Walker Zupp
L’œuvre de Denis Colin se développe en gambade, discrètement. La simplicité, l’humilité de son économie vous poursuivent de leur charme, de leur humour enfoui. Le plus souvent crée en regard d’un lieu, pour un lieu, un évènement, elle s’y insère et s’en libère aussitôt.
J’ai proposé à Denis Colin des images de son travail tournant autour de la question de l’habiter.
All photographs © Philippe Robin. To see more of his work go here.
Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975) was the first film by Jamaa Fanaka (1942-2012). Fanaka was a film undergraduate at UCLA when he made the film, and it was an attempt to make use of the equipment he had access to. “They’d have these assignments called a Project 1 then a Project 2, which were usually five or ten minutes without sound,” Fanaka recalled in an interview with Jeff Brummett*. Although turning one’s “Project 2” into a movie was unheard of, Fanaka decided to “take advantage of this blessing” and started production on his first feature-length film*.
1975 was a watershed year for the United States. It saw the evacuation of American soldiers from Saigon and the takeover of Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The American merchant vessel, Mayaguez, was also rescued after being seized by Cambodian forces. Lastly, Americans and Soviets launched their respective spacecraft—Apollo and the Soyuz—into space for a U.S.-Soviet link-up, which led to new developments in space travel. In the United States things were equally tumultuous. John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman were found guilty of covering up the Watergate Scandal and were sentenced to up to eight years in jail. Then Gerald Ford—who had only recently been sworn-in as president—survived two assassination attempts within seventeen days†. (Both attempts were carried out by female shooters, one of whom was a member of Charles Manson’s cult.) In short, it was the right time for Fanaka to make a film about an ex-con’s murderous genitalia. As of June 2023, however, Welcome Home Brother Charles has 4.8 out of 10 on IMDB, is generally classed as a Blaxploitation movie and is about as obscure as the pioneers of Soviet animation, the epic Polish science fiction movie, On the Silver Globe (1988), and the experimental novels of Ann Quin.
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Creative Writing In Higher Education
The words “Creative Writing in Higher Education” fill me with dread (angst, disquietude). For the past 7 years, to varying degrees, I have studied creative writing at university level. If there was any consistent philosophy that held together the various modules I studied, it was evidently wasted on me: from the standpoint of a student there was no coherent vision for any of these modules. I have listened to creative students bemoan the courses which they cannot get their heads around and worry about whether they’re doing what they’re meant to be doing. But perhaps that is the point, the significance, the substance of these creative writing modules: that they have no “point”, as such, but instead play roulette with undiscovered talents and ignore them when they make significant headway. And there is a part of me that thinks this whole process insidious and evil: a damning summation of everything wrong with the teaching of creative writing in higher education. But, as Lars Svendsen points out in A Philosophy of Evil, the problem with many theories of evil is that they have a tendency to assume that evil wants to commit harm. (Cf. Natural evil.) And the one-sided nature of this tendency “leads us to lose sight of ourselves” which in itself can be described as evil (Svendsen 87). The whole losing-sight-of-ourselves could be prescribed to the evils committed under both Hitler and the Nazis as well as Stalin and the Communists. Thankfully, the teaching of creative writing in higher education is nothing so serious. And in many ways that is a part of the problem: it is not taken seriously enough.
It’s also a mistake to try and make people take things seriously. What often happens when this is attempted is the people for whom the lesson is being taught start cracking up; because the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they ought to be taken seriously ought not to be taken seriously at all. (E.g. Hitler and Stalin.)
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It’s impossible to talk about criticism without talking about interpretation. Before I do that, however, I would like to talk about logical inference. This is, quite simply, the drawing of a conclusion; the engine for truth. There are several theories of truth. The most relevant one here is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact. And what is a novel, if not a series of propositions? You can’t deny that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s descriptions of cars, for example, correspond to automobiles in the real world; and the fact that automobiles exist. If we bear in mind, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, moreover, it doesn’t matter if one car is red and another car is blue; or if one car is a Ford and the other is a Chevrolet. Fitzgerald’s descriptions (i.e., propositions) of automobiles correspond to those in the real world, for those are the facts which we call automobiles, or cars.
How can I say that logical inference breaks down on a literary level? Am I asking the impossible? I have demonstrated, via the correspondence theory of truth, that the things propositions describe correspond to those things which are described; they exist in the real world and can be committed, via writing, to print.
What does the word ‘fiction’ correspond to? If the logic of correspondence is anything to go by, it must correspond to something. If this were a perfect world, I would say that ‘fiction’ corresponded to anything that was not non-fiction; even if non-fiction, in light of the correspondence theory, becomes redundant, like snow which is non-snow, and water which is non-water. We can quickly see a problem bubbling to the surface here; it’s obscuring our goggles and making us nervous.
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[Disclaimer: As much as I detest genre, this is a piece of creative non-fiction, where the names are not real, but the entities are. Most of them.]
My first exposure to porn was aged 15. I viewed the exploits of a rubber-donged superman called OG Mudbone whose witticisms were matched only by the 14-inch prosthetic he adorned for each naked and mostly hilarious adventure. Soon after, I discovered genuinely large penises and genuinely large breasts.
I have always disliked watching porn where there is no laughter. Given that the majority of porn has little to no laughter, this poses something of a problem, and directs me to several regulars. Jack Napier—out of work since a near-fatal motorbike crash—is always laughing. His affability is infectious, and he comes across as highly professional. Another admirable regular is Gianna Michaels: a Hooter’s waitress-turned-porn-star, whose brassy giggle I find more alluring than her sizeable cleavage and prodigious sex drive. These people are the exceptions.
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I am here.
A hyper-intelligent adolescent whose scientific understanding of the world is betrayed by his lack of life experience. Undercurrents appear overhead, love is something only movies talk about, and whatever things the universe can’t articulate itself our hero can’t even begin to imagine.
I’ve not dedicated much time to David Foster Wallace: Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, The Pale King and The Broom of the System are the biggies I’ve read.
There’s Infinite Jest, but I got about halfway through and wanted to read some other books. I’ve also listened to him reading his porn essay, Big Red Son, and his commencement speech, This is Water. But I’ve not read the other Lobster essays; nor have I examined Oblivion or The Girl with the Curious Hair.
I like his work broadly speaking, but I think the emotional detail is lacking. I think it prevented him from producing works like Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin and pretty much every book Norman Mailer wrote. So Wallace had neither emotional nudity or a kind of progressive misogynism.
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