close
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20111224045211/http://heteronomy.wordpress.com:80/category/sunday-stories/

The Weblog

Home for the heteronomous

Sunday Stories: flat

It was hard work. With flat tires it is as if you are constantly riding into a headwind. Joe also cursed the moment he decided to put on his winter coat. When it’s rainy in October, it isn’t necessarily cold as well. That much he knew now – but now it was too late. He was stuck in his coat. It was raining. Even if it hadn’t rained the coat was too thick to be put away in something; the sleeves were also too thick to allow tying the coat around his waist. So he wasn’t even half way when he noticed that he didn’t just have a flat tire but that he was beginning to sweat profusely. He thought it was pathetic that – well into his 40′s – he had not managed to learn how to properly inflate his tires.

His awkwardness was however not his main concern. He knew that, beyond the next crossroads, his left flank would be at the mercy of wind and rain, because, once there, on his left there would only be the park. After the traffic lights, the sadly impersonal six- and seven-storey buildings for the wealthier public of modern perfectionism would only be to his right. The gusts of wind would come from his left. Joe thought they were strong gusts but that could as well have been a feeling caused by all too flat tires. It was worse than he expected. He felt like he wasn’t making any progress whatsoever. In front of him he saw how a sheer endless piece of sidewalk – clumsily painted in red – tried to make him feel like he was on a real red cycling track.

He had hated parks as long as he could remember. Read more »

December 11, 2011 Posted by | Sunday Stories, waking up in a cold sweat | Leave a Comment

Sunday Stories: he

He flat out forgot what he wanted to write about. The only thought that came to him was that ‘flat out forgot’ had quite a nice ring to it but that ‘that ‘flat out forgot’ had a quite nice ring to it’ didn’t (have a nice ring to it). That thought was disappointing he thought. “Keep it simple!”, so he was told; and he wondered whether that was what they said to his son’s friend, who killed himself the other day. It must have gone splash. That would have been simple enough, comic book simple. Not that it wasn’t well meant advise or anything. He was sure it was even good advise. Like ‘show, don’t tell’ which he got from some literary agent website advertising master classes for aspiring writers. He was an aspiring writer but he didn’t want to be taught, let alone recognize a master.

Maybe they both overcomplicated things. Maybe only one of them recognized it was due to aspirations that they couldn’t possibly fulfill. He felt like a one armed pole vaulter but he knew this was just complex self-deception covering up simple self-deception. Diversion was needed. Like when you are in a moving vehicle and you wonder what the person living over yonder in that house beyond the grazing cows is feeling like. She could have talent without aspiration. It was easy for him to fall in love with her because she Read more »

November 27, 2011 Posted by | Solidarity, Sunday Stories | , | 3 Comments

Sunday Stories: she

She was somewhat of a number. Like many of her generation she longed for epic disaster as the only way out of her present predicament. Getting hit by a car, for instance, when crossing the road. Unfortunately for her longing, she crossed roads in a prudent manner not just respecting all applicable regulations but building in additional safety. This meant her chances of car injury were vanishingly slim. It was not a matter of avoiding being hit by a car, she was just unable to break rules that made sense to her. And it made a lot of sense to her not to burden an accidental driver by with the guilt of having hit anybody.

Hers is a familiar position to be in: confined without being physically restricted. She realized it and that’s how she  came to plan her escape from civilization. Read more »

November 13, 2011 Posted by | politics, Sunday Stories | , | 3 Comments

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (last)

Bad things come to an end as well. This was a long haul. It certainly had its moments. There was enough raw imagination in it to permit being endlessly diluted to sub-homeopathic doses and still provide just about enough inspiration to an uninspired screenwriter to come up with a TV series which is not entirely Lost as far as entertainment value is concerned.

But all in all it required too much perseverance and provided too little ongoing incentive. That not only might be but most  probably was fully intended. Still, the ending definitely pushed it too far. It looked like a first time marathon runner who has overdressed and staggers – dehydrated – to what he takes to be the finish but actually falls a significant ‘somewhat’ short of it.

Absent a clue, I’ll remember Pökler.

Read more »

October 23, 2011 Posted by | Small Talk About the Weather, Sunday Stories | , | Comments Off

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (7)

This is the time of the Great Paranoia. Where good and bad billionaires set up their factions of militant activism preparing a struggle that could lead to enough insecurity to justify a backlash that would provide security for billionaires – of both sides. “Otto is earnestly explaining his views on the Mother Conspiracy. It’s not often a sympathetic girl will listen. The Mothers get together once a year, in secret, at these giant conventions, and exchange information. Recipes, games, key phrases to use on their children. ‘What did yours use to say when she wanted to make you feel guilty?’” A whole generation, which is only now finding the truth behind the adjective ‘lost’ attached to my generation, set up to defend a status quo that will allow this generation to live past a 100 years old, past 200 years old, until a time when death is finally pronounced dead.

“Tits ‘n ass,” mutter the girls, “tits ‘n ass. That’s all we are around here.”

It was prophetical to use the detective story analogy. Everybody is (a) suspect now. Read more »

October 16, 2011 Posted by | economics, Sunday Stories | , | Comments Off

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (6)

It is not about us. It is about them. No capital T, just a t. No drama but only performance. “We’ll all use it, someday, to leave the earth. To transcend.” Everything can be forgiven, everything except for the lack of aspiration that is normally called out by the label ‘ambition’. “They were athletic, brainless men without vision, without imagination. But they had power, and it was hard for him not to think of them as superior, even while holding them in a certain contempt.” A time is coming that will be the time for the weak. Emancipation of the weak is unavoidable. In the quadrialectics of strength we have reached the stage where muscular strength is still being compensated for by strength of character. The base movement is nevertheless a movement of removing strength from equations.

Read more »

October 9, 2011 Posted by | moving, Sunday Stories | , | Comments Off

Synday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (5)

It is difficult to like a book (this one) and hate its main character (Tyrone Slothrop) and do both at the same time. But what is difficult is not impossible. The RocketMan stuff is like torture to me. It is endless, pointless and basically narcissistic as far as I can tell: an exercise in showing off unbounded imagination rather then imagination trying to break bounds. Maybe there is an incredibly super-intelligent purpose in subjecting the reader to such a masochistic experience. Maybe the point is that it prepares us to have a more forceful literary orgasm when we finally reach Mexico or Pökel. Maybe it’s even deeper than any of that, but however unfathomable it may be: I hate show-offs.

“Slothrop has the inborn gift of selecting the wrong gear for all occasions, and anyhow he’s jittery, eye in the mirror and out the back of his head aswarm with souped-up personnel carriers and squadrons of howling Thunderbolts.” Whipped I feel, over the buttocks with a rather thin cane.  Did it make me enjoy the following quote more? “They want a negative birth rate. The program is racial suicide.” It did not. I would have enjoyed that anyway. Back to the whipping: Read more »

October 2, 2011 Posted by | Sunday Stories, torture | , | 1 Comment

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (4)

What is paranoia but being haunted by your own attempt at making sense of what you are doing? You know: “This is the kind of sunset you hardly see any more, a 19th-century wilderness sunset, a few of which got set down, approximated, on canvas, landscapes of the American West by artists nobody ever heard of, when the land was still free and the eye innocent, and the presence of the Creator much more direct.” Type of thing. Kind of.

I don’t particularly like Slothrop. I certainly don’t like the intermittent song lyrics. It is not their sporadic showing up I don’t like, it is the lyrics qua lyrics I don’t like. I have no clue how to sing them. They don’t make sense. It is well possible that both the lyrics and Slothrop are intentional nuisances (a bit like this maybe), but I still don’t like them. Go figure. But I do like the hatred of cruelty done to animals: Read more »

September 18, 2011 Posted by | Sunday Stories | , | 3 Comments

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (3)

Waves are awesome (specifically, but not only, standing waves). It’s hard to resonate with particles. Maybe it is time for the invention of ondulism were it not for the fact that it sounds so very much like botulism. Luckily, it seems that the original Latin string came from undo (stress the last syllable) and that the French got it in their usual way backwards in inverting the vowels in the stem to onde. So, undolism it is (and we’ll regard it as a sign of the universe’s harmony that this word is close to the closely related ‘indolence’). It’s indolence that explains how the way I came to undolism is immaterial, as it is undolism making my indolence in all of this possible.

It is really hard, you know, the Gravity of this Rainbow is weighing heavily on me. Mostly I just read on as if I’m getting in shape for some literary event of Olympic proportions. “But the reality is not reversible. Each firebloom, followed by blast then by sound of arrival is a mockery (how can it not be deliberate?) of the reversible process: with each one the Lord further legitimates his State, (..)” Fuck reality. A wave can be traversed in either direction; it is not the time that counts, it is the wave that counts and how it can be regardless of time, of reversibility and irreversibility.

Read more »

September 4, 2011 Posted by | Sunday Stories | , | Comments Off

Sunday Stories: Gravity’s Rainbow (2)

Back to the detective work. Let’s start with a clue:

“Why is your equation only for angels, Roger? Why can’t we do something, down here? Couldn’t there be an equation for us too, something to help us find a safer place?”

I was thinking about a detective who forgot the solution, that he even forgot to differentiate between clues and non-clues. I believe that may not have been radical enough. Maybe the crime was also part of the pattern of amnesia; not that there was a crime but what the crime was. Maybe this gives a clue: “The young statistician is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between.”?

Is the crime that there is something to write a story about? Something unpredictable and undefined that gave rise to both the defined and the desire for the predictable? Too many questions. Let us try an example: sex. Read more »

August 21, 2011 Posted by | meta, Sunday Stories | , | 1 Comment

« Previous Entries    

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.