The voice of Paul Reyment in SLOW MAN is very similar to the main character in Iris Murdoch’s novel THE SEA, THE SEA. They are both older, white, Brit (empire), educated, artistic, lonely men who have strong feelings, clear thoughts, but don’t hold to a certain philosophical structure (say, Christianity or leftist politics) that color everything. They are intelligent freelancers in life, aware that, given their age, it is highly unlikely that they will ever get answers to the philosophical questions they continue to ask (mostly of themselves) and nearly all the time.

The voice is similar to Philip Roth’s (EXIT GHOST) voices and Richard Ford (INDEPENDANCE DAY, and THE LAY OF THE LAND), but much more compelling for me. Roth is irascable, smart, and cranky. Ford is opinionated, human, realistic, and ultimately boring. Neither Roth nor Ford, though highly intelligent, I would call philosophical novelists. A philosophical novelist (or character voice) is one that questions the meaning of life more or less constantly at the same time he or she goes through their series of mishaps that constitute a plot. Some of Graham Greene’s characters have this philosophical approach, though it’s often in the context of a worldview (shared by many around him) that is crumbling, a worldview that once attempted to explain life. So his becomes a cynical voice–life has no meaning, at least not in THAT (old) sense. Paul Rayment (SLOW MAN) is always questioning at every moment — what does that mean? is that all there is to (human) life? It might sound irritating, and it is when the narrator is too young– Holden Caulfield being an exception there. When an older person still questions the meaning of life without falling completely into victimhoood (why did my kids and wife and etc. abandon me?) I find it interesting. The character who steps back, watches his life while remaining totally in it (not “alienated” or depressed) is interesting to me. It’s a person who I want to follow. I enjoy seeing/hearing them interact with the mundane events tossed more or less randomly at them.

The device in SLOW MAN of adding a character from an earlier novel (which, oddly, I haven’t read yet), Elizabeth Costello, creates a very mild form of magical realism. The characters, Paul and Elizabeth, seem pushed together by (almost) mystical forces but in world where no one particularly believes such mystical forces are possible.

All the voices, Roth, Ford and Coetzee deal with love, unrequited mostly, but only in Coetzee is the yearning elevated to what the Tibetan Buddhist Pema Chodran calls “unrequited love is the heart of the world.” Bummer. Can this be true? Only Coetzee’s characters (in a completely non-religious style) could contemplate this as a visceral possibility. In other words, like the song Blasphemous Rumors by Depeche Mode, “I think that god’s got a sick sense of humor… and when I die, I expect to find him laughing.”
Either that or reading Coetzee.

Watch for postings from new novel!

What show did I see of Philip Guston’s work? It’s the prerogative of the amateur to neither care nor remember, however, I do remember not being particularly excited about his work. I saw it in Chicago and for some reason I thought he was a professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where some of my friends still teach). Even if I got all my facts wrong (and who knows, he could have been a visiting artist there) he was solidly IN MY MIND in the school of Chicago Imagism which I still revere. This school includes Roger Brown, Jim Nutt and H. C. Westermann. Given that kind of company, artists unabashedly “pro-image”, Guston’s work seemed uninteresting. Sure I could see there were social critical themes underneath (why else all the Klansmen?) but they weren’t painted in a way that shouted at you (like Diego Rivera shouts “Marxism Good!”) nor were they interesting to me as images. I didn’t even like his signature “flesh rose” or whatever it was. So, I dismissed him. Wrong!

Where were we? Ah, yes. Artist’s books (aka artists’ books, artists books, and artist books) is a sub-genre of the art world, related to but significantly different from graphic novels (ie. expensive comic books, no offense intended). Artist’s books were viewed by some (including C.B.) as an interesting way to get “the work” (aka The Work if you’re in the Black Mountain lineage) “out there.” Out There was as vague concept as concept then as now, though at base it still means out of one’s studio, atelier, and/or basement (excluding xmas gifts). Obviously the whole online “see me in my studio” YouTube thing complicates matters further, but I digress.

Mr. C.B. Murphy started his Zoographico Press in 1979 with the first volume, the prophetic “January is Alien Registration Month.” I say prophetic because in 1979 very few people were wondering whether we should build a fence across Texas. It just wasn’t that big a deal, hence it was funnier. Zoographico Press put out three titles. After “January” we put out “Nuclear Pup” followed by the prophetic “The Second Mongolian Invasion.” Nuclear Pup (remember this was pre-Adult Swim cartoons on Cartoon Network!) was a irradiated harlequin great dane, anthropomorphized, though presented in “one panel” images as opposed to a straight narrative more common in graphic novels. “January” was selected for inclusion in Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art’s permanent artist’s books collection.

The target audience was a bit vague, one who saw it as children was frightened by its apocalyptic nature, others merely used it as a coloring book. And you know who you are, Kelly!The third book in the trilogy, “The Second Mongolian Invasion” was a kind of meditation on the intersection of science fiction, chakra metaphysics, tattoos, not to forget Wormo-vision, and communicating with the spirit world via ectoplasmic emission. For more information on the cultural milieu see Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars. Fast forward. My nephews (whose identities I will protect, but you know who you are!) informed me that two of the three titles were available as used books on Amazon. I modestly assumed they’d be in the incomprehensible $.01 category (I assume they make money on the shipping allowance) but I was pleased to see that there was one copy of January for sale at the collector price of $150.

I’m in the process of getting the third book, Mongolian, listed. Soon to be available to serious collectors!

I can’t understand why this movie “wastes” the amazing performance of Mr. Day Lewis on a script that is relentless, predictable, and completely unredeeming as satisfying fiction. It’s very close to being a good (possible excellent) movie, but its faults–no change in the character from beginning to end, undeveloped secondary characters, no climax, no resolution–make is seem like someone (who? the writers? director?) was in a hurry to show the EVILS of OIL. “Oil” obviously is the only plot that makes sense: it’s evil, and it makes you evil if you try to make money on it. I smell global warming funding.

As an artist I find that my interest in “outsider art” is complicated. On the one hand, I am like any other appreciator of the diverse artists who fall in the categories (outsider, visionary, et al) and on the other hand, I am able to use my appreciation to inspire me in certain values. Those values “arise” (if you will) from Outsider Art.
They are: (1) pursue your vision despite what is fashionable and/or going on in the art world; (2) be prepared to sustain yourself in your art without acclaim from the world; (3) listen to the various “voices” that arise, follow them, even when “the world” might be calling you nuts, non-commercial or merely underemployed.

I wish there was an identifiable market for “outsider-inspired” artists that was not an attempt to use our various short stays in mental institutions (if we are so “lucky”) to justify our inclusion in the “real” Outsider world. As such, I want to be respectful of collectors and gallery owners who are strict interpreters what it means to promote Outsiders.

I think it’s a shame that “narrative art” or “neo-folk” or “pop surrealism” can’t coalesce into a real “school.” I see efforts to do this, for example the Low Brow artists promoted by magazines like Juxtapoz and their associated galleries. I am inspired by a certain strain of their artists, but I often balk at the “in your face” embrace of street punk attitudes that insist tattooing, and painting cars, and tagging buildings is the same (if not better, i.e. more morally pure) than old fashioned painting. Their skateboarder politics profane and juvenile, is also a turn-off to me, and I would assume to many serious collectors.

Will these street-inspired artists collect one another? I doubt it. I have no problem that many of them are illustrators. I feel the pain of the illustrator, many of them technically skilled, many of them as inspired as any fine artist to create art. Despite Warhol, their willingness and ability to make money selling their images to businesses, makes them outlaws from the serious art world. Many of them can afford to take on Juxtapozian attitudes because they already have a business.

I think there are other elements to this story, other questions to investigate. How has the fine art world discouraged collecting my more “average” people, by making superstars and obfuscating aesthetics in intelligible post-post-modern theorizing that leaves so many people wishing for the next comprehensible show (whether Impressionist or Frida Kahlo). Maybe “average people” never were collectors and it’s all a fantasy. The difference is that today many people can afford art but due to the difficulty of entering the fray, opt for posters, or “decorator art” or reproductions of masters done in China for amazingly cheap prices. I fantasize that a rebirth of narrative painting could help change things. But then, I’d like to see us colonize Mars too.

“Hello, everyone. My name is Mummar. Obviously, I look like a Muslim.” He looked around. “There might be others here, but none so obviously in the young male category which makes me important.” He chuckles. “I only mean important in that so many of you think the troubles of the world are the fault of my people, or people like me. Unemployed angry Muslim youth. No? Am I right? Yes, I am right, I can see it in your faces.”

“Jackson tells us to stretch beyond who we are, to come up with solutions that are beyond what any one of us would ever imagine. He thinks that since we are anonymous, this will help us do this. It is like an exercise at a new age health spa, in California—no? Yes. Here is my stretch.

“I was watching an HBO show, one called Rome. This would not be allowed in my country, but I am a student of the west so I can do these things. Rome is a world before Christianity. Before Islam. There were Jews, of course, though I don’t think this gives them any special status because they are—and this is documented—an older religion.” He shook his head like he was getting distracted.

“So, you’re anti-Semitic?” Marion asked mainly to give him a hard time.

“No. Yes. I mean, it’s not supposed to matter here,” Mummar looked toward Jackson in the back of the room who seemed preoccupied on reading his PDA or whatever it was. “They said it was OK to be anything you want.”

“I think they meant,” Vinnie said, winking at Marion, “that whatever you are or pose to be, it’s fine but they didn’t say there wouldn’t be consequences.”

Marion had half expected him to say, “wouldn’t be no consequences” but then maybe his New Jersey mobster thing was all a put-on.

“Fine,” Mummar said, “fine. I didn’t want to talk about Jews anyway.”

“Romans, then,” Eartha said from the front row. She looked like she wanted to take notes.

“What I wanted to say was that we have to be open-minded about history. I mean, we can’t think we know what the final form if there is such a thing—of history—would look like.”

“I can tell you it ain’t gonna be no Caliphate,” Vinnie said. Again his correct pronunciation surprised Marion.

“You shut up!” Mummar said aiming a finger at Vinnie who did a high schoolish gesture that clearly read: I ain’t afraid of you.

Jackson raised his hand in the back of the room. Marion almost burst out laughing. Like that nerd was gonna keep them from killing each other. Mummar ignored him anyway.

“In Rome, the HBO series anyway, it’s clear that they believed that the strongest person had a right to win. Strength determined right, not morals. If you were capable of subjugating someone, you did it. You enslaved their people, killed their warriors, and took their goods. What I wanted to bring up was I think we all—and hear this—I include my own faith in this—might be laboring under a false premise, that human survival is only worthwhile if we survive with our moral system intact.”

The fierce though diminutive Chinese woman (Marion hadn’t been introduced she just looked Chinese, mainland Chinese) stood up. “He is right!” she practically screamed at the rest of the room. “You are right!” she pointed what looked like an accusing finger at Mummar. “We have to think beyond good and evil.”

“Dr. Nietzsche,” Marion said quietly, “please call your office.” Vinnie laughed. If he knew who Nietzsche was he had to have gone to college. Community college maybe but some college.

“You shut up, too!” the Chinese woman yelled at Marion.

“Please,” Jackson said from the back of the room. “If we don’t follow some common courtesy here we won’t be able…”

“To save the world!” Ward, the Native American-like professor, said.

Jackson walked to the front of the room. Just like an ineffective substitute teacher Marion thought. “Listen people,” he said. “We have to consider lots of things that might piss us off.”

The Chinese woman, still standing, looked confused. “Merde,” the Frenchman said. She looked shocked but sat down.

“We anticipated that it would be very hard to hear ideas that, well, we might find out of bounds, but that’s why we’re here. And your pseudonyms are meant to protect you. So don’t think of yourselves as the person you really are and will be again. Here you are a Master of the Universe, an entity outside of time. Think of yourself as a…”

“Demigod,” Vinnie said. “A minor diety—am I right Mr. Jackson?”

Jackson frowned. “It’s not Mister, just Jackson. I don’t know. I suppose. You’re referring to the classical gods of ancient Greece and Rome, creatures with foibles and powers, imperfect yet…”

“Powerful,” Vinnie said.

“Ok, but…” Jackson started, but Vinnie interrupted him.

“Let the man finish,” Vinnie said in a commanding voice. Again, Jackson looked confused but took a step backward. Mummar moved back to the podium. “Thanks, Mr. Vinnie.”

“Just Vinnie,” he said. “As you were saying…” Vinnie made a hand gesture as if giving the floor back to Mummar.

“We have to consider the possibility that certain truths we might hold in common, say, that slavery is a bad thing, or that the goal of society should be a kind of egalitarian classlessness, that these ideas are time-dependant, history-dependant. They might not be the best thing for the future of the human race. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“May I speak?” the Frenchman in the beret stood up. If he had on a striped shirt, Marion thought, he’d look like mime. “My name is Jacques.”

Marion instinctively looked at Vinnie who was silently laughing with her. She tried to look at Jacques without giggling. The old Kurt Vonnegut line came to her, more profound than ever: Life is like high school.

“Let us say there are a number of things that go wrong. We all know the list and the probabilities. If one of them happens, say a worldwide plague then of course the probabilities are kaput. Several could happen at once. Nuclear war, biological war, the breakdown of civilization as we know it. We’ve all seen the movies. It could happen.” He looked around as if ready to be challenged. “I propose we consider how we could recommend the immediate construction of one or several bunker cities, powered by nuclear or whatever, but repositories of what we have, what we know. They’d have to have strict guidelines as to who would be allowed in them.”

“Your classic ‘who gets in the shelter’ scenario,” Ward said.

“Excusez-moi?” Jacques said.

“Like when people were building bomb shelters in the 1950s against at the time, excuse me Nikola, the Russian threat of nuclear war. I don’t know what it was like in the old Soviet Union, but here in the States lots of people were building bomb shelters. And the issue came up, over and over, in conversation as well as in science fiction, how do you protect yourself from either people breaking in? Or worse—innocent people wanting to get in. You see them on the video monitors, children maybe. You have to let them die.”

“That’s what I mean,” Mummar said. “We have to be prepared to let our morality die, too.”

“But don’t we have to consider the cost of survival?” Marion said suddenly on familiar ground. “If we have to beome inhuman to survive, maybe the cost is too high. Maybe it’s better to die out as a noble species than live as a degraded one.”

“That is nonsense,” the Chinese woman said. “Utter nonsense. That’s what makes the west so vulnerable. You are too ready to die. What if I said to you, the Chinese race should survive, we are the ones that best represent the future.”

“I’m not sure what you mean, Chan is it?” Marion suddenly remembered the woman’s name from the list. “I can entertain the possibility that you bring up that one ‘race’ as you call it, and I don’t consider Chinese a race, but never mind, considers themselves worthy of becoming the sole representative of the surviving human species. And I can even see your logic that we westerners as you call us would be easily eliminated due to our readiness to self-destruct, but how do you propose the resources are allocated between those ‘races’ that feel they deserve to be the sole survivor?”

“That’s easy,” Chan said. “We make several cities of survival. They are not integrated, not a ‘UN,’ but a representing the best of each surviving group.”

“So in your mind,” Jackson said, “I’m just clarifying—let’s say the Chinese, the Arabs, the, oh I don’t know—“

“Russians,” Dimitri said.

“OK, Russians. Maybe the EU. All these civilizations that have access I have to say to some stream of resources on their own, would build their own cities.”

“Well I see a few problems,” Indira said. “Obviously, this is a racist idea, no matter how you express it. It is merely survival of the richest. The second and third worlds, and I don’t mean India, we might be able to do it, but others, Africa, for example, they would die out. Kaboom.”

“Kaboom, yes!” Mummar said. “I can not be alone in thinking this, call it what you will. But if a civilization has not as they say gotten it together by this point in history they are indeed failures. Beautiful worthy people, yes, but failures as civilizations. They are expendable.”