A random number of nonrandom things about Matias Viegener

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Liz Foley

1.  True fact: I started writing this post on Friday, before Professor Tougaw sent his email about posting in “25 things” format. I had already thought about posting á la Viegener, but had rejected the idea because I thought that every single other person in our blogging group would also do it, and that that might get annoying to read.

2.  Then it occurred to me that I would never again have an excuse to blog without the obligation of connecting consecutive thoughts to one another, and that I should jump at the chance to do so. So I started a post in “25 things” format, promising myself I would stop if I thought it was getting gimmicky.

3.  Then I got Professor Tougaw’s email and realized that all my angst on this point had been rendered meaningless.

4.  Key question: What makes Viegener’s lists of 25 things different from the five trillion other lists of 25 things that people had generated by the time this meme petered out on Facebook? Is it the fact that Viegener’s lists have been published offline in a physical book, a circumstance that historically has carried implications of permanence, legitimacy, merit, etc.?

5.  Would the stereotypical Facebook user (older millennial, raised on digital devices and formats, deficient in all important intellectual and professional skills according to yet another hand-wringing survey released this week) give the slightest bit of a damn about those qualities anyway, if such a person actually existed? It’s pretty clear in any case that this book isn’t aimed back at the audience of other list-generators.

6.  Viegener’s lists exist in book form, firstly, because he undertook them as an art project (though the project takes the form of writing, it’s also an instance of performance art); and secondly, because his friends at an art book press undertook to publish the result.

7.  The reason we’re reading them, however, isn’t primarily because they’re in a book, although that fact does help to isolate them from the distractions of the Internet at large. We’re reading them because they’re compelling. (And, naturally, because they offer another way into the theme of the course.)

8.  Not just anyone could produce 100 lists of 25 things that even sustained a reader’s interest for 255 pages, let alone functioned like a goofy, striking, insightful, record-of-its-time, stream-of-consciousness epic poem.

9.  I mean, can you imagine what a 25-random-things list by Koestenbaum would be like? Oy.

10.  I really hate to admit that it was Koestenbaum who gave me the idea that Viegener was writing a form of poetry. At least “epic poem” is my own phrase. But it’s not a big leap from “it’s a poem” to “it’s this particular type of poem,” is it?

11.  Given that I’m not Viegener either, is the fake 25-things format of this post getting gimmicky already? It is, isn’t it? I’m going to stop now.

There are three things (sorry, hard to stop it once you’ve started) that make Viegener capable of turning Facebook time-wasting exercises into something akin to poetry. One is writing ability: specifically, here, a talent for concision and precision. Another is his broad, well-educated, culturally informed frame of reference: he knows a lot about a lot of things that he can then mine interestingly for his “things.” Places, states of mind and body, art, history, literature, pop culture, famous and subculturally famous people, sex, human relationships, human-animal relationships, and especially, fruit.

But these things in combination still don’t completely account for the Viegener effect, and I think the third key element is his particular sensibility: he is steeped in art, and even in artsiness, without being the slightest bit pretentious. It’s very apropos that he likes Patti Smith, because this book probably would have made me think of her even if he hadn’t mentioned her. Like Smith, Viegener is a bohemian of an open, honest, emotional, nonexclusionary stripe; he’s not concerned with setting himself up as cool and doesn’t require that his audience meet some arbitrary standard of cool either. Furthermore, he and Smith share a certain innocence – I would use this word rather than Koestenbaum’s “adorable,” but I think we’re referring to more or less the same quality. I don’t mean that either Viegener or Smith is literally innocent; from what we know about their lives, they are clearly quite worldly people. I mean, instead, that both of them believe that innocence has aesthetic legitimacy, and both of them have made a conscious choice to retain some semblance of it for use in their work, as opposed to choosing some other persona.

One other observation about Viegener’s title: I don’t believe any of his “things” are fully random; they’re not necessarily sequential or connected, but that’s not the same thing. Viegener has his randomness on a leash; he gives it some room to play, but in the end he has control over how much it contributes to his lists. He’ll often include several related items within a single list (like his pronouncements about his “terrorist” former coworker) or over many lists (his musings on art, sex, or…randomness), and these items in fact tend to be sequentially placed, though interspersed with other kinds of items. The stories of Kathy Acker, Viegener’s mother, and his dog Peggy are woven into the lists from start to finish. And even the apparently isolated, one-appearance-only items are linked by the common criterion that Viegener thought they would offer something in the context of their lists, and that they would flesh out the overall impression and experience that the book creates.

Koestenbaum compares the lists (specifically the items about the men Viegener has had sex with, but he could just as easily be talking about the whole book) to a Netlfix queue, saying “The Birds doesn’t lead to Interiors; Interiors doesn’t lead to Body Double.” But who’s to say that they don’t? As someone who still has a Netflix queue (my TV is very old and very dumb, and my slow laptop doesn’t stream well), I can attest to the fact that seemingly disparate movies on it are in fact joined by hidden themes, such as “Oscar nominees from 2011 that I never got around to seeing” or “Obscure movies from the early filmography of James McAvoy” or “Stuff I will probably never see but don’t want to forget the existence of.” The same is true of Viegener’s lists, but I understand why he went with the word “random” anyway. “2500 Paratactic Things About Me Too” is not the title of any book I’d voluntarily read.

Posted in matias viegener, Wayne Koestenbaum | 2 Comments

How to lose friends and alienate powerful CUNY faculty

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Liz Foley

Wayne Koestenbaum was the keynote speaker for the English Students’ Association conference a week or so ago; I knew him by reputation and thought about going to see him. But it would have required leaving work early, and I was already so disoriented and vexed after having attended the conference’s opening panel the night before that I decided one evening of conferencing was enough.

If I’d seen Koestenbaum speak before reading his Viegener review and found him to be a delightful person, the review might have hit me very differently. As it was, I found the tone of the piece so insufferable on first reading that I composed, but did not send, an email to Professor Tougaw asking if it was OK to use profanity when I blogged about it.

To access the, as it turns out, many valid observations in the review, you have to wade through what initially seemed to me a vast swamp of scholarly grandstanding and name-dropping. Although Koestenbaum isn’t responsible for Salon’s stupid, point-missing subhead evoking Joyce and Artaud (which didn’t appear when the piece originally ran in the L.A. Review of Books), the piece itself is just as much of an exercise in highbrow self-congratulation as the subhead would suggest. Lacan’s tranche, Lichtenberg’s scrapbooks (you know, Georg Christophe Lichtenberg! the 18th century German physicist!), your no doubt favorite composers Les Six, the obnoxious parentheses in “Valéry (Carnets)” and “Aaron Kunin (Grace Period),” because of course you’re so familiar with their entire oeuvres that you need clarification as to which Valéry and Kunin. When Koestenbaum suggested that “we, readers, might also feel authorized to stop in the midst of any activity we find no longer worth pursuing,” I was very much tempted to take him at his word and give up on the review.

I eventually calmed down enough to acknowledge that Koestenbaum is doing more here than showing off. His term “parataxis” does accurately capture what Viegener is doing much better than misnomers like “random.” From what we’ve already read in Hustvedt about Joe Brainard’s I Remember, Koestenbaum’s connecting him with Viegener seems apt. Koestenbaum’s comment that Viegener “sides with life against art” in preferring his mother’s living presence over the whole world of conceptual art identifies a key reason Viegener’s book feels as humane as it does. His observation that each of Viegener’s “things” “stops exactly at its own threshold, and never violates the atmosphere by swelling into an unwanted narrative” is arresting and true, although I think the “things” do eventually swell into a larger, more subliminal narrative that Viegener does in fact want.

That said, I can’t help but notice the irony of someone with Koestenbaum’s reference-laden, authority-brandishing approach to art lavishing so much praise on what he sees as Viegener’s simple, essentials-only approach to same. As art aficionados, as cultural commentators, as writers, these two are so different. Where Koestenbaum says, “Viegener has a gin-clear candor,” Viegener himself simply says, “I like the phrase gin-clear.” If Viegener decided to imagine Walter Benjamin playing tennis with Arnold Schoenberg in Hollywood after the war, he would be certain to explain who they were, unobtrusively, in a manner that talked neither up nor down to the reader. Viegener would never use phrases like “a Whitmanic (body-electric) dithyramb reincarnated as a fortune cookie” or “a propositional, investigative, sight-cleansed freshness.” This doesn’t mean that Kostenbaum doesn’t sincerely appreciate Viegener; he may in fact appreciate him the more for being able to achieve effects that Koestenbaum himself is incapable of achieving. But it’s funny to hear Koestenbaum recommending that “literature’s happy futurity” should “involve a practice, like Viegener’s, of mentioning only the observations that matter, stopping immediately afterward, and waiting to speak until the next catalyst for speech arises.” I don’t think for a minute that Koestenbaum intends to apply this practice to his own work — not his prose, at any rate.

Nancy K. Miller is our other CUNY faculty author of the week, and I enjoyed her chapter in a much less conflicted way. I wrote “Yes!” in the margins of this chapter a whole bunch of times. The ‘90s memoir craze represented “the desire for story killed by postmodern fiction”? Yes. “The predominance of women writing memoirs may have something to do with the genre’s disrepute”? Yes, yes, yes. We have a heightened need for memoirs in an age of literal and metaphorical Alzheimer’s disease? Makes a lot of sense to me. Memoir is “a way to have my life turn out better on paper”? For sure. Also, I was delighted that Miller wrote about How I Became Hettie Jones – I’ve read it, and it’s a great book that nobody seems to know about. The Baraka-Joneses are as interesting a literary family as the Jameses, if you ask me: Their daughter, Lisa Jones, is a journalist who wrote great columns about, in her phrase, “race, sex and hair” for the Village Voice in the mid-’90s, which are collected in a book called Bulletproof Diva. And I guess Diane di Prima, who’s pretty interesting in her own right, needs to be included in that family too.

Koestenbaum suggests that memoir is a sentimental zone of jejune sentimentality; Miller is down in the trenches defending its honor. Have they gotten into fistfights in the English lounge yet?

Posted in matias viegener, Nancy K. Miller, Wayne Koestenbaum | Tagged | 4 Comments

Viegener, 2500 Random Things/Miller, Memoir?

Posted on March 15, 2015 by David Liburd

Not been one for “eavesdropping” on other peoples lives much, unless they are somewhat closely related to me. In consequence information and or circumstances would need to have an adverse effect on my life. Yes I see and read and hear things of historical reference and of everyday occurrence, but how much it affects me depends on what it is that I am being made privy to. It could last for minutes, days, months or years? It could be something that stirs subconsciously in the future. 2500 Random Things is an interesting read as tidbits go. Amusing morsels of “things”, a hurried sporadic “memoir” that one can and should have as a book to read while “otherwise occupied”.

1) I am in my 28th year living in the US.

2) I continued living here although I didn’t like living here.

3) I’m back in education as a student, why?

4) I was never the best student.

5) Some professors want you to understand…understand what? What they like? Life as ‘THEY’ see it to be?

6) I think education should teach one to understand themselves and their personal perception on being…

7) and it should be free. Thanks to how things are here, it is no longer the case in England.

8) It’s too expensive!!!

9) Too much information to be understood in a short period of time can be unproductive.

10) I’m glad the weather is improving I can stop thinking about Florida now.

11) Dismal today though!! Horrible weather on “Pi” day.

12) One of my brothers birthday today, he lives in England, south west London.

13) It was my oldest son’s birthday, four days ago, and my youngest son’s birthday fourteen days ago.

14) I’m still not sure even now why I decided to go for my master’s degree? Will it help me to get a better paying job?

15) I work for a non-profit right now. The pay isn’t great but the work is enjoyable enough. the people are nice and I am left to my own devices pretty much. No micro managing!

16) I work with artwork and that suits me…

17) It helps middle school through high school students get scholarships.

18) My aunt lives in Sarasota Florida, she will be coming to my sons graduation, my oldest the one who had a birthday four days ago. I’ve just recently started contacting her after being estranged, due impart to complex family issues.

19) I’m glad she will be going to my sons graduation.

20) On my way to the library today I transferred trains from the uptown A to the uptown F. I had been reading on the A train. At the west fourth stop I went down to the lower level for the F train, the express track had a commercial freight train on it and so I was a little taken aback then realised the trains were all running on the local track. I then noticed this young white woman decide to move uneasily away from where I was standing, I really hadn’t even noticed her, but she moved away as if she was being threatened or soon to be.

22) That happens more times than you may think.

23) I love Skype!!

24) As much as European Football!!!

25) I had a Skype session this morning with three other brothers who live in England.

Miller’s Memoirs chapter is witty and interesting in the beginning, then there are too many similar anecdotes or less interesting than other anecdotes which, in turn prove less puissant. They seem inconsequential. Millers excerpt however, does remind me of how social media users document their existence and try to make each others life to be more interesting than the next persons, or to all their “friends”. The use of social media does aid in the increased visibility regarding important and significant information. Memoirs can have the same effect depending on the subjectivity of its audience.

 

 

Posted in Assignments, Autobiography, Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Comments about Viegener collection of 2500 post to internet

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Jeffrey Vreeland

Comments about Viegener collection of 2500 post to the internet

My mind kept drifting off as I read the posts or list, my own history would keep getting mixed up with parts of his history. Mainly about Peggy dying, for as I was reading his ‘randoms’ my cat is slowing dying of starvation, hanging out in a closet upstairs. She is unable to keep any food down and has stopped eating. I would get mixed up with her dying and his dog, Peggy’s physical deterioration.

Its possible that even a biography needs some kind of plot to hold the viewer sustained interest.

This idea might work better in a serialized version such as Facebook where you are being fed only 25 items at a time, and the interval between each 25 items is at least a day, but it becomes over whelming if you try and read them all at once.

However this is a class about mind and not literature. This is a lesson about the impermanence of our thoughts. It kind of counters the idea of a rational mind believing,” I think therefore I am.”

It all has the chaos of a dream except that it has the footprints of a rational awake mind trying to imitate that chaos.

The process seems to intentionally try to avoid any possibility narrative cause and effect, or the stringing together of related ideas, or intentionally introducing thoughts which do not follow from previous ideas.

These thought have no chronological logic, they have no spatial logic. It gives the impression of a personality that has no sense of self except in a superficial sort of way…famous people he knew or saw in a restaurant, accidental sexual encounters, signed Playbills but little about what he might have learned from the experiences. It seems to lack a deeper cut like Siri’s work.

It’s possible that Viegener started out not doing an autobiography or memoire but an art project…dabbling paint on a canvas to see what will come of it. Personally as a professional painter for nearly 20 years , even though I had ideas for canvases I started, I always started them ( large canvases of reflections on water) with paper towels, applying paint, taking it off, putting it on again until I could get a satisfactory sense of the overall color theme emerging. Of course the painting did not start to become a painting until I got into using brushes and palate knives. My intent was to give the abstraction of reflected images enough reality so the viewer would have a way into the painting What seems to be missing in Viegener’s memoire is the application of a brush and or a palate knife, to give the work a little more meaning other than just blobs of color. Art, I was always told, reflects the culture that produces it. Maybe ours is a culture where just blobs of paint, like post to Facebook are the sum total of what some of us might believe are live are all about.

Obviously from what I just said, I didn’t think much of what Viegener thought of his own sense of self.

Maybe it’s just that we live in a timed cosmos where simultaneous events happen, and because they are happening simultaneously, and we live in a timed cosmos we cannot make any sense of them.
I enjoyed Viegeners shot at autobiography as a creative idea, but enjoyed reading, But enough about myself, becuase it gave me way in.

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random 25

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Yael Rosenstock

Looking at the water travel down the street makes me wonder where it goes.

 

I suppose I’m not that curious because I could probably look it up or explore it further by foot but I don’t.

 

The golden gate bridge is really just a bridge. It’s the combination of its color set against nature’s colors that make it beautiful.

 

Matias brings up his dog’s consciousness a lot. I never considered my own dog’s consciousness.

 

5. He just knew when he was needed. I considered it instinct more than a conscious awareness.

 

So far, not too hard to make this list. It’s fun.

 

Not 100 lists fun, maybe 10 lists fun.

 

It drives me crazy when people consider themselves non-racist or non-prejudiced.

 

This is kind of the flow for most of my internet conversations. I like to start multiple topics at once with a single individual and continue following them at random.

 

10. I think if I were to look back at my old AIM conversations and current Facebook ones, I could possibly create 100 lists just by copy and pasting.

 

We are all raised with certain prejudices and assumptions instilled in us. Tis our way of life.

 

Don’t be ashamed. Own it and control it. Identify the assumptions you make so they don’t inform your actions and assumptions.

 

Only half way done and I’m already preaching.

 

I really need to wash my old muck boots. Now that it’s not freezing, I can’t reasonably where my snow shoes and the huge hole in my rain boots makes them useless.

 

15. I almost wrote whole instead of hole. Hole is not a word I frequently write.

 

I’m sure you wonder (probably not) why I keep rain boots with holes. I don’t feel like I can get rid of them until I get a new pair.

 

More on boots: my muck boots are covered inside and out in mud and manure from a time where I got stuck in the mare field and had to have a horse pull me out.

 

My parakeet is beautiful, as parakeets tend to be, but the meanest one I have ever met.

 

When she bites, she looks for soft flesh and knows her aim is true when the victim yelps in pain.

 

20. reading and writing on buses makes me nauseous but I don’t feel like pausing my list writing.

 

Eating and drinking milk tend to make others feel worse when they are nauseous but will often alleviate my symptoms.

 

I have 3.5 hours of dance classes ahead of me. Last night’s dance practice will help me know which of the dance instructors are patient and which to stay away from.

 

I saw an androgynous looking person yesterday. Not only did I think zhe could make a beautiful woman, handsome man, and very attractive non-gender conformer, I also realized this person is Asian and my interpretation had been that zhe is Latin@.

 

Unlimited metro cards make me feel super powerful. Like I can conquer the world.

 

My 25 things ended up coming out to 499 words.

 

Posted in Assignments, Narrative, Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Workshop: Creating a Conversation among Texts (or, How to Avoid “Grand Confabulations”)

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Jason Tougaw

Charcot_experience_histeric-hipnotic

1. Choose two related passages, one from Casey’s novel and one Hacking’s chapter.

2. Talk about how the passages illuminate each other with regard to a shared question–or  a set of related questions.

3. Discuss why the question matters, how it helps us seek understanding about an issue that’s significant in some way.

4. Prepare a presentation for the rest of us about a possible research project that puts Casey and Hacking into conversation–and suggest what kinds of sources and methods you would need to develop a project like this. Talk about how you’d prevent such a project from becoming the kind of “grand confabulation” of theoretical models Siri Hustvedt worries about in The Shaking Woman.

Groups

Dag, Liz, David, Amber

Andrew, Justin, Ayanna

Jen, Berni, Mari

Yael, Julia, Venita

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Recollecting Our Life Stories Piece by Piece: Reading Albert in the Novel

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Justin Wenhan Luo

“Piece by piece, piece by piece, this is how the story will reveal itself.” (Casey, 202)

Albert in this novel is just like the Doctor, Walter, Marian and the rest of us, when he is striving to recall his life piece by piece and make his identity. We all use memory, imagination and even sensation to recollect ourselves by spinning a coherent life story and telling the story to ourselves and other people, though some of us try their best to forget some pieces, while others try to remember all.

To Albert in the novel, losing self (disappearing) means losing his history, his past, and seeking self is very much like looking for friendship, care, love which are unchanged in the course of time:

“He wants this new life where love isn’t always somewhere else. He wants this new life where he is not merely a man who has appeared out of thin air but a man with a history.” (Casey, 116)

“Love was something from long ago. Love required staying in one place. Love required knowing where you were last night and last week and last year, where you would be tomorrow.” (Casey, 120)

For me, Casey’s novel is not only about oblivion and cure, but in many senses about love and friendship.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Casey and Hacking Thoughts

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Ayanna K. Alexander-Street

The first line that struck me of Hacking’s chapter, that brought me back to many discussions with friends, was: “…mental illnesses, more neurotic than psychotic and we wonder which of them are affectations, cultural artifacts, clinician-enhanced, or copycat syndromes, and which ones are…real”. He mentions several syndromes, PMS, ADHD—I wrote a paper, looking at the etiology of ADHD, iatrogenesis, the ‘epidemic’ in the US versus the rarity of the condition in France, our overmedicalizing what may just be natural behavior—this caused quite heated discussions in the class, as you may imagine. (BTW, Ritalin, methylphenidate, is a stimulant, pretty much Speed for kids, not a steroid—I dare say I would rather give my kid some steroids than this).

Hacking makes a good point that we are somewhat voyeuristic when it comes to mental illness. It pervades our literature and popular culture. A “kooky” woman who swings between moods could be branded as having multiple personalities, which will inevitably bring about a “Sybil” reference (although the woman the book was based on admitted her disorder was faked), Woody Allen has made a career off of his neuroses, we are fascinated with antisocial behavior (the train wreck that is Kanye West comes to mind). When people self-destruct due to their own errors in judgement, mental illness can be a convenient crutch (hello, sex addiction!—a REAL thing, but not in the way it happens all too often to our politicians).

Hacking questions “what counts as evidence that a psychotic disorder is legitimate, natural, real, an entity in its own right?” The issue is with how we try to fit diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder into the box of the medical model used for diagnosing physical disease. The symptoms of psychiatric disorder are behavioral. You can’t fake clogged arteries, we can test for that…but what about personality disorders and depression? Also, could the bombardment of images, ads for psychiatric drugs, news reports on the prevalence of depression, anxiety, adult ADHD, bring about a type of “intern’s syndrome” (the phenomenon of medical students believing they have fallen ill with the diseases they are studying)? Is it our overzealous healthcare? It is true that social awkwardness can now sometimes be dx as Asperger’s, a disorder on the high functioning end of autism spectrum (but we would NEVER deny that autism is very real and very serious—but Asperger’s??). We have lamps in the GC to help us with our seasonal affective disorder. Fugue, like multiple personality disorder after Sybil was published, had a surge in diagnosis rates—were we just more enlightened, now knowing what to call these groups of symptoms? It seems that Hacking, while recognizing that some severe psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, are real—fugue may be a bit too “convenient” of a disorder, especially as manifested in Albert, the “clean” traveler, who always seemed to lose his ID papers.

The Casey novel was a nicely written dramatization of fugue—but I feel like I missed a resolution. I’m not sure if I was expecting the wrong outcome. I suppose I’m incapable of reading for reading’s sake? (My scientist mentors have beaten this out of me, ha ha ha!)

Posted in Assignments, Uncategorized | 1 Comment

Present, past and future selves

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Julia Schaffer Gruberg

I appreciate Liz’s question about whether/how The Man Who Walked Away fits into the form of novel. Casey’s use of fragmentation and repetition is very effective. She conveys Albert’s sense of mystery and wonder and limited well of information by repeating images or sensations or stories throughout the narrative (the bells, the swan brothers story, listing city names). Continually referring to the Doctor, the Director and the great doctor by titles also mirrors Albert’s confused state and diminished capacity. My problem with this though is the similarity in voice when writing from Albert’s point of view and the Doctor’s. It winds up conflating their identities for the reader — identities that are actually very different. The fragmentary way Casey writes, using repetition and floral descriptions of settings, is certainly not clinical. But it is also not strictly literary. I wonder if I would have a problem identifying the book as a novel if it weren’t based in reality.

This returns me to what I keep focusing on throughout the semester and our readings: truth, time, subjectivity. I am fascinated with how individuals can be multiple selves throughout time and how two people can have conflicting realities — that subjectivity allows one situation to take place with two opposing results or truths. We see this all the time in politics or religion or the Oscars or even an argument between friends. Any past creation or remnant (like a tweet!) is a hologram of who I am. If I change, am I no longer that person even if it exists on record somewhere? What about a visual representation, or a video? I am interested in the tension in present, past and future selves.

Posted in Assignments, Maud Casey, Narrative | 2 Comments

You are here where the silky mist hides the deserter

Posted on March 2, 2015 by V.Andrews

Ian Hacking’s “Mad Travelers”, served to be the skeleton Maud Casey hung her novel on.  I read Casey’s first and now I wonder if I should have read the Hacking chapters first. Casey moved about the minds of her characters in a knowing fashion. Through Casey’s work the Albert Dada’ character   Albert was a timid, boyish figure. She invited the reader to empathize with this “odd boy”.

In Casey’s piece Albert’s walking was a transient issue exacerbated by the tragic loss of his father his last bastion of love and home. His cottage with his father and his bedtime stories, the lamplighter neighbor, and Baptiste was his home.  His travels were to find his home I thought that was obviously the meaning of the “silky mist”.

“A silky, silky mist, lifted into the air, his sadness becomes part of the clouds” (Casey P 29) this mist is the fugue state… an ethereal moment of being there, but not.  But then there seemed to be a mingling of the fairy tales his father told him and a need to find a home.  The fairy tales gave him a grounding point, something to replace the sadness with.  Hacking aptly defines Fugue as Strange unexpected trips, often in states of obscured consciousness.  (p 8) He further defines Fugue as being highly gender specific, class specific, it is directly involved with systems of control.” (p 13)

In the Asylum he was allowed a space to acquire a home and family. Casey fully fleshed out the characters in the asylum  Marian with her brusque attitude and loss of internal organs to the sun,  Timid Samuel, Pudding scented Walter, the  patriotic  Veteran whom served to be the voice of reality  calling him a deserter and real label  “ He is a man like any other” (Casey  P 86) … As I type this ,it hits me that perhaps all the patients in the asylum were really facets of Albert’s life and or personality.  Perhaps Marion’s character was his wife? Perhaps Elizabeth was Marguerite- Gabrielle, his daughter?

Hacking does touch on the theory that male’s that suffer from dissociative identity disorder are frequently  fugueurs.  “ ..”Nine out of ten people suffering from multiple personality, or dissociative identity disorder, are women. That has prompted the odd question, where are the male multiples? “

The answer after Albert was on the road… So I wonder if In Casey’s efforts to give life and a story to Hacking’s “analytical philosophizing” she softened Albert, and made him magnificent. Because after reading the Hacking account, it seems that Albert had a serious head injury as a child, leading to physical issues, He was able enough to enlist in the military and then desert, he was married had a child. Almost a basic life peppered with these episodes where he was in a mental “silky mist”, yet still able to reasonably work and get paid and live.

I enjoyed Maud Casey’s work for the landscape she created around Albert and his Doctor. Hacking has a more acrid view.  In the introduction Hacking makes it clear that he will not be painting pretty pictures of mental illness. In fact he will question the validity or realness of many mental illnesses. He reveals his skepticism of neurosis that are seemingly ambiguously based. The unexplainable behaviors that have no real physiological or scientific explanation.

“What counts as evidence that a psychiatric disorder is legitimate, natural real and entity in its’ own right? “ (p 10)

Hacking looks at Tisse Albert Dadas’s therapist similarly to Casey. The Doctor is a man with his own strange obsessive demons.   “ The man and his doctor were made for each other, opposite but parallel”  (p 14) The doctor finds his stability in his frantic bicycling and marking time Casey clearly described this complimentary relationship with her vivid descriptions of the doctor’s bike and train rides  “ his only concern is finding the watch that has marked the minutes of his life.” (Casey P 132)

Major issues that I felt are quite relevant in the discussion of mental illness where illuminated by Hacking’s piece. Mental ailments have been associated with societal and cultural issues; some neuroses serve as scapegoats for the ills of society at that moment in history.

Key Ideas that frame Hacking’s theory:

“Cultural polarity; the illness should be situated between 2 elements of contemporary culture, one romantic and virtuous, the other vicious tending to crime. “ (p 3)

“Ecological Niche: the concatenation of an extraordinarily large number of diverse types of elements which for a moment provide a stable home for certain types of manifestations of illness”

 

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