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The Nihilist

Posted by Unknown 7/25/2010

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below this line is the story of my life
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As Taught by Paul Frizler; or, Swan and Shadow by John Hollander

I discovered this masterful poem for the eyes and soul back in the autumn of 1989. I was an undergrad at Chapman University, when I took a course that altered my life's course inexorably, "Introduction to Poetry, 101". The poem above was featured in Poems, Fourth Edition: Wadsworth Handbook And Anthology , a textbook I still own and reference regularly. "Swan and Shadow" by John Hollander was used as an introductory illustration of what was then commonly called "concrete poetry," but today is better known as "visual poetry". The class was taught by the most eccentric and engaging genius of a professor I ever had, the late great, Dr. Paul Frizler , B.A. at the ripe old age of nineteen, Ph.D. in English by twenty-six. Frizler personified lightning. He was eclectic and sincerely outrageous. I remember his regaling us of his encounter with Jim Morrison at UCLA. Unlike Morrison , however, Frizler's eccentricity ...

On visiting a brilliant bookshop yesterday, The Magic Door IV

Yesterday, I finally had the chance to visit a local independent bookshop, The Magic Door IV , that I had been meaning to for years, but its store hours (2:00-8:00 p.m.)* had always made it impractical for me to drop by when I had a regular 8-5 office job working for somebody else. In May, when out of the blue it occurred to me that I had still not patronized the The Magic Door and its hours were no longer an issue, I dropped by on Memorial Day (May 29th), but the store was closed for the holiday. Undeterred, when Father's Day rolled around three weeks later, I decided I'd go then. Almost out the door, though, I thought maybe I better call first, make sure they're open. Sure enough, they were closed for the Father's Day holiday. They were closed, and yet the owner, Dwain Kaiser, answered the phone anyway and urged me to drop by on Tuesday. He was adamant that I — whom he didn't know from Adam as they say — drop by the store on Tuesday, ...

Excerpts of Early Optimism, Taking Notes on the First Chapters of Ulysses: March 2009

The " Proteus " chapter thus far (for me) can be sufficiently summed up by Joyce himself (p.32, line 52, Gabler ed.): "contransmagnificandjewbangtantiality". Got through " Proteus " fairly unscathed. The suggestion of the Jameson's does indeed help during Stephen's abstruse monologue. I really enjoyed particularly the page or so describing the dog, and once I got the feel for what Joyce was doing in this chapter about half way through, it really wasn't as hard to follow as I'd imagined it might be. I'm finding I'm relying less and less on the guides and staying focused on the text mostly (not sure why) but I'm enjoying the journey thus far immensely regardless. I think the " Proteus " chapter, in this amateur's eyes, is definitely worth a reread or threeread or four, as there's so much compacted dense layers of thought whizzing by like freeway traffic nonstop. I know I missed a lot of meaning(s) and imp...

No Exit -- "The Concentration City" of J.G. Ballard's

"The Concentration City" (1957) is one Hell of a story. That Ballard named his leads Franz and Gregson and set certain bureaucratic procedural crime dramas around them made me think immediately of The Metamorphosis , but I'm not positive Ballard was intentionally riffing off Kafka here. And regarding Concentration City's history there's multiple mentions to a time "before the Foundation" millions of years ago, which seems to be a gracious nod in Isaac Asimov's direction. Hong Kong's concentrated high rises. Photo by Michael Wolf Franz aims to fly in Concentration City (it was a dream he had) but there's really no room to fly in a city that has no open air space -- not even for a single bird. Any available space is already occupied with construction. So he hatches a plan with Gregson not so much to escape Concentration City but to ride the commuter train, a "Supersleeper" that connects the various Sectors and Fe...

The Wicked Little Book of Quotes edited by Helen Exley

The Wicked Little Book of Quotes is a purely good book, in my opinion. The quotes are mostly from women celebrities of yore making pithy, risqué declarations related to sex. There are five paintings of female nudes in the book. There are fourteen bare breasts. Ten paintings of men and women interlocked in passionate embrace. Beyond the fourteen bare breasts (two of my favorite words in the English language: " bare breasts ") there are another three of delectable décolletage. Full Disclosure : I was bottle fed as a baby. But as good as the tasteful, yet arguably, tumescent -inducing paintings are, they are easily eclipsed in erotic grandeur by the lascivious quotes from the many illustrious and lustful-minded ladies (bless them!) of mostly the early twentieth century, like this tasty truism below: " Men aren't attracted to me by my mind, they're attracted by what I don't mind . ~ Gypsy Rose Lee My runner up favorite is world famous, from Uly...

A.M. Homes' autograph (Things You Should Know: A Collection of Stories)

I remember reading Salon's 1996 interview with David Foster Wallace about five years after it'd been published — this was just after DFW had been hired by the Claremont Colleges and the L.A. Times had run an interesting piece on his work and arrival to the university, and my interest in this writer that I'd heretofore never heard of, was immediately piqued; and piqued enough, I might add, that I immediately and rather obsessively went online to learn more about him — in which Laura Miller asked DFW who were the contemporary literary writers he read and admired. A.M. Homes was at the top of his list (and this despite labeling her first novel Jack as being "imperfect" — as if his first novel had been perfect! — zeroing in on a short story of hers called "A Real Doll" that had particularly captivated him with what sounded like a bizarre mix of satire and social commentary on the sorry state of our culture's disconnectedness. After re...

These Disturbing Steps of Jerzy Kosinski

Did this, whatever this -- Steps -- is, truly win the National Book Award in 1969 ? Amazingly ... yes. Is it truly darker than his debut controversial classic, the allegedly autobiographical novel (or pure fiction, depending on whom you believe), The Painted Bird , that painted quite the icky horrific portrait of Kosinski's childhood, assuming it's true? Yes. Steps is even more absurdly dark than its more famous, if less award winning, predecessor. Was Jerzy Kosinski the Twentieth Century's Marquis de Sade? Albeit a far less sexually explicit, but no less sadistic, de Sade?Reading Steps certainly makes me wonder -- and that's a compliment to Kosinski's skills at creating discomfort in his readers, at least his readers with "typical" moral sensibilities. Who is this twisted first person narrator guiding us through this sordid collection of demented anecdotes and mostly vile (if not violent) vignettes, in Steps ? Is it Kosinski himself? I...

"Escapement" by J. G. Ballard

I'm seeing, sensing, absorbing the preternatural prescience and all-too-real surrealism of J.G. Ballard . In one of his first published short stories, for instance, his gem "Escapement" (1956), a man watching the tele with his wife experiences a bizarre hiccup in time's immutable ticktock, during which he discovers himself reliving the same fifteen minute span from 9:00-9:15 P.M. over and over again. As if time were trapped on a cassette tape that never stopped playing. The television show our increasingly incredulous man is watching keeps repeating itself, but his wife doesn't even notice! In fact, while her husband can't get past 9:15, it's almost 10:00 P.M. for her. Our man tries switching channels to escape. Same result: Rewind. He calls a quiz show to tell them he knows the question they're going to ask in order to try and convince somebody — anybody — that something very strange is going on with the clocks, that they're stuck in...

Exhuming The Body by William Sansom

Considering William Sansom's short fiction was once widely anthologized in frighteningly titled story collections (e.g., London Tales of Terror , Ghosts in Country Houses , The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories , as well as several installments of The Pan Book of Horror Stories ), with a novel named The Body , readers already acquainted with his better known, more diminutive, phantasmal forebears, could understandably conclude that Sansom's first novel The Body was likewise macabre. Honest mistake, that. And perhaps also disappointing for those mystic connoisseurs of the obscure with a taste for Sansom's peculiar style of understated extravagance -- a style similar to yet not quite as distilled as that of those refined denizens of the fin de siècle , nor as baroque as the later Lovecraft crowds he was often lumped in with (peruse any of the table of contents of one of the dozens of anthologies Sansom contributed to in order to better see my point) -- wh...

The Descent by Jeff Long

The Descent has far more in common with Jaws than epic medieval poetry. The Descent indeed, is a marriage of Jaws and Journey to the Center of the Earth . Heaven, in effect, stands up Hell at the altar in this wickedly divine Descent not to the center of the earth, but to the very core of humankinds most archetypal, universal fear: the dark, and the demons who swim in it. There's no great white sharks striking terror from the murky depths in The Descent ; no, there's worse, much worse: there's great albino "hadals" disembowelling you alive from the cavernous depths. Once they've disembowelled you alive, they just might make a rope out of your intestines, using your innards to tie you to a stake, so that you, a) won't escape; and, b) can sample your flesh while it's still fresh, like you were human-sushi! Are you scared? You should be. Because The Descent is so scary it will scare the Hell in to you, not out. Read The Descent a...

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