The adventures of Lucky Pierre Book

As any attentive reader of the Old Testament will immediately recognize, Coover opens Lucky Pierre's first pages with language taken directly from the first verse of the Book of Lamentations:

How doth the city sit solitary, that was full of people! how is she become as a widow! she that was great among the nations, and princess among the provinces, how is she become tributary!

She weepeth sore in the night, and her tears are on her cheeks: among all her lovers she hath none to comfort her: all her friends have dealt treacherously with her, they are become her enemies.

Judah is gone into captivity because of affliction, and because of great servitude: she dwelleth among the heathen, she findeth no rest: all her persecutors overtook her between the straits.

The ways of Zion do mourn, because none come to the solemn feasts: all her gates are desolate: her priests sigh, her virgins are afflicted, and she is in bitterness.

Her adversaries are the chief, her enemies prosper; for the LORD hath afflicted her for the multitude of her transgressions: her children are gone into captivity before the enemy.

And from the daughter of Zion all her beauty is departed: her princes are become like harts* that find no pasture, and they are gone without strength before the pursuer.

Jerusalem remembered in the days of her affliction and of her miseries all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old, when her people fell into the hand of the enemy, and none did help her: the adversaries saw her, and did mock at her sabbaths.

Jerusalem hath grievously sinned; therefore she is removed: all that honoured her despise her, because they have seen her nakedness: yea, she sigheth, and turneth backward.

Her filthiness is in her skirts; she remembereth not her last end; therefore she came down wonderfully: she had no comforter. O LORD, behold my affliction: for the enemy hath magnified himself.

The adversary hath spread out his hand upon all her pleasant things: for she hath seen that the heathen entered into her sanctuary, whom thou didst command that they should not enter into thy congregation.

All her people sigh, they seek bread; they have given their pleasant things for meat to relieve the soul: see, O LORD, and consider; for I am become vile.

Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

[*a hart is defined as an older male deer; relevantly, it has also come to be a slang term for A pimp daddy with an immense female-satisfying package... - "harts that find no pasture, they are gone without strength..." - let us here recall Lucky's many ascents into meadow idylls during his lowest moments of hard-on hypothermia-induced dream-escape, and Cinecity, that place bereft of greenery, where the only flowering pastures reside as sets in pornographic film studios...]

Lamentations itself is something of a nicely structured piece of poetics, five poems, three of which (1, 2, & 4) being acrostics consisting of 22 verses corresponding to the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet. Lucky Pierre itself is something of an acrostic, all of its nine director-dominatrix-actress-Muses assigned names beginning with the letter C - which of course is correlative to our beautiful English word "Cunt" (or Coover, many words begin with "C") - each seeing over, as if a goddess eye from above, one of the 9 "reels" that compose the book. Chapter 3 of Lamentations consists of 66 verses (a shame, for Coover's purposes, it wasn't 69) and the 5th poem for some reason isn't an acrostic, as if the Bilbical scribes tired of their own self-imposed restrictions, or became distracted or hurried, and decided to let it all fray out there at the end.

Lamentations is a qinah, a dirge, funereal music, a cry in song of misery for the siege and destruction of Jerusalem and its people. My source tells me in its quasi-authoritative tone "[Lamentations] is partly a traditional "city lament" mourning the desertion of the city by its god, its destruction, and the ultimate return of the divinity, and partly a funeral dirge in which the bereaved bewails and addresses the dead…" This I will choose to believe. "...the destruction of the holy city was a punishment by its god for the communal sin of its people…"

Coover's Lucky Pierre as well begins here, in lament, in song, a called-forth cantus, in a besieged Cinecity, a pornographic dystopia under constant snow and freeze, raining suicides from the windowsills, populated by a lost and suffering pedestrian population numbed to constant car accidents, death, and public copulation, where the sky is grey at its best and mostly black and icy. A film projector blinks to life in the abyss of a darkened movie theater, a wonderful faux-Genesis, commanding Let There Be Light upon the void, the formless dark onto the obliviated white plain, and the projector divided the light from the darkness, and from the tenebrous obscurity emerged : People fucking!... (discant)

Our pornographic movie is introduced accompanied by mournful plainsong, which of course reaches our ears from the earliest days of Christianity, which no one could argue is not an admirable sustain. I return to my Voice of Historical Authority (which is really just the winter wind cut-and-pasted, there's little icicles hanging from these letters, let's hope you can read them through the snow gusts) :

"Two methods of singing psalms or other chants are responsorial and antiphonal. In responsorial singing, the soloist (or choir) sings a series of verses, each one followed by a response from the choir (or congregation). In antiphonal singing, the verses are sung alternately by soloist and choir, or by choir and congregation. It is probable that even in the early period the two methods caused that differentiation in the style of musical composition which is observed throughout the later history of plainchant, the choral compositions being of a simple kind, the solo compositions more elaborate, using a more extended compass of melodies and longer groups of notes on single syllables. A marked feature in plain chant is the use of the same melody for various texts. This is quite typical for the ordinary psalmody in which the same formula, the "psalm tone", is used for all the verses of a psalm, just as in a hymn or a folk song the same melody is used for the various stanzas."

And from the same source of Undying Accurate Information, a list of types of plainsong (given here mainly because read in sequence they immediately remind one of a recitation of the progress from desire through foreplay and into the finale of the sex act, yes? "Alleluia" perhaps representing the moment of orgasm, the final three the sort of twined sweaty fragrant denouement) :

-Prayer
-Reading or Lection
-Psalm
-Canticle
-Hymn
-Prose
-Antiphon
-Responsory
-Introit
-Gradual
-Tract
-Alleluia
-Sequence
-Offertory
-Communion

…
…
…

All of this is to say that Coover's The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut is situated from the outset in the old school moral realm, in the originating place of Western belief. This is another story of the Fall of Man (Lucky spends a great deal of the middle section of the book literally in a prolonged fall); this surrealist-fabulist unfilmable pornography in extremis is in fact a double-edged morality tale. It is pornography not only as high art, it is pornography so twisted and fever-dreamed that it is pornography-pornography, which like a double negative, cancels out any titillation it might have achieved. I'd wager that all of the above-mentioned poetic-musical devices are employed at some point within LP's 9 reels... So what are we left with, after the double negation, other than simply Art?

Like Finnegans Wake, Lucky Pierre moves in circles, cycles, iterations and emergences rather than linearly. It accrues in kaleidoscopic stasis. It moves in circles because that is what a film projector has to do to tell its story. Every element of filmmaking, as well as every element of pornography ever imagined or to be imagined, will have its moment on stage in this book. Like Finnegans Wake it is obsessed with repetition - the same key scenes and images, with slight alterations, bloom and accumulate meaning over the course of the book - it is made in a tense-less cosmic time, which runs and bleeds and circles back and diverges on a whim. (Of course, because we are just playing with miles and miles of celluloid here… we can run it any way we wish… pause fast forward rewind splice zoom in zoom out!) Like Finnegans Wake, it is a dirty, dirty book, and someone should think of the children. Like Finnegans Wake, Lucky Pierre is self-consciously music in prose. Like Finnegans Wake, once you have read it through, you may open it to any random page and find its totality there waiting. Like Finnegans Wake, it is a comedy, a great Universe in micromacrocosmic comedy.

[But enough of this duality-making, comparison bullshit, it's not like this is some Joyce-Coover dick measuring contest!]

--(Here's as good a place as any for a quick personal note, a parenthetical aside on SADNESS. Lucky Pierre, at times, is an extremely sad book, pathetically sad. Lucky is essentially a prisoner, a prisoner of fame, a prisoner of his career, a prisoner of sex, of the public's desire, of his desire (and his desires are not only sexual, though they almost always end up resolved/depleted in acrobatic fucking, his main desire is escape) - this endless pursuit of fucking as escape is, at its most basic level, sad. He longs for pastoral deliverance from Cinecity and its pornographic horizons, but this is preempted, zeroed, negated by the constant intrusion of scenarios of ever more bizarre desire-satiation... I, dear readers, am a heterosexual male, this is my woeful existential envelope, and lamentably, practically every single attractive female I meet I desire to fuck. Often ones I don't actually meet, but just see out and about. Even if I attempt to deny this desire, as I most often do, it always reemerges, as if emanating from beyond my will. This perspective is a prison, it is pathetic, it is sad, and it prevents me from realizing the fullness of each human's being, it prevents me from treating people equally in my mind, it prevents me from walking around the world possessing anything approaching objective clarity in my interactions, and it is an inward-circling, self-perpetuating cycle of miserable, unattainable, retreating possibilities - but this impossibility of satiation is the very core of my desire! So Lucky Pierre's adventures seem to me, from my locus as a heterosexual male, abysmally sad, and lonely, and wretched, because so radically, tragically human… However, Coover makes central to this book the question of agency, for LP, remember, is always being directed, never the agent of his own actions - the most interesting part of this sexual-desiring sadness and wretchedness might be "who or what is making us this way"? Who or what is controlling these flows of desire? Do we have anything resembling control over our unconscious drives, these drives unto death? How do we attain, retain this control? This is perhaps the key question, among many questions, in this question-riddled book. Because Pierre is in actuality a prisoner of others' desires, social desires and where social desires end and personal desires begin, that is a murky, gray, unfilmable place indeed! Okay, end of parentheses. Back to my critical review!)--

Lucky Pierre's endless prismatic shuffling of fantastic-perverse imagery and manic scene changes reads like the internet feels perceptually, as does Pierre's capacity for self-division and replication and voyeurism at the hands of his torturesses (Lucky Pierre is never alone, never unwatched, never un-directed, never let alone to be himself without a reminder that he is a man who fucks!...) or it's like all the fuck films ever made at once broadcast on our libido's universal holographic edge, which according to quantum physics just might be a giant movie screen! (Don't ask me for citations.) It is Buñuel, Godard, and Keaton, of course, but you knew that from the beginning. Above all it is a virtuoso performance of Coover's superabundant imagination, a repeating cadence of fucking, comedy, violence, sorrow, meaninglessness and the pursuit of meaning, spiritual and physical depletion and replenishment, staged through more and more frantic, impossible and implausible representations of sex, in resplendent prose. ("The best in this kind are but shadows; and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them.- Saint Will) It is a perfect tape loop of our weirdly amoral supertemporal-technological-sex-saturated times, and a waving goodbye to the naive romanticism of movie theater days…

Should I go on? This thing is getting long (as is proper- oh my, look how it grows when given proper attention!), so perhaps it is best to rush on to the climax, make everybody happy and call it a day. But I don't want to talk about pornography. I want to talk about what people actually create when they attempt to represent themselves - duplicate, triplicate, infinate themselves through media, which is our predominant mode of communal living now in our present day Cinecities of 2015. When we think we are performing ourselves, who or what is it miming up there on that screen? (Most social media presences are far more perverse than pornography.) But this is a book without end. FADE OUT. YEARS PASS. FADE IN. What is there in the interim? The staggering loneliness of perpetual, undirected desire, pursuit of satiation, decrescendo of attainment, re-awakening of desire… and questions of human agency... A strange circle, this film reel we live inside. Here we come round the arc again!

~~

"Who is he to us? Why have we made him as we have? We should be asking questions about the enigmatic ways of sex, performance, memory - even scripted memory such as his - struggle against disorder, forgetfulness, entropy, impotence, despair; about the way his peculiar artistic talent, through the tensions of disclosure and concealment, thrust and withdrawal, somehow shadows forth eternal truths, or the way his iterative and abridged rituals, even stripped to their bare essentials, nonetheless feel necessary and even transcendent - intuitive and visionary. In short, we should be asking about the meaning of it all!"