what the fuck, literally

I'm really tired, so I'm not going to write anywhere near as much as I could. But I want to say simply that this NYT Books article absolutely disgusted me.

It disgusts me that Chabon, Eggers, and Wallace are supposed to be the "great male writers" of our time.

It disgusts me that Mailer, Roth, and Updike are supposed to be the "great male writers" of any time.

It disgusts me that anyone, woman or man, would be comfortable with this analysis of our current state of sexuality in america.

It disgusts me that anyone, woman or man, might possibly read an article like this an not get as disgusted and upset as I am right now.

There is an un-severable, bloody-uterine-appendage connection between sex and writing. It is thick, rigid, wet, tight, and secreting out of any literature. Not just the overtly sexual writing, and not just the graphic writing. If you read the sex of any of these listed authors, you are reading the most stilted, white, middle class, faux-intellectual, marginal american sex ever. This represents the worst that the american sex drive has to offer. Virginized christian america is more interesting, because it at least has a hang up, and teenage pregnancies. For goodness sake, if I wanted to re-read the tender violations of mainstream sexuality, I could read Cosmopolitan.

The problem with all of these authors, is that they set up a false dichotomy between the "mainstream facade" of american sex, and the "violation of the facade". All of them, in their own degree, are inflating a blow-up doll, and then knocking it down. I would hazard a guess that this represents 1% of americans view on life. They have a certain view of sex, and then worry themselves sick about the few contradictions of that view they are able to discover.

The rest of america, is fucking. Or they're watching porn, or watching VH1, or watching each other fuck on cell phone video, or hating sex, or killing people who have sex, or raping people (like, actually raping people, not just insulting them) or putting pictures of their penis on Craigslist. All of this is going on, 24 hours a day, and we're supposed to act like anything Dave Eggers says about sex is relevant?

Of course nobody is going to capture the complete package. But claiming that a high-brow novelist is even close to the truth is like a New Yorker treating their own sex life as anthropological archetype. Which they do, by the way. As do people from all over the country, all the time, 24 hours a day.

Everybody in this country thinks they know how to cure everyone else's sex life, while they can't see the problems with their own, while they watch other people have sex on TV, while they have sex themselves. This incredible non-stop orgy of the mind and body and everyone else's mind and body IS american sex. One of Burroughs' speed dreams about aliens and assholes is a lot closer to the truth than a novelist's Anytown, USA. The thing the NYT, and all of their canon miss, is the SPEED of sex. It is happening, all over the country, all the time, accelerating. Britney Spears' naked crotch is BREAKING NEWS in this dimension! What dimension is the NYT living in?

Alright, part of my anger is that I just wrote a novella outlining this basic concept, and to see wet blankets like the above names cited as "america's male authors" cuts into me like a 9" plastic stripper heel.

But apart from that, it really kills me that americans can continue to be so blind about their own sex lives. You can read all the literature you want, whether it be misogynist novelists or french feminists. But if you still cannot see the sex going on out the window in the middle of the street in the daytime, if you still cannot plug literature into your body as well as your mind, if you still cannot talk and read about sex while having actual sex, then how can we say we've progressed past or through anything? The key to sex in literature is not that literature IS sex, it is that we read with our eyes, think with our minds, speak with our mouths, and write with our hands, and then turn right around and use these VERY SAME body parts to pleasure ourselves and others. A metaphor is a working link, not a costume. Literature does not "take the place of", but "connects between". As it is for words, it is for body parts.

okay, well thanks for listening. I'm off to bed.

Mules of Semiotic Capitalism

From the NYT:

“I don’t see other graffiti writers as my competition anymore,” B.N.E. said. “Now I’m going up against the Tommy Hilfigers, Starbucks, Pepsi. You have these billion-dollar companies, and I’ve got to look at their logos every day. Why can’t I put mine up?”



I like to describe Facebook particularly, out of the dearth of social media, as "Acquaintance Spam". Sure, they're people you know--but the feed gives you want more information that you'd ever really want, from people you are socially required to "friend". And my Facebook account (set up ages ago, used primarily as a White Pages) has a funny way of forgetting my email settings, and re-signing me up for notifications. Kind of like AT&T.

So if we are encouraged, socially, to promote ourselves, or to sign up for mailing lists of social advertising, why shouldn't some one desire to be their own brand?

And if you are really designing a brand, you want to do it right. None of this trashy, reality TV, Tia Tequila crap. Start over fresh. Clean lines, contrast. A recognizable, pronounceable acronym. Helvetica Neue. (That's actually his font.) Start local with the street teams, go global, make it viral. In a media culture, you are what you see.

Oh, and hide who you truly are. This is the first step of corporate, non-accountability. If you really want to do guerrila marketing, act like guerrilas. Face masks, omnipresent, anonymous media threats disseminated through your network. Anybody got a problem? Refer them to a spokesperson. Until, of course, Fortune wants an interview.

My only question is this: if this is capitalist marketing nostalgia/mimicking, then where is the surplus value? Where is the profit, derived from the gap between the production cost and the consumption expenditure? If
this is marketing, where/what is the market?

As a good Marxist-Freudian, I'd probably feed you the line about expenditures of the unconscious capital of dreams, and taking surplus off the relations of the production of desire. Yes, yes. We've all read Capitalism and Schizophrenia, to the n-th plateau and back. (You haven't? What are you doing here? Go! Now!)

But maybe this is a flawed iteration of the (now) eternal logic of capitalist production. Maybe, just maybe, there is no profit. Sure, Mssr. BNE gets his own art show, but he could have defaced corporation logos and made a buck without slapping stickers everywhere. What does the brand sell? Who makes what the brand sells? Who buys what the brand sells? Nothing, nobody, and everybody. In the case of Facebook, Facebook scraps off a buck on advertising, just like selling space on the side of a truck, driving nowhere, delivering nothing, using (almost) no fuel. But what was I tempted to buy when I saw that Susie B. from way back when suggested I reconnect with Jimmy H.? I don't know. I was annoyed, but that was it. Was I just... tempted to be... social? Is that a product? Who made it? How do you use it? There are no answers to these questions.

Maybe capitalism has spawned off non-breeding children. These mules of capitalism look like capitalism, act like capitalism, talk like capitalism, but make nothing. Except, that is, more of themselves. Social capital doesn't exist. It is a hand feeding itself. If you're making money off of social capital, you're actually making money off of real capital, while the social just looks on. The mule may pull a load, but what is it as a species? What is it's species-consciousness? Its poch is a bastard; it is a species with an endless generation of one iteration.

Symbols may pull products, but this is only symbols, doing nothing but symboling. All over the place, with each other, replicating, but only ever to the zeroth power, to the infinite extent of n+0. It's an echo, it's a shockwave, it's a whirlpool. It's like trying to map the surface of the ocean. It's the fractalized image of the depth of cultural noise. It's the ambient electro-magnetic sound of the universe, emanating from our own heads and then back again, the simultaneous transmitter and receiver of the static, programming itself into a feedback loop entity of semiotic reality. It's the meaning of $700 billion dollars in the context of the dollar menu.

I'm not about to try and predict the future of capitalism with any certainty (at least not in THIS blog post). But it seems to me pretty obvious that if monetary capitalism was ever to go into decline, if the GDP was ever to flip into steady negatives, and our surplus value was to shrink... (I mean, it can't just go on for ever, can it? Even in a debt-centered, inflationary system?) ...if this ever was to happen, the social, symbolic side of capitalism would continue to grow, as long as there are the machines to do it, that is, the people to consume and produce haphazard, metastasized semiotics. Media may need investment, but the investment in meaning is you and me. It doesn't even need a return to survive. I can keep writing and writing, pasting my name all over the surface of the world, and I have no margins to meet, and no investors to please. You could do the same, and maybe we would read each other's work, or maybe not.

Once the mule is possible, there's no beginning and end. The extent of meaning, it's borders, are negligable if nobody is measuring. There is no compulsion to reproduce and evolve--any re-creation will happen spontaneously, as another instance pops up. There is no linear hierarchy, no temporality, only the fact of existence in expression. Filation becomes mere praxis. There's no piety in praxis. There's only interest or ignorance, and it doesn't matter which. The aesthetics of the rust belt will determine decaying infrastructure's own future use. People will move into libraries, and homes will become archives. All works, all lists, thoughts, and all records will be simultaneously incomplete/complete.

You could ask a mule what it's on earth for... and you could ask a word (or three letters) the same question. Rhetorical questions might as well be the new cold fusion.

They didn't have video in the 18th century, okay, pal?

Jon Lebkowsky interviewing Bruce Sterling for bOING bOING in 1992 (that's like, late 20th cen. shit!):

JL: I recall hearing you talk to Steve Jackson about electronic books. You said you thought that they were just throwaways.

BS: Yeah, software is throwaways. Where is your Apple software right now? Where is your IIe software? Do you even know where it is? You know how much money you sank into that shit? What can you do with it now? Zilch. Nothing. People just don’t keep that s tuff the way that they keep books. It’s profoundly disposable. I’m not worried for the future of literacy, though. Some people think that nobody’s going to read books in the future. I think that’s ridiculous. You can learn stuff from books that you can’t get from video, period. For one thing, without books you’re not going to know anything about the past 5,000 years of history. They didn’t have video in the 18th century, okay, pal? And if you want to know anything about the 18th century and what went on i n it, say, why the American republic was started and what people meant when they wrote the constitution, you gotta know about books. You’re not going to get that out of a Hypercard stack, I’m sorry. And if you know that, you’re going to have something ver y valuable…not just culturally and artistically valuable, but practically valuable. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance. If you put a guy with 800 channels of tv next to a guy who knows how to go to a library and do serious research, there’s no ques tion who’s gonna know the skinny…

More about the Brute Press, which you care about

I made a major style change to Brute Press, eliminating the occasionally irritating formatting, improving the font (thank you, serifs), and getting rid of the unneeded and excessive categories and organizational modes.

If that isn't a good enough reason to head right over there and check out some FREE LITERATURE, then how about

TWO BRAND-NEW SHORT STORIES!!!

"As the Man Said" is a fun piece about some kids. It's hot off rejection at a small, online lit mag, whose editor told me, "What didn't work is that, for me at any rate, there wasn't enough of a story here." How's that for praise? I could describe it more, but it's short and I'd give away the awesome part, which of course, is that there is no story in the story. Yep. A lot of works about nothing, apparently.

"On Fire" was born from a need to write a story about cars. This one was rejected from a lit mag too, but without any awesome criticism to totally make me see the error in writing stories about nothing. This means, through the obvious inverse, that something definitely happens in this story.

Well, there you have it. Brute Press: stuff happens, and is now 50% easier to read.

Staying Content with Forms

Reading this article, I had a little thought about some descriptive terms for media, so please bear with me, (or don't, it's a free Internet) while I flesh these out.

The article is discussing the difference between "content" and "experience" with media. e.g., Music consumers care more about the experience than the content, so they will buy iPod and iTunes, rather than simply downloading them for free, because this experience trumps both free torrents and big box music retailers.

This argument aside, (which characteristically, I believe to be a narrow interpretation of a wider ISSUE which I will now lay down the metaphysics upon), it got me thinking about two similar terms, which I have thrown around a bit: "content", and "form".

I'll cut to the chase, and say like all dualities, these are two elements of a compound. So, if you are quick on the dialectics, you could probably skip to the end. However, I'll probably do some loop-de-loops before then, so look out.

The effect of the deployment of "form" and "content" depend on where you draw the line. Basically, we are taking a material/ideal ruler, and laying it down somewhere, over top of another discussion. "Content" ends up being the more material aspects of a particular thing, while the "form" is more ideal. You can pick your own example. This is a good differentiation to make, useful for many things, not the least of which is splitting between the specific and the general. Within the general form of poetry, we find many specific instances of content, which might vary, but still fall under the same taxonomy. And because this is a taxonomy, we can move our duality-rubric around, deciding that two examples of poetry have the same poetic content, while being under the same form of writing or linguistic expression. It's all relative, of course. "Content", as a material classification of the specific, tends to be different than other similarly defined content, whereas "forms" unite various content by their similarities. And this extends up and down micro/macrocosms in various directions, overlapping and subsuming previous distinctions, as we need to. After all, "form/content" are only words, and they must work for us. As long as they work, who cares?

But when we're trying to understand media, of which words are only one form of "content" (heh heh), we should probably be a bit more delicate. Especially if we are attempting to predict the future of a particular medium, and its associated technology. Calling something an exemplary form (or "experience") does not necessary speak for itself. Different people will privilege content over form, or form over content, in various instances, depending on what they are referring to by each. It's the writing that matters; no, its the technology; no, it's the delivery; no, its media form itself; etc.

If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you will probably have noticed that I tend to deploy the "material" aspects of a particular situation, over the "ideal". This is because I read a bunch of books by this guy with a beard one time, and it has kind of stuck as a habit. However, if you really follow what I'm trying to say, (if I am not totally opaque and obtuse), you will notice that normally I am rounding upr aspects of what be called "ideal", in order to point out that it is actually more effective when they are considered part of the "material". I am shifting the taxonomy, playing my own little word game, but for this reason: "ideals", "genera", and "forms" are often used as givens, or unchangeable elements of a situation; whereas "materials", "species", and "content" are seen as mutable, able to be manipulated, and at various levels of accessibility and provenance--also known as available through PRAXIS (to use another of those words lodged in my brain).

My point is, we should not honor boundaries of Form, simply because we have identified them as such. Even the most dogmatic of beliefs are usable as a material to be built upon, and tools to be deployed to improve our praxis. The evolution of the word praxis is exemplary; like many philosophical terms, it has been re-appropriated from its original, Platonic and Aristotelian uses, to more, ahem, material forms. (Riddle me that.)

Anyway, back to media. When we think of content, as opposed to form, we might very well think of music or literature, opposed to iPods or Kindles. And yes, it would seem that the form is more important to the user's experience than the content. If you have a good technological form, you can move units of content.

But, we could also pose it this way: think of, as content opposed to form, sound waves or words opposed to genres of music or literature. If you have a good genre, can you move crap words to the consumer? Sometimes yes, but not always. You can't just put a heavy bass line over some shitty hook, and then sell mp3s of it. I'm giving people with bad taste the benefit of the doubt, thinking of them more as "ill-informed" than really liking crap music. I don't think this is going out on a limb--if you look at the demographics of people who buy "bad" music, they are often those whom, for whatever reason, have not had a chance to be exposed to anything better. But I think this is moving away from the point--which is, you must have some content that is, experienceable (regardless of merit) before you can sell anything to anyone. Even if its vampire fiction or club bass, someone has to like the content before they're willing to buy anything. This is a lesson the media industry has yet to take seriously.

Let's move in another direction. To oppose "content" to "form", let's oppose iPod to Digital Media Player. Ah ha--now it seems that it is not the form which really prevails, but the specific instance of that form. Now, I'm aware the article I was reading talked about "experience", not "form", to quote exactly. But they are deploying "experience" as both content and form, depending on what aspect of it they are referring to. It is form, in the sense that it is a digital media player, but it is content in the sense that it is THE iPod.

This brings us to an important point, which might make it a bit clearer how they are using both content and form: commodification is the unification of content with form. The material becomes the ideal, and vice versa. It is not just any media player, it is The Ideal music player, though it is still very much only a music player. Any IT object is not only what it is, but the ideal of that classification. It might function very well as what it is, or not at all. But it must be both material and ideal, content and form, for it to be a commodity.

Apple succeeded in this regard, but a commodity is nothing new. However, the delusion that commodity-status is necessary to move units is new. This is the erroneous belief of the publishing industry, which is desperately searching for its "iPod moment"; they think that when the content of publishing can be unified in form, suddenly everyone will want them, and they can sell Primo-Golden-Hyper-Books, or whatever. Making a commodity isn't going to save any industry, though it might generate sales in the short term. Some books still sell lots of copies, because they are commodified. But a single commodity is not an industry. You must continue to refine and produce new content in addition to interacting with the formal aspects of the medium, if you want to move units. Nobody will buy simply The Idea of anything, any more than they will buy a bunch of words tossed in a heap.

For evidence of this, look at an iPod now. It's a completely different device than the original, crappy LCD, click-wheel crap. It plays games now! It has a compass, a telephone. It's a goddamn video camera/DVR/baby monitor! The fact that it can also be an end-device for digital music is now entirely incidental. The content of the thing, in terms of its technology and functions, have far exceeded the form it was supposed to maintain.

Technology is content itself. Technology is a medium. The Internet is Language. The fact that content now let's use view other content, by nature of their combined content is interesting, but not a revolution in form. Once reading and writing was also a unique form, but it doesn't mean that linguistic communication was new. You can call it HTML if you want, or mp3, or even YouTube: it is all language. It is a language which enables the expression of other languages. Code is both a form and a content. It all depends on what you want to manipulate. If you want to write English language books, you probably see English words as content, and the book as the form. If you want to sell consumer electronics, you probably look at mini-processors and touch-screens as the content, and slick, thin form-factors and UI as the form. If you want to distribute literature to many people who want to read it, you probably should look at quality literature as the form, to which acceptable content-networks are applied. The genera of form can help you think about the species of content, but in the end, the generic and the specific are merely ways of thinking about meaning.

Which brings me to a last, elusive point, which I will not fully explain. Because content and form are really interchangeable depending on your conscious point of view (a coordination of content and form itself), neither are material in the sense that they cannot be transmuted into an ideal perception of material (what we call specific objects, as opposed to just things). If you really want to access the material roots of both content and form, you will have to go after something on which it is much more difficult to maintain a metaphysical handle: the human "expression" of form and content, and both the production and the consumption of this expression. Expression is found in both content and form, and controls the interaction between the two categories in our mind. It is closer to Kant's Transcendental Ideal, but between you and me, we might just say it is the force flowing through the pipes, no matter what sort of liquid they contain, nor where they might take it.

[For further reading, by a pair of dudes who grip it way better than I do, you might want to check out Deleuze and Guattari's essay on form, content, and expression in A Thousand Plateaus. It might be, "A Geology of Morals", but I can't remember right now. I'll check when I have the book in front of me.]

[Also, it should go without saying (though I'm saying it) that this argument about the form and content of material in space, also applies to Time. Say wha? Never mind! Another time then.]

The Well-Built Bridge

A book that I very much like is Hopscotch by Julio Cortazar.

The book is oddly constructed, built from 56 chapters numbered and ordered sequentially. But, there are an additional 99 chapters, which can be inserted into the flow of the first 56, in an order suggested by the author in an introductory passage.

Aside from this bizarre structure, the story is about a bohemian writer named Oliveira, living in Paris in the first half of the book, and in Buenos Aires in the second. He and his associates form a pseudo-beatnik collective, who's activities and warm snobbery wouldn't surprise anyone who has ever frequented a liberal arts college campus.

The characters are really a bunch of jerks, but they are presented so adorably, and their dialogue and activities written in such an honest-to-goodness tragic-comic feeling, that I couldn't get enough of them. Of course, there is the appeal of a bunch of do-nothings who listen to jazz records, talk about obscure philosophers and historians, and crowd their dirtbag Parisian apartments with spent cigarette butts and wine bottles. But really, this sort of beat-itude aside, I found myself turning the pages to hear Cortazar tell me about them, or even better, let the jerks tell me about themselves.

Here is an excellent passage, from perhaps the second-most riveting part of the book, yet my favorite. In this scene, Oliveira is in one window, and his friend Traveler is in another, across an alley, three stories up. They have built a bridge from two boards, extending out of either window, and Talita, Traveler's girlfriend, is halfway across the alley, trying to give a small package of mate to Oliveira. It was Oliveira and Traveler's idea to build the shaky bridge rather than walk down the street and back up, on an extremely hot day.

"You're getting there," Traveler announced. "Get into position so you can tie up the boards, they're a little bit apart."
"Look at the good job I did of roping her," Oliveira said. "There you are, Manu, you can't tell me now I couldn't get a job with you people in the circus."
"You hurt my face," Talita complained. "The rope is scratchy."
"I can put on a cowboy hat, come out whistling, and rope anybody or anything," Oliveira proposed with enthusiasm. "The bleachers will break out cheering, a show that has few precedents in circus history."
"The sun's starting to get you," Traveler said, lighting up a cigarette. "And I've told you not to call me Manu."
"I haven't got the strength," Talita said. "The rope is too coarse, it keeps catching on itself."
"The ambivalence of the noose," Oliveira said. "Its natural function sabotaged by a mysterious tendency towards neutralization. I think that's what they call entropy."
"It's pretty tight now," Talita said. "Shall I loop it again? There's still a little left over."
"Yes, tie it around tight," Traveler said. "I hate things that are left over and dangling; it's diabolical."
"A perfectionist," Oliveira said. "Now come on over onto my board and test the bridge."
"I'm afraid," Talita said. "Your board doesn't look as solid as ours."
"What?" said Oliveira, offended. "Can't you see that it's a fine cedar board? Are you comparing it to that piece of pine? Come on, don't worry."
"What do you think, Manu?" Talita asked, looking back.
Traveler, who was about to reply, looked at the spot where the two boards overlapped and at the poorly tied rope. Straddling his board, he could feel it vibrating between his legs in a way that was neither pleasant nor unpleasant. All Talita had to do was put down her hands, pull herself up a little and she would be over on Oliveira's side. The bridge would hold, of course; it was well built.
"Wait a minute," Traveler said doubtfully. "Can't you hand him the package from there?"
"Of course she can't," Oliveira said, surprised. "What's on your mind? You're ruining everything."
"Like he says, I can't hand it to him from here," Talita admitted. "But I could toss it, the easiest thing in the world from here."
"Toss it?" Oliveira said resentfully. "All this trouble and you're going to end up by tossing me the package?"
"If you stick out your arm you'll only be a foot away from the package," Traveler said. "There's no need for Talita to go all the way over there. She'll toss you the package and that's that."
"She'll miss the way women always do," Oliveira siad, "and the yerba will spill all over the street, not to mention the nails."
"Rest assured," Talita said, quickly taking out the package. "Even if it doesn't land in your hand, it will still go through the window."
"Yes, and it'll spill all over the dirty floor and I'll have to drink mate that's all full of dust," Oliveira said.
"Don't pay any attention to him," Traveler said. "Go ahead and throw it and come back."

This is why I think it is foolish that there are writers out there who would reject all use of metaphor instead for straight description, or dialogue. On this page there are four sentences that are not dialogue, and yet the metaphor is so rich, it almost ceases to function as one. Ignore the basic fact of a woman suspended on two planks held by the weight of two men--the scene is still so rich, merely in the way that they talk. You cannot avoid metaphor, because it is part of meaning. And no matter how hard you attempt to avoid anything smacking of meaning in writing, by the nature of the fact that you are using words, your text continues to mean--it continues to be metaphorical.

I think this is one of the lasting lessons of surrealism (though others would clearly disagree with me). Despite whatever you put into an image, despite whatever you believe should be in the image but is not, there is still meaning there, flowing out of the frame and into your mind. This scene is so silly. but still make me quake in fear as I read it. I can't help but take away real feelings from something totally absurd. Would the author really have Talita drop into the alley, while these idiots banter back and forth? Is that too obvious? Or would it be too obvious to have her escape unscathed? Why am I, like Talita, suspended between these two jerks bullshitting? Why do I read books like this? Is this something I do for fun? And as I ask myself these anxious questions, I continue to read, trying to get to the end of the chapter as fast as I can to find out, but still reading each word carefully, for fear of missing something, and losing my grasp on the text. It is secondary that there are men speaking, a woman suspended in the air, or any other myriad details. What is primary is that the words are begging to be read, pleading with the reader, ushering, pulling, and begging at your mind with every letter, word, and line.

This is good writing, when it makes me feel this way. A lot of readers and writers talk about "interesting characters" or "spell-binding plot", or "beautiful description". Yes, well and good. But an author's main character is always the narrative, the plot is always the building of phrases and sentences into paragraphs, and the setting is always the word being read, at that very moment. Because in reality, all metaphor aside, you are no where else, but within that word.

And lo, we have invented a new technical variety of literary wrongness

FUCK! Gerrr... ahk, goddam... fuck!

Okay, I'm doing it.

I promised myself that I wouldn't. But here we are.

I promised myself I wouldn't write anything about Tao Lin or Muumuu House. And yet here I am doing it.

I wasn't going to, because everything obvious has been said by his detractors, of which it seems there are a certain number (like anyone with an Internet presence). And second, what good would it do, really? There are plenty of shitty artists, artists I don't agree with, artists that fall short of their pretensions, and everyone in between. I try to only call out the people who really make me angry, or of whom I think I can make a good example for a particular point, mostly unrelated to the actual person. Attacking someone personally rarely has a positive effect outside of the rhetorical.

But as I said, here I am, and here we are.

I think the fact that he keeps being interviewed is what has brought us here today. Not who he is being interviewed by--some blogs, maybe written up by Nylon or TimeOut. (I would like to see a hipster Left Behind in which every person, place, or thing written up in Nylon, Paper, and TimeOut NY are suddenly vanished from the face of the earth, and those of us left behind actually go out on Friday night and have a pretty good time.) It is all about what he says in his interviews, which really gets me.

But it isn't a "grind my gears" sort of get. It's hard to explain--and this is why we are here.

I read his blogposts to Muumuu House, and his interviews because it is inspiring to me as a writer. We have some commonalities. We both write, and we both aspire to publish ourselves and others whom we admire or appreciate. But he does it in the absolute, complete opposite way I would ever want to. I read his Internet presence because everytime I do, I feel better about my own work and more determined to continue.

I don't mean that I think his work is shit, or even that I don't like it. I think it is absolutely wrong.

This is the opposite of what they teach you to say in liberal arts general-absorbtion-nontheoretical-aesthetics, otherwise known as "upper-middle class culture". They teach you to say, "it's writing, sure, but I don't think it's very good; I just don't happen to like it." Contrary to this, I would say this is the wrong way to write. I believe it fails.

I'm not attacking his format, either. I am all about blogs, Twitter, Gchat, or whatever else. You want to generate writing in new ways, go right ahead.

Tao Lin writes in what he refers to as the style of "Kmart Realism". If you have never had the experience, there are some pertinent examples on the Muumuu House site. I haven't seen him actually describe his own writing in these terms, (which is important, and I'll get to it in a minute) but he writes an essay on Kmart Realism here, a genre in which he groups Ann Beattie, and then in this interview he claims to mimic her work, so I suppose that is a fair, round-about Internet presence self-indentification if ever there was one.

I myself am not to certain what Kmart Realism refers to, or its context, other than feeling as if I generally get the joke but don't specifically enjoy it. For your own reference, I suggest you check out the work on Muumuu House, because I don't know anything about the other writers he references, and don't really care in relation to this.

Call it what you will, it is what it is. It is short-worded, choppy sentences, presented actively, with no metaphor, few adjectives that aren't treated as states, ("I felt weird.") loose descriptions if any, an overall first person tone, a psychological poise (lots of talk about how narrator "feels"), an auspicious ironic tone, and a certain misplacement of ideas that passes for humor.

It is, regardless of what a high school English teacher might think, literature. I can accept that. I, for one, seriously admire an adherance to a form. Most writing these days is so overarchingly auto-narrativistic without realizing it, it makes me want to burn things. I appreciate an approach which makes this tendency the rule, by making it obvious and part of the style. I also can appreciate the terse, shortness for what it is (as long as it lasts, which thankfully isn't long). Additionally, for a time I myself thought of swearing off metaphors, until I decided to embrace them completely. Despite my own writing's difference from these points, I can appreciate someone who sets out some rules, and keeps them as part of their art.

Here, in the same interview as previously linked, Tao Lin gets about as close to describing his prose as he ever does:

TL: The next two books are really detached. It has no adjective. They’re just told as simply as possible.

EN: Do you feel personally detached…?

TL: No, the prose style is detached. There’s no judgment or rhetoric at all. It will just say if it’s a house, it’s a house. It’s also lacking em dashes, semi-colons, similes and metaphors.

He does this sort of thing well, and he and his associates write pieces that still can be read, despite slashing long-proven elements of the English language out of their tool box. For this they should (probably) be congratulated.

But, I still don't buy it. It's still wrong. Not because they are revolting some sense of English-language hegemony deep within my phallus, but because I don't believe they are rejecting anything. Why throw out semi-colons? Why em dashes? Why not en dashes? Why not exclamation points? There aren't many of these in their work either. What is the argument for any of this? What is the rationale?

But, as I imagine the argument, it's not really about a logical argument for these tactics; it's about a feeling.

Oh wait, I didn't imagine that at all. He said it, in the interview. Numerous times. Let's count all the times he talks about how he feels.

"I feel like I’m reading stuff like I’m reading fiction. If it’s amusing I’ll feel excited, even if it’s talking shit about me."

"If I’m writing something that feels like a gimmick, I try to avoid that. I don’t think the term gimmick… I don’t know."

"Well, on my blog, it’s really how I am. I feel like that’s what I’m thinking, just not what I’m saying."

"I don’t feel like I put personal stuff on my blog. If I do, it’s just a lie. Because I treat it as a work of—not fiction—but a work of art. I delete anything I feel uninterested in. I go back and edit. I want someone who goes to it read the entire thing and feel like they’ve read a novel or something, instead of someone just talking without editing."

"I feel like some people will edit everything they do. Some people will just not really edit."

"Without the internet, I feel that I would have a job right now…"

"I feel like probably people wouldn’t want my life because I don’t have any money. With writing, I’m surviving in the way anyone could survive. This is just what I chose to do. I’m not really like living off of writing. I’m not willing to get a real job. Most people in my position would feel a lot of pressure to get a job but I just… don’t like jobs."

"No. I think most people probably have higher expectations that me. Especially NYU students. Maybe that’s why I don’t feel like I’m living the dream."

"I don’t think I think in terms of humor for my books. I don’t feel like I’m approaching it in that way. So it must be different."

"If I wrote all my other books right now they would be different. But I just feel like that’s a natural change. I feel like I’m always gonna keep changing. Not for the better or the worse. So I wouldn’t change it."

Okay--there are a lot more, but I'm tired of hitting Ctrl+C.

Clearly Tao is writing from his "feel", or maybe it's just one of those verbal ticks we all have.

Or is there a difference? Doesn't it seem as if the construction, 'I feel ____' is the foot of his sort of writing? Isn't the writing sort of an ongoing answer to the Twitter perennial, "What are you doing now?" which the introverted, melancholics of the world read as "What are you feeling now?"

Here's a piece from Muumuu House's website, "SELECTIONS FROM CHRIS KILLEN'S TWITTER ACCOUNT BY CHRIS KILLEN, EDITED BY TAO LIN". Reprinted here, absolutely without permission.

2:39 PM Mar 14th
lay in bed for a long time, 'twittering' in my head. tried to remember what i had 'twittered' last night. got up. put on dressing gown. etc.

2:50 AM Mar 14th
listened to man on radio in taxi with 'strong opinion'. panicked mildly that i would never have a 'strong opinion' about anything.

10:53 AM Mar 16th
possibly going to eat a banana in a moment.

11:00 AM Mar 16th
still haven't eaten the banana. what am i doing?

11:01 AM Mar 16th
i feel like i have 'twittered' myself into eating the banana.

1:41 PM Mar 16th
i feel like i am 'twittering the mother-fucking shit out of everything' today. i feel like i am in a fast, open-top sports car.

2:22 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a day old glass of water, with bubbles and a bit of tobacco in it.

2:22 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a CD i never listen to anymore.

2:23 AM Mar 16th
my penis feels like a curious old gentleman climbing a flight of stairs and then stopping halfway up to have a stroke.

1:47 PM Mar 17th
i am eating a blueberry muffin.

11:57 AM Mar 18th
it is 'blueberry muffin time' again.

4:13 PM Mar 18th
my leg feels strange.

4:15 PM Mar 18th
@jennashworth hi, babes.

2:19 PM Mar 20th
just watched a video on the internet explaining how to fold a t-shirt.

2:22 PM Mar 20th
just tried to look at the alley at the back of my parent's house in kenilworth on google street view. wasn't there.

Now, here's another piece from the site, "Relationship Poem" (OH GOD THE TITLE IT BURNS ME) by Brandon Scott Gorrell:

on the couch i kept asking what was wrong

you said that nothing was wrong

then you said it had nothing to do with me

then we turned on american idol

and only talked about american idol

later we went to bed

and gmail chatted the next day

using 'ok' and 'i don't know' at a frequency that seemed higher than usual

i was on the 5th floor of the downtown public library

sitting next to an obese teenager

who was listening to death metal on her ipod

i minimized our gmail chat and looked at the escalators

mentally projecting myself minimizing our gmail chat and looking at the escalators

then the music on the obese teenager's ipod switched to r&b

it was interesting

Pretty similar, huh? Interesting, indeed!

The good part, which is sort of bizarre, is that despite this petty stamping of the "I feel ___" phrase, whether literal or metaphoric--(you see, the thing about metaphors is you can't just write about something like a blueberry muffin and have it not be symbolic!) it is not writing that I definitely don't want to read. I like it a hell of a lot better that talking animals and teenage vampires/witches. But what are we reading?

We are reading, short prose, with little form except for what it avoids. We see:

-No long, complicated words (adjectives or otherwise)

-no metaphor or simile

-Little or no punctuation

-state description only

-very passive tense

-Nothing serious or attempting to be profound

-Only the first-person narrative

-An ironic self-reference to its own terseness by a grappling with larger, not exactly metaphorical, yet symbolic subject matter of the distinctly personally-narrative, i.e. (I feel "___", quotation marks included)

Is it all ironic? Is Tao Lin's interview style a continuation of his writing style? Is this terse-first-person meant to be involved deeply with what it "feels" in order to be more of a terse, first-person? Are the quotation marks, as the only form of often-used punctuation, meant to be a ironic use-mention form of the author's self-reflective but sparse use of words? Is every word, put in "quotation marks" or not, really a substitute for "I feel"? Is "feeling" the only real verb here? Are we meant to be looking inward, only to find there is nothing there?

wait a minute.... this all seems oddly familiar....

ON THE HIPSTER QUESTION

Is that what this is? Hipster writing? Short, un-artistic, form-as-gimmick, I-drink-beer-like-I-feel, living-in-williamsburg-is-so-damn-hard, Hipster bullshit? Has my attention been drawn, against my will, to the literature equivalent of an ass in skinny jeans?

Let's ask Tao about it:

EN: I read somewhere that you say you write for depressed hipsters. Why do you want to appeal to the hipster crowd?

TL: I try to think of a hipster I can’t think of a specific person. When I think of hipsters in general, they are just people who care about what’s happening now. What they look like… and also… most of that is so they can find more friends. I like all those things. I also feel like they’re like the only people who read books a lot, except for people trying to be writers.

EN: So do you have that audience in mind when you’re writing?

TL: Not when I’m writing… but… yeah, when I’m writing. Cause those are like… either those people or people who are interested in those people … those are the people I’m interested in, in terms of like, talking to and being friends with. In that sense, I target them. In the way I talk about it in interviews and stuff, I’m half joking … those are people who I think read books are, so I’m gonna target them.

Very suspicious.

Firstly, he "can't think of who that might be". Sure, I believe you live in Brooklyn and can't think of any hipster in particular. Even ride the L? Ever go to a bar? Ever go to NYU?

But then he figures out that would be a hard one to get around. Yes, it is the audience he has in mind when he is writing. He admits it.

However--I don't believe Tao Lin is a hipster himself. But what he says, for a "feeling" about who his hipster audience may be, is pretty apt: they are simply people in whom he is interested. People who read books, who might read his books, and who he would know on that basis. A bit scattered in terms of phrasing (edit much, "Bomblog"...?) but pretty honest.

There are many reasons to dislike hipsters. They gentrified your hood, they bought all the good records, they wear shitty clothes, they don't know how to make a good espresso, etc. This all falls under the general, catch-all hipster problem--they are a bunch of clowns who somehow are found everywhere you want to be. It's as if the Insane Clown Posse fan base stopped hanging out behind the drug store, and are now drinking in your bar, going to your favorite DJ night, and generally convinced half the nation's youth to do the same thing.

But this problem, which we are on to here, is separate from the unfortunate fact of hipster fashion. Tao Lin is not interested in hipsters because of the way they dress, but because of the way he feels. What is this link? What is causing his writing to take this dry, ironic, self-referential tone, without riding an 80s skateboard or buying all the good drugs? It is a gene carried by many hipsters, no doubt, but I believe we are looking at a totally different cultural chromosome's allele.

Let's give it a name: Emotional Singularism. That's a bit dry, so for the practitioners of this condition, we will give a nickname: Feelies.

In Emotional Singularism, we are re-visiting Cartesian dynamics, in a most-time appropriate way. In this era of graphs, datapoints, curves-as-linguistic-and-political-architecture, plotted points or the continuation of such points have a currency all their own. You want to be relevant? Show us a graph. You want to hold weight? Plot us a curve to stand your narrative upon. Run it through the points of You, Me, Iraq, Global Warming, George Bush, and make sure its all within the same plane of general consumer-liberalism. There, now you have momentum. It takes three points to plot a distinct curve, and if you read any persuasive essay, you will note at least three points, fixed in a cultural plane, with a nice, sloping approach drawn through the three of them.

But what is really important is the vantage point--the crossing of the axes. From this point, we measure everything. For Decartes it was the abstraction of the verb, "I think"; thinking denoted being. This is a cold, rationalist, metaphysics. It was the axiom of the geometry, and as easily forgettable.

These days, we don't care about the axioms. We just want to see the pretty curves. So we've withdrawn back into the crossing of the axes, without Kant's interest in the suppositions of the axioms, and the necessary philosophical internalization of the geometry of metaphysics into the unconscious (time, space, what is that like?). Rather than analyze the significance of the word, "I", for its own pre-conditions and metaphysical systems, Emotional Singularists are happy to take that singularity as fact. After all, they feel it. And there, they have found their new conscious substance for the pursuit of truth. Hence, their own personal emotions are the singular point on which they base and measure their world.

These days, it's enough to feel. You can debate metaphysics, or get lost along its lines of logic, but with feeling, you can never go wrong. Truth itself is called into question, but we have not yet called feeling into question. Instead, feeling is growing like a vectored weed, directing behavior, politics, economics, and even, so it seems, literature.

You know who these feelies are. We called them Emo for awhile, when boys holding acoustic guitars somehow picked up on a bizarre congruency with the feelings of a great number of record buying teenage girls. But the Feelies are still out there. They are the hipsters feeling self-conscious because they don't know if their fashion and friends are enough. They are the man/woman crying and yelling at a man/woman because s/he gets confused by his/her sexuality's mixed messages. They are the people who don't really know about politics, but have still decided they really don't like politics. They are the people who do one thing, but wish something else. They are the people who just don't feel comfortable with any number of things, and therefore try to avoid those things. They are the people who do not speak, but instead go home and cry.

Emotions are our friends, but they are not replacements for thoughts and words. It works like this, I believe, in actuality: there is some crazy business going on in our unconscious, which we never really understand. This craziness manifests itself in feelings, projected upward from that dark, unphysical undercurrent. These feelings then must be wrangled, absorbed, translated, and mechanized with words. Only in words do we have the ability to deal with the undercurrent of emotions. They don't always work, and if they don't, we throw out the words and start again.

Somewhere along the way, it got uncool to think too much. Maybe between the viscerality of the 60s and 70s, leading into the unholy terrors of thoughts flowing through the 80s and 90s, we felt we would simply be better off not knowing. Or maybe to be hip in knowing just got too difficult, so the eggheads like Foucault and Derrida could worry about that, but the common man was just going to do a bunch of coke and start talking about the fire in his loins at the speed of light. This substitute for actual thought, this rambling realist (or alternatively, speciously new age) hype-speak took the place of the actual definitions of words, the difficult terms of metaphysics, and the technique of linguistic construction. Feelings, those ever-flowing semi-conscious perception, could be packaged and sold as language without a second thought. Ever see one of those adbuster-esque packages, proudly titled, "plastic junk!" a little gag gift plastic nugget-thing wrapped in plastic? The joke is, people actually buy those; a gag in which the gag is that there is no gag. People actually like repetitive, sacarine emo music. They even go to see it played live, just like it is on their CD at home.

Feelings are not words in themselves. It is not enough to say, "I feel weird; I feel nauseous." Because you have a feeling you are not fully able to describe, it is not enough to simply call it "weird", and then describe the discomfort you have with your inability to vocalize it as nausea. Sure, I believe your stomach hurts. But who give a shit? If you drink enough, or do enough chaw, your stomach will also hurt. If you lick the pavement for long enough, you will get nauseous. If you are simply nauseous, I couldn't give a fuck, because you might as well be a fish floating upside down. Oh, something went wrong, and the fish is dead. Was it poisoned? Overfed? Underfed? Drowned from not enough oxygen? There is no way to tell, so I throw it in the toilet and go get another one. I probably even give it the same name.

Hipsters are just as infected by the Feelies as everyone else, but not because they wear clown shoes. It's something to do with our times--a certain wrinkle of modernism that's only metaphysical advance over the past fifty years was to start thinking there was no need to pay attention to the subtle vicissitudes of language anymore. A current in our culture that decided to outsource deep-thinking to the philosophers and focus on stomachs. A specific element of our society that believes it can learn more about themselves from daytime TV chock full of commercials specifically manipulating their emotions than by actually conversing with any person. Watch the commercials playing during an episode of Doctor Phil or Opraha. What is the show? What is the commercial? Which is manipulating your feelings? Which is telling you real information?

So, yeah, you go online. Somebody listens to music. Your girlfriend probably hates you. Man, that's some weird shit. How interesting. How about maybe you stop feeling, just for one second. Instead, why don't you try and write an original thought? Just one. To see if you still can.

Here is a new poem, written by you. In one line, you describe exactly what it is that you did that caused the last fight with your significant other. If you actually do it, trust me, it will be beautiful. (Write it in the comments or email it, and I'll post it.)

Well, Tao Lin--your work with Muumuu House is interesting stuff, I'll give you that. But I wonder if it is interesting because of the reasons you thought it was. Or did you and your writers even bother to stop and think about that?

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.

The Rabbit Hole of Ambition

So I was kind of stressing about Rabbit Hole Day. It sounded interesting and fun to blog with a Halloween costume. But, as the day loomed, I was having trouble finding a project. Anything that I could blog about with any real intensity, I pretty much already do. I thought about masquerading as a gadget blogger, or a hardcore liberal political blogger, or a philosophy blogger, but I kind of do these things already, albeit in my own way. I thought about making up a blog post like a teenager's MySpace page, but did that satire already with my own MySpace page (which unfortunately seems to be lost to the depths).

Then I read Cory Doctorow's Rabbit Hole post on BoingBoing, (where you can find out what it is, if you haven't Googled it already) and thought that was the perfect idea. Safe, perhaps; but at the same time, isn't revealing details about oneself that one never would a perfect mask to hide behind? Hiding behind the facade of the truth, which is essence is supposed to be a fundamental element of blogging: millions of anonymous strangers revealing details about their life to the world, which they wouldn't ordinarily tell their own mother. I've always taken the opposite approach in my online writing. I have never used a pseudonym or screen name, and only write things that I am prepared to represent as written and published by myself. So, now I am going to take the opportunity to cut in a completely different direction and tell "you" all about a part of myself. (This also fulfills half of my promise regarding my Blog Poll; I received two responses, so I must blog about the chosen "favorite topics" at somewhere near half-quality. Paula responded that "she doesn't like math"--I still haven't figured out how I'm going to blog about that. But Betabug, kind fellow that he is, chose to (perhaps lie) and say that he reads because of me, even though he doesn't know me. So, this post is about me! And maybe only halfway-readable!)

I'm going to write about my writing. Not my blogging here, that is. I mean, write about the fact that I want to be a writer. I am one of those people. To prove it, here is a list of asshole-wannabe-writer things that I have done recently:

-I have been non-apologetically expressive about my personal coffee fetish

-I have read pretentious literature and compared my own work to it

-I have struggled to write short stories about an author struggling to write

-I have "worked on a novel"

-I have felt a deep sense of annoyance at a rejection letter, "because my work is better than everything those assholes print"

-I have used a typewriter

-I have written in a Moleskine notebook, possibly while sitting in a coffee shop

-I have finished writing in a Moleskine notebook and looked up to see another person at the same coffee shop writing in a similar notebook and thought about how they are probably not as good of a writer as myself

Quite guilty. But of course, you knew I was a jerk, so why would anything change once I picked up the pen? So let's not talk about that. Instead, I'd like to share more about my writing and my writing process, for no other reason than that I have never done so before.

Originally I thought that I wanted to write SF. I even started, a couple of summers ago, writing a SF noir about a cyborg-alien detective investigating a strange streak of "psycho-terrorism" on a planet that's entire economy was based on tourism. It was called "Vacation Planet"--all my working titles are base and simply self-descriptive. The character, by name of Enoch (which has been the name of at least three separate potential characters since) finds the lush resort destination disconcerting after traveling from his own desert planet at the expense of the Tourist Board. He tries the vacation lifestyle, meets the underground resistance organization of the service class of the planet, and eventually determines that it is not terrorism, but a self-induced psychosis brought on by living in a world that is a constant buffet line for outsiders. I had the idea while visiting my brother in Orlando. While my plane was landing, I saw strip mall, hotels, and amusement complexes and their infrastructures all the way to the horizon. I imagined what it would be like if I had to live there. It was such a full, bright city, but empty in a way that only Disney World's Main Street USA can be.

I worked on a few other SF projects, only one of which ended up finished. I found my attention mainly drawn to the brainstorming. Simply writing out my idea after all the fun of thinking it up was a bit of a chore. When it came to the actual writing, my interests were leaning towards a speculation of prose, rather than of concepts. To speculate with literature itself, I found it more helpful to stay with the most basic plots. Naturally one can do both; but I'm only a beginner, after all. Here are some examples: a derelict of a man eats a sandwich on a subway, disgusting his fellow passengers. A man dies, and finds that the afterlife consists of walking over a bridge. A middle school boy listens to his peers, perhaps more closely than anyone of that age should. These are ideas that are not really original or enlightening in themselves, but I try to think about a way that I could tell them so that the mundane appears exceptional. I like to think that this is my skill: what I am able to do with words. Perhaps I succeed, and perhaps I don't.

I think that I do succeed. I feel that my writing is not just good, or readable, but I think that it shares something new and creative, in a way that might be called art. I write a lot on this blog about what I think "creativity" is, or what "literature" is, but in truth, I don't think of my own work in any terms other than "worthwhile" or "worthless" once it is sitting on the page. Most of it does seem "worthwhile", and so I keep making it.

I have to, in a way. If I end a week with less than 20 new pages (pages that I am happy with), I feel anxious and disturbed. After work, if Megan is working, I might be able to get 3-5 pages, if I'm not too tired. Then I try and set one weekend night aside for writing; I nap in the afternoon, and then begin to up my caffeine level. If I can write for 8-10 hours (normally resulting in anywhere from 5-20 pages), I consider it a success. I normally shoot for Friday nights. If I come up empty on Friday, then the pressure is higher for Saturday, and my anxiety builds. The anxiety isn't bad in itself--it can act like a wave, pushing me once I start, and keeping me going rather than letting my mind head off towards the Internet, video games, too much alcohol (during the writing) or other things. But when I'm sitting with a blinking cursor, or trying to "have fun" knowing that I've only written 3 pages in the last 10 days, the anxiety can be a lot less than comfortable. I haven't really analyzed this or tracked it down in my psyche. I think I'd rather not, at least for now. I consider myself lucky to have it. Tomorrow I could be old, and content with my day job, and willing to just push that anxiety back and let life take its course. Psychoanalyst's translate it as "drive" for a reason, I think.

To be completely honest, I do hope to be a well-known writer some day. Not famous, necessarily. I wish for these two things, specifically: one, to make enough money with the writing that I like, so that I may live comfortably and concentrate solely on my own projects; and two, to have enough of a following in readership that I can easily be aware that others care for and appreciate what I write. I don't think these are selfish or unreasonable goals. Of course, the publishing industry isn't really a well of hope right now. I've thought about the possibility that almost all writers would have to work for free (or almost so) in the near future. I think I would be okay with that, though it would be fun to live like Hemingway or Capote. But weren't they both independently wealthy before they were authors?

State of the Author: thus far, I haven't had anything published (not counting self-publishing). I have two pieces submitted, I have been asked to read at a literary reading in April, and I put a piece on Authonomy recently. As part of my "let's figure out where we're at" process, I made this tally last week:

Finished Work: seven (one novella, four short stories, an essay, and... err, Punk song-lyrics)

In Editing: five (one novella and four short stories)

Writing/Stalled: four (one novella, two short stories, and a poem. Novella is almost finished, the rest might never be, though the poem is close)

In the Aether: four (two novels, one short story, and one essay)

Even More Vague: I have a shit load of ideas scribbled down. Some of them are really good. Others are really funny. A few are illegible. At least one is probably really offensive, and I would tear it out of my notebook except that I can't bring myself to do it because that would make me feel even more guilty. My plan is that eventually all the unused ideas will be compiled into an epic poem of sorts. I write my notes in complete sentences or at least phrases (I always have) so it actually reads pretty well, if a bit esoterically.

I think one of the novels in "the Aether" could actually be something. This is what I'm working on now. My plan is to finish all the short stories that can be finished, bomb the shit out of the journals, and write the damn novel. I'm literally bursting with ideas for the novel, so I think it's going to be good. I'm actually worried that I'll ever come up with something to match it once I'm done. Of course, this could all change tomorrow, and it could go back into the stack.

I hate, absolutely hate, submitting my work. The entire process is so antithetical to why I write. Of course, I write largely to fulfill my inner desire, so getting rejection letters is obviously antithetical to my ego's pursuits. But I wouldn't mind being rejected if I didn't have to wait five months to get a form letter. It's disgusting--everybody bitches about how literature has gone to shit, and then they treat potential authors this way. Naturally, most potential authors aren't about to be the saviors of literature. But it certainly seems to be an odd system of improvement and support. Imagine if education was run in the same way--you work hard at some abstract task for nine months, turn in your work, and then wait for months to receive a form with almost no feedback except for "yay" or "nay", which itself is largely subjective or at least meaningless to a point where it might as well be. Oh, wait... that is how education works! Well, no wonder people like TV. Television is always there and loves you just as much, no matter what you watch or for how long.

Well, so there it is: Adam Rothstein, the hopeful writer. Probably not too different from most hopeful writers, but hey, I'm me, goddamn it!

I don't discuss my writing on my blog because my blog is not about my writing--or at least not about that writing. It's nice to keep them separate. This blog is a publishing tool: a portal to a certain audience to whom I write in a consistent voice more my own conversational tone than anything else. My subjects are things that I am interested in, and about which I choose to comment. But, this does not really include myself, or the things that I write about when I write. When I write off-blog, I am crafting individual pieces, works that would stand alone unchained into the subjective network of the Internet. I am in those individual works, but as "author", not specifically as the narrator. My blog is more of a pipeline that I log into, after which I begin to transmit straight from my own mind. Therefore, I let Author Adam do his own pretentious work, and here Writer Adam just tells it like it is for the peoples. They interact, of course. But form is as important as substance, and the Author in me knows his form, and the Writer in me knows his as well.

Have you enjoyed hearing about Adam the Author? I tried to tell you about him as truthfully as possible, though I am certainly a bit biased. It was a bit of a release to just talk about him freely, in this blog form. Certainly different than my usual rantings and ravings about the economy and technology. If you ever do want to read some of his work, you can always check out Brute Press, where he publishes online. I'll update you about him from time to time, of course.

Okay, I'm going to cut it here. I seem to have slipped into a disconcerting third person, which has some humorous, ironic possibilities, but also is starting to allude to the fact that this split-writer personality internet-publishing-form thing might have more uncanny consequences than we'd all like.

Happy Rabbit Hole Day!

"Walter Benjamin's Blog"

My article, "Walter Benjamin's Blog," was just published on The Brutalitarian, Brute Press' online theory center. It's available under CC license in pdf, html, and odf format.

If you've paid attention to any of my posts here about the future of literature, production and consumption in the digital age, or Internet and Information theory, you may find this essay interesting. It is a summation of my thought regarding all of these, compiled into a (fairly) well-organized article. I think some parts are pretty entertaining. In addition, I do feel that the conclusions I draw about the future of literature and digital reproduction should be taken to heart by many involved in the affore mentioned. In other words, the article is not just rants or musings, but a contribution (I hope) to theory on the subject.

It's very serious! But, it's also not written expressly for people with a Master's degree in philosophy, so [you] can read it too!

I'm also pretty excited about it, and happy that it's complete. So you might here me echo it's existence through my various internet channels. Just fair warning.

Wii are Railroads

Wow: Michael Bhaskar. Someone who finally gets the tech of literature. Well, perhaps this is a bit premature; it is hard to say that any of us literary minded folk really get the technology of literature, for if we did, we would not be suffering but blossoming. Nevertheless, Mr. Bhaskar hits far closer to the mark in his blog post on the "digital team" blog over at Pan MacMillan.

Being part of the digital team, it is likely that he sees literature more as a data or a technology than simple words and ink on paper. And he proves it with his juxtaposition between the US railway industry and Nintendo. (such a mix of infrastructural and fanboy tech is certainly a good start!)

"[...] there was no fundamental problem with the railways contrasting the States with Europe, where to this day railways are thriving. Rather there was a problem with the attitudes of the railway companies. They had always seen themselves to be in the railways business and focussed their efforts as such. According to Levitt this was their mistake- had they realised from the beginning that what they were in was the transportation business they would have been much better prepared to respond to and piggyback on innovations like the car, the lorry, the highway and the airplane.

[...]Nintendo originally produced hanafuda (Japanese card games). Throughout their history though they refused to define themselves as makers of card games- they saw themselves as facilitators of play, and so had a constantly evolving product set while maintaining a consistent purpose. It meant they were always ideally positioned to exploit new advances and could comfortably react to change. Moreover it has led to them being in the vanguard of innovation; just when their competitors Sony and Microsoft were beefing up their consoles for the hardcore gamer, spending mega bucks turning games machines into omnipotent media playing nodes, Nintendo re wrote the rule book.

The DS and the Wii, with their intuitive gestural interfaces and ludic game design, perfectly fit what legendary Nintendo games designer Shigeru Miyamoto sees as the defining goal of Nintendo: to create products grandparents and grandchildren can play together. Both consoles were colossal risks for Nintendo; both paid off handsomely."

The idea that I hate hearing from publishing folk is that literature needs to find its iPod--this always follows or leads a mention of the apparent success of the Amazon Kindle. The eBook is not an iTune! This is a perfect example of false appreciation of technology. These publishers are looking to the success of the iPod, and wishing the same for their own business. They are not saying, let's make storage of books portable, easily accessible and storable, downloadable, and personal. They are saying this, but only in the context of the fact that it made Apple a shitload of money. The iPod was perfect for music, because it gave music fans the exact tools that they had been missing for years. The Walkman got them part way there, and the Discman got closer. But the iPod was perfect for the majority of consumers. And there you have it: a technological milestone was created, but only looking at it in the past, from the point of view of critical acceptance and profit.

Nobody wants these things for books. Well, okay: some people do. And all those people will buy a Kindle this year and maybe the next. But then the market will die off, for the simple fact that the Kindle does not do anything that a hardback will not do--it is only a gimmicky, electronic Norton's Anthology (albeit one with many pages). In fact, the hardback is still a better technology in some respects, the total lack of DRM being one major respect, but closely followed by exchangability and durability.

What I've been writing about is the changing face of the technology of literature, happening under our noses. Gaming has changed because the technology has developed--the idea of an asocial young man peering into a tiny screen in a basement is past. Americans may still be bowling alone, but now they are gaming together, both virtually and in person. Nintendo saw the potential in the technology, and made it happen. They did not look at another successful technology and attempt to ape their business to it. Wanna buy a hybrid-powered gaming system? I think not.

But Bhaskar is right in saying that while we shouldn't be railways, we can't really be Nintendos either. We are not 'media providers' any more than we are simply bookmakers:

"As much as we can say that we are curators of stories and information, people involved in the entertainment/education business pure and simple, we simply don’t have the scale, the expertise and the financial muscle to become full on web platforms, film studios, arts infrastructure bodies or whatever else moving beyond print matter might entail."

Yes: literature must remember what literature is. Not just books, not just entertainment, but _____. The blank there is where I did not say, "a complicated human mixture of thought and desire manifested in the semiotics of symbolic phenomenal experience." I did not say it because that sentence does not translate into literature any more than gaming translates into "a somatic expression of imagination that breaks down the boundaries between the psychological and the social realm". Literature has to find itself out, because--I will all but promise you--it will not be a philosopher that creates the literature of the digital age anymore than it will be a business person.

The Publishers are Dead; Long Live Literature

- More about technology and the future of literature -

Two different articles caught my eye today, in the increasingly verbose re-hashing of the paranoia about the End of the Book. The first was a detailed analysis of the current status of the publishing industry in New York Magazine, and the second was yet another article in the form of a question (so, so, gratuitously annoying a form) about whether literature will survive "the digital age", in the UK's The Independent. For background, both of these articles are continuing the thread, which was perhaps not started but summed from the collective Luddite-leanings of modern society by Nicholas Carr in the Atlantic Monthly article, Is Google Making us Stupid?" Note again, an article in the form of a question.

My answer: no. I already voiced my opinion that literature will live on the digital age; an opinion voiced, perhaps in a not very literary fashion, but yet totally digitally. (At least my title question was more of a weak pun than an actual rhetorical act.)

Which brings me back to the issue, in light of these two readings that I have happened across, in order to make an important point:


Literature is written words.
Written words collected together in series are books. (At least until recently.)
Therefore, all literature (until the bright, blinding dawn of the digital age) has been in the form of books.


By the same token, all books are literature.


Yes, strike that false syllogism out! Unfortunately, those whose interests are taken with literature often are given to the inductive logic that "books" represent literature itself. Not true. Books represent many different kinds of word collections, some of which are quite awful indeed. To tell the truth, I would stand and watch my most major publishing houses flaming hulks disappear in a sizzling downdraft beneath the waves of our current cultural crisis. Can you imagine? Celebrity tell-all stories, political hack collections, and pet-themed cookbooks are not successful enough to keep paying their authors millions of dollars in advances, no matter how many of them have a giant "O" of an anus stenciled on the cover! Hosanna! The free-market has finally done something right, and the snake is finally eating itself.

For anyone actually looking, literature is doing is just fine. There are hundreds of working literary journals in the country, and where one falls over, three spring up. If perhaps you wished that you could walk into any bookstore in the country and find the same ten authors that made up some "list", and that you knew well, just like your favorite Starbucks beverage, then you may be out of luck. But there are still many people writing, editing, publishing, and reading literature in print form. Though they might not be making much money at it. And regardless, I'm sure someone will still be publishing Steven King twice a year, no matter what happens.

Literature is written words, and written words have never been more in style.

The idea that literature has to "evolve" in this crazy electronic world is pretty stupid, I think. Literature is not a corporation that has to cater to its stockholders. We should let literature evolve itself. The woman who claims, in the Independent article, that internet forms like Second Life, Twitter, and whatever else are going to give literature a new, digital life are idiots.

First, as to the technology: ink on paper will still be around no matter what. Sure, its use will decline. But it will always be there for a simple fact: a sheet of paper doesn't do anything but lie on the table. It doesn't run out of batteries, it doesn't get erased by magnetic fields, it can't interfere with the navigational equipment on an airplane, and it won't become anymore obsolete than it already is. It is the simplest denominator of the written word, and as such will always have a place in our culture, just as words will have a place upon it.

Second as to the literary quality: the words that are used in cyberspace are most often decidedly un-literary. Literature, as my little syllogism was meant to show, is not simply given via the ability to hold content, regardless of how novel the container may be. Literature is an art that evolves within its own semiotic structure: part of, but not reducible to its technological vial.

Can I say it more plainly? Yes: THERE WILL NEVER BE A TWITTER NOVEL.

Of course, I invite efforts to prove me wrong. I read a poem in McSweeney's that was written in the form of either text messages, emails or blog posts, I forget which. Needless to say: abysmal. Stick to stanzas, not SMS. The former was developed to push the literary content, the latter to push commication. The two are not the same. Making a book into a movie or video game makes the book no longer a book, plain and simple. Literature is still only the written word, whether in ink, in binary, or in LCD pixel. A book's character in Second Life is an advertisement or a simulation, not literature in anyway.

Eventually, no doubt, there will evolve literature that finds its rightful place in the womb of our new digital culture. However, this will not change the fact that the last 1000 years of literature found its placenta made from good old ink and paper. (And before that, speech was the hip technology, and speech is just as likely to fade from common use as paper, in my opinion. True, the oratory has seen better days, but there are still artisans and audiences of the form.)

And furthermore, this strike through of the concept, "words + sphincter = literature" shows why it is idiotic to look forward to an "iPod moment" for literature, when some messianical technological sex-toy descends from the sky to "get everyone reading again". There is no such thing as an iPod moment; we are getting dangerously close the "big-man of history" theory here, a decidedly reactionary conception of anything. (Then again, most literary critics, even the so-called "materialist" ones, seem to conspiculously avoid seizing the means of their production). The only thing the iPod did (even though actually, it was the mp3 that made it all possible) was to give music its "indoor plumbing moment". How amazing a breakthrough is it, really, that now we don't need to rely on record companies and ticket agencies to hear and share good quality music? Raw sewage is no longer flowing in the streets? How delightfully modern!

The iPod for literature is the book. Anyone can write the text, and anyone with an hour, some glue and some paper can bind one. Then you can give it to a friend, sell it to a shop, or burn it if you wish. You can carry it anywhere and it doesn't need electricity. It will even work in zero gravity.

To sum it up: literature, as a field of artistic creation, will probably stay about the same regardless off of what surface or substance it is read. The big book corporations and the music corporations will both, hopefully, go their appointed ways. I'm not worried about literature in the slightest. In fact, I bet literature will only get better. As I've said before, it's only recently that the literacy rate is so high; it should not be surprising that the literature rate has stayed about the same. Oh, and beware those who try to sell you on the quantity-quality conversion (AMAZON). It was just those sorts of quantativists that caused the failure of the publishing houses to begin with (on the stockholder side AND on the rich author side).