Down and Out in Yokohama

On a lazy Sunday, such as this one, and as I lay on this couch watching Apocalypse Now for the nth time (for the quotables; and being made from Conrad's Heart of Darkness), I'm reminded of similar Sundays in a quiet Japan. Recovering from Fridays and Saturdays, we seemed to be out of wretched slumbers on Sunday mornings; awake and staggering from major metropolitan cities headed to our various homes in rustic towns.

Whether we came from Tokyo, or Yokohama we were always headed back, via Metro express, to the hill houses at Yokosuka or Atsugi to nurse our hangovers. But notwithout eradicating our collective hunger over a beef bowl and miso soup. We spent the weekend quenching whatever thirsts we'd ganered all week; and our realization of however wild a weekend it had been, was felt over a silent beef bowl breakfast.
There were mishaps in the misadventures though, for example, a fellow I knew, couldn't find a single article of clothing as he woke up in a motel one morning. Some were more trajic cases that involved arrests or hearing stories of drunks who'd been beaten by local Japanese gangs (certainly not the Yakuza clan, certainly not!) I'm glad that I don't have wild stories like that to tell, albeit I had some eventful nights.

Besides me there was my best friend Brent Jackson, my boy Diggs the fighter, Dukes (breath), Guy (rude boy), and a couple of cool white boys including Decker. Anyways, we slept in on Sundays not worried about wicked Mondays and rigorous work weeks. In my apartment in particular, I favored the couch in the living room down stairs, I'd be there with Lauren (or whoeverelse before she came around) watching a sophisticated asian action drama. Everyone else was either on the matress in the living room floor, or the various rooms, going back to sleep, and watching their respective tvs. Brent was always in the guest room with incense lit and loud Japanese music, smoking with his woman. It was a time to remember. The sunlight tried to seep in thru the wicker screen doors that overlooked the valley. We slept still, with o.j., chuhais, and kool cigaretts dispersed about the tables. We were all broke suckers that spent recklessly and enjoyed our weekends as if the last. On Sundays we rested and pretended nothing about it. We were down and out in a foreign land and all we had was the atmosphere: each other, beef bowl, and the futuristic facade of Japanese media.
DefJukies!!!!

The death of the author...?

La mort de l'auter.
(preliminaries of a larger essay i'm working on.... just my initial assessment)

Have you ever struggled with a book that you particularly didn’t see a point in reading, or found the verbiage of the book totally different from what you’re used to, or even found yourself asking if the plot is at all accessible? If you had, then Roland Barthes’ La Mort de l'Auteur is deceitful to say the least.

If I get what Barthes is getting across, then there’s a schizo-Balzac thing happening here: Balzac, the writer, who exists as a person (the ‘scriptur’), and Balzac the author—that voice you hear narrating a the text to you (the floating eyeball). The author, whom we usually assume we are conscious of when reading a story is, in Barthes' case, non-existent, or at least should not exist in terms of lit. criticism; he commands, “once the Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile.” Consciousness of the writer distorts because the “book and author stand automatically on a single line divided into a before and an after” and this is problematic as “every text is eternally written here and now” by the reading public.

The “language speaks, not the author, through a prereq. impersonality,” rendering the writer as conveyer of a message in the performative act of using the mosaic of words, phrases, and semantics from their culture, and for Barthes’ thesis, the author is irrelevant because “a text’s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination.” Put that way, we have the Ecclesiastical claim that ideas are not original, and this is at the heart of the linguistic theory that looks only at the elemental matter of sentences, down to their basic abstract units: words.  With this reasoning, words exist in the aether as units of discourse while we wiggle through them ephemerally when we write. (I guess it’s kind of like breathing oxygen i.e. I’m no more special than anybody else for breathing. So writers are using words like we breathe; the text may be special, but not the ‘scriptur’). Semiotic rules viz. the "I" example of the signified and the signifier.

the operator of the funhouse is slumped in a plastic control booth that reeks of sensemilia

Getting into the DFW anthology now...slow going though, I have other obligations right now.