Writing from the Darkest Shadows in the Room: a Quickie for Christine Schutt

Sebastien Tellier, the french electronic musician, issued a set of instructions for the way in which he wanted his first album, L'Incroyable Vérité, to be heard: with the lights off and by candle.

Nightwork makes a similar mood, except the light is made by burning the Freudian furniture and the writing comes from the darkest shadows in the room. The copy I read from the library came pre-highlighted with each of the favored stories in the table of contents accompanied by a highlighter star. Incest, frail and flawed mothers, women in decline, disturbed sons, and wealth. The sentences are mystifying, in places elegant in places vague. Admire the precipitous architecture of this piece of the first sentence in the collection and you'll get a sense of the spaces she's playing in:

She brought him what she had promised, and they did it in his car, on the top floor of the car park, looking down onto the black flat roofs of buildings, and she said, or she thought she said, "I like your skin," when what she really liked was the color of her father's skin...

As a reader, there's work to be done to track back the referent and attempt to sort through the strata of impressions to see if there's a core, if the narrator is in the car with her father simply preferred her father's skin and was absorbed by the idea.  Schutt gives us both, she doesn't let us off the hook, in the best of her stories here she asks us to carry the baggage for the narrators. By the end of the collection, I felt that shock, something big and ugly was removed and my body reeled from it.

Reading a Never Read

I acquire books with a slight compulsion, based on recommendations or references or some other chain of interest. The books will either be read immediately as part of a streak, brachiated with a Tarzan yodel, page to page, cover to cover then relegated to the spot on the shelf for exhausted matter or added as furniture, place-held for the future hours its leaves will turn. Of the collection of unreads, there's the assortment of never-reads. It's difficult to define what makes a never-read. The book may have been purchased, the glow of commercial appeal, the cover design, the font and layout, all appealing in the store, but the prose never quite catches or some other stronger strain keeps relegating that book with its realm of associated recommendations to the sidelines and so there's the small guilt of disposing of a book unread on which I spent money. Some are gifts and the guilt of money spent is replaced with the guilt of a friendly gesture ignored.  And still some are found items, dimly assuring in their centrality to the canon of literature that they will, one day, be consumed or at least thumbed through with feigned interest.

Prompted by an imminent capacity purge, I read a never-read, or read a portion. I was reminded of past presumed never-reads that I read and felt something near the hygienic satisfaction of an attic cleaned by toothbrush or what John Baldessari writes about in his pencil piece. Something inert, weighted, on the edge of oblivion, recalled and now found to be momentarily satisfying. I flipped through a journal given by a friend who had assistant-edited the thing. I found a piece that I enjoyed, "List of 50 (31 of 50): You Could Never Finish Stretching" by Blake Butler. The piece, registered as non fiction in the journal's ToC, is a list of cascading memories and impressions given by the author to a specific prompt. It's clean, honest and engrossing and works within the spare limits of its four-page mostly-single sentenced list to evoke a good portion of the strange parts of the author's childhood. 

Recently, I was turned onto gordonlisheditedthis.wordpress.com/ , which is an experiment in mining the lost works edited by Gordon Lish. Having engaged with the idea, I logged onto my library's portal (to avoid further, permanent shelf-occupation) and kindly requested the archivist pull a few of these pieces out of storage. They arrived at my local branch and I read. I am apparently late to the Barry Hannah party, but the crazed discomfiting pace of The Tennis Handsome is sending me back to the stacks for more. Another, Campfires of the Dead by Peter Christopher, is partially through and I found the title story gorgeous and haunting, following a tack near Amy Hempel's world of ordinary days with their echoes.  

Immaterialism Revisted

The Times profile on Tino Sehgal, in discussing his pure detachment from object based art, places the artist in a place near altruism. There's a broad difference between objectless and selfless art. This is not life without headstones. It is formal withholding, anal retention as art, a form that thrives by word of mouth. It counts on interaction, like the work of Rirkrit Tiravanija. Vanessa Beecroft, who, as a young bulimic, color coded her meals to ensure complete purgation. Less minimal than Erik Satie, who only ate white foods.
Food and waste occupy similar social concerns as those presented by most conceptual art. Though like Manzoni, most conceptual artists seem to regard the art object as waste. This is different from the confusion of what was once deemed high and low present in Warhol and Jeff Koons. This is an assertion about mortality. Chris Burden, aka Joe the Lion or Johnny Knoxville's illegitimate uncle,confronts that assertion directly.
Linguistic conceptualists, like Bruce Nauman, while object bound, manage to address the social position of the artist and the social dysfunction at heart in the issues of creation and illumination. Nauman in particular does this with a whit and detachment that keeps a viewer from confusing the art with the artist, a separateness that perfects the object while keeping it from becoming precious.

Trying to Figure out What's on My Fingers

Whole Corn
Vegetable Oil (Contains one or more of the following: Corn, Soybean, and/or Sunflower Oil)
Salt
Cheddar Cheese (Milk, Cheese Culture, Salt, Enzymes)
Maltodextrin
Wheat Flour
Whey
Monosodium Glutamate
Buttermilk Solids
Romano Cheese from Cow's Milk (Part-Skim Cow's Milk, Cheese Cultures, Salt, Enzymes)
Whey Protein Concentrate
Onion Powder
Partially Hydrogenated Soybean and Cottonseed Oil
Cornflour
Disodium Phosphate
Lactose
Natural and Artificial Flavor
Dextrose
Tomato Powder
Spices
Lactic Acid
Citric Acid
Sugar
Garlic Powder
Red and Green Bell Pepper Powder
Sodium Caseinate
Disodium Inosinate
Disodium Guanylate
NonFat Milk Solids
Whey Protein Isolate
Corn Syrup Solids

The Kids Are Alright, Alright

In today's NY Times Book Review, Katie Roiphe puts forward an essay more interesting for its omissions than for its content. This is nothing new for the Times, notorious for baiting their book and art reviews in an attempt to lure some mild controversy.

To recap the core of "The Naked and the Conflicted", Roiphe essentially asks, "Whatup newbies-- where's the lavish carnality of our old literary heroes." Roiphe's piece, a brief comparison on the then and now of sex in literature, chooses to counterpose Roth, Bellow, Mailer, and Updike against Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, Michael Chabon, David Foster Wallace, and Benjamin Kunkel of all people. Whether or not she simply looked down the list of NY Times best sellers for the last ten years is hard to say, but for some reason the Times likes to harp on these people being the new literary generation, almost as much as they like to rend their shirts about the approaching death of literature.

It's not so much that this comparison isn't apt, it's that it is too convenient. The conflict overlooks the extraordinarily different conditions these writers all grew up in. The mere fact of a Roth in the world makes his reappearance less interesting. Whatever strategies the writers Roiphe picks employ, theirs is the job of dealing with sex post-Roth (Roth included), let alone the fact that each of the younger writers grew up in a world where sex is simply more evident in the mainstream. If the job of the contemporary writer is to re-envision the sexual revolution of the 1960's, then we might start to understand the cultural exhaustion present in so many of the "ambivalent" writer Roiphe picks and by extension implicates in the death of literature (which isn't happening).

Where does Don DeLillo sit in Roiphe's matrix? He seems to be the important missing step between those horny old gents and the newbies, precisely because he injects his fiction with self-conscious characters, while still maintaing tight engaging sentences. In part DeLillo's fiction works, antiseptic as it may be, because he pushes his work past that parochial breaking point where concept is continually introduced but never challenged-- i.e. the bubble never breaks, the world is always safe-- a criticism I found at least in Eggers' and Kunkel's works.

Here Roiphe and I agree to a point. But among the new male parochial writers she mentions sex is more than just out of fashion, it is anathema. Franzen typing for five years with a blindfold and ear plugs-- as he did when he wrote The Corrections-- is not searching for other people-- he is searching inside himself into a virtual world that can be destroyed by an encounter as true as sex. Likewise Infinite Jest for all its brilliance could not adequately synthesize sex. Sex is the opposite of its obsessive cleanliness. But who would look to Chabon for sex? His project is to revive real, engaging adventures with the loving detail of a twelve-year old enthusiast, a boy's world made mature, but not by sex-- by experience. Again, it is not mere ambivalence that keeps these writers from engaging with the Roth sex type-- these writers have read and know the work of the previous generation, they are trying to find something new in different places, a generation raised in the living room around TV, wounded by divorce and the tide of those sexual politics. The wish is in part to elide the extraordinary sex scene and suggest the simple safety of being together.

The problem more in Roiphe's essay is the desire to declare a new generation: a torch passed, a torch accepted. Writing is simply not what it once was-- nothing is. How can anyone expect the novel to reach back into that point before high and low were mixed and mass communication became paramount? Which is not to say it is dead. Far from it. As the publishing industry implodes, people are still writing and reading. More and more personal writing is taking place. The desire for those broad novels still exist, but the true zeitgeist rests in the personal, in those small human projects. Ultimately-- a good written account of sex may just be what America needs to touch base, to feel the separation from the endless titillation and recall something with power and depth. Nothing about the younger writers Roiphe picks would elect them to the position of writing that passage. If she wants to anecdotally ascribe their inability to a self-consciousness bred by first-wave feminism, that's fine-- why not take up the critical mantle and point us to a few authors-- male or female-- who might lead the way?

George Saunders, Jeffrey Eugenides, Ben Marcus and William T Vollman all take sex head on in their work. Here you actually have some authors who have taken the gauntlet from the previous generation and moved it forward in some cases to strange places and other ribald expressions of that same exhaustion with the perennial question of sex. Saunders' Sea Oak is very much aware of the fact that whenever a writer writes about sex today there is a large impersonal industry to deal with. That the language of sex has been broken to a certain extent. Brett Easton Ellis as well adapts his prose to pure Penthouse Forum (with fewer adjectives) whenever he writes about sex. Vollman had sex with a post-op transexual in order to write a convincing passage about it. That same power that Roiphe ascribes to Mailer's sexual writing is taken to its parodic extreme in Marcus' Notable American Women, where the narrator's passivity is taken advantage of by first the family dog, then each of the disciples within the Cult of the Female American Jesus.

I'm guessing the reason why the comparison was made in the first place was because of the perceived literary celebrity of those authors on Roiphe's chart-- this is more of an essay about what we find acceptable in popular entertainment and a misapprehension about the roles of writers in their times.

Immaterialism

Technology suggests itself. Persistently. The mechanism of convenience is primary. Again and again technology intercedes. As Don DeLillo has it, technology is desire removed from the body. Apolitical, amoral: technology suggests the possibility for perfection, a mirror that allows us to touch other people's reflections.

Internet shopping. Like catalogue shopping in the nineteenth century, the internet presents a shopper with the idea of a product: dimensions, weight, color and cut. With the help of pictures, one assembles the product mentally, tries it on, flexes, slouches, matches it to the other things owned and physically present. A conjuring act, internet shopping, in theory, is a more precise conduit to goods than physical shopping. You have to know what you want. Anything that suggests itself on the internet is junk. Who follows the pop ups and the automatic ads that show up in the in-box? Desire is central, in a way that may exclude a good portion of the conomy. Does anyone have room in their heads for the million small goods that hung on hooks or sat by the register? Internet shopping is essentialism.

On the otherhand, one can see the converse of Marx's theory: the central anxiety of the capitalist system is the separation of worker from product, the separation of product from consumer then is producing a new anxiety. One can read the story of the second half of the twentieth century as the story of empirical dominion. Everything on hand, everything seen. The rational moderns are morphing into semi-metaphysicians. Demonstrable laws produce invisible systems. The object disappears and a faith in reason is called upon. The product is bought in good faith that it will be delivered and match the measurements. This is more than faith in the honesty of strangers, it explains the fascination with Nigerian scam artists, the blatant come-on one can trust is too good to be true. Who do we picture tending the line when we click submit? And what pirates do we imagine raiding that line?

That anxiety also explains in part the rise in handicrafts. The reemergence of craftsmen goods, local foods, the handmade all place us in closer contact with the roots of production, the origin. Aside from dispelling problems of waste it instills a sense of old fashioned trust. What's next a return to the handshake in lieu of contracts?

Shame without Shame

 Nine out of ten frontier psychiatrists agree, the internet is only 1/4 real.  The parts that swirl around money, crime, and politics are the only places that have a true and calculated effect on the tangible world.  The rest is all intangible newness, a pillar of smoke doing impressions of Ricky Ricardo through Charles Taylor on its way to becoming solid.

The intangible pieces of the internet seem hinged on fulfillment of desires.  A better source for design inspiration, an endless tunnel of porn, a place to shout, a place to snark, a better way to stay in touch with family and friends. A portion of this intangibleness is hinged on the way the media used to interact with us.  

Censorship created a nest of odd desires. The arbitrary shape of certain slices and standards works like an inverted Tourrettes and manufactured some odd desires. The holy grail of a nipple, the strange cloisters of sexual performance.  The choreography of violence. The absence of true feelings and in all the total dismissal of difference and the assumption of agreement and conformity.  These absences provide for what I'll call the Chandler effect.

Chandler from Friends always seemed to be pulled through some abject horror.  His tone was acerbic and sarcastic, but the content of that tone was always bland, petty observations and his life was more or less fine. Yet the horror in his tone rang true.  As a viewer of late- 90's-00's sitcoms, one had already wandered through an odd conceptual landscape, the already buggered notion that every idea has already been done (don't get me started on the splatterhouse of Jerry Seinfeld's voice).  I like to think that Chandler, instead of simply replying to Phoebe's latest confession of anodyne quirkiness,  was in fact reacting to what wasn't there, what would show up a half-hour later on the evening news, what everyone else in the world seemed to be watching.  

The viewer fills in logical gaps.  Without thinking about it.  The characters on TV lead torturously abrogated lives.  Our brains fill in everything unseen and the unspoken.  In such a way TV interacts with our sense of normalcy, decency and perversity at the same time.  Depending on how willing we were to make the leaps in judgment that would allow us to believe that people act the way Chandler acted whenever he walked into a room, TV was interactive.  The interactivity was just subliminal.

The interactivity of the internet historically fulfilled the need for army bases to talk to one another should a thermonuclear attack wipe out phone and telegraph lines. But the mass appeal for the internet's interactivity is the direct result of that mute, one-sided TV interaction. The subliminal unsprung, the viewer unbound.  In the unconscious catch-all of American TV, the desire for normalcy was the viewer's true object.  Every show designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator, watched by millions and always pregnant with the notion that this was what everyone was watching.  And with family oriented programming, those among us with working imaginations, libidos, etc managed to back fill each antiseptic set with the nesting oddities of our unconscious drives. See the early years of South Park for the overture to the unhinging. Conversely, if the networks had decided to program porn, non-stop everyday, perhaps we would back fill the stories with our own impressions innocence, bathos and sentiment and feel flayed all the same.  Either way TV's basis of interaction produced a demiconsciousness that relied on the viewer's subliminal mind.  

Racing to the ever more liminal, our lives have come to include the unconscious of the collective to an unprecedented degree.  The internet today presents itself as an ad hoc system where individuals have the same thrall and power as multi-national corporations and governments. I wish to speak of systematic tendencies and not of scary end game prophecies (though I'm aware the template for non-affiliated internet essays is the conspiracy theory and so proceed with that baggage in hand).  There is a gigantic negotiation underway in the growing communities, one might hear the murmurs of Babel, one might see the outset of a multi-lingual means of communication.  As a friend pointed out to me recently, the use of extreme videos online is a means of communicating without words.  It is a way of effecting dialogue in an equalizing manner for those who do not come from English speaking countries.  It is also a way of bringing about quorum, if we can agree upon the extremes we can then move closer in.  

The internet as a system has potentially all other media as a reference point.  It is a place of rhetorical extremes, establishing a vocabulary based on new adjacencies. For the haves perhaps this could be called the creation of a flat language.   It is a vocabulary of search and discovery, skewed by the high prevalence and availability of material once defined as shocking or uncommon but that is now brought more and more into the semi-public discourse of online life.

We entertain ourselves now by questioning social mores with more and more of an acerbic and sarcastic tone.  We are Chandlers racing towards our epiphanic moment.  When this phase of the internet stalls and takes a final shape, when that last grandma watches Two Girls One Cup, and the rest of us grow bored with everyone else's sexual and social strangeness (i.e. when the next great platform arises and we forget or are distracted from this vein of thought) we will be left with a de facto system of American ethics.  Shame without shame because nothing is ever quite real until it is.