It was the eighth shopping day
before Santa jumps in his sleigh
and sprints around the world
on a trip fueled by meth and cocaine
stealing my cookies and all the acclaim
for the gifts I bought with a card
I'll no longer be allowed to retain.
Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Tag Archives: Consumerism
The Children’s Crusade
Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five introduces us to Billy Pilgrim. He’s an American born in 1922, but he’s a senile widower who has “come unstuck in time” when we meet him. He can revisit any moment in his life as if he’s watching a video, and the novel consists of non-linear video clips of Billy’s life, including the time he was kidnapped by aliens, brought to Tralfamadore, and put in a zoo.
The Tralfamadorians teach Billy about time and how it’s like looking at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains. ”All the moments, past, present, and future, always have existed, always will exist.” Except for their habit of putting humans in zoos, the Tralfamadorians are pretty cool dudes. ”They can see how permanent all the moments [of time] are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.” So people die, but they also continue living in all the prior moments, which will always exist. That’s either comforting or distressing. It depends on how much love and happiness you’ve experienced in your allotted time – things you may not have much control over.
Billy blinks and it’s 1945, and he’s a chaplain’s assistant in World War II. In his first battle he becomes a prisoner of war, and he’s sent to a German POW camp where he and his fellow American POWs meet a group of English POWs, who were captured early in the war. The English POWs look “stylish and reasonable, and fun” so their German guards love them. The Americans are wrecks. They don’t make war look stylish, reasonable or fun, so the Germans send them to Dresden to sweep the streets. They’ll be exhibits in a different zoo.
Dresden looks like a “Sunday school picture of Heaven.” The Allies have bombed nearly every other German city, but Dresden is unscathed because it serves no military purpose. Less than a month after Billy’s arrival, the Allies inexplicably bomb it turning it into “one big flame.” 135,000 people were killed for no reason at all. Billy is one of the few survivors, and he traverses the demolished landscape looking for someone new to surrender to.
Slaughterhouse-Five is a success on all levels. It’s a comic opera that skewers American-style capitalism and consumerism. ”Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops.” It’s elite science fiction that explores what time means and how that affects our understanding of life and death. But at its heart, Slaughterhouse-Five is one of the all-time great anti-war novels. As fantastical as the novel is, it won’t allow you to ignore a fundamental truth: wars are fought by babies. Every war is a children’s crusade, and it’s the children, our children, who suffer most the brutal consequences of our tragic inability to get along.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
White Noise: Always There, Just Like Death and Commercials
In White Noise Don DeLillo notes “All plots tend to move deathward.” I’m not sure if he is surprised by this, but he shouldn’t be. All life moves deathward. So how can plots do otherwise?
Let’s put that question aside and simply agree that DeLillo in White Noise is obsessed with death. But Gladiola, white noise is my favorite noise. How can it be linked to death? Sorry, my friend, white noise is always there in the background. Just like death. And Jack (the narrator) can’t stop thinking about death. Even when he’s thinking with his penis, his penis is thinking about death. He chairs the Hitler Studies Department at a small college on the hill. Why Hitler? “Some people are larger than life. Hitler is larger than death.”
Jack is married to Babette, and they have a blended family with a child from their own marriage but also children from several prior marriages. Babette is taking some kind of medication that she refuses to admit she’s taking. Like Jack, she is terrified by death. Even when she’s thinking with her vagina . . . well, you get it. “We (humans) are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no other animal knows, that we must die.” When a train accident happens on the edge of town, a deadly toxic cloud gets released. Jack is exposed to the poison, and his fear of death becomes all-consuming. The novel explores the reckless ways Jack and Babette try and fail to manage this intense fear.
Published in 1984, the novel also skewers consumerism and our culture’s reliance on television – a precursor of the internet and social media. “When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death.” And it touches on inequality and inequity. During the toxic event, Jack thinks “These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters.” The novel succeeds best when it is focused on these themes. But back to death.
The lengths Babette and Jack go to calm their fear are hard to relate to. When they wonder why no one else is overwhelmed by the fear as they are, Jack acknowledges that “Some people are better at repressing it than others.” He’s wrong. Everyone is better at repressing it. They become the poster children for repression and denial being the correct strategy. And that’s good news for me because I repress and deny everything. So I must be healthy as hell.
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
The Santa Cycle – Part 5
It was the eighth shopping day before Santa jumps in his sleigh and sprints around the world on a trip fueled by meth and cocaine stealing my cookies and all the acclaim for the gifts I bought using a card I will no longer be allowed to retain. Luvgood Carp, Editor-in-Chief
Annie Ernaux’s Exteriors: A Stranger’s Connection
When Annie Ernaux won the 2022 Nobel Prize in Literature, I had only one question. Who is Annie Ernaux? Why have I never heard of her? Is she French or something? That’s where the internet comes in handy. She’s French. Regardless, I picked up one of her books, Exteriors, which was first published in English in 1996. It’s short, curious and rewarding.
Ms. Ernaux believes a “hypermarket (supermarket) can provide just as much meaning and human truth as a concert hall.” That concept has been expressed before, but not quite the way Ms. Ernaux presents it. She writes in a hyper-detached style, as if she’s a scientist. She focuses only on the essential. Unicorns do not prance on these pages. Exteriors purports to be a memoir, but there is no sustained narrative. The book consists of written snapshots of complete strangers. Her observations are more akin to sparse journal entries.
Still, it is literary and themes do emerge. Ms. Ernaux describes contemporary society as purely transactional. Tacky consumerism pervades everything. She’s not a fan of the ruling classes either. Their obvious disdain for the working classes is oppressive and depressing. The few relationships presented tend to be dysfunctional. Ms. Ernaux does not interact with anyone except the reader.
So why does Ms. Ernaux write about the strangers she observes on the train or at the mall? I enjoy being a voyeur as much as anyone, but is this mere voyeurism? Ms. Ernaux thinks not. “It is other people – anonymous figures glimpsed in the subway or in waiting rooms – who revive our memory and reveal our true selves through the interest, the anger or the shame that they send rippling through us.”
In a crass world, there can still be profound connections, even with strangers. A child on the train reminds Ms. Ernaux of her sons when they were young. A woman waiting in line reminds her of her deceased mother. “So it is outside my own life that my past existence lies: in passengers commuting on the subway or the RER; in shoppers glimpsed on escalators . . . in complete strangers who cannot know that they possess part of my story; in faces and bodies which I shall never see again. In the same way, I myself, anonymous among the bustling crowds . . . must secretly play a role in the lives of others.”
Gladiola Overdrive, Chief Editor
Pungent Sound Journal of Pulp Poetry 