EVERYTHING IS CHANGING AND NOTHING IS STILL

ghostorballoon:

I had a conversation with a guy at a thing last Friday about John Keel. I claimed (perhaps in poor taste) that Keel was in his own way for US postmodernity as Schreber was for German modernity (qua Santner). While briefly talking about Keel’s themes and fixations, the guy said “that sounds a lot like Philip K. Dick” which is a good point too.

Anyway it got me thinking about my fascination with the sub-rosa unter-canon of cryptozoologists and conspiracy theorists (Jeff Sconce’s Haunted Media is an excellent survey of one facet of the field) and I spent some time today reading Charles Fort. Pretty rewarding. Here’s a little bit from 1916’s The Book of the Damned that wouldn’t sound out of place in Bataille or Agamben, with Deleuzian rhetorical flair:

(This is kind of a small-scale example of the difficulties I mentioned earlier this evening. How to discuss these authors? Not on their own terms surely, not as purely aesthetic objects, and not in totally good conscience as heavily chopped up and selectively read books of theory— a conflict that raged briefly but intensely among Schreber scholars in 1977 and 1978. Are we doing our duty as scholars to apply Fort’s statement above to Badiou’s generiques when it was written in reference to flying zeppelins or whatever? Lacan maintained that Schreber was not a poet because he did not set out in an attempt to create a new symbolic order. Does the same proviso hold true for Fort or Keel?)