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By next week, I hope to get a “comments” function added to VM. Until then, I’ll post any e-mailed responses people have to the blog. This one comes from someone I don’t know. One of my coworkers has forwarded my Passion Play to some people, and it’s begun meme-ing around:

Mel Gibson is no more Mad Max than this guy Gil is Jesus Christ. Perhaps the “Kingdom of God within you” includes the tolerance and wisdom that acknowledges the human inside the actor. That wisdom would also allow that the relationship to worship starts with the idolizer — not the idol. Gil seeing these celebrities as idols and not humans is his problem — don’t you think?

And a long response just showed up this very minute:

Lighten up! It’s only a movie. Haven’t seen it yet but it’s on my list, especially after the crowds dwindle. Mel became MY theologian with the first Mad Max movie. The second Lethal Wepon solidified his position along side St. Augustine, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and the Reverends Jerry Falwell and Al Sharpton.

And since when are whores a bad thing? Profitable business acumen, usually. Highly motivated, usually. And victimless, usually. Besides, who’s to complain if Brittany Spears wants to stick her tongue down the appropriately monikered Madonna’s throat? Certainly not the NASCAR Dads.

After all, the denial-of-sex-as-a-natural, biological function – especially as it pertains to the two women-twins concept – dominates the entire Bush Administration psyche. To wit, John Ashcroft’s throwing a sheet over the Statue of Justice. After reading the Patriot Act, that drapping, his first official act as Attorney General, is highly symbolic and evocative of his trampling on America’s civil rights, not to mention his part in the usurpation Christ’s Kingdom here on Earth.

Gil, I was born American with a French, Scot, and Native American heritage. I was raised Catholic (I’m Lapsed at the moment); I wasn’t born one and I’m horrified by ALL Born Again bigots. Never in my parents home did I hear ANYTHING that suggested that Jews were responsible for Christ’s death. To the contrary, what I was taught both at home and at the mandatory religious classes from first-through-twelfth grades was this: Jesus was a Jewish carpenter who died for the sins of mankind. True or not, what’s not to admire?

It’s clear that you — with the entire Bush cohort — have missed the point. For now, at least, we have the ability to view, read, hear, feel, experience — or not — pretty much everything. Choose as you will, rail against whatever you will.

My suggestion for you, Gil, is to focus on matters that really count: your loss of civil liberties under the guise of Homeland Security, for example. Or to understand what Junior (who should be tried in the Hague for Crimes Against Humanity), Cheney, Ashcroft, Rice, Perle, Wolfowitz, and sadly Colin Powell — are really doing. I do not want to live in a prison, even one as vast as the continental United States; for reference please read Kafka’s “Metamorphosis.”

So, please don’t do anything harsh to my friend, [who forwarded your post to me], or anyone else for that matter. Whether or not my God is within me, I do my best to find the Almighty in a good glass-or-three-or-four of beer, as, apparently, should you. If, however, drinking to excess doesn’t work for you, perhaps another movie that opens this weekend may work: Club Dread. My daughter, who lives in Mexico where this was filmed, has a minor role in it.

Hasta manana,

Pablo Incognito

As my friend, who forwarded this over to me, writes, “I don’t think he’s read anything else you’ve written, Gil.”

And, in the midst of posting that e-mail, here comes one from a buddy I met back in grad school:

good entry.

couldn’t the same thing be said for celebs who become sociopolitical theorists and soapbox firebrands every election year?

It doesn’t really matter, anyway. I’m hoping Club Dread (from the makers of Super Troopers) will dwarf what I like to call “the passion the of the christ” at the box office this weekend.

So it appears the jury is in! If Club Dread manages to bring in more box office than Mel Gibson, I’ll have somehow triumphed. I think. GodDAMN is this a confusing world.

Anyway, in response to Pablo Incognito, be assured that I’m all about frivolous entertainment. It seems to me that this movie (the Jesus one) doesn’t qualify as frivolous. It’s not a free speech issue at all. I’m not calling for the movie to be banned. I’m calling for people to find their interpretation of religion somewhere other than on a movie screen. And if watching someone’s flesh get flayed for an hour is your idea of frivolous entertainment, you should probably seek therapy.

I haven’t been out to see The Passion of the Christ. I don’t really plan on doing so, but I have a question for those of you who are going to see it:

If this movie was directed by someone who wasn’t a Hollywood movie star, would you go to see it?

If the answer is yes, then you can skip on to another entry. But if your answer (look in your heart) is no, then let me ask this followup question:

When did Mel Gibson become our pre-eminent theologian?

Because this movie is about theology, and it comes from a pretty fringe sect of Catholicism, as near as I can gather. I also gather that the grand majority of Americans had no idea what this sect was, prior to Gibson’s movie project.

So, has it become compelling subject matter because it’s being promoted by Mel Gibson? If so, do you realize how absolutely insane that position is? You’re saying, “I want to try to get a better understanding of the Gospels through an interpretation by the man best known for the Lethal Weapon movies.” Why on earth would anyone give credence to that person’s views?

You wanna know why? It’s because we live in a culture of starfucking celebrity-whores, and this is just the most extreme example of that to come along in, oh, a week or two. Sure, we thought that having Congressional hearings about an over-the-hill pop diva’s breast-exposure was bad, but we’re at a point where the national conversation is about Mad Max’s take on Jesus Christ!

How insane can you fucking people get?! Read a motherfucking book! Read the Gospels, if that’s what you want to understand! I’m a Jew, so this stuff isn’t my province, but isn’t the kingdom of God supposed to be within you?

And print this out and pass it on to anyone stupid enough to give a crap about what the star of Bird on a Wire thinks about the redemption of our souls.

–Gil Roth
groth@chimeraobscura.com

I’ve been a little busy procrastinating lately, so here’s an entry from Sirk, one of my devoted readers:

My iPodMini passed away this morning at the ripe old age of 5 days. In those 5 days it played 2 complete songs and 20 minutes of an audiobook, twice completed syncs with no songs present on the hard drive and had to be restored once. It is survived by an iRiver iFP-395T. Requiscat in pace and may God have mercy on Steve Jobs’ soul.

Record traffic for Virtual Memories this month (and there’s still a few days left, plus it’s a short month)!

Now if only more of you would buy The Immensity of the Here and Now, that novel about 9.11 by Paul West that I published last fall.

Last week, I mentioned that I needed a translation from the Swedish for this review of Immensity. Well, Ken Schubert took care of it for me, and did a bang-up job. Here’s his translation:

“I’ve become an anxious person”

The art, film and music worlds responded quickly to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center. Literature was slower. Dan Jonsson has read three novels about two airplanes that changed the world.

Caption: Why did the world change? Was it all the suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production?

For once, it appears to have actually happened.

The events in New York on September 11, 2001 literally changed the world.

Maybe the question we should be asking ourselves is what really caused that change. Was it all the human suffering, the dead people? Or was it the resemblance between the events and a media production — images of the planes crashing into the buildings, the soundlessly collapsing towers, the ash-strewn surroundings and the austere romanticism of Ground Zero? The symbolic, clinical sharpness of the images painstakingly concealed the essence of the attack — the death of its victims.

Literary portrayals of major historical traumas are normally long in coming, but September 11 has provoked prompt counterattacks on all fronts. Last fall marked the release of Paul West’s The Immensity of the Here and Now, a painful excavation of the psychological devastation that the attacks left in their wake. Around the same time, Frenchman Frederic Beigbeder published Windows on the World, a controversial bestseller that attempts to recount the episode from the vantage point of the famed tower restaurants.

Common to the two novels is their focus on inner processes rather than the all-too-familiar course of events. As Beigbeder comments dryly at the beginning of his book, “You all know how it ends: everyone dies.” That foreknowledge also casts a dramatic shadow over Else Buschheuer’s diary novel www.elsebuschheuer.de, presumably the first piece of September 11 fiction when it came out in February 2002. Much of it was written, and even published, before the attacks in the form of a running Internet diary of what was to be an extended visit to New York.

The first two months are a long, tumultuous tour de force of the city’s merchandise fetishism and media mirages, executed with great linguistic zest and ironic distance.

Reading the book is like sitting with your seat belt clasped in one of those planes, more and more terrifying the closer you come. The September 8 entry is about a “cozy evening at home in front of the TV” and the heading for September 9 is “Tidbits.” Triviality waxes prophetic when she expresses her “great relief” on September 5 that the New York sky “could never fall down on my head. The buildings are so high. They hold everything up, I thought, and grew calm.”

The attacks appear midway through the book like a classic peripeteia, turning everything into its opposite. For a moment, the writing becomes agitated, emotional, confused, vulnerable. The people around her — parents, boyfriend, a daughter not previously mentioned — are unexpectedly visible. “I have become an anxious person,” she writes on September 13. “Before this I wasn’tafraid of anything, except that someone would get too close to me. Now I’m afraid of everything.” The fear is accompanied by a vague sense of guilt about the flippancy of her previous life, uncertainty as to whether what she has just gone through is reality or mere images on a TV screen, and the fact that the victims are somebody else.

Similar issues plague Beigbeder in Windows on the World. But while Buschheuer’s talents are in the realm of the documentary, Beigbeder’s are closer to the essay. His book interweaves the tale of a Texas real-estate broker and his two sons with autobiographical reflections. Although the terrorist attacks are the kernel of the book, the narrative branches out both thematically and psychologically.

Beigbeder writes with a mixture of gusto and earnestness that can be explosive. The protagonist tries to console his sons by describing the world as a carnival attraction with special effects by George Lucas. Beigbeder points out that the lapse between collision and collapse is about as long “as a normal Hollywood movie.” He immediately follows that up with a well-aimed dig at his own “dandyism” — in other words, the author as perpetrator, fiction as a sinister moral vacuum. While aware of the risk that he will be regarded as speculative, Beigbeder argues that even a traumatic event of this magnitude deserves retelling in fictional form: “You have to write that which is forbidden” — i.e., what can’t be written. If that’s true, The Immensity of the Here and Now is the closest you can get to such a novel.

Three years after the terrorist attacks, Shrop and Quent, who have been friends since the Second World War, struggle with their phantom pains. Shrop is suffering from extensive memory loss, which Quent — a psychoanalyst — tries to cure.
Memory loss — West avails himself of a popular contemporary metaphor — becomes a composite symbol for innumerable smaller deprivations: a sense of reality, courage to live, trust among human beings, connectedness, comprehensibility, historical understanding and existential meaning.

With its Joycean flow of words, The Immensity of the Here and Now can either intoxicate you or make you give up in exhaustion. Given the abruptly shifting associations between the trivial and the momentous, the book often resembles a kind of collective psychoanalysis. Other times it is more like a melancholy dream, absurd and linguistically absorbed — a Finnegans Wake for a fragmented era. Shrop sees himself as fumbling for a pillar to lean on in a world that has spun out of control — as if the terrorist attacks were intentionally carried out “to devastate consciousness.”

His conclusion is that “something had happened that was nothing.” To encounter that “nothing” is to be at the juncture where language stops functioning. And to write in and around that juncture is — if I understand West and Beigbeder correctly — the author’s sole responsibility.

Dan Jonsson, kultur@dn.se

My pseudonymous buddy in Iran now has a blog! Check out the Brooding Persian!

. . . I probably shouldn’t read this magazine.

(I swear: sometimes, this blog just writes itself . . .)

Alexandra Wolfe on the deleterious effects of TMPR (Too Much Positive Reinforcement):

We’ve become so inured to the idea that a person’s self-assessment need not be changed by a little thing like repeated and utter failure that no one was the least surprised when Joe Lieberman took so long to throw in the towel. Before New Hampshire, he said, “The people of New Hampshire put me in the ring, and that’s where we’re going to stay.” Jon Stewart on The Daily Show put it best: “When did our elections become the Special Olympics? You’re not all winners. Not everybody gets a hug. You guys got crushed.”

Sorry I haven’t posted anything in 10 days. I’ve been busy at work, traveling for a conference, and doing a lot of formulating for longer essayistic VM entries (pop music, foreign policy, translations of love, and the white whale I call Gold/Stopwatch).

Also, I’ve been battling a mini-depression, but I like to pretend I’ve overcome it (of course, if I had, I wouldn’t be writing this sort of thing at 12:30am on Sunday/Monday, but hey).