February

The Tyranny of the Present

I recently completed the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle, A Man in Love.  It will be a while before I try Vol. 3. I am in the meantime attempting to replenish lost minerals and fluids expended in that effort. The book comes across like a microwave blast, evaporating everything it touches.  I can only puzzle at the source and follow the dry river beds that wind out from there. For the time it takes and the considerable patience it requires of its reader, the rewards are not immediately apparent.  Sitting now, more or less a month apart from the final page of the volume, the chief element that stands out is KOK's technique, his ability to draw out moments and build the humdrum continuities of daily life, what's at the window, what shall we eat, clean the dishes, will I write-- all acts of doing saved from higher thought or direct synthesis. He uses this idiom to show the foundations of experience.  In a way, he has perfected what he began in Vol 1-- the project to grab time at its slowest.  Through this idiom, he gives us the solipsism of a man in love, the binding, blinding totality of need that supersedes the capacity to think like a person out of love and this flows into the problems of cohabitation, the willingness to self-sacrifice to do the dishes and the cleaning and this flows into child birth then exhaustion and all the while, the mind is keenly occupied by the task at hand.  There's seldom pleasure taken in the moment. One act gives way to another.  In contrast, Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine, operates on a micron scale in its dissection of a man's lunch break excursion but works to elevate each small choice (the nostalgia for paper straws that sink in Coke, the proper way to tie a shoelace so it doesn't break over time) with a kind of pragmatic wisdom that breaks the true present with asides. With KOK, escape always seems impossible, or its rarity is celebrated with a beer, as so much of the extended scene between Geir and KOK encapsulates the book's walking philosophy.  And for all its dryness, for each attempt I made to put it down for good, I found myself needing to pick it back up, if for no other reason than out of respect for the rush that I felt during the birthing sequence, but more out of a sense of incompleteness-- that my actions too were tied to KOK's and I needed the novel to be complete to feel released.

When I started writing about Proust last year, it was in a way to deal with the crisis he creates for writers-- the crisis of capacity and inclusion.  I don't feel the same crisis extending from KOK, though he may have been dealing with his own crisis in his own way.  As a writer, I find Knausgaard's work draining, unique and perhaps necessary, fascinating for its callousness to its reader, and for reconfiguring the frame around domestic life.  I wonder if KOK could work as a baseline, if what he's written can be used to start new conversations around the manner in which we live. I wonder as well about its relationship with technology-- aside from the question of self-surveillance and reality TV-- how does providing this level of detail in marking the passage of days, effect the database of human experience?  Does it ultimately alter what we understand human experience to be or simply allow us to say more about the causes and symptoms of contemporary living?  If we were to build a robot whose personality was pulled from every book in the library, would this one help it to take some mercy on people or would it just refuse to do the dishes?  I wonder if this isn't the first true book of an eventual mathemesis that could be used to translate human thought and feeling for machines. It may sound a little extreme, but in this way KOK seems to have gotten to the mechanics of love.  
    
Leonard Cohen's Democracy    
 

Out to Sea: An Appreciation

I have been thinking about old habits, of those I think I have outgrown, but having been reminded of them I become filled with a nostalgia for their grip, a longing, if for nothing else, for the known past. Like a hermit crab, if it could miss the snugness of its old shell. That nostalgia may be important. It may be the only place where I can find a sense of departure, a measure for psychological growth, but it's rife with peril because it can easily induce vertigo. It wouldn't be so hard to collapse back.

A teacher of mine once asked the class to tell him what the expression a painted ship upon a painted ocean indicated. There were answers, none of which he deemed right. Motion! I answered, picturing Bob Ross dabbing some spray around a ship's bow with a fan brush (look at that water: bold, churnin', carryin' on). My teacher shook his head at our collective stupidity, looking directly at me. Stillness, he said. A painted ship on a painted ocean is Coleridge's symbol for stillness.  It was there in the poem if I had bothered to read it.

Back then I used to read differently.  There was a long time when I sounded out the words in my head and placed each word next to each other and slowly, slowly assembled meaning and should meaning not come forth, I would stop and flip through the dictionary or refer to the shelf loaded with the leather bound volumes of Encyclopedia Britannica. Building meaning sometimes took an hour or more and by then I would need to start the assignment over again to try to get the full sense of what I was reading.

A vestige of that style of reading carried with me all the way through college.  It wasn't until I read Gravity's Rainbow that that habit broke out of necessity. It was the Spring of my graduating year. I had technically graduated that winter, but I had stayed on since I had found a job in the media department at my school.  I fixed broken 4 x 5 cameras. I serviced the color printer in the photo dome. I rented equipment to students with valid IDs. I helped shoot a video textbook that a visiting professor was making on avant guard art starring Rikrit Tiravanija, among others. I lived in a house with four other kids and the parents of a kid we knew through a friend. The parents were the landlords and weren't supposed to be living in the house, but had decided at the last moment to renovate their house and split the first floor with me. They had a microphone and an amp and would sing either the Eric Burden version of House of the Rising Sun or Ween's Piss Up a Rope with one of the other four kids I lived with (the kid I found from time to time shitting in my bathroom because she had run out of toilet paper on her floor of the house). But it was Spring in Ohio. The thaw had become a general budding and there was music, better music, escaping the windows of the conservatory I walked past to get to work.

I had the Penguin Modern Classics edition of GR with the V2 schematics on the cover. I keep to this day a kind of running list of books that people recommend to me or that are referenced within books I have already read and adored. This auxiliary list exerts a significant pressure, compulsive and consumptive. For my entire college life, I just wanted to be able to choose the books I could read.  It's probably what drew me to creating my own major and can be credited with the many C's that litter my transcript.  There was a thirst that I could not get a handle on.  I asked first to understand then to know, if that makes sense, outside of the arrogance of a freshly minted twenty-one year old. There were things that seemed so elemental that were completely left out of the college curriculum. I didn't have the patience for the iterative steps. I wanted the big picture. The biggest picture. I was very much attuned to the idea that the world was knowable and would have gladly carried an x-ray machine on my back from block to block if it meant I could see everything-- the danger, the opportunity that each day wore underneath its ordinary clothes.  

There was also no small amount of social pressure to say that I finished it, GR, that book held up as the paragon of postmodern complexity. It had been recommended by a friend of mine who dabbled in postmodern lit for fun, who had the book pressed upon him while studying at Oxford. I had mishandled that friendship. I picked a moment after he had broken his leg playing soccer to let him know that I needed some space.  As a result, that friend and I had been in less frequent contact than we had been the previous year when I had bought the book, which means the spine had been staring at me for at least a year and that I had, as I did in those days, re-read the first few pages at least a dozen times to get the rhythm. I wasn't fully aware yet of the distance I had put between myself and this friend. Even now I am aware only of the possibility of our return to full friendship as it stands, fifteen years out, that the time of our mutual affection is now something subterranean and that some force would be needed to bring it back to the light of reality. So it may have been still within the acts of friendship, competition and lingering resentment that I decided to read Gravity's Rainbow, at last.  I was also in love and the intercession of that fundamental feeling may have been the solvent that suspended everything that year.

Time is a game only children play well.   

I miss in part the freedom of that arrogance, its prod. There is something almost holy about the arrogance of the young. It is simultaneously our most animalistic feature and the feature that separates us the most from nature. A superiority built upon the most spurious credentials, the achievements of youth taken as an end unto themselves, the eighty yard runs,  the gleaming report cards, the mere fact of youth with all of its heliocentricity. Yet I feel a great many problems that would seem otherwise unsolvable were only initially addressed due to its presence, that secret sentence shouted with every thought, I am better than this! Of course it only worked in those cases where the thought was grounded in some actual ability and I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell has some good stats about how the people who solve insurmountable problems in their youths were actually never young, but suffered some kind of Benjamin Button like disorder where they intellectually aged in reverse so applied themselves in their youths and caroused in their 60's. To get older, is to learn how to doubt yourself with style, but also to learn that confidence and arrogance are miles apart. Maybe neither truly matter past appearances.    

A good deal of my early intellectual arrogance (who's to say it's over) was the result of that class, the one where the teacher asked us the meaning of Coleridge's simile.  He taught us to think, or so he said, woke us from our intellectual stupors.  He got me to read, to begin reading and to begin questioning what I read, for which I'm eternally grateful, but he also set up a self-critical paradigm, a kind of zero point in my learning based on the humiliation of ignorance. Okay not to ding him too much, because he wasn't the only teacher who taught by spectacular humiliation, I went to an all boys Catholic school after all and sometimes the only way to cut through the green fog of indifference was to break a kid down. He was just the one who raised it to an art form. It's still there to this day, a kid made of all of the mistakes I've ever made, swollen with them, the little fuckhead, my inner Mr. Bungle.  This kid is so essential to my thinking, is so full of my own partial understandings, prejudices and old ignorances that when I find his shape outside of me, say in the shape of someone else who maybe shares a misunderstanding of which I have long since disabused myself, my first instinct is to make fun of the person. In a way it's a mark of comfort and friendship, a mark of sameness, a reflex of pier to pier connoisseurship, the kind that's used to sniff out insider knowledge, like the deepest cut on Chubby Checker's discography (a doggone space baby), but it's also polarizing, limiting-- well, dick-ish, right? But to think about that kid, the little fuckhead, is almost bathetic. It's impossible to rehabilitate Mr. Bungle, to normalize relations with him. He must remain a whipping boy. Mustn't he?  I read over this summer Watching the Body Burn by Thomas Glynn. Glynn's world is defined by the illogic of youth and through the portrait of his father he shows effectively how the long trace of that illogic grows well into adulthood, whether its partially suppressed by alcoholism or expressed outright in unchecked bigotry. In Glynn's world, Mr Bungle is the operator.  (See here for an interview Thomas Glynn conducted with Frank Zappa).         

So too, the odd ease with which the effects of love can be extended to those completely outside its sway, an infection local only to the sufferers of that condition, since it's bred from the senses and the misapprehensions which live solely in their brains. In my case, I could sense only the slack I was due as a person in love, that it was my right to withdraw, to be tied up and preoccupied and that everything else could hang until the day I was able to return to their priority, like a Rip Van Winkle certain both of his nap and that things would all remain the same. 

I actually hurled the book, sitting on my bed alone in my room, chucked it so it flew, the many unread pages fluttering as a kind of warning and startled my toilet paper rustling roommate so bad she let out a scream when the spine went kunk against the bathroom door. I let it stay where it landed, facedown against the baseboard for what I thought would be forever. I had run into the Kenosha Kid sequence and I couldn't for the life of me figure out what the fuck he was saying.  Forever turned out to be a day. When I picked it back up and carried on, I decided to take in as much as I could. Full comprehension may not necessarily be the key to making it through the book and I wanted to say I had finished it.  GR was on my auxiliary list.  The fact that it was put there by my friend with the broken leg, the one with whom I had mismanaged my side of the friendship, it made it seem like reading it through would connect us again, that it would go into some column of material we could touch on should the friendship return in full.  At the same time, completing it would mean I was independent of him, that the debt I owed him of reading a book he had recommended was there-by fulfilled and that in reading it I was his equal and so wouldn't need him. If all of this existed, it formed a layer around the book jacket and snuck into the bracket holes/ censor marks that broke each section of the book.

But when I made it through, I was fully under the book's spell. I hadn't resurfaced by the time the last page was turned. It actually wasn't until a few weeks had past that I found that the novel started to unpack itself.  Scenes would bubble up and I'd gasp at what I missed the first time through.  Questions would arise about plot points, historical details and luckily at this point, the internet was a thing, so I went online and found a treasure trove of resources, not the least being Tim Ware's indexes at the old Hyperarts page (now turned to http://thomaspynchon.com/). What I found was a great match for the drive, an answering voice for that drive to understand everything (and that this need doesn't necessarily obey linearity) and a model slightly outside of the Mr. Bungle model for learning.  The book gave you everything and you had the freedom to find yourself within it.       




Considering it now, the notion of a painted ship on a painted ocean makes me kind of nauseous. I think of a sudden stillness brought on as the ship tilts into a painted wave, Bob Ross replaced with Albert Pinkham Ryder, caught as I sometimes am when the subway stops on a banked portion of the track. Caught, standing on my toes like Gidget on her surfboard, the surf itself a rear-projection, so incapable of moving anything or settling completely. It's a bit like the stasis that comes from too much navel gazing, the desire to act but the inability to do so either because of a lack of self-confidence or fear of repetition.   But its not self-consciousness alone that breeds stasis, it's self-consciousness with a refusal to own your thoughts, to accept them as your own and so valuable that tends to shut things down.  

I was lucky to get an afternoon a couple weeks back to catch Inherent Vice on the big screen, the 35 mm print on a real projector with scratches and bubbles and cigarette burns and shit.  I was trying to recall the book, but this happens to me sometimes.  Books melt away if I don't think about them regularly or talk to someone about them.  So I was probably as prepared as Doc Sportello for the fun. Now, a little ways after the pic-- enjoyable for its willingness to go there, to be dense and funny and unreal but never quite as fluid rhythmic or funny as the book--I recall a whole subplot involving a country that broke off the edge of California and dropped into the ocean that didn't make it into the film, Lemuria, and its parallel with the lost ideals of the 60's.  That lost country laying somewhere below the surface waiting to be rediscovered.   

David Bowie Golden Years
Boredoms Seadrum
Mr. Bungle Sweet Charity

Devotion Over Time Equals Meaning: Proust's Mysticism

From Giotto's St Francis cycle

The means whereby to identify dead forms is Mathematical Law. The means whereby to understand living forms is analogy. By these means we are able to distinguish polarity and periodicity in the world. 

-Oswald Spangler, The Decline of the West, Charles Francis Atkinson, trans.
[NB-- I started reading this after coming across a reference in KOK's second volume. Haven't finished yet, but found the quote interestingly close to Proust's formulation.  With Proust though, the formulation seems to apply more to personal history.  From what we see of capital H history in In Search of Lost Time, it is attended to and created by people caught in the pettiness of the former, so perhaps there is its fingerprint.]

Diverting Analogies, Pleasurable Loops

Walter Benjamin, in The Image of Proust, trims an outline of the author, from youth to recluse that when held against up against the life of say St. Francis or the life of Buddha, makes Proust's epiphany resemble a kind of holy conversion.  The story is there-- the wealthy young man, leading a life of luxury and excess, experiences a moment that recreates his entire being.  St Francis found his catalyst in a dream, followed by the public humiliation of his early return from the Crusades. He is then moved toward an ascetic life after encountering a leper. Buddha grew up in a palace where his every need was cared for. It isn't until he leaves his palace and encounters a sick old man and a funeral that he begins to seek austerity. Both of their conversions occurred over years and our accounts of them are given from the outside, mediated by dogma.  There is something to be said about the relative seclusion and opulence that attended their youths and the sensitivities that these childhoods bred and there may also be something superhuman about Proust.  The eloquence he displays in synthesizing his memories, in limning the ways in which the significances of a moment, of a belief, or of an idea yield over time, ripen and rot and grow anew, transcends his experience. It transcends the form of the novel and vibrates between novel, essay and memoir, using novelistic tropes as foils for deepening his reader's relationship to the progress of character. If there is within the Bildungsroman the remnants of the Medieval confession, its shape can be found here as well.

What benefit can Proust see in self-study outside of the ability to reach a synthesize, to find his life?  He makes the point that a life without review is basically un-lived, but if this is a question about capacity, it is a deeper question about Modernity. If Proust's epiphany can be taken as a kind of conversion, what quantity should we assign to this shape of mysticism?  If it is a reflex within the human organism, then perhaps we can use it as a bridge to understanding those earlier conversions. If it is separate, irrevocably apart and situated in the a-historical moment of life after the WWI, perhaps it is a new form.

I spent about nine or ten posts devoted to the concept of modern literary capacity (see the IPoStHL tags, if you're interested). The Modern mystic is a kind of oxymoron and, in Proust, the irony of his withdrawal seems convenient to his illness, to his heart-brokenness, and to his misanthropy-- not that any of those reasons would be excluded from the lives of earlier mystics, but in the context of The Search for Lost Time they form a brittle portrait of the author, a human rind that protects the fruit of the work and it seems we can't have one without the other, so the only remnant is devotion-- and I may have mentioned this earlier, but Proust's only true avowed devotions seem to be to time and music.

I recently attended a Bat Mitzvah that my father-in-law, who is not a rabbi, officiated.  The Bat Mitzvah was held in the basement of a home in New Jersey and he mentioned that traditionally synagogues are humble buildings, that the buildings don't matter. Jews worship within the cathedral of time. The phrase struck a chord.

In considering the progress of Charles Swann through In Search of Lost Time,  his assimilation and his rejection from the Faubourg St Germaine, plotted against the backdrop of the Dreyfus Affair, provides ample insight into the anti-semitism of the time. I learned recently that Proust's mother was Jewish but Proust himself was baptized and confirmed as a Catholic (a faith he later rejected). In considering the way in which Proust foregrounds Swann's struggle within society and studies it with such an obsessive eye, I felt as a reader almost assured that the narrator too would fall into the same traps as Swann and lose his standing. The novel instead uses this kind of false foreshadowing to highlight the great folly of youth, that in seeking our models we mistake their errors for our own and remain blind to the personal monstrosities we have been nursing all along. There is an added soupcon to consider Swann as well as a kind of model for the narrator-Proust's assimilation.

Within Jewish history there is the story of historical recursion, of repeated pogroms, depredations and struggle. Recursion is written into the Jewish story. But within rituals, the Bat Mitzvah for instance, we find the routinization of struggles and the joyful celebration of their conquest-- momentary as it may be.  Here we have an adequate parallel to Proust's temporal analogies, the celebratory moment in survival.  However, the kind of experiences that strike the sympathetic memory cannot be ceremonial. The analogous moment must sneak up on the intellect, it needs the element of surprise to strike the deepest chord, which is precisely where the routinization of faith fails.  It's not to say that the faithful are exempted from these kinds of experiences. The tragedy of the content of faith is that it is lost to repetition. It dies to provide the structure to the living part of ceremony. The spiritual crisis of Modern man may in part be due to the failure of religion to adapt out of cyclical and stale repetitions. In Proust's attention to phenomena we may find a temporary antidote.  To see it from a humanist perspective, Proust's --or any -- purported mysticism is interesting only in that it reveals an order apart from that of the mundane senses.  Its reward may be a constant inward search for similitude that cracks out the endorphins, that and a kind of kinship born across the several selves we leave in time. Its price is solitude.  Its corruption is nostalgia.

For another time: song structures and recurrence, Girl Talk and the memory of music, Nick at Night, the memory content of memes, Beckett and forgetting...

The Ear

He cannot move the furniture
through that small aperture, yet
expects it must serve
used with reserve,

To wit, the company that comes
runs to be first in,
arranges what it can
within the man,

who (poor fool) bulges
with secrets he never divulges.

-Robert Creeley

E-Z Listening: Schubert Six Moments Musicaux No. 3

Takashi Murakami Buddha at Versailles. Image by Christophe Ena

Gridpoliteque

Some theme music for gridpolitics by Dremstat: via Vangelis, via Trainspotting, via Tron for fire-y chariot home-karaoke: https://soundcloud.com/gridpolitics/gridpoliteque

Notes on Twin Peaks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Commercial Art by Dave Gunton

Notes on Twin Peaks, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Commercial Art 

by Dave Gunton

1.

I recently watched Twin Peaks for the first time, binge-watching the 30 episodes over the course of a month on Netflix.  The thought I had 5-10 times each episode was: this was on network television in 1990?  The series is so weird, gory, fanciful, disturbing.  An apparently familiar murder mystery narrative dissolves into a supernatural fantasia, and the show ends, depending upon interpretation, with the image of our hero--our unwavering companion for 29 plus episodes--in the maniacal possession of a demon, as discouraging an ending as I’ve experienced in narrative art.  (Although that ending was only supposed to be a season finale.  When ABC declined to pick up Twin Peaks for a third season, it became the series finale.)  Mostly I felt disbelief that Twin Peaks ever was made and then broadcast.  The highest rated show in the 1990-1991 television season was Cheers.  The next season it was 60 Minutes.

2.

Twin Peaks is a parade of quintessentially American themes and archetypes.  The town sheriff, Harry S. Truman (great), wears a cowboy hat and recalls countless lawmen who strive to bring order to chaos in American Westerns.  Donna, Audrey, and the late Laura Palmer are all femme fatales, good girls on the outside who lure men astray.  It is 1990 in the show, but Audrey wears hoop skirts and saddle shoes like it is 1955.  In fact it still seems to be the 1950’s--America’s favorite decade to romanticize--throughout much of Twin Peaks.  The Double R Diner, where the waitresses wear turquoise dresses, is the town meeting place, and James, riding a motorcycle in his black leather jacket, is Marlon Brando, the scarred boy rebel with the heart of gold.  Meanwhile our hero Agent Cooper is the reformed, born again man who now adheres to a strict moral code, part Eliot Ness, part Tom Joad.  True to their a story about the dark undercurrents of life, the show’s creators, Mark Frost and David Lynch, reference a decade when America’s mainstream was perhaps most triumphant and those undercurrents were most in the shadows.

3.

Twin Peaks recalls the 1950s but it also recalls the 1850s, or at least the work of a man who was writing at that time.  I am not the first (or the second) to make the connection, but the show’s references to the stories of Nathaniel Hawthorne, in particular “Young Goodman Brown” are striking.  In that story the title character, a virtuous young man in a Puritan village who is soon to be married, wanders into the adjacent woods one night to find all of his fellow citizens engaged in devil worship.  He is even presented with his bride-to-be, Faith, so they may be indoctrinated into the dark cult together.  The town is the place of order and virtue, and the woods are the place of disorder, moral transgression, and evil.

Likewise in Twin Peaks the characters continually meet with violence and horror in the woods.  Laura Palmer retreats to the woods for a wild night of sex and drug use, and she does not live to the see the morning.  Her friend Ronette barely makes it out alive.  The Log Lady lives in the woods and prophesies the spirits that lurk there.  One Eyed Jack’s is a casino in the forest over the Canadian border where you can drink, gamble, and pay for sex.  The serial killer Windom Earl sets up shop in a log cabin.  Major Briggs is abducted by some mysterious force in the forest.  There is an evil that lives in these woods, Sheriff Truman says in an early episode.  And ultimately the characters discover The Black Lodge, what may be interpreted as a portal in the woods to a netherworld of horrors, with Agent Cooper and his beloved Annie standing in for Young Goodman Brown and Faith.

4.

I wonder though whether this dichotomy of town/forest, order/disorder, resonates in our contemporary culture.  The more common experience today seems to be to retreat to the woods as a place of calm and escape the frenzied stimulus overload of the city.  Or perhaps these dichotomies look different from the vantage point of New York City, versus the vantage point of rural Washington.

5.

I read about Twin Peaks after I finished I watching it.  Apparently it was never the intention of Frost and Lynch to reveal the identity of Laura Palmer’s killer.  They only did so in season two in response to pressure from ABC, which was concerned about sagging ratings, and believed that the audience needed resolution.  A developing love interest between Agent Cooper and Audrey ends rather abruptly in season two, and apparently the cause was the objections of Lara Flynn Boyle, the actress who played Donna, and who off-screen was romantically involved at the time with Kyle MacLachlan, the actor who played Agent Cooper.  Ms. Boyle did not care to see Mr. MacLachlan involved with Sherilyn Fenn, the actress who played Audrey, on screen.  Enter then, rather suddenly in season two, the actors Billy Zane and Heather Graham, whose characters become the love interests of Audrey and Agent Cooper, respectively.  And of course the show’s creators did not intend to end the show with season two, with their hero in the throes of a demon, but that was simply the last episode that was made.

6.

How, then, are we to accept something like Twin Peaks as a work of art, when the artists are not calling all the shots?  We are reminded that television shows are fundamentally products, vehicles to sell advertising, and but for that commercial purpose they would not exist.  (In 1990 they were used to sell advertising; now they may be used to sell subscriptions instead, but they are always selling something.)  So of course in the case of a television show, the network can have a heavy hand in deciding what the show looks like, from plot, to casting, to direction.  We as viewers want to think of Twin Peaks as Mark Frost and David Lynch’s pure artistic vision, and interpret it on those grounds.  But it is not.  It, like many shows, and many works of art, was shaped in part by countless commercial interests.

7.

Is it then still a work of art at all?  It is tempting to say that once commercial considerations shape in part a work of art, it is no longer art at all, it is merely product.  That seems harsh though.  The dream sequence in season one, episode three of Twin Peaks, in the red room with Laura Palmer and The Man From Another Place, one of the most enduring images from the series: nobody at ABC dialed that up, I’m sure.  That is pure Frost / Lynch madness.  You can’t take that away from us.  So what are we talking about here?  Was the show 75% art and 25% commerce, and we will just focus our interpretive interest on the artistic part?  How can we, when the commercial part had such a profound effect as to force the revelation of the killer, when that was not the creators’ intent (and what Mr. Lynch calls one of his biggest professional regrets).  

8.

And these issues are not confined to television shows but surely are present in nearly every artistic form, certainly every popular form.  Every book, album, or movie that is distributed by a major publisher, label, or studio is shaped by commercial considerations, to a greater or lesser extent. 

9.

No doubt Nathaniel Hawthorne thought about commercial considerations as well.  He anonymously self-published his first novel, Fanshawe, and it did not sell at all.  The Scarlet Letter has never struck me as a work of marketing, but I imagine Hawthorne gave some thought as to the kind of book readers might like to buy.  Hawthorne’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, may not have technically been paid by the word, but he was paid by installment, receiving payment for each 32 pages of text he provided for serialized novels like David Copperfield and Bleak House.  Was he selling novels or toasters?

10.

It seems unforgiving to say that art that bears any commercial influence is no longer art.  I enjoy many such works of art, like Twin Peaks, finding them not only entertaining but deeply thoughtful and meaningful.  Still I find myself increasingly drawn to art forms that are free(r) from commercial influence.  Paintings.  Early 20th century western swing music: the only consideration there seemed to be what would make people dance (itself a kind of commercial consideration).  Low-budget movies.  I used to think that criticizing something as “corporate” was just a tired cliche.  Now I find anything anti-corporate, anti-commercial to be inherently attractive.

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for CK 

David Lynch for YSL 

David Lynch for Armani

David Lynch for Playstation (post twin peaks) 

David Lynch PSA (pre twin peaks) 

David Lynch for Dior (post) 

Dave Gunton is the Fiction Editor of the Paris Review.

Dave Gunton lives with his wife and two daughters in Athens, GA.  You can find him on Twitter at @DavGun10 and on Tumblr at davgun10.tumblr.com.

Walking Shots, Biked Over

Robert Smithson's concept for a floating island.

Stanley Crawford's concept for a man-made floating island. Image courtesy of http://www.stanleycrawford.net/ (buy some shallots).

Love that Smithson painted geological cross-sections.  Always found these so engrossing in text books. 

John Gerrard's Solar Reserve at Lincoln Center.  An LCD screen displaying a virtual solar power station written over a vacant expanse of Nevada desert.

Beneath the watery April sun, an occasional police car or jeep cruised slowly, watchfully, among the bright shoals of cyclists who floated, flushed, moist, openmouthed, above wantonly pumping legs, curiously disowned, jumping knees, and the transparent whir of wheels.   

-Harold Brodkey, Hofstedt and Jean--and Others, originally published in the NewYorker, 1969. 

 I was nearly hit by a cyclist the other day.  I was crossing 5th ave with the light and he came careening downhill with no intention of stopping.  I panicked and froze and he squeezed his brakes until his bike squealed and he popped forward on his seat. We each checked if the other was okay before we started yelling. I had the light, was my point. What if he was a car, was his point. To which I again stated, that I had the light-- this is generally less of a problem for cars. I told him he should watch where he was going and I assumed he was just as much in shock as me, because what if I had been a car? but then I grew furious with him and conceded, yes, it is true assholes who want to go fast and ignore traffic lights can drive cars or bikes. He told me to go fuck myself. I had actually just gotten off my bike. I had locked it up before crossing the street. I had the helmet tucked under my arm as I was yelling at the guy.  I was thinking about this today when my train stopped.  Strap-hanging for fifteen minutes with only the dark of the tunnel on the other side of the window, I became conscious of a fear that somehow time would figure out a way to stop-- time would stop but but my consciousness would remain active, my subway car would drop out of time, my fellow passengers would not age and would not feel time passing and though we'd all be stuck with one another, we'd remain as equally inaccessible as if the train were moving and we were waiting for the next stop. It is with biking that the frustrations of mass transit-- of being held momentarily due to the train traffic ahead, of sick passengers, of investigations and earlier incidents, of the people who look as if they've already died twice that day that stay plastered in place even though there's room in the middle and of the others who wedge themselves through the closing doors, of the basic package of powerlessness the city offers its residents--disappear.  I love riding my bike in the city.  At its best I feel as if I'm floating just eight inches above the city, which is enough to feel euphoric.  The city and its rules peel away.   The biking passages in Hofstedt and Jean-- and Others are the best I've come across for detailing the sensation of riding in the city. 

Frank Zappa plays a bicycle on Steve Allen in 1963.

         

Gowanus

Irricule

Magic hour