orbis quintus

So i zipped through The Invention of Morel last night. Borges it ain’t. I have yet to read any actual collaborations between Adolfo Bioy Casares and Borges, so it’s not quite fair of me to make an informed judgement…. not that i ever feel i make an informed judgement. It’s sci-fi written in 1940, and the concept has long since been worked to cliche. I’m now curious as to when holography was conceived, because while i found that it was invented in 1948, it’s interesting where Bioy went with these concepts. It may seem a natural progression from movies to the projection of 3-D objects indistinguishable from the originals, but 1940 still seems early.

As for the narrative, eh…. Bioy does not have the feeling of a giant, enigmatic cosomology that Borges does. There’s something reductive and mechanistic about it, with souls trapped in machines caught in endless loops. It was interesting, but underwhelming, a signpost where other writers would take similiar ideas about the meaning of time.

It is a landmark book, but more for the ideas it potentially spawned than self-contained brilliance. Oh, and i may be clueless, but i didn’t detect a hint of this book being Latin American in origin, aside from some names.

I’m eager to see photos of the art of this new cave, and see how similiar they are in style to the Chauvet cave.

PARIS – Cave drawings thought to be older than those in the famed caves of Lascaux have been discovered in a grotto in western France, officials from the Charente region said Sunday.

A first analysis by officials from the office of cultural affairs suggests the drawings were made some 25,000 years ago, Henri de Marcellus, mayor of the town of Vilhonneur where the cave is located, told France-Info radio.

He said, however, that the date could only be confirmed by further investigations.

Cavers exploring a part of a grotto in the Vilhonneur forest made the discovery in December, the local newspaper Charente Libre reported Saturday.

News was withheld until a first investigation could be carried out, local officials said on French radio.

“If this first expertise is confirmed, the paintings discovered here (change) scientific findings date to Lascaux and Altamira in Spain,” Michel Boutant, head of the local government, said on France-Info radio.

The famed Lascaux Cave in Montignac, in the Dordogne region of southwest France, has long been considered one of the finest examples of cave paintings. The art dates back 13,000 years, like those in Altamira, in northwest Spain.

However, the Chauvet cave, discovered in the mid-1990s in southeast France, features some 300 examples of Paleolithic animal art dating back in some cases 31,000 years.

If known only by plot, Soul Resin might not seem so exceptional. It’s about souls, memory, a peculiar metaphysical science, and doom. In the wrong hands, it could easily be passed off as a knockoff Stephen King novel. However, Cannon has something odd, as he wrote a literary horror, not a pulp, and he delves far into the strained racial relations of New Orleans, especially in the Reconstruction era. It’s strange, ugly stuff, and combined with the cataclysmic climax of the story, with a flood of water and dead, is weirder yet in the aftermath of Katrina. Cannon almost comes off as a rogue prophet in some sense, more concerned about the social issues than the creeping supernatural horror that is soul resin.

He knows New Orleans. He has the aura down cold, except it frustrated the hell out of me when he moved the Tchefuncte from the north shore, to below New Orleans near Barataria, messing up my psychogeography, but that’s a minor quibble.

There’s an interview with Cannon here on the Fiction Collective 2 site, and i’m clipping this other bit from a piece that appeared in Other Voices:

OV: C.W. Cannon is one of the newest champions of the independent press. At this time next year, I suspect we’ll all be talking about his novel, Soul Resin, in which shifting narrators take us through the dark and thrilling world of Mills Loomis Mills, a self-appointed freak whose gifts include hearing the sound of blood.

Soul Resin will be published by FC2, a press that consistently presents some of the most original and controversial voices in American fiction. In fact, it would be impossible to discuss edgy fiction without mentioning FC2, whose authors have been called “the bad boys and bad girls of contemporary fiction”

C.W. Cannon has recently joined FC2’s Board of Directors, and continues to serve Other Voices as a contributing editor. He holds a PhD. from the University of Illinois at Chicago and makes his home in New Orleans. He is an assistant professor in the English Department at Xavier University.

CWC: I’d like to start by talking about terminology. What defines this idea of “fiction on the edge?” What has this type of work been called in the past? Mostly, it has been categorized as “experimental.” But the term experimental fails to capture the range, scope and diversity of work we want to put under the heading of Fiction on the Edge.

There are lots of other terms, like avant garde, postmodern these days, and fifty years ago modernism was a term used a lot. The writers being described in these terms were known as the radical writers. Radical novels, radical fiction. And while the term radical may bother some, I find it more useful than “experimental.”

Experimental seems to speak to language and form more than content and social meaning. Don DeGrazia’s American Skin may not strike me as experimental, but it’s on the edge. It is radical. A reviewer compared him to Faulkner, but a more obvious literary ancestor may be James T. Farrell. Studs Lonigan. But readers and literary reviewers may not have access to these literary traditions, partly because of the failure of university English departments to emphasize America’s rich tradition of radical fiction. James T. Farrell worked in something we call Radical Social Realism. It’s not necessarily experimental in terms of structure or language, but it is truly experimental in terms of social meaning.

I’m fond also of the term innovative fiction, though it may seem a little general, vague, or unclear. This is used by Dalkey Archive Press in a 1998 anthology edited by Robert L. McLaughlin. And I think the subversive element of this kind of fiction needs to be emphasized. So perhaps “subversive” is better than “innovative.”

What struck me most in Robert L. McLaughlin’s introduction to Innovations: An Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Fiction is his recalling a suggestion that the purpose of great literature is to sow confusion. I think sowing confusion is something a writer might strive for, an interesting goal to set for ourselves. We’re all taking different risks, working in different textures. If my comments have demonstrated anything thus far, it’s that often our work doesn’t fall easily under headings.

I’d like to recognize a collective non-tradition and cite the term “miscegenation.” It has some political dynamite to it, miscegenation as the mixing of the races, an idea that led to much blood and smoke in Southern history. As a Southerner, my own regional radical vocabulary-that of the Scalawag-likes to celebrate miscegenation.

I like the concept of miscegenation as a model for American culture, the best of American culture. We should look to Jelly Roll Morton or any of the great musical developers of the twentieth century in the United States along with the best writing. They should be miscegenated.

My favorite American novel in this tradition is Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo, the great black revolutionary postmodern pagan classic from 1972. This novel is all of these things, and its own thing. Radical, innovative, etc. And it was beautiful when people didn’t know what to do with it, couldn’t nail it down with a classification.

This may be the most difficult thing facing radical writers today as they try to get their work published—publishers want to be able to know what section of the bookstore to put your book in. Musicians often face this problem. Publishers look at a book like mine and say, Is it a historical novel? Is it noir? What the hell is it? It can be all of these things together if we miscegenate form.

I encourage writers of radical and innovative fiction to look hard at all kinds of presses, to get to know presses like FC2 and other great independent publishers. It’s time to see a bold and strong independent fiction movement. Musicians do it. Independent film succeeds in soaking up some widespread attention. It’s time for Indy Fiction to get a powerful movement going.

‘HEY KIDS! DO YA LIKE THE FLAMIN’ GROOVIES?!’

‘NO!!!’

‘WELL THEN, HOWZ’ABOUT A GROUP OF CRAZED GROOVIES’ FREAKS FROM THE WILDS ‘N’ WASTES OF MID-70’s WISCONSIN?!”

‘NO!!!’

‘WELL, HERE THEY ARE – THE NEW LEGION ROCK SPECTACULAR!!!’

This may well be heresy. But as much as I adore the Flamin’ Groovies’ second coming in the form of Byrds-y London mods, I’ll forever hold a torch for their greasy, early 70’s gut-rot, rock sides. Class of ’76/’77? Forget it – the Groovies were true punk rock prodigies, graduating in and out of it long before most anyone else had so much as thought of the idea. For as remarkably astounding as ‘Shake Some Action’ and ‘Flamin’ Groovies Now‘ are, the incarnation of the band led by amphetamine-howling Roy Loney always seemed much more muscular, chaotic and legitimately crazed in comparison to the stately and often restrained studio-craft of Cyril Jordan and producer Dave Edmunds (as well as most of their chart-clogging heavy rock contemporaries). And though at times this ricocheting energy ultimately proved to the band’s detriment, there is not a single minute on the group‘s two early 70s albums, ‘Flamingo’ or ‘Teenage Head,’ that I do not find toe-tapping fantastic and utterly compelling. And despite the fact that they are now (sometimes) acknowledged as the legendary, hard-driving, hard-luck pioneer rock band they always were, they are still owed a lot, at least in my mind.

Still, if the Groovies’ story today remains a much-referred-to-yet-seldom-read chapter in the sadly-neglected book of pre-punk 70s rock, in their own day, the band’s status must have been just about on par with that of lepers or Holocaust deniers. ‘Bah, how can they still be playing this hackneyed, primitive 50s-derived bourgeois white rock-a-boogie? The nerve!’ About the only place, mid-Me-decade, you were likely to see a favourable write-up or review on the Groovies’ doings (outside of France where they were always treated as stars) was in one of Greg Shaw’s publications and even that was so much preaching to the choir.

…heavens: can you imagine the look of some of those choir members? Forget Bowie – the Groovies were the REAL leper-messiahs!

And in case your imagination isn’t up to such a task, you’re in luck…‘cos some of them misfits got together just like the old songs said, formed a band and put out a record. Actually, a couple of ’em…and from all places, Milwaukee! I give you the New Legion Rock Spectacular – Groovies’ fanatics with a name sillier than their semi-divine inspirers!

There’s nothing really quite like the private-press LP. It’s like a hand-carved invitation to a bed-room birthday bash being thrown by the most unpopular kids in school. What will you see or hear? In the case of the New Legion Rock Spectacular it’s even more interesting still; for despite incorporating the DIY ethos of the nascent punk explosion, the record sounds as if punk rock had never happened (which, incidentally, is just the way I like it). It sounds like a sequel or rather a hybrid stop-gap of the styles the Groovies were stomping through on both ’Flamingo’ and ’Teenage Head’ (rockabilly, country, blues, ballads), along with a dash of their later Sire polish! All this from a bunch of bearded bumpkins from Wisconsin (just be grateful I don’t have a scan of the LP’s flip-side), which only adds further fuel to my thesis that isolation in rock music is an asset, not a hardship (to say nothing of the farcical ’77-as-year-zero’ platform).

New Legion Rock Spectacular predictably garnered little press; in the mid 70’s, an American band in the style of the Groovies must have seemed similar to a tribute band to the flu. Nevertheless, this didn’t stop the band from issuing a self-pressed single – one-side of which, of course, was a Groovies cover (‘Second Cousin,’ Roy Loney’s hymn to rock’s eternal incestuous bad-boy, Jerry Lee Lewis) – which was followed a year later, in the holy year of ‘77, by a full-length LP, entitled ‘Wild Ones!’ And, upon hearing this LP, I must say that the explanation point in the title is no mere decoration or umlaut garnish – it is absolutely essential warning. ‘Wild Ones!‘ wallops you over the head with energy and excitement and you best be ready! I have no idea what became of the New Legion Rock Spectacular following their lone LP – the utopian, open-arms of punk certainly didn’t escort them down any aisle. And perhaps it’s just as well (Greg Shaw loved it though). Just like I wouldn’t want a bunch of safety pin obvious-Situationist-believers turning up on my doorstep preachin’ the newly Damascene Groovies blues, I wouldn’t wanna turn on TRL or stare at the cover of Q and see the NLRS staring back at me. Enough gobble, let’s let the songs do the talkin’ now!

BROKEN OPEN – the most convincing Roy Loney impression on the record. Recalls ‘Teenage Head’ as well as the harder rocking moments of Ducks Deluxe.

DON’T YA JUST KNOW IT – the roll-call lyrics on the last verse sealed it for me. Fucking great. Inspiring even.

LIGHTS OUT – This is another one of those lyrically ambiguous rock/sex songs that I love so well; in which the perpetually insatiable male plaintiff equates his level of amorous voracity with thief-in-the-night-style violent frenzy. What the medieval French might call a chevauchee. Neanderthal rock from a simpler age.

WILD ONE – Another nod to Jerry Lee – this time the Killer’s unofficial theme. I know some people have a real problem with a preponderance of covers on a record, but that’s one of the things that always made the Groovies interesting. Instead of schlock recitations from the old honky-cat blues kit-bag, the Groovies dug deep, breathing life and madness into a range of truly obscure and eclectic material. Oh, and any lyrical resemblances between this and Iggy’s ‘Real Wild Child’ are purely coincidental I’m sure.

HEADING FOR THE TEXAS BORDER – because Groovies covers (that aren’t ‘Shake Some Action’) are so rare I felt almost duty-bound to post this one. Not near as cackling maniacal or furious as the original (how could it be), but still a pretty solid reading.