Currently:
The Known World, by Edward P. Jones
Nixonland, by Rick Perlstein
For the year:
1. Inherent Vice, by Thomas Pynchon
2. Blackwater, by Jeremy Scahill
3. The Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen
Daniel Silliman
10.2.10
"This was July, and July dirt tasted even more like sweetened metal than the dirt of June or May. Something in the growing crops unleashed a metallic life that only began to dissipate in mid-August, and by harvest time that life would be gone altogether, replaced by a sour moldiness he associated with the coming of fall and winter, the end of a relationship he had begun with the first taste of dirt back in March, before the first hard spring rain."
Hitchcock said he wanted to make us too afraid to go to the bathroom. There's a very American tradition of this kind of fear in art -- the American gothic, the American horror story, the story where the "thing," the site of our fear, isn't strange or unheard of but common, mundane, normal, and absolutely terrifying. It is a tradition that follows from Poe, and has pretty good representations in genre fiction and literary fiction and, for that matter, in consumer reports and recalls and panics that make everyone throw out their spinach. Obviously, Hitchcock is one of the masters, even though he's British.
Another Brit who makes American movies, Guy Richie has a bathroom-death scene in Sherlock Holmes that starts out like something that might make us afraid of the tub -- the bathtub seems to not just be the place of the crime, not just the weapon, but also the bubbling, boiling killer -- but then the very tall bad guy walks in, apparently to take credit for the killing and leave a clue for Holmes, and also to take the audience's horror away from the tub and focus it on the strange, obviously-evil, evil-personified "thing," who of course is really a pretty standard movie villain and isn't a site for our fear at all.
Richie's response to the too-intense horror of the inanimate object, this way of looking away, is poorer, artistically, but seems to be the shift that happens all the time, culturally. People who fear fluoride in the water don't fear the water but some conspiracy. People who fear computers and the dominance of technology in their lives shift the fear to Y2K, or the powers behind facebook. People who fear credit cards shift that fear to credit card companies or connect it to other, larger end times theories. Focusing on the object is so painful it can be artistically perfect, but it's not what we do.
But then, neither Hitchcock nor Ritchie get us anywhere near the inside of the fear that has nightmares of Obama as a secret outsider set on destroying our country. Or the fear that inspired letters to Chicago politicians in '66 saying Martin Luther King Jr. was "a dark-skinned Hitler." Or the fear of Communist take-over, populists and demagogues and no-knowing uprisings, the bomb, urban riots, immigration, AIDs, or any of the mass fears we've been taken by in the last 100 years.
These are real fears, continuing fears, and these are the kinds of fears that seem to shape the culture, as opposed to the anxieties and plot-devices that make, respectively, artistic and popular movies.
What art do we have, though, that shows us this kind of public fear, mass fear that feeds itself and conspiracies and politicians who shape the direction of panic. This is, isn't it, the kind of fear that defines a nation and changes the future? So where's the art that describes and gives shape or even just shows this kind of fear?
First, it seems like a pretty good post-ontology ontology, a good description or accounting for the world that doesn't get stuck in essentialisms or attempting to talk about what is, in some Platonic way, but instead uses an evolution metaphor and talks about how the world functions and how it means. But, as a literary theory, how does it help us read?
Second, when we talk about what counts as a "system," don't we walk right into a real tangle of taxonomies? The definition seems clear and laid out -- emerges and differentiates itself from the environment, has boundaries against a boundless totality, "observes" itself, relates to itself, etc. -- but when we start identifying and naming systems, it gets confusing and impractical and a little bit crazy. Like, music is a system, and within that pop music is a system, and then Chuck Berry's music would be a system and Lady Gaga's and Billy Joel's. But then it seems like "love song" would also be a system -- it meets the definition for what counts, I think -- and that system would include some parts and not others. And doesn't our taxonomy then turn into a zoo? Wouldn't any art about love be a system, and all non-liner narratives, and all words with the letter "e"? I just don't see how the systems remain clear, or relate to each other, but maybe all of this is worked out with the "poly" of polysystemic or with the kind-of-awful description of "inter-penetration"?
This seems like a problem, unless it's just going to be a good metaphor for how the world works semantically. Maybe this has all been explained, though. Is there something of Luhmann's I should read?
"Because I always feel like running. Not away. Because there's no such place. Because if there was I would've found it by now .... Because the thing I fear cannot be escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from, not without showing the fear as I see it now. Because closer, clearer, no sir, nearer. Because of you. And because of that nice that you quietly, quickly, be causing."
Gil Scott-Heron has been noted, when he's noted, as the godfather or forefather of rap. It's a title that belongs to him as obviously and fully as it belongs to anyone -- there's certainly a certain point when or where his voice, his tones and patterns and political spirit and even his actual words overlap with those of Public Enemy's Chuck D. and others. But Gil Scott-Heron's voice also has connections the other way. There's something in his voice, in his poetry, the rhythm of what he's saying, that can and ought to be related backwards not just to the obvious, like Langston Hughes, like black goes back to black, but also related and connected to Kerouac, especially the way Kerouac read when he read out loud in that bop way he had, and farther back, all the way to Walt Whitman.
Scott-Heron's voice is only a breath away from Whitman's -- just compare "Strong, ample, fair, enduring, capable, rich, Perennial with the Earth" and "escaped, eluded, avoided, hidden from, protected from, gotten away from, not without showing the fear." The similarities and sheer common Americanness of their voices belies the distance of the century between them.
After the Bigfoot hoax I would, with some regularity, get these calls asking for help or information for someone doing a big story. Almost without exception the idea for the story seemed to be rooted in a deep misunderstanding.
The worst was from a documentary film maker with an accent who'd won some award he was wielding like a codpiece. He wanted me to help him in exchange for some percentage of points in his system, which he couldn't quite explain and which seemed vaguely ponzi-like. He kept presuming I would help him and would be honored to work with him. Like a salesman pitching hard, he went straight to trying to set up my meeting with his advance man, Fabio. Fabio was going to get some preliminary footage to sell the idea of the documentary to investors and I was gonna be the guide.
The man who'd won the award kept asking questions like could I take Fabio to the woods, so we could see the woods where the men found Bigfoot.
And I would say, "we don't really have woods," but he didn't seem dissuaded.
"The general store," he said, "you take Fabio to the general store ..."
"This is metro Atlanta. We don't really have a general store."
"... and you interview the villagers. We get the villagers, we ask them about Bigfoot," he said.
"I don't think you understand."
"... the villagers, they have seen this thing? They think they have seen this Bigfoot ..."
"Look," I said, "this story didn't happen here. It happened on the internet."
"You take Fabio to see the villagers ..." he said.
It seems like such a simple fact, a straightforward thing -- where a story happens. But it's really not.
I was struck by the weirdness of this the first time I went to a murder victim's vigil, where the family and friends were holding candles and saying prayers. When I got there they were standing in a half circle. The other half of the circle was for an audience that wasn't there. There was me and one guy from TV, supposedly covering an event, witnessing something that was happening, but finding ourselves sort of making up half of the prayer vigil circle: barely filling the void but acting, in some way, to complete the event. Later, I looked at my pictures and watched the 30 or 40 seconds of the vigil that made it on to the nightly news, and there it just looked like a circle of people praying. We made the circle hole.
So where did it happen, this vigil? Where were the prayers prayed? What should the dateline on a story like that really read?
A lot of events you're assigned to cover at a newspaper feel like half events. Press conferences and political announcements especially have this feeling, like a stage is set for an audience that won't be coming. In the This American Life Story, "Politics," Michael Lewis says that when he had a camera with him during the Bob Dole campaign, on the Bob Dole plane, everything changed. Suddenly people were talking to him -- but not to him, but to the void where he stood, to the blank lens of the camera, to the second half of a dialog that was happening somewhere, but which felt, right there, like a one-sided conversation with an absence.
I guess this is the media equivalent of the fourth wall. And because the fourth wall can't be broken, we, in the audience, get to think of ourselves as just observers, and as passive. The fourth wall saves us, preserves us in our idea of our own passivity. We're just watching. This happens to journalists too, where you think you're just a witness, as if your presence didn't change things, as if the details would have been arranged the way they were arranged in your story even if you weren't there to pluck them up, seek them out, elicit them and make them narratively meaningful. We imagine this wall between us and what we see, but we're involved in the constitution of the stories -- not just as witnesses but also as authors, not just audiences but also participants, the other half, the ones necessary to complete the scene.
There's a moment when the critique is turned against itself. It becomes reflexive and the critique critiques the critique. This is often where people get frustrated with theory. For me, though, the discovery of the tool of Derrida's idea of "always-already" was amazing. The moment of self-reflexivity actually worked, I thought, to show with incredible clarity how the critiqued thing, e.g. violence or ideology, actually functioned. The critique of the critique allowed for a Pauline or Augustine-like move of confession and awareness. The "always-already" gave deconstruction its particular ethical force.
I don't find that same clarity when the critique of sexism or racism becomes self-reflexive. The "cultural turn" leaves me mostly confused, any point after the claim that racisim, sexism, etc., are important and should be paid attention. The critique turned against itself, though, doesn't seem to show how the critiqued thing functions. When I find the sexism in critiques of sexism or the racisim in racism (e.g. the sexism implicit in "the possibility of a specific female mode of writing," or the racism in "multicultural literature is good because it's a source of energy"), instead of understanding how it works always-already and having this available critical-confessional response, I find I'm stuck in endless loops of static. I feel like these theories are just repeatedly telling me I'm wrong, bad, and my thinking is trapped, and I want to say, "I know I am, but how?"
The internet changed child pornography. Not by making it more available, though there was that. Nor primarily by giving more child pornographers more access to more images of more children in sexually explicit poses. Nor even by putting more children in harm's way, (for, actually, children have been vulnerable as long as there've been children, and most abusers are family members and trusted friends, not people lurking in ugly corners of the internet). Instead, the foremost effect of the internet on child pornography has been in the creation of communities of child pornographers.
These are re-affirmative associations. So where it used to be that everyone a particular child pornographer knew thought child pornography and what a child pornographer might want to do was evil, sick and wrong, now all of the child pornographer's closest associations and all his conversations are and can be with people who affirm and encourage, endorse and legitimize. The media or form of media enabled the creation of what is essentially a society of affirmative feed-back loops. Shame was gone, with the internet. The need for secrecy, gone. There was a decrease in the internalization of critiques, which was one of the functions of society replaced by communities built around fantasies, and thus the child pornographers were loosed, in a way, allowed to escape, in their own minds, some social restraints.
The people I talked to about child pornography (a U.S. Attorney and his office, FBI agents and experts, and officers from a number of local departments involved in the controversial practice of basically baiting people into incriminating, online conversations), said the internet changed child pornographers so that what used to be cravings and impulses were, in a way, calcified into confirmed opinions and beliefs.
Of course, the internet has done this to all of us. This is the reality of the new media age. This is what happens when mass media is fractured, and communities are organized by self-selection. We occupy worlds built around ideas, our fantasies. There is a direct relationship between the multitude of media and each individuals' isolation from any information that would disagree with what one believes. The function, here, is not to broaden or educate but to re-affirm. We all live now in these loops of re-affirming feed-back, enabling us not to question ourselves, insulating us from critique, protecting us with cult-like repetitions of affirmations of our rightness. My media choices comfort me with sermons that praise me for my choices, for being chosen, for being right, always encouraging me to join and repeat again the prayer, I'm so glad I'm not like them.
"If we can just tar and feather Nixon, America will be America again, without everything loathsome and lawless that's crept in, without all this violence and malice and madness and hate. Put him in a cage, cage the crook, and we'll have our great country back the way it was."
-- The Swede's father, in John Updike's American Pastoral.
For the moment at least, and maybe for a couple, I'm going to try to turn this blog to a different purpose. I need it, right now, to be a place for notes in American studies, the beginnings of ideas of essays and pieces of papers -- a space where I can work out and keep track of some thinking. More along the lines of what was posted last week.
So we're taking a more critical, essayistic turn and tone.
I am not, by any means, stopping the other writing, the fiction and creative writing. I am trying to put those energies into longer-form efforts, and recently writing short-short fiction here was making more substantial efforts more difficult. I plan to push myself with the fiction, which of course you, my few readers, will know about as soon as there's some success to know about.
"That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write 'Fuck you' right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say 'Holden Caulfield' on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say 'Fuck you.' I'm positive, in fact."
But, rest in peace anyway, Mr. Salinger. We're going to say what we're going to say, and you're free from us now. We hope it's better. We'd be sorry if we could be, but we don't really know how. We loved you for all of it anyway.
It's not what you know, it's what you know you don't know
Part of what conservatism has meant, as a political idea, is a circumspect attitude towards knowledge. It is this position of doubt, a claim about the limits of our ability to know, a claim of "unintendedconsequences."
I'm very sympathetic to this idea, but not persuaded. I find it fails, first, to translate into any coherent political plan or program (how are the unintended consequence of cutting taxes substantively different from those of raising them?). This is especially the case since conservatism and this idea of human limitation has not been parlayed into efforts at preserving a status quo, but has been focused on reversing policies, abolishing or neutering institutions, and radically remaking society in the form of an imagined past. This is surely as ambitious and as unmarked by doubt as any New Deal or Great Society plan. Second, unintended consequences ought to be as pernicious in private action as in public programs, and this seems to be ignored by those who would privatize everything (consider the unintended consequences of Blackwater). Third, I don't see why the unintended consequences should necessarily be negative. That's a move that doesn't seem to have any logical support. Fourth, and finally, the negative unintended consequences of progressive programs, historically, seem to be piddly, when compared to the real, positive effects. Social security saved lives, outlawing child labor saved lives, WIC saved lives, and yes of course there were unintended consequences to these programs, but it's preposterous to say their net effects have been negative.
Maybe more critically, though, it is profoundly odd that a political philosophy that takes doubt and systemic uncertainty as central has consistently found philosophical moorings (or at least common cause) with foundationalist theories. Why, if we believe human knowledge is dramatically limited, would we rally to support natural law, with its claims that right society and correct living are not only completely knowable in all important ways, but also immediately knowable. Why wouldn't we go from "unintended consequences" to postmodernism, where doubt and uncertainty and the limits of knowability are central? Why not something like a "hermeneutics of suspicion"? It doesn't make sense. Philosophically, conservatives have said anything short of absolute certainty is tantamount to and is nihilism, while, politically, conservatives have hoisted up this idea of doubt.
Or, perhaps, it was just the canard of a new know-nothingism, but I find it hard to take talk of unintended consequences seriously.
Weegee's method was proximity. He was, we are told, "proud of being the only photographer to have obtained the privilege of installing a police radio in his famous Chevrolet.” When he wasn’t out on the street, Weegee was in the police station. He was as close as he could be. “Here’s what I would do,” he said, “when a story came out over the police teletype, I would go to it.”
Proximity also pervades the myth of Weegee, with constant references to “Weegee’s World,” his city, and his people. Proximity marks and makes his style, with the iconic photos taken from the viewpoint and position of a detective, showing corpses on the street, for example, the way an officer would see them squatting at the scene, and from the viewpoint of the crowd of onlookers, from the middle of the mass of people who lived in the slum world where tenements burnt down and suit-wearing men were “offed” with some regularity. He has been called “a great photographieur of backs": this is his style, and it’s meant to be taken and is taken as testament to the great value of his photographs, which is to say the way they were, in the words of Robert Capa, “close enough.”
Weegee himself thought the value of his work was directly related to his proximity to the subject of his photography, saying, “When you find yourself beginning to feel a bond between yourself and the people you photograph, when you laugh and cry with their laughter and tears, you will know you are on the right track."
Close proximity, especially with regards to violence and death, is the first and primary value and criterion of documentary photography. This goes unquestioned.
Close proximity also means a loss of perspective, though. In pretending to be unmediated and have no perspective, photography with the priority of proximity becomes either a thing of romanticization or trauma.
In Weegee’s work capturing the life of the streets, for example, everything seems to be either romantic or traumatic (or both). These are his only two modes, and he oscillates between then. His photographs of kids and bums, hookers and late-night lovers in park and diners are all very romantic. They could have served as models for Norman Rockwell. On the other hand, his crime photos are very dark, portraying a world of death and betrayal, casual murder and corpses on cold concrete. These photos in fact did serve as models for film noir. There’s no in between for Weegee. It’s one or the other. And sometimes it’s one right after the other: In one story, Weegee takes a photograph of bum sleeping on the street, walks away, hears the man run over by a car, and returns to take a photo of the fatal accident.
There's a loss of nuance here, when we are only left with these two modes. A loss of explanatory power. This is the gamble of the myth of what it means for a photo to be "true." This is the gambit of proximity: try to get close enough to be true in a way that means unmediated, uninterpreted, unquestioned and simple, just truly true and present, but risk maybe getting stuck in wild oscillations of mood and two too-simple modes and losing the ability to capture complexity, the ability to explain, and the ability to be analytical about the photos taken.
Wendell Berry: "The reach of responsibility is short."
The ostensible reason to hide a homosexual or push a homosexual out of the civil rights movement (thinking Bayard Rustin here) was always other people. It was because of the way J. Edgar Hoover or Joe McCarthy and gang would use it against the cause of civil rights. Oddly, Hoover, the state department and more than one presidential administration used exactly the same logic of displacement of responsibility: it wasn't that they necessarily had any problem with people being gay, it was that communists would use it against democracy, etc.
This same displacement of responsibility happens in some of the public arguments against gay marriage, so that while an adult has no problem with gays getting married, he or she is going to go ahead and act homophobic for the children (in which case we're opposing gay marriage the same way we believe in Santa).
Displacement of responsibility is an interesting thing. It is one of the most effective ways homicide detectives have of eliciting a confession. The detectives, in the interview room, offer an explanation, a way for the suspects to explain how the death happened while, at the same time, not say they're responsible. It was an accident. He was coming at you. You didn't mean to. Feeling trapped, suspects are often sucked right into the confession, because the responsibility, and maybe the guilt, has been put somewhere.
Louis Althusser's idea of authorship and ideology makes exactly the opposite move, though, taking a responsibility which might naturally seem to be somewhere out there, and placing it with each person. We are, he said, "'hailed' or summoned by ideologies, which recruit us as their 'authors' and their essential subject … ideologies speak to us and in the process recruit us as 'authors.'" The word "ideology" makes it sound nefarious or something, but I think this happens with any story: first on a market level -- little poetry published, Conan canned, no more Haiti on TV, James Patterson, Inc? We get what we want. Collectively, yes, but the personal force of this can't be dismissed -- but also, this happens in the sense that we are invited into the story. We own it. Like authors. Ideology or not, be in Jesus or the Green Party, The Smiths or Quentin Tarentino, it becomes our story. If we follow Althusser's move, though, we quickly come to this place where we can't displace responsibility. It's never "other people." It's always me.
All men are mortal. Socrates is mortal. Therefore Socrates is a man.
Some logical fallacies are taught just because they're common mistakes. Slippery slope. Ad hominem. To some extent, Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc. But there is also a second, maybe more important purpose. They're mistakes, yeah, common, yes, and you want the students to see those mistakes and correct them, but becoming aware of some fallacies in particular preforms another function. When something clicks and it is clear why an argument doesn't work, clear how, is suddenly obvious why Post Hoc isn't Ergo Propter Hoc, it's suddenly possible for the students to critique their own arguments. It opens up the possibility for reflexive thinking.
The same thing happens when philosophy and theory are applied to pop culture. Before, when it was about rarefied things, distant, high-class things, Plato and Shakespeare and the stuff of school, theory and thinking are cordoned off into homework, something separate from life. But when it's applied to "Seinfeld" or "Pirates of the Caribbean," Lady Gaga or Coco Puffs, there's this rip and we realize we live in theory and it's all around us. It's like becoming aware of breathing or the ocean of air. This is why the aesthetic response to Chuck Klosterman is to start coming up with theories that connect some pop culture ephemera (Scarlet Johannson's voice, faux hippies, sharks in hip hop artist's homes in "Cribs") to an explanation of something important about us. The feeling with which we respond to Slovoj Zizek's toilets or David Foster Wallace's cruise is one of enlightenment, even if we're not quite precisely sure what we're enlightened about (note, e.g., DFW's negative reaction to the applause he gets from the speech that became This is Water). Jacques Derrida, in the documentary about him, says deconstruction is not about a TV show about nothing, but he's wrong. We look at pots to understand Pompeii. Deconstruction, if it's going to do anything, has to open up a space where we can be critical of ourselves and think about our thinking, where we can be critically aware of the culture like air around us.
This function of theory, like the light bulb that goes off sometimes when talking about logic, is to make self-reflexive criticism possible in a way it wasn't before.
All lips are red. The truck is red. Therefore, the truck is lips.
Little Mike stopped on the downhill side of the rise. He put it in park but left the truck running. He opened the door but didn't close it, stood there and shaded his eyes. The coyote was on the far side. He was smelling the wind which was coming down the valley between them. The wind was pushing the last of the stray clouds up against the foothills, holding them there, bunching them up there until they were black enough to rain. The coyote was belly deep in the brown grass, but his head was up, smelling the wind. Mike lifted the gun off the rack on the back of the cab and cradled it.
Of all the things a man could do, this was what he did. And why was that except that he'd liked pigeons, wanted to raise them and then joined the 4H, found the ad Big Mike had there and said, yeah, he'd be willing to muck out an old barn and bang together some fence posts for money. That was 12 years ago. Big Mike was retired and the dairy company moved him into the Route 2 house. He watched the calves, every spring, pulled them out when they were breech, and kept the bulls in hay in the winter. He put the catalytic converters back in the two trucks ever summer for the inspection sticker, then pulled them out again in the garage so they wouldn't start any fires when he idled in the fields. He worried about having enough water, and every day watched the way the dirt dried. He watched the sky, wanting clouds, and carried a gun in the cab. He supposed any particular profession out of the vastness of things a man could do might be weird. But this seemed strange to him. The other place he'd applied, 12 years ago, was making popcorn at the movies in Visalia. Because of a couple of homing pigeons, this was his work.
Little Mike had the gun out and a bullet from the box, a .223. He levered it in and worked the bolt, resting the rifle up on the frame of the door. He had one boot on the step of the cab and the other on the dirt. The dirt was hard and showed no mark from his heel. He breathed, exhaled half way and held it, lined the lines of the scope across the front shoulder and squeezed. The Remington was rifled clockwise, 1-in-12. The pin hit the primer, which exploded, lighting the powder, which expanded rapid into gas, sending the bullet in a spiral to the right. It went across the valley, over the field. He wanted to hit the lungs or the heart. The coyote jumped, but he couldn't tell if he hit it or not with his shot, and he knew in the wind his bullet could have tumbled. He'd have to go over there to look for blood. Of all the things a man could do. He worked the bolt and ejected the cartridge into the cab. The copper casing, still hot, rolled on the rubber mat on the floor.
1. In Ralph Ellison's short stories, Flying Home, the characters all have a narrative they can appeal to. It's a narrative about being black. Something about being black in American. When the characters are young, they feel the edges of it, hear it and start to assimilate it, and when they're older it's there and they can use it, make recourse to it. It explains something -- even when it doesn't quite, when it's only very awkwardly applicable. But whenever the characters are confronted by confusion and their own powerlessness, by the world's hostility, they have this narrative. One of the peculiarities of white American experience in the 20th century, particularly with poor whites and with those were shocked to discover their disempowerment, has been the lack of any natural narrative to appeal to. Marxism might make sense here, but there's an inoculation against it. This gives rise, I think, to a fleet of unnatural narratives, strange and unsettled stories of conspiracy, populism, and lot of different, ill-formed end times meta-narratives.
2. Look at the worlds we construct. In David Foster Wallace's Oblivion, in the very last story, there's a couple of characters who are very lower class and very Midwestern. They are also a joke and kind of a crass one -- the kind of joke that gets titters, not laughs. What was interesting about this, though, is that it was the first time any characters didn't have a college degree, didn't have careers, weren't white, upper class professionals. The book is brilliant, and Wallace is great, but it strikes me as very strange that this world, Wallace's world of Oblivion, has no garbage men, no tow truck drivers, no cops or yard guys. It does have a lot of people in therapy. It does have a lot of people who are good at math and/or some type of high-level analysis. There's nothing wrong with this -- this is Wallace's world -- but it's still worth noting and there are, I think oddly, an awful lot of white-collar-only worlds in literature. How many working men are there in Updike, Roth, Bellow? In Jonathan Franzen's The Twenty-Seventh City, which I'm reading right now, there's a minor character from the lower classes who kind of infringes on the narrative. He's an old high school friend who works at Sears. I'm not really sure what he's doing in the story, and he's not described very well. One character says, "I thought he'd fallen by the wayside." The limitations of worlds are not always about class, either. No one in Raymond Carver's stories ever seems to go to church. Think about that: no one.
3. When I hear Hegel thought Napoleon was the manifestation of the ideal, or something like that, that he adored him and went, breathlessly, to see him, I think that's odd and wonder why he thought that. When I hear Adorno disliked jazz and thought it was an example of everything he didn't like in music, I automatically distrust everything else he says. I can't really explain the difference in my reactions.
4. There seems to me to be a change in how literary theories are evaluated. In how their worth is measured. As we're going through the class I notice that some literary theories stand out as interesting to me -- some Marxisms, some structuralisms, some parts of work of Russian Formalists -- but that I find them interesting for very different reasons than they themselves would hold as the standard for measuring the accomplishment of a theory. Up until a certain point every theory, conservative or radical, sets for itself a standard of comprehensiveness. The idea is that, like a scientific theory, it should explain everything, account for everything, and give a complete answer. Each of the theories want this sense of finality, as if they would end the need to read literature. Once we get to post-structuralism, though, the value shifts from finality to fecundity. A theory that valued finality would attempt to take in and read very broadly in order to bring everything into it's oneness, it's conclusion, where a theory with the ideal of fecundity would accept a breadth, be interested in that width and range, and delight in that multiplicity, that diversity. A good theory, now, is one that opens up a multitude of readings, leads to more and interesting interpretations. This makes theory worthwhile. It is, for me, even retroactively, even obliquely, interestedness that makes a theory interesting.
5. There are two serious criticisms of deconstructionism1. First, obscruantism, that all the ways of talking, all the jargon and phrases and everything are a deliberate darkening, a dumb game of making things harder to make deconstructionists seem smarter. Second, supervenient reading, so that all deconstruction does is reduce everything into deconstructionism, so every reading turns every text into a plot that is always about deconstructionism, and every text repeats the point again. Both of these are definitely true in cases. I can't figure out, though, why it would be necessarily true. The critiques seem to be about how it is practiced, not about the practice itself.
1An ever-present, not-serious critique being the boogeyman "nihilism." One, this seems to only come out of misunderstanding of the idea, the sort of misunderstanding that usually involves not having read any primary material. Two, nihilism is poorly defined, and acts more as a phobia. When it is defined, the definition is normally equal to not believing in some particular idea, which is not, in fact, a meaningful definition. I'm not sure what they think they're talking about actually exists. Third, the only time I've ever seen nihilism (as characterized by those who abhor it (possible different characterization: the nihilism of speculative realism?)) embraced, has been by people who came out of those anti-nihilist groups and accepted the idea that nihilism was the only alternative to whatever it was they believed before.
Listen to this, he says, and he puts it in. The CD changer grinds a dry grinding sound and for a moment there's nothing. The CD is in and there's nothing but the sound of driving, traffic and the hush of air, the interior of the closed car, compression, the windows up and the suck of sound the trees make as you pass them on the road. This isn't the first time he's done this. This isn't the first time he's done this for me or probably even for others with this CD and we drive, an afternoon indistinguishable and blue, and we drive, it's winter and the countryside, and we drive, and the digits of time on the dash are gone, blinked out. The first song on the CD registers 01, registers 00:00.
The promise is that this could be a beginning. This could be when I see. This could be enlightenment, ecstasy, when I see and see as if for the first time, time from this moment, hear now, from here now when we were in the car and in the pause, as the final zero goes to one and the silence fills up everything, when I would find the words which were someone else's words and then need words no more.
I really think you might like this, he says, and searches for a second for something to say about it, some fact, some factoid, some detail from the making-of or something from the linear notes, not really because I need to know or even, after all, because he does think in fact I'll like it, but just in case I don't. It's his safety line out of the suspense of the promise and the seconds it takes for the song to start. I say nothing though. I say nothing and make no move to shift away from the center of suspense, nothing to save myself from the full force of anticipation. I act as if I do not hear, focusing instead on the first of the sounds that has yet to come, not accepting the way out, the alternative, casual conversation, not accepting anything that would modify of modulate this waiting. Everything is heightened. Every detail sharp as frost. Every scent like the last scent forever. The CD dash time registers two, and then three, zero-zero-colon-zero-three, and then we know I'll know immediately, and either I will wonder what he was thinking and if he even knows who I am, sinking into isolation in my seatbelt, on my side of the car, or otherwise I will be transported, transfixed, transformed. Everything will be beautiful. Everything changed. And I will say damn.
Then there's the first note, a base note, a line. And there I am.
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the only known person to survive both the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombings, who crawled away from the first city and escaped over a river full of dead bodies, who believed he could, maybe, with the rest of his life, "change the life of some child who might otherwise grow up to do something evil and ultimately had a small chance of even preventing perhaps another Hiroshima or another Nagasaki in the future," died today at the age of 93.
The first thing they shot was aluminum cans. Mr. Stample said they should learn to shoot and they didn't even think to ask him why that was. He gave them each a gun and an old box of old pop cans. Hez had the bolt action, a .22 that shot shorts, and Levi had the revolver, all blued metal, a .22 too, and it was like they were cowboys, except cooler. Stample took them to the berm that was the back of the pond he had and they shot the pop cans there. He filled one up with water, 80 percent like a person, and showed them how when you shot a can like that it exploded. They already knew how to aim and he had his little safety talk, and then he let them shoot.
They got pretty good. Levi said what would happen if they shot right through the embankment and the pond poured out all of the sudden, gush! Hez said that would be awesome. Hez set up some cans on the side of the berm and shot them so they'd jump in the air when he hit them. Shot the lower lip edge of the can and they flipped up. Levi laughed and said that was so cool.
The second thing they shot was rats. They might of been mice, neither of them really knew. Mr. Stample had a hen house that was infested and he hooked his tractor to it, moved it a few feet to the side towards the house, and all of them, gray little guys with whiskers, went running around in a panic. Hez and Levi shot them as fast as they could, shooting them as they ran. Levi was a lot faster, since he had the handgun, and he got more. After a while Hez switched to a shovel, then he got more too. The ones he killed were crushed or cut. The mice didn't explode when you shot them, not like the can did when Stample filled it up with water. Maybe mice aren't mostly water like we are. Levi said they should do this for like a business. Make money shooting mice. Hez said he'd have to have a revolver too, since you had be close up and quick. It was a good idea though and they thought it'd be cool to do this for a business. Mr. Stample moved the hen house a few more times and when they were done they counted the corpses and there were 42. He gave them $20 to split and they shoveled up the mice and put them all in the burn barrel he had. That night they felt like soldiers coming home from a wild war. They smelled of must and feathers and dried-but-moldy feces.
After that there was only the cans again. All of them already had holes. It was Dr. Pepper cans, and Mrs. Stample's Diet Mountain Dew and the holes all had sharp edges, especially on the back where the bullets punched though. Day after they killed the mice they went out again and shot again, but it wasn't the same. They shot a lot though, and it got so the cans were shot all through, not cans so much any more but shredded strings of aluminum.
Levi said he wished there was more mice to kill. Hez said yeah. Hez said you know I thought there'd be more blood. Levi said do you remember that one, did you see that one I shot when it was almost getting away? The gun barrels got hot after a while and Levi burnt his hand holding it as he changed the bullets in the revolver. He said a word he wasn't to supposed to say. Hez got mad then too and said another word and said this shit was boring. It was. It was the most boring day of winter break. There was nothing to do.
There is in here a compulsion, a need, why I read. It is not a reason, even though I'd like to frame it that way, not a program, not a plan, not a choice or a syllabus. There are obviously elegant and approved apologia for this, for this act, for this reading, as antisocial and deeply needy as it is. There are prose poems in praise of this and library posters with knights and castles, space ships and wind-blown lands. There are speeches spieled on this, arguments argued in essays by authors, defenses offered, pronouncements made of preciousness and importance from podiums by canonists and promoters of programs in schools of every level. There are cliches for this, sentiments to set off, values to elevate, romanticisms to reel on about even thought we know or anyway I do that these are not the reasons, that this is not a thing of reasons. There's just the need.
I don’t even go to the grocery store without a book and usually two. When I go out to eat with you and you excuse yourself to the restaurant restroom, I will read. When you come back and I have a book you’ll say you’re sorry and be confused because you weren’t gone that long, but I was fine. Reading is when and where I’m fine. I read before classes and on buses and in bathrooms. When culture shock was cracking me, crushing me until I cried, I went and found books, Ham on Rye and Pynchon in the afternoon, because books is when I am okay. When I find myself in a city that’s strange and wander the streets that always seem to me to be surreal, I find a bookstore somewhere or a library, a public library, which is a refuge and which is where the “public” always appears to be kids who can’t be quiet, from families who can’t afford day care centers, and people who’ve pissed themselves, who sleep here instead of on the streets and sometimes get up and walk around and argue quietly with themselves or something hidden in the shelves, and I will find books by the stack here, I belong here with the homeless and the abandoned kids, find refuge here and a corner and read. I was the one who went to the library on Fridays in college and collected books from everywhere on everything and set them up around on the table like the walls they were for me, and I would read. Not for class but just because.
It’s not that the reasons aren’t right. Books might be about escape and education, empathy and expansion, but that’s not why I read. Don’t dismiss the desperation. Don’t misunderstand results as reasons: this is intransitive need.
I wanted to say too that when Y2K came and happened, or maybe didn’t happen would be a better way to say it, I was 17 and disappointed. I wanted it to happen, though I know now how strange that sounds. To me it was a millennialism, a meta history, and without it there was only this, life like this, flat infinity, life unimportant and unstructured forever, mundane and just this: world without narrative without end. I knew by the time when the lights were still on in the east coast that there’d be nothing, and I was depressed. We played Risk that night as nothing happened and I had an empire in Africa I couldn’t hold. On the day and in the days after I was bothered - deeply bothered - by my need, by my willingness to want Y2K to happen. My response to this was to read, and read everything. My response to this was to be deeply suspicious, as has been said, of meta narratives, by which I mean or want to mean especially my own. I say this only to say I don’t even read to understand or make things make sense. Maybe the opposite. I read for complication. I read for confusion. These are the functions I need. I read for the babble in books, because with every first person and third person story, with every worm- and bird- and God’s-eye view I get another layer and level of chatter, of confusion to confound my construction of towers to heaven. I need this Bable. Each book adds to the barrage, another bombardment of and siege to the certainty with which I would will the world to death, to darkness for the sake of some sense of self importance or abstract meaning.
I read because I need to read. Because I have to. Call it compulsion. I read in the same way I pray, which is to say that it will not make me a better person and it’s not just good to do, it won't pay off or profit, it's not a plan or a program and not, at all or in any way, with reason. It’s just need. I have to and need to and without it what would there be? I’d be left to my own devices.
Books read in 2009: 1. Prophecy & Apocalypticism, by Stephen L. Cook 2. The Salmon of Doubt, by Douglas Adams 3. Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner 4. Farewell, My Lovely, by Raymond Chandler 5. Ham on Rye, by Charles Bukowski 6. The Inner Circle, by T.C. Boyle 7. Breakfast at Tiffany's, by Truman Capote 8. The Crying of Lot 49, by Thomas Pynchon 9. The Poet, by Michael Conely 10. As I Lay Dying, by William Faulkner 11. Slumdog Millionaire, by Vikas Swarup 12. 2666, by Roberto Bolaño 13. Teaching a Stone to Talk, by Annie Dillard 14. The Most Beautiful Woman in Town, by Charles Bukowski 15. White Butterfly, by Walter Mosely 16. The End of the Affair, by Graham Greene 17. Fathers and Sons, by Ernest Hemmingway 18. Into The Wild, by Jon Krakauer 19. Close Range, by Annie Proulx 20. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, by David Foster Wallace 21. By Night in Chile, by Roberto Bolaño 22. Killshot, by Elmore Leonard 23. This is Water, by David Foster Wallace 24. Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough 25. Breath, by Tim Winton 26. The Savage Detectives, by Roberto Bolaño 27. Loving Che, by Ana Menedez 28. Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card 29. The Short Stories, by Ernest Hemingway 30. Cities on the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy 31. Charlotte's Web, by E.B. White 32. The Selfish Gene, by Richard Dawkins 33. Good Omen, by Terry Pratchet & Neil Gaiman 34. Where I'm Calling From, by Raymond Carver 35. The Armies of the Night,by Norman Mailer 36. The Street Lawyer, by John Grisham 37. Legacy of Ashes, by Tim Weiner 38. Oblivion, by David Foster Wallace 39. Seize the Day, by Saul Bellow 40. Literary Theory, by Jonathan Culler 41. The Absolutely True Diaries of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie 42. Slouching towards Bethleham, by Joan Didion 43. War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning, by Chris Hedges 44. Flying Home, by Ralph Ellison 45. The White Album, by Joan Didion 46. Camera Lucida, by Roland Barthes
The phone was attached to the wall in the kitchen, which was okay, since that was the only place he could smoke. He smoked while he waited.
Stan couldn't see the sea from here. Couldn't see the sky. There was an orange tree, though, where the oranges were starting to turn ripe for the winter, and he could see between the backs of bright and flamenco-colored houses to the warehouse store with a blank beige wall and the steel steps of the loading dock. At night when the window was open you could hear the trucks back up. In the morning when the wind was right you could hear the highway going up to Orlando. He smoked and waited. He watched out the window at the houses and the back of a superstore as an old neighbor lady in a night gown seemed to scowl and inspect the grass of her brown back yard. He waited. He smoked again. The woman went inside and night came slow, pink and then gray and then murky night, and he still waited for the phone.
He waited in the morning when the papers came, crashing into the backstops of the doors down the street, and waited when the commuters he could see through the bent blinds in the front all drove off. He waited when the mail came. Waited by the phone. He lit his cigarettes with a plastic lighter that said FLORIDA in an arc over a bouquet of oranges. Six months in the sate and he hated Florida now, and this was his Florida. He flicked the finished cigarettes into the sink when he was done, then saw they were still smoldering, letting off single spirals of filter fiber smoke and he stood up and ran the tap. Soggy butts lined the bottom of the sink like slugs.
Around 11 he ate two hot dogs. He boiled them on the stove. The old lady was out in the yard again, walking around with a pointed stick she kept poking into the ground. He wondered if she was watching him. The phone was between two sheets of wall paper, hung between the seams. It was white but yellowed as he watched it. The cord was kinked in places, stretched out until it lost the loops in others. It didn't ring. He picked it up a couple of times to listen, but hung up again and sat down in the chair between the stove and the window.
He ran out of cigarettes at about 1. He smoked the last one and instead of putting the pack back in his pocket he let it lay on counter. He played with the edges for a few minutes, turning the pack and turning it again, and then took $5 and hustled down the block for some more. He cut across the lawns, jogging, and then walked fast past the low row of stripped stores: Chinese food; dry cleaners; laundry mat with a woman in sandals slumped in the molded metal chair; empty; hair salon; empty; and a corner grocery with lettuce and broccoli browning, match-3 machines in the back with high stools and a little, hard-faced grandma behind the bullet-proof glass. She was sorting and stacking magazines, racking them facing out through the glass. and didn't look at him for a long time. When she finally did he slid the five through and said what he wanted and she found his brand, found his type, rang it up, made him change, printed up a receipt and passed it piece-at-a-time through the glass.
He lit the first one outside, but then walked back, smoking as he went, his exhales over his shoulder. It was a bright day, for winter, and the sun looked solid. When he got to the door he could hear the ringing. He dropped the key. When he pulled it out of his pocket he spilled spare change across the concrete steps and dropped the key and the phone rang, paused, and rang. Stan put his shoulder into the door when he turned the lock, panicking as the phone's each pause seemed to last too long, and when the door clicked he flung it open and fell inside, slammed it into the white wall hard and he ran as the phone rang, across the six steps to the kitchen. He said her name. He cracked as he cried it into the phone, "Linda!," he said and his throat was dry, but then there was nothing except a tone. It was flat. And dead. It was one tone extending forever in an infinite line, extending unbroken or interrupted, extending unstopped and unstopping without even a waver, a quiver, a moment of modulation.
It extended even as he hung it up. He sat down heavy and stared away from the phone, staring at the window, not through it at the houses and the old tree and the old woman in the yard, but at the window, the surface, the glass. He could feel that tone between his eyes. He shook out a cigarette again.
"Doc had outrun souped-up Rollses full of indignant smack dealers on the Pasadena Freeway, doing a hundred in the fog and trying to steer through all those crudely engineered curves, he'd walked up back alleys east of the L.A. river with nothing but a borrowed 'fro pick in his baggies for protection, been in and out of the Hall of Justice while holding a small fortune in Vietnamese weed, and these days had nearly convinced himself all that reckless era was over with, but now he was beginning to feel deeply nervous again."
I wanna ask the angel when. Can we could we, will we here. But when. Tidings bid and peace promised as if it were only infinity unfurled. If this is real, then when. Learn to hope, it has been said. I would ask but then the angel would or maybe should ask it back, throw it back and ask it at me: yes and when? Or perhaps not that question which was mine, but instead another, a better one with a clearer answer and one that is not so abstract, a question where with the answer in the thump of organ tissue blood and flesh.
For an angel, if this was or there were an angel then it might be right at the end of that to ask. Don't assume the angel knows. This is God absurd. Don't assume the symbols from a story boiled down. Accept or anyway start at least with the weirdness of this. Something of the dada's been diluted now. But this is. God gives up: God no more: no more power and heaven empty, no glory, transcendence, no force or army no more. No more all in all and all and God's an accident here, no longer absolute but contingent now -- and didn't this used to be the insult for the enemies of YHWH? Your God is sleeping, crying, too small and human, away or indisposed, and now it's true and chosen. Now a choice. The insult embraced, weakness preferred. God here gives up being over all. He'd rather be a baby.
Baby born in slime, slick with fluid of birth and afterbirth and blood - I remember blood but it's later denied - mucus and crying, contingent, accident unto us, boy unto us and born, contingent to die and dying already. The face all squished: all babies alien. Misshapen head and features mushed at first. Here's a cord that has to be cut, umbilical, cut and clamped and knotted purple where a belly button will be, drying until it falls away.
In the ascending elevator the people were unhappy and complained. There was no sun. It was Florida in Spring, green and glowing, warm and with recorded birdsong symphonies broadcast from every bush and bunch of flowers in the resort. But, the people said, there was no sun. The elevator opened on the eighth floor and they got off, glum and silent. They were replaced by a young couple in sandals and swimwear with towels and the elevator descended again. It was all shiny metal and mirrors, and the pair saw themselves reflected there, on the inside of the elevator, smiling and holding hands as they went down. The pool outside was perfect blue, the kind of water where you can see straight through and it seemed, to them, a perfect day.
A mallard landed in the pool leaving little ripples, a gentle wake of his glide. His head was green and held high and he swam in a circle, a surveying king. Besides that it was empty.
The young couple brought their own towels, taken from the room, and draped them over the plastic poolside chairs with their sandals and his glasses and the key to the room. Then he saw and pointed out the resort had whole stacks of towels there all ready by the pool. The towels were white and thick, folded in stacks that seemed endless. She said, "well, now we know for tomorrow," and it seemed like tomorrow was a long way away, and when it came it would last for forever, and everything was at peace. Then they swam in the pool, under the overcast sky, and the place was mostly empty and completely calm as they swam. The woman did laps back-and-forth and the man floated on his back and looked at the sky. He closed his eyes, and with the light through the trees, everything was green. She swam underwater and came up to surprise him. She laughed and made a funny face and they laughed. She wiped the water from her eyes and he kissed her.
Around them, though, everyone was unhappy. At the restaurant an older couple ate without speaking: he the clams with wine sauce, she the roast beef with couscous and asparagus spears, both of them frowning and picking. Out in front of the resort, where the shuttles were supposed to stop, a man in board shorts and a flowered shirt kept shouting, "Is that what you want?" At a bench outside a boy played a gameboy while a man, maybe a father for whom this was custody, asked questions that were not answered. He phrased each one as if it was interesting, and then paused and said, "hmmmm?" At the hot tub two little girls splashed and jabbered as their father tried to read the USA Today. The younger girl splashed and shouted through the bubbles and the older one saw the mallard dripping and waddling and began to screech "he's so cute!" until the father snapped the paper and said he was trying to read. The hot tub was immediately silent then except for the bubbles, and the younger girl began to cry. Against all this, above it, behind it and around it, ignored, the birdsong kept playing, trilling and tripping like happiness with a whistle.
Then on the third day when the couple woke up the woman was sick. She had a fever and ached and it felt like the flu. This was the third day at the resort, the fourth they were married. She threw up in the bathroom. Her head hurt and throat hurt and she lay in the bed and wanted to cry or at least sleep. The man went and got nyquil at the supermarket outside the resort, driving a mile and then two to find it. He bought cans of soup and orange juice and rented two movies. He had to wait to be checked out because the clerk, a pregnant woman chewing gum, was talking to the police about two teens she'd seen stealing condoms. They were, she said, dumb little fuckers. Then he went back to the resort and up the elevator, letting himself quietly into the room.
The woman was asleep but woke up to say, "you're here," and he crawled under the covers and held her. "I'm here," he said. He told her what he bought and she said he was wonderful. The afternoon air was sweet and came through the curtains open to the balcony. He held her and watched the curtains. She sighed and closed her eyes again to sleep.
"Oral Roberts, the Pentecostal evangelist whose televised faith-healing ministry attracted millions of followers worldwide and made him one of the most recognizable and controversial religious leaders of the 20th century, died Tuesday in Newport Beach, Calif. He was 91."
1. In the bowling alley in the afternoon everything was quiet and the TV would be on wrestling and religious programming. The woman that ran the place was always watching prosperity preachers. Her son watched wrestling. She liked the charismatics. He liked the Undertaker. It was mostly empty in the afternoon, a dusky quiet, a business that wasn't booming. She left the door propped open to the parking lot and cleaned the tables and floor and cooked hotdogs before the league bowlers came in in the evening, and the only sound was really the TV. They'd switch it back and forth without fighting about it, and after awhile the shows seemed seamless: Chris Benoit and Joel Osteen, the Undertaker and Creflo Dollar, Christan Cage, Oral Roberts, Word of Faith and WWE.
2. At the abandoned gas station on the corner, a kid lay among the leaves and stains of brake fluid, antifreeze and oil. The kid had had the spirit since he was ten and was, before this, in seminary. A sort of seminary: it was a school of eight in the basement of a charismatic church, unaccredited, with a curriculum of prophecy and prosperity, faith, visions, healing and miracles. The boy was also getting his GED. He had a spot at ORU if he finished the equivalency. He had been prophesying a lot, lately, "seeing the invisible," "doing the impossible," "filled with the spirit." He was starting to preach some Sunday nights. His schizophrenia flared up in the Fall, though, and he thought he saw snakes and the devil. The police thought he was high and he had a knife so they shot him three times at the Shell station, and he died there, several miles from the church.
3. Up on a hill in the hills East of Bakersfield, the elderly woman was alone since her husband went home, and no one had worked on the yard since he died. Her house was set so she could see the sun sink through the city. The place was overgrown with olives trees and oranges that fell to rot like a carpet in the weeds. She got a discount on the yard work since she was a window and when they came one of the men agreed to carry her letter down to the mailbox, a prayer request and her last will, legacy tithe to Oral Roberts. The rooms were dark except for the orange light of the sun setting in smog, and she stood in the window wearing her oxygen mask and watching the men at work on her yard. When they finished she gave them lemonade and glasses with ice and copies of Expect a Miracle.
Problems arise from the conflation of what something is and what something should be. For one thing, Franzen’s definition of the literary novel doesn’t really leave space for a failed work, something that takes the human condition as its subject, but isn’t successful. He also, at this point, took a little hop-skip and said literature is about “people as they really are” – as if realism were as natural as breathing. In fact, novels are not and never could be just simple reflections of reality, but are always and have to be constructions, artificial and formal mediations, interpretations.
Moreover, it’s not at all clear that this description of literature as being about “people as they really are” will divide writing in the way Franzen wants to divide it. It doesn’t seem obvious that a story about a man turned into a bug, just to use Franzen’s own example, is about humans “as they really are,” in some way that, say, Leonard’s story about former ’60s radicals on a for-profit bomb spree is not.
