author: Thara Ruskin. title: “[re][dundant]: PEH Pap in the Age of Transgressive Interdisciplinarity.” publication: NY Times Book Review, 08 February 2010.
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…] (Hughes’s) writing grates, indeed, chafes at the spirit of modern speculative fiction. Steeped in the post-Delany aesthetic, the author’s latest (and presumably last) offering is a confusing, dissatisfying and ultimately offensive collection of “transgression.”
If we are to assume that P.E. Hughs (sic, henceforth) is in fact dead, then the literary world should rejoice that we will no longer be subjected to such self-indulgent rubbish. It is painfully obvious to even the casual reader that what Delany handled with such skill in The Mad Man (1994) and Savage Bent (2007), Hughs maims. Is Broken truly the gift he had intended for his sf idol? Doubtful. Delany, were he dead, would be screaming invective from his grave.
Essentially a string of space-suited dykeouts intermixed with the post-post-modernist ramblings of a mentally-ill young man from upstate New York, Broken is transgressive only in implication…What else would we expect from a self-published author? What he lacks in talent, he makes up for with vivid descriptions of sexual encounters, cannibalism, brutality. In essence, exactly what we don’t need in a novel.
A message to Mr. Hughs, if he is reading this from an island populated by other victims of the age-twenty-seven curse: stay dead. Our slushpiles are already filled with similar pap.
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [criticism + posthumous + negative + response]]: [translate: standard] :
author: SE Colmey. title: a response to “[re][dundant].” publication: NY Times Book Review, 14 February 2010.
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To Ms. Ruskin:
I guess I’m partly to blame for the book that so upsets you, Paul Hughes’s Broken. I found the manuscript in an old cardboard box he had willed to me should he disappear. Inside the box, there were photographs, letters, cards, things that meant nothing to anyone except him and me. At the bottom, I found a cd-r with the novel on it. Sorry that I disappointed your precious literary world so much. I just thought it was a story that should be told.
What’s your problem with his book? That he wrote things that made people actually feel? That he had a following, people who would read everything he wrote just because of the way he had of drawing us in and making us think we were part of the book or his life? Some of us loved him. I understand it’s your job to read books and write reviews, but your commentary wasn’t a review of the novel, it was an attack on someone dear to many of us, someone who had more love to give than he knew what to do with. He knew how to write the things that most of us could never even begin to put into words, and his words were beautiful, magical things. Some of us regret letting him go.
And yes, I’m the Seattle girl in the books. I’m sure that taints your view of me. I’m too involved in this to see things clearly, right?
It’s now been almost eight years since I saw him, five years since anyone else saw him. I just hope he finally found what he was looking for somewhere out there.
In closing, fuck you, Ms. Ruskin. It was a good book, better than anything you ever could have written. “Pap?” Nice word. Do you feel proud that you have a big vocabulary? Get over yourself.
Sincerely,
Mrs. SE Colmey
Chair, Fine Arts Department Cornish College of the Arts Seattle, WA
p.s. There’s an “e” in his last name. Use it.
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search results: [[an + end] + [forever + dust]]: [translate: standard] :
author: unknown. title: “An End of Us: An Ontological and Epistemological Discourse on The Forever Dust.” publication: Ein Journal des Instituts für die Erforschung des Heiligenscheineffektes.
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…] post-Judas anthropological teams from Sol-3 (14.7+) found little to suggest that the agent actually arose from “Black Space,” that area of the AC system most affected by the destruction of Proxima Centauri. Intervention posts listening from the edge of the timeline reported no significant evidence of remaining industrial centers, much less the planetary production system that the creation of silver would have necessitated.
Perhaps it should be noted here that the anthro teams did eventually compile a comp/cont report on the status of the AC system pre- and post-war. That report is fundamental to understanding the conditions in that system that most likely were contributing factors to the madness of subject Maire and the Forever Dust she caused.
…] remember that teams arrived mid-war, and even under the cover of […
…] major shipping lanes closed, and some evidence suggests that orbiting war platforms enacted a planetary blockade that forced the starvation of over ninety percent of the population. We can only imagine the desperation that the survivors felt while quite literally under the gun of the blockade platforms. Added to the lasting effects of biowar and engineered climate changes, the […
…] without doubt tortured.
Torture is that most effective of appropriations: the victim in essence becomes the transitional commodity of the process. The information gathered during torture is only secondary in importance to the “owning” of the victim by the perpetrators. The process is one of excision. First, the victim is excised from her normal environment. Second, the victim’s language is excised. Torture enacts a regression within the victim; it takes away the ability to communicate as one always has and instead replaces it with those first forays into verbal communication that we make as infants: cries of pain and fear. Third, the perpetrator restores just enough verbal ability to excise the required information from the victim.
Torture is an insistence. Without the benefit of […
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [criticism + posthumous + negative]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Thara Ruskin. title: a response to SE Colmey. publication: NY Times Book Review, 15 February 2010.
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My dear Mrs. Colmey,
You are the last person I would have expected to write to defend the late Mr. Hughes. My apologies for misspelling his surname. Truthfully, I couldn’t be bothered to care when I wrote my review; fact-checking is the responsibility of interns. Let us for the moment set aside personal differences (I am familiar with your painting practice and your work at revitalizing Cornish, and for that, I applaud you as an admirer) and analyze your involvement in PEH’s books.
We all know the story of the manuscript at the bottom of the cardboard box; please don’t insult my intelligence. I commend your willingness to seek the publication of the third novel in the silver series, given the unflattering character summary of you young Paul wrote in both an end and his online journals. I commend your willingness, yet lament it at the same time. What you’ve given the literary world is a horrid tangle of self-serving scribble hardly worthy of a hand-written diary entry. Empower yourself, woman! Can’t you see what he was writing about? You. He wrote about you in the most selfish, vain way possible; your side of the story has never been represented. All the readers are left with is but a shadow of whom I assume you truly are. That, in and o
f itself, is unforgivable. Had I been you, I’d have burned that cardboard box and been rid of that man.
We can only forgive so much to mental illness. I hope someday that you see what you’ve done. Broken will only serve to inspire future generations of conceited young authors.
Ms. Thara Ruskin, associate editor NY Times Book Review
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [personal + journal + 2002]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Paul Evan Hughes. title: “hovering.” publication: 28 June 2002.
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through it all, i’m still crazy
this veil of dream i weave around myself
.
moon behind gauze: walk, because. that’s all there is. stumble. through tripping grass, barefoot. thistles, prickers. shred. flesh. but at least i can feel something, anything. not him, not now. he’s asleep.
stumble into black, smoke inhaled, exhaled, tears under gauze: moon. walk: because.
if this is a test…how much more can you take from me? how much more before i am broken completely?
whispers into that night. shards of a song. two songs. more. words run together, thoughts: none, because. there is this, but it isn’t stillness. there is defeat. replacement. there are silences begun, and
all i ever wanted was forever.
there was happiness in those months, happiness in those years. in that life. in what existed between us and between Us. i’ve lost. so much. and. the mind. it consumes.
i’ve considered locking myself away in a place where chemicals will wash the blood from these wounds. for a while. just to get away. from this. from
and i trip, fall into a rut, grass, stems: gouging pathways into palms. mud. water. wash my face with this dirt, rub mud into those wounds so that they’ll scar and i can be reminded someday of how far i once fell.
things will be okay. not now. not for a long time.
and tonight someone seemed genuinely concerned. thought i was joking at first. when i told her that i’ve slipped into a deep depression. slipped? falling, falling, feels so much like i’m still falling and there’s no end in sight. subtractions. how could anyone ever love this? broken? man?
it is better that you’ve escaped me.
take
take me
take me to
take me, too.
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [MFA] + [Goddard] + [advisor + response]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Pam Hall.
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…] [I] feel pressed to note and name the “tone of voice” that runs through these pages. Paul, you have such a powerful (and yes, engaging, seductive, inspiring…) “positive” voice. I cannot tell you, as both your advisor, and as hopefully, a friend, how fine it is to share it and the energy that it carries…energy, which, yes, is also in the work and thinking and just kind of leaping out of everywhere[…
And here I want to take a small stab at pulling out what I suspect might be an important thread of practice even though it might be obvious. This shift in your voice, (and I suspect in your eye)…this joy, this more active attitude, represents for me what I have meant all along when I share my little platitudes about “practising your joy” or rigorous play. As artists, almost everything we do depends on our “seeing”…our gaze, our perceptual “attitude” or stance. Our work in the world begins with how we “see” the world, yes? With how it excites us, makes us wonder, invites our curiosity, or interrogation, or awe, or even anger…So it seems to me that part of our “task” is one of making ourselves, keeping ourselves in a state of sharp-eyed-ness…raw receptiveness…“good looker”…yes, “see-er/seer.” This is part of practice…fundamental I think to the next step or layer…which leads us into “making” or “poking at” meaning. And, if this little “theory” might have some truth, then it makes a profound difference “where we look from”, i.e. our Point of View, our stance, or what I call the “attitude of the gaze”. And we need more than one.
The gaze of “beginner’s mind”, of child enchanted, of pissed-off cynic, of broken heart, of deep despair, of wild, erotic heat, of heart in love, of brain on fire…are just a few that we might bring to the way we dance our work into the world. And just as I would argue for diverse vocabularies for expression, different strategies for different discourses, so would I argue for diverse “attitudes of gaze” or perceptual stances or POV’s[…
…]It really is the “eye of the beholder” that creates the thing “beheld”.
…] can we become fluent enough, flexible enough, skilled enough to select our lens, to call up that stance or attitude most needed by the notions we are dancing with, or are we victimized by a single purpose POV forever, and cursed to frame a lifetime’s vision from within a single “attitude”?
…] there is a fundamental thing afoot here, Paul, a “quickening”, a new way of “seeing/looking”…and it is beginning to sing through you…Pay attention to it. Find out how to call it up when needed[…
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [music + (John + Cage + Farley + {middle + C})]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Brandston, Ken. title: “The New Cage: The Experimental Revival from Cornish to Prague.” publication: Journal of the American Musicological Society, February 2010.
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…]and consider the following journal entry recently decoded from the private writings of self-styled wunderkind Hughes:
…]newfound love of john cage’s music now forever tarnished by biographical research. you should know why unless you’re completely ignorant of cornish alumni. MethodStructureIntentionDisciplineNotationIndeterminacy InterpenetrationImitationDevotionCircumstancesVariableStructure NonunderstandingContingencyInconsistencyPerformance(I-VI). —”Dream”: In a Landscape: John Cage. there has to be a reason for these webs.
Mentor and ethnomusicologist Dr. Michael Farley presented an intriguing posthumous analysis of Hughes’s musical mentalities:
“The Hughes boy…He was a different kind of young man. Please don’t take that the wrong way. He just thought too much. The kind of thinking a person does when they can’t sleep, but they also can’t stop listening. Not hearing; it’s not an issue of hearing. He couldn’t stop listening.
“He told me once that he’d figured out that that ringing in his ears was a ‘C.’ Took him a while, since he wasn’t the kind of technical musical student I usually get. I asked him to play middle C on a piano once in my Musics of the World class, but he couldn’t.
“His dad had tinnitus, too.
“But he said that that sound, that ringing, it was a ‘C,’ and I played it on the piano, and he just nodded his head.
“He had a theory, said it came to him one night when he couldn’t stop listening. He thought that maybe people were drawn to music that featured the note of their natural resonating frequencies. He told me he’d gone through dozens of songs that had touched him deeply at some level, and ‘C’ was a prominent tone in each of them. He was convinced that those songs literally resonated with his heart.
“There’s a thing called a seiche wave. It’s a wave that travels on the surface of a lake, or any landlocked water. Barely discernible. Sometimes it takes minutes, sometimes hour
s to oscillate completely. It’s the natural resonance of the earth.
“That boy got caught in a seiche wave. Maybe he heard a ‘C.’
“That’s why he disappeared.”
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + [personal + journal + 2004]]: [translate: standard] :
author: Paul Evan Hughes. untitled. publication: 12 February 2004.
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i am complicit in my own desolation.
no matter how brilliant they say you are, how sweet, charming, intelligent, no matter how innovative your work is or your theories are, no matter how all-around great they tell you you are, the cold, hard truth is that you fall asleep at night alone, and in the end, there will be no one to hold your hand and watch you die. there will always be someone prettier, more interesting, more spiritual, closer, bigger, better, faster, to fill the time with flesh and sound.
there is no enlightenment. there is nothing left to enlighten.
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search results: [[Paul + Hughes] + […signal corrupted…]]: [translate: standard] :
author: […signal corrupted…] title: […signal corrupted…] publication: […signal corrupted…]
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dear jacob,
i’ve dismantled my life completely in these two weeks.
dear jacob, i know i haven’t spoken to you in a while—it’s been difficult. it’s been the happiest almost-year since you left, and i apologize for substituting contentedness for communication. i owe you more than silences. the time i visited you, just before the dismantling began in earnest, i didn’t give you my full attention. i was selfish. i didn’t listen, didn’t really talk. just looked at a rock and wondered what’s left of you.
Broken: A Plague Journal tst-3 Page 14
