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The Deadly Affairs of John Figaro Newton Or a Senseless Appeal to Reason and an Elegy for the Dreaming

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The Deadly Affairs of John Figaro Newton Or a Senseless Appeal to Reason and an Elegy for the Dreaming The deadly affairs of John Figaro Newton or a senseless appeal to reason and an elegy for the dreaming Item Type Thesis Authors Campbell, Regan Download date 26/09/2021 19:18:08 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/11260 THE DEADLY AFFAIRS OF JOHN FIGARO NEWTON OR A SENSELESS APPEAL TO REASON AND AN ELEGY FOR THE DREAMING By Regan Campbell, B.F.A. A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing University of Alaska Fairbanks May 2020 APPROVED: Daryl Farmer, Committee Chair Leonard Kamerling, Committee Member Chris Coffman, Committee Member Rich Carr, Chair Department of English Todd Sherman, Dean College of Liberal Arts Michael Castellini, Dean of the Graduate School Abstract Are you really you? Are your memories true? John “Fig” Newton thinks much the same as you do. But in three separate episodes of his life, he comes to see things are a little more strange and less straightforward than everyone around him has been inured to the point of pretending they are; maybe it's all some kind of bizarre form of torture for someone with the misfortune of assuming they embody a real and actual person. Whatever the case, Fig is sure he can't trust that truth exists, and over the course of his many doomed relationships and professional foibles, he continually strives to find another like him—someone incandescent with rage, and preferably, as insane and beautiful as he. i Extracts “Whose blood do you still thirst for? But sacred philosophy will shackle your success, for whatsoever may be your momentary triumph or the disorder of this anarchy, you will never govern enlightened men. Tell me, what, actually, will be your place in the pages of history?” —Olympe de Gouges “And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” —Louise Erdrich ii Acknowledgements However you want to classify the genre of this text, for which the author would like to offer the title of “doom caper,” an extremely long list of individuals must be thanked for pioneering the atomic accretion that composes its swirling and corrosive pop-culture bath. Chiefly, considering the manner in which the story takes the form of a vicious and confrontational entity, Shirley Jackson and Phillip K. Dick serve as king and queen over its principality, respectfully, and the book is more or less dedicated to them. We should also include writers Thomas Mann, Brian Evenson, Alan Watts, Carl Sagan, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Fasano, Erik Olen Wright, and probably to some extent Nietzsche, Hegel, and Baudrillard. Further in, we have to mention the chaotic encouragement gleaned from numerous filmmakers, some of which are Thom Eberhardt, Denis Villeneuve, Richard O'Brien, Jim Sharman, John Cameron Mitchell, David Lynch, Ridley Scott, Jonathan Nolan, Lisa Joy, and Stanley Kubrick. At the nexus of it all are the songwriters, whose artistry was undeniably the substrate in which the experiment is suspended—Billy Idol, Kennedy Ashlyn, Cash Askew, Marcos Ortega, Ric Ocasek, Timecop1983, Brett Anderson, Bernard Butler, Liz Harris, Woody Guthrie, Mitski Frances Laycock, Paul Westerberg, Ella Marija Lani Yelich-O'Connor, Claire Elise Boucher, Sarah Barthel, Karin Dreijer, George Lewis Jr., Dan Deacon, Trent Reznor, Sarah Chernoff, Vince Clark, Tom Petty, William Garvey, Matt Sharp, Alex Turner, Lauren Mayberry, Aaron Bruno, S0ren Rasted, Claus Norreen, Gary Anthony James Webb, Marty Robinson, George Ivan Morrison, Cass Elliot, Andrew Eldritch, John Barthmus, Patrick Marsceill, and Marc Bolan. Lastly, the author would like to express significant gratitude for the love, support, and fastidious readership of Heather Ezell, Nick Moninger, Greg Petrovic, Charles Frost, Eric Parker, Anysia Ketchum, and Kristin Ortiz, as well as the patience, expertise, and genius of his graduate thesis committee. Consider all the same extended to anybody else who is tricked into seeing the thing through to its end. iii Table of Contents Page Abstract......................................................................................................................i Extracts..................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements................................................................................................. iii Table of Contents....................................................................................................iv 29 The Jealous Husbands Problem........................................................................... 1 34-35 The Sleeping Beauty Paradox...................................................................... 53 55 The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever....................................................................... 139 iv 29 The Jealous Husbands Problem San Francisco and its remoter communes jeweled the dark outside the yacht and cast an iridescent and unnavigable storm of light roiling on the black water of the bay. Now and again an oily breeze blew through the wedding reception that smelled partly of boat exhaust and another part oceanic rot. A few moths eddied in the buttery light of paper lamps and bulbs bobbing naked on white cords, strung up as a glittering spider web above the upper deck where the reception awaited the cutting of the cake. John Figaro Newton watched the lights imperceptibly soften and flare back up when the vessel's bulk pitched atop the water, holding in his hand the table's battery-powered synthetic candle, flicking it on and off again in his palm with the switch on its underside. They had asked him to give them a riddle, which for many years now Fig had started to think of as one of the best ways of getting under his skin. When he'd been a little boy it was cute—now it was as if he was continually asked to do his Morgan Freeman impersonation so everyone could get a clear look at how racist he was. In the spirit of that, he opted for one of poorer taste—the missionaries and cannibals problem. Maybe it wasn't as bad as he imagined, but he still felt like people were trying to get a sense of whether he was some kind of savant or if they were themselves by comparison. It was stupid, and it had started making him sad. Vivian had gently badgered him into it in full view of the table and he tried to think through the paranoia. To steady his thinking, he looked again at the faces scrunched around the table. “You're the leader of a deployment of missionaries in Papua New Guinea, and you've got three in your missionary group including you,” he narrated, and the others scribbled either a numeral three or a crude diagram. “Apart from you three, you have moored off the coast of a hilariously tiny island 1 where three cannibals have made their own micro-civilization—and here's the catch—these three men do not have Jesus Christ, and the pope has had enough of it.” They were looking at him a long time as he went on and Fig leaned into the telling, totally stone-faced. “To get off your ship, they need to show you holy men how to row on the treacherous water of the inlet. Only two people can fit in the boat at a time. The cannibals are looking a little skinny, so you and your chaste men aren't taking any chances—the missionaries have to stay together and never be outnumbered by cannibals, either in the boat or on the beach or the deck of the ship.” “So do we all start on the deck of the ship?” someone asked. “Yeah, all six of you,” Fig confirmed. “So, how are you going to do it? The white Christ is waiting.” Fig was drunk. He was sitting at his original girlfriend's wedding. He had spent years holding a candle for her, holding it in such a way to scald his retinae and eventually incinerate his entire reptile brain. It was a bad breakup, and it was a bad ten years after in which he never really got over it. This was a supposed and self-imposed final exam in the course of his growing maturity and non-denominational foray into something resembling Zen Buddhism. Things were going okay, even if he couldn't quite shake the sense of extreme dread that had accumulated too slowly to keep him from boarding the reception yacht after the ceremony. He watched the pair of empty chairs at the middle of the long table of the wedding entourage, the left flank peopled with teal dresses and dizzying pylons of hair, the right with teal vests and half­ familiar faces, firm chins and thin thinking-lips. In his head, unsolicited, Fig could hear his younger self reminding his current self of the long speech he had prepared for tonight, the gospel of closure he'd fantasized for many years, intended for the bride if he'd ever see her again. In his 2 mind's other hand, he grasped the mental picture of the gaunt missionaries watching the savage waters slap at the boat, avoiding the wayward gazes of the cannibals rowing them into the inlet. “I love you, Jesuuuuuuuus Chriiiiiiiiiiist!” sang the fourth man, who Fig didn't know, an athletically-bodied man with a large nose and long sun-faded hair put up in a bun, who looked like he knew a few banjo chords and how to surf and that his name ought to be Robin. The others hushed him up to minimize any misdirection from Fig. “That's all?” Stephen Fitzgibbons asked. Stephen Fitzgibbons had studied business administration and had recently switched careers from accounting to real estate development. He sat diligently scribbling on his napkin, drunk and teeming. “If you want,” Fig offered as an addendum, “you can swap the cannibals out for wives, and the missionaries for their jealous husbands.
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