What Would Lynne Tillman Do? (14 page)

Traveling into libraries, cool; I hated returning books (but library as physical space, as possible sanctum, will be missed; the idea will be missed). The ability to “access” knowledge replays the old Information v. Knowledge prizefight. What’s knowledge? I can see, so can you, the movies, mixing animation with live action, the cyber world entering the “real” world, boring. A TV sitcom with the nerd at the computer, all the trouble he—maybe she—gets into. You know. But what’s interesting is you can’t encompass it, you ride it, surf it (I skim it), you choose. (You have to pick Echo, Panix, Netcom, America Online, Compuserve, one of the delivery systems first, which reminded me of another great
divide: IBM or Mac.) Immediately arresting and annoying, to me, overwhelming, the magnitude. What you decide to look into and lurk around, voyeuristically, is self-evidentiary. (Watching trials has changed me. I get worse all the time.)

A showbiz gossip group—“Keanu Reeves’ publicist, Robert Garlock, has just issued a release stating that Keanu has never met David Geffen and Keanu is not gay. . . . Any comments, folks?”

A group around dry cleaning—“All of my suits have cleaning labels that say ‘Professionally dry clean only.’ Has anyone ever heard of an amateur dry cleaner?” “Actually, yes: there used to be, and perhaps still are, coin-operated dry-cleaning machines.”

“The Extropians”—“The Extropy Institute now has an official home page and a gopher site as well. Extropian interests include transhumanism, futurist philosophy, personality uploading, critical analysis of environmentalism. . . .”

(I love the use of the word gopher; the hiddenness of cyber-places realized by a furry, furtive animal is futurist anthropomorphism.)

“Alt.Baldspot”—“Oh, my shiney head, my achin’ baldspot. I’m writing to ask all of you what is the best baldspot shining method. . . .”

See, one Alt.Baldspot member imagines he can reach “all of us.”

People join groups just for flaming, flaming’s a raging element of apparent endlessness. The term’s telling. Compare it with “Sticks and stones will break your bones, but names will never harm you.” Flaming’s more abstract, even if you think about fire, maybe a play on “reaching out,” which involves the idea of touching
but also implies a larger, nonphysical embrace. (
NYPD Blue
uses it too much lately.) A galaxy of sex discussions/groups—”alt. sex.bestiality.hamster.duct tape” is my fave. Haven’t mentioned the serious conferences, haven’t gotten serious, yet. I did go into a house, “a virtual community,” LambdaMOO, and moved from room to room, trying to talk to somebody, but everyone was asleep, virtually.

So, I’ll go on it, get E-mail, and become involved in a few conferences. Maybe you’re already doing it, like sex, or you’re not, because what is it, anyway, or you’re apathetic. I don’t know. I’m curious, not driven or obsessed, yet. It further marks and divides an already divided world, haves v. have-nots, and being literate or not is evidence of access, obviously, and disposition and more. A thing that seems limitless is all and nothing, what you make of it, like everything else. Massiveness, its volume, if not depth, is attractive and repulsive. I’m living approach/avoid anyway.

Alt.yours.

The Regulation of Pleasure

Thinking about F.T. Marinetti, I’m reminded of an incident in London. Some years ago a play based on Kafka’s diaries was performed there by a fringe theater group. Their space was on the 8th floor of an office building. The elevator operator, noting the floor I wanted, complained, “Everybody talks about Kafka but no one does anything about him.” What does one do with Marinetti? An anarchist, a poet, an innovator, a fascist, an antifeminist, a super patriot, a drum major for war, a “master” of the manifesto, as he was called, the progenitor of the Futurists is no easy figure or influence to gloss in a few words or in many words.

With the first Futurist manifesto, published in 1909 on the front page of
Le Monde
, Marinetti gave voice to a movement that understood the impact of the machine, that ecstatically embraced technology, war and the idea of progress, a movement that saw itself as the new incarnate. The Futurists cried “Burn the museums.” Marinetti demanded “parole in liberta,” free verse, free words, words freed from syntax. The sculptor Boccioni was “nauseated by old walls and palaces, old motives, reminiscences.” Marinetti claimed the automobile over Samothrace. But in their uncritical belief in progress, the Futurists took off with some 19th-century baggage, brashly landing at the doorstep of a new century, ours.

It’s this aspect of Futurism that may be carrying undue weight for its position at the start of the 20th century when modernity was burdened with trying to become modern. To “make it new,” as Ezra Pound exhorted. In the 30s movie,
The Twentieth Century
, the train conductor—the name of the train is also the 20th century—keeps repeating, when there’s any problem, “But we’re on the 20th century,” and passengers insist, “But this is the 20th century,” The movie asks ironically, What makes one modern (or for that matter, postmodern)?

Through
The Futurist Cookbook
, published first in 1932 and just now translated into English, Marinetti and others propose recipes for modernity, manifestoes for the table. They polemicize against traditions of all sorts, particularly those of the bourgeoisie, offering Futurist maps to the entrance of the new. There’s a recipe for “The Excited Pig, formula by Futurist Aeropainter Fillia,” which calls for “a whole salami, skinned, served upright on a dish containing some very hot black coffee mixed with a good deal of eau de Cologne.” And one for “Words-In-Liberty, formula by the Futurist Aeropeot Escadame,” which needs “three sea dates, a half-moon of red watermelon, a thicket of radicchio, a little cube of Parmesan, a little sphere of gorgonzola, 8 tiny balls of caviare, 2 figs, 5 amaretti di Saronno biscuits: all arranged neatly on a large bed of mozzarella, to be eaten, eyes closed letting one’s hands wander here and there, while the great painter and word-in-liberty poet Dopero recited his famous song ‘Jacopson.’” Or there’s “The Steel Chicken”—the flavor of steel is an important ingredient in any machine lover’s diet—“the body of the chicken mechanized by aluminum-colored bonbons.” And my favorite, by
Marinetti, “RAW MEAT TORN BY TRUMPET BLASTS; cut a perfect cube of beef. Pass an electric current through it, then marinate it for 24 hours in a mixture of rum, cognac and white vermouth. Remove it from the mixture and serve on a bed of red pepper, black pepper and snow. Each mouthful is to be chewed carefully for one minute, and each mouthful is divided from the next by vehement blasts on the trumpet blown by the eater himself . . . The soldiers are served plates of ripe persimmons, pomegranates and blood oranges. While these disappear into their mouths, some very sweet perfumes . . . will be sprayed around the room, the nostalgic and decadent sweetness of which will be roughly ejected by the soldiers who rush like lightning to put their gas masks on.”

Trumpet blasts, soldiers and ripe persimmons, gas masks and perfumes of nostalgia characterize the Futurist menu of the 1930s, a tempting mix of militarism, sensuality, art and nature. The
Cookbook
aims for a “culinary revolution . . . changing radically the eating habits of our race.” As in the earlier—or first wave—Futurism, speed, motion, light and liberty are part of any dinner, constant companions. Futurist cooking will be “tuned to high speeds like the motor of a hydroplane.” Marinetti promises eating that is art, “the art of self-nourishment, which “like all arts . . . eschews plagiarism and demands creative originality.” These are prime ingredients of Modernism, taking into the equation, or recipe, that an “art of self-nourishment” is by any other name reflexivity.

“Since everything in modern civilization tends toward the elimination of weight and increased speed, the cooking of the future must conform to the ends of evolution.” Pasta is banned. Pastasciutta, “however agreeable to the palate, is a passeist food
because it makes people heavy, brutish . . . sceptical, slow, pessimistic. Besides which patriotically it is preferable to substitute rice.” The Futurists are for risotto, or “totalrice.” Rice is light, good for speed and action, and, it’s noted, there’s the Italian rice industry to consider as well.

Marinetti deploys food to construct “the modern man,” the new subject, to build him from the inside out, where food is what one ingests as metaphor and fuel. Futurist Marco Ramperti asserts: “The allegorical Italian has always got his avid mouth wide open over a plate of tagliatelle when he isn’t dangling dripping strands of vermicelli down his greedy gullet. And it’s an offensive image: derisory, grotesque, ugly . . . Our pasta is like our rhetoric, only good for filling up our mouths.” Since Marinetti’s the poet who advanced the idea of “words-in-liberty,” it makes sense that food might be seen as rhetoric, freed from its traditional position as just food, or that using certain words and dropping others, like dropping pasta and adding rice, might signify departures and surprises, changes in thinking, changes in being.

In the new diet, taste alone certainly isn’t enough. Like art, food must strive to interact with its environment, and the environment itself, like the cuisine, must be shaped to serve higher ends, the evolution of society Marinetti calls for. At a Futurist dinner all the senses must be engaged and taught to renounce the habits that dull pleasure. Between bites one might be squirted with perfume while an airplane motor roars, the music of machines. Under a Futurist regime, where knives and forks are passe, eaters could be asked to touch continuously the leg of the eater next to them or, when having “Fillia’s Aerofood . . . composed of different
fruits and vegetables,” to eat “with the right hand . . . while the left hand caresses a tactile surface made of sandpaper, velvet and silk. Meanwhile the orchestra plays a noisy, wild Jazz . . .”

Their antic dinners and wild proclamations are meant to be taken with a dollop of the zany, the movement itself sometimes appearing to be what Oscar Wilde may have had in mind when he conjured up “zanies of style.” Though where there’s style there’s content, and Marinetti isn’t content with jokes. He defines Italian Futurism of the 30s as “the renewal of Italian pride, a formula for original art-life. the religion of speed . . . spiritual hygiene . . . the aesthetics of the machine. . . . Convinced that in the probable future conflagration those who are most agile, most ready for action, will win. . . .”

At the Holy Palate restaurant, sometimes known as the Aluminum restaurant, site of Futurist dinners, one might be served “sculpted meat,” which is “symbolic of Italian regions.” Marinetti demands: “The word Italy must rule over the word Liberty! The word Italy must rule over the word genius. The word Italy must rule over the word intelligence. The word Italy must rule over the words culture and statistic. The word Italy must rule over truth.” It’s an odd position from the man who called for words in liberty, words freed from syntax. But not an odd position for a fascist. Words in liberty become fixed, their meaning subsumed by a new syntax, one created by the State. Marinetti was, after all, one of the first members of the Fascist Party. And his own words, not freed from history, resonate with it, tasting the bitter aftermath of the Great War and Italy’s sense of betrayal at the hands of the Allies. A past that also, in 1932, included the deaths of many of the leading
Futurists, like Boccioni and Sant Elia, a startlingly innovative architect, both of whom, like so many other, had enthusiastically rushed to do battle in that war. In fact it was the Great War that effectively put an end to the most productive moment of Futurism. In this respect, it’s not surprising that Marinetti calls for the murder of nostalgia. The Futurist door to modernity, once pried open and walked through, must be shut forever on the past—past failures and past losses.

If Marinetti hadn’t written it himself of
The Futurist Cookbook
, it would have been necessary to comment: “It is not by chance this work is published during a world economic crisis.” Marinetti’s “antidote” is “a Futurist way of cooking: optimism at the table.” Significantly the cookbook begins with a parable against despair. In “The Dinner That Stopped a Suicide,” Giulio is obsessed with killing himself, as “She” has died in New York—at that time a place of many capitalist suicides—and is “calling” to him to join her. So Marinetti, Prampolini and Fillia, the “Aeropainters,” rush to rescue their friend. But another “She” has sent Giulio a message, he tells them, another “who resembles her.” Giulio “must not betray death” and says he must “kill himself tonight.” “Unless?” the Aeropainters ask. “Unless?” Marinetti asks. “Unless you take us instantly to your splendid, well-stocked kitchens.” A hilarious retort to a singular cul de sac or a worldwide depression, and an absurd way out of the devastating effects of the War that ushered in Hitler and Mussolini, as well as killed the earlier Futurism, which was once synonymous with avant-garde.

It’s not without consequence, either, that death in the suicide story is represented by She, for women, who are always other in
Futurism (though sometimes [m]other), sit uneasily at its table, occasionally having to eat food shaped like their own bodies. The first Futurist Manifesto proclaimed: “We will glorify war, the world’s only hygiene—militarism, patriotism, the destructive genius of freedom-bringers, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women. We will destroy. . . feminism.” And it’s not just coincidence that the call against death also comes from a She, “one who resembles her.” This may be reference to capitalism under a Fascist state. But in any case, it’s the female body that signifies death as well as renewal. “The fugitive eternal feminine is imprisoned in the stomach. . . . At dawn he devoured the mammellary (sic) spheres of all mother’s milk.” In the “Geographic Dinner,” she’s a waitress, “a shapely young women dressed in a long white tunic on which a complete geographical map of Africa has been drawn in color; it enfolds her entire body.” This is a neat conflation, woman as Africa, especially Africa, the site then of some Italian colonies. She is colonized and that part of the world is turned into something to be devoured, the waitress, the provider, greedily eaten up like a woman might be by a hungry lover desirous of conquering and overwhelming her. Women here, like food, are figures of speech.