Moby Dick!

The following is an excerpt of a 7 December 2014 email exchange between Art and Will. It should be noted that, since 1 November 2014, all Art's emails have originated from Farthington's account.


"Moby Dick p510 illustration" by A. Burnham Shute - Moby-Dick edition - C. H. Simonds Co. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

Art:

By the way, some other things on my Arthur White reading list: lots of Achebe, Robinson Crusoe, De Beauvoir's book (not sure which one) in which she argues that existentialism would result in engagement not quietism (I want to use her as a model for Steffi). Also Wilson Harris, also Claude McKay. 

Also dust off some Yeats. Also dust off some of my knowledge of the regionalist movement in modernism: one of the ways we address the utter fragmentation of modern and post-modern times. 

Also I want Steffi to be totally uninterested in anything that Carlton or Arthur are interested in. I want her to have totally separate interests and to discuss them with people, preferably women, who are up to something entirely different. Unlike Father Yod's wife and follower I want her to use her ascendancy to move in an entirely different direction. Of course, that won't necessarily work out so well either but it's important that she is allowed to tell her own story and to aspire to her own tragic set of goals. 

Any other suggestions that you would make? It seems like we need to read up on a few things, me especially. 

Also all of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne!

Moby Dick! 

Will:

I'm wondering if I should go for some William Burroughs or David Foster Wallace...something strange. Frank O'Hara? 

Probably some more Toni Morrison, too. It's been a while. 

I like your ideas about Steffi. There are a few interesting things to me in feminism that I never talk about because I don't want to start a fight, but they might be interesting to examine. One is that feminism seems to have fallen so completely into the deconstructionist camp that it no longer stands for anything, or put another way, it stands for multiple mutually exclusive things simultaneously without any sort of irony. 

The feminism of the suffragettes had a type of discipline to it. I'd even say the feminism of the 60's and 70's did. 

Now it seems to be about if a woman has an impulse or instinct of any sort, even if it is to do something that to older feminists would have been completely against the cause, it is valid. We get a postmodern system of tunnels within tunnels, arches with arches, that resonates with Farthington's structures while being a different beast. 

The other thing is the idea of power through murder. If power is about making people dead, the patriarchy seems to accumulate lots of power by killing innocent bystanders through war or terrible economic policies. The matriarchy seems to assert its power through abortion, although the patriarchy certainly backs it. 

So many billionaires fund population control as one of their top charities. I think the devils in charge of granting unjust power don't care about the specifics of our politics as long as politicians kill lots of people and get members of the more-or-less virtuous populace to foam at the mouth about the virtue of killing lots of people. 

From the politician's end, you get human sacrifice to the demons who grant them power. From the public's end, you get people calling good evil and evil good.   

In either case, we all crawl closer to hell and call it progress.