I was just interviewed by Kevin Barrett. Kevin pointed out that right after 9/11, this Bowles story was cited by several commentators as evidence of Islamic barbarism.
That is a very distorted reading. In "A Distant Episode," the fictional tribe that cut the Professor's tongue is shunned and held in contempt by ordinary Morrocans. That's why the waiter gets angry when he's asked by the Professor about camel udder boxes.
As a linguist, the Professor is a scholar of tongues, so it's only appropriate that his presumptuous tongue is cut out. This, Paul Bowles does, not any actual Moroccan.
Interviewed by Barrett, I said that Bowles was interested in unusual solutions, let's say, to life's basic problems. Interested mainly in boys, Bowles was married to a lesbian nymphomaniac, Jane Bowles.
In his "Pages from Cold Point," Bowles has a rich white teenager paying black boys and men for sex on a fictional Caribbean island. This scandalizes the village, whose mores are traditional. Not sated, the teenager even tries to seduce his own father, by lying naked, uninvited, on the old man's bed.
Though the father refrains from such congress, his rumination is creepy enough:
"I stood looking at him for a long time, probably holding my breath, for I remember feeling a little dizzy at one point. I was whispering to myself, as my eyes followed the curve of his arm, shoulder, back, thigh, leg: ‘A child. A child.’"
A normal father would say, "What the fuck are you doing?! Get out of my bed!" This father, though, spends the entire night next to his naked son, whom he suspects is not sleeping, for the suspense.
"He lay perfectly quiet until dawn. I shall never know whether or not he was really asleep all that time. Of course he couldn’t have been, and yet he lay so still. Warm and firm, but still as death. The darkness and silence were heavy around us."
So Bowles was certainly interested in decadence and corruption, but in this story, he's indicting the white father and son, not the dark natives, and in "A Distant Episode," he punishes the Professor for his presumptiousness, if not hubris.
There's this question on Quora, "Moroccans are known internationally, but what is the dark side of them we never hear about?"
Kevin Barrett answers:
"The dark side of Moroccans we never hear about?! That is a very strange question. No nation has had its dark side spotlighted and exaggerated more than Morocco has! Edward Westermarck’s Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926) obsessively catalogued Morocco’s colorful and sometimes bizarre magical and mystical beliefs and practices. The American beat generation novelist Paul Bowles did similar things fictional form. Brion Gysin did too. (The Process is his best book.) Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House also obsesses (very entertainingly) with Moroccan superstitious and magical beliefs. Combs-Schilling’s Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice is a brilliant neo-psychoanalytic exposé of Moroccan patriarchy. So is Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child. I could go on, but those highlights should keep you busy for awhile ; - )
"The problem is that Western orientalist writers have been so obsessed with Morocco’s dark side that they have missed the light side. Islam in Morocco, for example, has a very reasonable, sophisticated, beautiful, intellectual, mystical side that is a far cry from the Issawiyya dervishes sticking knives through their tongues. But it’s easier for Western writers and scholars to get attention and sell books by focusing on the lurid stuff. And it’s also easier on Western egos. Islamic high culture, in Morocco and elsewhere, is both spiritually richer and more intellectually defensible than (post)modern Western culture. A Westerner who seriously engages with it is likely to lose the argument and convert."
Barrett is a Muslim convert and as such biased. A dark side of Morocco and Algeria would be the case of kidnapping and sacrifice of "Zhouri children", of which the blonde girl recently killed by an Algerian immigrant in Paris, Lola, might be an example. It is likely a pre-islamic belief, but still very present there: https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/09/103129/zouhri-children-and-witchcraft-moroccos-darkest-beliefs
It is tempting to have contempt for the Americans or even easier for the Israelis, but the language isn't just bad, it is the result of it having been turned into a weapon against us without our realizing it. We have been occupied down to the level of thought. It is a conquest that is not satisfied until it has total control of every act, word and thought. And sure, we get pumped up with all kinds of hollow claims of supremacy, but in the end we are slated for slavery or worse just like the Palestinians, the African Americans, the Native Americans, the Iraqis, the Vietnamese before us. A death cult has colonized our culture and our minds and it has been carrying out its ritual sacrifices on a global scale for some time. The question is, how to retain our thoughts and have the temerity to use our tongues in spite of those all around us capitulating due to either ignorance or fear or a mixture of both. Where is the mental refuge or fortress than can protect us from the war on thought by those who revel in the power to create death? How do we find others in the same refuge or fortress? How do we press back? What hope can we offer our children? Perhaps this is just more ignorant blather from another dumb deluded white American who would best serve the world by having their tongue and all ten fingers removed in an "operation." But since despair is a sin, I will keep pressing on none the less. God Bless and Protect you Linh Dinh, you will never be canceled in my book. You, like every one of us, are sacred. And as long as my tongue or fingers still work, I will be trying to use words to resist them. To my last breath, for the Glory of God in humble gratitude of all that God has created.
Yes a wonderful essay and so refreshing to read. One thing occurred to me out of my equally bad French. Could the sentence "An honor to do what? Deliver a fool to his death? And what does he mean by “You just have to go down, you’re right,” in bad French." Could the sentence also be translated "You just have to go down, its your right" which makes a little more sense to me. Right seems to have the same multiple meanings in French as in English.
The only Paul Bowles I have come in contact with is the movie made of The Sheltering Sky which, despite my aversion to John Malkovich I found very good and watched several times. In looking up the novel on wikipedia I found this wonderful (times being what they are) excerpt:
"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."
Dear Linh, I spent an hour or so trying to find an e-book or used copy of Pages From Cold Point but unfortunately haven't found one I could afford as yet. It seems to have been delicately deleted from general distribution. I decided to go for A Delicate Prey which is available as an inexpensive e-book and when I find out how to load a reader I will report back! Isha
I wonder how much a writer's personal proclivities influence his fiction, and if we should consider this or not when reading their work. The other day I was reading a story by E. M. Forster, who was a homosexual, and thought about that -- would he write differently if he was not homosexual? The story had nothing to do with homosexuality, but perhaps you could see it in his worldview? This story by Bowles also gave me a similar vibe, for some reason reminding me of his personal life. Paul Bowles was of course a homosexual (and according to a commenter here, part jewish) and led a very promiscuous life -- probably the reason why he moved to Morocco in the first place. Then of course you have Proust (half-jewish and gay), and Oscar Wilde (but apparently he repented of his lifestyle in the end, in De Profundis), and others such as Arthur C. Clarke (another sexpat in a Muslim country, Indonesia -- it seems Muslim countries are the places to go for gay sex? There's Lawrence of Arabia and Rimbaud, too).
Paul Bowles was born to Claude Dietz Bowles and Rena Winnewisser.
From comedy to drama to horror, whites are painted as the worst of inbred barbarians by Jews. And before you say that's impossible as O'Connor's parents were both from Ireland, I refer you to the book "When Scotland was Jewish". If still unsure, I refer you to her face.
Most famous and influential (well promoted and "best selling") novelists are spawned from intelligence. Miles Mathis has covered many. In this article, it's John Kennedy Toole. On his "pre-suicide driving tour" he is alleged to have visited O'Connor's home, as well as Heart Castle- http://mileswmathis.com/jkt.pdf
It's not all acrimony, Mathis does list "A Good Man" in his 75 best books.
Miles is interesting but I'm not sure how seriously one should take him. According to him basically all writers are spooks. O'Connor has great short stories. (half)-jewish? Yeah, probably. Bowles I didn't know, but his mother's name sounds jewish too. And he was also gay. Apparently lots of famous writers are either jewish or gay or both.
It's become a running joke at his site. Just about ever culturally influential figure has turned out to be a gay Jewish actor. The latest was Bruce Lee. If it were simply a coincidence I wouldn't take it seriously. But if he's right about even half, the picture being painted is one of a comprehensive effort to shape our culture going back centuries. Is it really that far fetched? We currently have a pop music industry which universally promotes overt Satanism and Masonic symbolism. Jews freely admit how much influence and control they have, and the things they've been behind https://jewishcontributions.com/infotables/
I'm probably not going to convince you of anything, but if you're inclined to keep reading his papers, you'll see it's all there, openly sourced. We're dealing with the people who were directly responsible for 9/11 and covid/The Great Reset. It's not beyond their ambition. To quote Maurice Samuel, "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own."
They've been building that world for quite some time, now with the assistance of messianic Christians, first as controlled opposition, and now as unabashed Zionists, openly advocating the destruction of America and the West. https://www.bitchute.com/channel/qPYBk4x8LaDs/
Many readers seem to view an author’s perspectives and opinions and his/her writing as a unified whole. I find it quite easy to enjoy and admire the latter while disagreeing with the former. I once read a complete collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and thoroughly enjoyed them, although they certainly don’t duplicate my own outlook on life and society. Indeed, if agreement with one’s own perspective is what a reader is looking for, I’d say the reader is looking more for self-affirmation than to learn from another’s perspective.
My only exposure to Paul Bowles was his novel “The Sheltering Sky” a few years ago. Much like the short story you describe, it sets down white westerners in North Africa and has them doing inexplicably stupid stuff, clueless as to the cultural norms they are flaunting. It was quite a novel. I did not know Bowles had written short fiction—I’ll have to find and read some.
Ok, now I've read the story and it's interesting, but I fail to see why O'Connor mocking poor (and sometimes rich, too) white people in the South is bad, and Bowles mocking some American (white) professor in Morocco is good. O'Connor's satirical view of the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (great short story) is, to my mind, somewhat similar to the one in this story by Bowles. Both are about people who don't understand what's going on until it is too late (or perhaps not even then).
Hi everyone,
I was just interviewed by Kevin Barrett. Kevin pointed out that right after 9/11, this Bowles story was cited by several commentators as evidence of Islamic barbarism.
That is a very distorted reading. In "A Distant Episode," the fictional tribe that cut the Professor's tongue is shunned and held in contempt by ordinary Morrocans. That's why the waiter gets angry when he's asked by the Professor about camel udder boxes.
As a linguist, the Professor is a scholar of tongues, so it's only appropriate that his presumptuous tongue is cut out. This, Paul Bowles does, not any actual Moroccan.
Interviewed by Barrett, I said that Bowles was interested in unusual solutions, let's say, to life's basic problems. Interested mainly in boys, Bowles was married to a lesbian nymphomaniac, Jane Bowles.
In his "Pages from Cold Point," Bowles has a rich white teenager paying black boys and men for sex on a fictional Caribbean island. This scandalizes the village, whose mores are traditional. Not sated, the teenager even tries to seduce his own father, by lying naked, uninvited, on the old man's bed.
Though the father refrains from such congress, his rumination is creepy enough:
"I stood looking at him for a long time, probably holding my breath, for I remember feeling a little dizzy at one point. I was whispering to myself, as my eyes followed the curve of his arm, shoulder, back, thigh, leg: ‘A child. A child.’"
A normal father would say, "What the fuck are you doing?! Get out of my bed!" This father, though, spends the entire night next to his naked son, whom he suspects is not sleeping, for the suspense.
"He lay perfectly quiet until dawn. I shall never know whether or not he was really asleep all that time. Of course he couldn’t have been, and yet he lay so still. Warm and firm, but still as death. The darkness and silence were heavy around us."
So Bowles was certainly interested in decadence and corruption, but in this story, he's indicting the white father and son, not the dark natives, and in "A Distant Episode," he punishes the Professor for his presumptiousness, if not hubris.
Linh
The tribe, usually by passing as gentiles, is always claiming to be holding a mirror to us, saying "this is who you are," but it's always projection.
Hi everyone,
There's this question on Quora, "Moroccans are known internationally, but what is the dark side of them we never hear about?"
Kevin Barrett answers:
"The dark side of Moroccans we never hear about?! That is a very strange question. No nation has had its dark side spotlighted and exaggerated more than Morocco has! Edward Westermarck’s Ritual and Belief in Morocco (1926) obsessively catalogued Morocco’s colorful and sometimes bizarre magical and mystical beliefs and practices. The American beat generation novelist Paul Bowles did similar things fictional form. Brion Gysin did too. (The Process is his best book.) Tahir Shah’s The Caliph’s House also obsesses (very entertainingly) with Moroccan superstitious and magical beliefs. Combs-Schilling’s Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice is a brilliant neo-psychoanalytic exposé of Moroccan patriarchy. So is Ben Jelloun’s The Sand Child. I could go on, but those highlights should keep you busy for awhile ; - )
"The problem is that Western orientalist writers have been so obsessed with Morocco’s dark side that they have missed the light side. Islam in Morocco, for example, has a very reasonable, sophisticated, beautiful, intellectual, mystical side that is a far cry from the Issawiyya dervishes sticking knives through their tongues. But it’s easier for Western writers and scholars to get attention and sell books by focusing on the lurid stuff. And it’s also easier on Western egos. Islamic high culture, in Morocco and elsewhere, is both spiritually richer and more intellectually defensible than (post)modern Western culture. A Westerner who seriously engages with it is likely to lose the argument and convert."
https://www.quora.com/Moroccans-are-known-internationally-but-what-is-the-dark-side-of-them-we-never-hear-about/answer/Kevin-Barrett-73
Linh
Barrett is a Muslim convert and as such biased. A dark side of Morocco and Algeria would be the case of kidnapping and sacrifice of "Zhouri children", of which the blonde girl recently killed by an Algerian immigrant in Paris, Lola, might be an example. It is likely a pre-islamic belief, but still very present there: https://www.moroccoworldnews.com/2013/09/103129/zouhri-children-and-witchcraft-moroccos-darkest-beliefs
It is tempting to have contempt for the Americans or even easier for the Israelis, but the language isn't just bad, it is the result of it having been turned into a weapon against us without our realizing it. We have been occupied down to the level of thought. It is a conquest that is not satisfied until it has total control of every act, word and thought. And sure, we get pumped up with all kinds of hollow claims of supremacy, but in the end we are slated for slavery or worse just like the Palestinians, the African Americans, the Native Americans, the Iraqis, the Vietnamese before us. A death cult has colonized our culture and our minds and it has been carrying out its ritual sacrifices on a global scale for some time. The question is, how to retain our thoughts and have the temerity to use our tongues in spite of those all around us capitulating due to either ignorance or fear or a mixture of both. Where is the mental refuge or fortress than can protect us from the war on thought by those who revel in the power to create death? How do we find others in the same refuge or fortress? How do we press back? What hope can we offer our children? Perhaps this is just more ignorant blather from another dumb deluded white American who would best serve the world by having their tongue and all ten fingers removed in an "operation." But since despair is a sin, I will keep pressing on none the less. God Bless and Protect you Linh Dinh, you will never be canceled in my book. You, like every one of us, are sacred. And as long as my tongue or fingers still work, I will be trying to use words to resist them. To my last breath, for the Glory of God in humble gratitude of all that God has created.
Exceptionally well said.
Another great one Linh. Keep on truckin'.
Jay
Linh Dinh is a great writer.
Yes a wonderful essay and so refreshing to read. One thing occurred to me out of my equally bad French. Could the sentence "An honor to do what? Deliver a fool to his death? And what does he mean by “You just have to go down, you’re right,” in bad French." Could the sentence also be translated "You just have to go down, its your right" which makes a little more sense to me. Right seems to have the same multiple meanings in French as in English.
The only Paul Bowles I have come in contact with is the movie made of The Sheltering Sky which, despite my aversion to John Malkovich I found very good and watched several times. In looking up the novel on wikipedia I found this wonderful (times being what they are) excerpt:
"Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless..."
Hi Isha,
I think your reading is correct. I just misinterpreted the waiter's "droit."
Linh
P.S. Do read his "Pages from Cold Point." Though it has no violence, it's nearly as sick!
Dear Linh, I spent an hour or so trying to find an e-book or used copy of Pages From Cold Point but unfortunately haven't found one I could afford as yet. It seems to have been delicately deleted from general distribution. I decided to go for A Delicate Prey which is available as an inexpensive e-book and when I find out how to load a reader I will report back! Isha
I wonder how much a writer's personal proclivities influence his fiction, and if we should consider this or not when reading their work. The other day I was reading a story by E. M. Forster, who was a homosexual, and thought about that -- would he write differently if he was not homosexual? The story had nothing to do with homosexuality, but perhaps you could see it in his worldview? This story by Bowles also gave me a similar vibe, for some reason reminding me of his personal life. Paul Bowles was of course a homosexual (and according to a commenter here, part jewish) and led a very promiscuous life -- probably the reason why he moved to Morocco in the first place. Then of course you have Proust (half-jewish and gay), and Oscar Wilde (but apparently he repented of his lifestyle in the end, in De Profundis), and others such as Arthur C. Clarke (another sexpat in a Muslim country, Indonesia -- it seems Muslim countries are the places to go for gay sex? There's Lawrence of Arabia and Rimbaud, too).
O'Connor's mother was a Cline, as in Kline/Klein.
Paul Bowles was born to Claude Dietz Bowles and Rena Winnewisser.
From comedy to drama to horror, whites are painted as the worst of inbred barbarians by Jews. And before you say that's impossible as O'Connor's parents were both from Ireland, I refer you to the book "When Scotland was Jewish". If still unsure, I refer you to her face.
Most famous and influential (well promoted and "best selling") novelists are spawned from intelligence. Miles Mathis has covered many. In this article, it's John Kennedy Toole. On his "pre-suicide driving tour" he is alleged to have visited O'Connor's home, as well as Heart Castle- http://mileswmathis.com/jkt.pdf
It's not all acrimony, Mathis does list "A Good Man" in his 75 best books.
Cline is an Irish name, as well as being Jewish and German.
That is understood, ad is addressed in the linked material.
Miles is interesting but I'm not sure how seriously one should take him. According to him basically all writers are spooks. O'Connor has great short stories. (half)-jewish? Yeah, probably. Bowles I didn't know, but his mother's name sounds jewish too. And he was also gay. Apparently lots of famous writers are either jewish or gay or both.
It's become a running joke at his site. Just about ever culturally influential figure has turned out to be a gay Jewish actor. The latest was Bruce Lee. If it were simply a coincidence I wouldn't take it seriously. But if he's right about even half, the picture being painted is one of a comprehensive effort to shape our culture going back centuries. Is it really that far fetched? We currently have a pop music industry which universally promotes overt Satanism and Masonic symbolism. Jews freely admit how much influence and control they have, and the things they've been behind https://jewishcontributions.com/infotables/
I'm probably not going to convince you of anything, but if you're inclined to keep reading his papers, you'll see it's all there, openly sourced. We're dealing with the people who were directly responsible for 9/11 and covid/The Great Reset. It's not beyond their ambition. To quote Maurice Samuel, "We Jews, we are the destroyers and will remain the destroyers. Nothing you can do will meet our demands and needs. We will forever destroy because we want a world of our own."
They've been building that world for quite some time, now with the assistance of messianic Christians, first as controlled opposition, and now as unabashed Zionists, openly advocating the destruction of America and the West. https://www.bitchute.com/channel/qPYBk4x8LaDs/
Many readers seem to view an author’s perspectives and opinions and his/her writing as a unified whole. I find it quite easy to enjoy and admire the latter while disagreeing with the former. I once read a complete collection of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories and thoroughly enjoyed them, although they certainly don’t duplicate my own outlook on life and society. Indeed, if agreement with one’s own perspective is what a reader is looking for, I’d say the reader is looking more for self-affirmation than to learn from another’s perspective.
My only exposure to Paul Bowles was his novel “The Sheltering Sky” a few years ago. Much like the short story you describe, it sets down white westerners in North Africa and has them doing inexplicably stupid stuff, clueless as to the cultural norms they are flaunting. It was quite a novel. I did not know Bowles had written short fiction—I’ll have to find and read some.
I like Flannery O'Connor.
I will check Bowles -- I don't think I've read much of him so far.
Ok, now I've read the story and it's interesting, but I fail to see why O'Connor mocking poor (and sometimes rich, too) white people in the South is bad, and Bowles mocking some American (white) professor in Morocco is good. O'Connor's satirical view of the grandmother in "A Good Man is Hard to Find" (great short story) is, to my mind, somewhat similar to the one in this story by Bowles. Both are about people who don't understand what's going on until it is too late (or perhaps not even then).
Wonderful essay. So happy to be reminded of Paul Bowles. Thanks.