Phillips/Perec/ReeferMadness

Today I read the next fifty pages of Jayne Anne Phillips’ Quiet Dell. The novel is becoming less interesting the more it goes on. The character of Powers is still firmly in the background and in the abstract one would think that this decision to keep the killer out of the spotlight would be one of the most interesting aspects of the novel. The problem, however, is that Phillips has not been able to generate a character who holds the reader’s attention as much as Powers himself might have been able to. The reporter, Emily Thornhill, seems to be the novel’s protagonist, but Phillips doesn’t give us enough of a reason to care about her perspective on the case. Annabel keeps flitting in and out of the novel, but again, not enough is done with her to make her compelling. An example of a road not taken comes when Phillips includes a scene with Powers’ wife and her sister, emphasizing what kind of knowledge they did or did not have of Powers’ activities. Telling the story from the perspective of these characters could have been very interesting, but alas…

I also read the next fifty pages of Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces and Other Pieces. This includes pieces originally published in the collection L’Infra-Ordinaire in 1989. In “Approaches to What?” Perec talks again about the power of the ordinary, first by noting that it’s always the extraordinary and the cataclysmic that grabs our attention, and then by asking how we should then account for that which usually escapes our notice: “How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs every day: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual?” The other two pieces in this section of the book can be read as answers to this question. “The Rue Vilin” consists of Perec’s descriptive notes of a single street visited on a number of occasions over a period of years, whereas “Two Hundred and Forty-three Postcards in Real Color” (written for Italo Calvino) is made up of 243 banal postcards that list a location, an activity, and a greeting. Reading all 243 is actually quite difficult because they are so banal and repetitive but eventually one settles into a rhythm of reading and then the minute variations in the ordinary start to become both more apparent and more weighty. Incidentally, for those who know Slavoj Žižek, I found Perec’s distinction between the extraordinary and the ordinary reminiscent of Žižek’s distinction between visible and invisible violence in his short book Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. According to Žižek, it’s always the first that grabs our attention, but we need to try and see the second type.

I also watched the infamous 1936 propaganda film directed by Louis Gasnier, Reefer Madness. http://web.archive.org/web/20060328163318/http://www.reefer-madness-movie.com/history.html Of course, I’d heard a lot about this film, but this is the first time I’d actually watched it from start to finish. It certainly lives up to its reputation in terms of its awful acting, its hysterical condemnation of marijuana, and its laughable hysteria about the dangers of weed, and yet there was something else about it that I didn’t anticipate. First, it was interesting how drugs are not racialized in this movie by having any connection with African Americans. Instead, both the pushers and the users in this movie are middle-class white Americans. In this respect, Reefer Madness is unusually accurate in its depiction of who sells and buy drugs in the US, much more so than most films on this subject. Second, while Reefer Madness should indeed be laughed at, we should not assume that we’ve moved on very far from this kind of anti-drugs hysteria. Here’s a story I came across the other day: https://www.change.org/petitions/president-obama-commutation-for-weldon-angelos-55-years-for-marijuana?utm_source=action_alert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=43498&alert_id=lTrGzXTBEr_ZFAISBQiCp. A 55-year mandatory prison sentence for marijuana possession? Reefer madness is alive and well in the 21^st century US.