Day 45: Louise Glück, Harlan Ellison, Mark O'Donnell
Louise Glück - Otis
Louse Gluck describes looking out the window at someone planting beans in the morning sun while listening to Otis Redding. The song brings her back to being 23 and heartbroken, obsessively relistening to the same record, "my one thought being / the only grief that touched mine was Otis' grief". The poem cuts back to the pastoral scene of bean planting and in a final stanza she writes:
This is the end, isn’t it?
And you are here with me again, listening with me: the sea
no longer torments me; the self
I wished to be is the self I am.
In a young poet, this last line of self-affirmation would feel a bit played-out, a pander for the yass queens, but from Gluck, whose 30+ year ouvre so far has consisted of detached and icy sadness, the line here feels very beautiful.
I am not the biggest self-liker but when I accidentally hear some music I've loved throughout my life, I can see myself with my selves at 30, 28, 26, 24, 22, 20, 18 and 16, standing on a bridge, all holding hands. Also, the weather is sunset.
Harlan Ellison - "Repent Harlequin" said the Ticktock Man
Considering how amazing the title is, and how this is supposed to be one of Ellison's best stories, I did not enjoy it overall.
I found its world message incredibly dumb, childish even. In it, a grey dystopian world is run by the clock quite literally -everyone must do things on time or else their heart may be stopped by the Tiktok man. Our hero, a rebellious harlequin who is an inspid version of the joker, does small acts of rebellion against the time master such as scattering $150,000 worth of jellybeans on the factory workers. In the end he is martyred.
I can't really believe this won so many awards even if the language is good. It reminds me of stupid kids games like De Blob where you recolour the totalitarian world through graffiti and funk music, or the Tony Hawk game where you spread colour wherever you go. The thumbing your nose at The Man through Punk Rock is a bigass cliche at this point.
That being said, I would still get a tattoo of the phrase "Repent, Harlequin!" said the TikTok Man.
Mark O'Connell - Space Oddity
A recent essay on "Muskism" in the New York Review of Books.
To exist in this time is to be forced to think, whether you like it or not, about Elon Musk.
And yet for God’s sake, just look at the man...
The author reviews a new book on Muskism that talks about not Musk the person but the question: "what is Musk a symptom of?"
This essay is an entertaining and thoughtful injury of of the world's richest dickhead. You have probably read this exact type of article man times before.
What is quite interesting about it is it talks about Elon Musk's fantasies of cybernetic transhumanism in a way that seems informed by Deleuze and Guattari - mentions of flows, machines and plugging in. But it points oit that Musk's idea of the Cyborg is limited to tech bro fanatsy:
Muskism’s mandate to meld us with our machines represented an effort to turn humans into cyborgs, both figuratively and literally. The cyborgs of the Muskist imagination were drawn from cyberpunk science fiction, where cybernetic augmentation gives people superpowers, such as enhanced strength and intelligence. But it is also possible to think of a transgender person as a cyborg. Their superpower is the ability to modify their body to better fit their gender identity, which is achieved through the use of technologies like hormone replacement therapy and surgery. This raises a troubling possibility for Muskism: dissolving the boundary between the natural and the artificial might open the door for other boundaries to be redrawn. (Slobodian and Tarnoff).
As good an article as any you'll find on the Elon Musk phenomenon.