James Chaffee, São Paulo Blues, Enigmatic Ink; 2 ed., 2013.
What could be worse than stumbling on the mutilated corpses of a scad of Brazilian hookers? How about falling hard for a Brazilian prostitute marked for death by torture? A web of passion and homicidal fervour snares retired detective Mike Devere on his first excursion to Sao Paulo. Watch the clueless gringo wriggle as he is reluctantly sucked in.
Following the information-theoretic-puzzler drift of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, Sao Paulo Blues careens along a geodesic flow where old-fashioned sex and violence replace the polite veneer of obfuscatory science lingo. Can Devere untangle the web and straighten the trajectory? Can you?
Jim Chaffee, the former Nam medic, is the greatest writer of violence since Homer. When a guy gets clobbered in a Jim Chaffee book, he doesn’t lie down and lose consciousness for a narratively convenient period of time. He kneels down and pukes. When bullets are involved, blood and mucus ooze from exposed sinuses. “Hearty lungs full of air” are gulped: a reflex of the intact brain stem, “a chemical memory prompting useless remains to take an occasional needless breath.”
São Paulo Blues is a detective novel in the same way that Journey to the End of the Night is a physician’s day book. This is the sort of genre-pulverizing feat you would expect from the inventor of mathematical pornography, the only genuinely new literary form to appear in the last seventy years, for all the plague of “genres” that have lately been pulled out of publicists’ asses.— Tom Bradley
The larger blurb on the back cover, while tantalizing and telling, doesn't seem to be entirely indicative of the book. Purchasers will perhaps be more clearly steered by the synopsis which appears just above. Mention there is made of Pynchon's first book.
Sao Paulo Blues is like Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, in that deals with entropy and information. But it does so actively rather than passively. Pynchon is passive, more or less, leaving the reader to get the idea of a decrease in entropy after the famous episode of the auction of the stamp, when there will be an increase in information. But he leaves it all in abeyance.
SP Blues is more active in that it increases the information, but the reader himself must decrease the entropy, since it is up to him to piece it all together. Until the reader does so, the entropy will not decrease.
In any case, the synopsis' reference to Pynchon is apt, for Jim Chaffee rises to parallel levels of excellence. A brilliant book! - Phaborinos of Arles
Jim Chaffee, Studies in Mathematical Pornography: The American Dream, Enigmatic Ink, 2014.
Perhaps the most daring, erotically pugnacious, offensive testament to all that is wrong with the USA, told in a brilliant, seemingly (but not!) disparate merger of mathematics and pornography.
Whitey Butcher, former U. S. Marine wounded in Vietnam, is a candidate for the PhD in mathematics in New Orleans when he falls in with an otherworldly assortment of porn actresses. They lead him to a world beyond imagining. This surrealistic romp is truly nonlinear, a mathematical pornography from beyond hell.
The Drill Press has decided to run as a serial some of the chapters from Part I of Jim Chaffee’s study in mathematical pornography, the novel in progress American Dream, Volume 1: New Orleans. What could be more interesting than mathematics? Of course, heterosexual congress is among the dullest of duties performed by the male of the species, but has been the lot of most men since the time of the Greeks who gave up cavorting with their catamites from time to time in order to fulfill the civic duty of impregnating their wives. But I defer you to Socrates for discussion on this drudgery.
Admittedly it is a difficult work, particularly so for Americans who not only cannot comprehend complex mathematics but cannot in fact grasp even the simplest of mathematical concepts, though one may as well leave out the adjective mathematical in that statement. They can’t do simple arithmetic, which they confuse with mathematics, but that has much to do with national inability to follow simple directions related to their God-given inability to read with comprehension. Nor can they understand science or grasp the difference between science and engineering. A majority of the population (likely over 70%, given that is the percentage of college graduates with this affliction) cannot read even moderately difficult prose with comprehension. The US (or as some of us living outside call it, Freedonia, specifically with reference to Duck Soup) is populated with what are, in essence, functional illiterates, or perhaps more descriptively, quasiliterates Though able to understand some of the words in sentences, ceremonial certification has guaranteed that the bulk of them are unaware of their inability to string together sentences according to syntax, know when they are breaking rules of syntax, or comprehend when what they read or hear or say may vaguely follow rules of syntax without containing a lick of semantic content. After all, they are certified educated!
The US is the land of the MBA, a ceremonial certification process that has destroyed business just as formal education ( now including television which can be viewed for credit as coursework at all levels from grade school through the PhD) has created a nation divorced from reality, which thinks it is educated even as its citizens are unable to perform the most basic tasks of an educated people. It amuses us watching from afar that the industrial nation which spends more than any other on the most dangerous, deficient health care system in the world does the same on an educational system that produces innumerate, illiterate graduates incapable of performing even the simplest task of logical reasoning, let alone with a grasp of history or culture, not only of others but of their own. Graduates who can read the words without grasping intended content (when such might actually exist), and in fact are seldom interested in what the author or speaker might have actually intended, let along being able to draw conclusions from ideas or determine if the conclusions of those they read have any merit. They have learned to read what they want to find in the written words, just as they hear what they hope to hear. A nation of unreasoning brutes, hateful, xenophobic, racist, locally culturally myopic and intentionally stupid. Stupid and proud of it, the call of the Old South.
So in the unlikely event that you read some of this work, don’t worry as you run across unfamiliar terms and concepts. There is no list of prerequisites for this novel (actually a faithful autobiography, I have been informed by some clueless insiders who are merely judging by their knowledge of the author’s actual life), since we would be under the burden of necessity to warn, as did Paul Halmos in his elementary text Measure Theory, to not be discouraged if one does not have the prerequisites to read the prerequisites. Do not be concerned by words you may not understand because, to be blunt, whether or not you can read with comprehension, you are daily bombarded with words you don’t understand if you do any reading (or listening) at all. The list of nonsense words people spew to listeners and readers includes such as God, evil, good, liberty, human rights, freedom, truth, liberal, conservative, democracy, The Market, free markets, human rights, no arbitrage, yadda yadda yadda to quote a once famous television comedy (stolen from Lenny Bruce?). I apologize if you are aware already that these terms are bullshit, and perhaps this is not something you have need of reading. Perhaps such an introduction is unnecessary since those who can’t read the novel won’t understand this either, but it is a warning to the literate who have not become familiar with the abstract art form called mathematics (the algebra class where you learned to solve a quadratic or linear polynomial is not mathematics, nor is the calculus class where you learned to use some formula to calculate something called a derivative or an integral) that you do not need to understand the mathematics in the novel. In fact, it is better if you do not. Listen to the magic words in those brain activities called thoughts: don’t skip the language; there is herein the odd attempt to convey something in the expressions beyond what you consciously grasp.
The expressions are the language of real mathematical ideas. If you see a word like cohomology, do not freak out. It is a term that is defined operationally so that it is transferable from one human to another in complete detail, much like square root, a term you likely can understand operationally (that is, square root is defined by an operation, so that a number can be seen to be a square root of another number by the simple operation called multiplication; Chaffee has in fact realized that square root is an abstract concept most humans can grasp; one of the few). Although it is a serious deficiency of basic education that you do not understand the rudimentary foundations of calculus (as made rigorous by a string of artists beginning with Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the first part of the 19th century with his invention of epsilonics) as represented by, say, Walter Rudin’s little textbook Principles of Mathematical Analysis, that can be remedied. But to be sure, that book represents the beginner’s most elementary class in mathematics, along with a decent text in what is called abstract algebra, (for example Nathan Jacobson’s Basic Algebra I, now available from Dover Publications.) And though reading these works with comprehension would help reading the novel, it would not suffice to explain what is cohomology or a Riemannian manifold or what is the big deal about integrating with respect to Brownian motion as sample paths, though the idea of Riemann-Stieljes integrals as developed by Rudin would provide a short leg up (bounded variation! which this novel is not).
When you hear people utter or write nonsense words like God or freedom or blah blah blah, you need to inquire as to operational meaning. How can you tell when you have one of the things supposedly specified by the words in hand? With a square root, it is easily decided. That this novel will be too conceptually abstract, too extreme and too “nonlinear” (whatever that might actually mean in an operational sense) for all but a very tiny few readers goes without saying. For the rest, it will be difficult, but I find it worth the effort. Of course, most humans refuse to expend any effort in this age in which everything is “entertainment” by convention. Go turn on the telly or play that video game if you don’t find that reward is proportional to effort. If you are an American, a Freedonian, it is likely that you don’t.
As a final unauthorized note, Chaffee is quite happy to let slip the myth that this is an autobiographical work. And those who know him well think it true because the novel chronicles his life. But that is false thinking. I know for a fact that this be a work churned out by a computer program. It is automatic writing from new pre-beta software that is not parameter driven to sew together snippets and strings of characters and events to form a novel in some predetermined style (as I have helped develop and bring to market and which if you read books from, say, Amazon.com on e-book readers you are reading all the time: computer-generated post-industrial literature), but rather takes in a system of ordinary differential equations (for your basic stuff like Elmore Leonard or Dan Brown or Margaret Atwood) or partial differential equations (does anybody really know what are partial differential equations? see A. M. Vinogradov, Cohomological Analysis of Partial Differential Equations and Secondary Calculus for a light-hearted discussion) and produces a work of fiction, more or less. The difficulty is the computational burden of this sort of development: it takes months to years of constant CPU churning iterated with interactive smoothing to produce one work, which is why even the ODE method is not applied to get the industrial works of a John Grisham, say, to add to the names and their ilk listed above. Parameter-driven software produces dozens of novels by any of these popular icons (or even by composites of them) in nanoseconds. The PDE method produces work not built by such trivial construction.
The new technique remains stuck in the patent mill, by the way, so perhaps look forward to a disclosure of its workings soon, assuming there exists some able to understand it. It is safe to say that Mr. Chaffee didn’t put anything in the hopper regarding his life, there being no database of characters or events to drive, and yet this autobiographical work appeared. A great mystery, but then also a great justification of his choosing to never go with the flow (even the Ricci flow) that his judicious choice of system of PDEs (and the requisite initial and boundary data) reproduced his own life, a mathematical pornography. To be sure, he used a highly nonlinear system of partial different equations that some say were not well-posed, and in fact might be highly overdetermined as well leading to extreme properties of solutions, assuming that such exist. (Note that producing a novel does not require that a solution to the PDE exist, not locally and certainly not globally.)
What I find most amazing, beside the (perhaps) unintentionality of the biographical nature of the work, is that the archetype of the main character and vision of reality, Manly “Whitey” Butcher, goes far back into world literature and has been most recently explored in the US in film. It is, of course, Harpo Marx. Chaffee would be tickled if I were to add Raoul Bott to the mix, as in say a combination of Harpo Marx and Raoul Bott, but Chaffee is no Raoul Bott. In fact, he was not ever a mathematician, not of even of the third rate, since he left academia to work with engineers for filthy lucre. What a disappointment, though it is likely he didn’t carry the requisite temperament to be a real mathematician in any case, and certainly not the intellect to be one of the status of Bott which requires superhuman intellect, discipline and creativity. Chaffee would not have proven any theorems a fraction of the weight of, shall we say in passing, Bott periodicity, K-theory, extensions of Morse theory or the index theory of Atiyah and Singer which includes the Atiyah-Bott fixed point theorem, the work on gauge theory via the Yang-Mills equation or even the work with partial differential equations. Groucho’s words apply to the author: Your overhead is too high, your brow too low. (The cognoscenti know that the Coen Brother’s Miller’s Crossing is a remake of the Marx Brother’s Monkey Business.)
Is it any wonder the author is so fucking old and hyperbolic? But Gårding is not conditional, so Gård well.
Tom Bradley provides a more literary look at Chaffee's work, based on Bradley's careful reading and editing of Part I and some of Part II. I recommend reading this before proceeding, for the edification, the preparation and the sheer delight of beholding one twisted bastard's mind cornholing another twisted bastard's mind. - Maurice Stoker
…the sparsity of text on the board surprised me. A nebulous shape with some squiggles like lonesome spermatozoa or maybe spirochetes emanating from a couple points to the boundary, a formula for the conditional expectation on the boundary, nothing else.
Whitey Butcher has been making marks on a chalkboard, pretty much in a trance. Then he comes to himself and notices what he has written. This moment in American Dream is remarkable, in that it clarifies, as much as possible, the subject of this novel: higher math.
Jim Chaffee calls it "…art for art's sake, with no reason to be otherwise."
Like the majority of Americans, I am functionally innumerate. Teacher kept me in from recess in second grade till I memorized the stupid fucking times tables, which I've since forgotten. I never made it beyond first year algebra—no calc, no trig, nothing.
But, in addition to being a mathematician, Jim Chaffee is a novelist, so he knows exactly when to have his protagonist draw me a picture: two or three quasi-organic shapes, or maybe crystalline facets being hinted at by force of number, images that help a numerical mongoloid appreciate all the algebraic topology that's washing over him. Here's one such helpful image, straight from everyone's childhood:
So, connecting preimages above the 2-sphere where they came from as fibers, a bundle of some kind then, clearly you would have a torus wrapped around the 2-sphere with a twist in it. A kind of twisted slinky with infinitesimally close rings… I saw an infinity of slinkies along every potential direction around the great circles, all adjoining in perfect harmony…
And the novelistic aids don't have to appear on a chalkboard or spring from a toy bin. Nightmare hallucinations are effective as well. Disturbing Whitey's rest is a "machine-quaking mound of sand" which makes the math concrete, like a cement mixer configured as a Klein bottle.
But this is not just a mathematics book. It's mathematical pornography. Fucking is done in borderline infinite numbers of ways; human orifices are delved into like non-orientable surfaces. Whitey's encounters with females are analytically penetrative, like those portrait busts the Romans used to carve, with every wart and skin pore and chancre right in place, alongside noses and brows that would, in a more idealized context, be implausibly beautiful. Butcher sees the ugliness and the beauty and the inner complexities they conceal, ornament and express.
In the middle of the sex sections, which begin primarily non-mathematical, sudden throw-aways propel us back into the math guy's head—
I wasn't up for her mood and didn't take the bait, sitting quietly probing for deficiencies in my grasp of Ito's construction of his stochastic integral.
Whitey Butcher has the mathematician's manner of considering people other than sex partners as well. His view of his own family shows the superhuman aplomb available to the mind accustomed to moving in pure abstraction, the brain quintessentialized in the retort of cohomology and Hodge theory. A Vietnam vet, he was better off being AK-47ed in the jungle than hanging around his monster mom. And not only does he allow himself and us to realize this, but he expresses it out loud, without rancor or sentimentality. Her death scene equates thus:
...about her I certainly didn't give a rat's ass. Let the ancient vengeful volcano god of genocidal, homicidal smiting fury she worshiped carry her through…
Fancy-fucked women and dead mothers are all well and good. But, as one might expect, it's in the field of music appreciation that we get our sharpest glimpse of Chaffee's supra-dimensional mind. At one point Whitey turns on the phonograph, and—
…listens to [Eddie] Gomez man-handle the bass and [Bill] Evans’ deeply self-involved solos, conversing with himself and handing Gomez as much rope as himself…
…I found myself leading the Gomez solo on the seventh cut by an infinitesimal time step. After a brief flirt with some melodic memory, it simultaneously dove and climbed onto the atonal aharmonic arhythmic free-born bowing path… jangly stuff, nervous tension building to a dissonant variant of an exotic sphere a la Milnor or Kervaire…
Jazz brings K-theorists to a mind such as Chaffee's—which is unutterably strange. But nobody has gotten musical experience any better than this in fiction. When, at the end, topology is spoken of as "singing true magic" it comes across with absolute authority, from a man who hears music as sharply as he maps unmappable space.
As a feat of virtuosity, American Dream is analogous to one of Eddie Gomez' four-octave sixteenth-note runs, executed on a fingerboard with extreme negative Gaussian curvature. This is and will remain a unique book. - Tom Bradley
MATHEMATICAL PORNOGRAPHY’: A Book Where Men Go To Die
The Drill Press has decided to run as a serial some of the chapters from Part I of Jim Chaffee’s study in mathematical pornography, the novel in progress American Dream, Volume 1: New Orleans. What could be more interesting than mathematics? Of course, heterosexual congress is among the dullest of duties performed by the male of the species, but has been the lot of most men since the time of the Greeks who gave up cavorting with their catamites from time to time in order to fulfill the civic duty of impregnating their wives. But I defer you to Socrates for discussion on this drudgery.
Admittedly it is a difficult work, particularly so for Americans who not only cannot comprehend complex mathematics but cannot in fact grasp even the simplest of mathematical concepts, though one may as well leave out the adjective mathematical in that statement. They can’t do simple arithmetic, which they confuse with mathematics, but that has much to do with national inability to follow simple directions related to their God-given inability to read with comprehension. Nor can they understand science or grasp the difference between science and engineering. A majority of the population (likely over 70%, given that is the percentage of college graduates with this affliction) cannot read even moderately difficult prose with comprehension. The US (or as some of us living outside call it, Freedonia, specifically with reference to Duck Soup) is populated with what are, in essence, functional illiterates, or perhaps more descriptively, quasiliterates Though able to understand some of the words in sentences, ceremonial certification has guaranteed that the bulk of them are unaware of their inability to string together sentences according to syntax, know when they are breaking rules of syntax, or comprehend when what they read or hear or say may vaguely follow rules of syntax without containing a lick of semantic content. After all, they are certified educated!
The US is the land of the MBA, a ceremonial certification process that has destroyed business just as formal education ( now including television which can be viewed for credit as coursework at all levels from grade school through the PhD) has created a nation divorced from reality, which thinks it is educated even as its citizens are unable to perform the most basic tasks of an educated people. It amuses us watching from afar that the industrial nation which spends more than any other on the most dangerous, deficient health care system in the world does the same on an educational system that produces innumerate, illiterate graduates incapable of performing even the simplest task of logical reasoning, let alone with a grasp of history or culture, not only of others but of their own. Graduates who can read the words without grasping intended content (when such might actually exist), and in fact are seldom interested in what the author or speaker might have actually intended, let along being able to draw conclusions from ideas or determine if the conclusions of those they read have any merit. They have learned to read what they want to find in the written words, just as they hear what they hope to hear. A nation of unreasoning brutes, hateful, xenophobic, racist, locally culturally myopic and intentionally stupid. Stupid and proud of it, the call of the Old South.
So in the unlikely event that you read some of this work, don’t worry as you run across unfamiliar terms and concepts. There is no list of prerequisites for this novel (actually a faithful autobiography, I have been informed by some clueless insiders who are merely judging by their knowledge of the author’s actual life), since we would be under the burden of necessity to warn, as did Paul Halmos in his elementary text Measure Theory, to not be discouraged if one does not have the prerequisites to read the prerequisites. Do not be concerned by words you may not understand because, to be blunt, whether or not you can read with comprehension, you are daily bombarded with words you don’t understand if you do any reading (or listening) at all. The list of nonsense words people spew to listeners and readers includes such as God, evil, good, liberty, human rights, freedom, truth, liberal, conservative, democracy, The Market, free markets, human rights, no arbitrage, yadda yadda yadda to quote a once famous television comedy (stolen from Lenny Bruce?). I apologize if you are aware already that these terms are bullshit, and perhaps this is not something you have need of reading. Perhaps such an introduction is unnecessary since those who can’t read the novel won’t understand this either, but it is a warning to the literate who have not become familiar with the abstract art form called mathematics (the algebra class where you learned to solve a quadratic or linear polynomial is not mathematics, nor is the calculus class where you learned to use some formula to calculate something called a derivative or an integral) that you do not need to understand the mathematics in the novel. In fact, it is better if you do not. Listen to the magic words in those brain activities called thoughts: don’t skip the language; there is herein the odd attempt to convey something in the expressions beyond what you consciously grasp.
The expressions are the language of real mathematical ideas. If you see a word like cohomology, do not freak out. It is a term that is defined operationally so that it is transferable from one human to another in complete detail, much like square root, a term you likely can understand operationally (that is, square root is defined by an operation, so that a number can be seen to be a square root of another number by the simple operation called multiplication; Chaffee has in fact realized that square root is an abstract concept most humans can grasp; one of the few). Although it is a serious deficiency of basic education that you do not understand the rudimentary foundations of calculus (as made rigorous by a string of artists beginning with Augustin-Louis Cauchy in the first part of the 19th century with his invention of epsilonics) as represented by, say, Walter Rudin’s little textbook Principles of Mathematical Analysis, that can be remedied. But to be sure, that book represents the beginner’s most elementary class in mathematics, along with a decent text in what is called abstract algebra, (for example Nathan Jacobson’s Basic Algebra I, now available from Dover Publications.) And though reading these works with comprehension would help reading the novel, it would not suffice to explain what is cohomology or a Riemannian manifold or what is the big deal about integrating with respect to Brownian motion as sample paths, though the idea of Riemann-Stieljes integrals as developed by Rudin would provide a short leg up (bounded variation! which this novel is not).
When you hear people utter or write nonsense words like God or freedom or blah blah blah, you need to inquire as to operational meaning. How can you tell when you have one of the things supposedly specified by the words in hand? With a square root, it is easily decided. That this novel will be too conceptually abstract, too extreme and too “nonlinear” (whatever that might actually mean in an operational sense) for all but a very tiny few readers goes without saying. For the rest, it will be difficult, but I find it worth the effort. Of course, most humans refuse to expend any effort in this age in which everything is “entertainment” by convention. Go turn on the telly or play that video game if you don’t find that reward is proportional to effort. If you are an American, a Freedonian, it is likely that you don’t.
As a final unauthorized note, Chaffee is quite happy to let slip the myth that this is an autobiographical work. And those who know him well think it true because the novel chronicles his life. But that is false thinking. I know for a fact that this be a work churned out by a computer program. It is automatic writing from new pre-beta software that is not parameter driven to sew together snippets and strings of characters and events to form a novel in some predetermined style (as I have helped develop and bring to market and which if you read books from, say, Amazon.com on e-book readers you are reading all the time: computer-generated post-industrial literature), but rather takes in a system of ordinary differential equations (for your basic stuff like Elmore Leonard or Dan Brown or Margaret Atwood) or partial differential equations (does anybody really know what are partial differential equations? see A. M. Vinogradov, Cohomological Analysis of Partial Differential Equations and Secondary Calculus for a light-hearted discussion) and produces a work of fiction, more or less. The difficulty is the computational burden of this sort of development: it takes months to years of constant CPU churning iterated with interactive smoothing to produce one work, which is why even the ODE method is not applied to get the industrial works of a John Grisham, say, to add to the names and their ilk listed above. Parameter-driven software produces dozens of novels by any of these popular icons (or even by composites of them) in nanoseconds. The PDE method produces work not built by such trivial construction.
The new technique remains stuck in the patent mill, by the way, so perhaps look forward to a disclosure of its workings soon, assuming there exists some able to understand it. It is safe to say that Mr. Chaffee didn’t put anything in the hopper regarding his life, there being no database of characters or events to drive, and yet this autobiographical work appeared. A great mystery, but then also a great justification of his choosing to never go with the flow (even the Ricci flow) that his judicious choice of system of PDEs (and the requisite initial and boundary data) reproduced his own life, a mathematical pornography. To be sure, he used a highly nonlinear system of partial different equations that some say were not well-posed, and in fact might be highly overdetermined as well leading to extreme properties of solutions, assuming that such exist. (Note that producing a novel does not require that a solution to the PDE exist, not locally and certainly not globally.)
What I find most amazing, beside the (perhaps) unintentionality of the biographical nature of the work, is that the archetype of the main character and vision of reality, Manly “Whitey” Butcher, goes far back into world literature and has been most recently explored in the US in film. It is, of course, Harpo Marx. Chaffee would be tickled if I were to add Raoul Bott to the mix, as in say a combination of Harpo Marx and Raoul Bott, but Chaffee is no Raoul Bott. In fact, he was not ever a mathematician, not of even of the third rate, since he left academia to work with engineers for filthy lucre. What a disappointment, though it is likely he didn’t carry the requisite temperament to be a real mathematician in any case, and certainly not the intellect to be one of the status of Bott which requires superhuman intellect, discipline and creativity. Chaffee would not have proven any theorems a fraction of the weight of, shall we say in passing, Bott periodicity, K-theory, extensions of Morse theory or the index theory of Atiyah and Singer which includes the Atiyah-Bott fixed point theorem, the work on gauge theory via the Yang-Mills equation or even the work with partial differential equations. Groucho’s words apply to the author: Your overhead is too high, your brow too low. (The cognoscenti know that the Coen Brother’s Miller’s Crossing is a remake of the Marx Brother’s Monkey Business.)
Is it any wonder the author is so fucking old and hyperbolic? But Gårding is not conditional, so Gård well.
Tom Bradley provides a more literary look at Chaffee's work, based on Bradley's careful reading and editing of Part I and some of Part II. I recommend reading this before proceeding, for the edification, the preparation and the sheer delight of beholding one twisted bastard's mind cornholing another twisted bastard's mind. - Maurice Stoker
…the sparsity of text on the board surprised me. A nebulous shape with some squiggles like lonesome spermatozoa or maybe spirochetes emanating from a couple points to the boundary, a formula for the conditional expectation on the boundary, nothing else.
Whitey Butcher has been making marks on a chalkboard, pretty much in a trance. Then he comes to himself and notices what he has written. This moment in American Dream is remarkable, in that it clarifies, as much as possible, the subject of this novel: higher math.
Jim Chaffee calls it "…art for art's sake, with no reason to be otherwise."
Like the majority of Americans, I am functionally innumerate. Teacher kept me in from recess in second grade till I memorized the stupid fucking times tables, which I've since forgotten. I never made it beyond first year algebra—no calc, no trig, nothing.
But, in addition to being a mathematician, Jim Chaffee is a novelist, so he knows exactly when to have his protagonist draw me a picture: two or three quasi-organic shapes, or maybe crystalline facets being hinted at by force of number, images that help a numerical mongoloid appreciate all the algebraic topology that's washing over him. Here's one such helpful image, straight from everyone's childhood:
So, connecting preimages above the 2-sphere where they came from as fibers, a bundle of some kind then, clearly you would have a torus wrapped around the 2-sphere with a twist in it. A kind of twisted slinky with infinitesimally close rings… I saw an infinity of slinkies along every potential direction around the great circles, all adjoining in perfect harmony…
And the novelistic aids don't have to appear on a chalkboard or spring from a toy bin. Nightmare hallucinations are effective as well. Disturbing Whitey's rest is a "machine-quaking mound of sand" which makes the math concrete, like a cement mixer configured as a Klein bottle.
But this is not just a mathematics book. It's mathematical pornography. Fucking is done in borderline infinite numbers of ways; human orifices are delved into like non-orientable surfaces. Whitey's encounters with females are analytically penetrative, like those portrait busts the Romans used to carve, with every wart and skin pore and chancre right in place, alongside noses and brows that would, in a more idealized context, be implausibly beautiful. Butcher sees the ugliness and the beauty and the inner complexities they conceal, ornament and express.
In the middle of the sex sections, which begin primarily non-mathematical, sudden throw-aways propel us back into the math guy's head—
I wasn't up for her mood and didn't take the bait, sitting quietly probing for deficiencies in my grasp of Ito's construction of his stochastic integral.
Whitey Butcher has the mathematician's manner of considering people other than sex partners as well. His view of his own family shows the superhuman aplomb available to the mind accustomed to moving in pure abstraction, the brain quintessentialized in the retort of cohomology and Hodge theory. A Vietnam vet, he was better off being AK-47ed in the jungle than hanging around his monster mom. And not only does he allow himself and us to realize this, but he expresses it out loud, without rancor or sentimentality. Her death scene equates thus:
...about her I certainly didn't give a rat's ass. Let the ancient vengeful volcano god of genocidal, homicidal smiting fury she worshiped carry her through…
Fancy-fucked women and dead mothers are all well and good. But, as one might expect, it's in the field of music appreciation that we get our sharpest glimpse of Chaffee's supra-dimensional mind. At one point Whitey turns on the phonograph, and—
…listens to [Eddie] Gomez man-handle the bass and [Bill] Evans’ deeply self-involved solos, conversing with himself and handing Gomez as much rope as himself…
…I found myself leading the Gomez solo on the seventh cut by an infinitesimal time step. After a brief flirt with some melodic memory, it simultaneously dove and climbed onto the atonal aharmonic arhythmic free-born bowing path… jangly stuff, nervous tension building to a dissonant variant of an exotic sphere a la Milnor or Kervaire…
Jazz brings K-theorists to a mind such as Chaffee's—which is unutterably strange. But nobody has gotten musical experience any better than this in fiction. When, at the end, topology is spoken of as "singing true magic" it comes across with absolute authority, from a man who hears music as sharply as he maps unmappable space.
As a feat of virtuosity, American Dream is analogous to one of Eddie Gomez' four-octave sixteenth-note runs, executed on a fingerboard with extreme negative Gaussian curvature. This is and will remain a unique book. - Tom Bradley
MATHEMATICAL PORNOGRAPHY’: A Book Where Men Go To Die
Glancing up, I witnessed Dina crawling, hair turbaned in a towel, tits nearly dragging along the old wooden planks. The vision brought with it the realization that the degree of conjugacy of a conjugate point measured by the index and degree of degeneracy of the form measured by its corank amounted to the same thing. Degeneracy and degrees of freedom related. It seemed just. Still, it pissed me off that he’d dragged me into conjugate points with dreary shit using determinants, a clunky foray into discontinuous vector fields that seemed unnecessary . . . That’s why I fucking hated books. Too much blah-blah-blah. Limit everyone to two pages.
-- Jim Chaffee, American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography, p. 156
An interview with THOR GARCIA on American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography by Jim Chaffee (Enigmatic Ink, 2014)
Interview conducted by Jakob-Marc Fluhntuster.
PRAGUE -- Q: Hello, Thor Garcia, welcome. I trust this marvelous June day finds you hearty and seething. . . . I understand you recently received an advance copy of Jim Chaffee’s new novel, American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography. What’s your immediate impression?
A: Well, thank you, Jakob. First off, American Dream is nothing less than a horrifying, hilarious, soul-sucking, psychedelic experience of excruciating, unforgettable intensity. It’s got sadness and aggression, hatred and defiance, something wicked and druggy and ineffable, draped all over it. But above all, sadness, hilarity, cocks, mathematics, and gaping assholes. It also may be one of the greatest jokes of our time. I may never be sure. That’s the magic. I mean, this is a book where heaving monster cocks, many of them black, are constantly exploding vinegary cock-juice into the mouths of willing babes whose assholes, lest you doubt, are well agape after a furious fucking. Then there is a discussion – often angry and bitter, it seems, and lasting for pages – about mathematical formulae that are surely incomprehensible to the lay reader. This is just some of what Jim Chaffee has given us in the masterpiece he has chosen to call American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography
Surely –
Yes, at least according the rules most of us observe now, or would testify that we do. But that’s not all, Jakob. I must emphasize – in American Dream, a profound mathematical exploration of prodigious philosophical dimensions seems to be occurring on almost every page. It’s quite disorienting. Mathematical theorems and conceits are continually exposed, dissected, celebrated and tossed aside, mostly without remorse. And then, without skipping a beat, someone is again being reamed by a black cock of inestimable length and girth. As you know, I’m not really capable of discussing the intense math in any detail . . . but the cocks and wide open cunts that Jim Chaffee brings to the fore are quite another matter. Basically, with American Dream Jim Chaffee has stroked and stroked and launched a cruel, blinding, unflinching come-blast into the eye of literature. The effect is dizzying and warping, nauseating and crippling. It resists description. It’s just plain fucked up. I’ve read nothing like it before. It’s a tremendous, epic achievement, one that rightly should inspire fear and longing.
But –
What I’m saying, Jakob, is that this is a book that will fuck with your head. American Dream is likely to be the least reassuring thing you will read this decade, perhaps in your lifetime. This is a book that, possibly, may give you clues about finding your place in the cosmos, if you think about it hard enough. But your conclusions will not be reassuring, of that I can assure you. At the same time, it must also be seen as a highly sentimental work – in the sense, however, that you might be sentimental about a whore’s anus that you once loved and defiled, and witnessed being defiled in a gangbang. Yes, it is that tremendous. And what we can say without qualification is that American Dream puts to shame anybody who’s lately tried to be a literary bad boy, and there are many of them out there, as you well know. . . . Also, it’s a merciless heartbreaker. You will not easily rise from the dead after American Dream. In fact, you may die. If you don’t come close to dying during the reading of this book, you’re probably already dead. Make no mistake: Jim Chaffee is a literary bad man who has come to your house to mouth-fuck your wife and scrawl mathematical equations on your kitchen table and bathroom mirror, debunking all your closely held theories. He will simultaneously be having a second orgasm and a Vietnam War flashback. In sum, it’s an affront to everything we pretend to hold dear, or have tried to ignore in our greed and sloth. The tender reader, I fear, will be rendered unusable under the onslaught that is American Dream. And thank heavens. A book like this is a gift. We must clutch it tightly to our chests.
Fascinating. Tell me, Thor –
Well, Jakob, I felt myself going queasy and unhinged from the opening pages. A totally involuntary reaction. The first night I spent with it, I ending up smashing a champagne bottle against the wall and falling asleep with my face in an ashtray. I woke up trembling the next day, spooked, embarrassed over some of the things I seemed to have been thinking while under the influence of those first 200 pages. . . . It starts off, predictably enough, with a claustrophobic scene involving a pathetic family and a dying mother. There’s a suggestion that they've all gone batty because of religion and the tragedy of the American illusion, and also because they’re weak and tired and their brains never worked so good. We’ve all been there, certainly, but believe me – there’s nothing cute here. Chaffee stomps his boot on the windpipe from the get-go – he’s none too happy with these folks. He’s gone ahead and outlawed sunshine. . . .
Are you suggesting –
No, no. What I’m saying is, the main character seems clearly pissed off – about everything, really. And you’re waiting for him to get started. But again, there’s nothing cute about it – Chaffee makes no attempt to give him attributes that might make you sympathetic to him. It’s a shutout. Instead, we see this guy smoking hash and babbling about Riemannian manifolds and so forth, but in a totally asshole and condescending way. You have no idea what he’s talking about, but he acts like you should, like, right – you should know exactly what he means as he rambles on about diluting his hash and Cauchy-Riemann equations. It’s a staggering combination of arrogance and madness, but totally lucid. You’re thinking – this guy’s a real prick, come on, man, what’s next. . . . Well, sure enough, without much explanation, the next thing you know he’s drinking and having a threesome with a couple of nymphomaniacs named Lori and Millie. It seems perfectly natural. It’s just what this guy does. He just knows a lot of freaky chicks, apparently. In this passage, there’s a delightful description of an extremely hairy asshole. One of the chicks begs Whitey to screw the other in her “hairy sphincter” while the two girls get down sixty-nine style. Whitey obliges, without much comment. Everybody’s moaning and tonguing clits and coming and slurping semen. It’s a wonderful scene, one of many descriptive summits achieved by Chaffee.
But –
Yes . . . so in any event, things continue along. We find Whitey talking about Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, and he’s snorting coke and doing drug deals and name-dropping Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, and there’s packs of homos wandering about in the New Orleans haze, and sleazeballs and strange women and suspicious dudes cropping up everywhere, and they’re eating disgusting food and talking darkly and vaguely about unfortunate things that happened or could happen. Good stuff. . . . Also, it turns out Whitey’s got a leg injury from the Vietnam War, which sometimes causes him serious pain, if not total distraction. The crime and loss of the Vietnam War is very much a part of things in this book, indeed it’s the precipice that the whole thing is built on. But to Chaffee’s immense credit, it’s far, far from a “Vietnam book,” as least as we’ve been trained to understand such beasts. Vietnam is mainly the ignored, unwanted spectral guest in the room, but there’s no ignoring the stink it gives off. . . . Anyway, and maybe, you know, Whitey’s got a big, ugly dick. Well, it seems like he might. . . .
What the fuck are you talking about? Who is this “Whitey”? That’s a very provocative name, isn’t it?
Is it? Yes, absolutely. That would be the superhero, or perhaps just math-anal superstar, of American Dream – Whitey Butcher. Whitey repeatedly drops suggestions that he’s a true bad-ass, but the braggadocio mostly seems half-hearted, not completely persuasive. Whitey’s cagey, he never seems to reveal exactly who he is, at least not in the conventional way of most books – most of which, we must admit, are quite bad. Whitey does inform that he was teenage delinquent, and that he went on to fuck a married woman in junkyards and on the side of the road and in skuzzy hotel rooms. . . . In any case, then he signed up for Vietnam. The military liked his bad attitude and fighting spirit – now here’s a lost, unfeeling bastard we can really chew up. . . . Whitey comes off as a somewhat arrogant, immoral character who seems to have a nuclear-level rage burning just below the surface. You worry what might happen if he could ever force himself to give much of a damn. But that’s one of his strengths – he never seems to lose his cool, no matter how much crazy shit is going down. He seems to have a resigned indifference to just about everything – a far-out distance from what’s occurring right in front of him. . . . As I say, he’s not easy to like, and you never find yourself rooting for him. But he’s also not the kind of guy who would give much of a damn about whether you like him or not. Whitey seems to have achieved some kind of mental or philosophical breakthrough that allows him to use this ingrained aloofness to his advantage. At the same time, he never quite gets around to saying exactly what’s happened that’s made him this way – dick-swinging chick magnet, jaded pervert, and mathematical fiend. His narcissism is operating on an altogether different level. For all the freaky scenes he indulges in, all the hot whores who are constantly munching his balls, his intellectual triumphs over everyone he encounters – Whitey never seems too impressed with himself or anybody else. He’s not captive to the same egomania that fucks with other people’s brains. His nonchalance, I must say, is more than a little uncomfortable – it adds to the sense of horror and depraved unreality of this deeply unsettling book. Whether Whitey’s shooting his load into some slut’s mouth, getting his ass rimmed, doing coke and slugging cocktails, hanging out with folks who fuck dogs and make bestiality movies – it doesn’t seem all that much of a big deal to him. You get the idea he could take or leave it. . . .
And yet. . . .
Right. But let him get started talking about the math – oh, dear. This guy is a whiz at the complicated math. He thrives on it, even more than he thrives on sticking his dick in an anal whore. Whitey can talk the math talk for pages and pages. See, if it’s not about the hardcore math science, it’s total bull to Whitey. He just ain’t interested. Whitey’s got a few things to say about economics and what he regards as the other fraudulent sciences. But what really seems to get Whitey off is ass-fucking and sex-slaving to ruminations on the Smoluchowski Equation. . . . Anyway, it’s spectacular. Suddenly Whitey will shift out of the math and there he goes, ramming his dick in another chick’s ass. Or maybe he’ll be watching some black guy called “Mule” perform the service with a cock the size of a fire hose.
But, surely –
Exactly, Marc-Jakob. This book, as I say, if it has nothing else, has really got a great number of gigantic black cocks pumping and pumping away in every orifice a woman can possibly offer. Girls are constantly begging for black cock, and sucking and getting fucked in the ass by gigantic black dicks, and indeed, hoping to be impregnated by black cocks. “Whitey,” of course, digs it – it’s absolutely tremendous, delicious. Somebody stop him, Jim! – but no, sir. Chaffee slays again, another black cock straight through to the abdomen. I remember one passage in particular – “Nigger dick is best,” says a “carpeted bush.” Yes, it’s a phenomenal exploration of this classic Americanism, this white male fear/desire. Fans of black cocks – and as you know – as you well know – we can confirm there are a great many in this world – will be extremely gratified with what Chaffee has cooked up in American Dream. . . . In sum, then: Whitey Butcher fought the gooks, got fucked over while fighting the gooks, fucked lots of whores in the ass, mastered the math, took all the drugs, and apparently became a millionaire. And in the end, he didn’t amount to anything.
Before we go on – for the record, Thor, do you know Jim Chaffee?
I’ve never met him, no. . . . But he was one of the first on the internet to publish one of my stories, on his Drill Press site, The Big Stupid Review, which I highly recommend everyone take a look at. You can get some clues about what Jim Chaffee’s thinking about by examining the Drill Press. It was very inspiring for me. His earlier novel, Sao Paulo Blues, is also an outstanding work and is widely recommended. About stuff the American expatriates get up to in Brazil.
What would you –
Anyway, Jakob, through no real fault of his own, Whitey eventually winds up with this fantastic, lovely, disgusting pig of a girl named Dina. They cut a deal and Whitey chains her up in a New Orleans hovel. Dina’s a brilliantly pretentious, if misguided, intellectual whore – and a cock-craving slut of the very highest order. As if you had any doubt. In fact, for some time Dina made her living fucking dogs for the merriment of rich people. She became well-acquainted with the finer points of male canine genitalia, and some of those details will certainly be an eye-opener for many readers.
But, in what sense –
Of course she is, Jakob. What did you expect? And yes, it makes perfect sense. Dina is soon outfitted with a leather mask and forced to crawl around on her hands and knees, drinking and eating from a dog bowl. When he’s not ejaculating all over her, which is early and often, Whitey is more than content to watch her get mouth-fucked and gangbanged by a crew of skuzzy dopers and skunks who he sometimes hangs around with for illegal purposes. . . . And Dina’s perfectly happy – the story makes clear that her goal in life is to be abused and dominated, to be an anal fuck slave – to agree to be a slave, at any rate. It’s her choice, you see, and we should respect and honor it – and I do. There’s a keen passage where Dina explains that she’s tired of men who want her be a filthy anal slut when she’s in bed with them . . . but a prim and sexless housewife in her encounters with men in the outside world. This chick, man, no way – Dina wants to be an anal slut all the time. She’s hooked on the thrill. She craves losing her moorings, her sense of identity, her fears and sadness, by allowing men to indulge their most savage fantasies and agonies by ravaging her body to their heart’s momentary satisfaction. It’s her passion, her game, her power.
Would you say –
No. But what I can say, Jakob, is that Dina insists on calling Whitey “sir,” at all times. And when they are not fucking, sucking and ejaculating, they are often fond of preening pompously together while pontificating about white-male domination and Benjamin Lee Whorf. And so on. And so there is this imaginary depth that they play at. . . I’m going to say that this girl, Dina – you can see her as the true hero of American Dream, if we believe there is such a thing. She gives of her body and soul in order to soothe and worship Whitey, to make him feel desired and in control. No matter how callously and squalidly he treats her, no matter how often he whores her out, no matter how often she’s humiliated, she only insists that she craves more. In this way, she stays true to herself – devoted, disciplined, and dignified, no matter how much splooge from strange men might be streaming from her nostrils. In any event, she is eventually purchased from Whitey for $2 million. Whitey pockets the money and shrugs. No doubt, many tender and humorless readers will find something contemptible in all of this, along with many other frightful aspects of this book. Again, Jakob – Jim Chaffee deserves many congratulations for his achievement. We must stand up and applaud.
What do you think –
Well, I don’t know, Jakob. Yes, indeed, there are times it all seems like a gargantuan joke – and I’m not sure who it might be on. The math, or the study of what you might call ideal constructions, adds to the unreality, the separation from the world of ordinary concerns. Perhaps it’s the logic-based parameter that emphasizes Chaffee’s idealized world of insatiable sluts and endlessly splooging penises. For those not competent in the math, it ends up being like poetry from another planet, an alien language. You let it flow over you, enjoying the sensuality of the terms, mysterious equations and names. You can imagine that the math is some kind of madman’s insanity – which works as a proposition on its own – or you can assume that Chaffee knows a little something of what he’s talking about – that in some way, he’s laying waste to faulty structures, lowering much-needed booms on the frauds of the Math Wars . . . all with a sadistic, sybaritic grin on his face. If you can cross that threshold, it takes on its own poetic surrealism. And then, without fail, we’re back to the ass-fucking. Chaffee is a man who seems to love his algebra and his assholes in equal measure. There’s no other way to put it. He deserves many prizes, on both the U.S. and international stages. American Dream should be made into an NC-17 feature film, as directed by the members of Throbbing Gristle or GWAR.
But how –
Jesus, Jakob – how many times do I have to say it? It’s the cocks, the cocks, the cocks! Misshapen white cocks, flaccid and bendy cocks, black cocks as long as elephant trunks and thick as giraffe necks. In the end, Chaffee makes the totally legitimate point that all women want to get hosed, indeed to get impregnated, by black dudes with long schlongs. . . Personally, I counted more than 400 uses of cock, dick or penis throughout the book, which averages to about one every page and a half. . . . There’s also a curious case where a girl has “a clitoris the size of a baby’s fist shaped like a glans penis but without shaft or meatus.” And in answer to your question, Jakob – the answer is no. . . . Chaffee turns out to be a very cruel and vicious writer, which makes him, by definition, a very funny one as well. As one character says: “All reality is local. Worse, you cannot be sure what is the imaginary. Or the power of the types. In an unstable theory, not all types are definable. Indiscernible is one thing, indefinable another entirely. You can’t be sure – these models are not homogeneous – you can’t be sure where you end up with what. Elementals can be imaginary or maybe you can be imaginary or both. What is eliminated?” To which Whitey responds: “You sound like a witch.” It rarely gets better, anywhere, in any country or time.
Is there any –
No – the human spirit, as you well know, Jakob, is not noble. That is an idiotic myth. No, Jim Chaffee has created nothing less than a soul-trampling work of genius and rampant anal sex, chock-filled with all manner of druggy sloth, blasted personalities, decayed spirits and sheer far-outness. It’s a masterpiece for the math geek and anal pervert in all of us. But it’s a tear-jerker, too, and a dick-jerker. . . A heavy, hideous shadow of unrequited loss lays across its brow. Chafee goes further in sincerity, confusion, obscenity, and brutal and joyful provocation than just about anybody I’ve ever read. What I am trying to say is – well, truly, it made me question just what the fuck are people doing with their books, including myself. Why are they bothering? And that's a great thing for Jim Chaffee to have accomplished. This is a book where men may go to die.
Thank you, Thor Garcia.
Thank you, Marc-Jakob.
- www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6432474-mathematical-pornography-a-book-where-men-go-to-die
-- Jim Chaffee, American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography, p. 156
An interview with THOR GARCIA on American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography by Jim Chaffee (Enigmatic Ink, 2014)
Interview conducted by Jakob-Marc Fluhntuster.
PRAGUE -- Q: Hello, Thor Garcia, welcome. I trust this marvelous June day finds you hearty and seething. . . . I understand you recently received an advance copy of Jim Chaffee’s new novel, American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography. What’s your immediate impression?
A: Well, thank you, Jakob. First off, American Dream is nothing less than a horrifying, hilarious, soul-sucking, psychedelic experience of excruciating, unforgettable intensity. It’s got sadness and aggression, hatred and defiance, something wicked and druggy and ineffable, draped all over it. But above all, sadness, hilarity, cocks, mathematics, and gaping assholes. It also may be one of the greatest jokes of our time. I may never be sure. That’s the magic. I mean, this is a book where heaving monster cocks, many of them black, are constantly exploding vinegary cock-juice into the mouths of willing babes whose assholes, lest you doubt, are well agape after a furious fucking. Then there is a discussion – often angry and bitter, it seems, and lasting for pages – about mathematical formulae that are surely incomprehensible to the lay reader. This is just some of what Jim Chaffee has given us in the masterpiece he has chosen to call American Dream: Studies in Mathematical Pornography
Surely –
Yes, at least according the rules most of us observe now, or would testify that we do. But that’s not all, Jakob. I must emphasize – in American Dream, a profound mathematical exploration of prodigious philosophical dimensions seems to be occurring on almost every page. It’s quite disorienting. Mathematical theorems and conceits are continually exposed, dissected, celebrated and tossed aside, mostly without remorse. And then, without skipping a beat, someone is again being reamed by a black cock of inestimable length and girth. As you know, I’m not really capable of discussing the intense math in any detail . . . but the cocks and wide open cunts that Jim Chaffee brings to the fore are quite another matter. Basically, with American Dream Jim Chaffee has stroked and stroked and launched a cruel, blinding, unflinching come-blast into the eye of literature. The effect is dizzying and warping, nauseating and crippling. It resists description. It’s just plain fucked up. I’ve read nothing like it before. It’s a tremendous, epic achievement, one that rightly should inspire fear and longing.
But –
What I’m saying, Jakob, is that this is a book that will fuck with your head. American Dream is likely to be the least reassuring thing you will read this decade, perhaps in your lifetime. This is a book that, possibly, may give you clues about finding your place in the cosmos, if you think about it hard enough. But your conclusions will not be reassuring, of that I can assure you. At the same time, it must also be seen as a highly sentimental work – in the sense, however, that you might be sentimental about a whore’s anus that you once loved and defiled, and witnessed being defiled in a gangbang. Yes, it is that tremendous. And what we can say without qualification is that American Dream puts to shame anybody who’s lately tried to be a literary bad boy, and there are many of them out there, as you well know. . . . Also, it’s a merciless heartbreaker. You will not easily rise from the dead after American Dream. In fact, you may die. If you don’t come close to dying during the reading of this book, you’re probably already dead. Make no mistake: Jim Chaffee is a literary bad man who has come to your house to mouth-fuck your wife and scrawl mathematical equations on your kitchen table and bathroom mirror, debunking all your closely held theories. He will simultaneously be having a second orgasm and a Vietnam War flashback. In sum, it’s an affront to everything we pretend to hold dear, or have tried to ignore in our greed and sloth. The tender reader, I fear, will be rendered unusable under the onslaught that is American Dream. And thank heavens. A book like this is a gift. We must clutch it tightly to our chests.
Fascinating. Tell me, Thor –
Well, Jakob, I felt myself going queasy and unhinged from the opening pages. A totally involuntary reaction. The first night I spent with it, I ending up smashing a champagne bottle against the wall and falling asleep with my face in an ashtray. I woke up trembling the next day, spooked, embarrassed over some of the things I seemed to have been thinking while under the influence of those first 200 pages. . . . It starts off, predictably enough, with a claustrophobic scene involving a pathetic family and a dying mother. There’s a suggestion that they've all gone batty because of religion and the tragedy of the American illusion, and also because they’re weak and tired and their brains never worked so good. We’ve all been there, certainly, but believe me – there’s nothing cute here. Chaffee stomps his boot on the windpipe from the get-go – he’s none too happy with these folks. He’s gone ahead and outlawed sunshine. . . .
Are you suggesting –
No, no. What I’m saying is, the main character seems clearly pissed off – about everything, really. And you’re waiting for him to get started. But again, there’s nothing cute about it – Chaffee makes no attempt to give him attributes that might make you sympathetic to him. It’s a shutout. Instead, we see this guy smoking hash and babbling about Riemannian manifolds and so forth, but in a totally asshole and condescending way. You have no idea what he’s talking about, but he acts like you should, like, right – you should know exactly what he means as he rambles on about diluting his hash and Cauchy-Riemann equations. It’s a staggering combination of arrogance and madness, but totally lucid. You’re thinking – this guy’s a real prick, come on, man, what’s next. . . . Well, sure enough, without much explanation, the next thing you know he’s drinking and having a threesome with a couple of nymphomaniacs named Lori and Millie. It seems perfectly natural. It’s just what this guy does. He just knows a lot of freaky chicks, apparently. In this passage, there’s a delightful description of an extremely hairy asshole. One of the chicks begs Whitey to screw the other in her “hairy sphincter” while the two girls get down sixty-nine style. Whitey obliges, without much comment. Everybody’s moaning and tonguing clits and coming and slurping semen. It’s a wonderful scene, one of many descriptive summits achieved by Chaffee.
But –
Yes . . . so in any event, things continue along. We find Whitey talking about Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers, and he’s snorting coke and doing drug deals and name-dropping Ferdinand Georg Frobenius, and there’s packs of homos wandering about in the New Orleans haze, and sleazeballs and strange women and suspicious dudes cropping up everywhere, and they’re eating disgusting food and talking darkly and vaguely about unfortunate things that happened or could happen. Good stuff. . . . Also, it turns out Whitey’s got a leg injury from the Vietnam War, which sometimes causes him serious pain, if not total distraction. The crime and loss of the Vietnam War is very much a part of things in this book, indeed it’s the precipice that the whole thing is built on. But to Chaffee’s immense credit, it’s far, far from a “Vietnam book,” as least as we’ve been trained to understand such beasts. Vietnam is mainly the ignored, unwanted spectral guest in the room, but there’s no ignoring the stink it gives off. . . . Anyway, and maybe, you know, Whitey’s got a big, ugly dick. Well, it seems like he might. . . .
What the fuck are you talking about? Who is this “Whitey”? That’s a very provocative name, isn’t it?
Is it? Yes, absolutely. That would be the superhero, or perhaps just math-anal superstar, of American Dream – Whitey Butcher. Whitey repeatedly drops suggestions that he’s a true bad-ass, but the braggadocio mostly seems half-hearted, not completely persuasive. Whitey’s cagey, he never seems to reveal exactly who he is, at least not in the conventional way of most books – most of which, we must admit, are quite bad. Whitey does inform that he was teenage delinquent, and that he went on to fuck a married woman in junkyards and on the side of the road and in skuzzy hotel rooms. . . . In any case, then he signed up for Vietnam. The military liked his bad attitude and fighting spirit – now here’s a lost, unfeeling bastard we can really chew up. . . . Whitey comes off as a somewhat arrogant, immoral character who seems to have a nuclear-level rage burning just below the surface. You worry what might happen if he could ever force himself to give much of a damn. But that’s one of his strengths – he never seems to lose his cool, no matter how much crazy shit is going down. He seems to have a resigned indifference to just about everything – a far-out distance from what’s occurring right in front of him. . . . As I say, he’s not easy to like, and you never find yourself rooting for him. But he’s also not the kind of guy who would give much of a damn about whether you like him or not. Whitey seems to have achieved some kind of mental or philosophical breakthrough that allows him to use this ingrained aloofness to his advantage. At the same time, he never quite gets around to saying exactly what’s happened that’s made him this way – dick-swinging chick magnet, jaded pervert, and mathematical fiend. His narcissism is operating on an altogether different level. For all the freaky scenes he indulges in, all the hot whores who are constantly munching his balls, his intellectual triumphs over everyone he encounters – Whitey never seems too impressed with himself or anybody else. He’s not captive to the same egomania that fucks with other people’s brains. His nonchalance, I must say, is more than a little uncomfortable – it adds to the sense of horror and depraved unreality of this deeply unsettling book. Whether Whitey’s shooting his load into some slut’s mouth, getting his ass rimmed, doing coke and slugging cocktails, hanging out with folks who fuck dogs and make bestiality movies – it doesn’t seem all that much of a big deal to him. You get the idea he could take or leave it. . . .
And yet. . . .
Right. But let him get started talking about the math – oh, dear. This guy is a whiz at the complicated math. He thrives on it, even more than he thrives on sticking his dick in an anal whore. Whitey can talk the math talk for pages and pages. See, if it’s not about the hardcore math science, it’s total bull to Whitey. He just ain’t interested. Whitey’s got a few things to say about economics and what he regards as the other fraudulent sciences. But what really seems to get Whitey off is ass-fucking and sex-slaving to ruminations on the Smoluchowski Equation. . . . Anyway, it’s spectacular. Suddenly Whitey will shift out of the math and there he goes, ramming his dick in another chick’s ass. Or maybe he’ll be watching some black guy called “Mule” perform the service with a cock the size of a fire hose.
But, surely –
Exactly, Marc-Jakob. This book, as I say, if it has nothing else, has really got a great number of gigantic black cocks pumping and pumping away in every orifice a woman can possibly offer. Girls are constantly begging for black cock, and sucking and getting fucked in the ass by gigantic black dicks, and indeed, hoping to be impregnated by black cocks. “Whitey,” of course, digs it – it’s absolutely tremendous, delicious. Somebody stop him, Jim! – but no, sir. Chaffee slays again, another black cock straight through to the abdomen. I remember one passage in particular – “Nigger dick is best,” says a “carpeted bush.” Yes, it’s a phenomenal exploration of this classic Americanism, this white male fear/desire. Fans of black cocks – and as you know – as you well know – we can confirm there are a great many in this world – will be extremely gratified with what Chaffee has cooked up in American Dream. . . . In sum, then: Whitey Butcher fought the gooks, got fucked over while fighting the gooks, fucked lots of whores in the ass, mastered the math, took all the drugs, and apparently became a millionaire. And in the end, he didn’t amount to anything.
Before we go on – for the record, Thor, do you know Jim Chaffee?
I’ve never met him, no. . . . But he was one of the first on the internet to publish one of my stories, on his Drill Press site, The Big Stupid Review, which I highly recommend everyone take a look at. You can get some clues about what Jim Chaffee’s thinking about by examining the Drill Press. It was very inspiring for me. His earlier novel, Sao Paulo Blues, is also an outstanding work and is widely recommended. About stuff the American expatriates get up to in Brazil.
What would you –
Anyway, Jakob, through no real fault of his own, Whitey eventually winds up with this fantastic, lovely, disgusting pig of a girl named Dina. They cut a deal and Whitey chains her up in a New Orleans hovel. Dina’s a brilliantly pretentious, if misguided, intellectual whore – and a cock-craving slut of the very highest order. As if you had any doubt. In fact, for some time Dina made her living fucking dogs for the merriment of rich people. She became well-acquainted with the finer points of male canine genitalia, and some of those details will certainly be an eye-opener for many readers.
But, in what sense –
Of course she is, Jakob. What did you expect? And yes, it makes perfect sense. Dina is soon outfitted with a leather mask and forced to crawl around on her hands and knees, drinking and eating from a dog bowl. When he’s not ejaculating all over her, which is early and often, Whitey is more than content to watch her get mouth-fucked and gangbanged by a crew of skuzzy dopers and skunks who he sometimes hangs around with for illegal purposes. . . . And Dina’s perfectly happy – the story makes clear that her goal in life is to be abused and dominated, to be an anal fuck slave – to agree to be a slave, at any rate. It’s her choice, you see, and we should respect and honor it – and I do. There’s a keen passage where Dina explains that she’s tired of men who want her be a filthy anal slut when she’s in bed with them . . . but a prim and sexless housewife in her encounters with men in the outside world. This chick, man, no way – Dina wants to be an anal slut all the time. She’s hooked on the thrill. She craves losing her moorings, her sense of identity, her fears and sadness, by allowing men to indulge their most savage fantasies and agonies by ravaging her body to their heart’s momentary satisfaction. It’s her passion, her game, her power.
Would you say –
No. But what I can say, Jakob, is that Dina insists on calling Whitey “sir,” at all times. And when they are not fucking, sucking and ejaculating, they are often fond of preening pompously together while pontificating about white-male domination and Benjamin Lee Whorf. And so on. And so there is this imaginary depth that they play at. . . I’m going to say that this girl, Dina – you can see her as the true hero of American Dream, if we believe there is such a thing. She gives of her body and soul in order to soothe and worship Whitey, to make him feel desired and in control. No matter how callously and squalidly he treats her, no matter how often he whores her out, no matter how often she’s humiliated, she only insists that she craves more. In this way, she stays true to herself – devoted, disciplined, and dignified, no matter how much splooge from strange men might be streaming from her nostrils. In any event, she is eventually purchased from Whitey for $2 million. Whitey pockets the money and shrugs. No doubt, many tender and humorless readers will find something contemptible in all of this, along with many other frightful aspects of this book. Again, Jakob – Jim Chaffee deserves many congratulations for his achievement. We must stand up and applaud.
What do you think –
Well, I don’t know, Jakob. Yes, indeed, there are times it all seems like a gargantuan joke – and I’m not sure who it might be on. The math, or the study of what you might call ideal constructions, adds to the unreality, the separation from the world of ordinary concerns. Perhaps it’s the logic-based parameter that emphasizes Chaffee’s idealized world of insatiable sluts and endlessly splooging penises. For those not competent in the math, it ends up being like poetry from another planet, an alien language. You let it flow over you, enjoying the sensuality of the terms, mysterious equations and names. You can imagine that the math is some kind of madman’s insanity – which works as a proposition on its own – or you can assume that Chaffee knows a little something of what he’s talking about – that in some way, he’s laying waste to faulty structures, lowering much-needed booms on the frauds of the Math Wars . . . all with a sadistic, sybaritic grin on his face. If you can cross that threshold, it takes on its own poetic surrealism. And then, without fail, we’re back to the ass-fucking. Chaffee is a man who seems to love his algebra and his assholes in equal measure. There’s no other way to put it. He deserves many prizes, on both the U.S. and international stages. American Dream should be made into an NC-17 feature film, as directed by the members of Throbbing Gristle or GWAR.
But how –
Jesus, Jakob – how many times do I have to say it? It’s the cocks, the cocks, the cocks! Misshapen white cocks, flaccid and bendy cocks, black cocks as long as elephant trunks and thick as giraffe necks. In the end, Chaffee makes the totally legitimate point that all women want to get hosed, indeed to get impregnated, by black dudes with long schlongs. . . Personally, I counted more than 400 uses of cock, dick or penis throughout the book, which averages to about one every page and a half. . . . There’s also a curious case where a girl has “a clitoris the size of a baby’s fist shaped like a glans penis but without shaft or meatus.” And in answer to your question, Jakob – the answer is no. . . . Chaffee turns out to be a very cruel and vicious writer, which makes him, by definition, a very funny one as well. As one character says: “All reality is local. Worse, you cannot be sure what is the imaginary. Or the power of the types. In an unstable theory, not all types are definable. Indiscernible is one thing, indefinable another entirely. You can’t be sure – these models are not homogeneous – you can’t be sure where you end up with what. Elementals can be imaginary or maybe you can be imaginary or both. What is eliminated?” To which Whitey responds: “You sound like a witch.” It rarely gets better, anywhere, in any country or time.
Is there any –
No – the human spirit, as you well know, Jakob, is not noble. That is an idiotic myth. No, Jim Chaffee has created nothing less than a soul-trampling work of genius and rampant anal sex, chock-filled with all manner of druggy sloth, blasted personalities, decayed spirits and sheer far-outness. It’s a masterpiece for the math geek and anal pervert in all of us. But it’s a tear-jerker, too, and a dick-jerker. . . A heavy, hideous shadow of unrequited loss lays across its brow. Chafee goes further in sincerity, confusion, obscenity, and brutal and joyful provocation than just about anybody I’ve ever read. What I am trying to say is – well, truly, it made me question just what the fuck are people doing with their books, including myself. Why are they bothering? And that's a great thing for Jim Chaffee to have accomplished. This is a book where men may go to die.
Thank you, Thor Garcia.
Thank you, Marc-Jakob.
- www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/6432474-mathematical-pornography-a-book-where-men-go-to-die
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