CRONENBERG COLONOSCOPY
Wicked long mille-feuille enfolded newsletter: my colonoscopy, Genet bio review, Krivolapova interview, Pere Ube fiction, new painting habits — I dare you to take time to read this
CRONENBERG COLONOSCOPY
When they prepare you for a colonoscopy, they tell you when you come out if it to avoid making any major life decisions or do any online shopping because you’ll still be under the influence of the powerful anesthesia. It’s the same stuff that Michael Jackson had every night for beddy-byes. So you don’t want to come out of that and make any big movements: Think with horror about the receipts.
I’ve now had two colonoscopies in three months and they’re a trip. Roller coasters. You live your whole life being basically ignorant on many levels about what’s inside of you. Well, maybe you don’t because you have a super duper quality health regiment and you’re married to a personal trainer/nutritionist or something. I don’t know.
Colorectal cancer is a killer. [insert death statistics here] They’ve lowered guidelines for beginning the screening to 45 years old. They figure if they can catch it early enough they can treat it — if it is there. Naturally a lot of men avoid this because they have issues with a team of medical providers putting a video robot tentacle up their butt. It’s a guy thing. It’s shameful or something.
They tell you “the worst part is the prep.” The laxatives you have to take to clear out your colon so they can get a clear view of your insides. Dulculax and miralax. Sounds like two Gothic generals who sacked Rome and murdered thousands, put babies on spikes. It’s not fun. I don’t need to paint you pictures. It’s bad. You’re starving and shitting out a steady stream of water at the end.
But no, they’re wrong. When they say “the worst part is the prep” they’re lying. What they’re trying to say, is the preparation is the only thing you’ll remember as the procedure itself is concealed behind a wonderful, beautiful scrim of drugs and deep sleep. But it gets worse. The WORST part of a colonoscopy is waking up in Michael Jackson’s never never land of intoxication and being told you have to do it AGAIN because you weren’t thoroughly cleaned out enough for them to see everything. Oh and by the way we saw enough to remove a LARGE POLYP from your sigmoid colon and it’s being sent for biopsy.
It focuses the mind. You’re going to die of ass cancer. You have to do it again with EXTENDED PREP which is basically eating no fiber for five days, lots of fluids, and the two Gothic generals again sacking Rome the day before the procedure. It’s horrifying. What did you do wrong in your life, what did you eat that was bad for you, how did you lie in the worst position for digestive health all your life while you scrolled on your phone for hours.
After my first colonoscopy I just happened to go on a mini-excursion through the films of David Cronenberg and I am convinced that Crimes of the Future, his most recent movie, is partially inspired by having a colonoscopy. They remove polyps and tumors and tattoo your insides (which they did with me). You might be “growing new organs” that need to be removed in a kind of televised performance art piece in a semi-crowded room. It’s a surgical procedure.
I was going to write this whole brilliant mega-review of three Cronenberg movies and tie it to the colonoscopy but I can’t do it. The weight is too heavy. Suffice it to say that his fables of the new flesh have fascinating resonances and ramifications for me at this stage of my life, beyond Kubrick, beyond Tarantino, maybe even beyond Lynch. I think Cronenberg is hitting the target artistically in ways that these other directors didn’t and can’t.
He’s made more movies than Lynch and thus provided more substantial grist for a dreamer’s mill. He has swerved in and out of commercial viability and come out with creative principles intact, seemingly. Somebody should write a book about how he convinces international financiers to support his movies again and again. Knowing how off the wall and just plain difficult they are.
Kubrick is obviously a master, without question, but putting Cronenberg’s Crash up on the x-ray and comparing it to all the portrayals of sex and sexuality in Kubrick’s movies — Eyes Wide Shut chief among them — tells me that one of these directors understood sex and the other didn’t. Likewise with Tarantino’s Death Proof. Which I love as pure cinema. It is the quintessential stunt action sequence extended out into feature length. But it is artistically vacant, it seems to me.
Here is where I paused and listened to an episode of Karina Longworth’s You Must Remember This, which is her podcast about the history of the movie business in the 20th century. The episode was from the series Erotic 90s and it’s specifically about Cronenberg’s Crash. I couldn’t have said it any better myself. Listen here:
Cronenberg is concerned with how humanity is evolving and in this case, from the director’s own words, it’s how the existential condition of mankind is being shed.
(One interesting intertextual moviemaking detail is that Vaughan the bisexual death hustler/theoretician in Crash is played by Elias Koteas, who in Some Kind of Wonderful was a scary thug character who in a satisfying reversal has Eric Stoltz’s back as he faces down the rich overprivileged love rival played by Craig Sheffer, who is essentially a second rate knock-off of James Spader in Pretty in Pink.)
Other points of interest: in A Dangerous Method, the restrained period piece, the Cronenbergian metamorphosis is not in the flesh as with movies like The Fly but it is suggested that the evolution is psychological, that the new morphology of humanity would correspond to the escape of Jungian psychoanalysis from the steady state of Freudian psychoanalysis which revolved around sex and sexuality. I suggest reading “Long Live the Heroic Pervert,” the intro essay by David Leo Rice in the Cronenberg study Children of the New Flesh for other perspectives on what the transformation of humanity has looked like in the 21st century, the directions other than physical or physiological that it has taken.
What does this have to do with colonoscopies? Not much except that the procedure is so Cronenberg that it hurts. Turning you inside out and making you aware of the horrors of your body, which is pitted against you as a kind of parasite confronted in a middle-aged rite of passage (that is, if you’re not already there due to injury, ailments, damage).
Waiting for test results is terrifying. Some people get a thrill out of waiting to hear. Science telling you the facts about your decrepitude and sliding into disease and death. I don’t dig it. This last procedure they took a bunch of polyps and random samples from my large intestine. It seemed like the more samples they took, the more odds were against me that something would go wrong. It didn’t turn out that way, though. And the results were all in the clear. I could move past it and drop the pervasive dread. I’m still convinced that Cronenberg was making a movie about colonoscopies though. And I watched it at the perfect time (or the most horrible time, or both).
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In book news, I wrote a goodreads review of the Jean Genet bio by Edmund White that I’d been battling to complete for several months.
GENET. Edmund White. Vintage, 1993. 728 pages.
This book took a while to finish reading but it was worth it. I read the Philip Roth bio by Blake Bailey without having read any of Roth’s novels, which was a weird backwards experience I tried to emulate here, until I read Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers and Funeral Rites, two novels which were stunningly good and over the top. Edmund White’s biography of Genet was excellent and it’s clear White loved the French novelist and playwright.
Genet was the consummate outsider and literary outlaw, given that he spent the first part of his life in and out of prison. He wrote novels that were autobiographical in nature about criminals and people living on the margins. The biography was a handy cross-section view of French literary culture during the 20th century, as Genet in spite of his checkered past (putting it lightly) mixed with towering French literati on multiple levels. It’s amazing that World War Two France was the Petri dish in which a writer like Genet could thrive and gain respectability. His writing was always aimed at accusing and terrorizing the nation that locked him up for decades. He hated their bourgeois values, and not even from a position of Marxism but something more diabolical it seemed. One side note was that for a while Genet kept getting released from prison and compulsively stole again and again; it wasn’t for some time that the issue of his recidivism almost got him a life sentence (other writers and cultural figures went to bat and asked the authorities for a pardon). It’s difficult to imagine a current day penal system that would allow a Genet-type figure to exist and would give writers enough sway to get one of their own out of legal hot water like this.
Genet was admittedly a transgressive, antagonistic writer to common morality and common sense. He was a homosexual thief who had a set of values completely at odds with society. Later in his life Genet came to fall into step with political underdogs like the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, and he used his pen and his influence, which had largely fallen silent creatively, to speak on their behalf, often in fiery excoriations. This was an exciting section of what was already an exciting biography: the man’s status as a cultural producer put in the service of political causes. Some dubious steps were taken along the way, but that seemed to be in line with the curve of the man’s life.
Most hardcore of all upon finishing the biography was noting how Genet, who supported the Black Panthers and the Palestinians as political underdogs, said that “if they accomplished what they were after and gained a nation and a flag, I would have turned against them too.” Genet’s anarchic righteousness should be taught in schools.
It wasn’t enough to deduct a star from the five-star rating, because it wasn’t White’s doing but mine, but I had to skim over sections of the biography because I hadn’t read this or that novel or play, and wanted to dodge spoilers. Particularly the plays which I haven’t read yet. This biography was well-done and makes a compelling case for reading the rest of Genet’s literary output.
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Here’s an interview I conducted with Anna Krivolapova for Bruiser Mag on the occasion of the publication of her short story collection Incurable Graphomania. Her subject matter is life in the Washington DC area, the corridors of power, from the perspectives of (mostly) young Russian immigrant women, adopted into US families. The stories are wickedly knowing and intelligent and dangerous. I have slipped up a little bit and described them as “suspense fiction” but as I say in the intro, readers shouldn’t be fixated on restrictive genre tags.
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I had a piece of fiction accepted at a new (to me) location called Pere Ube, tantalizingly near enough to Pere Ubu to confound Google. I had worried about wearing out my welcome at Don’t Submit with the repeated fragments of my novel I See Prism Threads; feeling “pinned down” creatively if that makes sense. I somehow stumbled upon this new site and saw their first entry was by Brad Liening, whose poetry collection O Gory Baby by Schism[2] I had really admired. The adventures of Noah Turbot through the back stairs of my mind have taken weird anti-narrative turns, until sometimes it’s just like a diaristic recording of whatever thoughts I seem to have at the time, whatever notes are in the hopper of consciousness. I had played with the novel being a kind of mutant murder mystery novel with a dead body and clues and all that, but set at a surreal angle to our own world in the “city of fog,” which is supposed to be the fictional city of Oylesburg NY where several other novels of mine including Blood Trip are set — perceived through a schizotypal lens, something German Expressionistic or dream-like and heavily psychological (or “sike-ological” in the usage of the novel). Now I don’t know. I’m still trying to just devise fragments to piece together and carve around the characters and not worry a great deal about the plot contrivances of crime fiction. Inspired by certain factors in Genet, I’m trying to drill down into an autobiographical excavation of Noah Turbot’s sexuality, and breaking the drill bit in the process.
https://pereube.univer.se/prolactinshrinebyjessehilson
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I’ve taken up painting again. I have a lot of creative directions I like to go in. I’m working on a painting here which was outlined to a degree by the last substack newsletter I wrote. Medea Plays Tetris with AR-15 Parts. It’s coming out ok.
I’m trying to look for someone who will buy the painting. I sold a previous painting for a tidy sum just a couple weeks ago and I’m addicted to the extortion of it. It’s a money game which I’m not qualified to play. I need to work on finding buyers. Oh of course it’s about the artwork. But if it were just about money, selling that one painting made me more than all the work I put into and got out of The Tattletales so far. I still want to publish novels but this is some good return, I have to say.
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My problem with colonoscopies these days is they never live up to the first one I had, where the gorgeous nurse took hold of my ass cheeks as I passed out and the drugs made me wake up euphoric. Now it's ram, jam, get up and go. Not even a warm blanket and a box of juice. I've had polyps removed. Hope everything is benign. No comment on Cronenberg. Love the "Erotic 90s" series. I've had a lot of wine.