“You should view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people, and you should think of those people as yourself and your friends.” - Robert Anton Wilson
"When, lo, there came about them all a great brightness and they beheld
the chariot wherein He stood ascend to heaven. And they beheld Him in
the chariot, clothed upon in the glory of the brightness, having raiment
as of the sun, fair as the moon and terrible that for awe they durst
not look upon Him. And there came a voice out of heaven, calling:
Elijah! Elijah! And he answered with a main cry: Abba! Adonai! And they
beheld Him even Him, ben Bloom Elijah, amid clouds of angels ascend to
the glory of the brightness at an angle of fortyfive degrees over
Donohoe's in Little Green Street like a shot off a shovel."
– JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES
Poet John Sinclair just shared details of a filmfestival scheduled in his home of Ann Arbor later this year, featuring a lecture that sounds like the perfect sand-wedge, between Bobby Campbell's fantastic artwork and recent mind-cleansing MCLUHAN/JOYCE postings:
Friday, March 26 at 5pm: ANN ARBOR FILM FESTIVAL LECTURE -
at Ann Arbor Library, 343 South 5th Av, AA, MI 48104, 734-302-7774, free admission http://www.aafilmfest.org/
DREAM AWAKE - HOW JAMES JOYCE INVENTED EXPERIMENTAL CINEMA & DISGUISED IT AS A BOOK - Paramedia-ecologist Gerry Fialka's challenging interactive workshop probes how Joyce's 1939 book/epic collage/meta-narrative film FINNEGANS WAKE (and Marshall McLuhan's Menippean Satirized translation of it) presaged experimental & political activist cinema. How did the WAKE influence Hollis Frampton, Owen Land, John Cage & Peter Greenaway? How & why does the WAKE tell the history of everything that ever happened and will happen? Why did Joyce hang out with Masons and reveal their secrets? Why did the British secret police study the WAKE? How did the WAKE invent MK-ULTRA, the CIA's mind control program? How does the WAKE write a detailed history of the future? How and why did Joyce anticipate the Facebook-Google-Wiki-Twitter-YouTube-Blogosphere swirl (social networking), TMZ, Girl Talk and whatever comes after the Internet? Harry Smith, who claimed Giordano Bruno invented cinema, stated that the function of film viewing is to put people to sleep - dreaming awake. ReJoyce interconnecting Finneganese "funny funereels," "allnights newseryreel," "they leap looply, looply, as they link to light," "cellelleneteutoslavzendlatinsoundscript," and "a ... riot of blots and blurs and bars and balls and hoops and wriggles and juxtaposed jottings linked by spurts of speed." Fun for all at Finnegans Wake. "Gerry Fialka's 'Dream Awake' is a great, entertaining, eye-opening, mind-widening, and provocative event. It amply demonstrated for me Marshall McLuhan's assertion that Finnegans Wake is 'a memory theater for the entire contents of human consciousness and unconsciousness.' Highly recommended." - John Bishop, seminal James Joyce scholar, author of "The Book of the Dark," and author of the intro to the current in-print edition of Finnegans Wake.
"A half-forgotten, half-legendary pioneer in American abstract and animated filmmaking, Mary Ellen Bute, late in her career as an artist, created this adaptation of James Joyce, her only feature. In the transformation from Joyce's polyglot prose to the necessarily concrete imagery of actors and sets, Passages discovers a truly oneiric film style, a weirdly post-New Wave rediscovery of Surrealism, and in her panoply of allusion - 1950s dance crazes, atomic weaponry, ICBMs, and television all make appearances - she finds a cinematic approximation of the novel's nearly impenetrable vertically compressed structure.
With Passages from Finnegans Wake Bute was the first to adapt a work of James Joyce to film and was honored for this project at the Cannes Film Festival in 1965 as best debut."
"Oh yes, dreams. I know they are important. But you want me to free associate about the dream elements. I have the same blanking out. More resistance for you and Dr Freud to complain about.
I read his "Introductory Lectures", God, what a genius. He makes it so understandable. And he is so right. Didn't he say himself that Shakespeare and Dostoyevsky had a better understanding of psychology than all the scientists put together. Damn it, they do.
You told me to read Molly Bloom's mental meanderings (I can use words, can't I) to get a feeling for free association. It was when I did that I got my great idea.
As I read it something bothered me. Here is Joyce writing what a woman thinks to herself . Can he, does he really know her innermost thoughts. But after I read the whole book, I could better understand that Joyce is an artist who could penetrate the souls of people, male or female. It really doesn't matter that Joyce doesn't have ... or never felt a menstrual cramp. Wait a minute. As you must have guessed I am free associating and you are going to hear a lot of bad language. Because of my respect for you, I've never been able to say the words I'm really thinking when we are in session. But now I am going to say whatever I think, no matter what it is.
While reading Molly's blathering, the IDEA came to me. Get a tape recorder. Put a tape in. Turn it on. Say whatever you are thinking like I am doing now. It's really easy. I'm lying on my bed wearing only a brassiere. If I want to go to the refrig or the bathroom, push the stop button and begin again when I want to. And I just free associate. No problem.
You get the idea, don't you? Patient can't do it in Doctor's office. Patient is at home with tape recorder ...
Well, that's something for you to sleep on, Doctor.
Good Night."
BONUS! Sally Kelllerman reads the end of Molly Bloom's aforementioned monologue, much to Rodney Dangerfield's delight, in Back to School. (The sounds pretty low on the clip, you'll have to jack up your volume)
and if you notice, at the end, the first book on the class' reading list is Finnegans Wake!
"Roaratorio,John Cage's 1979 composition, is a work of staggering complexity. To put it simply, it involves several elements all working together at once to create a soundscape of Finnegans Wake." (Read More)
[Leading on from some earlier e-mail interview question's you answered for me, can you expand upon why Finnegans Wake, Cannabis seeds and a Rottweiler are essential elements for a 21st century survival kit?]
RAW: You need Finnegans Wake to understand the merging world village that's appearing; Finnegans Wake is the only book that's written from a global perspective, well Pound's Cantos are almost global, they include China , parts of Africa, most of Europe and the United States and some ancient Sumer, Egypt. Joyce is much more universal, he includes a lot more of Africa than Pound does - a hell of a lot more - and a lot more of Asia too. That's part of your education to live in the 21st Century, you gotta master Finnegans Wake, and then you need what? - [Cannabis seeds] - Obvious, that doesn't need any explication does it? And the Rottweiler ....[GAP IN RECORDING WHILE TAPE IS CHANGED] http://www.maybelogic.org/maybequarterly/08/0801FlyRAWInterview.htm
Soundtrack: The Complicated History of the Concept of the Soul by The Mr. T Experience
"ALL YE SUCKERS WHO ARE GONNA GET TRIMMED, STEP THIS WAY FOR THE BIG SWINDLE!"
- Groucho Marx as Mr. Hammer in "The Cocoanuts"
Over these last few years the 2012 media virus has proven to be very formidable indeed, the millenarist plot has taken on a great many twists and turns, for the most part abandoned and dismissed by it's early adopters, it has evolved into a kind of fundamentalist, new age, lowest common denominator, main-stream of complete and utter bullshit! Not to say that it wasn't always bullshit, but now it's bullshit that's rapidly becoming a household name!
A media virus consists of a protective & sticky outer shell, which contains within it a memetic code. The adhesive shell becomes attached to a host medium and thence it's memetic programming gets injected therein.
"The virus code mixes and competes for control with the cell's own genes, and, if victorious, it permanently alters the way the cell functions and reproduces. A particularly virulent strain will transform the host cell into a factory that replicates the virus."
The outer shell of a media virus is the "surface issue" or "face value" of the news event, idea, or whatever form the Trojan horse happens to take. The programming within the shell is the implication of the resultant dialectic, the worms in the can, to mix a metaphor!
It seems apparent that "The Eschaton" makes for an exceptionally sticky outer shell, but what manner of programming dwells within?
Who's kidding who here!?
As some of ye brave and bold readers may yet recall;
Joseph Campbell and/or Henry Morton Robinson report of Finnegans Wake Book III, Chapter 4: HCE & ALP- Their Bed of Trial. (Starting on pg 555)
The characters have woken from the dream & “It is the morning after the night of the winter solstice”
I can still find no indication of this in the text myself, but it provides an impetus to imaginate...
More interesting though is this excerpt from the audio book version of Terence Mckenna's "True Hallucinations", which ellucidates the McKenna Brothers' experiences in the Amazon Jungle at La Chorrera, the inspiration for novelty theory, timewave zero, and by extension much of the 2012 media virus. (the entire audio book is freely available for your listening pleasure, here.)
After over a hundred page SLOG through the relentless hypnagogic babel of the riverrunning nat language, Mr. Joyce drops the jiggerypokery and talks straight turkey meet to mate.
The resistence training having paid off sparkling dividends, the well worn reader earns a bit of the familiar Ulysses style blinding clarity. The culmative effect on my neuro semantic field seems already like that of a magic mushroom feast. (a similar tweaking of connotation & denotation, the cambridge caveman speaking more of the many.) Though RAW, Leary, & Mckenna have already said as much.
I asked Joyce in a dream once where for he got all his juice. He said he had picked a fight w/ the monster in the sky (God) and no one seemed sure who had won...
I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.(Joyce cited in Richard Ellmann's James Joyce more probably about Finnegans Wake)
One of the artists I have met online at MLA calls himself Bobby. I'll leave him to link up to his other work. We worked together on some stuff about initiation levels and the four elements (from a book I read about Shakespeare's The Tempest) - but I never finished my part of it. Recently he started illustrating James Joyce'sUlysses. He works with both hands at times. He makes comic books. He'll introduce himself soon enough. I love this image for Section 9 - I printed it out and hung it on my wall. If you don't know Ulysses, try the BBC's very short version.
Or, in slightly more depth: 9. SCYLLA & CHARYBDIS In the office of the director of the National Library, Stephen, A.E., John Eglinton and Lyster the librarian discuss Shakespeare. The others mock Stephen for his youthful enthusiasm for complex theories of literary creation. [...] Thus Hamlet becomes a ghost-story: the ghost/father is Shakespeare, Hamlet is the product of his artistic soul, and the treacherous Gertrude is Ann Hathaway. Echoes with Stephen's own life here are apparent (he has been 'wounded' by his mother and presents himself as a tragic character without a father; Bloom too is invoked here — he has lost a son and is soon to be cuckolded by his wife), but his theory is presented to impress the Dublin litterati, it is wild, clever and interesting, but they aren't very impressed (when asked if he believes his own theory, Stephen replies that he doesn't). Mulligan appears and parodies Stephen's theory, and other Shakespearean 'theories' are discussed, including Oscar Wilde's.
For MLA members (you have to log in for the link to work), I got this from this post, where you will find more pictures from Bobby.
