Traveling

Traveling

Over the past four weeks, I have slept in five different rooms broken by intervals of sleeping at home. I woke up in the night last night and for a moment felt completely displaced, as if my identity was still asleep. In that moment, my impression of my room, my bed and myself were entirely out of sync. Even though it was dark, I saw bright white walls. For a second my senses were useless- there was an impression, a certainty that my brain refused to let go and in the moment I felt like no one. The sensory displacement of a dream, the creature of my dreams for a moment became me. It vanished slowly over the following minute as the blood climbed into my brain and dilated the channels of my normalcy, my home. This happens from time to time and I recall as a child feeling terror in the moment of displacement. The memory of that terror tinged the momentary relish I took in this departure with a sense of power.  The strangeness of my adulthood. I find deep pleasure in the conquest of my old monsters, but then what is the right power to assign old pains? If I can hold them with the calipers of my current peace should I pass their carapace over fire to see the colors they turn- should I make a spectacle of those pains to show they are now nothing to me? Or let them rot and revive in time in the lobes of my brain, maybe show up as insuperable traumas in my later dementia?

Bullshit Matadors

Where are the shits of yesteryear? 

Last summer I walked into the Park Avenue Armory to see Paul McCarthy's White Snow. Of the things that installation accomplished in me, a temporary detente with my epic body shame may have been the most significant. I stood at the entrance and stared for a good half hour before venturing in further. Over the entrance hung three enormous screen. In glaucous and saturated shades a number of pseudo dwarves in college sweatshirts were waking from a nap in the forest. They burped, they casually masturbated, they moaned and groaned. Then they Heigh-Hoed. My eyes moved from screen to screen since each held a different scene. Once they reached home they were greeted by White Snow, played by Elyse Poppers, who brought a party kit with her and seemed to be on hand to entertain. I wandered into the installation and found among the sets the remains of the party that was about to happen on screen. There was a dirty smell and flies and a stained carpet and dummies that doubled for corpses of White Snow and Walt Paul- McCarthy's Disney inspired alter ego in this piece. 

Past the sets stood a forest of polystyrene painted brown possessing the uncanny morphology of three story shits. The forest platform split for a path I followed. The forest floor was just above my head and a cross section of foam core could be seen buttressing the fake shit trees and in the middle of the shit forest sat a three-quarter scale replica of McCarthy's child home. The armory itself is immense and cavelike. The sound from the films played through speakers mounted above in the rafters. Groans and shrieks and giggles that blew out the balance on the sound system echoed through the main hall where the piece was installed. 

Along either wall smaller sculpture and then beyond doors into cavelike chambers where films showed. In one of these cavelike rooms I sat beside a sixty something year old man in Ferragamos. He was accompanied by a woman equally well turned out and of similar vintage.  I sat beside them on a bench and watched the screen, smaller than the ones hung out in the main hall and only ten feet away. The film was of White Snow and Walt Paul engaged in a mommy-son domination fantasy. Walt Paul walked on his knees. His eyes darted with mischief. White Snow ordered him around the set. She washed his mouth out with soap and told him how disgusting he was. The man in his Ferragamos snapped pictures with his phone as White Snow disrobed. The scene was guttural, primal and horrifying, but played on the edge of pathos so deftly, where I felt deeply for Paul McCarthy and even more deeply for Elyse Poppers, who stood up to all of the harsh physicality McCarthy demands of his performers, who through out the collected films stands as the consistent point of focus and control, who carries so much of the work with unnerving portions of force and charm and how deeply the whole piece played with the viewer- the monstrous size of the installation, the hours and hours of available film- the whole work there to overwhelm the viewer to give a sense of bottomlessness and yet at the same time to show every gesture, so it would seem that McCarthy himself reached the bottom.



In February, I attended a screening of Matthew Barney's River of Fundament at BAM. Like White Snow the piece featured a recreated home and used shit as its central focus. The recreated home was Norman Mailer's and it floats on a barge over a river of shit, the river you have to pass to be reborn, to trick nature, as Mailer is reborn three times in the movie, as Barney is reborn in the form of his Masonic apprentice from Cremaster 3. The movie is uneven, but it is most compelling in its first hour and half as it follows the participants in a wake for Norman Mailer, including a cross section of sixties intellectuals, film makers, writers, a pharaoh, his retinue, the lesser participles of Mailer's Egyptian spirit and a number of gods. In the opening sequence, Barney has figured out the pacing, blocking editing and adapting of Mailer's source, Ancient Evenings, while simultaneously establishing the objects that will be transformed over the course of the film. There's a purposefulness in the pace where we see Salman Rushdie hanging out by the pig that's being roasted for the wake, as we see the LA car dealer/evangelist cutting silver grey lines as if they were coke then rendering them in a miniature blast furnace into a tiny shovel that then dissolves when swizzled in his drink. There's some beautiful music then there's just wind- there are musicians who play the steam radiators of the reconstructed home. The first hour was the only time I saw Barney beat his own films, succeed in a way his old films failed. That's not to say there weren't compelling parts later, but they were detracted by the woodenness of the scenes that were shot live as performances- the LA car sequence being the one stand-out as well as the rendering of the golden Osiris-mobile in a towering blast furnace in the rain. That latter as part of an homage to James Lee Byars (who wrote his 100 questions during a residency at Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute). When Barney's at his best, he is only in competition with himself. Having seen and been a fan of the whole Cremaster cycle, this work seemed redundant in places and borrowed heavily from Alejandro Jodorowsky and Joel Peter Witkin (NeverSFW btw) at times. 



White Snow and River of Fundament both reminded me of Makavejev's Sweet Film, especially his footage of the Viennese Actionists, who lived in a commune and followed the psychological guidance of Wilhelm Reich in practicing radical confrontations followed by recursions into infant play with vomiting, shouting and smoosh play. The point being the community accepts the human animal in its extremes with it's many urges- giving full expression to the unconscious, to undo the repression built into learning a social code.

The power of shit- as Mailer puts it: many a fine sentiment has been buried in shit. McCarthy's shit forest stands in for the uncanny passage of time, the shit of sentiment, of personal history and of forgotten time accumulated and confronted. Barney's shit stands for the horror of death but also the promise, the prospect and possibility of renewal and growth. I did walk away from River of Fundament thinking of the history of the human form in western art and how up until recently art refused to acknowledge that the body had holes and here we had Arrrrrrt (roll the R, alá Dalí) about shit- it may be progress towards something- self acceptance maybe? Though in Barney's case the acceptance maybe tempered with the somewhat delusional premise of the male artist's ego- maybe as long as we're looking at ideals we're only looking at shit and the real thing is always going to be you and I. It's always been the alchemist's trade to try to turn shit into gold. 

The same day I went to White Snow, I also visited James Turrell's exhibit at the Guggenheim. I laid on my back in the Guggenheim atrium for an hour staring up at Aten Reign- the colors shifting subtly up from floor to floor to the skylight and the color of the sky changing ever so slightly with the colors of the rotunda. It was the opposite of trompe l'oeil. It was a method showing the ways in which our eyes are constantly fooled, a way of showing the in born flaw in our perceptions. Our bodies, in other words, are designed to perceive illusions. It takes some thought to show that.

If we think of the telescope as Archimedes' lever that moved the world, Galileo's discovery as the first great realignment of modern European thinking where scientific reasoning showed that both faith and the climate of perception were faulty. I think now of the business of attraction and the bodies of supermodels actors and actresses, the illusion that our bodies can somehow become theirs- that their bodies are theirs - and that we can forget ourselves to become someone else for thirty minutes, for two minutes of thrilling numb tourism. It's anesthetizing and fraught and enough to make me consider Bridget Jones the epic heroine of our times. But I have a vested interest in moving away from body fantasies and the pseudosciences of appearance- aside from being on a diet, a friend let me know I look just like this criminal type:

At the close of White Snow there was a gift shop where the stunned and stumbling patrons could buy a piece of Snow White merchandise signed by Walt Paul for a ridiculous mark up. I almost broke down and spent $15 for a plastic-wrapped set of paper plates. After the sensory assault, I needed to have something to touch. I held off and stumbled forth to the subway, where I gripped the handrail and swayed with the car bumps and kept my eyes to myself.

Life in an Asymmetrical Universe

I may be the only person who adored The Counselor. It seems to have been panned universally. I'll give my spiel then I'll shut up. Cormac McCarthy helps edit theoretical astrophysicists books in his spare time. He practices a form of economy in his fiction that borders on psychic invocation. He found in the Cartels of Ciudad Juarez the moral core of our asymmetrical universe- as Warren Zevon puts it- the vast indifference of heaven. Though I'm still a hundred pages to go in 2666, it seems that he and Bolaño may have been in deep agreement here. There's something in this brutality and the indifference that allows it to occur that mirrors all the worst behavior of WWII but that points to a null in human behavior- an absolute empathetic zero bred by self-preservation for the indifferent and an absolute ruthlessness on the part of the killers. The violence in The Counselor and the near indifference towards audience comprehension ring with the coldness of that world, where our stand in- the poor Counselor - was in over his head from the beginning. If we don't see in the shape of contemporary society the pattern of this indifference and worry about what things may come, we may be equally lost.

Elegant Opposition, Inside Out, A Little Break (IPoS,tHL Part 8)

Elegant Opposition

Perhaps you know the person offering you a light is a martial arts master, perhaps you don't.  Perhaps you know that the offered match will approach with a physical precision and authority that will require a response, a minor contortion, but a move of equal elegance that preserves space and precludes any action further than a single gesture.  Perhaps you know you are being filmed by Wong Kar Wai and the fluidity of the camera will perfectly frame your action and the editing will assemble the scene in an equally fluid balance.  If you know this then you are Tony Leung and the fluidity of your movement can only mean you are playing Ip Man, the kung fu Zhivago, and that you are in the midst of redefining the idea of the kung fu movie and that you exist in one of the best records of motion put to film. But if you are this version Ip Man, the Ip Man who dulls a straight razor with a swipe from a single steel rod, who turns a two story fight with Gong Er (Zhang Ziyi) into a lighter than air Fred and Ginger number while retaining an edge of lethalness and you know that the strategy of living is in anticipation. Self-protection and self-preservation are slightly different than the mechanics of game theory, at least Ip Man's rendition of self protection. Within Ip Man's world, an opponent will adhere to a certain set of rules, that ruthless as the opponent may be, the object of the study of kung fu is to practice and not to fall back on a submachine gun, atomic warhead or other cheap tricks. There is a code of conduct, power built out of restraint.

Inside Out

Yukio Mishima once challenged his translator, John Nathan, that westerners could not understand Japanese culture. I'm not going to pretend to contradict Mishima, but the challenge has always bothered me, like the lyrics in Pink Floyd's Eclipse or David Hume's box. In each there's the premise of a closed system, and maybe less so with Pink Floyd, a trap of inscrutability, isolation or solipsism. But what I think Mishima was getting at was the role of individual in Japan versus the Western artist as individual. In traditional Japanese culture, what may appear as a performative or an aestheticization of a social role stems from a unification of mind, body and purpose, a formative concept that would recreate the western idea of the individual as belonging first to a society then to oneself. In this way the surface comes under a different kind of scrutiny in Japan. Where a westerner may speak of the performative as false, there it would be genuine, essential and indistinguishable from the act of living. I only go here to point out that fraught relationships with appearances have a cultural basis in the US that may not be found elsewhere in the world or get branded differently depending upon the inclusiveness of genuine difference and the strength of a central cultural identity that can be enforced. 

Mishima's work by and large portrays the point where the spirit outgrows the form. I think of the tortured acolyte who burns down the Temple of the Golden Pavilion because he cannot stand its beauty. Or the children who murder the eponymous sailor in The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea for choosing the beauty of a woman over the beauty of the sea. In a radio interview, Mishima once said that while most people believe themselves to be secretly evil, he knew himself to be evil. Mishima was in the generation that came of age in the years following the second world war. His ultimate act, haranguing the assembled troops of the Japanese Diet to rise up and embrace Japan's militaristic past and his subsequent death by seppuku, speaks to the paradox of the performed interior. There's a moment in his short story, Patriotism, when the protagonist commits seppuku and the author pauses to relay the vitality and color of the spilled intestines: the interior becomes another surface, a proof. In the case of Mishima, his message was met with jeers from the assembled troops, so it may be that personal myths die the hardest or it may be that he was one of the emperor's last casualties (though Kawabata also took his life a few years later in a much quieter manner and there was that soldier found in Guam in 1972 who still believed the war was going on).  

So often in art, the unspoken is the sign of the true self, the character finally tricked into a revelation. As in love or crime, confessions serve to drive the drama.  In that confessions uncover a secret, they work to gel the audience's perception of a character and so to tie them to their fate. In as far as we are defined by our actions, we undervalue the character of silence.  Silence is a shadow.  It's a quality born from an absence. The silent character is on the side of the image, in that every image is latent, an event to unpack either immediately in the case of icons, or eventually in the case of symbols. While visual memory can function without the aid of language, when we begin to tell ourselves what we are seeing, images become subject to the conditions of our abilities to describe.  As a movie fades to black and the silence hangs before the credits role, there is a kind of death that occurs for each of the characters in the film that preceded.  Their story has been truncated and so we consider it complete.  They live within a reducible truth. What we saw, or thought we saw, was all we have been told is worth knowing. But the image persists past the credits. The image recurs each time we see a cop and Mahoney or Tackleberry come to mind. In this way, they live in echoes each time their associated features of actions are invoked and we smuggle bits of reality back into our fantasies or project our fantasies on the world. But in silence, in primary silence, say in the scene between Nick Nolte and John Travolta in The Thin Red Line  or in the complex of unexplained images that pass in Inland Empire where the widening context of the film only works to retain the original complexity of the image, the opacity of silence may at times be the point, or if John Cage has his way, that demonstrated silence is an illusion and that the experience we point to as silence may occur in nature, it is less compelling than the psychological force of a silence imposed.      

I will be forgiven more than this when I am forgotten...
- Samuel Beckett First Love

A Little Break

I'm taking a little break from Proust to read 2666 by Roberto Bolaño (thanks in part to the excellence of The Savage Detectives and Richard Marshall's piece on it at 3AM).  I was reading the first book of the trio that come in my slipcased version at a local barbecue place. I sat at the bar, which is right next to the kitchen and prep area and one of the staff called me out on the book.  I was called out twice on the subway as well, by complete strangers who wanted to tell me how good 2666 is.  The guy at the barbecue place told me some advice he had heard from and interview with Bolaño, advice Bolaño had received from an older writer: work on one piece, only piece, until it is perfect then submit it everywhere under different titles.  Bolaño asked what he should do if it was accepted at more than one place and the older writer said he should publish it everywhere it gets selected.  But won't I get in trouble for publishing the same work in two places? Bolaño asked.  If it's got a different title, how are the stories the same? the older writer asked.  The guy at the barbecue place then told me how highly he regarded Bolaño and that Haruki Murakami was the other writer he was currently holding in equivalent esteem. Murakami is another writer, whenever I read his books on the subway, someone mentions how much they like him.  

A while back, I took a class on globalization at the New School and the professor who was very much into Japanese culture mentioned this phenomenon of near universal Murakami reading on the NY subway system and the subculture he'd noticed of complete strangers talking to one another about Murakami. His opinion of Murakami was pretty low and he was more dumbfounded that New Yorkers thought of it as culture, but he also belittled Koyaanisqatsi for not supplying labels or any cultural information aside from the images, a move he believed to be intended to equalize all cultural differences and to negate them. In his class we watched footage of a tribe within the amazon that had been isolated for the length of its existence and was now part of a network of tribes in the amazon seeking a way to stop deforestation. As part of this footage, they showed a ritual the men of the tribe undertook to make themselves courageous which involved getting shit-faced on a fermented brew standing arm in arm in a line and chanting songs. When they watched the footage of themselves they asked for the documentarian to destroy it.  They didn't want the loggers to know the secrets of their courage.

When I was reading book five of In Search of Lost Time, I sat on the train beside a guy with an open laptop, who seemed to be taking up two seats. I moved into a window seat without really asking him to move, but he did and put the laptop more squarely on his lap and continued to work.  After a while he stopped and asked me if I was reading Proust.  He had just finished book five. He was reading it in French.  He was originally from Montreal and came to New York to advance his studies in neuroscience. He thought Proust's jealousy would make an interesting case study. We swapped some thoughts on Proust in a guarded conversation with extended silences. When we both got off at the same stop I said good bye. Though I thought about asking if he'd like to correspond further on Proust, I stayed silent and moved to the other side of the platform to await my train.         

The guy at the barbecue place mentioned that he thought Murakami's work functioned entirely through coincidence.  That coincidence was the engine that made the various pieces of Murakami's world work.  I agreed that coincidence was a strong feature in the works I had read of Murakami, but I also mentioned something about the space of the personal, which may have come out as a remark about personal space and may explain why he stopped talking to me, but what I meant was that Murakami's works all explore forms of the uncanny by way of interiority, the collapse of shared meaning in symbols or historical moments remade so they become unique and temporarily personal, the way a good daydream can pry a moment free from the grind. I recall an interview with Murakami where he states the Japanese word for different is the same as the word for wrong and his project seems to be finding the space for difference within contemporary Japan.   

Today on the train, I was reading the second book from my slipcased edition of 2666, The Part About the Crimes, when I noticed two 4 x 6 photos had been slipped inside the case of a poster advertising a health plan. Both of the photos that had been slipped inside the poster case were of the same woman, a fit black woman with a large afro, sitting on a couch in front of an elaborate case that held a few large bottles of alcohol, maybe magnums of champagne among cognac and sake, bottles I did not recognize.  On the floor beside the couch there were boxes, which made me think the pictures were taken in the store room of a liquor store or a back room in a club or lounge. One picture showed the woman on the couch within the room. The other showed the woman up close. The zoom had been used. The scene made me wonder about the relationship between the woman and the photographer.  Her right upper arm was slightly tensed and it showed good definition.  Her hairstyle and her clothes placed the photo from any time between the 1970's and the present, except she wore white high tops and the photo paper itself looked new, the edges of the photos appeared crisp and white. Her expression seemed neutral and her look didn't directly engage the camera. The photos had ben placed in the bottom corners of the poster frame, so they sat on either side of a commuter's hair.  The commuter was sitting in front of the poster looking down, maybe at my feet or past me into the central void eyes find on the train. The commuter's hair was a set of elaborate coils, professionally tended and she wore a raspberry skirt suit so she was likely on her way to work. My eye moved from the book, to the commuter's professional hair to the photos, to the afro in the photos and the toned upper arms. The part of the book I am reading describes a series of killings in Mexico. I was reading a description of one of the women that had been killed in a particularly violent way and it put a pall on the pictures and made me wonder why someone had placed them in the ad's poster frame on the train. The act itself is already strange, but people slide cards and tags and other images into the poster frames all the time.  The light in the photos was dim and muddy and the whole thing looked amateurish to the point of questioning why the photo was taken in the first place and in the second why it was printed and not digital. They would have been deleted if they had been taken on a phone. Instead they were left behind. At a certain point, the commuter got up and left the train, leaving her seat open for me.  I took it and looked from side to side at the woman in the photo flanking me on either temple, but the mystery stopped when I sat and I returned to my book.   

It makes no sense to expect or claim to 'make the invisible visible', or the unknown known, or the unthinkable thinkable.  We can draw conclusions about the invisible; we can postulate its existence with relative certainty.  But all we can represent is an analogy, which stands for the invisible but is not it.
...

Perhaps the Doors, Curtains, Surface Pictures, Panes of Glass, etc. are metaphors of despair, prompted by the dilemma that our sense of sight causes us to apprehend things, but at the same time restricts and partly precludes our apprehension of reality.

-from Gerhard Richter, The Daily Practice of Painting          

The Silence of Repetition, the Ecstasy of Agreement (IPoS,tHL Part 7)

In Gravity's Rainbow, we have a contemporary equivalent of medieval folly, the point at which all of our sophistication bends back to annihilate us. It differs from Chaucer, Bocaccio and Rabelais in that the articles of faith have shifted toward technology. Man, the maker, has mastered his ignorance of the planet enough to create abundance, but he cannot master himself. Sam Cohen in later reflection after inventing the neutron bomb and seeing his design altered for maximum destruction, was said to have noted that as a child he suffered extensive diarrhea and one of the effects of his bomb, if released at the proper altitude was to inflict diarrhea via radiation poisoning to the population living within the farthest ring of the zones of impact. We can see in this a simple Freudian stencil placed over Cohen's guilt, but we may also ask if there is truth within a claim that we do not know the full content of our inner drives and what shapes they can take in the things we make.

There is a separate destructiveness of the hand, not immediately connected with prey and killing. It is of a purely mechanical nature and mechanical inventions are extensions of it. Precisely because of its innocence it has become particularly dangerous. It knows itself to be without any intention to kill, and thus feels free to embark on anything. What it does appears to be the concern of hands alone, of their flexibility and skill, their harmless usefulness. It is this mechanical destructiveness of the hands, now grown to a complex system of technology, which, whenever it is linked with a real intention to kill, supplies the automatic element of the resulting process, that empty mindlessness which is so particularly disquieting. No one actually intends anything, it all happens, as it were, of itself.

-Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power  

I will never touch the sun. With some advanced optics, I can see the surface of the sun and I can feel the warmth of its rays, but I will never touch the sun itself. There's naturally the theory that everything I touch necessarily spun out of the fusion of simple gases into heavy metals and that the sun itself is our local representative of this massive living fusion, the grounding of our orbit and so the source of the mass on earth (unless there is a deeper massiveness I am missing contrived from our solar system's rotation within our galaxy or the larger motion of our galaxy, but these too are extensions of the same counterintuitive principle: though I cannot touch the sun, I can feel its influence through the resistance of every object or body on Earth). It is a statement about the particular fragility of human life- that we can only be sustained en masse at our current distance from the sun - our senses evolved at this distance, so we are necessarily separate from the fundamental source of our life.

You taught me these words. If they don't work anymore, teach me new ones.

The shared nature of language is it's greatest mystery. A population assimilates to varying degrees the rules of speech, adapts and performs its idiosyncrasies. This creates the tension between experiential language, that is private language or the language that reflects back on our subjective place within culture and time, and public language, the language we adapt when are out of our element or when attempting to achieve a sense of timelessness. No doubt there's a spectrum in between that grades that tension, and there are certainly people who speak to themselves in a voice they consider timeless, using what would seem to be a public voice to dictate their inner moods, but in those two modes I generally find the space where we each begin to translate one another, where even within spoken 'Merican, we perform fleeting minor translations of relatability to synthesize what someone is saying. It happens on a nearly unconscious scale, unless you live and work among people who are different than you, then the act of translation can take on semi-consciousness. In resolving semantic differences, exhausting as this can be, the exact points of  exchange between private languages, or things understood tacitly within a specific context, become parsed and the associative webs in which our words are wrapped, come a little more unspooled.

I love Ummmmms. In conversation, ummmmms can signify so much: the brain's attempt to catch up to a line of thought, the brain's inability to properly express an idea, a linguistic gap where the word may not exist for a thought that needs to be expressed-- in short it becomes a catch-all expression for the gap between language and thought.  I happen to love clichés as well.  A good cliché can stave off an ummmmm.  It can work as a distancing mechanism.  A good comment about the weather in the elevator at work can set off a series of shielding words that transfers the tension built by the otherwise ominous silence that goes with being a group of relative strangers in a steel box suspended 100 feet above the ground.  The tension then moves to either extending the cliche, responding in kind or adding some small witticism or personal anecdote about the weather, or in refusing the offer and maintaining your part of the silence. The point being that through clichés, people come the closest to animal calls, to jungle noise-- it's precisely when we have nothing to say to one another that we feel the need to speak.

In art, clichés simply point to the saturation of certain approaches, identities and tropes.  In mass media, the ultimate aim for a work is to become a cliché, something infinitely repeatable that ultimately stands only for itself, but at the same time minimizes any personal content to allow for the maximum number of people to associate with it, to sit inside its disposable hollows and allow its temporariness to be carry the weight of expression, or tune out completely.  There are some images and some songs that I've seen or heard so many times that when they recur, as they inevitably do, I can no longer see or hear them directly.  They have been so effectively imprinted themselves in my brain that my eye or ear skips over it. It's like a type of silence, the silence of repetition. This sadly happens with a lot of my favorite songs and films.  They get played out.  In a way, the compulsion to re-listen to a song or re-watch a movie is just a way of taking their power away because they will occupy a space in my head until I find a way to make space for something new.  Songs especially will repeat themselves ad nauseum in my head, and incorrectly so, until I play them. Then I play them and play them until they erode.    

The worm bird catches the early.

Some work is able to reinvest a cliché with meaning.  I looked at John Wayne differently after watching Full Metal Jacket. I thought about MTV spring break specials differently after Spring Breakers. But inevitably, the clichés win out.  The counter-image resolves, if for no other reason than it's out-numbered.

Though the source of language may be physiological, or a physiological adaptation to a social need, language itself (outside of Braille) is intangible. As with the sun, words derive their weight in their distance from or proximity to their subject.

With Proust, we can see certain luminous subjects (the Vinteuil Sonata or Vermeer's yellow wall for example). It is in his tendrils, though long passages where a he slowly turns a subject, that a full gradation of the voice achieved. The personal is made public. That silent inner reworking of a moment over time, he coaxes onto the page then stretches it to its fullest form.  He gives the type of repetition that grows with each recurrence in his processing of grief or his obsession with Albertine's private life.

Future children our are our.

We normally find ourselves debating gradations by proxy by debating extremes- it's often the case that we push or are pushed towards an extreme form of thought by trying to get to it's logical end, but the illusion of a logical end is doubly impoverishing. In abandoning what may at first appear to be a milder or moderate form of a thought or say political position, we lose the personal understanding of that form and it's associative force. Once moved to the extreme, we have built a lattice of assumption, which may be founded in political reality, but which will always make a convenient fit of something that should be finessed and complicated.

In art we have the chance to share, on a mass scale, the ecstasy of agreement. The form is always there, the icon we can point to, the scales repeatable. The shape we can recognize and fill with our impressions. As long as we remain silent about the impressions, we can evade the personal, elide our differences and assume an equality of consumption, we can conform to the shape and lose everything we placed inside it. We can become the song without singing it.

For a long time, I found after reading a book, its ideas simply melted in, that the book itself stood as a kind of icon I could tap and skim through the highlighted impressions it left, but the details would vanish.  I would forget that my having read a book didn't necessarily mean that everyone had read that book.  It may be a function of the idea that at best we come to another person's work as a second or third generation reader.  In some circles it was definitely true that I read behind the curve. That discussing a book became an act of working up a reading list. That one book lead to another and that it's usefulness could only be described in its relevance to the next work and that in relation to what was yet to be read-- that unread book I always imagined to be more meaningful and more fulfilling than the one I'd just completed. Then in other circles, I'd realize only after slightly painful misunderstandings that everyone had not read the same things as me, that they wanted to talk about Haruki Murakami and I wanted to talk about Bruno Schulz. Or even if they had read Schulz, their memories differed or the scenes that I found meaningful did not match those scenes that stuck with them- ah well. Sometimes shared knowledge can be an illusion.

Today I passed a woman who shared the coloring, height and demeanor of a friend who is currently living on the opposite coast, yet for a moment, rather than allowing this woman's features to remain strange, I conferred on them a momentary familiarity and noticed how the squareness of this woman's face added a melancholy to my friend's, though by this point I knew it wasn't my friend and they really didn't even look that much alike. I have not thought about this friend for months, but circumstance-- chance-- places an approximation in my path and pulls out my memory of her face, her general appearance. This particular friend is out on the lonely spectrum of petite Jewish strawberry blondes and I hardly find people who remind me of her, though this type may be more likely on the sidewalks of Brooklyn than say Mexico City, so it's not out of the ordinary, just slightly less ordinary than seeing someone with my own features, which happens fairly often. Now I wonder if the next time I see my friend, if her face won't appear the more sanguine for the small change made in my impression by this brief interloper.

In public at any given moment we are surrounded by fragments of our own consciousness.  The elements we recognize can blind us. One element of growing up plugged into mass culture is access to its proliferation of types, of faces associated with character traits. The people I see on the street, in the supermarket, strangers, only appear less strange in relation to the faces I already know. This problem is double-edged. The familiarity is a shallow one, misleading, but provides a kind of balm-- that persistent sense that people are knowable, if not already known.  On the other side, people who are not represented on TV or in movies, those faces which don't have any more than a token form of familiarity may seem even more strange than they would normally. They may carry the full burden of strangeness that I withhold from the people who appear at least partially familiar.This may be an especially suburban concern (i.e. any place where different races and ethnic groups can hide from each other by driving to work or living in different neighborhoods, going to different schools, etc) but the families on sitcoms and their variations (groups of friends, of cast-aways, of house-mates) begin as stand-ins, anodyne extensions of our own families.  The faces on TV become masks for the faces we know and in this way they build off of primary familial recognitions, those parental and sibling features we see or do not see within our own faces.    

There's truth to Buggin' Out's complaint with Sal in Do the Right Thing. When we rely in part on the media to tell us who we are, to be unrepresented is to be invisible, or to be wrong.
 
With every picture there is also the opportunity to turn ourselves into strangers, to allow the camera to capture not the light of friendship or family, but the mere facts of appearance.  Pictures where I don't look like myself are inevitably deleted. The portion of face I never catch in the mirror, the flank-man with a half-open mouth, double chin and mostly closed eyes, who walks ear first into the light of a flash, or just the closed-mouthed unsmiling thing with the rings under his eyes, moving his facial muscles towards an expression-- these images though repeated often enough on the screen of my camera still don't fit-- and who would want them, but they give the visceral recognition of total vulnerability, the poor timing of the self-image surfacing between shutter clicks, vanishing to leave just the transitory animations toward the thing I recognize as me.
   

Here, young Caravaggio is David and old Caravaggio is Goliath.

With Proust, we can only trust that the truth of what someone thinks about us is said after we have left the room.  Such is the case with Swann.  Though Swann's assimilation into Parisian society is aided by his wealth and intelligence, it is his choice in marriage and the concurrence of the Dreyfus Affair which ultimately limits his access to the Guermantes and the fashionable set and acts for those players, M Guermantes especially, as a kind of proof that Swann will always be Jewish first and therefore not a true Parisian, a kind of eternal traitor in their midst.  With the case of Baron de Charlus, the homosexual brother of M. Guermantes, there is a conformism, his masquerade as a lady killer, that allows Charlus full access to society but also a discretion that links the Baron through to the secrets of the society set, which gives him power.  Proust is careful to show the hypocrisy of a culture both enthralled by and unwilling to openly relate their desires.

...the qualities of the heart need darkness and protection against the light of the public to grow and to remain what they are meant to be, innermost motives which are not for public display. However deeply heartfelt a motive may be, once it is brought out and exposed for public inspection, it becomes an object of suspicion...  
--
For Socrates...it was an authentic problem whether something that 'appeared' to no one except the agent did no exist at all. The Socratic solution consisted in the extraordinary discovery that the agent and the onlooker... were contained in the self same person. ...that the Socratic agent, because he was capable of thought, carried within himself a witness from whom he could not escape.. that tribunal which later ages have called conscience.

-Hannah Arendt, On Revolution

In the pursuit of unification or resolution of a blind spot there is a separate pain of wanting to know something unknowable, the pain of Proust's narrator. The pain of wanting to know may be equally horrible as the fate a blind spot can make for us. For some, the vulnerability that comes with an inaccessible blind spot, say from a tic a person may wear but of which they may have no knowledge, can be the exact expression of that person's humanity. In other cases, it can be the exact expression of their inhumanity. If we think of unconscious or semiconscious racist behaviors, for instance, or of hypocrisy, which is the broader context of Hannah Arendt quote above, some examination of our blind spots is clearly requisite to living in the 21st century.

There is a transfixing silence born from where repulsion and attraction meet, that compelling place where it becomes impossible to turn-away.  In fiction, the double or doppelgänger is the physical embodiment of what we cannot admit to ourselves, of the things we find repugnant. Perhaps this is why doubles normally hate each other at first but then buddy up into a kind of odd couple relationship feel the need to kill their opposite. In the double, the tragic counterforce is distilled, the unknown becomes material, fate immediate.

Adrian Piper's Mythic Being

There is also the other.  

There's a moment in J R where a picture of J R's class has been Xeroxed.  The machine reverses the image, so the white children appear black.  The picture is being viewed by the executives in a brokerage firm where J R's class visited on a school trip.  The executives begin to criticize the children. They seem capable of seeing only at this time the kids' flaws and looking at J R they see the raw expression of his greed.  In Gravity's Rainbow, Tyrone Slothrop, of Boston-town, is given a dose of sodium amytal and observed in the hopes of getting a greater understanding of the race problem in North America. While Charlie Parker plays Cherokee, Tyrone drops his favorite harmonica down a toilet.  Who should come and help him find it down in there,but a pre-Nation of Islam Malcolm X, known as Red, but only after first finding Tyrone's rear exposed and vulnerable. Tyrone, to escape certain rape (keep in mind this is a psychedelic peek-a-boo into Tyrone that winds up freeing him from a quotient of his inherited racism, which allows him later to buddy up with Oberst Enzian and the Schwartz Kommando, a battalion of Herero from the Sudwest with a collective death wish, against Major Marvy, southern racist leader of a technical intelligence team and buddy of Bloody Chiclitz of Yoyodyne, military industrial mega-weight) climbs down the toilet and is pulled through a sea of shit (batting dingleberries out of his eye). The sense of repulsion is there and maybe for Slothrop an experiment like Adrian Piper's Catalyst or John Water's Pink Flamingos wouldn't seem so extreme an example of what we confront when we approach the notion of otherness.
 
In her Mythic Being project, Adrian Piper attempted to be herself, a person with her own history and background, while dressing as a man. She considered herself anathema while she performed this, everything you most hate and fear, and noted the ways in which she felt herself adapting towards her appearance. This, as well as her Catalyst exercises, are ways of measuring the weight of different social stigmas and the often unspoken limits and expectations they set, specifically in the context of race in America.

Little is said directly about race in Infinite Jest. Canadians are the ghettoized identity, but with physicality at the core of the novel, it instead takes on handicaps as a kind of ontological limiter or intensifier, where there are Quebecois wheelchair assassins, deformations caused by the toxic environment, mutilations, the list of malcontents in the Madame Psychosis hour, Mario Incandenza and addicts, but everyone is defined in part by their addictions, their maladies, their hypertrophied abilities as tennis players or mothers and their tics in a broad spectrum of behaviors and everyone shares at least in part a type of otherness. This is in part why this book cauterizes the post-modern aesthetic. The other is the norm, to the point that all claims to otherness become flat, but this is also one of this book's biggest weaknesses.  Just read about Uncle Nathan in Scott McClanahan's Crapalachia and you'll see the difference.

Everything Crash (IPoS,tHL Part 6)

Tadanori Yokoo

In the previous posts, I have taken up a lot of time to talk about a number of works that have been celebrated fairly widely within the world of letters.  In part, I wanted to acknowledge that within our culture, the currency of exchange is generally trafficked around attention.  That is, certain works are spoken about more than others because they serve as functional vehicles for the most number of ideas, or as caches for meaning.  This is only one need for writing or art.  On the other side resides those works that measure personal feelings, sentiments or ideas, that always appear as under-appreciated treasures. Often, the preciousness of the text is in direct proportion to its relative obscurity. In some cases, the level of idiosyncrasy assures that while a reader may identify with the work, love it, empathize with it, they may lack the language to describe it or a means to pull it into their everyday thinking.  Mark Costello's Murphy Stories is one of those books for me.  Christine Schutt's Nightwork is another. In both of these cases, I felt the writing dissolve some essential structure in my thinking that then made me a better reader and lifted a psychological burden I didn't know I'd been carrying.  I could add a few more (The Log of the S.S. Mrs. Unguentine, Motorman, Firework, Stories in the Worst Way) but I mostly want to stop to acknowledge that though I've taken pains to pace out my thinking here, I am still missing some points and I'll make an effort to pull this out a little further, but that in casting off with this idea I really wanted to get a handle on the means by which Proust makes himself understood and consider the reasons for that form of expression, its value and its short-comings in contrast to other styles as well as to a number of writers I find valuable to find a balance to the means of self-expression and ultimately what is made public within any given form of writing.

Through the pain, I always tell the truth

In this light, I was thinking about Denis Johnson's Tree of Smoke, and considering the text as an inquiry into meaning that withholds meaning and simply presents the actions of character in their search. As a Vietnam novel and one that deals with the intelligence community leading up to and following the conflict, we already have the cultural implication of a meaningless war, an implication that isn't spelled out in the novel, but instead exists as the fundamental question within, but also the idea of hidden meaning and the variety of truths people seek.  The novel unlocks for me around the early use of the word infestation-- the only four syllable word spent in a sea of single or double syllable words within the early portion of the book and used to describe the state of a tree in a jungle with ants-- then following the assassin Fest and the change in meaning that association ascribes to his name and actions within the book we get to the prime contrast of intelligence, agents of meaning and meaningless death. Not as overt as Harry Mathews, who includes actual cryptograms within the text of Tlooth, but along those lines-- the question of the ways in which people conceal and reveal political truths contrasts to the larger search for meaning and the ways in which we interrogate nature to fulfill our needs.     

Mark Lombardi Global Networks

Everything Crash

Despite all of the energy put into a system, there is always a point of diminishing returns, a point where the system becomes supersaturated and cannot continue to perform the function of its design.  Within the natural world, the system breaks down and transforms through decay into its reduced, constituent parts, nutrient and toxic.  It's written into the second law of thermodynamics.  

Consider what came out of the second world war.

Proust and Pynchon, separated by Puig and Puzo on my shelf, separated by two world wars, separated by an ocean, separated by titanic differences in form, style, and thought. Considering Proust as one removed from Parisian society, sitting in his cork lined room limning the evanescent stuff of memory and its extensions then considering Pynchon, removed as well from the old monied New England and Mid-Atlantic society, self-exiled and wandering, I assume, through bars and back rooms and scenes intellectual or non, it may be worthwhile to consider the type of reclusiveness an author adheres to.

Pynchon has cultivated a charismatic absence. Gaddis's reclusiveness, because of the tone of his writing, the anger, came off with a kind of disdain born of superiority (a Jonathan Edwards type severity and distrust of people).  Nevertheless Gaddis has his followers too and for many Gaddis's and Pynchon's concerns are so close that some assumed they were the same person. I'm assuming someone put this forward before, but I always thought that Pynchon could have been the name Gaddis and Ralph Ellison put on the work that came out of Herman Kahn's Hudson Institute (the institute does pre-date V. by two years).  Come to think of it, Ellison too went into reclusion after The Invisible Man. 

In the absent author, I've found surrogates for other absences within my own life, but  I think of Thomas Pynchon as a kind of reverse Batman. His name appears in lights and he disappears to allow the citizens of Gotham to learn krav maga and assemble the clues left behind in the Riddler's latest puzzle, only the tools he leaves us are our own paranoia, our foibles, our follies and a deep mistrust of authority. Gravity's Rainbow is about the collapse of Europe after WWII and what rose up from its remains. In Search of Lost Time is an attempt to reconstruct in part the society that stood before the first World War.  The two works stand as book ends for the first half of the twentieth century: one looking backwards and the other looking forward (I had read online a while back a letter Dow Mossman had written about GR stating that it goes into the past to talk about the future-- thought that was a good way of putting it, but can't find the link to save my life now).  

Going back through his work, Pynchon presents himself as a kind of paradox.  His books avoid a build to hierarchical meaning, instead setting his balance so that all elements can carry equal weight, a novel in suspension and novels that would appear to highlight the means of control and relinquish the more obvious elements of authorial control.  Indirection, discourse and expansion as the methods of understanding the world. The variety of epistemologies that he uses as lenses (organic chemistry, horticultural, behavioral psychology, parapsychology, film theory, electrical engineering, rocket science, etc) underpins the basic idea that the pursuit of knowledge is inherently Faustian, but also the only means of alleviating the human condition of unknowing, ignorance, subjection and subjugation. While there's always a sense of the absurd, Pynchon is more interesting for his ability to maintain a concept of the tragic, that notion of the innocence lost in the path toward total knowledge (Gnossos and Mathemesis for the Gnostics out there).  To consider Tyrone Slothrop, swabbed by Q-Tip as an infant to build the response that would turn him into the V-2 divining rod he becomes as an adult, that he was sold into said swabbing by his father, so that Tyrone could be eventually the pawn within the questing of industrial, governmental, clandestine and military plots gets at the level and degree with which Gravity's Rainbow points at the embedded corruption, but despite still retains the character's humanity (ironically, the swab in this case).      

Pynchon adapts the Joycean strategy of reference, inference and invocation to attempt a text that addresses a pluralistic readership.  If there should be any one reader who comprehends the whole of Gravity's Rainbow  without additional research, that reader may feel  a bit like Maxwell's demon. The book is there to prompt us out of specialized roles, to sort through the elements of the story to come away with their own sense of understanding, or the reader can simply allow the work to flow, to take it for its ride. Joshua Cohen's review of Bleeding Edge in Harper's captures the effect of Pynchon's influence: people come together to solve the mystery. That this type of collective pursuit of meaning is in a way the best antidote to a corporate system that propagates single, easily replicable solutions may be the unintended extension of Pynchon's charisma.  It reminds me in ways of the work of early Christians, or of Talmudic scholars-- readers can inhabit and question the text in pre-political communities and come away with their own pet theories.

To think of Pynchon's work within the question of publicity, it seems that in his pursuits he has created a matrix of books that would allow for the maximal expression of latent meaning, but that those connections are left for the readers to discern.  The ways in which Pynchon plays with the explicit is always tempered with a healthy dose of the unknown.

Get 'Em in the Guts (IPoS,tHL Part 5)

Get 'Em in the Guts

Of the decisions made within the creation of a book, it is worth commenting on how a series of words can come to take on a shape and that shape may be perceptible, but latent. A novel's shape isn't necessarily apparent. It belongs most-frequently to the unspoken quotient of subtext that fills in the space between words, the area where the author and the reader are meant to interact.   The Recognitions, for instance, takes on the shape of a screw, following the lives of a circle of people and pulling the action in tighter and tighter until the final collapse. Infinite Jest (in printed, not e-reader format) becomes a piece of exercise equipment: problem and solution bound in one hefty volume. To take a different tack, or to apply an anachronistic empiricism to the written word, what appears on the page and what appears within a reader's mind as the words begin to aggregate are separate and almost unaccountable phenomena, unless of course you suffer from perfect comprehension (zero noise as Wiener might have put it).

Determining where exactly meaning appears within a text or parsing the meaningfulness of a text is both personal and contextual.  It's personal in that whatever is being written must flash against some existing question within a reader's head for it to gain priority over other text.  It's contextual in that more often than not, meaning is a product of the subtextual games an author has deployed to manipulate our attention and bring us to a point of focus. We can see these quotes and excisions dragged out and held to the light and at times find enough in it to think we agree or to empathize with its sentiments or if we've seen it before, we nod in recognition and see that someone else found value in a statement.

In Ben Marcus's The Flame Alphabet another problem is introduced.  The narrator lets us know that he can only speak of dead ideas, that, much like the light from stars, we are reading something cast off, something that may have once been precious, but has now been outgrown. I extend this idea in part to some of the decisions Marcus makes within the novel, some of the themes he pursues and the slanted pieces of his own identity on display within the work.  The novel itself is about a language virus, so we already have a level of alienation from the text, but to get more into the lower guts, Marcus has provided a context where-in he can produce a special language, an enriched syntax and a means of exploring the written word that is jarring in its novelty but applicable to the world which he creates, but the writing is another cast off and perhaps part of the problem inherent with the form of the novel, we will always be reading something dead. Whatever life we try to bring to it is a kind of revival or resurrection, secondhand pants that may or may not fit but may also be toxic.

In The Captive, we encounter what seems to be the central problem of modern rationality. The narrator, who Proust shruggingly allows us to call Proust in this volume, has arranged for his mistress (Albertine) to live as his cousin, in secret, to share his home.  Obsessed by what she does when she is not with him, Proust has her surveilled, prods and manipulates her into staying at home. Considering his navigation against the history of Swann's path in society, the ways in which he strains to glimpse into Albertine's secret nature provides a perfect picture of his limit. Proust wants to know at all costs, even if it breaks his heart and it drives him mad that he cannot see around this particular blind spot. In part, it reminded me of an updated Oedipus myth, one where Oedipus is ever vigilant against the fulfillment of his fate, but where as well the vigilance is the signal of his character's flaw (a flaw crafted from a great strength) to the point where whatever peace we allow ourselves in the shade of our ignorance is ruined in an attempt at comprehension of our own particular place within the world. The way in which his thinking is bent by this blind spot shows that there are things that rationality cannot process, that knowing only begets further suspicion.

Walter Faber and to an extent Oedipa Maas both extend this concept of the rationally tragic. Homo Faber, the novel by Max Frisch, borrows its name from a concept co-created by Hannah Arendt and Max Scheler (it means "gay pencil" "Man, the maker"). Faber's rationality is that of a survivor looking to recreate the world in the wake of WWII.  His rationality is built upon a movement away from history, his own personal history and its resonance with the war, and a genuine need to put the past behind oneself in order to continue living.  The mechanics of Faber's tragedy are all folded within the folly of that very real need on the part of Europeans to not look back, but we can also extend his brand of hubris to the engineer and scientist castes of the 50's and of the supposed rationality of the play between the super powers built upon the mountainous irrationality of thermonuclear war.  Oedipa Maas on the other hand inherits the tragedy of lost knowledge (oh the sweats expired in the mattress fire) in the face of mass of culture and communication (Rich Chocolatey Goodness) censorship and greed.

To take a brief side step, the themes of Homo Faber find a number of echoes in The Crying of Lot 49, but the two books are deeply divergent in terms of style. Frisch's cool, collected plotting and descriptions vary widely from Pynchon's discursive plunge through southern California in the mid-60's. One difference may be psychedelia and Pynchon's great co-author, the substance, but another may be best stated as James Joyce. The best counter to the sequence above in the Captive, where Proust obsesses over the unknown, may be that epiphanic moment near the end of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, when Stephen Dedalus grasps the louse crawling near his neck and crushes it. It echoes back to the description of his mother's finger stained with louse blood through to his confrontation with the British soldiers in Ulysses. It may be safe to say that Joyce was much more comfortable with inference than Proust.  That Joyce's poverty, relative to Proust, provided him early on with a sense of the place people saw him in, so in Joyce instead we have the fight against that fate, toward greater artistic freedom. And while both authors are capable of investing a single sentence with several layers of resonance, in Proust I find most often the meaning is organic to the book, the shade of meaning and the precedents provided in the pages that came before, even external references to authors or art are contained within the construction of the novel to ensure its significance is rooted in the perceptions of the characters.  Joyce on the other hand is constantly sampling referencing outside works, either pulling the knowledgable reader further into the plot and characterization or sending the reader to the library or whizzing the references right past the reader's head. With Finnegan's Wake we see Joyce's language freed wholly from the waking world and subsumed through the unconscious. Here we have sentences that read aloud as if written phonetically in brogue, but reveal puns in multiple languages, the simultaneous collapse and extension of the syntax, the English language broken and freed and we can see that the unknown may be best handled obliquely. 

 

Methods of Extraction, a Detour (IPoS,tHL, part 4)

A Brief Detour

I was taught that the more a person read, the wrinklier their brain became, so, to be thorough about this:

• Light hits the page of a magazine.
• Photons absorb and reflect from the page, cross a threshold of atmosphere to enter the lens of the eye, stimulate the rods and cones which creates a signal that travels down the optic nerve to the visual cortex, in the back of the brain, where the signal is justified.
• The signal is then rushed through to the pertinent portion of the brain [like a library the segments of the brain are neatly categorized by type of knowledge, so writing from Sport Illustrated goes to the sports section of the brain] where the brain has to store this vital bit of news and has no choice but to grow to take it in, but since it already fills the space within my skull, the brain has no choice but to fold in on itself to accommodate this new important data set: Kathy Ireland. [Was that wrinkle curvier than the rest?]    

Neurological growth as a direct physical result of encountering the written word, as if the word were nutritive enough and air, water and food were completely foreign to the growth of grey matter.  Whether this was my biology teacher's shorthand, whether the science at the time dictated it or whether it was caused by my short-attention span, it strikes me as odd now considering that physicality.

I did attend Catholic school, so perhaps this was a subversive attempt to tie the scientific to the religious ála the word made flesh, but considering the mysterious grey and white matter, that the nervous system traffics in electric and chemical signals and that those signals arc synaptic gaps, one could ask the function of empty space in thought (I'm really too eager to imagine a vacuum here, but okay, plasmic conductivity in gap junctions). Thought, though it feels cloudy and poof-like, is a physiological process that for reasons unknown incorporates the insulated neural cabling of dendrites but also synapses, so that Milton Gloaming (whose mind is always gathering correspondences) can make new correspondences.  Ben Marcus's rebuttal of Jonathan Franzen in Harper's grazes the neurophysiological refinement that actually happens while reading (my misapprehension was almost right).  I'm thinking here about the teleology of gaps (after-all, we're all Tauruses born between April 20 and May 20 toruses) and perhaps the temporary psychic balm for my on-going provocation-- if it doesn't happen in public, it didn't happen-- can be tallied if not by EKG then by the knowledge of those signals whether there's a measure of the output (one guy thinks the brain uses about 24 watts of power a day-- converted from 500 calories-- those calories tied to food- so there's a minimal/ materialist impact to thought-- if one could squeeze out a smaller portion of that percentage that is engaged in active thought).  Not to get all Cartesian here, but I read therefore I read better does not get us closer to output (the trek from Wernicke's Area to Broca's).

I watched Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry last night and if I can put aside for a moment the personal resonance of Arendt's idea and focus instead on the true intent, Ai Wei Wei echoes it in the film, in the face of opaque and oppressive government, publicity can be the catalyst to change.  It may be the duty of intellectuals and artists to unite their ideals and their actions, to keep themselves from feeling safe with their thoughts in private and to pronounce them (oh but I cringe when I think of the Futurists in this light). It brought to mind Blake Butler's piece in Vice, posited as a return to censorship as a way of making literature feel dangerous again.  With Vice, the tone is always contrary and shifts the question of irony back on the readership. In part, this is in keeping with the notion of real political engagement, confrontational writing, but it straddles as well the place of the North American media spectator. The thrill of confrontation can become yet another reason to stay on the couch or another back pocket item to take to the bar and trot out when talking politics to prove a certain edge in understanding the grim geo-political realities (and so the ultimate balm for the disillusioned and apathetic since it can justify ingrained jadedness). But the flip side to Butler's argument is that censorship does still exist, naturally, it's just a more difficult kind to adapt to as a writer.  If the government is not pressing back directly against writing that takes on problems, the writing loses the power of notoriety and subversion, so it becomes entertainment.  The interesting thing is that the impulse in writing now seems to be to expose the personal, that self-exposure is rewarded more consistently than say exposure of corporate greed.  This may not be fair-- there is a generation of writers coming of age in a time where unprecedented levels of self-exposure can occur, so it does seem to be there is some genuine role here for writers to play in normalizing this and taking the opportunity to highlight broader issues within our social framework (thinking of Marie Calloway here). But for those of us who came of age earlier, in the days of Pine, and have had to work to adapt to the tools, Ai Wei Wei shows a good way forward.          

As entropy increases, the universe, and all closed systems in the universe, tend naturally to deteriorate and lose their distinctiveness, to move from the least to the most probable state, from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness.
...
In control and communication we are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized and to destroy the meaningful; the tendency, as Gibbs has shown us, for entropy to increase.

Is it a big thing or small thing we need to describe? How many words do we need to make it feel complete?  I'm finding the terms minimal and maximal useful in a certain way, to get at methodologies of expression, but their usefulness ends at the point we recognize the wide variety of works that can fall under either umbrella.  To go back to Proust, if you spend any kind of time reviewing your memories, scrutinizing them, you'll recognize how frail a thing they are, how intangible. You can't use a bulldozer to study orchids. And where the context of a memory's inhabitation may be caught up in incidentals we don't readily recognize when we revisit them in the quiet of our own minds, my appreciation of Proust comes through to the effort of rebuilding the full architecture of his place and time and setting the content of his memories throughout like so many jewels. In this way, the articulation of his memories, folded through with the estimable care of his meticulous craft may not be maximal at all, but merely sufficient.

In The Human Use of Human Beings, Norbert Wiener,former child prodigy and originator of cybernetics, applies Willard Gibbs's thoughts on entropy as well as thoughts of machine governance to communications. Signal, noise, feedback, noise. He makes some interesting parallels between systems commands and human language and shows a possible measure of linguistic efficacy.  Signal, noise, feedback, noise.  He even makes a point to talk about meaning and inference and the faith of a scrutable universe. THUoHB is a kind of Ur text to American writers working in the US throughout the Cold War. It's the text crouching inside of William Gaddis' JR, which is quite literally a novel of voices, as if the text arrived by floating microphone with the occasional need to report a detail here and there.

Gaddis would certainly fall within the maximal mode of expression.  As mentioned above, the merit of his works have already been hashed and rehashed in the court of public letters.  I'll take only a moment to say that what was missed in those exchanges with Marcus and Franzen and then Ozick is that the formal conceit which Gaddis undertakes does require some work on the part of the reader (a different type of work than say Julio Cortazar requires in Hopscotch) but the real question is whether it is work worth doing.  In reading Gaddis, I find ideas I wouldn't otherwise have come to. His level of engagement with those ideas is what's at play in his form.  He is, in JR, taking Gibbs' theory via Wiener and savagely applying it as a kind of artistic proof of the merit of the idea and providing his audience the tools for recognizing the ways in which social entropy attaches itself so thoroughly within a cultural malaise.  If there is an element of Cassandra here, one can always point to the doom of a culture and eventually appear wise, I see, specifically in the work Gaddis asks the reader to undertake, an antidote to that malaise.   Not that all long books are inherently prescriptive to a lulled society, but the formal invention presented within JR invites the reader to focus on cues and engage with the voice directly, as with radio, to encounter the rhythm of language (and the consistency of Gaddis' rhythm and musicality pulled me through the book) and in this way it doesn't seem accidental that JR, the eponymous 12 year old tycoon who pulls the strings within the novel, wads a handkerchief into the receiver of the phone in order to disguise his voice.  As a follow up to The Recognitions, which is about art forgery, social fakery and the degradation of ideas, where so many problems of the visual world are produced, here too the sonic world is fraught and lulling and deceptive. Taking a 12 year old's sense of morality and fairness as the organizing principal of the book (oh how JR just wants Bast, the composer and JR's second hand man, to love him), he satirizes the underlying ethos of late 20th century capitalism.

You can learn a lot by the way a person handles their money.  In Herman Melville's The Confidence Man, money is shown in a much more complicated way. We watch as a confidence man or a team of confidence men (a god in disguise or a demon, depending upon your perspective) set about fleecing the passengers aboard a steamship on the Mississippi on April 1st (ship of fools). Melville sets the novel as a series of dialogues.  In each scene we wonder at the true identity of the participants and look for the ways in which trust is built, until the character of the mark becomes evident.  In each, whether money is given or held back, the issue closer at hand is always trust, faith.  One can see in it Melville's experience with money: the charity he received as a child is inset as a story the confidence man deploys at one point, but also there's insight here into his role as a novelist, as a man who lies to try to show truths in the hopes of payment.

Looking back to the activism in North America in the last decade, a lot of it has used consumerism as the fulcrum for change.  Its hard to remember life without the ubiquitous local/organics, but Michael Pollan and a number of other food writers and documentarians increased awareness of environmental, health and ethical issues with mass processed and factory farmed foods. Or the (Red) campaign, which has raised over $240 million dollars to fight AIDS in Africa by harnessing our gigantic will to spend.  Like BioMass energy, maybe our own sloth and bad credit can be used to fix real-life problems elsewhere. So what's the problem here?

As an aside-- on Kurt Vonnegut's chart showing the shape of stories, he sometimes marked "the end" as "entropy."                

[Next time, More on Amplification, some Mystification, Pynchon and a variety of silences]