How the West was Exchanged for a More Dynamic West

Is there no value that cannot be exchanged for a more dynamic value? Two authors come to mind: Tao Lin and Zadie Smith. Our Contemporaries. I plan on doing a brief comparative study. I see that a comparitive study is necessary, for each of these authors have exchanged the truth value of violence (I am cut, therefore I bleed) for the truth value of conception (sperm meets the egg, then Mr/Ms Baby is born).

EEEEEEEE by Lin is a short novel divided into three parts (reminiscent of another baby book by Ariel Dorfman), there is pre-womb, womb, and violence/conception/marriage. The first part, which deals in the black spaces of nonexistence, involves the conversation between two specks. One speck is an Israeli, the other an unidentified militant subversive with no particular political partiality. One may ask, on hearing the summary, how can specks speak to one another? Well, this is a good question, rather it is a point. We all know that 'pre-womb' in reality is an ominous darkness, similar in some ways to the stage directions in The Tempest (shapes appear, what is a shape?) and to give this ominous darkness specks is for no other reason than to make it recordable. I have no patience for this bastardization of pre-reality, and the conversation between the specks is null. The exchange is obvious. If you can't see in this example how value (p) is exchanged for dynamic P (D{p}) then I suggest reading Plot to Underestimate America by Richard Yates.
We will skip over the second part of Tao Lin's book. "The womb," he writes, "is the whale, the embryo is the whale-song" I think not, Mr. Lin. I think not!
However, the third portion of this book is fascinating. And while this is only a blog I cannot go into greater detail. Though I would like to cover one scene in particular. The anti-protagonist, a fellow named Mike (may or may not be the speck/embryo(whale-song)) marries an ex-prostitute involved in the theater (we thank M. Proust for this inspiration) and after seeing that she has been unfaithful to him with a killer whale (motiff or fugue?) He impregnates her. Instead of intercourse, however, he clubs her over the head. Perhaps the blood, which Lin descibes as "crawling from her skull, across the Venetian rug, like a melting ice statue, not at all like a human baby" is supposed to bring us back to the pre-womb specks, for pre-life and conception, both in Lin's world, are impossibilities without discreet ideologies (that is, without discreet relationships to the material world (i.e., -D{p/-p})). Is it cyncism or an objective look at dynamic exchange when Mike, after killing/impregnating his ex-prostitute thespian, befriends the killer whale and invites him out for drinks so they may sing together? My opinion: It is Lin's conception of 'truth' after truth values have been exchanged for more dynamic truth values. (We may write the equation like this: +/-p =-p-+p{D(p)=D(-p)}).

Oh, out of time. I have not yet covered Zadie Smith's Authograph Man. This will be the next blog. My penis has fallen out of my pants and my dog has just entered the study. And a good day to you!

Psychic exchange in the work of Tobias Wolff

I was in my study this afternoon, paging through a collected works of Tobias Wolff, his exploration of what he refers to as "scout exchanges." There are three stories in the "scout exchanges" cycle: Melancholy Theodore, The Night Carries All it Needs to Tie a Knot, and In the Garden of North American Martyrs. In each story (third-person or first) a male scout attaches himself to another male scout. In each story the mystery of kinship is equated to the natural and untamed (in two cases nocturnal, ...Theodore however takes place at the boatshow in the sunlight, and the untamed natural is designated by an angry cat (Tesla)).


In The Night Carries... young Christopher (third-person) takes even younger scout Micheal onto the lake one cool evening. They ride a motorized boat. Christopher is a Torch-Bearer; Micheal is a Tenderfoot. "A boy is awkward," writes Wolff, "before he experiences the phenomenon of Koolie Fish with another boy. There were boys who jerked off in the motorized boat while alone, and the Koolie fish showed up because they sensed the horniness. But those boys never thought a thing about them."


It's not until a boy is horny with another boy, says Wolff, that the presence of the Koolie fish is observed. In The Night Carries... the older scout, Christopher (who has been known to creep through the shower stalls when it was not his time) orders Micheal, the younger, to drop his scout-colored khakis and make a horny little boy out of himself. The younger scout, being a boy, thinks this is a 'hazing' though he doesn't use this word. He says to himself "Even before I'm given a rope, or even a post, I'm expected to tie this first knot. This knot is something that can only be tied in the night."


The scouts get horny together. The motorized boat (the motor shut off) licks back and forth in the water. The night "is as sweet as a bosc(sic) pear" When the first Koolie fish appear, like puddles of ancient jelly, floating on the lake's surface, smelling the horniness, the boys take no notice. It is not until the Koolie fish, red and wiggling, come over the boat's edge and rest themselves at the boys' feet that Micheal, the younger scout, hollers. "We're being attacked," he shouts.


Christopher, the older scout, knows better. He is in the daze. "Relax," he says. "They're only fish. This whole night depends on the heat we can make. Just you and me."



What Tobias Wolff is concerned with, it's clear, is how the tender little beasts inside of us summon unwanted beasts from the unknown. It's as if Kant's a priori had a slight opening in its defining partition. Not a loophole, but a window for exchange between the sensible and the senseless.

This was my first 'blog.' I hope you bear with me. Next time I will discuss the opening in Kant's partition and other exchanges. Psychic currency, to utilize a phrase made popular by Noel Winters in his Culture and Currency: How the West was Exchanged for a More Dynamic West