In Which Our Hero Let's the Literature Mag and the Bloody Mary Get the Better of Him...

I just read an excellent, I'll say again excellent article by Walter Benn Michaels in Bookforum. I would repeat it all, but I've been doing that a lot lately, so I'll just summarize it, and leave it up to you. The reason the article is so great, is because it is short, and yet says in no uncertain terms that it is time for American fiction writers to wake up.

Basically, authors have been writing about certain tropes of history rather than the present day's problems because:

"[...] although it’s true that books about slavery and the Middle Passage, the Holocaust and the extermination of Native Americans, are more or less definitionally sad, it’s also true that the logic by which they are produced and that makes them so attractive is an optimistic one.

Why? Because trying to overcome, say, the lingering effects of slavery doesn’t involve criticizing the primacy of markets; it just involves making sure that everyone has equal access to them. So when Beloved reminds us that we are a nation divided by race and racism (and, in case we start to forget, A Mercy reminds us again), we’re effectively being told that our problem is lingering racism—not burgeoning capitalism. And when Morrison wins the Nobel Prize and Obama becomes president, we’re being reassured that we are headed in the right direction, even if we’re not there yet."

What an amazing incite. I hate to say I have been realizing this since the time period between 6th and 10th grade, when I was assigned no less than 10-or so Holocaust themed novels, and another 5-or so "African-American" novels. Yes, I get it--now, what about everything else?

Here are some other tropes Michaels thinks we would do well to leave behind:

Individualizing Memoirs - "So maybe another upside of the collapse of a Thatcherite economy will be the disappearance of this entirely Thatcherite genre. Maybe people will lose all interest in the moving stories of the struggles of other people to overcome destructive (although sometimes seductive) parents and seductive (although always destructive) addictions, and no one will want to read memoirs. Maybe people will even lose interest in their own struggles, thus conceived, and no one will want to write them, either."

Oprah Books - "For sure, no more books like The Corrections, or any of Oprah’s other choices." (enuff zed!)

The American Liberal Dream - "And no more stories about the children of immigrants, trying to figure out whether and where they fit into American culture. Ethnic identity is just the family writ large, and no move is more characteristic of the neoliberal novel than the substitution of cultural difference for (one of the things Thatcher meant to deny) class difference. What the neoliberal novel likes about cultural difference is that it sentimentalizes social conflict, imagining that what people really want is respect for their otherness rather than money for their mortgages. But they don’t."


Look, we don't have to get all Eagleton over here, and politicize the hell out of the novel (though would we be any worse off?) but for goodness sakes, let's think about what we're writing. Think of the subject of your work in progress. Is the plot, any character in it, the moral (if for some horrible reason there is one), or the narrating voice ANYTHING like anything you've seen on TV or at the movies since 2000? If it is, then burn your notes, and eat your pencil.

Here are some key words and phrases to run away from while immolating oneself:

Lesson
Journey
Change
Nostalgia
Growing Old
Coming of Age
Dealing with Violence
Overcoming
Resolving Differences
Best Friends Since _____
Culture Shock
Pets
___ Things to ____ Before You _____ (unless it is... well, okay, I'll keep it civil & blank)

What? But those are key components to the human drama? Fuck the human drama! Everything is the human drama! You want human drama--fine, here are some possible choices.

A list of words and phrases to run towards while desperately grabbing at oneself and salivating:

Mucus
Rockets
Japanese Pornography
Lasers
Poisonous Sea Life
Waste Oil
Radiation Therapy
FUCKING
Moon People
Power Lines
Driving Cars Into Things
Toe Nail Clippings
Concrete
Guns Guns Guns
Trees
The Stuff on the Night Club Floor
Hardcore Japanese Pornography
Race Cars
Evil Appliances
Paint Fumes
Breweries
The Dry Taste in the Back of My Mouth That Makes Me Spit Without Stopping


Any of these are good, by themselves or in combination. But don't go thinking, "Oh yeah, I can see that--a race car driver who gets in a wreck and has to abandon his dream to work in a brewery and succumbs to an addiction to japanese pornography until he gets a dog and re-unites with his father so they can resolve their differences and overcome the violence between them..."

No No NO! This is precisely the point. We can take any random situation, and have the Hallmark channel imbue it with their dirty, smelling plot machine. Is there truely nothing going on in a Race Car that is not a family re-appraisal story? Or an overcoming addiction? Or a high-stakes drama? Or a murder mystery? Is there nothing? Nothing?!?!

Do we really rely on such boring tropes to make sense of the world? Is this all there is left to talk about? There are no more great stories of the world, only the same ones within a different middle-America state, with main character named Pete or Dave, Sarah or Betty? Oh, now they have cell phones, whereas they didn't ten years ago? Come on!

You know what I think the problem is? You know why I think all our fiction is boring, neoliberal, conformist pap? Because all our authors are boring, neoliberal, conformist pap. And luckily, there are still enough of their ilk with credit cards to keep buying the books from the supermarket. Me? I spend my money on beer, and I get my books from the library, because most of the authors I admire are dead.

Gogol--now there is a man who can fucking tell a story. You know what I like about Dead Souls? Not once, not ever, does Chichikov feel any sort of angst about his prescription drugs. He does not have neighbors with which he either idolizes, hates, or fanticizes about. And, thank goodness, he never once feels like maybe he had failed as a father. All those bullshit bourgeois problems of the late twentieth century don't exist, and he can get down to buying and selling human souls in peace. America--learn something from the Russian estate system: it is not boring as hell.

I know books aren't dead. Despite the fact that the vast majority of American writers are stuck in a rut, there are still people out there who can write a good, original, interesting and entertaining story, and do so. There are just damn few of them. This shows that it isn't writing that is broken; its the writers, stuck in an ideology of suck. The question will be, will I have to go meet these surviving authors in person to get a copy of their books, because we can't send them back and forth without someone intercepting them to use as firewood or toilet paper before they arrive?

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.

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.