Back in the days of Appleworks and WordPerfect, we all had dot-matrix printers. As far as anything of the sort can be, they were pretty musical. You had the constant hum of the printer head, the rhythmic chunk at the end of each line, and a variety of sounds depending on what was being printed. For normal text, it would usually come out as undifferentiated chattering, but I used to get a visceral thrill from the sharp ring of a divider line, and was irritated when bold type made the entire casing rattle with a deep roar.
The User's Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers, from last year, downplays the more obnoxious noises and sticks to the cleaner sounds of simple characters like dots. "Control to Efficiency" really makes something out of the resonance of heads just moving along the track, not printing. The other two excerpts are reminiscent of glitch-style electronica--you could tell me it was Farmers Manual and I'd probably believe it--and are for me less interesting. You can use dot matrix printers as rhythm machines, but with everything on earth already having been sampled for rhythm, it's not as noteworthy.
The other instance that I know of is Hugh Davies "Printmusic" from the mid-80's. Davies is probably best known for being a member of the Music Improvisation Company in the late 60's and early 70's with Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, and Jamie "If we carry on like this we're gonna end up like King Crimson" Muir. Muir abandons the rhythm aspect as much as possible and focuses on the variety of timbres and unclean tones that his Epson LX-80 printer can produce. In the 80's, I owned an Epson L-series printer, and despite its sturdy ordinariness, Epsons had one distinguishing characteristic: they were loud. You could hear it anywhere in the house once it started going, and Davies' result is much harsher than The User's, and closer to the sound source. It could be a different instrument. It's not any more musical than his other work, but it isn't especially less so; he gets a lot of mileage out of it over five minutes. (The composition is one page long, for those of us who forgot how slow these things were.) But the best experience is to be had from following the printed score as it plays, as lines like these are translated into recognizable sounds:
Via correspondence to Bellona Times, Paul Kerschen tells of a story of Joyce dictating Finnegans Wake to Beckett:
There was a knock at the door which Beckett didn’t hear. Joyce said, "Come in," and Beckett wrote it down. Afterwards he read back what he had written and Joyce said, "What’s that ‘Come in’?" "Yes, you said that," said Beckett. Joyce thought for a moment, then said, "Let it stand." He was quite willing to accept coincidence as his collaborator. Beckett was fascinated and thwarted by Joyce’s singular method. (Ellmann, 649)
I haven't read enough of the Wake to comment on how dastardly the intrusion actually is--I've looked at the passage and it seems obtrusive and isolated enough to be disregarded--but it is this ethic that, intuitively to me, seems to reflect itself in the act of exhibitionism to young girls that figures early on in Finnegans Wake. But Joyce's own private use (private even, I believe, from Stuart Gilbert) of the sigla does seem to mitigate against the charge of pure japery, and it's that somewhat submerged ethic that keeps even non-obsessives wondering if the thing holds the meaning of the universe. On the other hand, it could just be a joke on the third item in Ray's taxonomy of desperation, a tinge of regret that he gave up the five or six schema variations too quickly. But Joyce wasn't that much of a joker.
(And Beckett had his own preoccupations as well.)
What later became a proving ground for indulgence vs. earnestness was the Oulipo, whose trickeries have overshadowed the vast differences between the efforts of its authors. Harry Mathews has more in common with B. S. Johnson than with Raymond Queneau, Italo Calvino, and Georges Perec, and even Perec and Queneau, the most famous of the French set, are atypical next to, say, Jacques Roubaud, a seemingly more archetypal Oulipo writer who bears more of a resemblance to Donald Barthelme than he does to any of the aforementioned. That the rubric doesn't include Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon, who can be considered defiantly post-surrealist and viably experimental, makes the affiliation seem rather superficial: these authors were brought together by their love of palindromes, of games, of metafictional tour-de-forces.
And I think this is the reason that, with the possible exception of Perec, these authors' most significant work was done outside of their association with the Oulipo, and their work inside of it was their most playful. (With Mathews, I see the difference as almost polar, particularly in his later work like Cigarettes and The Journalist.) The indulgence was a consequence of the context, of the avowed project.
The name-dropping in the last two paragraphs isn't so important. The point is that the oil and water of logorrheic brinksmanship and the drive towards hidden universals (e.g., the sigla) can coexist. Some authors, like Beckett and Barthelme but also, for example, Lawrence Sterne, mostly reject one or the other. Many of the Oulipo authors worked with both at different times. In Ulysses, Joyce worked with both simultaneously. I suspect the same is true of Finnegans Wake.
The short but daunting Pedro Paramo does share some things with The Obscene Bird of Night: a wealthy landowner and his horrific son, a madonna/whore figure, and a very whacked narrative structure. But Rulfo's book is not about the creative process at all, and deals with a fixed, if endlessly refracted, set of circumstances.
Juan Preciado returns to the town of Comala, which his mother had left when he was just a baby. His father is Pedro Paramo, the landowner, enforcer, and tyrant of the entire town. Comala is literally a ghost town; Juan is taken in by a series of maternal spirits that guide him through the history of the town and its death, brought on by Paramo.
Paramo owns all the land, and with the willing assistance of the church, most of the town is dragged into corruption, philandering, and decay along with him. As landowner, Paramo comes to infect the land, and violence suffuses the entire town. This is personified by Paramo's son Miguel, who is a serial rapist and eventually comes to an end when he's killed by his horse, before he can be killed by another man planning Miguel's death. Rulfo is clear that all the chaos and evil is arising from Paramo's hands, similar to the second part of Goethe's Faust, as when the old woman Dorotea, who has lost her son, makes a deal with Paramo to round up women for Miguel. When Paramo's unattainable love, the insane figure of redemption Susana, dies, Paramo shuts the entire town down, mandating that the farmland become dead and funding revolutionaries. He is eventually killed by another bastard son of his, leaving the town to the ghosts of its past inhabitants.
Those are the basics. There is a great UT essay that delves more deeply into the background. What makes the book difficult is the hopscotch narration, which jumps between Juan's dealings with the residential ghosts of the town, his channeling of the non-ghost souls those departed who exist in a mental limbo, and non-linear retelling or straight narration of the past. It's not as chaotic as it initially seems once the basic rhythms are established. Juan hears more and more levels of the story, and at the height of it, communicates with Susana, who is lost in the reliving of Paramo's attentions, which she ignores, and her escapes to swim in the ocean, which constitutes her escape from Paramo. The structure is loosely a spiral, and by the end of the story Juan has completely disappeared, absorbed into the weave of fragments and voices.
The issue is what effect the treatment has on more or less classical, realistic material. Rulfo intends to have Paramo have acted in such a way as to create a purgatory, his shutdown crippling the progression of time and of souls. Body/soul dualism is very prominent here, and Rulfo has a bizarre version of it, since bodies go on as sentient ghosts without souls. And clearly, no salvation is at hand. To the extent that a clear end to the story would function as that anyway, the book does read as having an entrance but no exit. It trails off shortly after Paramo's death, but the revelations of what have been going on are sequenced so that no real conclusion exists. Paramo's death is known from the start, and the circumstances of his life and of the town's life don't end with his death as much as with the death of Susana. The discovery that it's another of his sons who kills him is fitting, but it is so in line with what has gone before that it is not revelatory. Still, the material itself is intact. Rulfo's elaboration through the after-the-fact ghosts and souls does not fundamentally alter the plot, which is traditionally tragic. It instead attempts to offer a version of how the events are perceived by those who experience them rather than by a reader. Mostly, there is infinity instead of closure and claustrophobia instead of perspective.
Despite the narrative shuffling, I believe that Rulfo was going for this simple effect of exploring tragedy as experienced rather than as viewed. It's a selfless approach, and of all his admitted fans who adopted and modified his approach with considerably greater levels of complexity, mythology, and confusion, only Gabriel Garcia Marquez used it in a similar manner to move away from literary artifice. (I might also admit Guillermo Cabrera Infante, but honestly, the jury's still out.) In comparison, Julio Cortazar in Hopscotch deploys the shuffling chiefly as a tool of abstraction away from experience. The problem is that while Rulfo's strategy may be more noble, it likely makes writing nearly impossible.
Thomas Bernhard has always put me ill at ease. He possesses a unique style that promises much but is forever getting caught up in itself and carefully avoiding revelation. The intrusion of childish ranting in his later work is disappointing. And there is always the allusion to something missing, something very carefully left out as though it were anathema. The novella "Walking" does provide a partial key in a way that most of his other work doesn't, but it's only useful if you know the lock quite well. Bernhard's exit from his most hermetic work is well known: you can see it from The Loser on, and even in his autobiographical fragment Wittgenstein's Nephew. But the entrance is only revealed here.
The characters are typical of Bernhard: obsessive, ruminative, prone to running off at the mouth, and always men. Bernhard's rhythmic style and intense repetitions come across regardless of the translator, though I think Sophie Wilkins always did the most convincing job of rendering them in English. When he gets going, as all but his earliest work does, his run-on style gives the impression of skipping across water...but in slow motion. He can be read quickly, but Bernhard avoids building momentum, preferring to secure his mood moment by moment. After a few dozen pages, his work inevitably comes to seem sludgy, as you wonder if you will ever be granted more than the myopic view he is presenting. (The answer is no.) Bernhard's arid, obsessive elaboration on Beckett, Wittgenstein, and Broch is striking, but it can be limited.
"Walking" is an early novella, coming when Bernhard was just cementing his style, leaving the coherent grotesques of Gargoyles behind and beginning to focus on the minute (some would say petty) details of his Austrian world. Eventually this tack would turn into the extended anti-Austria cultural rants of Woodcutters and Old Masters, but in the 70's, Bernhard managed to avoid the poles of both abstraction and curmudgeonness while digging very deep in his chosen idiom.
Here, the narrator (a Bernhard stand-in who is a shadow of the other characters) walks with Oehler, who talks about their mutual friend Karrer, who has gone insane and is locked up in an asylum. The book divides into three parts. The beginning of the first can be read here. (Thanks to wood s lot for the link.) In it, Oehler lectures on the decay of Austria, which, in its refusal to provide funding, caused the brilliant chemist and unofficial philosopher Hollensteiner to commit suicide, which helped tip Karrer over the edge. Oehler's pronouncements are more rational and considered than Bernhard usually allows, and consequently they seem vapid. To someone who doesn't know Bernhard, it's an inauspicious start, with Bernhard failing to shrug off his predecessors.
Very, very few people have the strength to abandon their dislike of the country that is fundamentally ready to accept them with open arms and unparalleled good will and go to that country. They would rather commit suicide in their own country because ultimately their love of their own country, or rather of their own, the Austrian, landscape is greater than the strengths to endure their own science in another country.
In the second section, Bernhard's narrative redirection explodes as the narrator recounts Oehler telling him about telling Scherrer, Karrer's doctor, about an incident in a clothing store where Karrer lost control and ranted at length about the shoddy "Czechoslovakian rejects" that are the cause of the near-transparent patches in his trousers. It's a relief to see most of the philosophical pretense dropped, even as Oehler starts to look as badly off as Karrer, which is the sort of thing that tends to happen in Bernhard's work:
I again recognized to what degree madness is something that happens only among the highest orders of humanity. That at a given moment madness is everything...Psychiatric doctors like to make a note of what you tell them, without worrying about it, and what you tell them is a matter of complete indifference to them, and they do not worry about it.
In the third section, Oehler returns, somewhat different, to his philosophizing. Here he discusses the equivalency of "walking" and "thinking," considers them as inseparable activities, as inherently un-self-conscious activities, how the constant approach of new thought/territory and recession of old thought/territory is unceasing, and, eventually, how, as Karrer says, "This exercise will one day cross the border into madness." Oehler's tone is the same as the first section, as is the style, unsurprisingly, but Oehler is a bit more detached, and the narrator has long disappeared, except for the steady interruptions of "says Oehler." The second section acts as a key to the first section, since Oehler's ramblings now read as a fancier variant of the same kind of language game as Karrer's in the shop. The saner man's self-assuredness and confidence vanish under the threats that Oehler reveals: the prisons of certain types of substance and style a person sets for themselves, and the endless, fixed track that they follow at varying speeds.
The odd thing is, I wouldn't have figured this out had I not come to "Walking" late in the game. Wittgenstein's name gets dropped in a few spots (Karrer is apparently an expert), but the connections aren't as clear here as they are in later work. Read in isolation, "Walking" appears to have more in common with Schopenhauer because Bernhard isn't especially precise about the nature of the thought that drives people mad. It's as amorphous as the Will, and though Bernhard presumably intends the trousers scene to be a record of a moment of total loss of perspective, Karrer just seems existentially uptight. It doesn't quite come off, nowhere near as well as Roithamer's project to build a cone in the middle of the forest in Correction, where Roithamer is convincing as a Wittgenstein surrogate. But it's only having read this book that the first section of "Walking" can be seen as a lab experiment rather than an uninspiring sermon. (I still have my doubts.)
By Correction, published in 1975, Bernhard had dropped the generalizations completely and moved into an even more rarified type of sludge. Why I find it both impressively focused and unsatisfying will have to wait until later, but "Walking" is more focused than most, less blinkered than what was to come, and underneath it all, contains more of a justification for Bernhard's approach than anything else I've read by him. That first section makes the latter two damn near necessary.
Published by Pushkin Press in one of their cute, compact 5x7 editions, this is a novel with remarkably strange effects for its modest approach. There weren't many people writing about pure dissatisfaction in Europe or America in the mid-1930's, and Len Rix's very contemporary translation helps, superficially, to unmoor the book from time and place. It reads nothing like Dezso Kosztolanyi's social realism text Anna Edes, written a decade earlier. The setting hops from Budapest to Rome without incident, and the casual state of business and finances makes it seem as though the Great War never happened. Szerb came from a upper-class Hungarian background, and the novel contains traces of decadence and hints of a sheltered life. But Szerb reads sharper than all this....
Mihaly and Erzsi are a well-to-do but fundamentally lazy couple, and both are happy when they become separated during their honeymoon. Erzsi gets involved with manipulative men who treat her like dirt and nearly make her pine for Mihaly. Mihaly becomes obsessed with slipping into the shadows and divorcing himself from a staid, respectable life, following siblings Tamas (who committed suicide) and Eva, his tormented friends and masters as a teenager. Mihaly whines that he could never be as free as them, because "I was just too petty-bourgeois. At home they had brought me up too much that way, as you know." Still they cast him in their plays:
I don't have the slightest instinct for acting. I am incurably self-conscious, and at first I thought I would die when they gave me their grandfather's red waistcoat so that I could become Pope Alexander the Sixth in a long-running Borgia serial. In time I did get the hang of it. But I never managed to improvise the rich baaroque tapestries they did. On the other hand, I made an excellent sacrificial victim. I was perhaps best at being poisoned and boiled in oil. Often I was just the mob butchered in the atrocities of Ivan the Terrible, and had to rattle my throat and expire twenty-five times in a row, in varying styles. My throat-rattling technique was particularly admired.
Yet the book is light, with the same sort of bourgeois detachment that Mihaly finds in himself, and Szerb appears to intimate that this is how he himself deals with the world; i.e., that it would be inauthentic of him to deal with weightier topics that are outside of his own experience. Mihaly's relationship with Tamas is so myopic and worshipful as to bring back memories of Death in Venice, but I respect Szerb's book more. It holds itself back from pathos as well as romanticism.
Szerb died in the camps. There is nothing in Journey to suggest that he was at all troubled by what was coming; his detachment is greater than the Romanian Mihail Sebastian's in his Journal, where his aesthetic reveries are constantly interrupted by a creeping panic which eventually balloons. Mihaly, and by extension, Szerb, could not commit to such visceral unease, and the book is one of the few written before the deluge that acknowledges a bourgeois unreality with an unblinkered eye.
Richard Cochrane brings us a memorable image while reviewing an old Bill Laswell Praxis record:
Buckethead will be the sticking-point for most listeners. He sounds like an actor playing the part of a heavy metal guitarist, standing there on stage shredding his fretboard as if flanked by enormous quotation marks.
It's ripe for reuse:
Jonathan Franzen plays the isolated writer who locks himself in the closet and writes portentous truths about the world, as if flanked by enormous quotation marks.In front of European audiences, Richard Perle spews out Ugly American fantasies of empire, as if flanked by enormous quotation marks.
Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salo walks through a series of post-Genet allegories against Terrible Things as if flanked by enormous quotation marks.
Steven Pinker reiterates classically overblown nativist dogma as if flanked by enormous quotation marks.
Alex Golub discusses, in the January 28 entry on this page, Philip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, one of his best. As Golub implies, Dick drops the proto-VR line midway through the book for one of his unique renditions of mind-altered hell. I actually remember less of the political situation in the first half than the endless, shifting realities of the last half, and particularly the character who realizes he is never going to know objective reality ever again. I found Dick's sociology wanting in comparison, a mixture of isolationist paranoia and classically liberal pleas for love and peace, even in spite of happiness. But Golub draws a parallel between the escapist proto-VR of Dick's book and today's multiplayer games in terms of the sheer amount of energy people pour into them.
I take exception to his equating of first-world living with the total boredom of Mars, though. With Dick, the glamor and decadence of the Perky Pat game was inviting, but it's made clear that it's the distraction, the consumption of time, that made it necessary. Golub says:
Purged of the pathology of paranoic war mongering and financial scare tactics, in a realm where the world is as we have created it, the world online may prove to be an opening to utopia whose space we ought eagerly to explore.
That's not to say there aren't differences. Games allow for an imposition of artificial utility on groups of people that keep relationships going. Since utility-based relationships are always more durable, more constant, and less stressful than emotionally-based relationships, providing this utility in so many new and more enveloping forms is the most remarkable thing these games offer. Who wants to play intramural volleyball when you can start up an economy or take over a third of the land? The sheer amount of shared accomplishment is something that most people won't get from their work.
But still, work isn't so bad for the middle and upper-middle classes. It's not the nightmare that C. Wright Mills projected on to them, even if by all logic it should be. The minority of creative, neurotic, dissatisfied types run into trouble, but ask most workaday people, even the single, lonely ones, if they grant no importance, meaning, or significance to their jobs, and few will go whole-hog on it. Many will say that they would be far more bored without their job than with it. They won't say that they're happy, but they are involved, something that wasn't even possible on Mars. The times that they spend griping with their coworkers about this and that hold the same kind of emotional significance and attachment as multiplayer games. For amusements and even for accomplishments, they have to look elsewhere, but not for involvement.
Now, the word "amusement" is misleading, since there is far more importance in these things than the word suggests, just not the sort of escapism to which Golub alludes. They provide tremendous amounts of safety and comfort, sometimes in very impersonal ways. I'm thinking of a quote from cartoonist Chris Ware:
I know that if I had [a teleivision], you know, I might, "Oh well..." turn it on, maybe see what's on, and before I know it, I would be back to the way I was, eating Doritos and slugging orange pop. One of my art teachers at the University of Texas actually admitted that he had to have the television on to paint, otherwise he said he felt too "lonely." Television does seem to have this curious presence to it--I don't know if it's the high-pitched whine that the cathode ray tube makes, or what it is, but it can almost provide a sense of another person being in the room.
Some sociologist (was it David Riesman?) said that before television, the great unwashed masses found plenty of ways to waste their time in equally lazy and uncreative ways. Likewise with online games--you can theorize forever about the communities, the psychologies, the human relationships, but they are fundamentally amusements that cohabitate with "real" lives rather than supplanting them. The best thing about them is that no one is ever going to write a book called Playing The Sims Alone.
Berg comes to the small British town where his absentee father lives, checks into a boarding house, sleeps with his father's girlfriend, and eventually kills his father. There's some nonsense involving a wooden dummy, long passages about the look and feel of the town, and occasional imagistic reveries of self-hatred and other-hatred. Quin is stingy about what she gives you to work with, and I felt for a lot of the book that I was reading it forty years too late (it was written in 1964). So there's a missing context--what is it?
Although Quin inconsistently pulls back from a formal, abstruse description to pure stream-of-consciousness, she mostly sticks to a literalism that doesn't go beyond its settings. (The obvious conflict between the "low" occurrences and setting and Berg's stilted, hyper-affected prose underpins the book.) There is slow-motion physical comedy that is undeniably reminiscent of Beckett, and slow-motion objective observation that brings back bad memories of the endless, neutral descriptions of Alain Robbe-Grillet's Erasers, but underneath the language, the allegory, and a couple narrative blinds that don't seem to add up to much, the consistently boorish behavior of everyone involved, particularly the supporting characters, points to a different facet of mid-century modernist novels, best exemplified by Raymond Queneau. Not the Queneau of The Blue Flowers or The Sunday of Life and definitely not the Queneau of Exercises in Style; instead, the Queneau of Pierrot Mon Ami and Zazie dans le Métro, self-consciously provincial novels dealing with trivial events, whose "statements" are have very little to do with any ideology obeyed by their characters. Rather, they're "about" Queneau's rejection of any greater internal meaning his plots could take.
(For another, more morbid take on the same principle, see the work of Carlo Emilio Gadda. I find Gadda very difficult to read because his mystery melodramas don't ever add up, and not just because they don't end. Gadda deals with the whole anti-mystery concept in a very literal way, and his general effect is far more nihilistic than Céline, simply because Gadda is trying so hard.)
Queneau's books are the most concentrated example of the folklorish anti-meaning approach, but Italo Calvino was working in the same area in Marcovaldo and even in the earlier Baron in the Trees. Quin is too concerted (and, possibly, too British) to be as carefree as either, but Berg doesn't read like a rejection of Queneau's approach, more of an evolution of it. The distancing techniques, fantasies, and Freudian plot don't overpower what is ultimately a story about a very alienated and angry boy screwing around in a small British town. It's strongest when Berg is dealing with the small-minded landlady and tending to his incontinent father; it's weakest when Quin goes straight for symbolic effect and has Berg abruptly dress up in drag to be manhandled by his father. Quin needs basic realism to push off against, and when the course of the plot seems predetermined, the rationale for the abstract style disappears.
What is the rationale? It has something to do with taking the trappings of provincialism--boorish behavior made charming, Keystone Kops slapstick--and recontextualizing them. It had already been done with mythology and history, but despite the Oedipal situation, Berg isn't really about the past but about the specificity of a present that much closer to reality than to any literary idiom. Coming from a tradition that was far less fanciful than that which Queneau worked from, Quin had more territory to explore, but it makes you wonder how much she came back around to her Bloomsbury antecedents: the sensory overload of the prose at points almost resembles D.H. Lawrence.
No matter; the book is Quin's (not Berg's) triumph of literary fancy over rather terrible, base circumstances, even if it reads like a temporary victory. It is superior to books that came down the pipeline many years later dealing in the same sort of alienation, mostly American works like Gordon Lish's Extravaganza and Jay Cantor's Krazy Kat, which have too much affection for their sources to work at the same level as Berg. And when the writing calms down, as it does for brief spells, the small village is reminiscent of that in the Membranes' "Tatty Seaside Town" (1987), so that part of the book has dated fine.
Ray at Bellona Times presents us with an inspiring vision:
For the type of webloggers I read, the comparison that matters -- the comparison that decides the value of what they're doing -- isn't their hit count vs. the largest hit count on the web. What matters is their hit count vs. the number of readers they would have if they printed on paper (or not at all).
Blogs? The deal, I think, is this: I will pretend to read your crap; if you will pretend to read mine.
Much of the stuff coming out of literary academia in the last twenty years, give or take ten, would be, if self-published in pamphlet form, be branded the work of cranks. This is not to comment on its quality or worth; it is simply a statement about the sort of internal validation arcane, "technical" writing needs to gain credibility. When it's said that of course a layman couldn't understand Fredric Jameson, and two or three years of being a teacher's assistant is necessary to get it, there are two possibilities: one, that like neurobiology or electrical engineering, modern language theory is a well-founded discipline that has grown from a foundation of concrete; or two, that its validation is purely internal.
It might be presumptuous to make this observation if the speakers at the MLA weren't alluding to the same thing. The New York Observer takes far too much pleasure in reporting the dire state of the academy that rejected most of the paper's writers, and they fail to notice that what MLA President Stephen Greenblatt says--
We need to remind ourselves and gesture toward the fact that this is not an esoteric private club. It’s as big as the people riding on the subways with their noses in books, or at home watching television shows. Our culture is saturated with the making and consuming of stories.
What it points to, specifically, is an upcoming point at which the judgment of work will be so disciminatory as to rule out all but obvious geniuses or trend-setters. You can see it happening if, as the article suggests, academic presses cut down on the number of lit crit books published to the extent that it's no longer possible to differentiate between the gray masses of non-genius Ph.D.'s. If this stage is reached, where we're at now will look like an interim stage. Things may turn decisively commercial, with the classic gentleman's club of criticism so beloved by the old white men who prospered in it continuing in drastically diminished form, and the more fashionable theory disciplines generating something not too far off from market research. Since everything is a text anyway, it's not hard to see Ph.D.'s analyzing websites and magazines and producing area-targeted follow-ups of Growing Up Digital. Franco Moretti (read the review, it's quite good) has already analyzed the causes of the popularity of books of the past; why not take it into the future, where it'll be useful?
Assuming such a switchover happens, the arcane work, or what's left of it, has to move somewhere, and people including Stephen Greenblatt are already suggesting the web. In the absence of a silver bullet that preserves a prestige publishing industry at low cost, that's what will probably happen. At that point, the web, previously home to popularizations, incomplete understandings, and well-ground axes, will bulk up with some of the most incomprehensible writing imaginable, and their audience will be, at the end of the day, about as big as it was before. The point being that the current state of affairs, where the literary establishment publishes incomprehensible technical work and the web is home to chatty, colloquial correspondents, is unsustainable, and substantively speaking, the situation will probably invert before it stabilizes.
Why the Met? Evan Parker is the closest thing to a celebrity that the European improvising scene has thrown up, but the high art world has always been much slower to pick up on this less prestigious and less trendy little world that has, in large part, been funded by arts councils rather than by patrons or prizes. The last time he was in New York, Parker played at the Tonic, much more in line with his audience and with those he has influenced (that would be Zorn, among others). So how did he end up with a considerably higher profile show at the Met? Through an association, it seems, with photographer Thomas Struth, who was having a retrospective there, and evidently managed to snag a show for his friend as part of his exhibit. The Met was half-hearted about the presentation; here's the program blurb:
Hailed by the authors of The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD as "one of the finest and most virtuosic instrumentalists working in improvised music today," Evan Parker creates mesmerizing, spontaneous music using the technique of circular breathing pioneered by saxophone legend John Coltrane [sic]. Both precise, free, controlled and relaxed [sic], Parker's uninterrupted sheets of sound share a special spiritual affinity--in terms of concentration, focus, and openess [sic]--with the photographs of his friend Thomas Struth, whose work is currently the subject of a major mid-career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum.
It's true that most of Parker's solo work is more accessible than most everything else that emerged from the British scene at the same time. It has repetition, it has flow, it has its own harmony and rhythm. It also is still not to most people's taste, and I believe that after the show, most of the audience remained people who would not want a Parker album in their house. But this isn't so bad, since under the right circumstances, it came off for them. It became, briefly, a public music, and I think it's Parker's ability to at least adapt to that situation that has let him in for some criticism by his successors and old cohorts. It's true that Parker's solo style has settled in the last 15 years on one particular mode of performance, while the 15 years before that were far more varied, but his route towards being an inimitable icon led to that place, and to rest at one unique pinnacle--to become a reference point--is not a creative fault. He's still instantly recognizable, and the two players who I feel come closest to mimicking his style at points--Ned Rothenberg and Jon Lloyd--exist far more in the jazz world than in Parker's freer idiom. The free players that followed him--Urs Leimgruber and John Butcher are two of the more paradigmatic--always run the risk of being defined in relation to Parker, but it's Parker's clear identity that helps define their own idioms. It works both ways.
Parker being Parker, it is the forceful, concentrated presence of the man that provides much of the meat of the performance. So while I was worried that seeing Parker do his thing would seem a bit predictable after listening to dozens of his albums, the public nature of the event and the specificity of that night, that concert hall, and that audience marked the performance emotionally, even if I couldn't have detected that from a recording of the performance.
And since High Fidelity had been on television earlier that day, here's my top 10 chronological list of Parker albums that tower over their peers (based on Parker's playing, not always as albums in themselves):
1. Monoceros (solo, 1978)
2. Tracks (Parker/Barry Guy/Paul Lytton, 1983)
3. The Hearth (Parker/Cecil Taylor/Tristan Honsinger, 1988)
4. Elf Bagatellen (Parker/Alexander von Schlippenbach/Paul Lovens, 1990)
5. Nailed (Parker/Cecil Taylor/Barry Guy/Tony Oxley, 1990)
6. Portraits (London Jazz Composers Orchestra, 1993)
7. Duo (London) 1993 (Parker/Anthony Braxton, 1993)
8. Sankt Gerold (Parker/Paul Bley/Barre Phillips, 1996)
9. Most Materiall (Parker/Eddie Pr鶯st, 1997)
10. Live at Les Instants Chavirés (Parker/Noel Akchote/Lawrence Casserley/Joel Ryan, 1997)
When I was a kid, and I mean a cheerful, oblivious 8-year-old who was gobbling down Donald Duck comics, I couldn't tell the difference between Carl Barks's artwork and the rash of those inferior artists who succeeded and co-existed with him. I knew that his writing was better, though Gold Key/Whitman's endless reprinting of his painful "Riches, Riches Everywhere!" story occasionally put that into question. But out of a sheer lack of visual acuity, I couldn't see why it was that his drawing was so much more skilled, so much more well-proportioned, so much more careful. There actually was one difference that allowed me to identify Barks, once I figured it out: Barks was the only artist to use pie-cut eyes for all of his characters. Quality of artwork? Mystery to me. I hear these days that Tony Strobl wasn't such a bad artist compared to those who followed, but at the time I couldn't even tell.
Then the wave of fans who'd been Barks fans came around, with Another Rainbow and Gladstone doing their best to reprint the choice stuff and find new work of a higher grade, instead of picking randomly and often rather badly. Daan Jippes, William Van Horn, and Don Rosa were the big names. They used pie-cut eyes. They were committed to recreating Barks's particular vision of Donald Duck, Uncle Scrooge, the nephews, and all the other incidental characters. Since by that point I'd exhausted the collected works of Barks, I gobbled down the new work, which seemed as good as Barks's stuff. And I liked Rosa the most, because he seemed to buy into the greater mythology of it all; he was the most obsessed with past references, with dense storylines, with establishing new characters in the old continuum. The willingness to work with huge amounts of archival material as gospel and yet go no further (any sort of rewriting, much less "deconstruction", was strictly verboten) may be summed up best by this Q&A of a Disney animator:
Q: Who's your favorite Disney character?
A: Love Dewey, hate Huey.
Rosa is unapologetic. In The Comics Journal #183, he said:
Strangely enough people ask, "Aren't you excited about creating your own characters?" And I say, "No, I want to use Barks' characters!" That's the thrill, not creating my own. It's taking one of his characters and doing something else with it that I love. Because Barks used so many of them only once I can actually use these characters a second time!
I'm not going to pass judgment on Rosa's approach, but I will say that for a while he succeeded. When I first read the early stories, they might as well have been new Barks stories as far as I was concerned. Maybe this speaks to a lack of discrimination in my prepubescent years; it doesn't matter, since the new stories weren't intended for an eye that would be first drawn to Rosa's more crowded and worked-over art rather than the basics of plot and character. They were aimed at someone who would read them as though they were additions to the master's oeuvre.
Wealth Bondage squares the circle on matters of authority and authenticity and in the third paragraph mentions Trilling's Sincerity and Authenticity. The book is the height of Trilling's concern with Freud, something that Leon Wieseltier mostly elided in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, the ostensibly definitive Trilling collection he edited. From Wieseltier's selections, Trilling seems to think Freud a fellow critic; in Sincerity and Authenticity, he is a prophet. Speaking of Freud's pessimism about resolving the dissonance of the psyche, he says:
Why did Freud bring his intellectual life to its climax with this dark doctrine? What was his motive in pressing upon us the ineluctability of the pain and frustration of human existence?Freud, in insisting upon the essential immitigability of the human condition as determined by the nature of the mind, had the intention of sustaining the authenticity of human existence that formerly had been ratified by God. It was his purpose to keep all things from becoming 'weightless'.
Like the Book of Job, it propounds and accepts the mystery and the naturalness of suffering...It is this authenticating imperative, irrational and beyond the reach of reason, that Freud wishes to preserve.
I'm not unsympathetic to the end result, but Trilling's rescue of the Good and the Literary requires a peculiar God, one that holds out an endless problem to solve while offering little except the reward of further understanding. Thus, one who only holds an appeal for the most refined of intellects.
What does it offer for the rest of us? A return to an inherently "authentic" way of life, where we pay heed to the war in our heads by acknowledging it as our shared burden. Trilling's position is that cultural alienation is indubitably bad and that only through a shared effort in the tradition of the pragmatists and mythmakers like Lewis Mumford is there hope. He would no doubt lack patience for Colin Wilson's worship of the figure of the outsider if he deigned to mention Wilson at all. He seems to dismiss all forms of extreme and private individualism from Kierkegaard onwards.
The book, which was composed in 1970, concludes with an attack on the then-trendy but fading fast R. D. Laing and Norman O. Brown (and by way of them Thomas Szasz and Stanislaw Grof), and what Trilling views as their shared goal to escape through madness the tyranny of an inner self that demands to be mirrored in one's actions, holding out as a reward the badge of "sincerity." But Trilling's route forward, through the apotheosis of the psychic struggle, differs mostly in number rather than approach: Trilling wants us to all go together. It's hard to see how Trilling's approach to Freud differs that much from the ancient bicameral brain described by Julian Jaynes, whose right half plays the role of a god to the "conscious" left half. Both paint our conscious minds as accepting the rulership of uncontrollable (but quite fascinating) internal forces. Ironically, Jaynes painted schizophrenia as the modern manifestation of a reversion to the proclaimed bicameral condition, which implies that the gospel of Freud may eventually lead down a very nasty road indeed.
The Jaynes/Trilling comparison is not precise, but the extremity of it should at least indicate a problem with Trilling, who at the end of the day is holding out a promise of meaning-in-struggle that is usually the domain of philosophers and demagogues. But I find it nearly unfathomable that Trilling reaches a reaffirmation of authenticity and breaks down the inner/outer self dissonance not by giving people more control but by taking it away.
[Postscript. A question I never got around to: what differs in Trilling's American take on a Hegelian/Heideggerian do-as-we-say societal project? I've assumed he privileges literature, and that his affection for it over philosophy is self-perpetuating, but where does it originate?]
(The whole argument from which I quoted above is on pages 156-159, and is worth reading. I can't excerpt it satisfactorily here.)
A very entertaining conversation between the two, probably after having drunk too much coffee. Two main points of interest:
(1) They spend much of it talking past one another and seeming as incompatible as their respective music would suggest, Feldman with his "human" and "emotional" concerns and Xenakis with his "structural" and "architectural" ones.
(2) Xenakis is quite pithy about clearing out some of the baggage that muddies his creativity:
I prefer artistry instead of psycho-analysis because in psycho-analysis... In fact what you do is, you're trusting on some traces of your memory, something different in your story, and when you think you have left that story, you're building something different and it becomes your new past.
Hermann Broch to Elias Canetti in the 30's, recollected by Canetti:
What you have done in your novel [Kant Catches Fire] and in The Wedding is to heighten fear. You rub people's noses in their wickedness, as though to punish them for it. I know your underlying purpose is to make them repent. You make me think of a Lenten sermon. But you don't threaten people with hell, you paint a picture of hell in this life. You don't picture it objectively, so as to give people a clearer consciousness of it; you picture it in such a way as to make people feel they are in it and scare them out of their wits. Is it the writer's function to bring more fear into the world? Is that a worthy intention? You believe in alarming people to the point of panic.
If I did, if I had really given up hope, I couldn't bear to go on living. No I just think we know too little. I have the impression that you like to talk about modern psychology because it originated in your own back yard, so to speak, in a particular segment of Vienna society. It appeals to a certain local patriotism in you. Maybe you feel that you yourself might have invented it. Whatever it says, you find in yourself. You don't have to look for it. This modern psychology strikes me as totally inadequate. It deals with the individual, and in that sphere it has undoubtedly made certain discoveries. But where the masses are concerned, it can't do a thing, and that's where knowledge would be most important, for all the new powers that are coming into existence today draw their strength from crowds, from the masses. Nearly all those who are out for political power know how to operate with the masses. But the men who see that such operations are leading straight to another world war don't know how to influence the masses, how to stop them from being misled to the ruin of us all. The laws of mass behavior can be discovered. That is the most important task confronting us today, and so far nothing has been done toward the development of such a science.
But first look at Broch. Here he sounds like the cautious elder, advising a sympathetic intellectualism that would open people to self-understanding. Canetti portrayed Broch as a weak, transparent man, but fitting an admirer of Freud, he adhered to an outlook on the world that prescribed clear values. Read The Sleepwalkers or The Unknown Quantity and his characters are archetypes: the scientist, the revolutionary, the party man, the artist. They behave in predictable ways, and the dilemmas they face clearly arise from their occupations.
This would seem fatalisic, but since Broch is pushing sociological points rather than a realistic story, it has the mythological status of Totem and Taboo more than the hopelessness of Theodore Dreiser or Mikhail Lermontov. The problem, and this is more of a necessary aspect of his work than a defect, is that his points all point backwards. Broch's "weakness" is not any reticence to say bold things, but an inability to see any prospect of a golden age coming out of cultural and industrial modernism. In his last and best book, The Death of Virgil, he sets his titular artist up as a paragon of being, existing in ancient Rome but at the same time taking the material of his existence and casting it on his own plane of creativity. It is a clever way to turn away from the immediate , but it suggests that Broch never solved his problem. Virgil is on top of such a mountain of prestige, selflessly giving his works down to all beneath him, that Broch comes off (to use a vulgar example) as a proto-Harold Bloom figure, rhapsodizing about the days when the impact of state poets equalled their (supposed) breadth of understanding. This is why I called Broch a conservative.
Canetti wanted none of this. The disrespect of tradition and people of which Broch accuses him is real, and the urge to destruction persists from Auto-da-Fe, his novel of a bookish man and his plebeian housekeeper, who destroy each other, to Earwitness, a collection of heartless character studies. His description of "The Home-biter" is clinical:
The home-biter has an ingratiating manner and knows how to form new friendships. He is especially popular with ladies whose hands he kisses. Never getting too close for comfort, he bows, takes the hand like a precious object, and brings it the long way to his lips.
My interest in Canetti goes way back, and my attitude towards him has worsened as I've grown more mistrustful of those who would separate themselves from society in order to dissect it. Canetti is more skilled at it than any of Colin Wilson's children, and the backwards-focused Broch may have been more scared than most by what Canetti represented, but damned if Broch's accusation, even when tweaked by Canetti, doesn't ring true. It's melodramatic to see him as a anti-life force, as his young lover Iris Murdoch evidently did, but it probably took someone of Murdoch's strength to reject his ethos as completely as she did, both personally and in her writing.
Paul Ford discusses the nameless obscurity of software designers, and some exceptions to the rule:
A few authors of software do not remain faceless, like Richard Stallman, who created the Emacs text editor and the GCC compiler, Donald Knuth, who created TeX, Larry Wall, the developer of Perl, or Guido von Rossum, the developer of Python. Most of these men (always men!) did their work below the interface, as designers of languages and systems, creators of tools that allow creation. To write a language, to abstract the computing process into a fundamental sequence of tokens which will be internalized and applied by others, is an individual act; thousands may add libraries, but Python is still Guido, Perl is still Larry, Emacs is RMS, and TeX is Knuth. The experts of abstraction who are able to catch into some zeitgeist do not lose their identities as their products become popular; their faces are not replaced by buttons. They exist in a textual realm of code, as authors of fundamental texts.
Even at that time, there was a split between the obsessive hobbyists like Kersey and even Bricklin and Frankston, and the DARPA-funded academic work that was used in constructing and running ARPANET. Jon Postel, nominal leader of the TCP/IP design effort, and the group he led have undoubtedly had more of a technical impact, but that hasn't exactly translated into "popularity." (To paraphrase an old saying, "Would you call God popular?") Certainly at the time, Bricklin and Frankston had a much greater cultural impact, but they were playing a different game with different rules for fame. Standards efforts like TCP/IP, then and now, do not generate celebrities, but they do occasionally help to produce the zeitgeist, rather than just catch it. The same could be said for a research project like NCSA Mosaic, which had the biggest breakout since ARPANET.
Ford relates fame to the type of code at issue. Ford gives a fairly heterogeneous set of examples. Consider:
(1) Python is a clean object-oriented scripting language that takes some of the better ideas from some heavy-duty lower-level languages and puts them into a useful package.
(2) Perl is a huge mishmash of several earlier scripting languages (awk, sed, and assorted Unix shells). It may be, in the words of a professor, "the worst designed language ever," but it's very, very useful for text processing, among other things. Wall gave the people what they wanted, and who cares if the seams show?
(3) Emacs is a super-powerful text editor that contains its own implementation of LISP and can (and has) be extended to do just about anything. For Unix junkies, however, it has yet to fully supplant lean-and-mean text editor vi.
(4) TeX is a markup language that allows for detailed formatting of documents and can be compiled into Postscript, etc. It is the standard in academia for computer science papers.
Yet their authors do have a kind of celebrity, Stallman and Wall in particular. But their fame seems directly to the extent to which they are involved in the hobbyist side of the equation. Even Knuth sunk far more effort and time into supporting and promoting TeX than a computer science professor committed to an authoritative seven-volume history of computer algorithms could ever be expected to do. Likewise with Wall, who got out there and sold (metaphorically speaking) and supported Perl in a way that the authors of sed and awk never had. It makes them culturally significant, but they also run the risk of becoming more famous, less hermetic versions of the forgotten figures of Steven Levy's Hackers, a weird, weird book that deserves an entry of its own for its uneasy combination of geek worship and technological revolution. These people have indeed wrestled the zeitgeist, but their code, for the most part, is not fundamental: it is ephemerally contemporary.
The situation puts authors of algorithms and low-level abstractions like assemblers in a bad spot, since they can't really "sell" their work. The easiest way, it seems, is to work your name in somewhere. Academic decorum prevented Anthony Hoare from calling top-ten algorithm quicksort "Hoaresort," but Linus Torvalds has most of his name in Linux, and though the kernel is a tiny percentage of the code, the OS will always be identified with him. It's a funny sort of fame though, since all I know about the authors of the Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) compression algorithm is that their names are Lempel, Ziv, and Welch.
It wasn't until two-thirds of the way through A Burnt Child that I remembered that Dagerman committed suicide at age 31 and therefore, this book had been written at a very young age: 24, exactly. The odd shifts in the book make far more sense if you think of the author as barely out of his schooling, and I wonder what I would have made of it had I continued to think of him, incorrectly, as a mature, staid adult. The book's demeanor and its flaws are very particular, and it's not a stretch to think of them as endemic to a specific period in one's biological life and its respective mental organization.
It begins with a mother's death, and places three, then four characters, into the aftermath in a clean, Ibsen-like family schema. There is the father, Knut, who has little but contempt for his monstrous, dead wife, and the son Bengt, who venerates her to the point of swearing revenge against his father, and Bengt's girlfriend Berit, who is mostly a passive observer. Knut quickly begins to date the elderly but feisty Gun, whom Bengt loathes.
Apart from Bengt's infrequent histrionics, the early part of the book alternates between a processional of grief and slow, well-observed descriptions of the shaken world of the characters. It's very proper, and very "mature," since it's closer in tone to work from the early 1900's rather than 1948, when it was published. (There is no mention whatsoever of the war.) But soon, Bengt's psychosis takes over, with impressionistic dreams and threats of violence. The psychology is typical, but delivered in such an unself-conscious manner that you can almost think he hadn't read Freud. Unavoidably, Bengt has an affair with Gun, and the book shifts again. The writing becomes lost in reverie and Dagerman reveals a newfound weakness for romantic philosophical generalization:
We cannot comprehend our own death, nor the fact that someone should deceive us. That someone else should sleep naked with the one we love is something beyond our power of imagination. If we were to see it even our reason would not believe it, our feelings alone would know it.
It's not the self-obsession that marks A Burnt Child as having been written by a 24-year-old. His writing is not immature in the way that Marguerite Duras's writing is immature, though they share a passionate narcissism. It's the way he moves in many directions without committing to one, and the way he treasures the extremities of feelings to which teenagers and young adults are prone. Dagerman thought highly of himself and his writing, but he thought even more highly of his self five years earlier, who makes the basis for Bengt. Compare him with Salinger, who deals with hyperarticulate children with overdeveloped neuroses. Bengt is remarkably simple and remarkably passionate, and he makes his forebear, Goethe's Werther, looks measured in comparison. It is a portrayal of an immature mental state by someone who has picked up enough writing ability before he's forgotten the firsthand experience of the feeling altogether. (Compare him to Thomas Mann, who in Buddenbrooks is rushing away from firsthand mental experience as fast as possible.) It seems like less of a recreation than a contemporaneous document. The verisimilitude is startling, but the drastic shifts in tone and style yield a book that is not cohesive. It is too close to Dagerman's own experience, and his own shifting perception as he aged at 20. Dagerman's apparent lack of awareness of any of this damages the novel, but as a record of a period of a person's life that has rarely produced any worthy writing, it is at least comprehensive and deeply felt, in many contradictory directions.