Most Useful Information for July 2023
Throwing eggs, puking, Jean Genet twice, plagiarism, and evil
Pre-Useful Information
The last two months there’s been no written useful information. Just podcasts. This month there will only be written information. No podcasts. In September or October things might go back to the way they used to be. A newsletter the first Thursday of the month. A podcast in the middle of the month.
I’ll probably start printing and mailing newsletters again. Let me know if you want one.
Thanks for bearing with me during these chaotic times.
What’s the point?
One summer nite I got off work and called Ryan.
“What are we doing tonite?”
“Tim A. had the idea to go to the new Walgreens, buy eggs, walk out, and throw them at Walgreens.”
“Sounds fun.”
Quickly plans changed. Tim A., Molly, Ryan and I went to Rosauers. Ryan shoplifted a dozen eggs and a package of rubber gloves. We walked to Winco. Put on the gloves. Bought five dozen eggs. Paid cash. Asked the cashier to touch the receipt a lot with his hands. Walked three miles out of town to where they’d built a new Toyota dealership.
Around midnite we arrived. There were people inside. Lights on. We were about to head home when the lights went out. A few cars left the lot. In seconds the building was covered in dozens of eggs. We were about to walk back when Ryan said he left a note in the front door written on the back of the egg receipt about the “tyranny of toyota” and the “ignorant perpetuation of fossil fuels.” Molly and Tim A. (very sensible people) said we needed to get that note back. With the receipt they would find us. Ryan thought cops were too stupid. Went back to grab the receipt when a car pulled into the parking lot. Someone forgot their jacket. We left the note, hoped Ryan was right, and got out of there.
The next day Tim A. was walking to the laundromat. A cop stopped him. The cop was married to Tim’s high school Spanish teacher. The cop said he knew what Tim did. The cop said, “I used to watch you play soccer in high school. What happened to you?” Tim was pretty freaked out.
After ignoring his calls all day I invited the cop over to my apartment. We would talk to him. We made omelets. The cop said it smelled really good. I said, “we’re making omelets, do you want one?” Not for one second did the cop understand the joke we were doing.
We got in trouble. We (Molly) baked him a vegan (no eggs) cake and wrote apologies in frosting. We were charged with trespassing and malicious mischief (fair enough). Got some “free” hippie lawyer that hated big oil to take care of everything. (He told us it was “pro bono” then sent us a bill for $800. I might not know what pro bono means. We never paid him. Years later I saw him sweeping the sidewalk outside his office and we waved to each other, but I crosse the street to avoid chatting.) Had to pay clean up costs, which were undoubtedly inflated (over $1000 to hose some egg off some windows. Yeah, right.).
Local newspapers called my parents. My parents called me. They were mad. Until they read about it in the local newspapers. (link here). My mom said, “I still think you’re stupid, but I can see how this is funny.” My grandfather couldn’t stop laughing. The owner of the local bookstore tracked me down at work and said, “Next time don’t get caught.” A conservative blog said we’d never get jobs. Time magazine said we were the third dumbest terrorists ever. Slightly dumber than the shoe bomber. (link here).
Throwing eggs at a car dealership because you’re bored on a Wednesday night is nothing but silly and maybe annoying. And childish. The Toyota dealership was surprised and pissed at how old we were. At our age we should behave within the rules of adult society. We shouldn’t be so silly and annoying. That stuff is for kids. Therefore we were criminals. Villains. Evil.
I bring all this up because all three books this month are about children and evil.
Literature and Evil by Georges Bataille. First published in 1957. Translated from French into English by Alastair Hamilton. Published by Penguin Classics in 2012.
Evil is when someone rebels, rejects, disrupts, ignores, transcends the established laws of society for no material gain. Evil acts only become evil if the actor enjoys committing it “independent of the advantage to be obtained from it.” If there is material gain it isn’t evil. Laws governing society were established through rationality and politeness. Do you know who is irrational and impolite? Children. Children are evil.
In Wuthering Heights Heathcliff and Kathy fall in love as children. “They abandon themselves, untrammeled by any restraint or convention… But, in their innocence, they placed their indestructible love for one another on another level, and indeed perhaps this love can be reduced to the refusal to give up an infantile freedom.” Love is based on freedom. As they grow up Kathy abandons her “infantile freedom.” She gets married and dies like a normal person. Heathcliff refuses. His refusal is “that of a child against the world of Good, against the adult world.” Heathcliff’s adult life is spent enacting revenge on the adult world that stripped him of love and freedom. He gains nothing in return.
Each chapter focuses on a different writer. Each writer rejects the adult world in favor of childhood or childishness. From rejection comes freedom. But sometimes freedom is evil. Bataille sets a template and fills in specifics for Emily Bronte, Baudelaire, Michelet, William Blake, Marquis de Sade, Proust, Kafka, and Jean Genet. Some are famously evil (Baudelaire, Sade, Genet). Others aren’t (Blake, Proust, Kafka). When evil means child instead of adult Blake and Proust make sense. When evil means rejecting the adult (working) world Kafka makes sense. I still don’t know who Michelet is.
Sade wrote most of 120 Days of Sodom while imprisoned in the Bastille. He, supposedly, saw a mob rioting outside the prison and yelled from his window, “They are eating people in here!” The Bastille was stormed. “Instead of liberating its author, the mob at the Bastille lost the manuscript which was the first expression of the full horror of liberty.” Sade’s manuscript lost forever. Until it was found and published. Now we know the full horror of liberty. There’s a reason we abandon infantile freedom. As adults we give up liberty because liberty is gross and a bit dull.
Maybe what separates the irrational world of children and the rational world of adults is our responsibility to one another. Heathcliff refuses responsibility to anyone and that makes him a child. Similarly Sade’s libertines seek their own personal pleasure regardless of expense. Acting as an isolated individual without care or responsibility for others is childish and evil.
The most evil of all is Jean Genet. To be the most evil means to be an entirely isolated individual. Thus entirely sovereign. Being sovereign rejects society, its laws, and the people who follow them. Genet does what he wants. He rejects connection, responsibility, and communication. Dependent on no one. No dependents. “Sovereignty is the power to rise, indifferent to death, above the laws which ensure the maintenance of life.” Genet wants sovereignty. He won’t grow up and die like a normal person.
But, “humanity is not composed of isolated beings but of communication between them.” Sovereignty makes Genet most evil. It also isolates him from the world. Isolation neuters evil. What good is evil if it cannot be communicated to others? How can we know Genet is sovereign if Genet can’t communicate his way of being? We can’t. “The sovereignty to which man constantly aspires has never even been accessible and we have no reason to think it ever will be. All we can hope for is a momentary grace which allows us to reach for this sovereignty although the kind of rational effort we make to survive will get us nowhere. Never can we be sovereign.” Most of us have moments of evil. We brush against limits but don’t cross them. Or we exceed limits but only temporarily. I may throw eggs at a car dealership but I’m not always throwing eggs at a car dealership. Genet tried to transcend the limits of society. He tried for permanent sovereignty. Constant evil. He failed.
As an undergraduate I took a summer course titled, “The History of Sexuality.” In that course we learned about the sacred and the profane. How the profane could become sacred through ritual. We read, among other things, Philosophy in the Boudoir by the Marquis de Sade, which was both lurid and extremely boring. The instructor was a loose mentor to me and my friends. We’d go to his office just to hear him talk. He told us if we ever wanted to have a really weird night we should go home and watch The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover. We went home, watched the movie, and had a really weird night.
Right now it's clear to me that a lot of the class was informed by Bataille, which is ironic because I distinctly remember my professor telling me that if I didn’t get into Georges Bataille by the time I was 22 I would probably never get into Georges Bataille. He is a young man’s philosopher. Obsessed with childhood and youthful acts of rebellion, which would have meant a lot to me as a 22 year old. Still, there’s something about encountering a book for the first time at a period when it doesn’t resonate emotionally. Distance allows me to sift through the ideas. Take what’s useful and leave what’s not. At the very least reading it now, I’m less likely to act like an asshole and justify it philosophically.
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker. First published in 1978.
In the world of Blood and Guts in High School it’s the adults who are evil and the adults who want to be individual. Not children. Children want connection. Janey is a child. She is ten years old and lives with her father who is also her boyfriend. She is jealous because her father starts seeing another woman. Her father starts seeing another woman because being Janey’s boyfriend makes him miserable. Not because of incest, because of how controlling and demanding Janey is. “You’ve dominated my life, Janey, for the last nine years and I no longer know who’s you and who’s me. I have to be alone. You’ve been alone for a while, you know that need: I have to find out who I am.” He moves to America to be an individual. As a result, Janey suffers.
She’s on a quest for love. “I was desperate to fuck more so I could finally get to love.” Janey’s father is too concerned about his individuality, his identity to love Janey or let Janey love him. Love is childish. Requires porous boundaries. Love is still based on freedom but freedom looks different for Janey than Heathcliff. Janey is on a quest for porous boundaries, where she is indistinct from others. From the world. There she’ll find freedom.
Janey moves to New York City and works at a bakery. Customers behave badly. Disgust her. She joins a gang. Has a lot of sex. Two abortions. Everyone in her gang dies in a car crash except her. Thieves break into her apartment and kidnap her. They give her to a Persian slave trader. She writes a book report on The Scarlet Letter where she says, “The society in which I’m living is totally fucked-up. I don’t know what to do.” She’s right.
Before becoming a prostitute for the Persian slave trader she gets cancer. He sets her free. She moves to Tangier and hangs out with Jean Genet. Genet falls in love with Jimmy Carter. Janey dies.
Janey moves from place to place, person to person trying to find love. She never does. True love isn’t possible because the society she lives in is totally fucked up. Society extols individuality, boundaries. Love doesn’t.
Acker theorizes a radical world without distinction, without boundaries.
The night was black and the universe was black. You weren’t able to distinguish any forms in this night. A black band separated the black earth from the black sky. All over was just blackness, a layer of blackness.
You, the thing you called ‘you’, was a ball turning and turning in the blackness only the blackness wasn’t something - like ‘black’ - and it wasn’t nothingness ‘cause nothingness was somethingness.
“The thing you called ‘you”” suggests ‘you’ is merely a name one gives oneself and not an accurate one. Distinguishing anything in the blackness, isolating anything from its environment is wrong. You are not distinct from the blackness and humans are not distinct from animals nor the environment. Distinction is an illusion that needs to be destroyed.
Every day a sharp tool, a powerful destroyer, is necessary to cut away dullness, lobotomy, buzzing, belief in human beings, stagnancy, images, and accumulation. As soon as we stop believing in human beings, rather know we are dogs and trees, we’ll start to be happy.
Once we’ve gotten a glimpse of the vision world (notice here how the conventional language obscures: WE as if somebodies are the centre of activity SEE what is the centre of activity: pure VISION. Actually, the VISION creates US. Is anything true?) Once we have gotten a glimpse of the vision world, we must be careful not to think the vision world is us. We must go farther and become crazier.
Once we destroy the human impulse for distinction, for individuality happiness and love can begin. Doing so requires conceptualizing new capacious languages. Doing so requires becoming crazy. But only in the eyes of a totally fucked-up society.
Acker’s attack on distinction is apparent in both format and content. The content consists of text. Some of it is written by Acker. Some of it is plagiarized. Sometimes the text is formatted like a novel. Sometimes like a play. Sometimes like a diary. Sometimes like a book report. No distinction between genre. In addition to text there are drawings. Of bodies. Of maps. No distinction between words and images. The format is fragments and collage. The fragments flow into one another without comment and without distinction. Beyond the form and content Acker’s use of plagiarism undermines the idea of a distinct, individual author. The book is an attempt at creating a world without distinction. A world of love.
Throughout the novel various men own Janey. Her dad, gang leader, Persian slave trader, Jean Genet. Then death. Love requires giving up a sense of individual identity. Freeing oneself from oneself. But there are other ways to lose an individual identity. Acker shows that each relationship Janey has with a man Janey has to give up herself, her distinction in ways that don’t constitute love. Having yourself taken from you rather than willingly given up is the opposite of love but the way of the totally fucked up society we live in.
The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll. First published in 1978.
Like Janey, Jim Carroll is a child. These diaries were written between ages twelve and sixteen. That makes him evil. Like Janey, he would say that the adults are evil and if he is evil, like Janey, it’s because of the totally fucked-up society he was born into, which makes it to hard to tell if he’s evil by choice or circumstances. Is he rebelling or following a natural flow? Probably both.
Unlike Georges Bataille and unlike Kathy Acker Jim Carroll doesn’t have grand theories of society, categories, distinctions, or individuality. Instead he’s great at basketball. Basketball earns him a scholarship to a private high school he couldn’t otherwise afford nor have interest in attending. At fifteen he gets addicted to heroin. Before that he sniffed glue, skipped school, stole, vandalized, prostituted, and any other sin you can think of. For a while he was confused. Thought marijuana was addicting and heroin was safe. Oopsies.
Carroll lets a man masturbate while watching a parrot eat grapes out of his teenage pubic hair. With the money he’s paid he buys drugs. He does drugs in a park with his buddies. The cops find them. He runs from the cops. He and his buddy have to jump off a small cliff. His buddy still has needles in his arms when he jumps. Carroll sprains his ankle. They find a dead pig floating down the Hudson River. Carroll gets kicked out of his house. He spends time in Rikers. He pukes a lot. A lot of his friends die.
Throughout the book Carroll refers to himself as a war baby with “war baby blues.” A child born in the wake of World War Two ingrained with a fear of air raids and nuclear apocalypse. His parents, their generation, built a totally fucked-up society where nuclear war is real possible.
When they dropped them A-bombs on Japsville I wasn’t even an idea, but I paid for it anyhow all through growing up and I’m still paying. The “war baby” gig ain’t no smartass headshrinker’s dumb theory, and all the people who grew up when I did can tell you that. I used to have horrible dreams of goblins in tiny planes circling my room and bombing my bed most every night age six or seven; every time a fire truck or an ambulance passed the house I was pissing with fear in my mother’s arms with the idea that it was the air raid finally come, and real air raid drills still freak me when I’m stoned. The worst is the old buggers can’t believe it’s real, that it could ever happen to us. Now there’s a big peace move growing in this country and my old man and the rest are calling me a creep and saying it’s all some commie who brain-washed us all, it’s them fucking commies, that’s all. Shit I don’t give a royal screw what a commie is. It’s just the dreams we remember that make us want to end your nuclear games. I think more about a fire truck passing late at night than I do about Karl Marx when I’m out yelling for them to fuck your wars, I don’t pay no dues to no commies, that’s some dream dreamed up to take the rap for you. The Russians are a drag too, you’re all old men drags, scheming governments of death and blinding white hair.
The rational world of adults brought world wars and nuclear bombs. It also brought poverty and drugs. It established the authoritarian schools he’s kicked out of, the cops that harass him, and the prisons he sleeps in. The rebellion is intentional. “I feel like farting and blowing up the 257 years of fine tradition of this place.” Bataille would say Carroll is evil in his rejection of the adult world and for clearly gaining nothing from his rebellion.
Carroll starts a steady relationship with an older woman. When they sleep together she wants Carroll to pretend he is her son. While pretending he is her son she dresses him in drag, so then he pretends he is her daughter. As things go on, though, he pretends that he is the mother and she is the daughter. Carroll is paid but roleplaying is too much. Not worth it. He takes sixty dollars from her and leaves. As he leaves she yells, “What about my sixty dollars?” and he responds, “What about my innocence?”
Earlier on a subway high on heroin Carroll sees a woman sitting in a skirt with her legs apart. He can see her underwear. He walks up to her and asks her to close her legs because he “is barely fifteen and it’s distracting and, frankly, lewd.”
Presumably everything in Basketball Diaries actually happened. It’s written in casual deadpan, refusing sensationalism. Nothing is a big deal. Boring day to day life of a poor junkie kid in New York. These little jokes about innocence tied up with screeds about nuclear war illustrate Carroll never had innocence. The totally fucked-up society he lived in didn’t give him a chance. His rebellion wasn’t intentional. He was born into it. He just went with the flow.
The book ends with a desire to purge society from his being and start fresh, start innocent. “I got to go and puke. I just want to be pure…”
***
Here’s a song Jim Carroll wrote about his friends that died.