Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 16

betweenity

free beauty

acoustic attack time

hypercrisy

reflexive bracketing

appropriate dismissal claim

fromtaking

epistemic blame

zone of proximal development

the exosonus

Recently Reading #3: Jerrod Jordahl

Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we've been reading lately.

Jerrod Jordahl is a Brooklyn-based playwright.

Nate: You have a new play debuting this August in New York as part of the ?!: New Works 2023 Festival. What's the premise of your play? 

Jerrod: I do, thanks! It's part of The Brick's annual festival of new, short-form work by experimental artists from a wide range of disciplines. I'm very excited to debut my play at this festival and honored to be a part of the community.

The premise is simple, really. With two actors, we recreate a scene from Marlon Brando's 1961 film, One-Eyed Jacks. We repeat the scene to absurd and tragic lengths. Sometimes the whole thing resets, other times the characters get stuck on a single line, word, or movement. In this way it's a bit of a collage. Or maybe dance or performance art.

It's called death as repetition, which gets its name from the Clarice Jensen album The experience of repetition as death, which in turn got its name from a line in Adrienne Rich's poem "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," which in turn was a response to a 1611 poem of the same title by John Donne. At first this was a working title but the further along I got in developing the idea the more appropriate it seemed.

I'm not sure of all the ways in which my play is directly connected to these works. For Jensen, I know Freud was an influence, in particular his ideas about a "Death Drive" and the compulsion to repeat traumatic events. There's some of that in my piece, but I was more interested in the role of violence in all of it. Rich's poem, as I understand it, is about the poet's struggle to write in a language gatekept by men. The conflict between power, agency, violence, myth. The myth surrounding the violence of the "western man." Which is a big part of what my play is about. 

The repeated gestures and words are meant to question the transportive nature of violence often found in American mythmaking, in particular the Western genre, which often uses violent acts as a catalyst for change. How men become heroes by way of the gun. That kind of thing. 

Without spoiling anything, the scene we use is meant to set up Marlon Brando's redemption, his riding-off-into-the-sunset moment. A moment that follows a great deal of death, by the way. But the repetition keeps the characters trapped. Violence is not transporting. Rather, they are caught in a loop made by violence. One steeped in heteronormativity, whiteness, and aggressive masculinity. In the end (as much as there can be one), heroes aren't heroes. There is no redemption. No great victory. Just violence. Just death.

Nate: Now that I think of it, One-Eyed Jacks makes the connection of violence and masculinity pretty explicit: Karl Malden's character is named Dad! Considering that, Brando's vendetta against him probably has some Freudian undertones that maybe connect back to Jensen's influences. How did One-Eyed Jacks become the focal point for the play? Was it a direct inspiration?

Jerrod: One-Eyed Jacks came late to the party, actually, after a lot of time and some research. First, I was drawn to the idea of writing a piece with repeated gestures. One of those vague instincts you have but are not yet sure of, so you let it sit and collect data. But the original idea to do something with repeated gestures came from seeing a few dance pieces. Works by Pina Bausch and Bobbi Jene Smith. For me, there was something really special about the repetition in their pieces that deepened the storytelling. Funny and weird and tragic and very human. These were very formative experiences and I knew I wanted to do something that used repetition as a narrative device and metaphor, I just wasn't sure what. So I let it sit and collect data.

And while it sat, I also got a little obsessed with Western movies. Or maybe I always have been, but I started to really dig into the psychology of the genre. The things I mentioned before about the knot of violence, masculinity, and mythmaking. I had just finished writing another play called Gregory Peck, a full-length monologue in which a hunter talks about various familial traumas to a fawn he shot while hunting its mother. One of the things the hunter talks about is the 1950 Gregory Peck film The Gunfighter and in talking about it reveals, among other things, his complicity in a chain of violence.

It was the idea of a chain of violence, framed by the Western genre, that brought that old instinct about repetition into focus. It all clicked and made perfect, tragic sense. I realized pretty early that I wanted to adapt an existing work; that I wanted to use the language of the genre and its icons. And for practical reasons I knew the movie would have to be in the public domain. But I watched a ton of movies, first looking at the big names like John Ford, Howard Hawks, and John Wayne. All the movies I watched have scenes like the one I use from One-Eyed Jacks - that moment of redemption through violence. But One-Eyed Jacks worked on multiple levels, many of which are subtle and don't necessarily live on the page but nevertheless inform the work.

For one, I liked that Rio (Brando's character) tries to escape the chain of violence in the third act but can't. And I liked that the film tries to be subversive but ultimately engages in many of the same old tropes (its hero still finds redemption through violence), like the movie itself is caught up in a chain of violence it can't escape. And on an even more meta level, I liked that the making of the movie, Brando's one and only time behind the camera, was steeped in aggression and masculinity. There are a number of examples here but the fact that even Stanley Kubrick, the film's first director, lost his stomach for arguing and left the project is telling enough.

But finally, I really just loved the scene. It's one filled with the promise of life and love, which is in conflict with the proceeding scene and its death, anger, and terror. The switch between the two is a weird and awkward beat, and I think it will be nice to bounce between the two as the repetition cycles through.

Anyway, that was a long-winded way of saying it all kind of got pieced together as time did its thing.

Nate: You're looking back at classic 20th Westerns, many of which were themselves looking back toward the 19th century, but today we're still trapped in an endless loop of gun violence committed by men. Do you feel the play speaks to our present moment, was that on your mind at all as you conceived the work?

Jerrod: Oh yeah, the current crisis of gun violence was absolutely on my mind. For me, the device of repetition is a (probably pretty on the nose) metaphor for that endless loop of gun violence we experience nearly every news cycle. How it feels unending. Hopeless and absurd. How even as bystanders we are trapped, made into witnesses of trauma. I'm not sure how the audience will react, but I suspect seeing Louisa scream in terror over and over again, denied a happy ending, will feel something adjacent to our own terror. I didn't mention this before, but another reason why I chose this scene is because it doesn't show the violence. Rather, it shows the effects of violence and the tension it spawns. The aftermath. The terror of watching another news alert about another tragedy. 

I'm not sure how the play will handle all of this, to be honest. There's still a lot that needs to be explored, most of which I won't know until we begin rehearsals and get a chance to develop some ideas, which I'm very excited to get started on. 

Nate: Can you tell me a little more about the ?! Festival where the play will be debuting? Are you familiar with any of the other artists presenting at the festival?

Jerrod: I'm very excited to explore these ideas at The Brick's ?! festival. The Brick itself is a beautifully inclusive and accessible theater company, for both emerging artists and its audience. It's been around for twenty years, I think, maybe a little more, and has created an incredible home for the experimental performing arts community in New York. This festival is a big part of that community. It's all about bringing together a diverse group of artists and forms to work out, as they put it, "disastrous" ideas. I'm not familiar with any of the other artists in the festival, which means I'm excited to make a bunch of brilliant new friends and future collaborators!

Nate: That sounds like an exciting community to be a part of. Good luck with preparations and rehearsals! 

Have you been doing much reading lately, what are you getting into?

Jerrod: I end up reading a lot as I work on a project. Usually a bunch of different plays. And usually plays I've read multiple times. Sources of inspiration, I guess. While I worked on death as repetition I read Heart's Desire by Caryl Churchill. It's also a play that resets and replays scenes, and I wanted to see how she went about it. The narrative is deceptively simple. A family waits for their grown daughter to arrive for a visit. Through the resetting many different scenarios play out and what seemed very straight forward becomes incredibly complex and even tragic. Churchill is an absolute master in disrupting form in the most beautifully affecting way. I reread many of her plays as often as I can - they've taught me so much.

I also just finished writing a series of short monologues about the sacred nature of everyday objects and while I was writing I read Will Eno, another one of my favorite playwrights. His are long-form monologues, but I reread Thom Pain (based on nothing) and Wakey, Wakey. It's fun to see how other writers deal with the specific language of the monologue, and I really love Eno's voice. Another playwright whose work has taught me a lot.

The short monologues ended up having a bit of a poetry vibe to them, so I kept a few collections close by. Mainly Patterson by William Carlos Williams and Midwinter Day by Bernadette Mayer. Her collection, which tracks one day of her life and all its grandeur of everydayness, was particularly inspiring. And I don't have any of her collections, but I read a ton of Stevie Smith online. I probably read her poem "The Galloping Cat" a dozen times or more. I love her use of repeated words and phrases (I guess repetition might be becoming a bit of a thing for me). 

Outside of all of that, the most recent book I read for fun was Zama by the Argentinean writer Antonio Di Benedetto. It's narrated by Don Diego de Zama, basically a bureaucrat for the Spanish crown, while he's stationed in remote Paraguay in the late eighteenth century. He's not a very likeable character. Actually very pathetic. He spends the book waiting to be reappointed, failing at many things, and indulging in paranoid grudges. His obsessions and delusions eventually lead him into a bit of a nightmare of personal failure. But the kind happily blamed on others. Like I said, he isn't a very likeable character. I guess the book is part of a "trilogy of expeciation," and I really look forward to checking out the other two. This book was actually made into a movie a few years ago, which I also recommend. 

Nate: That's some great reading, I love William Carlos Williams and Stevie Smith, I'll look into the other writers. I'm drawn to repetition in poetry as well, nothing breaks my heart harder than a tight villanelle! Also, your description of Caryl Churchill's play reminded me a bit of Alain Resnais' film Last Year at Marienbad, an encounter being re-interpreted as it is continuously re-told. 

We've been discussing some works, including your own, that dramatize and complicate the act of storytelling. So, in that vein, I wanted to bring up a devastating short novel I read recently called So Long, See You Tomorrow by William Maxwell, originally published in 1980. I had the chance to go pretty deep on this one for a writing assignment and it was quite a mindblow. 

The book has an interesting origin, which is detailed in Barbara Burkhardt's biography William Maxwell: A Literary Life. When Maxwell was a child, he was friends with a boy whose father murdered his neighbor. Memories of the crime haunted the author through his life and decades later he decided to try writing about it. He drafted a story based on his memories, which he believed to be accurate. But when he later researched the murder he discovered that his memories were fundamentally wrong, down to essential details like the number and identity of the victims and the location of the crime. The falseness of his memories was what inspired him to write So Long, See You Tomorrow. It's an autobiographical work that directly confronts the fictional quality of autobiography. But there's a bit of a postmodern magic trick going on because even though he carefully establishes the impossibility of knowing the past (he even refers to the past as a "lie"), when he finally recounts (or invents) the circumstances leading to the murder it could not feel more real, it's absolutely convincing and gut-wrenching. 

At the beginning of the book, Maxwell notes that the murder left him with a lifelong feeling of guilt. We don't know what the guilt could be referring to at first but (and I don't think this is a spoiler really, it's a thread throughout the novel) we find out that after the murder took place, Maxwell had a chance encounter with his friend (the murderer's son) and they passed by without acknowledging one another; they never talked again. His failure to speak to his friend is the source of his guilt and the novel - an elegant act of speech - is his penance. He can't know what really happened and he can't comfort his friend. But he can imagine what occurred and speak on behalf of an innocent survivor. I'm literally getting choked up right now just thinking about it, it's truly beautiful.

I think these ideas maybe resonate a bit with death as repetition. In So Long, See You Tomorrow we see a man seeking retribution through gun violence but instead initiating a cycle of trauma and silence. Maxwell is a relative bystander, but even he is drawn to imagining the crime over and over, remembering it, misremembering it, researching it, writing it, re-writing it. That kind of mirrors the repetitive form of your play, the emphasis on the cyclical, endless quality of violence, as well as the failure of violence to provide redemption.

Jerrod: I haven't read So Long, See You Tomorrow, but will check it out as soon as I can. Your description alone is beautiful and affecting. And it certainly sounds like what I'm aiming to do with my play is in conversation with what Maxwell articulated of his experience. I'm so taken with the ways in which violence impacts its witnesses. That Maxwell, though a bystander, carried with him a great deal of guilt and trauma, much of which he didn't even understand at first. 

I'm beginning to understand that a big part of death as repetition is about the lingering impact of violence on the witness. There is the chain violence that one violent act breeds, but there is also the guilt, shame, and hopelessness that's forced upon those along the edges. Louisa, the audience, someone watching the news, Maxwell, the little boy who grows up believing masculinity is defined by these forms of mythmaking. The list is endless. Our own dumb, hopeless loop. 

Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 15

collective face

P-center

apodicticity    

proprioceptive auto-affection

aesthetics of proximity

temporal ecstasis

flower-deer-man

ear space

distanciation

mediatized grief

Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 14

Great Oxygenation Event

successful dyarchy

spandrel

We-relationship

collection of utterances

cribria orbitalia

geophagy

High Integralism

theory theory

Necker Cube

Sub-entry Sampler 5

denial

     drivers of

artistic practices

     as technologies of self

other-being

     transition to

gut

     as nexus of embodiment

selection

     methodical and unconscious

Recently Reading #2: Greg Hunter

Corresponding with writers and bibliophiles about what we’ve been reading lately.

Greg Hunter is a writer based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He has edited graphic novels for young readers and contributed comics criticism to The Comics Journal, The Rumpus, LARB, and other publications.

Nate: You have a new book out this month called New Realities: The Comics of Dash Shaw. Can you give me a little intro to the book?

Greg: New Realities takes readers through the graphic novels of Dash Shaw, an American cartoonist and filmmaker. He has authored several books, and his style varies from book to book, often in significant ways. So a big part of the project is my effort to explain what these books have in common. That tends to be moments or narratives of people not connecting, not understanding - characters hitting the limits of their subjectivity or personal reality.

Nate: What drew you to Shaw's work?

Greg: I had been a reader of Shaw’s since picking up his 2008 book Bottomless Belly Button - not technically his debut but the book with which he made a big early impression. Years later, I had an invitation to pitch a critical text to my eventual publisher, Uncivilized Books. Shaw was the first artist that came to mind, but before I started to re-read his books, I didn’t know if I’d see a really evident through-line. Still, that theme of interpersonal gaps became legible almost as soon as I started reading his body of work as a body of work.

New Realities is a monograph, but it reproduces enough of Shaw’s art that - in a way that makes me happy - it also feels a bit like a coffee-table book. And while I’ve written a lot of comics criticism, I’m not an academic, and the book doesn’t observe all the orthodoxies of academic writing. (No shade, etc.) But New Realities doesn’t have academics or even necessarily other critics as its intended audience.

When I thought about an ideal reader, I thought more about someone who’s 19, 20 years old and reads one of Shaw’s works for the first time. The story resonates, but they’re also struck, or just perplexed, by how the comic functions. Especially in a book of Shaw’s like New School, BodyWorld, or Discipline, there is a purposeful willingness to get weird with the comics form. So another part of what I try to do in New Realities is explore how these thematic concerns I’m mentioning play out on the level of form, through specific visual choices we see Shaw making.

Nate: Can you give me an example of how Shaw's formal playfulness informs his themes?

Greg: Here’s one from Bottomless Belly Button. The book follows a family on its vacation, two divorcing parents, their adult children, and some of their children. Shaw draws one of the adult siblings, Peter, as a froglike cartoon person, even though the other characters are all recognizably human. (It is not, for example, a book of anthropomorphized animals.) A visual device like that might disrupt a reader’s immersion in the comic, and it might seem counterintuitive for a book that’s rooted in realism on plot level. At the same time, it invites a reader to think about ways of seeing and the limits of how people see one another. The view of Peter the comic gives us is reductive, and it’s up to a reader to flag that.

Nate: I'm looking forward to reading the book and I want to familiarize myself with some of Shaw's work before I dive in. What's a good place to start with him? 

Greg: A good place to start might be his book Doctors. It’s a short, high-concept science-fiction story from 2014, following a team of scientists who can give the recently dead a brief form of extended life - and mostly help expired elites put their affairs in order. The book works through some questions of technology and ethics in a way that’s direct and focused but still makes lots of room for formal play.

Nate: I'll check that out, thanks for the recommendation! And congrats on the publication, do you think you'll write more books?

Greg: I’d like to think so! Whether that would mean more book-length comics criticism, it’s hard to say. The most substantial thing I’ve worked on since finishing New Realities is a piece of fiction - something not developed enough for me to describe here, but miles apart from the Dash book. And if I’m fortunate enough to publish anything else, I like the thought of an eclectic bibliography.

Nate: So, I'm sure you've been busy with the book release, but have you had time for reading lately?

Greg: I’ve also been all over the place with what I’ve read lately. In prose, that’s been The Plague of Doves, a novel by Louise Erdrich; He Died with His Eyes Open and The Devil’s Home on Leave, the first two books in Derek Raymond’s Factory series of British crime novels; and a pair of oddball sixties westerns, Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down by Ishmael Reed and The Ballad of Dingus McGee by David Markson.

 

In comics, I’ve been having a moment with the Welsh cartoonist Carol Swain, re-reading her graphic novel Gast and picking up her book Foodboy; reading the new memoir by MariNaomi, I Thought You Loved Me; and reading collections of E.C. Segar’s Popeye comics for really the first time.

Nate: Can you tell me a bit more about the Ishmael Reed novel? I enjoy his work, but I'm not familiar with Yellow Back Radio Broke-Down.

Greg: Here’s part of the appeal for me: I’m sure that even with primary-source accounts from people in the American West or Southwest in the second half of the 19th century and start of the 20th, you’d find the start of countless conversations about what’s real, what’s true, etc. But if we’re just talking about early forms of Western fiction, we’re talking about stories that are going to hold, and further codify into myth, lots of ideas about the American character. Stories of rugged individualism, of American exceptionalism, if not more insidious fables of Manifest Destiny. 

So, maybe this is true of all genres in some way, but with the Western perhaps most obviously, what you’re seeing is this kind of warping-through-fiction-writing of these ideas that were never true in the first place. And by the time you get to the sixties, when Reed and Markson published the books I mentioned, things have gotten really weird. Parallel to their work, you have the Italian Western in cinema, these exercises in style with multinational casts and crews. And then stateside, you have the Western filtered through American postmodernism, this literary mode with a higher-than-usual tolerance for comedy and a heightened skepticism about whether anything means anything. 

 

Reed is also a Black writer in conversation with other Black writers of the time, which is a huge dimension of the book. (There’s a meta-conversation happening about what form the literature of resistance or liberation should take.) With Markson, what’s been wild is just how different the book is from his other novels, which have a very singular style. (In Wittgenstein’s Mistress or Reader’s Block, you find voices totally removed from action, and cultural references or pieces of literary trivia that somehow accumulate into a novel.) But each of those books is fascinating to me in consciously being a refraction of a refraction of a refraction of a lie.

 

Nate: The Western genre does seem particularly ripe for revisionism in literature and film, that movement has gone through multiple waves. To deconstruct the American mythos, start with expansionist ideology. 

I've been reading pretty widely as well. I want to highlight a couple of film reference books that I'm kind of always reading: the Bleeding Skull books, A 1980s Trash Horror Odyssey and A 1990s Trash Horror Odyssey. The first was co-authored by Joseph A. Ziemba and Dan Budnik, the sequel is by Ziemba, Annie Choi, and Zack Carlson. These books (and the Bleeding Skull website) are incredible resources for film discovery, they really dig deep into the DIY, backyard, SOV, regional sides of cinema to find movies that have had minimal distribution and often no prior critical engagement. 

Their reviews are humorous and awed, not condescending at all. They aren't really concerned with whether the movies are good or bad, they're looking through an alternate aesthetic lens that values obscurity, madness, resourcefulness, shock, the inexplicable, the illogical. Their equivalent of "four stars" would be a phrase like "brain-exploding". Filmmakers including the Polonia brothers, J.R. Bookwalter, and Chester Novell Turner are celebrated as auteurs, which they absolutely are. 

There's obviously precedent for this type of criticism, from Manny Farber's appreciation of B-movies to Susan Sontag's "Notes on Camp" to John Waters' celebration of "trash" to Quentin Tarantino's vocal love of exploitation cinema. The Cahiers du Cinema critics were also ahead of the curve in their appreciation of outré American directors and genres. Bleeding Skull is in that tradition but is maybe even deeper in the weeds when it comes to discovery: You have to actively search to turn up something like Alien Beasts. 

Co-author Joseph A. Ziemba is also the Creative Director of the American Genre Film Archive, a theatrical distributor and superb Blu-ray label. So, there's an element of advocacy and preservation in what the Bleeding Skull crew does, which I think is important.

Greg: I’ll have to check out the books you mentioned. I’ve never gone deep with things like SOV horror, although I did listen to the Live at the Death Factory podcast, which, when active, discussed a lot of it. To do some contortionist-level looping back to New Realities: Years ago, my publisher Tom Kaczynski at Uncivilized Books recommended to me The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, a book about the difference between two concepts that animate a lot of horror stories across mediums. And ever since, The Weird and the Eerie has held a real place of privilege in my mind as an example of great arts writing for a lay readership. It’s something I’d recommend for anyone interested in what weird fiction is and how it works, too.

Real Terms, No Context: Vol. 13

the incognizable

foot morphology

sentimental conservatism

abductory induction

godparental vowing

pious heretics

truth-producing virtues

rectangular skin panels

logica utens

human frailty