The Three Little Bops

Ah, they don't teach the classics any more. Some people just look blankly at you when you invoke "The Three Little Bops." Everybody knows a few great Looney Toons, but those spoiled by grad school often rattle off a slightly wrong list of cartoons, the half-consciously arty later work of Chuck Jones. Nothing wrong with Jones; he brought Daffy himself to his peak, and there's no higher praise than that. His fans are simply wrong. I don't mean wrong about some particular matter; I mean wrong people, wrong in the aestheto-fascist sense, as in, "This is a wrong person, so please stand him/her up against the nearest pockmarked wall, will you, Lieutenant?"
Of course, I'd have to be stood up against that same wall, about a thousand times over. People like me simply should not be allowed to talk about Looney Toons. We ruin everything we mention. It's the basis of the academic profession, ruining anything decent.
But here I am, alive and yapping despite all the probabilites, so let's commence the contamination.
"The Three Little Bops" is part of the l0ng and glorious series of Looney Toons using the most common fairy tales for a bassline. Nearly all of these are great, but "Bops" is one of the best and for some reason the least known. It's one of those perfect products of California just as it was about to be swamped, the era of Philip K. Dick's early novels and the San Francisco movies of Hitchcock.. Pre-rock, pre-hippie, something autumnal about the music and the style. "Bops" makes the three little pigs into jazz musicians--and I hate jazz. Bart Simpson put it best, explaining why cartoons are the only native American art form: "I don't include jazz, because it sucks."
And the three little pigs look jazzy: one has a pork pie hat, another a beret. I winced at the picture. But the music they play isn't jazz at all. It's got a beat, it's simple and insistent, and in fact to my pop ear sounds exactly like the tune of "Rock Around the Clock." That was such a relief that after enjoying the cartoon for the tenth or eleventh time, I looked up the musicians on the credits. The musical director is Shorty Rogers, credited with a big influence on "the West Coast sound." Which I'm guessing means, "Sneaking an actual tune and a decent beat into the musical wanking called jazz."

Belated Homage to Jean Rhys

I just started reading Jean Rhys and can't believe how good she is. I tried to read her once, long ago, but she seemed too close to a kind of terror and bitterness I wanted to avoid. Well, I know better now. You don't avoid that stuff, any more than Hazel Motes could run from Grace.
These days I respect only invention, as in PKD and Jack Vance, and blunt intellectual honesty. And that's what Rhys delivers. The book I've just read, Tigers Are Better Looking, consists of two lots of stories, about a young woman dragging through chronic poverty and the general swinishness of other people in London and Paris. No use pretending the protagonist here is anybody but Rhys, who once said, "I never wrote about anything except myself." Damn right. Same thing holds true for Celine and Limonov: it's all what hicks call "self-pity," and how wonderful it is, after wading through the hotel paintings that we call Fiction, or Writing.
Rhys is too smart to settle for that Writing crap. She's going to tell you to your face. She reminds me of a strange set of people who'd hate each other, Schopenhauer and Celine (the only two writers I know who use those damn three dots effectively, they also share a healthy loathing for human life) and Naipaul. But she's much more honest about London and the English than Naipaul, who will never say a thing about what he suffered there. Rhys spits in London's face and thanks Fate for the opportunity. She's not shy about her sheer hatred of the place and people. A sample: "That was the English for you: heads I win, tails you lose." Every story in the London half of this book is framed, very loudly, as a hate-letter to Britain.
Yet no critic can see, or will admit seeing this. They talk about her hatred for any safe substitute: colonialism, men, "life"--and indeed Rhys has some spittle left over for all of the above. But in this part of the book, the clear target is the English.
Is the critics' 'failure to mention this the result of an impenetrable smugness--"She can't mean us, we're too wonderful!"--or a grim determination to ignore provocation shouted by a "horrid colonial"? It's an interesting question, reminding me of similar reactions to Swift's "Modest Proposal." You can't imagine how many critical essays on that text begin, "Clearly, Swift does not mean simply to condemn England." Oh yes he did. And so does Rhys. Can they not see this, or are they just lying about what they see? Yeah, that's the question these days, about a lot of things.
The second part of the book is set in France. It lacks the fierce hate of the London stories, displaying instead a wonderful contempt for all the fussy Writing decorations favored by amateurs: moral lessons, endings, pathos. Her motto here is "Take it or leave it, idiots." She's tired of talking to the world Celine describes in Journey, full of brave idiots. She'll tell you quickly and drily what it's like to be smart, female and scared in a world of male chimps and trannies. If you don't like it, go read Barbara Kingsolver.
Like Celine, Rhys is above all a writer forged by the 1930s, the most insanely misogynistic decade of the last century. Celine thought he had it bad in that world of vicious apes; Rhys had to deal with being a woman there, writing for idiots about idiots. She must have thought Celine was a sissy.
Her take on the French in these stories is very different from her fierce bombardment of the English. She looks at the French with a squint and a shrug; they're rational animals, no more and no less. They must be dealt with, but there's no need to hate them, any more than you'd hate the trees as you struggle through a forest.
Strange how the feminists of my youth claimed Rhys as one of their own. It's oddly reminiscent of the way Leftists claimed Celine after the publication of Journey. A classic case of a handy misreading by idiots. But Celine's came while he was young enough to enjoy it. By the time the idiocracy had misread Rhys as one of its own, she was past caring. When she got a big award in her old age, she said simply, "It has come too late."
A taste for truth. That's what you end up respecting, after you puke up all that Writing.

My eXile-ent Adventures

Ever since its inception in 1997, I've contributed to Moscow-based satirical zine The eXile. The current issue tracks all the threats sustained over the course of eleven scandalous years.
Browse my articles by clicking on 'the eXile (John Dolan articles)' link to the left.

Pleasant Hell

Pleasant Hell, my first novel/memoir, was published 2004 by Capricorn Press.

These reader reviews should give you some idea of the tone:

"An unconscionable perspective on the value of human life." -- John Gorenfeld
"John Dolan is easily the best writer the 21st century has yet produced. "-- Richard Stockton
"Pleasant Hell does many things -- beautifully and savagely -- but its biggest accomplishment is its ability to tell the truth."

Find out more at (and order from!) amazon.com:
http://www.amazon.com/Pleasant-Hell-John-Dolan/dp/0975397044/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212694076&sr=1-1

PS Yeah, that's a dead squid on the cover.