Modernism to Postmodernism to Postmortemism

By P. Emerson Williams


We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising only with greater efforts require new extremes of fetishism. A point comes when completed work crowds out attention. Art, empire, economy, politics look to us to be sated with days and ready to give in to sweet oblivion.

Lady Gaga killed sex, says the once much discussed Camille Paglia, who quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie”, “Art is a lie”, “Gaga is a lie”. The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the candyman to appear. And closer to home for us here, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent writing for Acceler8or the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius says we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing of music as a living mode of expression. Nice opening shot.

Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, Navajo ancestral chants, and so on, that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.

Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a cancelling out of entire traditions of music and culture. I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated basically that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news – taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan buddhism into candy-coated self help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the universe.

Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.

Arthur Krystal is a voice in the Death of the Novel chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:

Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.

Tina Brown Asks Philip Roth About the Future of the Novel from The Daily Beast Video on Vimeo.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen," Roth says. "It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”

The End of the Word as We Know It by Wes Unruh

Remember the unburied dead (and the as yet unborn) this Memorial Day: The End of the Word As We Know It is now available to order from Amazon.

This is a cycle of poetry narrated by and studying Thorn, a storm giant turned little horn, eventually becoming a letter subsumed into language and forgotten. It is a response to the unburied dead whose need for vengeance re-ignites ancient spirit winds. And it is at the end a cry for meaning in a vortex of signifier without sign, spun out and half-mad in the twister’s line-of-sight.

Read the poem ‘Count The Other’ on Wes Unruh’s Unrelated Thoughts poetry blog: http://wesunruh.wordpress.com/2011/05/30/count-the-other/

Listen to the reading of ‘Count The Other’ set to music by Ikipr: http://soundcloud.com/unquietmind/count-the-other

Poetry
Paperback: 48 pages
Publisher: Weaponized (2011)
Language: English I
SBN-10: 1907810129 ISBN-13: 978-1907810121
Product Dimensions: 11 x 8.5 x 0.1 inches
Available now in paperback or kindle.


Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.(Or sign up to be notified of its release on Amazon.com)

Climate Change? Or Unburied Dead? Going Beyond Science to Understand 'Twisters'

By Wes Unruh


It is impossible to look through the images of the Joplin tornado aftermath without a sense of withering smallness - the landscape is rage and tinder, a barren warzone and is photographed as such again and again.

I know the running debate is - essentially - that this is either a result of climate change or somehow associated with the increase in temperature from the gulf of Mexico as a result of the oil spill changing the water's refractivity or some such scientific shit. But the truth is it's ghosts. Angry, bitter, and unburied dead raging and raging across their lost lands.

Bear in mind that I'm making poetic, intuitive leaps in the paragraphs below, tied together with the barest threads of balderdash and shinola - and I do not want to make light of anyone's suffering - in fact I'm promoting Denver Band Relief and their communal effort to put together music shows to benefit a number of victims. This isn't about blaming the victims, it's about laying to rest the unburied dead.

This is not 'fact' in the strictest sense, but it has a kind of truth, something classified in other blogs as a synchromystical truth, which here I will relay only as a kind of modern myth - unmoored from djinn and religion and anchored in the very rooting sense of the fabric of this United States cultural dementia and hallucinations in honoring and sealing away the dead improperly: I do not know this but I feel it, and it overwhelmed me enough that I put that raw sense into poetry to capture, honor, and lay to rest the violent unburied ghosts who's dance is erasing whole cities from the landscape; a laser-tight eraser marking out the suburb, the rural, broken and betrayed landgrab, this ghost dance raises storm giants, thunderbirds. Capturing this in prose is hard enough, I warred with the tumultuous nature of these visions to hold it down in poetry as 'Outcry This Dark Story' which is a significant portion of the poetry contained in 'The End of the Word As We Know It' (coming out soon thanks to Weaponized.net)

If this is true, there must be some reason. I started with the impossible hypnagogic hallucination of a vortex intermingling, where narrative bleeds through that fourth wall familiar to magicians and actors which blows to smash the tradition and rote of assigned roles and can even falsify memory, a maddening space where nature re-asserts itself as thee primal mover, and driven by the void - a void of memory, broken treaties, and trails of tears.