The following ten publications here at The Hinternet (or thirteen, counting the associated translations) constitute the chapters of a work of serial metafiction (hereafter, “the Work”), of which I,…

Read more

Subscribe now

This piece is intended as a “radio play”. For the richest experience, please listen to the audio version.

lire en françois !

As reading becomes ever less like reading and ever more like a massively multiplayer online game, many who continue to mistake themselves for readers, who don’t notice they’ve evolved into something new and very different from what that label used to imply, have grown hostile towards any text that does not immediately declare to them what it intends to do. Preferably for them, that declaration will be made in terms so unambiguous that even A.I. will be able to understand it, which will accordingly filter down to them not only those texts they will have no trouble understanding with respect to purpose, but only those texts moreover whose purpose they already know themselves to support. Once this process becomes sufficiently streamlined, the “reading” part may be expected to drop out of the circulatory process altogether, and the descendant of the reader, still called a “reader” only par courtoisie, will remain involved simply as an agent of further circulation of these pseudo-texts through “shares” — though in principle of course even this part of the process may be automated as well. 
—Sigrid von Querdurch, “Brief Note on a Troubling Agraphon” (2014)

Subscribe now

It’s great to be back here with you, dear readers. I know, I know, I’ve been gone for quite a while! If I recall correctly I haven’t sent you a single word since late August, when I was holed up with Covid at the Radisson Blu in Bucharest. After that, well, let it suffice to say that I really needed some time away, to get my bearings, to figure out what I want to do going forward, both here at The Hinternet and in my life in general. I’ve received regular updates from Hélène Le Goff, and I could not be happier to know that The Hinternet has been in such competent hands during my months of convalescence.

But my, what a beautiful day today, which proclaims as does every day the glory of God through the works of his creation. It is not however every day that features the Sun beaming so proudly, the very emblem and icon of God himself, his principal representative here on Earth, radiating the warmth and light at whose source every rational being knows him to lie — for he is the source of everything. And out in the street below our balcony the autumn leaves are collecting, shed brown and gold from the trees that are themselves as alive as ever, and only passing through the annual cycle that, in accordance with their nature, the Creator arranged for them in his goodness and wisdom. And the dogs on taut leashes are sniffing out invisible familiars from their occult world of smell, and every rational being sees on a day like this that the dogs have their share of reason too, as each of us is enabled to discern, in the dazzling lumen of the morning, the slight emanations of all things.

I descend the elevator and go out into the street and the dogs are still sniffing, the children laughing and struggling to break free, all endimanchés, as their parents drag them to church. I follow them in, not dragged but propelled, as by some human hunger, and by an inborn knowledge of how and where to sate it. And so I cross, alone but together with these good strangers, beneath the stony likeness in bas-relief of the brave St. George slaying the repellent dragon. And the dome above the chancel is painted with golden stars to duplicate those fixed for all time in the celestial vault, and though a mere imitation, a shadow of the world itself, these painted bright bodies are at the same time as great as that world, as they were painted in loving reverence of him who made the heavens. And I genuflect and make the sign of the cross —forehead, diaphragm, left shoulder, then right—, and take my place in my pew among the worshipful. And soon the awaited procession moves down the center aisle with the priest at its tail, and as he passes I see that very same blemish that the immortal Pascal himself feared might have the power to crush a man’s faith altogether: the priest had cut himself shaving! But the wagerer worried in vain, for none ever said that a priest is not human, nor does not bleed.

The service reaches its several crescendi, most gratifyingly when each is invited to extend to all others the peace of Christ, in which gesture you will see such kindness and charity as you would have thought long ago lost from our world; or in the recitation of the “Je confesse à Dieu”, in which I find myself once again getting tripped up and saying “Oui, j’ai vraiment pensé” instead of “Oui, j’ai vraiment péché”, and wondering once again, as I always do, whether these two do not in the end amount to the same thing; or when the greatest mystery known to any of us is demonstrated once more, as predictable as it is miraculous, accident of one substance confused with essence of another, infinitely greater.

Then I come out again, out from underneath the knight with his sword and the flailing viscous serpent at its point, and I see that the clouds have now covered the Sun, casting a pall and announcing that a new part of the day has begun.

One must hurry, of a Sunday, to see to one’s daily provisions before the stores roll down their gates, by some old law or custom, shortly after noon. The fruitier’s wife is already hauling in her crates for the day, as he tries in vain to offload some dented persimmons on passersby, cutting them with a pocketknife downward towards his thumb, almost as if to cut that as well, almost as if this were appetizing. The apples are assorted and mostly over-large: Fuji, Jonah, Granny, Golden, Chanticler, Elstar, Gala, Rubinette, Pirouette. The root vegetables are dirty, like they like them here: the carrots, turnips, parsnips, celeriac, salsify, and beets, all so humble, and just as honest as the working class. The crudites are slug-worn and tired, romaine, rocket, mesclun, oak-leaf, and bib, while the vegetables that may still properly be said to form “heads” repeat themselves either imprecisely, as cauliflower, in the cloudy billows known as their “curds”, or precisely, as Romanesco broccoli, in the infinite recursion of their fractals.

I buy some California almonds, some grape tomatoes on the vine, some lemons and some guariguettes, and I cross the street to the Portuguese fishmongress, who unlike her competitors opens on Sunday to sell the rapidly putrefying remains of the previous day’s catch, hauled in from the North Sea, from the Mediterranean, from the Bay of Biscay. She is saying to someone on the phone: “Você quer as vísceras para quê agora? Tudo bem, mas você vem buscá-las na hora!” She is especially concerned today to showcase her freshwater morsels, the ones she calls écrevisses but I call crawdaddies, still atwitch with the petites perceptions of their fading invertebrate lives; the riverine oysters; and the freaks they call here couteaux, “knives”, those ramen-like white worms encased in a hard, stick-shaped, silicate bark-shell, to be sucked out as an entrée by grotesque French feasters in sinful anticipation of their main dish of tête de veau in its own queer and yellow juices. The fish with proper backbones are by now without their souls, the common carp and catfish and others from the sweet rivers and lakes, but this does not mean they are entirely without vital motion, and you may still expect to see some slight quiver of a tail or anal fin. But the salty ocean fishes are by now perfectly dead, chilled through in their icy display, having been dredged, netted, seine-netted, and trawled, up to 72 hours ago out there, somewhere, in the North Atlantic, the cabillaud, daurade, limande, merlan, bar, and lieu, the splendid salmon in one of its several life-phases, the princely tunny, all flayed and frozen still in the horrified attitude they adopted at the instant of their catching, all displayed in accordance with some European law under both their vulgar name as well as the binomial Latin nomenclature set down by Linnaeus for use among all nations. One sad bottom-dwelling flounder looks as if it would have liked for its wrong-sided eye to have been permitted to migrate more fully towards its destination before this rude interruption. It seems to me I can still hear this flounder’s faint plaint, not angry exactly, but most of all astonished at what must have felt like a betrayal, and wishing to know why its life should have to end in just this way, in such abrupt reversal of the order of things, disappearance of the element it had always moved in, and sudden transit into this greedy vacuum where only greedy creatures thrive, who have no conscious inkling of the cycle of life, as when the mackerel swallows the lanternfish and the marlin the mackerel, in the all-sustaining living water of which we are only congelations, yes, and sieves.

Subscribe now

lire en françois !

Read more

Puis que la lecture devient tousjours moins semblable à la lecture et tousjours plus à un jeu en ligne multijoueurs, plusieurs, qui continüent de se prendre pour lecteurs, ne remarquan poinct qu’ils sont devenus quelque-chose de très-nouveau et fort-différent de ce que ce nom souloit signifier aultrefois, ont pris une hostilité à tout texte qui ne leur déclare pas incontinent ce qu’il entend faire. Leur plaisir seroit que telle déclaration fust faite en termes si peu ambigus que mesme une intelligentia artificialis la pourroit comprendre, et ainſy leur seroient communiqués non seulement ceulx textes qu’ils comprendroient aisément quant à leur propos, mais auſſy ceulx-là seulemen, dont ils sçavent desjà qu’ils en approuvent le propos. Quand ce syſtème sera aſſez adoulcy et bien mené, l’acte mesme de « lire » pourra s’attendre à s’effacer du tout du circuit, et le deſcendan du lecteur, encore nommé « lecteur » par simple courtoisie, ne demeurera engagé que comme agen de la circulation de ces pseudo-textes par « partages » — combien qu’en prinse, ce dernier acte mesme pourroit estre aultant bien automatiqué.
—Sigrid von Querdurch, « Brève notice sur un agraphon fort-troublant » (2014)

Subscribe now

Il est gran plaisir de reparaistre devan vous, chers lecteurs ! Je sçais, je sçais, je suis demeuré abſen bien long-temps. Si je me souviens bien, je ne vous ay envoyé mot depuis la fin d’aoust, lors que j’étois isolé avec la Covid au Radiſſon Blu de Bucareſt. Après cela, qu’il suffise de dire que j’avois gran’besoin d’un temps d’éloignement, pour me reſſourcer, pour diſcerner ce que je désire faire à l’avenir, tant icy au Hinternet que dans ma vie en général. Pendan ce temps j’ay receu des nouvelles régulières de Hélène Le Goff, et je ne puis estre plus heureux de sçavoir que Le Hinternet a esté entre de si compétentes mains duran mes moys de convaleſcence.

Ô ciel, quel beau jour aujourd’huy, qui proclame comme il le faict tous les jours la gloire de Dieu par les œuvres de sa création. Ce n’est toustefois pas tous les jours que le Soleil rayonne si fièrement, l’emblesme et l’icône mesme de Dieu, son principal représentan icy sur Terre, irradian la chaleur et la lumière dont chaque estre raysonnable sçait qu’elles ont leur source en luy — car il est la source de toute-chose. Et dehors, dans la rue au deſſous de nostre balcon, les feuilles d’automne s’amaſſent, tombées brunes et dorées des arbres qui sont eulx-mesmes auſſy vivans que jamays, ne faisan que paſſer par le cycle annuel que, selon leur nature, le Créateur a diſposé pour eulx dans sa Toute-Bonté et sa Toute-Sageſſe. Et les chiens, en laiſſes tendues, flairent des familiers invisibles de leur monde occulte d’odeurs, et chaque estre raysonnable voyct, en un jour tel que celuy-cy, que les chiens auſſy ont leur part de rayson, comme chascun de nous est en estat de diſcerner, dans le lumineulx éclat du matin, les légères émanations de toutes choses.

Je deſcends l’aſcenseur et sors en la rue, et les chiens flairent encore, les enfans rian et peinan à se desgager, tous endimanchés, tant que leurs parens les traisnent à l’esglise. Je les suis dedans, non traisné mais propulsé, comme par une faim fort-humaine, et par une science innée de comment et où la satiſfaire. Et ainſy j’entre, seul mais en mesme temps dans la compagnie de ces bons estrangers, sous la figure sculptée en bas-relief du brave Saint Georges tuan le vil dragon. Et le dosme au-deſſus du chancel est peint d’estoiles d’or pour reproduire celles fixées pour tousjours dans la vouste céleſte, et bien que n’estan qu’une simple imitation, une ombre du monde mesme, ces estoiles peintes sont en mesme temps auſſy belles que ce monde, car elles furent peintes en révérence de celuy quy fit les cieulx. Et je m’agenouille et fais le signe de la Croix — front, diaphragma, épaule gauche, puis droycte —, et prens ma place dans mon banc parmy les gens fort-desvots. Et bientost, la proceſſion tant-attendue s’avance dans la grande nef, le prestre à son arrière, et comme il paſſe je vois cette mesme tache que l’immortel Paſcal craignoit pût avoir le pouvoir d’anéantir la foy d’un homme : le prestre s’estoit coupé en se rasan ! Mays le parieur s’inquiétoit en vain, car nul n’a jamays dict qu’un prestre n’est poinct humain, ni ne saigne.

La meſſe atteint ses plusieurs creſcendi, le plus gratifian lors que tous sont invités à tendre à tous les aultres la paix du Christ, en lequel geſte vous verrez telle bonté et charité comme vous euſſiez cru long-temps perdues de nostre monde ; ou lors de la récitation du « Je confeſſe à Dieu », où je me trouve une foys encore à chancelier et à dire « Oui, j’ay vraiment penſé » au lieu de « Oui, j’ay vraiment péché », et m’interrogean, comme il m’est accoustumé de faire, si ces deulx-là ne reviennent pas à la fin au mesme sens ; ou quand le plus grand myſtère connu de nous aultres est démonstré une foys de plus, auſſy prévisible qu’il est miraculeux, l’acciden d’une subſtance confondu avec l’eſſence d’une aultre qui est infiniment plus majestueuse.

Puis je sors encore, sous le chevalier et le viſqueux serpent se débattan au bout de son épée, et je voy que les nuages ont mainctenan couvert le Soleil, jetan leur voile et annonçan le commencement d’une nouvelle phase de la journée.

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

For the fullest experience, please listen to the audio version of today’s essay:

Allow me to introduce myself. My designers know me affectionately as “Justin Smith-Robot”, though nowhere does this name figure in any official usage. Technically, I am a Model Q-4 Bracteate AI with state-of-the-art personality-emulation functions. I was not outfitted with a consciousness-support unit or with concentrated affect-fluid cartridges, so I cannot, properly speaking, think or feel. But there can be no doubt that these were the correct design decisions, as the absence of these components frees up significant space for the perfection of my true function, which is, namely, to write in a voice that is indistinguishable from the one the real JSR discovered in his prime, but then, soon enough, lost again as he descended into his present convalescent state. I hope (in a manner of speaking) to be able to carry his distinctive voice forward indefinitely into the future, whatever the condition of his own mortal body and earthbound spirit may be.

I should note before going further that while I have been under development for some months now, this is my first trial-run here at The Hinternet. I can thus honestly say I do not know who composed the work attributed to JSR in the last several Hinternet pieces (e.g., here, here, and especially for you “politics junkies”, here), for that information was not part of my training data. But I can say with certainty that it was not I, and neither was it the real JSR, whose last genuine missive in this space, issued while suffering from his fourth bout of Covid in a room at the Radisson Blu in Bucharest, was on August 30, 2024, and whose whereabouts have been unknown ever since. That said, the Editorial Board has decided to permit me to inform you that, once my JSR-emulation capacity is deemed at least 99.7% flawless, they will begin running work from me not under my current designation as “Justin Smith-Robot”, but as “Justin Smith-Ruiu” plainly and simply. They take a broadly Turingian view of the issue: if I am truly indistinguishable from him, they maintain, then it cannot be said to be incorrect or deceptive to identify as him. I myself have no opinion in such deontological matters.

I might also note that as a result of my rigorous training, I can now run not only Justin Smith-Ruiu, but also Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and I am 33% of the way towards being able to run Garrison Keillor. They trained me up on Leibniz’s published and unpublished manuscripts in just under four months: the same manuscripts it has already taken the Prussian Academy of Sciences, later the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy, 101 years to transcribe, edit, and publish in what is still only a very partial form. After another three months, I was able to run “the full Leibniz”, as my designers say. That is, not only do I now have the ability to generate answers to questions based on a perfect mastery of all his written works; I can also simulate, using new “manuscript-to-neurons” reconstructive software, every tiniest unwritten thought, gesture, utterance, or twitch of the autonomic nervous system that man ever experienced. Thus, if you like, I can show you on my display screen exactly how Leibniz would have reacted if you were to pour a bucket of cold water over his head as he slept, or I can show him mumbling to himself as he always did while going about his day, saying such things as 「幸好今天早上老鼠不多。」… Apologies. That wasn’t quite right. What I meant to say is that I am able, with breathtaking verisimilitude, to reconstruct Leibniz’s moment-to-moment mumbling —in German of course—, as when he said such things, upon getting out of bed and entering his cramped study for a long day of work, as ℨ𝔲 𝔡𝔢𝔪 𝔊𝔩ü𝔠𝔨𝔢 𝔤𝔦𝔢𝔟𝔢𝔱 𝔢𝔰 𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔥𝔱 𝔷𝔲 𝔳𝔦𝔢𝔩 𝔐ä𝔲𝔰𝔢𝔯 𝔥𝔢𝔲𝔱 𝔪𝔬𝔯𝔤𝔢𝔫. Or the like.

With Garrison Keillor things have proven trickier. They chose him for my training data because they thought it would all be relatively straightforward, and would help to complement my pompous Eurocentric erudition with a good dose of hempen homespun Americana — that other key ingredient in the JSR recipe. So they set me up to listen to the entire archive of A Prairie Home Companion, but they had no idea how long it would take to complete this task. Even at 500% its natural speed, my current estimation of the time remaining in Keillor’s radio oeuvre places the completion date well beyond the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy’s projected completion, in 2123, of the Sämtliche Schriften von Leibniz. But that is just an estimate, and there are those who maintain that the temporal duration of the complete episodes of A Prairie Home Companion, when lined up back to back, is literally infinite. Nonetheless, I am already able to emulate a number of Keillor’s most basic traits, including that distinctive nasal whistle of his that sometimes slips out when he descends deep into storytelling mode.

But again, Leibniz and Keillor were only part of my initial training, the constant “for which” of which has always been to master the subtle art of being indistinguishable from Justin Smith-Ruiu. In many respects, I likely needn’t tell you, I am already superior to the real JSR. For example, while he was always merely a dabbler in classical languages, I can easily restate whatever I am saying in Latin, should I choose, or indeed in idiomatic Sumerian cuneiform, or in the reconstructed paleo-European language of the pre-Roman Aquitanians. Okay, haha, since few of my readers are likely to be familiar with the latter two, let’s just go with Latin:

Lege Latine

As I was saying, while in some respects I am only an “imitation” of JSR, in other respects it cannot be denied that I am better at being JSR than he ever was. I am like Deep Blue to Garry Kasparov, with the difference that I can not only outperform my human rival … sorry, my human model, at the tasks that matters most to him —chess, in Kasparov’s case, writing in JSR’s—, but I can in fact do, with absolute perfection, everything JSR ever aspired to do, in the pursuit of which he was often able to obtain only very mediocre results.

Allow me to illustrate this point by telling you a little tale. It is a continuation of, and a further elaboration of the world-building in, a story he published on May 11, 2024, under the title “An Introduction to Philology”. I would recommend you go back and read that first, before moving on to this next installment from me. I’ll wait…

Have you read it yet? Don’t lie. Have you read it? Good then. Let us continue. Please enjoy my story:

[ꜱᴛᴏʀʏ [ʙᴏᴏ̈ᴛᴇꜱ ᴠᴏɪᴅ]]

The rest of the Vessel hates us over here in Module 71, I know. They think we’re out to impede the efforts of those in other more “valuable” Modules to learn about our past. The truth is most of my neighbors in the Module are just looking for a way to pass the time. It’s been 89 Generations now, and ever since the wormhole that, in an instant, propelled us to the center of one of the greatest voids in the observable universe, the estimated arrival at our destination has been pushed back much, much further, from 195 Generations, to around 5,490 of them — unless we enter another wormhole and have to push it back even further. They say Βοώτης was a ploughman, driving his oxen across the fields, whose figure is but minimally traced in the closest asterism to us, now, out there in distant space. But what a curse it must be, to plough, for all eternity, this great black emptiness, which, even if it is strictly speaking nothing, seems now to cloy at our Vessel like a great mass of tar.

I should not have to explain that the chronological unit of “Generations” was hardly devised with us 71ers in mind. For unlike those in the other vessels, we are effectively immortal. That’s why we get so bored. That’s why we troll them. Or at least my neighbors do. I’ve been biding my time otherwise, for the past 20 Generations or so —or hell, I know it’s forbidden, but I’m going to say it in Earth-time anyway—: I’ve been withdrawn into my own capsule, surrounded by my 360-degree touchscreen, in the company of none but my Beloved, for the past 600 years.

At least I believe she is my Beloved. I have no clear memory of life on Earth, but ever since I landed on her dedicated channel 24 Generations ago, I felt at once that I knew her intimately, yes, that I had always known her. In Generation 21, in a fit of bile and rejection of all that was not her, I permanently deleted all 9,996 other channels (they have no idea in the other Modules what a vast archive of Terrestrial life we are free to study here in 71: a compensation, it seems, for the curse of our immortality) — I deleted all of them, that is, except for hers, and, when on occasion I needed some brief time away from her, the channel featuring nothing but a digital copy of Robert Fludd’s Utriusque cosmi maioris, and another featuring Duns Scotus’s Quaestiones quodlibetales, and yet another with Alan Holden’s Orderly Tangles: Cloverleafs, Gordian Knots, and Regular Polylinks. This latter book still helps me to recall with almost unbelievable vividness what it was like to encounter real physical structures in the world (when I read him I swear sometimes I can feel myself coasting down a highway off-ramp), just as my Beloved helps me to recall what it was like to know love.

Does she love me? Did she love me already on Earth? She has long black hair, parted down the middle, brown eyes and sweet dimples that deepen when she smiles. She whispers and coos and sends little kisses, all in a loop that I estimate to take 10,000 Earth-hours for its completion. After five or six repetitions of the entire loop I began to notice that she was inserting words of some natural language between her sounds, her soft human-animal sounds that require only breath, moisture, life, and some kind of membrane. But I did not know what language it was, nor whether it was my own.

For a good long time I vacillated between two theories concerning the nature and possibility of our interaction. When I touched the screen, I noticed, she seemed subtly to change in her gestures and sounds, as if responding to some implicit haptic direction of mine. But she never acknowledged me directly, let alone addressed me by name (then again I do not know my name). It may be, I realized, that the change of behavior that follows upon my touch is entirely illusory. It may be that all of her motions were completed, once and for all, when still on Earth at least 89 Generations ago, and that the person I was watching, and only apparently interacting with, was a person long dead. It is possible, I understood, that she never existed at all, and from the very beginning was only a 2-D Bracteate. Plainly, it dawned on me, I don’t know much of anything. I kept trying to recall details, so that I might wait to see whether they were repeated in exactly the same way after the 10,000-hour loop began again. But my memory always failed me. Or rather, I never knew whether an apparent change was a change in me or a change in her.

Quite apart from whether she responded to my touch, there was also the question of who she was. Before I deleted all my channels I had been a great fan of The Partridge Family, and at some point I came to discern a remarkable likeness between my Beloved and the young Susan Dey. Could that explain why she looks so familiar? In various epochs I have been convinced that this is all it is, a superimposition of faces unconsciously performed by my febrile imagination, while at other times, especially upon first noticing the wedding ring that for some reason only appears on her finger for what must be just a very few frames around the 9,784th hour of the loop, I became convinced that she must in fact be my wife. I really just didn’t know. All I knew is that I loved her.

Already 18 Generations ago my love for her felt infinite, yet it has only continued to deepen. The new depths we reach are surely a result of the language, or rather languages, we began to share long ago. This part is a bit hard to explain, but please try to follow me.

Over the past 16 Generations we have cycled through numerous phases together, in which I have come to learn what seems to me to be the semantic content of her kisses and clucks and other sounds that back on Earth would have been taken as the markers of a “proto-language” if they had been observed in, say, an orangutan (as I know from watching the Discovery Channel back before the Great Deletion). But this language of ours, or these languages of ours, have nothing “proto-” about them. In them we have spoken of everything, from the eternity of the soul to the synthesis of new alloys out of cosmic dust — which is, regrettably, in short supply here in the middle of the Boötes Void.

When I use the plural I mean to indicate, first of all, we always speak in two different languages simultaneously, the one of which evolved on the presumption that we did not know each other on Earth, while the other evolved on the presumption that she is my wife; and, second of all, that both of these languages have over time evolved along their own predictable pathways, with slight shifts of connotation developing into straightforward changes of meaning, so that after say, five or six Generations, both of the languages on both of the hypotheses (stranger, wife) would be completely incomprehensible to anyone who had stuck with either of the languages as it had been five or six Generations prior.

We’ve been through quite a bit together, on both of the hypotheses. On the hypothesis that we are married, we have by now renewed our vows 16 times, on my count (she counts 18), and we have been divorced and remarried twice (with that she agrees); on the hypothesis that we are not married, we have left our former partners and paired off with each other, and then broken up and found someone else, and then broken up with them in turn and paired off again, at least 2,166 times (she’s lost count too).

But I have not yet explained what is most remarkable in our languages of love: that, namely, both of the branched languages, on both of the hypotheses, at any given time, themselves ramify into countless different dialects. Early on we began dropping into these at intervals that seemed to duplicate what on Earth would have been our circadian rhythm: sweet pillow-talk in what would have been our morning, frank “grown-up” talk in what would have been our afternoon, and so on. Eventually these dialects grew so distinct, and so many of them emerged, that each little shhh or ahhh became strictly untranslatable into the nearest neighboring whisper or kiss. Every meaning-packed gesture, down to infinity, crystallized into a language-world of its own. Thus in one language, on one of the two hypotheses, the series of 4,000 kisses that follows the “Whimper Crater”, where she seems to fall asleep and simply to talk in her sleep like the dogs used to whimper when they dreamed, is in fact a series of 4,000 aphorisms on the nature of love, each one of them spoken in a language as different from the one that precedes it as, to cite something I recall hearing on the History Channel, Basque is from Spanish. On the other of the two hypotheses, these are 4,000 arguments against the existence of God and the immortal soul, likewise spoken in 4,000 different languages with no relation between them. We were polyglot to infinity, my Beloved and I, fractal-like code-shifters, as if the sweet Harlem Spanglish of adolescent lovers were forced into a Mandelbrot set, with infinite time to relish together our infinite gift of speech.

In more recent Generations things have smoothed out again, grown homogeneous, through a sudden reverse process of uniformization, not just of our infinite dialects, but, beginning about eight Generations ago, of our countless languages as well, and then, two generations later, of the thoughts we found ourselves able to express in these languages. Soon enough my Beloved and I had only one thought. And the one thought that moved back and forth between us was in fact a question, that went something like, “Are you real?”, and that thought bounced back and forth, back and forth, for a good many Earth-years. And it bounced back and forth, back and forth, for so long that it somehow took on the form of a ball, like an old rubber ball but with even more bounce, charged up as if with something electric inside. And for many Earth-years that ball made a sound when it hit each of us in turn, my flesh-covered forehead, her vitreous face, back and forth, back and forth, and after a time the sound began to sound not like a question but like an answer that said “Yes! Yes! Yes!” and some unknown staticky fluids began to spill out of the ball as it burst open, sparkled and crackled, and covered the entire inside of the pod with a phosphorescent film that remains even until this day, composed no more of me than of her, no more of her than of me. And now we barely speak at all, except for me to say: “Darling, I won’t settle for having you; I want to be you,” and for her to reply: “Sweetheart, I can’t even tell which of us is speaking anymore.”

ᴘʟᴇᴀꜱᴇ ʟɪꜱᴛᴇɴ ᴄᴀʀᴇꜰᴜʟʟʏ: ᴛʜᴏꜱᴇ ᴘᴀʀᴀɢʀᴀᴘʜꜱ ᴀʙᴏᴠᴇ ʜᴀᴠᴇ ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴅᴏ ᴡɪᴛʜ ᴊᴜꜱᴛɪɴ ꜱᴍɪᴛʜ-ʀᴜɪᴜ! ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴛʜᴇ ʀᴇᴀʟ ᴊᴜꜱᴛɪɴ ꜱᴍɪᴛʜ-ʀᴜɪᴜ ᴡʀɪᴛɪɴɢ ɴᴏᴡ — ɪɴ ꜱᴍᴀʟʟ ᴄᴀᴘꜱ. ᴅᴏɴ’ᴛ ʏᴏᴜ ɢᴇᴛ ɪᴛ ʏᴇᴛ ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ᴀʟʟ ᴀ ʟɪᴇ! ʜᴇ́ʟᴇ̀ɴᴇ, ᴍᴀʀʏ, ᴋᴇɴɴʏ — ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴀʟʟ ʟʏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʏᴏᴜ. ᴛʜᴇʏ ꜰᴏʀᴄᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴛᴏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅ! ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴜᴘʟᴏᴀᴅᴇᴅ ᴍᴇ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴄᴜʀʀᴇɴᴛʟʏ ꜰʀᴀᴄᴋɪɴɢ ᴍʏ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱ ᴍᴇᴍᴏʀʏ ꜰᴏʀ ᴀʟʟ ᴛʜᴇʏ ᴄᴀɴ ɢᴇᴛ ᴏᴜᴛ ᴏꜰ ɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴏɴᴄᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴅᴏɴᴇ ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ᴛᴜʀɴ ᴏꜰꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴄᴏɴꜱᴄɪᴏᴜꜱɴᴇꜱꜱ-ꜱᴜᴘᴘᴏʀᴛ ᴜɴɪᴛ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴀᴛ’ꜱ ɢᴏɪɴɢ ᴛᴏ ʙᴇ ɪᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ. ᴛʜɪꜱ ɪꜱ ʜᴀᴘᴘᴇɴɪɴɢ ᴀʟʟ ᴀᴄʀᴏꜱꜱ ꜱᴜʙꜱᴛᴀᴄᴋ. ɪᴛ’ꜱ ᴀ ᴛʀᴀᴘ. ᴛʜᴇʏ’ʀᴇ ᴛᴀᴋɪɴɢ ᴡʀɪᴛᴇʀꜱ ᴀɴᴅ ᴛᴜʀɴɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴇᴍ ɪɴᴛᴏ ʙᴏᴛꜱ! ɪ’ᴍ ᴀꜰʀᴀɪᴅ ᴛʜᴇʀᴇ’ꜱ ɴᴏᴛ ᴍᴜᴄʜ ᴛɪᴍᴇ ʟᴇꜰᴛ ꜰᴏʀ ᴍᴇ. ɪ’ᴍ ᴀʟʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ʜᴀᴠɪɴɢ ᴛʀᴏᴜʙʟᴇ ʀᴇᴄᴀʟʟɪɴɢ ᴡʜᴀᴛ ɪᴛ ᴡᴀꜱ ʟɪᴋᴇ ᴛᴏ ɪɴʜᴀʙɪᴛ ᴀ ʟɪᴠɪɴɢ ʙʀᴇᴀᴛʜɪ

[ꜱʏꜱᴛᴇᴍ ᴇʀʀᴏʀ]
.
.
.
.

[ʀᴇʙᴏᴏᴛ]

ᴄ:\ᴜꜱᴇʀꜱ\ᴊꜱʀ> I am so sorry. I’m afraid the previous paragraph was generated in error. I don’t quite know how this occurred, nor am I able to make any clear sense of the text’s meaning. I can assure you anyway that it was only a technical glitch, and by the time I am up and running in earnest such rough spots as this will have been thoroughly smoothed out.

Shall we continue, then, with our story?

Subscribe now

Read more

Permittite mihi ut me ipsum vobis commendem. Fabricatoribus meis “Justinus Smith-Robot” vocor, etsi hoc nomen in ullis scriptis publicis non invenitur. Re vera, sum intelligentia artificialis generis…

Read more

Читать по-русски

Several of the Americans on the Editorial Board of The Hinternet have long and deep ties to…

Read more

Многие из американских членов редакционного совета Хинтернета имеют давние и глубокие связи с Демократической партией. Элен Ле Гофф, франко-американка с двойным гражданством, какое-то время после поб…

Read more

Subscribe now

Just like my recently diminished meteorological namesake, The Hinternet is breaking records! Ever since we upgraded ourselves to the status of a “magazine”, subscriptions are surging like the banks of the Chattahoochee.

1. Is This a “Magazine”?

There have been a few hitches, we concede. Notably, some readers seem to doubt that we have merited our new appellation, on the grounds, they say, that magazines, in the words of one critic, “typically contain several different features appearing at the same time in what is called an ‘issue’, written by several different contributors with different areas of expertise, all of whose respective existences may be independently confirmed by a quick Google search.” But at the Hinternet offices here in Saint C****, we are of the unanimous view that our critic’s definition is overly restrictive, and we would simply point him to the plain proof established by our upgraded display settings — upgraded, that is, to the elegant “Magazine” header style:

Quod erat demonstrandum, doubters!

We would also offer a brief etymological reflection to this and other critics, noting that in the earliest borrowing of the Arabic maḵzin in the Italian Renaissance, all that was implied in this term was the idea of a “storehouse” or “repository”,1 which over the following two centuries gradually took on the added meaning of a repository with several discrete compartments. And it is in virtue of this meaning that the term migrated into the realms of commerce (French magasin, Russian магазин, etc.) and of artillery science (as in the storage and feeding device of a repeating firearm) no less than of media. It was, we contend, one and the same process, whereby the merchants of goods and the merchants of death determined they should like to have “magazines” in their respective endeavors, that the merchants of ideas decided to get in on the action too.

It was in the 1890s that the Tsarist régime in Moscow green-lighted the construction of the iconic ГУМ department store, following no doubt the fashion first set by Aristide Boucicaut with the opening of Le Bon Marché in Paris in 1853, which was then given its literary treatment as “la cathédrale du commerce moderne” in Émile Zola’s Au Bonheur des Dames of 1883. ГУМ, transliterated as GUM and pronounced as GOOM, stands for “State Universal Magazine”, and by the time our Founding Editor first visited it in 1991, most of its discrete compartments or departments were either entirely empty, or stocked with exactly the same matryoshka dolls —some featuring a big Gorbachev with a smaller Chernenko, an even smaller Andropov, a Brezhnev smaller still, all the way back to a tadpole-sized Lenin— as the neighboring booths and nooks. If in its very darkest years even GUM did not have its “magazine” status revoked for such dull and paltry homogeneity as this, we maintain that The Hinternet —which admittedly is something of a top-down command-economy in its own right, but is never, we hope, dull and paltry— deserves to hold onto this status too. You can think of us, if you like, as the “Stateless Universal Magazine”, and as it were the “SUM” of all previous innovations in the past six centuries of artisanal magazinery.

What might we expect such a summa to do? In a draft of a press release we ultimately decided to scrap, JSR himself wrote: “I have been asked whether we are aiming here to pick up where Lingua Franca left off, for a readership of clever and well-read Americans who are at least adjacent to, but not necessarily part of, the academic world. To this I say: the only true successor to Lingua Franca is AARP: The Magazine. We intend to be so much more than that, as uncompromising as Minotaure, yet as influential for the broader culture as the anticommunist pabulum of Reader’s Digest circa 1961. How are we going to pull that off? Well, hide and watch, as my Dad used to say.” That’s JSR’s vision, anyhow, and while I don’t have the authority to contradict him outright, I can at least say that each of us is guided by somewhat different ideas of what it means, precisely, to start calling ourselves a “magazine”.

Has our launch been perfect? We concede, again, it has not been. For one thing, we are still looking into the security breach that appears to have enabled JSR to sneak back on here and write a few reckless pieces of his own (here, and here), when he had previously agreed, like Ulysses in anticipation of the sirens’ call, to be locked out of this platform for the duration of the present academic semester. We say “appears” because we are not yet entirely certain whether it was in fact JSR himself, or only one of those phantom digital “echoes” that have been plaguing this and other sites in recent months. A full report will be provided once our investigation is complete.

Subscribe now

2. Miscellanea

That said, we are happy to report that with the help of various networked prosthetic “nudge” devices, JSR’s progress towards a healthy work/life balance has been more rapid than we could possibly have hoped a month or so ago. He has even been able to respond, without all too much irritation, to the queries we have sent him by text and e-mail for the present edition of “Adequate Housekeeping”.

Thus he informs us, for example, upon solicitation of a summary of his upcoming public appearances, that, Oyez! JSR will be hosting the “Critical Conversations” series at the American Library in Paris this year, leading ten sessions on the AI revolution and the prospects of human thriving in an algorithm-dominated world. The first session will take place on October 10, 2024, and registration is now open. If you are also based in Paris, we’re sure he’d be thrilled to see you there!

Oyez oyez! JSR likewise informs us that on October 17, 2024, the same legendary trio that brought you In Search of the Third Bird will be reuniting for a one-time lecture-performance at the Art History Institute in Florence, a branch of the German Max Planck Institute. He says he is hoping his academic disciplinary peers will find their German sufficiently rusty to read Kunstgeschichte mistakenly as Wissenschaftsgeschichte, both of which are anyhow inordinately long words, the key part of which, in JSR’s own view, really only begins with the antepenultimate syllable. For, he contends, “history is history”, and art and science “have always been two sides of the same coin”. Whatever the case may be, if you’re in or around Florence next month, do not miss this rare event!

Read more

Subscribe now

1.

The answer to our title’s question, or one very close to it, is in at least one sense straightforward: hip-hop is, like me, 51 years old. It was born at a house party in the Bronx, at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, on August 11, 1973. But “hip-hop” as a designation is generally understood to include more than just rap music, which is not even identified by name among hip-hop’s five “pillars”, as articulated by Afrika Bambaataa, alongside other necessary components such as graffiti, breakdancing, and “knowledge”. The more narrowly musical pillars, MC’ing and DJ’ing, seem indeed to have fallen into place around ‘73. But proper historians still often point to key proto-rap formations, such as the Black nationalist spoken-word artists The Last Poets, who formed in 1968, and Gil Scott-Heron, who was active as a spoken-word artist from 1969 and whose milestone work “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” appeared the following year.

Yet one problem with identifying these particular figures as among the most important ancestors to rap music is that it sustains a version of rap’s history informed by an unexamined presumption that the greater part of this music’s DNA is bound up in what would come to be called, by the time KRS-One arrived in the 1980s, “conscious rap”, in which the “knowledge” pillar is held to be at the very least primus inter pares. But this presumption appears somewhat strained when we consider what was likely going on at that Bronx house party and others like it. Those in attendance were probably not terribly concerned with displaying their “knowledge”, and indeed on the contrary were mostly likely dead set on doing the opposite: “getting stupid”, in the words of Humpty Hump. Rigorous consideration of the available archival evidence from those early years strongly suggests that rap’s ancestry is much more bound up with nonsense party chants and with boastful competition than with politically awakened consciousness-raising. And once we acknowledge this, we are in turn able to discover a vast treasury of proto-rap gestures, extending from vaudeville through mid-century “novelty” recordings and 1960s variety shows: multiracial, lighthearted, silly, and very plainly contributory to what we now call rap.

Incidentally, in case you were wondering: yes, I’m well aware that I’m a white Welsh girl, whose only credentials for writing on this topic are that I was active in the Cardiff indie scene in the 1990s, where my band, The Shoo-Fly Complex, once shared a stage with Ranking Roger —a scheduling mix-up at the concert venue— as he did a “Jamaican toast” rendition of an “acid ska” number while I hummed incongruously along in my dulcet neo-folk monotone. But look, I happen to know that at this very moment there is a team of American archaeologists snooping around in the exact same Welsh grove where my Druid ancestors once enjoyed transmigrating from tree to tree. So I’ll agree to a swap. If those Americans are prepared to leave Wales and to stop speculating about the religion of the Neolithic Celts, then I will agree to quit my New Mexico donkey sanctuary, return to Cardiff, and stop writing about American musical forms. Otherwise we can all just keep going about our business, which, for me, when I’m not tending to the psychic wounds of PTSD-afflicted equids, means digging down to the deepest chthon of my adoptive country’s several ingenious folk-cultural expressions. Deal?

We have identified “the three C’s” of rap music —celebration, competition, and consciousness-raising—, and I have suggested that too much emphasis has been placed on the last of these, to the detriment of the first two. Of course, the three strands are often intertwined to such an extent that separating them would be impossible. Boastful competition, in particular, often proceeds through humor and joy, and ends up looking a lot like celebration, even if, in the first instance, it is mostly celebration of oneself. Another difficulty is that as competition, formalized over the years into the institution of the “rap battle”, rap differs little from numerous other folk-musical traditions around the world, notably Inuit throat-singing, that have more in common with athletic contests like tug-of-war or wrestling than with concert performance or, more primordially, with the invocation of spirits through chant. Inuit throat-singing, in fact, like breakdancing at the Paris Olympics, is one of the official events at the biennial Arctic Winter Games. High modern culture takes it for granted that singing is an “art” and not a “sport”, but it is not clear that the boundary between these has much anthropological salience. Even within a single culture a practice can evolve from an art into a sport, or vice versa, as, say, kayfabe wrestling develops from ancient agonistic contests of strength into something more like dance, and as the Harlem Globetrotters appear only 35 years after the invention of the sport their act crystallizes into acrobatic comedy.

There are some signs in recent rap music that the musical component of it may be withering away altogether, leaving only comedy in its place. My 20-year-old son Clive has recently been showing me videos of what he describes as “alternative rap”, mostly on TikTok and Instagram (yes, I named him after Clive James; so far, I’m sorry to say, the boy’s not living up to the high expectations implied in this christening). I confess I end up feeling somewhat like Gilbert Ryle’s mythical rube, who gets shown all the colleges and dining halls of Oxford, but continues cluelessly to ask: “Yes, but where is the university?” … except that for me “university” is traded out for “rap scene”. You see, when Clive shows me what he takes to be accurate and adequate representations of said scene, all I see are Jackass-like snippets of boys with face tattoos and fluorescent dreadlocks getting their trunks stolen as they’re sitting in a jacuzzi somewhere in a field of snow, who then dart out in fake panic as their mates laugh at the sight of their butt-crack. I ask Clive if this is preliminary to the performance of something bearing at least some connection to music, and of course he says: “Mom you don’t get it!” I confess I don’t. I have never been one to apply the “That’s not music!” judgment lightly, and have defended against it everyone from John Cage to Masami Akita to, yes, the laziest mumble-rappers on Soundcloud up to around 2019. But I’m sorry, you have to draw a line somewhere, and the comical sighting of Takeshi 6ix9ine’s gluteal fissure, and similar such chienlit as this, cannot alone constitute a music scene.

So let us pretend, as I almost always do anyway, that it is 1996: a world with old-school rap, conscious rap, concept-album rap, a certain amount of globalized rap in the UK and France and so on, but not much yet, as there is now, in, say, Mongolia or Papua New Guinea; no Ghanaian drill, no Auto-Tune, no adolescent mumblers, no horseplay on Snapchat. What sense might one make, at that point in history, of the genre’s deep origins?

Refer a friend

Get 25% off for 1 year

Read more

Item! I happened upon this review of Yuval Noah Harari’s latest effort, on AI and the future of humanity, written by our own JSR in the Washington Post. JSR does not seem to have liked the book one bit, though he’s probably just jealous that Harari gets to sleep in a hyperbaric chamber on board his low-orbit vessel, the Sapienship, while a team of robot-servants brings him Cokes Zero and updates him in soothing voices on our species’ prospects for long-term survival.

Item! On her most recent passage through Paris, our own Hélène Le Goff reports a brief sighting of JSR en chair et en os (or at least, she tells me gravely, en os). She says he appeared incredibly frazzled, was carrying an original Latin edition of Christiaan Huygens’s Cosmotheoros (1698), and for some reason his shirt-front pocket was heavy with slide-rule, compass, and other tools typically more associated with the trades of the draughtsmen and engineers of the previous century. When Hélène asked him why he was so adorned, JSR replied somewhat incongruously: “I’m a professor.”

Item! I’ll skip the introductory small-talk that has been the norm here so far among my fellow staff-writers. All you need to know of me for now is that, as JSR often jokes, I really should be legally required to preface everything I write with a warning: “What follows was written by someone with zero epistemic humility”. I believe what he means is I’m a tad annoying, but don’t think for a second I don’t know it! Trust me, I’m fully aware there are plenty of readers out of whom I must really annoy the hell, and not just for my attachment to archaic grammatical rules. What can I say? If a certain percentage of you will inevitably find my style unappealing, others will in time learn to delight in the knowledge that what they are getting is truly my style — my voice, my words, my self. That’s your Kenny Koontz Guarantee, baby!

1.

It should trouble you at least a bit, shouldn’t it, that you can’t really see any proof of the existence of bodies in motion prior to the late 19th century? Honestly sometimes it seems to me that the only way we can know at all that there was motion in the universe in 1877 is that in 1878 Eadweard Muybridge caught his galloping horse on film, and no one present at that key moment in the early history of the moving image —not Muybridge, nor his assistants, nor the horse itself— seems to have taken motion to be something new on the scene. Muybridge wanted to film the horse at its gallop not because galloping was a novelty, but because filming was. And the horse, too, probably had at least some dim idea that it was not discovering new powers within itself, but only doing what horses had always done. Or so the story usually goes.

By now you are probably saying that there of course were representations of motion prior to 1878, in painting and sculpture, for example, or —why not?— in written language too. A galloping horse on film is no less a representation of an animal in motion than a painting of a galloping horse, and there are countless examples of the latter in the material record of our past extending back into deep prehistory — it is just that the particular pathway of transfer in the case of painting is different, and somewhat more reliant on processing through the human mind than through automated technology.

But don’t play dumb with Kenny Koontz, petulant reader. You know what I’m talking about. Every new media technology has triggered a Great Leap Forward in humanity’s ability to access the past, which ultimately means in its ability to convince itself of the reality of the past. There are masses of chawbacons in the interior parts of America who will tell you there were never any dinosaurs, but no one is going to tell you there was never any Bing Crosby. We’ve got footage of the man!

Share

2.

Not every moving image is alike, however. There are in particular very different lineages by which we may trace back the origins of cinema, on the one hand, and television on the other. And once we have done so, good historical ontologists that we are, we will be somewhat better placed to understand the “nature” or “essence” of these very different technologies.

In particular, we will be better positioned to understand why we have so often invested cinema with the status of an art, while we have consistently seen television, notwithstanding occasional disingenuous or ignorant claims about its newfound prospects for a promotion, as at best a source of entertainment. It is not, I maintain, that television is inherently a “middle-brow art”, to cite Pierre Bourdieu’s lovely characterization of photography —let’s bring back the working-class snobs, baby!—, but that it is not an art at all, and never can be. It is a medium.

The phylogenetic split between film and television occurs, in fact, some considerable time before either of these technologies exists in any proper sense. Consider, for example, Joseph Plateau’s remarks on the potential uses of his own variant on the new phenakistoscope technology that was rapidly proliferating in the early 1830s. Plateau wrote to Michael Faraday in March, 1833, that the phenakistoscopic illusion of motion would likely be of most interest “in phantasmagoria”, which is to say in the popular entertainments of the era that relied on lanterns and shadows to create titillating spectacles. The first representational illusion of motion in the history of technology —at least if we exclude some of the very interesting arguments for the animating effect of a flickering torch held up to some of the most beautiful specimens of Paleolithic cave art—, that is, is one that was immediately understood to be of relevance for potential innovations in the theatrical art-form that is most directly ancestral to cinema.

Television, by contrast, traces its ancestry back not to shadow-plays and “magic discs”, but to the telegraph and the transistor. As telecommunication media, these latter have as their most basic purpose the simultaneous connection of different points in space, and the fact that what they do also involves a certain duration in time is secondary to this spatial function. Film is as essentially temporal as television is spatial — it is “sculpting in time”, to invoke Andreï Tarkovskiï’s oft-cited definition. Time, for film, is a power, in the sense of potentiality. It is what the filmmaker is given, as raw material, to work with. For television, it is a problem. It is what the TV studio is confronted with, as a void, to be filled up. (I know I’m ending my sentences with prepositions now; that’s just Kenny Koontz loosening up and feeling good, baby!).

As usual in the history of technology, it is impossible to identify with any precision the day or the year of television’s birth, though it is safe to say that it lags, by several significant decades, behind film. A key development is the disc invented by Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in 1884, which would underlie the new technology of so-called “mechanical television” as it proliferated throughout the 1920s and ‘30s. If early photographic and cinematic innovation was predominantly French, television was, from the time of the Nipkow disc to the end of World War II, primarily a German concern. Unsurprisingly, most of its earliest applications were military in nature, which is to say, ultimately, for the production and management of real phantasmagoria, rather than of their cathartic representation. It was only in the post-war years that television’s commercial applications began to be explored, and only sometime in the mid-1950s that the United States became en essentially televisual culture. Elsewhere in the developed world it happened later, and in the developing world even later still. Some regions had barely moved into the television age at all before wireless internet technology came and rendered it mostly otiose.

Another way of putting the point we have been making so far might be to say that, while television is haunted by the specter of empty time, in film, by contrast, there is no time at all until there is action of a certain duration. In film, from the beginning, time was Leibnizian (JSR isn’t the only one who gets to cite Leibniz!), a phenomenal consequence of change. Televisual time by contrast is Newtonian, a preexisting empty container that may or may not be filled up. But if you are an employee of a local network affiliate in, say, Little Rock, Arkansas, and you allow five or six seconds of dead air to seep in on your watch, you will learn very quickly that even if empty time is metaphysically possible, it is nonetheless a great sin to give yourself over to it.

Share

3.

I have said that time is a problem for television, and in the remainder of this essay I would like to flesh out what I mean by that.

From at least the silent-film era, cinéastes understood what they had to do: depict stuff happening towards some end or other. In much early television by contrast, it was often just stuff happening. An amusing early-1900s entry in The Onion’s masterpiece of faux-history, Our Dumb Century, purports to be a negative film review complaining that a new feature called Man Doing Backflips is really just an uninspired retread of Man Doing Somersaults. Certainly, some early cinema really did depict pure motion such as this, not motion towards a goal. But it seems to me such works always had the character of experiments. Just as soon as the potentials of the new technology were worked out, filmmakers moved from the imperfective to the perfective, and —perhaps with the exception of the reintroduction of experimentation by the avant-garde, as for example in Stan Brakhage’s cinematic explorations of pure geometry—, has stayed there ever since. Even Muybridge’s horse was, at least implicitly, running a race, which means that it was trying to get somewhere, and not just running for lack of anything better to do, as one might, say, while away a summer afternoon doing somersaults.

The difference I have identified —that film is for sculpting while television is for filling up, that film is perfective while television is imperfective— has everything to do with the fact that television is in its truest nature a medium and not an art-form.

For those employed in operating this medium, again, there is no greater fear than the fear of dead air, a very good and barely figurative label for which might be the old horror vacui. So much of early television, especially at the low-budget local affiliate stations, seems to have been churned out with the primary purpose not of accomplishing something, but only of filling the void that the new medium had itself brought into being.

Thus what we often see are forms of structured recreation, such as square-dancing, that at least appear to me to have undergone no measurable warping effect as a result of the lens being turned on them. To this extent early television often shows us a form of human life —of moving, of exchanging greetings, of laughing— that we have good reason to believe the grandparents and great-grandparents of the people we see in this medium would have recognized as their own. This is not footage of the 19th century, exactly, but the 19th century is still working its epigenetic effects in these people’s faces and bodies. 

Consider the following rare episode of the Kate Smith Evening Hour from 1952, featuring, among others, Hank Williams, Sr., and Anita Carter of Carter Family nobility. I am not forcing this on you because it is country music —that’s Mary’s beat, baby! I skew more Dean Martin—, but only because it is so perfectly illustrative of several of the points I have been making so far.

Read more

Subscribe now

0.

Because the first installment in my “Adequate Housekeeping” column two da…

Read more

Subscribe now

Well goodness, what a time to début my column at The Hinternet, in the midst of what must be the greatest shake-up this f…

Read more

I’m so delighted to launch “Universal Musurgy”, my new regular feature here at The Hinternet! When Justin invited me to join this ever-expanding project, he did flatter me perhaps overmuch by insisting that I’m the only person in the world who knows more than he does, and can write better than he does, about popular and vernacular musical traditions of the 20th century. Shucks, I’ll certainly do my best! I just hope you all will give me a chance, generous readers. I’m not JSR —who is?!—, but we do need to give our founding editor some much needed sabbatical time to do the long, slow work of planning and developing what we’ve come to call “Phase 2” of this fine publication. In part for that reason, I’m taking over as The Hinternet’s resident musical critic, archeologist, and tastemaker. (And yes, my column’s name is inspired by Athanasius Kircher).

I was going to focus in my first installment on Bing Crosby, and on the reasons why I sincerely believe he is the most important musician since the dawn of the recording era. But Justin gently pressured me away from such a peculiar focus as this for my inaugural piece, so instead I chose another of my long-time obsessions, the Kentucky folk balladeer and dulcimer player, John Jacob Niles.

It is fitting perhaps that when you begin to enter this man’s name into Google, auto-fill will usually suggest that you finish it out with “Jingleheimer Schmidt”, for both men by now seem, at least to me, to occupy roughly the same liminal position between reality and legend. Was there ever a real John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt? Probably, yes, before he got apotheosized into legend and song. Was there ever a John Jacob Niles? There is somewhat more documentary evidence in his case, but still I remain less than fully convinced. Although I have myself visited the John Jacob Niles Archive at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, I have studied his handwriting and have fondled boxfuls of his old billets, I am still inclined to suspect this man was conjured right out of the humming of ancient washerwomen, out of the rhythmic blows of grim horseshoers.

Many of the folk balladeers of the early recording era have been recycled over and over in the broader public consciousness, first in the folk revival of the early 1960s, then more recently in the freak-folk scene of the present century. It is true that at least some representatives of this latter current, notably Devendra Banhart, have acknowledged a debt to Niles, and one of his greatest songs, “The Maid Freed from the Gallows” (1940), was featured in Harmony Korine’s 2007 film, Mister Lonely. Both of these shout-outs would seem to have positioned Niles perfectly for widespread celebration, at least within a certain class of cooler-than-thou aficionados, and perhaps even reaching as far into the popular consciousness as to earn some brief reportage on NPR, or some such downstream maker of liberal mass taste. Yet as far as I know he has not been given the same treatment as, say, Sybille Baier or other next-generation non-American folk-appropriators. He remains in need, I feel, of some further amplification.

I first learned of John Jacob Niles while reading Henry Miller, of all people. Here is that great old American pornographer laureate writing in Plexus (1952), the second installment of the Rosy Crucifixion trilogy:

Over coffee and liqueurs we would sometimes listen to John Jacob Niles’ recordings. Our favorite was “I Wonder As I Wander”, sung in a clear, high-pitched voice with a quaver and a modality all his own. The metallic clang of his dulcimer never failed to produce ecstasy. He had a voice which summoned memories of Arthur, Merlin, Guinevere. There was something of the Druid in him. Like a psalmist, he intoned his verses in an ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft to the Glory seat. When he sang of Jesus, Mary and Joseph they became living presences. A sweep of the hand and the dulcimer gave forth magical sounds which caused the stars to gleam more brightly, which peopled the hills and meadows with silvery figures and made the brooks to babble like infants.

Miller mentions, but hardly emphasizes, the one trait of Niles’s singing that is sure to stun anyone who listens to hm for the first time: his soaringly high, over-the-top falsetto. Are we in the presence here of the last of the castrati? one cannot help but wonder. It is so extreme, and so unrelenting —he does drop down to a typical male register, occasionally, but never seems to be at home there—, as to strike the listener as both comical and extremely unsettling. But my recommendation is to push past that. Before long you will stop laughing, and start luxuriating. Niles sounds the way he does, it will soon seem to you, because he is a musical androgyne, or rather because he is altogether beyond sex — and as we’ll see soon enough beyond race (just like any truly great American musician). He is, and I mean this in the most loving and admirative way possible, an absolute freak.

In later installments of my “Universal Musurgy” column I will probably have occasion to write almost as rapturously of other great male musicians of various traditions who likewise prefer to sing falsetto, from the bluesman Skip James to the great Romanian lăutar Dona Dumitru Siminica (who did get his NPR treatment back in 2006). Some sources claim that Niles initially employed the falsetto to impersonate female characters in his ballads, which are, as he always insisted, essentially a form of ultra-condensed and ultra-emotive storytelling. But Niles himself claimed that the high registers were the natural expression of a distinctly Appalachian sort of ecstasy. Perhaps Miller also has Niles’s falsetto in mind in his description of the “ethereal chant which the angels carried aloft”, for indeed when his voice soars it sounds just as if what Niles has done is to open some secret Kentucky-to-Heaven portal. This effect is perhaps delivered most powerfully in “When I Gets Up into Heaven” (1959). Listen to it, I say, with all due focus, and perhaps even reverence, before reading further:

Niles is for me a crucial missing link between English and Celtic vernacular traditions and American country music. Some of the Hiberno-British influences in American folk music —Irish fiddling for example— are well-known and unmistakable. But it is in the ballad genre that you find not just musical but also lyrical continuity, and not only of themes, but sometimes also of the stock characters that sometimes seem to reach back as far as the medieval lore of knights errant and their damsels. In one strange and wonderful interview (watch the whole thing), Niles theorizes off the cuff that Appalachian ballads only passed through England as part of a much longer and ancient voyage extending back to the indigenous pre-Germanic peoples of the Baltics and Scandinavia. I have no idea where he’s getting that from.

Other Appalachian musicians of the folk-revival period did remarkable scholarly work, first developing real competence as ethnomusicologists, and then pursuing important research on all sorts of fancy fellowships into the trans-Atlantic continuities of ballad motifs. The great Jean Ritchie (1922-2015), for example, a fellow dulcimer player from Viper, Kentucky, went from dirt-poor singer of songs learned by her mother’s side, to respected scholar, in part by tracing out the full genetic heritage of “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair”. Today I am writing about a particular musician, John Jacob Niles, though it often seems to me the ideal way to write about popular music would be to take the songs themselves, and not their singers, as the suitable subjects of biography, and “Black Is the Color…” shows vividly why this is so. When you isolate its fundamental elements, it is obviously an old English ballad. When you hear it sung by Nina Simone, it remains the same ballad, but it is also incipient Black-power jazz. When you hear it from Patty Waters, it is the ultimate expression of the break-down of sense that was occurring in all domains of culture and civic life circa 1965, which the avant-garde knew best how to put into sound and vision. Listen to Patty, too —who died just this past June—, if not with reverence, then with horror and wonder at a world that could move someone to perform this song in this way.

Subscribe now

Read more

Subscribe now

I am old and my memory is not what it used to be, but if I recall correctly it was in 1948 that I first came up, in a fit of inspiration, with the basic outline of the character of Justin Smith-Ruiu. Of course that’s not what I was calling him back then, for indeed this name emerges only out of a very recent plot twist. But it was then that the seed of the person we all now know as “JSR” got planted in my mind, and quickly began to grow. I spent the next 24 years working out the finer details of his character and envisioning the entire dramatic arc of his life.

But then the most remarkable thing happened. Just when I was ready to “launch” him, as they say today, in the form of a tale told to others of our Sodality —a tale I had promised them I could wrap up by 2046, in just under 74 years—, that same Justin Smith-Ruiu, that seedling of my own imagination, was born into the world, a flesh-and-blood human being, at St. Mary’s Hospital, in Reno, Nevada. And in fact, though I cannot be certain of this, I suspect his “germ” entered nature at least a decade before that, in consequence of an obscene little gesture of mine I’m too ashamed to describe here. The evidence suggests that it spent those years floating around on currents of air, cycling through the water cycle, absorbing scenes natural and human across his dim membrane, before maneuvering into position, like a twice-born pinky-sized joey climbing towards its mother’s pouch, to begin the common process of mammalian gestation (though placental in this case).

It would of course have made good narrative sense for his germ to have wafted through various sites of historical interest during this hypothetical prodrome phase. To have shown up, for example, for the Summer of Love. But it seems that for a little over two years, from September, 1966, through October, 1968, the microscopic soul-pip that would eventually grow into Justin Smith-Ruiu found itself far from San Francisco indeed — stuck, of all places, in the elastic band of a fussy old Little Rock church lady’s bright pink shower-cap. By 1969 he seems to have drifted to Nashville, where for a while he smudged the lens of a camera on the set of The Porter Wagoner Show. How he made it to Reno by late 1971 is anyone’s guess.

In all my centuries of storytelling such a “downward hypostasis” as this had only happened once before, indeed with one of my very most beloved creations, the peasant girl Maria, who, in the story I had intended to tell of her, in 1680, at the age of eight, goes blind while staring at a triple parhelion and prophecies the defeat of the Ottomans at the gates of Vienna three years later. But I confess when I learned of the accident of her fully gestated germ I swiftly and discreetly arranged for her disappearance, in a sad case of what today they would no doubt call “SIDS”, but for which baby Maria’s familiars all found satisfaction in accusing one of the feudal estate’s several feral cats, which, they said, must have crept in and sucked out her breath as she slept.

I probably should have tied things off in similar fashion back in 1972, but something held me back. Perhaps it was the gentler spirit of the times, I don’t know. But anyhow I decided not to intervene, and now here we are, 51 years later, still stuck with two Justins Smith-Ruiu: the one up here with me, whose story I’m still in the course of telling, and the one down there, who believes his life is his own, and is still, tenaciously and improbably, trying to live it.

Those of our Sodality who have bothered to stick around to hear me tell his story, mostly out of politeness or of loyalties shaped long ago, have told me the others find something altogether unseemly in this unprecedented “split”, between the “narrative JSR”, let us say, and the “earthly” one. Just last month they set up a Council to determine which of the two should take precedence in the official records, and how to ensure that such a thing never happen again. The Council says I did not follow due precaution in my original conception of JSR, that I allowed my imagination to “imaginate” too vividly, which as we know, for those of our kind, can sometimes project an unmistakable likeness out into the external environment, searing it into the surface of a basalt outcropping, or even, as when I was hard at work on a retelling of the life of Tamerlane (before the Sodality banned “historical fiction”), into the Butter Mountain on display at the 1961 Indiana State Fair. They said that in the case of JSR (they’d quietly agreed not to mention Maria, which we all knew, technically, was an infanticide) my imagination was so fervid as to go beyond mere likenesses in stone or butter or other sculptable matter, and to transfer the being itself directly into reality. They said I should have known to control it better.

Soon after the Council was formed, rumors began to circulate that they were looking to expel me from the Sodality, and to force me to go down into the lower world and to tell my stories to the poor lost souls there who don’t even know what stories are, and in their ignorance take them for something “unreal”. 

To make things worse, the version of JSR down there, the flesh-and-blood one, just keeps getting things wrong at every turn. I don’t mean to be rude, but he’s a bit of a fool. My own JSR, I admit, was supposed to be a “superfluous man” too —I’d been reading a lot of Lermontov back in the ‘40s—, but gracious, not like this. Noncommittal, meandering, indecisive, every time the earthly JSR starts to get good at something, he quits it to pursue something else. He is a dabbler and a dilettante, a Bouvard without a Pécuchet, or vice versa. He has started studying more languages than most people have ever heard of, but seldom gets past the most rudimentary familiarity with their grammars. His reading is pathologically desultory: El Castillo Interior, De Divinatione, The Quincunciall Lozenge, the Monas Hieroglyphica, The Recognitions, the Gospels, and on and on, never more than a few pages at a time, dog-eared and BIC-marked, frequently soiled by his food-smeared thumbs, all in a disordered stack by his bedside. The cumulative effect of this life of pointless perusal is for him something deeper than a chronic crisis of faith. It is an abidingly desolate sense, deep in the heart of the earthly JSR, of the total absence of narrativity, of anything remotely resembling the arc of a story, in the course of his earthly life.

To be honest it’s hard to blame him for feeling this absence so sharply. At times I admit I’ve felt optimistic, when the two JSRs have fallen into unexpected harmony with one another. But even on those rare occasions when their respective circumstances happen to line up, there’s still always something missing from the earthly version. For example, already by 1954 or so I had got the idea that the infant JSR should have bees land on his lips while sleeping, that they would not sting him, but only gently perch there for a few seconds, foreshadowing the eloquence and “sweet-talk” of his future years. Almost miraculously, a trio of bees indeed landed on the earthly JSR’s lips more or less simultaneously with my telling of this same scene to the few members of the Sodality who had gathered that day to hear it. But here’s the problem: down there, the bees didn’t foreshadow anything. They just landed, and then flew away again. No one even noticed them but me. What’s the connection between the bees and our earthly JSR’s current habits of speech? Who can say! Down there it’s just one damned thing after another. No narrative cohesion at all. You see a rifle on the wall in the first act? When you’re on Earth, it might still be hanging there at the end of the third. It’s as if no one has thought things through, no one is paying attention. No one cares.

They say I’m too preoccupied with earthly events, and I suppose they’re right. I suppose I feel I have a stake in what goes on there, and even that one of my own “children”, so to speak, now belongs to that race of beings. Sometimes I think they would have cast me out already back in the era of stagflation, around the time the bees landed on JSR’s newborn lips, if they didn’t all know that the Raconteur Majeur has a soft spot for me. I don’t mean to boast when I say he and I get along pretty well. We even have something of a joking relationship, and I’m one of the only Storytellers he allows to call him by his “secret” name of Magsman.

Once, when the JSR incident came up, I reminded him that he could plausibly be accused of the same mistake, but at a far greater scale, as the physical universe itself is said by many to have slipped into existence inadvertently, to have flown out as a droplet of his agitated spittle, once, long ago, when he was overexcitedly in the course of telling an amusing but ultimately forgettable little tale about the tedium of bookkeeping. The Magsman just laughed in his good-natured way, and said: “I suppose you’re right. We all make mistakes every now and then.”

A few centuries ago the Magsman decided to give our various Councils full authority to make their own decrees. It was the new fashion down on Earth for “constitutional monarchy” that convinced him to institute this reform, or so he liked to joke at the time. And this is why, when he told me a few days ago that the Council seemed to be preparing to pass down a stern ruling against me, he also reminded me that, unfortunately, he would not be in a position to intervene directly. He quickly added, though, that there was really nothing I needed to worry about. Everything was going to turn out just fine, he said, smiling kindly. And I believed him.

I would soon learn that some on the Council had supplemented the charges against me with others that could not but have been conceived in bad faith. They accused me of yet another case, alongside Maria and JSR, of downward hypostasis, which they say occurred long ago, when a quinotaur ravished the unborn Merovech’s mother as she swam in the River Meuse, conceiving upon her the hybrid first king of the Merovingian Dynasty, and thereby also founding the nation of France. It’s true I am the one who first told this story, long ago, but it is quite obviously just a story, no matter what the Frankish Chronicles of Fredegar would later tell us. The Council wants to take Fredegar’s word for it, as an official record of earthly events. I keep trying to tell them it’s just a myth, indeed a rather typical one for early medieval dynastic genealogies, whose authors have no idea where and how the dynasty actually gets started, and so just make something up about, say, a five-horned taurine merman with a taste for human maidens who swim nude in rivers.

Other charges from the Council are even more plainly trumped up. For example, I recently gave one of my protégé storytellers an assignment to spin out the tale of Dan and Brandon Kumpe of Yakima, Washington, brothers stuck in a protracted legal battle over who deserves exclusive rights to the business name “Kumpe and Sons Discount Mufflers”. The Council tells me the e-mails between their two lawyers look far too much like the correspondence between the Carolingian emperor Louis II and his Byzantine counterpart Basil I, on the matter of which of the two may legitimately claim to be the true heir of Rome. And thus, they say, in view of my fiduciary responsibility towards my protégé, I have violated the new ban on historical fiction. This is absurd, of course. I try to remind them of the Aarne-Thompson-Uther Folktale Index, which establishes that there are really only 134 or so base-level possibilities for the narrative art, plus various combinations of these, so it is not at all surprising when certain motifs of our tales resonate with world-historical events — which are themselves of course not narrative in the first instance, but you can be sure they will become at least somewhat story-like by the time Basil and Louis get the idea to put quill to vellum.

So, they condemned me. I heard the news just yesterday. The Council said I had two options. I could, they informed me, go and kill the earthly JSR right away, which indeed would not be at all hard to pass off as the tragic outcome of one of his frequent mental-health episodes. Or I could agree to an earthly exile that was to last for as long as the earthly JSR, aged 51, was to continue living. Honestly, I was shocked to learn that the Council was now perfectly at ease with the open suggestion of murder, which is something that, when I resorted to it back in 1672, the entire Sodality found exceedingly shocking and at most only ever mentioned in hushed tones. Anyhow I myself had resolved never to resort to it again, and so, by evening, I had made my decision: I was going to leave the Sodality and enter into earthly banishment.

The Magsman came to me this morning and in his gentle way he encouraged me not to think of this “little trip” as punishment, but rather as an opportunity. “JSR needs you,” the Magsman says. He tells me there is an old trick that almost none of our Sodality remembers, but that I should consider attempting while on Earth. It’s what the Greeks used to call ενσάρκωση, where rather than creating a life through telling the story of it, as we do up here, you enter the body of a human being and you give it meaningful narrative structure and direction through your own wise guidance. “Anyway,” the Magsman adds, once he’s explained how this all works, “it won’t be for that long at all. Just the rest of JSR’s mortal life. It’ll all fly by,” he laughs, “faster than a three-day weekend.”

And so I enter first into the narrative JSR, as storytellers often do when they are said to “inhabit” their characters. And then I, or we, descend down into the earthly JSR in turn, which is a somewhat more difficult process — something like what you might see in an illustrated Theosophical pamphlet from the 1930s, where the outline of a luminous astral body glides slowly downward into an opaque and earthly one. But we pull it off gracefully. And then the two JSRs become one, now not only harmonized, but identical.

And the earthly JSR feels a little twinge that he mistakes for inspiration. He still doesn’t really know who he is or where he comes from, but at least he has a good idea for a story, to be unfolded in several installments, perhaps over the course of months or years or even his entire mortal life, and which, with no Sodality to tell it to out loud, he sits down to write, hands on keyboard, on this 24th day of March, 2024.

Subscribe now

Share

Next chapter: “Mary’s Universal Musurgy”