Blogger turned off support for FTP publishing last night. Another vanishing technology – serve me right for getting nostalgic about mailboxes.
Here's Shep Knacker, the hero of Lionel Shriver's So Much For That, contemplating the prospect of using a manual toothbrush -- “He would have to grow accustomed to technological regression, which in a manner he couldn't quite put his finger on was surely good for the soul. Something about backtracking to a stage of development that you could understand.”
Shriver subsequently develops this technological regression theme -- “When Shep was fifteen, he did his homework on a typewriter. It was electric. He may not have completely understood the circuitry through which a tap on a key raised the arm of a letter. Still, he could watch the arm rise, inspect the three-dimensional backward a affixed to the metal. He could grasp the elementary process by which it struck an inky ribbon and stained a black a-shaped mark on a physical piece of paper. But when Zach typed an a, it was magic. His iPod was magic. His digital TV was magic. The Internet was magic. Even his father's car, the machine through which boys once achieved their first dominion over the physical world, was now controlled by a computer.” No wonder Knacker wants to move to Africa.
I'm reminded of Bruce Sterling's Dead Media manifesto, written back around the turn of the millenium. Sterling wrote that “some media do, in fact, perish. Such as: the phenakistoscope. The teleharmonium. The Edison wax cylinder. The stereopticon. The Panorama. Early 20th century electric searchlight spectacles. Morton Heilig's early virtual reality. Telefon Hirmondo. The various species of magic lantern. The pneumatic transfer tubes that once riddled the underground of Chicago. Was the Antikythera Device a medium? How about the Big Character Poster Democracy Wall in Peking in the early 80s?”
Sterling and Richard Kadrey began compiling an encyclopedia of obsolete communications technology -- I don't know what happened to that. In the manifesto, Sterling provides this line from Surrealist Jacqueline Goddard that's ultra-evocative about how technology impacts culture:
“The telephone was the death of Montparnasse.”
Monday, May 3, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
The Magic Darkness of the Mailbox
Paul Auster's The Locked Room brilliantly evokes a writer's relationship with his mailbox:
“Eleven-thirty rolled around – the hour of the mail – and I made my ritual excursion down the elevator to see if there was anything in my box. This was always a crucial moment of the day for me, and I found it impossible to approach it calmly. There was always the hope that good news would be sitting there – an unexpected check, an offer of work, a letter that would somehow change my life – and by now the habit of anticipation was so much a part of me that I could scarcely look at my mailbox without getting a rush. This was my hiding place, the one spot in the world that was purely my own. And yet it linked me to the rest of the world, and in its magic darkness there was the power to make things happen.”
Auster wrote that before e-mail, the medium by which unexpected communications now characteristically arrive: now the magic darkness lurks 24/7.
Yet I still experience the rush Auster describes with respect to my own mailbox. When you wield a tiny key, to open a space to which nobody else theoretically has access, how could your heart not beat faster? It's like being able to consult a tiny oracle in the lobby: there's something random and inscrutable in there, that's meant just for you. And living in a tenement that has an elevator makes the process of going to consult this oracle somehow even more mysterious.
Like most oracles, the mailbox produces mostly junk and bills. And yet on days when no snail mail at all is delivered I feel obscurely cheated.
“Eleven-thirty rolled around – the hour of the mail – and I made my ritual excursion down the elevator to see if there was anything in my box. This was always a crucial moment of the day for me, and I found it impossible to approach it calmly. There was always the hope that good news would be sitting there – an unexpected check, an offer of work, a letter that would somehow change my life – and by now the habit of anticipation was so much a part of me that I could scarcely look at my mailbox without getting a rush. This was my hiding place, the one spot in the world that was purely my own. And yet it linked me to the rest of the world, and in its magic darkness there was the power to make things happen.”
Auster wrote that before e-mail, the medium by which unexpected communications now characteristically arrive: now the magic darkness lurks 24/7.
Yet I still experience the rush Auster describes with respect to my own mailbox. When you wield a tiny key, to open a space to which nobody else theoretically has access, how could your heart not beat faster? It's like being able to consult a tiny oracle in the lobby: there's something random and inscrutable in there, that's meant just for you. And living in a tenement that has an elevator makes the process of going to consult this oracle somehow even more mysterious.
Like most oracles, the mailbox produces mostly junk and bills. And yet on days when no snail mail at all is delivered I feel obscurely cheated.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Susan Palwick's The Necessary Beggar
This is the first book I’ve read for a while that reminds me of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience. Both books try to figure out through story the theological implications of intelligent life on other planets or in other dimensions.
A family from Lémabantunk are exiled to Nevada. The people of Lémabantunk have a beautiful religion, one that probably resembles Susan Palwick’s own understanding of Christianity more closely than does the Christianity practiced by the Nevadans they encounter. This is of course an old device – like the Houyhnhnms being more human than the Yahoos – but still effective.
“Welcoming the Necessary Beggar is a symbol of welcoming the rest of the world.” The Necessary Beggar makes it clear what Palwick thinks a Christian attitude to homelessness, healthcare, and immigration would be: since the loudest U.S. Christians have rather different attitudes, we might call Palwick's a liberal Episcopalian attitude. As a volunteer ER chaplain, she has the details down. The book has its “bleeding-heart” moments and maybe reads a bit like soap opera in places, but one could say the same about the New Testament.
Here Palwick describes writing The Necessary Beggar as “ten and a half weeks of bliss.” From any other novelist's perspective, that’s just annoying... Perhaps we should just accept The Necessary Beggar as a divinely revealed text, and declare that in this book Palwick is writing not just fiction but scripture.
Poet Jose Emilio Pacheco has noted that one can think of writers themselves as members of a mendicant order...
A family from Lémabantunk are exiled to Nevada. The people of Lémabantunk have a beautiful religion, one that probably resembles Susan Palwick’s own understanding of Christianity more closely than does the Christianity practiced by the Nevadans they encounter. This is of course an old device – like the Houyhnhnms being more human than the Yahoos – but still effective.
“Welcoming the Necessary Beggar is a symbol of welcoming the rest of the world.” The Necessary Beggar makes it clear what Palwick thinks a Christian attitude to homelessness, healthcare, and immigration would be: since the loudest U.S. Christians have rather different attitudes, we might call Palwick's a liberal Episcopalian attitude. As a volunteer ER chaplain, she has the details down. The book has its “bleeding-heart” moments and maybe reads a bit like soap opera in places, but one could say the same about the New Testament.
Here Palwick describes writing The Necessary Beggar as “ten and a half weeks of bliss.” From any other novelist's perspective, that’s just annoying... Perhaps we should just accept The Necessary Beggar as a divinely revealed text, and declare that in this book Palwick is writing not just fiction but scripture.
Poet Jose Emilio Pacheco has noted that one can think of writers themselves as members of a mendicant order...
Tuesday, April 27, 2010
Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase
I had a shot at rereading this circa 2005, with the aim of trying to understand the powerful effect it had on me when I first read it circa 1990. In 2005, I came away with a frustrating and paradoxical feeling that analyzing this novel's structure is actually somewhat futile as a means to understanding how it works...
The first nine pages encapsulate Tokyo in 1970, and are mostly about a woman who has no obvious relevance to the rest of the novel. The rest of the story happens in 1978. The narrator's getting divorced, and his ex-wife tells him, “Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.” As a piece of characterization, what does this even mean? Yet it characterizes the hero perfectly. The novel is filled with such analysis-defying brilliances. “In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn.” What's not to like?
Now that I reread the book in 2010, it's twenty years old, and I like how smoothly it slides from the utterest realism into the craziest fantasy. First the author establishes a mood -- poetic immediacy plus nonchalant delivery; of all Surrealists, Murakami is the most matter-of-fact. Then, having won you over, he slips you the ludicrous plot. The setting helps: if you told me about a hotel whose second floor is a “sheep reference room,” I might be skeptical, until you told me it was in Hokkaido... which is to say that the unfamiliarity of the territory may have been a factor in the initial vogue for this book.
Key to the atmosphere is that none of the characters have names, not even the narrator's cat. When a character is referred to by a name, it's a sobriquet like the Rat or the Boss or the Sheep Professor.
“I mean towns and parks and streets and stations and ball fields and movie theaters all have names, right? They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth.”
So... as long as you're still moving, who needs a name? I guess that makes some kind of sense. The book's rich in the sort of conversational remarks that would sound profound in a coffee-shop late at night -- Murakami makes these sound good on the page too -- detailed itemizations of food eaten, and dubious sheep facts, e.g. “In Spain in the fifteen hundreds, they had roads all over the country no one but shepherds could use, not even the King.”
Frederick Barthelme wrote, “Reading A Wild Sheep Chase is like spending a splendidly foul weekend with the four Raymonds – Chandler, Carver, Massey, and Queneau.” Which is excellent except why “foul?” Plus Barthelme might also have worked in Raymond Lully a.k.a. Ramon Llull. Let me note in passing that Murakami actually translated works by both Chandler and Carver into Japanese.
Only while researching this blog post did I learn that A Wild Sheep Chase was originally the third in a trilogy, the first two novels of which Murakami has not allowed to be translated into English. Maybe this sheds some light on its structural strangeness, while also disproving all my prejudices against trilogies. Although then again, there is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase published in English that I could only get a few pages into – Dance Dance Dance, in which Murakami makes the cardinal mistake of assigning the main characters from A Wild Sheep Chase proper names. In A Wild Sheep Chase itself, however, I still think he merges the formulaic and the inscrutable with the perfect touch of a jazz master.
The first nine pages encapsulate Tokyo in 1970, and are mostly about a woman who has no obvious relevance to the rest of the novel. The rest of the story happens in 1978. The narrator's getting divorced, and his ex-wife tells him, “Say there's an hourglass: the sand's about to run out. Someone like you can always be counted on to turn the thing over.” As a piece of characterization, what does this even mean? Yet it characterizes the hero perfectly. The novel is filled with such analysis-defying brilliances. “In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn.” What's not to like?
Now that I reread the book in 2010, it's twenty years old, and I like how smoothly it slides from the utterest realism into the craziest fantasy. First the author establishes a mood -- poetic immediacy plus nonchalant delivery; of all Surrealists, Murakami is the most matter-of-fact. Then, having won you over, he slips you the ludicrous plot. The setting helps: if you told me about a hotel whose second floor is a “sheep reference room,” I might be skeptical, until you told me it was in Hokkaido... which is to say that the unfamiliarity of the territory may have been a factor in the initial vogue for this book.
Key to the atmosphere is that none of the characters have names, not even the narrator's cat. When a character is referred to by a name, it's a sobriquet like the Rat or the Boss or the Sheep Professor.
“I mean towns and parks and streets and stations and ball fields and movie theaters all have names, right? They are all given names in compensation for their fixity on the earth.”
So... as long as you're still moving, who needs a name? I guess that makes some kind of sense. The book's rich in the sort of conversational remarks that would sound profound in a coffee-shop late at night -- Murakami makes these sound good on the page too -- detailed itemizations of food eaten, and dubious sheep facts, e.g. “In Spain in the fifteen hundreds, they had roads all over the country no one but shepherds could use, not even the King.”
Frederick Barthelme wrote, “Reading A Wild Sheep Chase is like spending a splendidly foul weekend with the four Raymonds – Chandler, Carver, Massey, and Queneau.” Which is excellent except why “foul?” Plus Barthelme might also have worked in Raymond Lully a.k.a. Ramon Llull. Let me note in passing that Murakami actually translated works by both Chandler and Carver into Japanese.
Only while researching this blog post did I learn that A Wild Sheep Chase was originally the third in a trilogy, the first two novels of which Murakami has not allowed to be translated into English. Maybe this sheds some light on its structural strangeness, while also disproving all my prejudices against trilogies. Although then again, there is a sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase published in English that I could only get a few pages into – Dance Dance Dance, in which Murakami makes the cardinal mistake of assigning the main characters from A Wild Sheep Chase proper names. In A Wild Sheep Chase itself, however, I still think he merges the formulaic and the inscrutable with the perfect touch of a jazz master.
Monday, April 26, 2010
Melancholy Inscription Anecdotes
Hard to beat this one from Mary Karr's Lit --
“He tells me the story of a writer who – on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore – opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad...”
OK so this is sadder, about a first edition of The Jungle Book Kipling inscribed to his daughter who died aged six.
I recently checked out from the Mechanics' Institute Library a copy of The New Improved Sun: an Anthology of Utopian SF, edited by Thomas M. Disch. It's inscribed For ______, who does want it signed. With love, Tom Disch. Anything to do with Disch gets me down nowadays.
From Sam Savage's Firmin, a book that offers a rat's eye view of the used book trade -- “I hated most of all reading the inscriptions over his shoulder: 'For my darling Peter on fiftieth wedding anniversary' (in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), 'This book was given me by dear dead Violet Swain when we were both seventeen” (in The Catcher in the Rye), “To Mary, may it bring her solace” (in John Donne's Sermons), “Just to remind you of our fortnight of Italian heaven” (in Ruskin's The Stones of Venice), “Madness is only misunderstood genius – pray for me” (in Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience), “I live, I die; I have lived, I am dead; I shall die, I will live” (in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling). Dozens of these in every carload. It was obscene. They should have buried the books with their owners, like the Egyptians, just so people couldn't paw over them afterward – give them something to read on the long ride through eternity.”
blahblahblah has posted links to some inscription collection projects here.
“He tells me the story of a writer who – on finding his own first book remaindered in a used bookstore – opened to the flyleaf only to discover his own signature above the note To Mum and Dad...”
OK so this is sadder, about a first edition of The Jungle Book Kipling inscribed to his daughter who died aged six.
I recently checked out from the Mechanics' Institute Library a copy of The New Improved Sun: an Anthology of Utopian SF, edited by Thomas M. Disch. It's inscribed For ______, who does want it signed. With love, Tom Disch. Anything to do with Disch gets me down nowadays.
From Sam Savage's Firmin, a book that offers a rat's eye view of the used book trade -- “I hated most of all reading the inscriptions over his shoulder: 'For my darling Peter on fiftieth wedding anniversary' (in The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám), 'This book was given me by dear dead Violet Swain when we were both seventeen” (in The Catcher in the Rye), “To Mary, may it bring her solace” (in John Donne's Sermons), “Just to remind you of our fortnight of Italian heaven” (in Ruskin's The Stones of Venice), “Madness is only misunderstood genius – pray for me” (in Blake's Songs of Innocence and of Experience), “I live, I die; I have lived, I am dead; I shall die, I will live” (in Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling). Dozens of these in every carload. It was obscene. They should have buried the books with their owners, like the Egyptians, just so people couldn't paw over them afterward – give them something to read on the long ride through eternity.”
blahblahblah has posted links to some inscription collection projects here.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Understatement and Overstatement
To Californians, England is a culture of understatement. To the English, California is a culture of overstatement. But from a more global perspective, both cultures are rather on the understated side of things.
Anna Wierzicka's English: Meaning and Culture quotes Syrian author Abraham Rihbany’s The Syrian Christ, published in 1920, on the differences between Anglo-American and Middle Eastern ways of speaking. Arab speech codes favor rhetorical exaggeration, Anglo-American speech codes favor accuracy or toning stuff down. After spending time in America, Rihbany found himself attuned to American cultural norms, saying things like “in my opinion” and "as it seems to me.” My favorite among the Rihbany quotes that Wierzicka provides --
“It is unpleasant to a Anglo-Saxon to note how many things an Oriental says, but does not mean. And it is distressing to an Oriental to note how many things the Anglo-Saxon means, but does not say.”
I used to have a therapist who was Palestinian: he expressed frustration that, when asked about my feelings, I would respond by elucidating what feelings somebody in my situation might reasonably be expected to have. In this respect I suppose I was being like an Englishman and he was being like an Arab. I can see why therapists hate me though...
This is from Watching the English by Kate Fox --
“Even those foreigners who appreciate the English understatement, and find it amusing, still experience considerable difficulties when it comes to using it themselves. My father tells me about some desperately anglophile Italian friends of his, who were determined to be as English as possible -- they spoke perfect English, wore English clothes, even developed a taste for English food. But they complained that they couldn't quite 'do' the English understatement, and pressed him for instructions. On one occasion, one of them was describing, heatedly and at some length, a ghastly meal he had had at a local restaurant -- the food was inedible, the place was disgustingly filthy, the service rude beyond belief, etc., etc. 'Oh,' said my father, at the end of the tirade, 'So, you wouldn't recommend it, then?' 'YOU SEE?' cried his Italian friend. 'That's it! How do you do that? How do you know to do that? How do you know when to do it?' 'I don't know,' said my father apologetically. 'I can't explain. We just do it. It just comes naturally.'”
So there you have it. Understatement: not such a big deal really...
Anna Wierzicka's English: Meaning and Culture quotes Syrian author Abraham Rihbany’s The Syrian Christ, published in 1920, on the differences between Anglo-American and Middle Eastern ways of speaking. Arab speech codes favor rhetorical exaggeration, Anglo-American speech codes favor accuracy or toning stuff down. After spending time in America, Rihbany found himself attuned to American cultural norms, saying things like “in my opinion” and "as it seems to me.” My favorite among the Rihbany quotes that Wierzicka provides --
“It is unpleasant to a Anglo-Saxon to note how many things an Oriental says, but does not mean. And it is distressing to an Oriental to note how many things the Anglo-Saxon means, but does not say.”
I used to have a therapist who was Palestinian: he expressed frustration that, when asked about my feelings, I would respond by elucidating what feelings somebody in my situation might reasonably be expected to have. In this respect I suppose I was being like an Englishman and he was being like an Arab. I can see why therapists hate me though...
This is from Watching the English by Kate Fox --
“Even those foreigners who appreciate the English understatement, and find it amusing, still experience considerable difficulties when it comes to using it themselves. My father tells me about some desperately anglophile Italian friends of his, who were determined to be as English as possible -- they spoke perfect English, wore English clothes, even developed a taste for English food. But they complained that they couldn't quite 'do' the English understatement, and pressed him for instructions. On one occasion, one of them was describing, heatedly and at some length, a ghastly meal he had had at a local restaurant -- the food was inedible, the place was disgustingly filthy, the service rude beyond belief, etc., etc. 'Oh,' said my father, at the end of the tirade, 'So, you wouldn't recommend it, then?' 'YOU SEE?' cried his Italian friend. 'That's it! How do you do that? How do you know to do that? How do you know when to do it?' 'I don't know,' said my father apologetically. 'I can't explain. We just do it. It just comes naturally.'”
So there you have it. Understatement: not such a big deal really...
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Dehaene and Proto-Letters
In Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene asks “What does a macaque do with the brain areas that we now devote to reading?” His answer: object recognition. Experimental evidence shows that the kinds of symbols that crop up in human writing systems are the same kinds of symbols that primates are good at recognizing.
Dehaene -- “The most likely hypothesis is that these shapes were selected, either in the course of evolution or throughout the course of a lifetime of visual learning, precisely because they constituted a generic 'alphabet' of shapes that are essential to the parsing of the visual scene. The shape T, for instance, is extremely frequent in natural scenes. Whenever one object masks another, their contours almost always form a T-junction. Thus neurons that act as 'T-detectors' could help determine which object is in front of which.”
More on this from the OnFiction website. See also my earlier post on kangaroos.
The point is clarified by some pictures from Dehaene's book that are available online. This illustration pertains to a neuron in a monkey's inferior temporal cortex that fires only in response to the image of a chair. This illustration shows how a neuron that will fire in response to a particular type of object will also fire in response to a version of the image that has been streamlined into something like a glyph.
Dehaene -- “The most likely hypothesis is that these shapes were selected, either in the course of evolution or throughout the course of a lifetime of visual learning, precisely because they constituted a generic 'alphabet' of shapes that are essential to the parsing of the visual scene. The shape T, for instance, is extremely frequent in natural scenes. Whenever one object masks another, their contours almost always form a T-junction. Thus neurons that act as 'T-detectors' could help determine which object is in front of which.”
More on this from the OnFiction website. See also my earlier post on kangaroos.
The point is clarified by some pictures from Dehaene's book that are available online. This illustration pertains to a neuron in a monkey's inferior temporal cortex that fires only in response to the image of a chair. This illustration shows how a neuron that will fire in response to a particular type of object will also fire in response to a version of the image that has been streamlined into something like a glyph.
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