Pop Culture

A straight jacket. A drugged cosh. A warehouse super ego.

Academic culture is how duty to life is avoided.

As an architect I am making an intervention in this developing rave. I am constructing a thesis that Canada has no ethnicity. It is a hole into which the suggestion of the possibility of being Canadian is thrown…

…along with genocidally-altered original nations.

Because ethnicity is no longer possible culturally, linguistically or as a life, it is re-membered by grant-aided, socially-parasitic arts, a loyal opposition trained not to depict anything beyond the fictionally parochial and the victim memorial, and other 3-D printed versions of Frankenstein’s monster.

Without the stitching.

Canada is permanently a colonial culture, colonized not by European fur traders but by transculture itself, a culture of low sentiment.

It largely ignores the room and offers small complaint and smaller soul.

Its artists ignore one or more of three duties.

To art.

To entertainment.

To truth and beauty.

It is the fault of the artists that there is a fucking popular culture.

More calmly, conflict often is a re-occurrence of previous contradictions expressed in new forms. It often occurs where culture, especially identity, is rendered political towards the creation or preservation of hierarchies, expressed by identity, cultural diversions, distortions and cover-up narratives — like a religion or ideology.

Can you really have your cake and eat it too?

On the other hand, when systems decline, incoherence arises, needs are not met, connections cannot be made, coping mechanisms fail and storming the chamber of the people is considered the highest form of liberty of and for the people.

Even though culture evolved as a substitution for instinct. Even though it rewires the processing of the sensations which prompt actions for securing survival and pursuit of desire, the associations that initiate emotions.

Even still.

The transcultural electrician is challenged to rewire that initiation, to create images that will shatter the dangerous and restrictive politics of stereotypes that block it. An electrician like that gets into the mind, to project in order to get a response, which then enters the transcultural field, confronting the dissonances that culture creates in gender, race and other continuous spectra.

To *project*, not to create a narrative arc, to react *against* acculturated memory and its social identity, not to complete a circle.

Transcultural politics is not a politics such as

‘multi-culturalism,’

which proposes rules of interrelationship and reconciliation between people grouped culturally and is based on adapting cultures to a common law, nor is it the politics of ‘interculturalism’ which proposes exchanges of cultural enterprises towards a common market, characterised by the critical filtering of culturally acceptable objects and activities to a mainstream and dominant culture.

In the ongoing collapse of globalism there is no dominant culture.
Says Global Culture

We all suffer from interpretive violence. No one helps construct anyone else from what could be plausible beyond that which is accepted. One person to any other is no more than a wind to a stone.

When people actually see themselves in books and poems, see themselves unfamiliar, in new planes, when they are no longer encouraged to see themselves in widely circulating stereotypes, they will prefer chaos, as I do, cured of vanity that supports the lack of conviction with quotations from the dead who cannot correct them.

Let us look at grace, or freedom, or redemption, or

revolution.

None of them happen, especially not grace, in some God awful mild and present harmony. They come together in otherness.

As the early transcultural writer Ernest Hemingway said,

“the sun also rises.”

Then the fool went on safari.

The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 2

Yes, I knew Robert Mugabe. I wrote to him in the bush.

I made a small contribution to the arming.

I went there to teach and to make theatre. I saw the body bags go by my house and my son’s nursery school.

I heard the night screams.

I saw something begin.

At first, Robert could write pragmatically and could conceal the sectarian.

Isn’t it time to read The Bush of Ghosts?

But I did not make the revolution.

There was hope.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKfwIJSp7bc

A lot of it was made by children who I later had to teach a truer history. First, I had to teach it to myself.

The decline, the sectarianism, the racism that developed, was so obvious. The pedantic cultural nationalism, the scams for thugs and murderers. The deliberate deceptions and populist rants to appeal to the lowest.

I have tried with many others to support a change. I went back a few times to try a few things. I have tried to support the celebratory and glorious resistance literature that Robert hasn’t.

Probably like you, I thought things were of cosmic and universal significance and of personal reference to me, my narrative, destiny and self, in completely banal events, as the latest number one.

You and I were thinking like Robert.

As I became antiques, I found, as a matter of fact, obvious truth and common sense; that I was wrong about everything important: love, family, significant persons, art, and common sense.

It doesn’t help that I wasn’t the first.

Like Robert.

Now, I am in the best shape ever, I am as sharp as a wasp nest attack, I am as funny as a dancing baby camel on being set free in the yellow desert.

Transcultural adventure novels, on the other hand, are game parks. They are managed by transcultural guards, hired from local communities of readers and trained in literary weaponry. Transcultural literary novels resemble modern diplomatic processes.

They seek to create results similar to those sought by applied neuroscience.

They do not have a familiar structure.

Transcultures themselves lack classic architecture. They attempt to lead their readers outside of patterns of thinking and preconceptions.

Mopane Worms, Anyone? There’s lots here for all.

They bring fluidity to genres and instability to characters. They require co-creation with their readers.

Call that trust.

ARE YOU IN?

Pale light.

Like pain.

Now the rain.

Grotesques: Part 1

I have frightened my peers.

Yes, I am starring in Dante’s *Inferno* now. Here I am demonstrating the first rule of the transculture: taking off my self and lugging it around like a garden Buddha. A Moai on Rapa Nui would do just as well.

There is no certain knowledge to which I may return.

I lectured about transcultural observation in Prague, Lisbon, Swaziland and even at Oxford. I wrote a novel particularly to illustrate it. It did.

*Will the Real Richard Rathwell please stand up.*

Especially the writing of it. The book is hitting the streets any day now.

It’s a visual work, designed to read itself to you. Language is just another of its visual effects. In return, its images are sound.

I became a fable.

At Oxford, they failed to see this pose as a novel. I guess they mistook this narrative for the gravestone of Robert Graves, who trained Nassar to read, well, Robert Graves. The Egyptians have revolted ever since. I thought they’d get the reference. Instead, John le Carré got credit for the plot in *The Night Manager.* Good on him.

In this package, I was bullied, as if I were a proverbial ass. Then I was expelled from my PhD course, because transculture wasn’t based on gender, class or race interpretation of cultural phenomena. ‘O.K.’, I said, that too, but also this.

I joined the police in Nice to prove it to you. You’re welcome.

Torn out of that package, I learned that the politics of culture, like sex, resemble the politics of my own memory.

I was still trying to figure out which is the memory of my years as a chicken in the colonies and which one is remembering, then I forgot why it might matter. They don’t respond to close invocation.

When I was more distant, I was in Nigeria, at the foot of the mountains near the Cameroon border. The mountain was aflame from the fires of “those people.” The school was still smoking from the fires of the first fundamentalists.

That’s when I realized that we needed a new culture, and a new literature. Even John le Carré is dead. Come on.

It was a new world. I was a teacher of women teachers. None were fundamental. Some were Madonna-like, demanding purdah, second wives, some were fifteen-year-old liars in too-tight uniforms, who had to be kept from the fences at midnight when the gowned boys came to howl and the old men in government Peugeots with offers.

The rain was coming in a wall across the horizon then. Dust cast before it in billows reddening skies.

These are my memoirs of the transculture.

It is time to prevent men from becoming books and books from becoming men.

Apocalyze

The pandemic of culture

Collage

Pop Culture

The Dream of an Uncommon Language: Part 2

Grotesques: Part 1