I wrote this poem the year I first moved to Chicago for grad school…so that would be 1993, I guess. Anyway, I got here at the beginning of the summer, and I was in student housing with an older guy who was pleasant enough, but who before my arrival hadn’t kept the place very clean. As a result, as the summer went on, we experienced a truly horrific roach infestation, culminating one day in me waking up, looking up, and seeing one of the little critters creeping across the window. They’re semi-translucent with the sun behind them. Who knew?

I was also reading Darwin at the time, and also (embarrassingly enough) Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Putting all those things together into this dinky little poem took me over a year and probably an entire notebook’s worth of paper; I wrote and rewrote it like a hundred times. And I really liked it when it was done, and some other people liked it…but not any editors, unfortunately. So finally 16 years later I’m just publishing it myself. Here ya go.

Evolution

Animals turn into roaches —
landscape determines shape!
Ceilings close to clutch forests and fields,
and dodo and bison, raccoon, deer and sea gull
creep out of their shriveling skin
and creep into cracks in the walls.

And though they have lost the horizon’s broad touch,
they have no regrets. Narrowness, too, is a boon,
and landscape and shape both fit as before! Immune, now,
to waste and constriction of space and the bomb
they thank the city for half-eaten food
and accept without fear the descent of a shoe.

Beneath kitchen floors and inside sinks and toilets
they are cupped in the cradle of each evening breath,
and wait with the patience of shadows and corners
for the curve of dark to eclipse all room borders,
and for the wide dawn when the wise insect kiss
of antenna brushed against tongue and lips,
will wake sleepers to roaches on windows and eyes —
to sunlight shining through a landscape the shape
of boneless amber backs and boneless silver legs;
the movement of bodies pressed close together
as if to become one rustling creature
stretching to cover the world.

Last week we had Johnny Monomyth; this wee it’s Joe Audubon. This is a one-page strip I did using manipulated clip art for Bert Stabler and David Heatley’s wonderful New Graphics Revival.

(The text is a little small, but if you click on it I think you should be able to read everything, except maybe where the little alien says, “Shucks.”)

The original was actually in color, though it appeared in black and white. So as an extra bonus:

Johnny Monomyth was mentioned in passing in comments this week. Johnny who? you might say. Well, yeah, that’s the name of the comic book I wrote in 1999 with art by Bert Stabler. Bert designed the comic as a giant mural, though it also came in a handy comic form which you could cut apart and stich back together. You can see some images from it at the link above…and here’s a photo of the original art from the finished piece. As you can see, it covered a whole wall.

Anyway, the way we did the piece is I wrote a draft using words and phrases from four books: Greil Marcus’ “Lipstick Traces”, Joseph Campbell’s “Hero With a Thousand Faces,” an issue of Fortune magazine, and Ian Fleming’s “Diamonds Are Forever.” Then Bert came up with his mural concept, and with that more or less in mind, I wrote out a complete script. Maybe someday I’ll post the art on here, but for the moment I thought I’d put up my original draft. So here it is, for both of my truly, truly diehard blog readers: Johnny Monomyth, Year One.

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Through the grafitti-covered halls of his secret corporate headquarters wanders our hero, Johnny Monomyth (“The Man with the Abstract Guitar,”) ruminating on the necessity of killing for one’s country and on the importance of being well-dressed. (He is dressed in suit, tie, and a leather jacket emblazoned with the words “Anarchist with Clout.”) When he gets to his office, he is contacted by Shadows from the Unfathomable Reaches Beyond, Inc. (a subdivision of the Gratuitous Dissipation Group,) through their emissary, Syd Lingam (a giant phallus covered with power-of-positive-thinking, anti-establishment grafitti and attended by several nude, nubile assistants of mixed gender who continually inject him with heroin.) Syd tells Johnny that the Womb Mob is attempting to wrap meaning and purpose around even prosaic postwar popular culture by smuggling dadaists into Las Vegas. If they succeed, intellectual hedonism will (via a culture of inclusion) come under the sway of the primordial Disney abyss, with the result that the radical reification of an immense increase in littering will no longer function as a negation of the government’s ever-tightening grip on American employers. Johnny promises to use the power of his abstract guitar to combat this nefarious theat to surrealist CEOs. Lingam and his retinue diappear, leaving the distinctive odor of half an avocado with French dressing and an Espresso mingled with the strains of Elvis Costello singing “Avril au Portugal.” Johnny then leaps through his office window, clutching his flaming guitar.

Johnny goes out to shake down his informants: the young prince Timothy Leary; James Taylor (Johnny has him up against the wall, the neck of his guitar under Taylor’s nose, screaming “I know you’ve seen fire and you’ve seen rain cockusucker! I want to know what else you’ve seen!”); cold, dedicated chess-playing Russians, and silent, deadly, anonymous men from Nike. After much violence and an interior monologue in which Johnny wonders if it’s worth investing in the idea of the insulating fascist or if he’d be better off putting his money in the late 1970s, he discovers that the dadaists are being shipped to Las Vegas from the Cosmogonic Cathouse, a grisly, ramshackle, somehow obscene center of world historical profit. Johnny confronts Brainpower Beretta, the owner of the Cathouse. At first she denies having the dadaists, but when Johnny plays the Marseillais backwards on his Abstract Guitar, she hears the secret words “bliss-yielding perpetual manifestation of the brass-knuckled domestic doyenne,” and, enlightened by the noise of the exploding syntax, she rejects the Womb Mob and its lavender agenda. Ravaged with CIA disinformation, she loses all control and attains to a virtual office solution of hopeless proportions. Thus converted, she explains to Johnny that once she was a Middle Eastern Diversity Deity till she gave up her immortality for love of situationist caviar and the riotous eclecticism of the World Savior — only to have her trust cruely betrayed by the Berkeley Bodhisattvas’ repeated denigration of her taste in both dresses and higher iconographies. Crushed, she renounced anabaptism and, after watching hours of Pepsi commercials, she vowed to serve the state as a mindless drone. Now, though, she has been released from her servitude and humility, and she not only admits to having the dadaists, but she agrees to hide Johnny in the next shipment. Accordingly, she disguises him as the terrifyingly obvious, sordidly powerful, divinely hygienic immaculate executive known to the customs men as Blood Clot Boy. She brings him to a room where hundreds of dadaists are milling about, some of whom look like well-dressed French intellectuals, others of whom are wearing costumes (like Johnny, who has a gigantic aorta stapled to his nose), others of whom are just dada art (an upside down toilet, various appliances) upon seeing which the Frenchmen-dadaists invariably make comments like “Revolutionary!” and “What a radical intrusion of ambiguous forms!” and “I guess every girl likes to come home and find a videoconferencing cybertechnician on her kitchen table.” In any case, Johnny fits in well enough, and is accepted as one of the dadaists both by the dadaists themselves and by the men who are raping them, hogtieing them, and shipping them to Las Vegas in crates. Johnny too is crated, and passes away his time in transit by imagining a muscular, craftsmanlike prose of a millenarian peasantry — a language of revolt so archetypal and immediate that it would, by its very existence, render frustrate the pettiness of left-wing youth-group politics.

When they arrive in Las Vegas, Johnny and the dadaists are placed in a glass case in a casino called “The Stalin,” and are dressed in skimpy uniforms of the Wild West. Passerbys place bets on which of them will say something witty, which of them will copulate, etc. Johnny now understands the full brand-name-intensified semiotics of the Womb Mob’s mystical quest. Economic prorities will deny the existence of paradoxical motifs, and will even seek to destroy them by personal analysis. Thus girded, Johny feels he now knows enough to bust a hole in the Womb Mob. Unfortunately, the cage the Womb Mob has constructed for the dadaists emits personal life balance initiatives which humiliate the bourgeoise tantras of Johnny’s abstract guitar. Unable to escape and subjected to the dadaists unending stream of mediocre puns and profound insights into industry, Johnny believes his herohood is up for good, when Brainpower Beretta appears in the early morning and leads him over the stacks of sleeping dadaists to safety in the empty casino.

Or so it appears. Just as Beretta gets Johnny outside the dada cage, they are accosted by two young roving hit men known only as Nietzsche and J.D. Salinger. They attempt to undermine Johnny by accessing his warp-speed narcissism. Johnny, however, knowing that homos make the best killers, is on guard, and cannot be easily swayed. He dodges in and out amidst the darkened casino paraphenalia until, finally, he makes a stand on a Tianananman Square themed slot machine and defiantly begins to play Robert Johnson’s “Gnostic Blues” on his abstract guitar. Fireworks explode, the Tiananman Square slots hit jackpot (three tanks,) all within earshot are covered in blackface (including Johnny, Beretta, the hit men, the dadaists, and the few casino personnell and players still about) and finally Salinger and Nietzsche are awakened to the synergy of soulless materialism, and pass into solipsistic superconsciousness.

Johnny stops playing and the sparks sputter out. Still in blackface, he grabs Beretta, who is gazing at him with her full red lips slightly parted, breathing as if the vitalizing image of the universal god-man has just seduced her organic network. She gasps, “I want it all, darling. Now. Quickly.” Johnny slaps her and growls, “Not till we’ve successfully vaguely considered concepts like ‘oblivion,’ and ‘Oedipal complex,’ baby.” He then pulls her outside the casino, barely ahead of the swarm of milling dadaists (also still in blackface and skimpy western attire) who have been stirred into a frenzy by the still-pumping slot machines — some of the dadaists are eating the money, some of them are snorting it or ingesting it rectally, while still others are merely cavorting among it screaming things like “The entrance to the zone of magnified power!” and “At last I will be financially capable of pursuing my strategy of continuous reinvention!”

Outside, Johnny and Beretta run away from the casino (outside of which is a huge neon picture of Uncle Joe wearing a cowboy hat with a gigantic dollar sign floating jovially above a diorama of dead peasants, all of who look cheerful and clutch money.) It’s just getting on to dawn — still dark out, but getting grey, and there are very few people on the streets. Still, Johnnny manages to satisfyingly straight-arm a few tourists (knocking at least one into a fountain) as he and Beretta keep one step ahead of the onrushing dada horde, which has been driven mad by its sudden acquisition of assets, and is busily trying to pay the assorted tourists (and/or the neon signs and/or early morning roaches) for sex, internet access, or punk singles.

Johnny, (who has been thinking as he runs about Las Vegas tourists, how they are conditioned by innovative mantra technology to dream like Pavlov’s dogs of the nipple inexhaustibble, how they bastardize the rock n’ roll uncreating of the uncreated Morningstar rating, and of how much he despises their smug inability to compose futurist manifestoes) drags Beretta up onto the roof of “Buddha, Buddha” (a casino with lots of splashy many-headed neon Buddhas, glowing Hindu gods in tantric position, etc, all vaguely Disneyfied) by scrambling up a large squatting neon Buddha which is wearing sunglasses and smoking a cigar. On the roof they look down on the dadaists running amok in the city (the dadaists are now being chased and clubbed by roving patrolmen who are also beating up random tourists, fires have started, people are looting, giant serpents slither down alleys, chaos reigns) and wonders if he’s witnessing the end of mainstream pop humanism as we know it. He asks Beretta if he is responsible for the anarchy below. She asks him if any man can be held responsible for anything, when the contradictions of one’s postiion inevitably resolve even acts of trendsetting into the void beyond all voids, from which unfold world-sustaining emanations, Sauce Bernaise-like, mysterious. He nods grimly, looks back at the chaos below, resolves that he must do something, and wonders if a bourbon and water would give him some ideas. Luckily, Beretta happens to have some, and the two of them sit down on the roof lotus style, drink, and chat about the Hebrew cabala’s discussion of the ideal wife (women shouldn’t paint their nails, should wear black velvet, and should be enjoyed as the encasement of eternity.) Johnny’s hand moves to her thigh, and the two gaze into each other’s eyes longingly, simultaneously thinking that when you gaze into the market, the market gazes also into you.

Just then they hear a dry laugh so empty and motionless that it might have been borrowed from a taxidermist. Turning, they see Syd Lingam and his retinue. Syd’s massive flesh is quivering with slimy laughter. He thanks Johnny ironically for planting the seeds of gender, race, and culture which will bear the fruits that inspire a vision of cultural symmetry. He says he knew Johnny would release the dadaists, allowing their brazen sexiness to balance and get feedback from Las Vegas’ insouciance. Soon, he says, this ghostly, ghastly crowd will vanish into its own unformed activities, and with the supernatural assisting force of Freedom, Home and Beauty thus neutralized, Syd will find a smart way to capture the whole financial universe. He laughs at Johnny’s efforts to save unretainable ecstasies. “The hero,” he fulminates, “is just a discourse of skeptical media buyers; a flaming fairy well in which the golden ball of integrity is drowned forever in the dank and foetid waters of latitudinarianism.” He then makes fun of Johnny’s attire, mocks his penchant for violence, suggests that his “bad-boy” image is merely a means of ensuring himself a beautiful secretary, and makes some lewd innuendoes about the fertile, gleaming intersection of Beretta’s new office towers and the angled thrust of her emerging capitalism.

Johnny, though, is unimpressed. He tells Syd that, as a hero, he is too shamelessy self-employed to be frightened by such ranting. “I am the secret agent-artist,” he says, “that curiously disinterested, almost diabolical human phenomena beyond the normal bounds of human judgment, dedicated to the morals not of my time, but of my art. When I kill, it is not murder, but gunslinging enterprise. When I rape, it is not rape, but the breathless passion of a spiritual obstetrician. And when I create anarchy by flushing the avant garde down the plugged drain of post-Fordist capitalism, I am not really creating anarchy, but am instead, like a wily shaman, orchestrating the lasting horse race in which my transcendent phallus will emerge victorious. You villain, may sport your menacing chromium as you will — your plots are for naught, for your devious history will soon be ritually erased by the spontaneous eruptions of my primal drumbeat.” So saying, he steps foward, pulls out a handgun, and shoots Syd, who falls over with a crash, killing most of his retinue (the remainder scatter making grunting noises which sound suspiciously like band names (i.e. “Mekooph!” “Cloosh!” “Eck! Istooph!” etc.) Beretta clutches Johnny, tells him she loves a man who can show the primacy of symbolization, and that she’d be as happy as a cricket to join him in an avucular confab. Johnny smiles his characteristic grin, blows the smoke off his pistol, briefly congratulates himself for performing the hero’s task of alchemizing a bad and stodgy society so that the life-redeeming glitter of the University of Paris may be made known to the Pinkerton force, and, holding Beretta’ hand, walks off into the desert dawn. Behind them, Las Vegas burns.

Back in the dim dark past, when I was only a hooded fetus, I carved my thoughts directly on the computer screen with crude stone tools, producing material more or less at random since I had no hit count to tell me what the people wanted. Most of this stuff has just been sitting on my hard drive for years and years now — poems, short stories, essays, zines, drawings, insulting notes about comics professionals; that sort of thing.

Anyway, I thought I might as well make like Dante Rossetti and disinter some of these effusions for your viewing indifference, dear blog reader. My plan is to post something from the archives every Friday. Eventually I’ll inflict poetry on you, but Bill’s piece about his own childhood encounters with science-fiction and suspending disbelief made me think of this essay, which I wrote way back when I was in college in 1991.

Reading it over, I still like the central idea, though the earnest defense of sci-fi’s literary bona-fides made me roll my eyes. Ah well. For better or worse, here it is.

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In his introduction to his anthology of science-fiction short stories The New Tomorrows, Norman Spinrad defines science-fiction as anything which is marketed with a sf label on its cover. Although this definition doesn’t seem to be very illuminating, the point which Spinrad is attempting to make is that the sf label is simply a marketing device rather than a true definition of a genre. In other words, science-fiction books have every bit as much (or as little) literary merit as any other form of literature, and that each science-fiction book should be read and judged individually rather than being forced into a single easily condemned category.

The difficulty with this is, of course, that science-fiction books do share certain characteristics which provide a large amount of fodder for the painfully (at least to those of us addicted to sci-fi) and just about uniformly nasty reviews which grace the pages of such publications as the New York Times Book Review when such journals stoop to writing about science-fiction at all. One of these characteristics is that works of science-fiction almost uniformly call for the reader to suspend disbelief to an extent which is far greater than that required in most other kinds of writing. Even in such stories as “Metamorphosis” by Kafka, which deals explicitly with fantastic elements, the suspension of disbelief is nowhere near as extreme as that required in a science-fiction book. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor Samsa turns into a bug. In Brightness Falls From the Air by James Tiptree, Jr., faster than light travel exists, as do several alien races, at least one of which can communicate easily with humans, and another of which produces a substance which can heal the wounds from a deadly human poison for which there is no other cure. Besides this, the book also deals with several periods of time distortion and a vast alien entity of indeterminate characteristics. I could go on for paragraphs, but the point is fairly clear. And yet, if one is willing to accept all this, the book is really wonderful: exciting, surprising, and even thought-provoking. Still, it is most definitely (despite Norman Spinrad) a science-fiction book, insofar as the suspension of disbelief is a function of the reader’s willingness to accept the tenets of science-fiction rather than on any special effort on the part of the author.

In addition to the quantity of science-fiction’s demands on one’s suspension of belief, I think that there is also a difference in the kind of belief which science-fiction demands. In “Metamorphosis”, Gregor’s family realizes that it is a little strange for their son to have been turned into a bug. In most science-fiction works, the characters accept as natural incidents and occurrences which are patently not part of the reader’s experience. In “Blue Champagne” by John Varley, the characters are real and believable, and the reader (at least this reader) is able to feel real pain at the story’s outcome. Even so, the entire premise of the story rests on the development of scientific equipment which can register emotions: if one does not accept this, then the story can’t work. And this element is not what the story is about: the piece is about relationships, the “unbelievable” facets of the story are not, as they are in “Metamorphosis”, the focus of the story’s attention. I think that science-fiction’s extensive reliance on belief can help explain why several of the field’s most respected authors often deal with matters of reality and unreality. Stanislaw Lem’s The Futurological Congress and Brian W. Aldiss’ Cryptozoic! both contain extremely long hallucination sequences which the reader believes are reality because of the standard suspension of disbelief with which he or she usually approaches a standard science-fiction novel. And Philip K. Dick in The Man in the High Castle has his characters discover the flimsy nature of the world they inhabit, a world in which Germany won the Second World War due solely to the writer’s imagination and the reader’s acceptance.

The question, then, is not whether or not science-fiction is a genre, but whether or not the characteristics which make it a genre also somehow limit its worth as a form of literature. Ursula K. LeGuin contends that, to fulfill its true potential, science-fiction must be about people rather than about gadgets and hardware. In many cases, in the work of LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, and others, I think that this goal is achieved, and, moreover, it is achieved in writing about people who would not exist without the science-fiction worlds they inhabit: not because they are too weakly crafted to exist in the real world but because their actions and thoughts have been shaped by a different reality than that delineated in most works of fiction. Since the suspension of disbelief has allowed these characters to exist, it surely can’t be a wholly evil thing. Besides, science-fiction can be a lot of fun to read, which is, after all, a large part of what books are all about.