sixteen hours daily life to many other people’s twenty-four. So I get a bit behind having to do my dreaming in the daytime – pressure on – but then again, I don’t have nightmares, I guess (how would I know?)

They’ve done tests. It appears that sleep deprivation alone doesn’t make a human hallucinate in the waking state, but the deprivation of dreams does. So, imagine – me with no dreams, no surrealism, no lucidity, no monsters or jump-cuts, zooms or eternities, always stuck with gravity, and hunger and life-threatening situations that are REAL goddamit, how do you think I feel when I open my eyes to the same old world, still, without a break.

At the breakfast table the jet-setters come in with their travellers’ tales of mythic adventure in lucid dreams. Me, I feel like I haven’t slept (I often feel like I haven’t slept – sleeping often seems about as refreshing as blinking). Anyway, my ‘real, one and only’ world has to incorporate any fun I might get, and for sure it contains some problems I’ll have to confront – dead subtle, too, some of them.

Dream rememberers often appear refreshed by their dimensional vacation (though sometimes they report getting stuck at some psychic airport), and they also remember what they were doing in real time yesterday, and why – so they may well have a script and plan for the day ahead, as they move smoothly back to take up where they left off.

What I call sleep is like the black bar between the frames of a movie. Normally (awake) we don’t see it, but when someone like me slows down into sleep it takes an age (a split second) to cross that line. Many mornings it goes as smooth as a flicker book – next image, next day. Just some days I cross the line and it’s a CUT to another scene entirely – sure, there’s probably a connection, some editing gets real suggestive, but there are shock cuts, like coming round and finding someone tied you to a chair and a light shines in your eyes.

Oh, sure. Call me hero. ‘Talk! ‘ they said. I can’t talk after I wake up until I have had at least three cups of coffee, some days. At 150 milligrammes per cup I must use a gramme a day. A gramme of caffeine.

It keeps me in the awake world – better the frame you know than the one coming up. Funny that, most people think coffee speeds things up, and I take it to stay awake and get more time in the same frame.

cut

– somebody slugged me

– They put something in my drink

– what happened?

– It all happened so quickly

I find myself back again – seeing if I can figure out a sequence to this movie or find out if the cuts have a logic or merely a careless randomness to them?

Each morning I struggle to piece together what I remember of the time before the last blackout. With a continuous memory of previous frames I might have a chance to pick up a theme, at least – some kind of order apart from mere habitual days, another page of the book, semi-coherent action flickering by (or at least the image of it.) No abruptness interrupts my days.

I find belongings, sometimes, and notes to myself, when I wake up alone and I’m not tied to a chair or whatever. I have no idea what they mean, beyond what they say.

6:01

601Most every morning it takes me at least 2-3 shakes of a lamb’s tail to identify THE ALARM what kicked me from ZZZ satori.

Open fist smacks down again and again and again until what made the noise stop?

Oh Strange Numbers Beeping Box what do you want from me!?! Get up from what? The notion of time then occurs. Yes, right, but which one? Seven. I have to be somewhere at 7. Where? Work. Why? What? Okay. How long then until I must not sleep? Ultimately impossible mathematical contortions arise, abide, & cease. And what are habitually the final calculations? 10! More! Minutes!

(That I stayed up late to write this will hopefully amuse me in the morning’s groggy delirium)

[Nota bene: It didn’t]
bc – 12/04/06

DUBLIN IS BURNING

BLOOMING! On a bus to NYC, weather by Van Gogh. Reading that Usylessly unreadable book of odyssey, on the Mahayana, in the long memory, going forth by dayagain!

The Psilocybin speaks more of the many in THE VOICE OF ALL THE BLESSED. Metemorphoses of word & thought through Spacetime, this light as a riverGeneral Semantics: Our use of language can severely alter our experience of Universe. Meanwhile, mine animism eyes spy translucent streams of organic ether, the open system, Alleluia! The Neurogenetic jam box spins Akashic records as the wheels on the bus go round and round.

The King and I will have our talk soon, of that much I am certain. He’s been on his cell phone speaking in foreign tongues for an hour now, when his call is finished, we will speak of things.

The King is dressed in the very most resplendent fineries, a man of gold and diamond and silk. A full page of TEXT embroidered on his shirt, soul on ice! I’ve a Dogs Playing Poker tie amongst my usual dorky rags, I hope I look ridiculous enough!

DAMN! Look at Shortie right there! (Across the way) Only just made of electricity!

A shimmering bundle of shakti, I wish for to tell her! “Excuse me, Miss, but it seems you’re a manifestation of the Waters of Life which pour into the world inexhaustibly, thank you.” Bah! She already knows. Everyone already knows, after their own fashion, and changing everyday, smiling then to full capacity, so help me Fucking Christ! Finally, after 600 pages, Jeems Jokes drops the F BOMB.

Abu is an Ambassador from Nigeria. (Foolish artisan myself, sir, what news?)  The language he was speaking has no name and he thinks it odd that I would assume it might. In Africa they have over 2,000 languages, most of which are nameless, communication is problematic. All around the world we speak different dialects of one same language, Abu suggests. (The logo substance of which the word is merely a reference!? Snoogans.) The rise of tyrant war lords and the resulting cultural isolation balkanized the once common language of ancient Africa. (Falling tower mythos seem to recur.) He tells me then of the African land, of their abundance, of a world not yet but rather to may-be. (4 times was the city rebuilded, Hooo Fasa.) He likes dialectic, the universal language, a babelfish called JIVE swims towards Wagadu, and the bus stops in Manhattan. “It was nice to meet you Abu!”

There’s the MAIN MAN then! Fellow bus passenger, and smiling face. We’ve MADISON UNDERGROUND business now if ya’ll’ll excuse us, our adventure having only just begun. NYC sun shines us a welcome.

Hello to everyone! and how’s your deal? A fine thing indeed it sounds and to all the best of luck. More of everything please and do keep the change. Thanks a million and have a nice day!

Eventually I meet a girl who makes me look ridiculous enough, THE END.

Falling on Deaf Ears

Written by Toby Philpott w/ Artwork by Bobby Campbell

“riverrun, past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.”

We learned many wonderful things on RAW‘s Tale of the Tribe course, but Giambattista Vico’s holistic view of human evolution and development as a cyclic progression, a spiral, really appealed to many of us and deserves further exploration. In spite of living in dangerous times for such thinking Vico perceived, and attempted to describe, history as a whole system, and humans as self-made, just as Darwin would later attempt to sum up how plants and animals formed themselves without a “creator”.

Moderns might describe Joyce’s fantastic novel Finnegans Wake (which implied this cyclic structure) as a hologram, but Vico might well have described it in the Hermetic or alchemical terms of a Microcosm/Macrocosm, “as above, so below.”

BABABADLGHARAGHTAKAMMINARRONN
KONNBRONNTONNERRONNTUONNTHUNN
TROVARRHOUNAWNSKAWNTOOHOOHOOR
DENENTHURNUK!

This 100 letter magical word appears on page one and some say it represents a clap of thunder, the Big Bang of Creation. To me it would work equally well as the sound of a slapstick fall (Finnegan falling off his ladder like a ton of bricks) – and, as the main character has fallen asleep, perhaps it could also remind us of a very loud snore.

The Gnostics seemed to think of The Fall (and the Original Sin) not as a human flaw – Adam eating the Forbidden Fruit – so much as something that “god” did. A demiurge fell for the temptation to slow Light down into Matter, to manifest Himself in the blissful void of the Great Mother, to create a world to rule over, and condemn people to a life and death struggle, etc. Confused echoes of this remain in the stories of Fallen Angels bringing humans fire and teaching the arts of civilisation, leading to the loss of an innocent life.

Vico worked with the Inquisition breathing down his neck, so he could not talk of an eternal cycle with no beginning, and had to start from the Creation in Genesis. He implied that after the Flood Noah’s descendants wandered for some time, losing their god-given culture and language and degenerating to a bestial life. (Without that pressure to fit the story to The Bible story, we just start with “cave-men” these days, and already know about ancient civilisations rising, flourishing and then falling).

Vico chose to start his description of the cycle with primitive humans immersed in nature, using only a symbolic language of gesture, monosyllables, signs, hieroglyphs and ideograms to describe their experience of the world. Deeply embedded, they viewed the world in a mythic sense, and felt themselves as part of the whole rather than as separate individuals. He thought that they would hold the elements in awe. Storms and the voice of the thunder would impress them greatly, and lightning snaking down might bring them fire with which they could keep warm while huddled in their caves. In the face of such “gods” those brute humans covered themselves with fur, and guiltily retreating to the privacy of caves (a recap of Adam and Eve cowering from God’s thunderous anger at their disobedience) so beginning the forming of human culture. The strong alpha males offered protection from predators, outlaws and other threats to the older or weaker, and to their families of women and children. Even if they seemed like giants, ritual may have proved necessary against these greater forces of nature, placating the “gods” and protecting the clan. Primitive religion thrives in the Age of the Fall…

As humans began to build shelters, cities, palaces and churches – develop communities and take up farming – they moved into what he called the Age of Heroes.

They gained more control over the elements, and the powerful either fought or joined in alliances, employing and ruling the poorer and weaker. Pharaohs, Kings and Queens appeared as demi-gods – a manifestation of an unseen deity. Laws, institutions, and rigid beliefs developed to control society. Their language became polysyllabic, and poetic – with the use of metaphor and simile – but few would understand this complex language – much of it remained a mysterious tool in the hands of the Priests and rulers. Rich families would have heraldic crests, flags, and other signs of power. Rules of chivalry and Romance (falling in love) might hold sway, but the social structure kept sharp divisions between rich and poor, as in feudal economies.

 

When the laws get applied fairly to all they inevitably restrict the abuse of power, and even the rich have to acknowledge and obey them, so gradually the use of logic and articulate common language leads to abstraction, generalization, free discussion, legal argument and rationality. Rigid, traditional values get challenged by a meritocracy and eventually this leads the way to “democracy”.

In the Age of the People all have similar rights, although freedom can feel frightening…

This stage, too cannot last, and Vico thought of the next stage (which he called the Ricorso) as a period of confusion and anarchy and self-indulgence. This could pave the way for a return to barbarism, a new upsurge of superstition, a neo-primitive phase, the resurgence of religion in all its forms, and a yearning once more for certainty, and the worship of a strong male authority figure, aka God.

Just as Joyce had written Ulysses to contain all the stories and struggles of humans manifest in one brief day in Dublin, portrayed by ordinary folk, so he structured Finnegans Wake as one long night, with several cycles of sleep and dreaming.

A falling asleep, a dreaming of all the tales of the tribe in all the languages of the world, an endless repetition of human relationships – marriage and a family ruled by the male in the age of gods, the fighting of brothers and the wiles of daughters in the age of heroes, the burial of the father in the age of the people – finally returning to consciousness at the break of day, to start the whole thing over.

We can see the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire in Vico’s model, and we can see the Roman Catholic Church giving way to Feudal England, followed by the rational Enlightenment, etc. Many people adopted the cyclic theory of history. Marx liked the inevitability he saw implied in the class struggle of the weak to demand and win their rights. He overlooked the fact that we cannot stop at any one phase of the cycle, so the reversion to autocratic Stalinism from the initially “rational” Communism might have disappointed him if he had lived to witness it. Of course, many of us may relish this anarchic period of confusion – but this model stands as a warning of the risks as time rolls on…and a Fundamentalist religious mentality kicks in.

Perhaps we can learn to control how long each part of the cycle lasts? Perhaps McLuhan’s prediction of an oral/aural, post-literate, mythopoetic tribe shows one way that we could pass through the current age of change and movement and turbulence and opportunity to enter a mythical and wondrous ‘golden age of the gods’ , with every man and woman a star, without this time Falling for a Father Figure?


“As his title indicates (FINNEGANS WAKE), he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let’s make it a wake or awake or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. The means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias is his “collideorscope”. This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: “deor”, savage, the oral or sacral; “scope” the visual or profane and civilized.”

-Marshall McLuhan

And Joyce felt tempted, god-like, to finally write his own sacred text, his last creation.

Here endeth the first lesson.

“The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the…”