Against the Blog

Been feeling a little bit weird since my last post. I always feel a little strange after writing a blog post.

Though the irony is not lost on me, let me explain what I mean.

I've been listening to the audiobook of Against the Day at work. It's 42 discs. I checked it out from the library and it took me the course of a whole weekend to rip them to mp3.

As I listen to the book, I can sort of let it wash over me in a way I couldn't do when I read the actual book. For one, the book (I bought it in hardback) is fucking heavy. It needs two hands or a table. Second, reading the book, because it was so long, became a bit of work over the course of the 16-or-so months in which I read it. I don't mind reading as work (I'm the sort of literary masochist who paid for the opportunity to read Being and Time on a schedule of three weeks just to eventually earn a certificate of some sort) but you necessarily experience the book in a different way.

As I hear the book, I am realizing it is absolutely fucking beautiful. I don't want to discuss Pynchon from the context of literature; again, this is like holding about ten hefty books in one's hands: work. Good work, sure, but work all the same.

The story of the novel, on the other hand, is just so wild and untamed. Totally free from typical literary constraints, it is free to just ramble on and on, like the landscape in the Western US. Have you ever driven across Wyoming, or Kansas, or Utah? Each view is magnificent, and it folds into the next as the horizon rolls forward, passing such landscape oddities as holes in the ground, dead trees, roadside trash, and trucks and trucks and trucks. The Western US is in bad need of an editor--and there is no shock that most of it has still never claimed a place on any best seller list.

And it just rolls on like this, going down the state highway roads of Merle Rideout, The Chums of Chance, Webb Traverse, (I've only just made it through disc 3) and all these other crazy characters in this gigantic space opera of a historical fiction novel, never worrying about getting off course, because the narrator knows he's got an unlimited tank of gas. Imagine where you could go with an unlimited tank of gas. This is the true cost of being on the road these days. It cost me about $600 in gas to make it from NYC to Oregon in May 2007. This was traveling for two weeks. That's barely a novella! But with an unlimited tank of gas, you could sleep in the car, and just have to scrape together enough for food. But who needs to eat, really? Listening to an audiobook is like driving without getting hungry or tired. You just keep going, stop, and keep going, like the sun's light going around the earth.

This last simile being a pointer to the point of the book (without discussing what it really is, or whether book's have points), as is all in the title. Enough said about that.

But it got me thinking, as I will do.

It got me out of that little individualist home-life bubble I get into, and sort of thinking in that state of mind I get into when doing something like driving across a continent. That feels of all that massive amount of land, man; not in a manifest destiny opportunistic vein, not even in an "On-the-Road" speed mentality, or even in a John Muir wide-open-natural-space hippie glee. Megan describes the fear of looking upward at the night sky sometimes, the horror of the phenomenal knowledge of traveling on a hunk of rock traveling around the sun. It's similar, but a bit more planetary, not so galactic.

It's as if suddenly you are caught in a massive earthquake. This is the big one. The sky line is crumbling around you, people are screaming and trying to save themselves: the moment during a boat fire when suddenly everyone realizes it is time to jump into the sea, because it's safer than the vessel. And just as the floor drops out beneath your feet, and you feel the sudden sensation of weightlessness in your joints, which being attuned to gravity from the time of their development, know only a harsh reaquainting with the effects of weight will soon result, and lock up in instinctual and reflexive fear of the void of orientation, and the perpetual pain hiding just beyond--yes, just at this point, time seems to freeze. The sound of shearing concrete and bending steel becomes mute, and you are caught in a stasis. Perhaps you have passed out, but instead of feeling nothing you feel enveloped, surrounded, as if buried. Suddenly an awareness comes to you, and you know your are not simply covered, but ensconced, held, and veiled by a... something. And then the something starts to speak.

You: Who are you?

It: I am the North American Plate.

You: The what?

It: I am the literal ground beneath your feet. I am the continental shelf, the mountains, the broad back of land you have been wandering over for the majority of your life.

You: And you are talking to me?

It: I don't have a lot to say, so when I pipe up, most of you are incredulous.

You: Oh. So what do you have to say? Is this some sort of cataclysmic anuciation of your own sentience?

It: No. I had a cramp. My back was really hurting. The edge of Juan de Fuca is pretty uncomfortable.

You: So after this, it's back to sleep?

It: It's not really sleep. There are no dreams. There is full consciousness. It's simply life as part of the earth's crust.

You: Does it feel good to shake the cobwebs loose every some years?

It: Not particularly. Barely like a muscle twitch, except for the pain.

You: What does pain feel like to you?

It: Do you feel that?

You: Yes, it hurts every time I move.

It: You've broken your arm.

You: I see.

It: What you are feeling now is as similar as you could imagine to what I feel. You are covered over, pressed upon by all sides, but with a great pain pressing in upon you, constricting your movement. Your back is hot, pressed to the fires from which you are constantly made and destroyed. But your front is cold, exposed to the thin cover of atmosphere, and beyond that, space. Yet it is not freedom in front of you, because the only substance you have is that you gain from being tied in a knot of your existence with all of your siblings, packed into a sphere from your combined weight. You, human, are free to walk over my face, twisting your body in all directions like a particle set loose in a vacuum, your only constraint being time, the constant circling of me and my siblings, beneath your feet. You need never think of us, except when we are forced to stir as now, because we have become a plane to you--a floor, a mere constraint of existence. But do not forget, we are the boundary of your world, and its extent.

You: So you just wanted to remind me of this, for my own good?

It: I don't know good or bad. I know stillness, and occasional pain, and the contact of my siblings weight, and my surface, and our unstoppable rotation. Now you know these things too.

And then you wake up, inexplicably in the middle of a street, with buildings torn down around you, with a broken arm, and a very strange feeling that you have wandered onto the back of a sleeping giant, and you could walk for years without knowing exactly where to jump off.

This was sort of the way I was feeling today, minus the broken limb. Feeling as if I didn't know whether I was proceeding with, or against the day, but suddenly conspicuously aware of the day, and filled with the general idea I should probably be considering it more, whereas only minutes before my life was lived in obliviousness of it.

I'm not sure to what this translates exactly. I'm not about to quit my job, or anything like that. But I feel like I need a bit of a purge. I feel a bit off course, like maybe I need to see exactly what in my pack is so heavy and poking against the back of my ribs, and see if maybe I should leave it on the next street corner.

But I feel pretty good about many things, such as my personal surroundings, my living space, and my protein intake. This is not some massive paradigm shift. It think it is more of a strategic reappraisal--not a change in strategy, but making sure I still know what the strategy is.

Perhaps things have been a bit negative in my world-of-thoughts lately. Too many foul clouds, the Nietzschean bad air. Sometimes I think total information awareness is a poison, filling the blood stream of thought with impurities, not letting enough good ole oxygen in.

Maybe I listen to the radio too much. I love the way I can flood myself with information. Podcasts, RSS, radio, constantly piped into my awareness--it's all possible, easy, and free. I can know so many things this way. Be up to date, whatever that means. It feels good to be in tune, to be a receiver, to vibrate with the wavelengths shooting through the ether.

But it goes without saying this gets old. Especially when the signals are often poor, or disagreeable. I can't stand commercials, and often turn the radio off in the car, which I never used to do. I would rather hear the sounds of my struggling transmission than the transmission of another mind-distortion ad campaign. I close my eyes to the bumper stickers, the email alerts, the constant stream of important announcements, because sometimes it is too much to hear what everyone would like me to think. I have thoughts too, and they don't have to be about whatever is going on, whatever is good or bad, and whatever else is trending.

I think it's time for an RSS purge. I'm going to cut some sections out of my newspaper. I need to load a collection of time-tested, lyric-free albums to the player, and put it on random. I need some emotive-content, not just rich-content. I'm going to post without reading, without referencing, without considering, without confronting. I'm going to write without a plan for a while, without any goal or literary-sound in mind, avoiding my usual word bank of tender, choice, and succulent vocabulary words. Build some sand castles, maybe. I'll read a book I've already read. I think I'll get drunk in the afternoon, and take a long nap. I'll just keep walking, and then take the bus back if I get tired. I'll eat something, maybe. Or maybe just make tea. I'll buy a magazine I've never read before, and only look at the pictures.

Let's see: it's May 15th. Still time to make some monthly plans.

Well, there is secret project M. I'll work on that (don't you worry about what that is, yet).

I could probably finish a short story.

And how about this--I'm only going to blog about stuff I really like. None of this Interdome of Interrogation for awhile. I think that will be nice. For the rest of the month, it's only Awesome Interdome around here. Not a hot list, not a brag or blow-up sheet, but stuff that is simply great, for fact of itself.

I've been making plans and lists like this for awhile now, in the effort of getting shit done. I don't know why I'm posting them here--no need to make this a Live Journal. But I didn't know why I was sitting down to write this post, either. And here we are, at the end.

Let's just say, the sun, and it's good friend, the North American Plate told me to do so. Yes, I like that. If you ever are called on to justify something, simply say it was a direct order by an entity which no one can question the existence of.

Phenomenological Rainbows

Each morning Lord Blatherard Osmo must put on his bowler, and take his briefcase out to the Adenoid to make his daily demarche. It is taking up so much of his time he's begun to neglect Novi Pazar, and F.O. is worried. In the thirties balance-of-power thinking he was quite strong, the diplomats were all down with Balkanosis, spies with foreign hybrid names lurked in all the stations of the Ottoman rump, code messages in a dozen Slavic tongues were being tattooed on bare upper lips over which the operative then grew mustaches, to be shaved off only by authorized crypto officers and skin then grafted over the messages by the Firms' plastic surgeons... their lips were palimpsests of secret flesh, scarred and unnaturally white, by which they all knew each other.
Novi Pazar, anyhow, was still a croix mystique on the palm of Europe, and F.O. finally decided to go to the Firm for help. The Firm knew just the man.
Every day, for 2 1/2 years, Pirate went out ot visit the St. James Adenoid. It nearly drove him crazy. Though he was able to develop a pidgin by which he and the Adenoid could communicate, unfortunately he wasn't nasally equipped to make the sounds too wqell, and it got to be an awful chore. As the two of them snuffled back and forth, alienists in black seven-button suits, admirers of Dr. Freud the Adenoid clearly had no use for, stood on stepladders up against its loathsome grayish flank shoveling the new wonderdrug cocaine--bringing hods full of the white substance, in relays, up the ladders to smear on the throbbing gland-creature, and into the germ toxins bubbling nastily inside its crypts, with no visible effects at all (though who knows how that Adenoid felt, eh?).
But Lord Blaterard Osmo was able at last to devote all of his time to Novi Pazar. Early in 1939, he was discovered mysteriously suffocated in a bathtub full of tapioca pudding, at the home of a Certain Viscountess. Some have seen in this the hand of the Firm. Months passed, World War II started, years passed, nothing was heard from Novi Pazar. Pirate Prentice had saved Europe from the Balkan Armageddon the old men dreamed of, giddy in their beds with its gradeur--though not from World War II, of course. But by then, the Firm was allowing Pirate only tiny homeopathic doses of peace, just enough to keep his defenses up, bu not enough to poison him.

--

This is the majority of page 16 of the Penguin edition of Gravity's Rainbow, which I have just finished reading. You may have just finished reading it as well, if you just read the portion of text I transcribed into this blog post. But you have not read the book I am reading.

That's because I was reading my copy of the Penguin edition--the one with the cover image of the V-2 rocket pulled from the Smithsonian archives; the one printed on cheap, paperback paper yellowed a bit, even though it is concievably not more than seven years old; the one set in some delightful serif font, with margins a bit too big I feel, though it does allow the text to an impressive 760 pages. The page numbers are set in italics.

But even if you have the same edition, you do not have the copy I do. I shoplifted this copy from a large book retailer back when I was college, and I was broke, but had an enormous appetite for fiction. On my way out of the store, I was confronted by a clerk who could not have been more than seventeen years old. I gave her a look and kept walking, calmly.

Later that summer one of Iowa's amazing thunderstorms blew open the windows of my then-girlfriend's apartment. It was an old building, a marvel of the midwest, with wide wood floors, one of the highest structures in the small town. The windows were also old, having antiquated latches keeping them from swinging open laterally. They were no match for the wind, which came in with sheets of rain, soaking the couch and the end table, where this volume was lying, my bookmark only three chapters into its pages. It was thoroughly soaked, but the remarkable thing about the cheap paper was that it dried as easily as a sponge, though there remains a water-damage wrinkle running from the binding out to the face like a scar, gradually lessening in severity as one turns the pages in reverse from the back of the book. While I hold the book open, I feel this wrinkle in the fingers of my right hand.

This would not be the last time this book would contact water. I did not finish reading the book that summer, because honestly, who sits down and reads Pynchon the first time around? I can't remember if I finished reading it the summer I lived in Arizona with the same girlfriend, a disasterous chain of events that precipitated our breakup. I did bring it to Arizona with me, where there is very little rain, but when there is, it is beautiful, and dangerous. Where the book met the water was actually in New York, when I brought it back from the failed relationship and put it back on the shelf near the window of our recently redone apartment.

The apartment was very cheaply redone. The fixtures were new, but the sink and toilet clogged. The windows were new, but they leaked. More water came in, but not the lovely, pastural aqua vita of Iowa, but the stinking piss-rain of the city. Luckily it was only the corner of the pages that got damp, because then it was able to dry out without leaving a lingering odor. I know it did not, because then it inhabited the floor of my bed room for a time, as I was reading pieces of it. If I had not finished its entirety in Arizona, I did so then--I remember this because it was cohabitating my floor with Asimov's Foundation series, of which I only managed to finish the first two books. I remember finding it ironic that I finished the Pynchon, but was drawn away from the Asimov. But, after all, this is how I read. I was also working on my thesis, and the Pynchon might have been more conducive to this work--though the Hari Seldon certainly found his place in my theories as well.

Now, in Oregon, I am picking up this same copy again. I knew how it would smell when I reached for it at the bottom of the bookshelf, just where I knew it would be. It smells pulpy, like the dust of a library, or paper that is old. It is the opposite of the smell of new paper--perhaps shining with the new gloss they print everything on these days, driving the cost of a paperback up to twenty dollars. The price on the back of this edition is $16.95, though I did not pay for it. Sometimes I feel bad for not paying for it, because Pynchon is still alive. My pseudo-ethic of shoplifting in those days was to steal only books of authors who were deceased. But I couldn't help myself in this case--I had just finished V and desperately wanted to crack into this massive book by the same man, alive or dead. If I knew Pynchon's address perhaps I would mail him a check. But I probably would not have read the book if I hadn't obtained a copy then. But perhaps I would have.

In picking up the book, I am going to read, at least some of it, as work in preparation for writing my own piece of work. It is not meant to be Pynchon-esque by any means, though going back over his words now I hear a lot of his prose in my own. I am searching for mystery in this book: how, in the amazing opulence of the prose, is there any open space for mystery? I think he is one of the finest mystery writers ever, because one doesn't even know one is picking up clues and rounding up characters as one does it. The mystery is so natural, once you have solved it, it seems as if it was your own idea, and not the author's. In planning my project, I realize I have a solution, but I don't think I have the mystery yet. I have too many pieces, and not enough holes. I'm hoping I can formulate some sort of idea, or theory, about how one makes a whole, and then carves the pieces from it. What is it Pynchon is telling us with the words, before we even start to look for the mystery? What is there, staring me in the face, the minute I turn the page? Crazy banana breakfasts? Metaphor-induced beat-war scenes? Superheroes of nation-states' secret sex lives? Not these things, but something else.

[sigh.]

Anybody who think that books will die out, is fucking crazy, or an idiot, or both.

That's what I wanted to write here, right now.



There is no way you can tell anything about a book without holding it in your hand, and turning the pages. You can read thousands about thousands of "pages" of text, but you cannot read one bit of a book on a screen. The only people who will be content with ebooks are those who are satisfied with text. Those who read books, will always read books. I have no doubt that a large part of the mystery I am looking for scattered on these pages is something to do with shoplifting, Arizona, Iowa, and New York, and the smell of wet paperbacks. No, it's not purely an aesthetic experience, but it certainly has to do with the phenomena of words. You may have read the text I typed into the top of this post, but you did not read it off page 16 of my copy, as I did. Semantics is not a holistic experience, by any means. But reading has never been a semantic practice, anymore than books are simply about good grammar. Semiotics--the meaning of signs--is about a communion of signs and the body. Does sentence structure matter? Yes. Does typesetting matter? Yes. Does paper choice matter? Yes. Does where that paper has been and who touched it before you held it in your hot little hands and greedily ran your eyes over it the same way you look at the picture of a naked human being? Yes.

Literary theory does not consider itself phenomenological, and only thinks of itself as sexual as a lark: a minor titillation, an inside joke. It is only recently that psychology even got in the door to the literature seminar, and we got to think of the people in addition to the text-in-itself. Oh--I mean we got to think of authors. Just wait until we begin to think of the reader. All those young men and women becoming arroused as they parse the pages of paperbacks borrowed from friends, and snuck inside the house. And not only the sex--but the sadness, the happiness, the content to sit in a chair for hours, moving nothing but the fingers (no, not the sex!). When will reading become part of literature? It already has, and this communion of eyes, hands, nose, and brain is the only reason anyone has ever read.

What's dying is not books, but publishing. The latter is the semantic: the title page, the TOC, the cover, and the price. The former is the semiotic: the meaning, the sign, the context, reading as an act. If you can call the semantically-glossy crap with which they fill up the mall "books", then yes, I guess that industry is dying. But good semiotics will find its medium just as it always finds its readership, as small as these might be. The collapse of the publishing industry doesn't have shit to do with that. Oh, and the money--well, people were writing before the publishers even let them have a little money--so I'm not worried about that.

I know--I have a love affair with books, and it is coloring my judgment. You're damn right. If one thing I said here is important it is this: reading words off bound paper is not necessarily the most authentic semiotic experience that will ever exist, but it is a phenomenologically distinct process that will exist for a very long time. You can read on whatever material you want, and read whatever you want, but literature will continue to exist, both electronics and rainwater be damned. See if I'm wrong.

Fine. Let's put it to the test. Who wants to publish something? Yes: right now. Let's get some literature together, and we'll put in on paper. I'll, print it and bind it with my own bare hands, if I have to. People will read it. If it's good, you can believe that people will read it.

Actually: totally serious. Let's go.

Laying Bare my Own Conceptions

Since everyone knows that by engaging in sex you are bringing horrible dangers upon yourself, I would just like to start this post with the caveat that I realize by discussing issues of sex I am treading into the danger zone. Or, at least engaging in dangerous discourse, through which I may die.

Now to the post.

Fiction and the Ladies

SO WHAT is the deal with women fictionists? And by deal, I mean where are they?

Ok, I'm not stupid. I know that there are many women authors who write fiction. What I mean to say is that it seems that there are few female authors that I know of who write experimental, creative, or surrealistic prose. That is, the sort of literature I am most interested in. Female straight-forward novelists, there are plenty. Female journalists, poets, academics: yes, yes, and yes. I even remember hearing somewhere that the editor/book production field is skewed towards the female, in terms of gender of the professionals engaged in the industry. And they obviously do their work well, or they would not be doing it.

But of the more esoteric "literary" variety of prose, I see it being dominated by men. I'm thinking of: Palahniuk, Dick, Grass, Pynchon, Rushdie, and more. Am I wrong? Have I been missing some incredible women writers just because I am not looking in the right places, or because I just don't know what I'm talking about?

It has nothing to do with ability. I know a lot of creative women, who I think with some practice could really write well, but they are all interested in other media or different pursuits. I'm trying to gather together good writers that I know, both personally, and more well-known authors (after all, who am I?), and almost exclusively they are male.

I wonder if it takes a special sort of jerk to think that s/he can flaunt literary and/or societal conventions to write really creatively. These jerks being more often than not men? Or maybe, I only like writers that are jerks, or men, and so I am biased. Or maybe I am just a jerk.

Please, let me be wrong. Women should write; they should write crazy, off-the-wall shit. Why don't they? Or if they do, where are they? Help me, point it out to me, guide me out of the cloud of my ignorance.