is more spookily congruous, a coincidence wreathed
in esemplastic ectoplasm, and no doubt explains why Franz Kafka's "In
the Penal Colony" is the only piece of modern literature referenced on
a Zappa album. But (another aperçu of Dallas Boner's), all
those "avant" popmusic wankers who drop heavy names (on their broken toes!)
in Wire interviews are just so much tiresome chestphlegm and nuke-us
mucous: the testament must be written INTO THE METHOD OF THE BODY OF THE
WORK. No flashes on readymade images confirming a commercial imaginary!
No icons plugged into the power circuit of temporary illusion! No exploitation
of semiotic triggers which will look quaint-as-Victorian-fairyporn when
the next wave of image-change splashes on the bitchhead! No collusive
inclusion of "sexy pics" like a Sonic Youth LP cover ... no Roger Deanesque
fantasy lanscape like Edgar Quinet rhapsodizing the scentladen florist's
array ... no chiffon to sneeze on, no baby hooks (the "drazy hoops"? does
anyone out there believe the lyric sheet on the Troutmask CD?)
to bleed on, no streets left for dummies to jog on or doggies to god on.
MATERIALIST ESTHETIX, baby, as inexpensive as plea song: no mystery, gnome
history, no images, no references, no tuned-up Bowie-esque sing-song and
pouting, no moral: a cavalcade, a cornucopia, a barrelload, a garbage
truck, a sorghum pipe, an icing'n'ointment utensil fuelly-charged with
STUFF STUFF STUFF, all from somewhere, scintillated and wriggling with
its torn-from vectors, a velcrose-fastened animé ball comprising
a bit of everything from whatever bin (and gwine be, I hear), seething
and weaving and frothing and spuming into a monstrous garish collagenikov
mock abstract on the freeway TEN FEET TALL! How like your dreams ...
Er, more specifically ... Zappa and Joyce are cultural
subversion cranked up to multispeed, where impediments to the artist's
megalomaniac will to put anything next to anything have become a persistent
itch whose scratching rends the body of the work so it longer "works",
it's all over the place ... but what a place! Both were medievalists contesting
a puritanical rationalised logico-commodity system imposed by the Protestant
Worth Ethic, reacting against repressive Roman Catholic upbringings and
schoolings, but saving the good part: the yearning for a universal world
picture. But instead of an inert ecclesiastical myth designed to prevent
the masses noticing their chains, Zappa and Joyce turn the rosy esemplastic
holographic wonderment of the Chartres effulgence into a begargoyled beast
at the beck-and-call of anyman or woman brave enough to walk by hissside.
It hisses at cowardice and snarls at censorship and sniffs at repression,
electrically sensitive to the BULLSHIT surrounding SOCIAL OPPRESSION.
People who write about Finnegans Wake without
reading it (mostpeople) forget how OBSCENE and SHOCKING and ANGRY and
RAW and NAKED it is. Folding everything into the thumping rhythms of a
few favorite prose passages whose style he loved but whose content he
disdained, Joyce evaded the British wartime censors (the same ones who'd
pooped on Ulysses) by producing a book of "incomprehensible gibberish"
- incomprehensible to every "educated" person, that is, who's forgotten
that everything written is merely a transcription of something said in
lust or anger or accountancy or pure punning fun. Joyce catches the words
in their spastic automatic splenetic shapescule before they've had time
to settle into orderly grey-ruled narrow-feint monosense. Finnegans
Wake is the best book of the twentieth century. It has of course has
been roundly condemned and squarely rejected as "unreadable" or "difficult"
by politicans, academics, journalists and mass-media spokepersons who
wish to keep alive the desiccated, non-lived, duped and BORING spectacle
of life supplied to us by those who rule. But the Wake has been
celebrated and pored-over and disputed and read - read read RED - by all
true REVOLUTIONARIES, SURREALISTS, BEATS, POETS, FREE IMPROVISORS, ZAPPA
FANS & COCKROACH-FANCIERS as the Bible of Post-Capitalism, our glimpse
of a humanist democracy beyond war, exploitation, media manipulation and
the money form, where MATERIALIST RECOGNITION OF OUR ACTUAL LIVES (what
the Communist Manifesto called "facing with sobers senses our real
conditions of life and our relations to our kind") becomes the open swinging-bar
door on a limitless realm of play, adventure, learning, social contact
and sexual bliss.
Frank Zappa was born into a time when James Joyce
was still alive: Joyce died on 13 January 1941; Zappa had been alive just
23 days (a number which always appears when your thoughts are concentrated
on the Great, the Pleasurable and the True (2)). Although their names
fit the same lettrist grid, their boehmic syllababbles waft totally different
aromas. James is soft, the repeated "J" is soothing, the sounds around
his name invoke aimiable joy and soulful high spirits (âme
is "soul" in French, "Oi!" is a Jewish ejaculation used in London's East
End); Frank Zappa is a weird abutment of northern Germanitude ("Frank"
rather than Frances or Francesco) and the southern Italianate (in Italy
"zappa" means a primitive garden implement). "James Joyce" is soft on
the tongue, almost labial, smooth on the ear: "Frank Zappa" is staccato,
a shock, a joke, a poke in the eye. In the 60s, ignorant of Italian words
for primitive garden implements, most pop fans thought Zappa's name was
a put-on, a perverted brandname-style misspelling of "zapper", i.e.
"one who zaps" ("Zap!" being a word like "Pow!" and "Wham!" used by post-war
comic strips used to describe the impact of ray-guns, or the sound of
fists meeting well-shaved chins).
People develop the meanings of words in use, as
associations accrete around them. Since the special area of artists is,
as the Danish painter Asger Jorn put it, "fascinations, their elaboration
and interplay" [The Natural Order, Report No. 1 of the Scandinavain
Institute of Comparative Vandalism, 1962 (3)], the names of artists are
especially conducive to such accretions. Nevertheless, the fact that Joyce
was a pacifist and humanist born into an era of wars and a successful
revolution, and that Zappa was a brash self-promoter born into an era
of wars and consumer booms and failed revolutions, should not extinguish
the extraordinary congruence of their project/objects. Both made vast
works which require inhabitation by the reader/listener. Joyce acts like
a summary of everything the book and reading can do, Zappa like a prediction
of everything recording media can and will do: yet only reader/listeners
who are sensitive to what they have in common can understand what makes
them tick unique. Zappa was a saboteur in the face of the mass-media
spectacle, a font of lacerating poetry who relentlessly criticised hype,
lies and manipulation. His emphasis on the detail and surface of his art
(so unlike the mysterious promises of hip lurking behind the folk modes
and echoic shimmer of the Velvet Underground) links him straight to Kurt
Schwitters and James Joyce. Zappa's art doesn't speak by provocation,
positioning or reputation (Duchamp, Warhol, Koons) but in the grain of
its maximalist mediation. It's not good because it shocks the art world,
it's good because it improves MY world.
Far from being a bookish retreat from modernity,
Finnegans Wake is set in a public house with a TV-set playing (a
device yet to be inflicted on the masses when he wrote), though this TV-set
is generally ignored in favour of the psychic reality of those in the
pub (which include the landlord's family and children upstairs in bed
or seated on the stairwell staring down through the banistars). Joyce's
prose evades the repression of literature and the responsibility of the
concept, and proposes instead a universal humanism in recognizing the
quaint proclivities of the human animal. Zappa recognised that the superficial
"immediacy" of the mass media was in fact the same spectacular oppression
which Joyce found in book learning. They both had a thing about knickers.
Different social poisons: same radical-subjective antidote.
The New York Times didn't take kindly to
the links between Joyce and Zappa made by Poodle Play [see Poodle
Play p. 559], interpreting them as a claim that Zappa was a "wordsmith
on a par with Joyce", as if I wasn't aware Zappa turned out albums not
books. But since it irritates the brokers of cultural value so much to
be reminded of how Joyce took literature down to the dregs, to the left-behinds,
those who aren't afraid to say what's on their minds, let's look at this
STUFF - even though it comes out as something that looks like nonsense
to you, oh my bourgeois brother.
Dropping into the Wake is so like listening
to Zappa, it's pitiful how few critics have remarked upon the similarity.
You are buffeted by powerful hot winds full of acrid scents you cannot
name but which you know promise strange and wondrous feasts (in pots!).
It's like landing on the roof of an alien factory in the midst of the
arrival of an important shipment of off-planet ores while also drinking
meths with the winos in a bivouac made of discarded rocket fins, moon
rocks and space rubbish. The poor saddoes who believe that sorting out
each little "reference" will clarify the oeuvre miss the point:
only readers/listeners who are prepared to drop "getting the point" and
experience the prose/music as a sensual, below-the-belt massage
will ever get the point. This is not to deny the fun to be had in Joyce
Studies and Zappology, which in the right hands (sceptical, materialist,
interested, unfixated, collective, Marxist) can use the objectivity of
their projects to develop a holistic, dialectical (esemplastic) interpretation
of history and cosmos, a science that (unlike positivism) has desire in
it, and a desire that (unlike postmodernism) has science in it. But we
HEARD the "meaning" of the Wake and we SAW the "meaning" of Weasels
as soon as we jumped with joy to experience such wilful, artful, SINFUL
transgresssions of the norm-oriented artefacts pumped at us down the culture
shoot. The lack of ostensible here's-the-hero, boy-loves-girl, I'm-a-bright-guy,
here's-a-sad-song "meaning" was our Orghast, our Persephone, our Citron
Peel of Lebanon. What did Joyce and Zappa want, an audience of FREAKS??!
Yes indeed, sir.
Allah 'n' Fang Ist Schweppes ... logically enough,
the chapter [Wake pp. 169-95] begins with Shem's origins:
