The Long Halloween

from Batman: The Long Halloween
Written by Jeph Loeb
Art by Tim Sale

The Zealot's Guide to Jurassic Park

by Andrew E. Colarusso & Katie Smither

It doesn't take a scholar to deduce that Steven Spielberg was one of the last great movie makers of the 20th century. Ask anybody, especially children raised through the nineties, what their favorite Spielberg film is and you'll likely hear the words "Jurassic Park". In many ways it was the perfect film to inaugurate the election of Bill Clinton, baby boomer extraordinaire. Like the Clinton Administration, Jurassic Park offered excess, escape, dramatic returns, and above all, spectacle. High art may have its devoted audience, but spectacle is universal. Jurassic Park is one of the highest grossing films of all time, and continues to earn income as a successful franchise long after its 1993 debut. In fact, a fourth film in the franchise is due for theatrical debut next year (2015)

Alas, Jurassic Park, the original film, is short on plot continuity. So distracted by the spectacle, and then panic, of dinosaurs set loose in an anthropocenic world, the audience neglects to remember or even notice certain character realities. This is where the film begins to really signify. But how?

from TRISTE TRISTAN by Paol Keineg

Tristan and Isolde; Salvador Dali (1944)

from TRISTE TRISTAN by Paol Keineg

trans. from the French by Rosmarie Waldrop

Tristan, Iseut, etc.

take nudity by storm —

the poor girl has escaped,

bursts of hate

all around the woods,

and the burghers

end up with a beautiful wedding,

the dog taken in with the loot —

the gift of oneself estranges the self,

we’d like to ruin

these militant lovers.

Waste Land: A New Literary Experience

Waste Land

Waste Land is an immersive world, a mystery waiting to be unraveled. Designed by Remo Arpagaus, principle designer at White-Ibex Games, and curated by Andrew E. Colarusso, editor-in-chief of the Broome Street Review—Waste Land bridges poetry and game design to create an all new interactive literary experience. The first of its kind!

Mise-en-abîme in Brian Evenson's "Windeye"

by Andrew E. Colarusso

What appears to be, in Windeye, is not what is in actuality. The result, which feels distinctly Brian’s or maybe Rod Serling’s, is a very intimate and jarring dissonance—a ringing in the ear which one locates just outside of the ear. A disembodied whispering over the shoulder.

He presents the reader with a mode of Pararealism—a twice displaced article that bears only a trace of its origin. Like finding yourself, your reflection, cascading infinitely between two directly opposed mirrors. Mise en abîme.

His is the presentation of a language, a matrix of interconnected signifiers which consistently evades the logic of reality as we live it and know it. So, in this way, what Brian presents in no unreal terms locates itself outside of or beside common perception. He presents a wilderness, a thing, a moment, a myth, skewed and spectacular and endowed with a certain alien quality that projects a distorted reflection of the reader.

Brian read this story to a small audience at Brown University just before the collection debuted and it was really that first scene, that first fragment that caught my mind’s eye, so to speak.

As the younger sister explores opaquely the exterior space of the house, fitting her small hand under the shingles, the older brother frames her experience narratively, sensually directing her thrill while he himself is thrilled by her reaction. It’s an uncanny denuding.

Looking back on it, many years later, he often thought it had started with that, with her carefully working her fingers up under a shingle as he waited and watched to see if it would crack. That was one of his earliest memories of his sister, if not the earliest. 

His sister would turn around and smile, her hand gone to the knuckles, and say, “I feel something. What am I feeling?” And then he would ask questions. Is it smooth? he might ask. Does it feel rough? Scaly? Is it cold-blooded or warm-blooded? Does it feel red? Does it feel like its claws are in or out? Can you feel its eye move? He would keep on, watching the expression in her face change as she tried to make his words into a living, breathing thing, until it started to feel too real for her and, half giggling, half screaming, she whipped her hand free. (1)

Influenced as I am with the work of William Faulkner and The Sound and the Fury especially, I asked Brian if he’d intentionally drawn some sexual, incestuous subtext between the siblings in the opening scene of Windeye. Of course he shrugged it off gracefully and I then felt like a pervert.

His response gave me the impression that it was not intentional, at least not in artifice. And, after all, a magician never reveals his secrets.

Written in the third person past tense, we as readers are already acutely aware that what has not yet transpired in narrative, has already occurred in time. This is a retelling, a secondary source. This creates an initial valance of distance. The narrative first introduces the physical space of the home. We then encounter the brother and sister in the familiar territory of juvenilia which is also already the poetic space of the uncanny—as both Freud and Bachelard can attest. “The German word 'unheimlich' is obviously the opposite of 'heimlich' ['homely'], 'heimisch' ['native'] the opposite of what is familiar; and we are tempted to conclude that what is 'uncanny' is frightening precisely because it is not known and familiar.” (Freud) This interplay of interiority and exteriority, of experiencing an intimate space and then from the outside witnessing its temporality and finitude, is a common theme in the collection.

This is embodied in the interplay of the children. The relationship between the siblings in Windeye bears a universe of potential energy which finally crescendos in the little sister’s disappearance and the older brother’s subsequent lapse from normative reality.

Being not alive wasn’t like being dead, he felt: it was much, much worse. There were years too when he simply didn’t choose, when he saw her as both real and make-believe and sometimes neither of those things. But in the end what made him keep believing in her—despite the line of doctors that visited him as a child, despite the rift it made between him and his mother, despite years of forced treatment and various drugs that made him feel like his head had been filled with wet sand, despite years of having to pretend to be cured—was simply this: he was the only one who believed his sister was real. If he stopped believing, what hope would there be for her? (5)

Immediately after reading the story I wanted to trace the narrative arc from its origin in reality to its manifestation in fantasy and place a cogent reading on its oddity, a carceral interpretation of its final discourse with wind. “If he turned around, he would be wondering, would he find the wind’s strange, baleful eye staring at him?” (6)

The first, and maybe most important clue we get is the dedication, For my lost sister. These are without a doubt the first and last transparent words the author inscribes in the text (disbarring the acknowledgments). Although it's possible that the dedication too was in service of the story, but I doubt it (paranoia). The story Windeye revolves around the loss of a sister, which coincides with the author’s dedication, now making this, in my opinion, a highly personal narrative.

Biography is relevant to our understanding of this text in so far as what occupies the narrative is memory and perpetuity. If the ghostly, unexplainable disappearance of the story’s little sister coincides with the true loss by the author of a sister, then the link here is trauma—a trauma which is veiled and then mythologized so as to allow its presence, her presence, as memory, as story, to exist. Because if she never existed then, in some way, neither had he.  

And if the story is itself a way of remembering the presence of another (perhaps the author’s sister), then the trauma, the experience of trauma, finds its objective correlative (Eliot) in the figuration of the Windeye.

The Windeye (a portmanteau of Nordic origin from which we derive our English Window) itself is an artifact which wrestles with notions of opacity and our response to opacity—in this case a hubris of Gnostic satisfaction and pleasure which culminates in loss. The boy wants to know with certainty, with empirical evidence, what occupies the discrepancy between what he’s perceiving and what he recognizes logically as truth or reality.

That is:

There’s a window visible on the outside which has no discernable presence on the inside. The boy is looking at an object which presents as its function and general purpose the ability to see through it, but this so called Windeye (not window) resists, and insists on its alterity—a window which projects outward, like the gaze of an eye, and captures/holds/suspends what it beholds. The uncanny here, again reminiscent of Freud and his fascination with E. T. A. Hoffman’s The Sandman, replicates itself in uncertainty and anxiety. And the narrative concludes thus.

And he would set about describing it. Does it feel red? Does it feel warm-blooded or cold? Is it round? Is it smooth like glass? All the while, he knew, he would be thinking not about what he was saying but about the wind at his back…

Chances were that he’d be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was, until the day when he was either dead or not living himself. (6)

This final sentence in its deceptive simplicity belies the character’s abyssal relation to time. It is an interesting example of paraprosdokian—from the Greek para (παρά) meaning beside, outside of, or against, and prosdokia (προσδοκία) meaning expectation. Consumed in what one may interpret as survivor’s guilt, the boy, now an old man, replays in his mind the young thrill of their experience as children. He has to remember, revisit, reinscribe their empirical instance because, “…what hope would there be for her [to live on]?” He admits his secret intention to continue visiting this memory until he is dead or not living. Hearkening back to his revelation that being not alive wasn’t like being dead…it was much, much worse. That one could be both dead and not-living, like Schrödinger’s cat, is yet another suspension which implies that he alone is responsible for keeping his sister from death, though she is not living. The conundrum, inherent in his mission of remembering, traps him tragically in a circular ruin (Borges).

The ruin of this final sentence falls farther, deeper, into anacoluthic distortion. Chances were that he’d be stuck with the life he was living now, just as it was… There is a fracture, a hanging conditional, a past subjunctive perhaps—already narratively couched in the past, his present is contingent upon what was and cannot be removed from this paradigm without inhabiting what is worse than death. Abyssal time.

In a way, Windeye is a sort of eerie reconfiguration of the Pandora’s box myth. What is ultimately lost is innocence and candor, the innocence and candor that comes with youth, with opacity. What remains is the injunction of narrative, belief, and hope.

—Presented at Université Rennes 2, May 21, 2015 

Colloque sur l'oeuvre de Brian Evenson

The Broome Street Review no. 5 now available!

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photo of the parking lot on Broome by Michael George

The Queerness of Quentin Compson III (pt 2)

Contemporary resilience researchers make the distinction that "resilience [as measured] is different from recovery" (George Bonanno) 

"The term recovery connotes a trajectory in which normal functioning temporarily gives way to threshold or subthreshold psychopathology (e.g. symptoms of depression or post-traumatic stress syndrome [PTSD]), usually for a period of at least several months, and then gradually returns to pre-event levels. Full recovery may be relatively rapid or may take as long as one or two years. By contrast, resilience reflects the ability to maintain a stable equilibrium." (Loss, Trauma and Human Resilience)

"Ah let him alone, Shreve said, if he's got better sense than to chase after the little dirty sluts, whose business. In the South you are ashamed of being a virgin. Boys. Men. They lie about it. Because it means less to women, Father said. He said it was men invented virginity not women. Father said..."

"and the strange thing is that man who is conceived by accident and whose every breath is a fresh cast with dice already loaded against him..."

Here is not yet Quentin weighted and unstable on the precipice of Anderson bridge. Cambridge, Massachussets. A Harvard student cutting class. 

"In the developmental literature, resilience is typically discussed in terms of protective factors that foster the development of positive outcomes and healthy personality characteristics among children exposed to unfavorable or aversive life circumstances...Resilience to loss and trauma, as conceived in this article, pertains to the ability of adults in otherwise normal circumstances who are exposed to an isolated and potentially highly disruptive event, such as the death of a close relation or a violent or life-threatening situation, to maintain relatively stable, healthy levels of psychological and physical functioning." (Bonanno)

What more lucid metaphor for queerness than Quentin weighted on the precipice of the bridge--he is a boy, not quite a man, in transit (from Yoknapatawpha, Miss to Cambridge, Mass) and perpetually so. Of course, general consensus on the behavior of Quentin Compson III follows the psychoanalytic diagnosis of the unresolved oedipal complex. (If you have not yet read The Sound and The Fury, it is crucial that you put it on your list) While much scholarship has been dedicated to this theory based on psychoanalysis and classical literature, relatively little has been written in the way of queer theory or resilience studies. 

Quentin's station as the most intelligent (and ineffectual) scion of the decaying Compson legacy arguably allows him the relative success of attending an Ivy League school--the Ivy League school (Harvard). One has to imagine (without having read Absolom, Absolom!) the childhood Quentin was born into. Obviously (and here is the genius of Faulkner) all that glitters ain't gold--people can hide in plain sight. The placement of expectation (and much was expected of Quentin) can determine one's path. As a form of scaffolding, the influence of a cohort or familial structure is among the most important factors contributing to the development of a mind, body, soul--an actualized individual. It is clear that somewhere Quentin was impeded, or perhaps never received a crucial "something"

"If I'd just had a mother so I could say Mother Mother."

Quentin is, without a doubt, a gentleman (characterized by loss and incapacitated by shame). Certainly a matter of queerness is a matter of sexuality and Quentin's sexuality, if we can call it a developed sexuality, is highly fraught. Living in parentheses where commas will do. A bastard with no rightful claim to bastardhood and therefore an attachment to denial. A denial of failure. A denial of (amoral) desire. A denial of self. A seeming resilience to the developmental trauma of deprivation and then self-deprivation. Unable to cry, to shout in pain. 

The Queerness of Quentin Compson III (pt 1)

By Andrew E. Colarusso

If you're unfamiliar with William Faulkner's unheimliche masterpiece, The Sound and The Fury, then perhaps it is time you familiarize yourself (however fraught that process may actually be) The novel, first published in 1929, is written in four parts from four distinct voices. These four voices have since become iconic representations of the southern gothic style (cf. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, James Dickey) and integral figures within Faulkner's mythopoetic invention of Yoknapatawpha County (more on this in subsequent posts). My interest in beginning this series is an attempt to unpack the identity of Quentin Compson III (1890--June 2, 1910), the consummate and tragic gentleman, as a figure of queerness. 

Let's begin with queerness. What does it mean for an individual to identify as queer? Typically, usage of queer is the referent of an individual's sexual proclivity, i.e. a homosexual, also typically male (though this has certainly changed over the past century). Queer is often analog to terms like fag/faggot--a word we may count among the dross of our American vernacular, but a word no less important to the fabric of our aural/oral culture (am I punning?...no, it reads as "too deliberate"). But, departing from common linguistic usage, there has been a popularization, a sort of movement (the kernel of which I'd date to the mid-late 70's) around queerness. But how? Queerness is, in a manner of speaking, an evasion--a perpetually limp wrist (There is a junk gesture that marks the junkie like the limp wrist marks the fag; the hand swings out from the elbow stiff-fingered, palm up) Queerness, perhaps as I've seen it in our present (and near future) political context, is an apolitical discourse that unsettles and therefore remains elusive and estranged from channels of power (though not necessarily estranged from agency--a sort of nowhere and everywhere occupation) (There is always movement around queerness) (Novels, in general, were heterosexual, whereas poetry was completely homosexual; I guess short stories were bisexual although he didn't say so... Anyway, the poetry scene was essentially an (underground) battle, the result of the struggle between faggot poets and queer poets to seize control of the word.) It is the refusal to choose either the sword or the ball before an observer (cf. 4th Chamber) though the ball and sword appear readily available before the queer individual. One could say it is the manner/manor/man(or) of body-form-cunctation. Hesitance. Self-consciousness. Derision of ego formation. Inaction perpetuated. The connotations here border on the negative--though there is a beauty in this, perhaps the only and crucial element when considering beauty (we shall return to this) 

Roy Cohn (as played by Al Pacino in the film adaptation of Tony Kushner's Angels in America):

No. Like all labels they tell you one thing, and one thing only: Where does an individual so identified fit into the food chain, the pecking order? Not ideology or sexual taste, but something much simpler: clout. Not who I fuck or who fucks me, but who will come to the phone when I call, who owes me favors. This is what a label refers to. Now to someone who does not understand this, a homosexual is what I am because I have sex with men, but really this is wrong. A homosexual is somebody who, in 15 years of trying cannot get a pissant anit-discrimination bill through the city council. A homosexual is somebody who knows nobody and who nobody knows. Who has zero clout. Does this sound like me Henry? 

So Quentin Compson?

(to be continued)

The Thin Man and Noir

Noir has been on my mind lately. Naturally, I turned to Dashiell Hammett when I got the urge for some mystery – picking up The Thin Man from a used book stand near Washington Square Park. Actually, the truth is I saw it and it was cheap and I liked the cover – of course, having read The Maltese Falcon a few years ago I was already familiar with his work, so I gave it a try.

I couldn’t put it down.

What fascinates me most about the noir genre, specifically those books focusing on crimes in the 20s and 30s, is the way in which the mind and clever conversation play the most important role in committing and solving a crime. The action usually occurs out of the scene, and the characters simply talk about it later, most often in the most hilarious ways (I was surprised by the comedy in fact, sometimes laughing out loud.) Some characters are never seen, communicating solely by letter or telephone.

It takes place in an era of technology before ours, when things were advanced but not enough to scrape DNA from hair samples and contact anyone from anywhere by a cell phone, when you sent harrowing letters by telegraph and the elevator boy walked you to someone’s room when you went to visit them (usually so he could become a witness for who has been entering which apartments). I read twenty pages out of a David Baldacci novel once and decided to stop on the grounds that the characters and the settings felt empty. I felt just as bored as the detective must have, waiting around for his DNA samples to be tested and his video surveillance to be analyzed. I don’t believe that crime novels now (and taking place in a contemporary setting) must be boring on account of the technology, and if someone who sees this knows a good one, I’d be very interested, but the advancement of technology certainly seems like a hindrance, especially when it comes to character development. I am not saying it can’t be done, but it seems more difficult. Characters don’t have to be particularly witty or clever or entertaining to commit crimes, they simply have to be sneaky, which is a trait inherent in all of Dashiell Hammett’s characters, guilty or not. This is a large reason for the elevation of language in Hammett’s stories, the need for each character to be extra clever, and for there to be an immediate divide between those who can speak well, and those who cannot.

Noir is a genre that becomes all about the characters – the plot lines remain generally the same; a lot of money is stolen, someone is killed, somewhere two people fall in love – what shines is the creation of characters, their differentiation through language, and the way that the author tells you straight to your face who did it as many times as he possibly can while still managing to keep you guessing until the end. Of course the not knowing is the best part – and still the picture I have of Mimi in my head makes me squirm, and her shady children certainly have something to hide. The mafia man Morelli in the speakeasy probably lied about everything he said, and why did the bar owner Studsy beat the hell

out of the pale man? Will we ever really know who murdered Julia Wolf? But I am intrigued by the title – The Thin Man…I won’t say too much because I don’t want to give it away, but the title is exceptionally clever and the more I consider it the more I find it to be the perfect title. The word “thin” can mean so many things beyond weight, and if you consider the various goals of the various characters in the novel, you will begin to understand what I mean.

What does it take to make new noir? I seem to only be able to turn to movies, which may not be completely considered noir but have the feel – like The Machinist, or Memento, where the solution that puts the focus back on the mind is taken care of by a character not being completely sane; or The Silence of the Lambs, where the crime solving is done precisely in the way it is done in Hammett, by clever dialogue between clever characters. (I have never read the books the movie is based off of, maybe it is worth a try.) There are twenty other films I could name, I am sure, (Fargo, Taxi Driver, Blood Simple, Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, etc.) but I guess the question is still left at what it takes to write it, what must be present, and what must not be present – or what must be present and yet remain as hidden as possible to the reader. As always, I am very interested in the structure of things, and the only problem with noir is, the point is to make the structure utterly confusing. All the more interesting for investigation, I say.

--Eric Adamson