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Category Archives: Joe Papa
The Familiar Yet Unrecognizable Road
As I read The Road (I’m not quite to the finish) what seems most powerful to me is the style that McCarthy uses in creating the post-apocalyptic. The grayness of the text seems so vividly real, and depressive. Descriptions of ash, of the layers of worn and distressed clothing and blankets, of the rare pleasure of finding food, the frustration when that food is contaminated, are rendered in such a way that though the language is overwhelming drab, and dark, and dreary, it is an image quite easy to realize in the mind, and immediately something profoundly tragic. Continue reading
A Manifesto for the Paranoid Mind
In this class thus far, we have read and viewed some troubling things, but none on par with The Turner Diaries. After reading some of it a few days back, I thought of that, and of course the reason, for myself at least, is the original-source nature of such a text (not sure if this is the correct terminology): this is not a text about anything, but rather was meant, to some people at least, to be a sort of manifesto. In some cases, the Oklahoma City bombing notably, the manifesto was carried out. Reading such a text as this can be quite disturbing, but ultimately, it teaches in a way a review, or other scholarly or journalistic work on a text cannot: it forces direct confrontation with such disturbing ideas, with no distance allowed, just the raw message, not distilled by a third party for easier consumption. Continue reading
Apocalypse through the Decades
On Friday night, I saw the movie Miracle Mile at the Doomsday Festival. The film was as much a meditation on the 1980s and Los Angeles as on the end times through the deployment of nuclear bombs, but that the film was dated, with a bit of campiness accompanying its attempts at creating a sense of apocalyptic urgency, made it much more enjoyable to watch, and in a way, made it easier to see the same sort of thinking alive in the present moment as for Angelenos gripped in terror of impending nuclear destruction. Continue reading
Urban Apocalypse
Both this week and last, images of the city as a place of apocalypse are ideas which have been perhaps most provocative to me. In both Watchmen and Children of Men, the city is the site of the apocalypse at its greatest (worst?) expression; it is in the confines of the urban environment that these secular apocalypses are to be most feared, and it is the escape from the city that can provide an escape from apocalypse, or at least the worst conditions of it. Why the urban space is the place best fitted for a secular apocalypse is something that has troubled me: is it because the urban space is inherently crowded, or perhaps because technology, and the use of such, seems at its greatest presence in the city? Or does it play on notions of the person of the city dweller, as already occupying the role of the other, the modern who has strayed too far from tradition (in whatever context that may be). Continue reading
Nostalgia, Apathy, and a Clockmaker
Perhaps the most satisfying aspect of reading Watchmen was that it was a comic book, and the particular way in which one enters into a fictional universe that the comic book allows. Especially considering how heavy the text was on apocalyptic imagery, it allowed an entry into a world which felt fully realized, and in that way, all the more frightening. Had the novel been text alone, the plot itself is strong enough that it could easily have been captivating as a traditional text novel (if that is the term). But the visual element truly made the experience for me. More than anything, reading Watchmen immediately post-Glorious Appearing was a lesson in not judging a text by form alone, as the graphic novel in this comparison is words apart from the traditional novel in character development, complex unfolding of plot, and use of symbols and themes. Continue reading
Mercy, Revised
Last week, I did not write about Glorious Appearing, which makes me feel the task all the more necessary, if unfortunate. Firstly, the overall structure of the book must be noted: I felt like I had whiplash from the constantly changing storylines, one moment with this person, next page with another, then a third introduced, then full circle and back to the first character. Continue reading
The Good, Violent Apocalypse
Perhaps an idea about apocalyptic thought I have found most confounding—and intriguing—has been the sheer amount of thirst, or want, or desire, call it what you will, associated with believers in seeing, living, and experiencing the day of doom. End time scenarios are never quite pleasant—they always involve some degree of torment, of pain and suffering, and certainly lie in stark contrast to what we might envision as a narrative of life, love, or tolerance that might be (naively, perhaps) expected out of those claiming the Gospels as their gospel. Continue reading
Apocalyptic Suffering Recast
When one reads the Book of Revelation, as was our task last week, it would seem that at the end times, everyone will suffer. Yet a peculiar recasting of this apocalyptic scenario took place in the Western world between the time of John’s strange visions and our modern moment, to the point of which only some suffer, while great numbers of others are totally excluded from the apocalyptic horror, and instead given something akin to a stadium box seat above the action, as the are “raptured” into heaven just before the things which must shortly come to pass, actually do (Kirsch 190). Continue reading
Here to Stay for the Apocalypse
Revelation, as an apocalypse, seems to be inherently invested in the future, and of course a certain rendering of the future founded not in the historical present of its writing, but a future that will be radically disconnected from the present day, and in effect, will be totally disruptive and transformative. As Kirsch writes, salvation in Revelation must await the reordering that the apocalypse will bring, which stands in contrast to the view of salvation in the gospels, as something actively achievable in the world in which we live today (58). Revelation finds little hope for ourselves on this earth; salvation, and the apocalyptic moment, seems in want of a site, a place, if this earth is insufficient for such purposes. Continue reading
