April 2023 Newsletter: Tlön, Kokomo, Ocean Blvd

When reality becomes fiction, and fiction becomes reality

Whale skeleton, National Museums Office, Asmara. © Sam Redlark

The Jorge Luis Borges short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius presents the reader with a set of nesting doll conspiracies, where every evolution is an escalation of the one that preceded it: A chance misquotation of an entry in a volume of The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia (described by Borges as a “delinquent reprint of the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1902”) results in the discovery of a country called Uqbar that is perhaps a region of Iraq or Asia Minor – any geographical information that might assist in pinpointing its location makes only vague reference to landmarks within the borders of the mysterious nation. It is mentioned that the mythology of Uqbar has no footing in reality but unfolds entirely within the imaginary realms of Mlejnas and Tlön.

Frustratingly for Borges and his companion, Bioy Casares, any mention of Uqbar remains quarantined within Casares' personal copy of volume XLVI of the aforementioned Cyclopaedia, and exists in no other copy of the same volume. The pair scour the archives of the National Library for any mention of Uqbar, however their search is in vain.

Years later, Borges comes into possession of a yellow leather-backed volume titled A First Encyclopaedia of Tlön. Vol. XI. Hlaer to Jangr. A sheet of silk paper covering one of the colour plates is stamped with the inscription Orbis Tertius.

He holds in his hands one small fragment of a larger work, describing an imaginary realm that was conjured into existence by the inhabitants by what is probably a fictional country. The tome abounds “with the dread of its [Tlön's] mythologies and the murmur of its languages, with its emperors and its seas, with its minerals and its birds and its fish, with its algebra and its fire, with its theological and metaphysical controversy. And all of it articulated, coherent, with no visible doctrinal intent or tone of parody”.

Borges begins to contemplate what it would take to engineer such a conspiracy – a cabal of individuals drawn from a variety of disciplines, working under the direction of “an obscure man of genius.”

The story concludes with a postscript, dated 1947. It describes the happenstance discovery, in 1941, of a letter that outlines the extent of the conspiracy: In the early 1600s, a benevolent society of educated persons decided that they would collaborate in the invention of a country. When it became clear to them that one generation would be insufficient to give form to their grand idea, each participant nominated a successor to carry on their work. Two centuries later, the endeavour came to the attention of an American millionaire who found the scope of the project too modest for his liking and proposed the creation of a 40-volume encyclopedia comprehensively describing an imaginary world. This enterprise was, in turn, intended as the basis for an even more mammoth undertaking – a further edition of the encyclopedia, revising the world the conspirators had created. This was to be written in the baffling language of Tlön and provisionally titled Orbis Tertius.

The following year, a princess finds among her belongings an object that she does not recognise – a strange compass inscribed around its edge with letters from one of the alphabets of Tlön. Soon after, a metal cone, the size of a die, yet so heavy that an adult can barely lift it, turns up on the body of a dead man. Borges remarks that in parts of Tlön these objects are made to represent the divinity.

The story ends with the conspiracy still ongoing, and with no clue as to who is currently directing it. There exists a disturbing possibility that there is no guiding hand, and that the project is being carried forward by its own dreadful momentum. Borges notes with resignation the gradual reformation of the sciences and the academic disciplines, bringing them into line with the belief systems of Tlön, as this imaginary world gradually overwrites the real world. He forecasts the eventual disappearance of English, French and Spanish, yet chooses to devote himself to a pointless translation of Browne's Urn Burial, which he does not intend to publish.

I keep a hardbound copy of Borges' collected Fictions in the draw beside my bed. A few weeks ago, when I couldn't sleep, I re-read Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius. After I had finished the story, and had replaced the book in its draw, and turned out the bedside light, I lay in the darkness and thought of Kokomo – the tropical island paradise that was born in the imagination, and that ever since has been slowly gaining a footing in reality.

Kokomo is known in its most recognisable form as a song by The Beach Boys – their last number one single in the US, when it was first released in 1988, and their last big hit anywhere. It was jointly written by Mike Love; Scott McKenzie (the writer and performer of San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in you Hair)); John Phillips of The Mamas and the Papas; and Terry Melcher. The lyrics concern an archetypical tropical island, located “off the Florida Keys”. Vague mention is made of sandy beaches and the ripple of steel drum bands. Among the details added in an alternate version of the song, penned by John Phillips, is a tropical breeze that “could blow her dress way above her knees.” He references flying fish, and technicolour nights, and making love on the beach while the locals dance away the dark hours. The steel drum band is a now a hammer-beaten, brightly-polished observatory, reflecting the flash of shooting stars as they streak across the heavens. While The Beach Boys' version of the song depicts an island retreat where couples go “to get away from it all”, Phillip's experience of the same place is bittersweet – the setting for the end of a relationship that failed to rekindle the spark of a dying romance.

Before The Beach Boys, Kokomo was a non-destination, or an ambiguous sexual activity, or the name of a girl, or it was a small community on the Hawaiian island of Maui, or a city in Indiana named after a cantankerous Native American chief from the Miami tribe.

For Chuck Berry it was “some place out in the sticks.” He drives his girl out there in No Particular Place to Go, then can't unfasten her safety belt.

A decade before Chuck Berry regaled the world with his car trouble, the lively Ko Ko Mo (I Love You So) was one of the most recorded songs of its era, singing the praises of a girl with dimples on her knees.

Mississippi Fred McDowell begs his woman to “Kokomo me, babe, Kokomo me twice”. Little Feat requests something similar, adding suggestively “you can Kokomo in a China cup.”

The Beach Boys' take on Kokomo originally appeared on the soundtrack of Cocktail – a movie starring Tom Cruise. The following year it formed part of the track list on The Beach Boys album Still Cruisin' which anthologised a number their own hits that had been used in recent films, alongside a collaboration with The Fat Boys, and some fairly lacklustre new material. The album is not well-loved. It has been omitted from reissue campaigns and remains out of print. Cocktail, likewise has vanished off the cultural radar and yet the fictional island paradise of Kokomo has endured. So universal is the song's influence that it has nailed down a definition of Kokomo in the collective cultural memory as a place of tropical white sands and steel drum bands. The reach of the song is so comprehensive that it is capable of travelling backwards into the past and changing it, to the extent that every pre-Beach Boys reference to Kokomo retroactively becomes associated with the fictional island.

When, in 1975, B.W. Stevenson enquired in a state of desperation: “Is there a sailin' ship goin' down to Kokomo?” he was perhaps thinking of Hawaii. Most would assume now that he is aiming himself in the direction of the Florida Keys.

In 1973, when Tim Buckley boasted to his partner that the noise of their lovemaking would be loud enough to drive their neighbours to “move back to Kokomo,” he possibly meant Kokomo, Indiana. In retrospect the unfortunate residents in the adjacent property are now reconsidering their relocation to the US mainland and planning a return to peaceful island living.

Wherever the “cute little cottage” referenced by Honi Gordon in My Kokomo, once stood, it now occupies a tropical paradise. The yawning canyons that reach for the sun are island ravines that are flooded with molten light at dusk. The flowers are tropical blossoms and the hills overlook the sea. The town - “a beautiful scene”, home to “Mrs. Smith and Brown” is perhaps a quaint harbour.

Is the blue train that runs “all the way to Kokomo” in the chorus of Robbie Robertson's Somewhere Down the Crazy River, really a train at all? Or does it describe some mysterious gulf stream current that will carry you to the shores of the island if you allow it to do so?

The Kokomo where Sandy is spotted “parked with her lover boy” in Bruce Springsteen's 4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) becomes a bar named after the island. Perhaps it is the same bar where Joan Jett claims to have lost her job in Light of Day, released a year before The Beach Boys revealed their own compelling vision of Kokomo to the world.

Songwriters who, in the wake of The Beach Boys, attempt to hold Kokomo hard to its Indiana roots are swimming against a strong current. For all of Greg Brown's talk of one-way greyhound bus tickets to Kokomo, when a stranger tells him “you'd be better off in Kokomo” most listeners' thoughts will run to white island beaches.

Similarly, many will imagine “Little Joe from Kokomo,” mentioned in passing by Tom Waits, in Lowside of the Road, as a man with a tropical suntan.

In Don’t Turn Your Back On Love by Ezra Furman & The Harpoons, you can actually see fiction and reality forking. “She said she'd take me down to Kokomo,” he croons. “We went to Kokomo, Indiana, where she told me her real name was Diana.”

Kokomo has come a long way from the back of beyond – a scattering of palm shacks, their frameworks blown askew by tropical storms. If recent references are anything to go by, it is transforming into a gentrified hotspot, favoured by the influencer caste – a destination to be casually name-dropped by some. RuPaul claims that his cultural reach stretches “from Tokyo to Kokomo”. Lemon Demon offhandedly mentions friends in Kokomo.

“I fly solo in the dojo, that way, your boy never have to split the dough low, that way, your boy's in Kokomo, slappin' ass in a kimono,” boasts Jonwayne, denigrating the island paradise to little more than a place to splash some cash in a manner that is comically vulgar.

Royel Otis is content to remain aloof and distil the essence of the tropics down to a personal, self-contained philosophy – “Going Kokomo, our life's a beach, so, let's let go, don't stress yourself.”

I will give the last word on the subject to Lana Del Rey, who reframes the island as an afterlife for one of The Beach Boys: “I miss the bar where the Beach Boys would go, Dennis' last stop before Kokomo.”

Dennis Wilson did not live to see Kokomo. He drowned (coincidentally at Marina Del Rey) at the age of 39, a few days after Christmas, in 1983. He had been drinking heavily and had reportedly been attempting to retrieve some items, belonging to his ex-wife, that he had thrown over the side of his yacht three years earlier.

Lana Del Rey has devoted the past few years to finely blurring the lines of her personal life and her public persona, to a point where one is indistinguishable from the other. Reading the lyrics of the songs on her most-recent album Did you know that there's a tunnel under Ocean Bvld, it is very hard to tell whether what you are hearing in a given moment is representative of the real Elizabeth Grant, standing in partial view – papered over by a tattered collage of archaic 1970s pop culture references – and what is half-truth, or outright embellishment.

She is becoming a seamless composite of the real and the fictional, as she ever-so-slowly dissolves herself into the mythology of California. The tunnel that is mentioned in the title track of the record is the Jergin's Tunnel that once functioned as a conduit for foot traffic between downtown Long Beach and the beach itself. It was closed in 1988, though it reportedly remains as she describes it with “mosaic ceilings, painted tiles on the wall”. In the song she inhabit some figurative shadow version of this abandoned space, as a woman who feels “somewhat like my body marred my soul”.

In the 1970s, when David Bowie became Ziggy Stardust, the transformation was recognisable as a costume change. It was a magnification of a role played by the artist, necessary to present a larger than life figure on stage. Ziggy was always subservient to the cold eye of David Bowie, who remained in control, and who pulled the strings of the audience along with his own strings.

He paved the way for Madonna's magpie-eyed appropriation of ever-changing looks throughout the 1980s and 1990s. This compartmentalisation of different eras of stardom appears to have reached a tightly-controlled zenith in the career of Beyonce, whose parade of alter egos – Sasha Fierce, Yoncé, Mrs. Carter, etc – carry the air of a heavily focus-grouped rifling through the dressing-up box, tailored to an album release/tour cycle.

Perhaps in Lana Del Rey we are seeing a retreat from the shock and awe of these obviously manufactured stage personas and a return to something that is more ambiguous; where currents of fact and fiction blur together, and where any mystique arises from the tension of not knowing what is real and what is facade.

On Substack

I am moving my Substack activity to Tuesday.

So says the man who is posting this monthly newsletter on Wednesday, because he didn't finish his research in time, and then went out in the evening to watch live jazz.

Over March, instead of writing spontaneous individual pieces, I wrote an equally spontaneous, four-part story titled The May Wolf. It is set in rural Victorian England and focuses on a group of proto-feminists and their rising anger over being forbidden from riding a wooden roller coaster.

You can read it here:

The May Wolf (Part I)

The May Wolf (Part II)

The May Wolf (Part III)

The May Wolf (Part IV)

For the remainder of April, I will return to writing more manageable one-off pieces of around 1000 words.

Books in progress

My first collection of short fiction is very slowly beginning to take form. It will probably end up containing between seven and nine stories. Some of them are rather long. They are all existing works and have already gone through many drafts and evolutions. Depending on what makes the final cut, one or two have been published before in small magazines. All are being rewritten. I am no longer labouring under the constraint of word counts and so there is no further need to abridge or remove passages.

The book will be divided into two sections, separated by a short poem. The first part consists of stories about people who have surrendered themselves either to the devil, or more often to some other insidious force that is analogous with the devil. The second part comprises stories of people who are either actively resisting these malign influences, or who are, at very least, orientating themselves towards the light.

Thus far I have completed two stories to my satisfaction (both for the second part of the book). The poem is also written, but on reflection requires some further minor tweaking.

I had hoped to begin writing my second novel on April 1^st, however I am still working on plotting the final two chapters. It is a complex book. There is a large cast of characters, all of whom have different, sometimes shifting, agendas. It takes a long time to get all of this necessary foundation work down on paper. I am not organised enough to hold it all in my head. I need to have the book fully-outlined before I break ground, so that I can write without a lot of stopping and starting. Chapter twelve is effectively the dust settling on the events of the novel. It will be what ties together the core themes, hopefully with a measure of subtlety. Chapter thirteen is effectively an epilogue that seals the fate of some of the characters. It also sets the scene for the next book, which takes place in Peru, and which currently exists as 26 pages of typed notes.