| Found note, in the MultCoLib's copy of "G." by John Berger |
[Jul. 15th, 2009|01:25 pm] |
Found note, in the Multnomah County Public Library's copy of G. by John Berger. It is written in pencil, in a slightly jagged, upright cursive hand (I would guess a left-handed woman's) on a page from a notepad bearing the Red Lion Hotel logo; the following is entirely crossed out, by means of a single large X on each side.
The front says:
women adapt themselves to
the coercions and expectations of the others around them
her favorite lines from Mallarmé the hoarseness of her voice a middle-aged nurse with the
complexion of a Neapolitan In Goalie Bloch traces the
opening of the girls [sic] cleavage with his finger.
229
The back says:
the tunnel of flowering canna Roy Harris the best Lindt chocolate
the racehorse 'Star STYLE' owned by Eula Bischoff
longshot wins wyatt - mitchell reel + rod
african girls in colorful dress going to school |
|
|
| The sublimity of mixed use areas |
[Mar. 24th, 2009|02:42 pm] |
 Kerby Ave runs past the high school, south for quite a ways, maybe even until it hits the Willamette, but I don't care about that stretch. Nor do I care about its northern stretch, perhaps running to the Columbia River after Kerby Ave picks up again past the community college and jogs a half block west at the park. These parts are too strictly residential, with all the awkward admixure of nice house/nice garden with shoddy disrepair that characterises almost any street in north Portland. Instead, I care about the two blocks of Kerby Ave between the high school and the community college -- two blocks counted, that is, only on Kerby Ave's western side, since its eastern is taken up entirely by the unbroken stretch of the high school's athletic field. One of the western blocks is residential, mostly filled with the decorative neglect of hippie houses and hammered metal items suspended from front porch overhangs. Though these houses are an essential part of the frisson of Kerby Ave, they are nothing without the community college's gym, which stands on this section of Kerby Ave's northwesternmost corner.
The windows of the gym are odd, as the ones on the front, facing a much busier street than Kerby Ave, seem to have a light reflective glazing that suggests a two way mirror. These windows stretch in a long line across the front of the building, each with a brown vent underneath it. (The building itself is a dark red brick, as is everything else on the campus (whose bulk is across that busier street) which seems to have been built all at once.) As one turns from that street onto Kerby Ave, though, one sees no windows at street level. Rather, there are high windows above blank walls on this side of the building, as well as on its south side which faces a small parking lot. These windows open at the bottoms and let out radio station music whose age I have lost the ability to distinguish. One hears the squeaks of athletic shoes amongst this music, and voices as well, all forming parabolas as they shoot from their sources on what I've gathered is a basketball court, out the high window, and descending to one's ears. One can think of the high windows as the speaker of a Victrola in this regard, as they form acute triangles which point down at the street.
I am not a fan of sports and am not lured into a sporty reverie, but I like to stop and listen there outside the gym, facing south down these two blocks of Kerby Ave. Standing there brings to mind the inefficacy of will, somehow: the building's permeability and the entirely different world playing out inside where my observation is not even conceived of.
As I listen, I sometimes look southwest into the small parking lot where cars comport themselves in 2 aisles. Separating the lot from Kerby Ave is a dry-looking, rather perfunctory group of plantings. There are four trees and short, almost cubic hedges in two parallel lines running north and south. Yet despite this arrangement along exclusively cardinal directions, there is a diagonal path through the sad and perfunctory planter in staring at which I had my first Kerby Ave frisson. This is where I began to wonder: who ordained this path? who would think to do so? how many levels of authority were involved in the decision to make this diagonal path, codified with round concrete and gravel foot stones? My own theory, if it matters (Kerby Ave becomes almost sublime once I start thinking of the orchestration even its two blocks require -- thus, it seems like an essential component of the frisson that my theory does not matter), is that this diagonal path was originally made by people crossing into the second, southern aisle of cars from the sidewalk, only later to be codified into an official path through the docile bodies of the shrubbery; this, despite the fact that there is a sidewalk that runs along the southern side of the building, perpendicular to the sidewalk which I like to follow down Kerby Ave, through which people who park in the southern aisle of the parking lot could access their cars without destroying the admittedly perfunctory plantings.
Going south, I hit Killingsworth Ct, which pierces my favorite two-block section of Kerby Ave in its middle. This corner represents the reason for the frisson I feel as I walk down Kerby Ave, but the frisson disappears as I come upon it. You see, I conceptualize Kerby Ave as consisting of three sections: to its east is the high school athletic field; to its west, a residential block and the community college gym. The intersection of Kerby Ave and Killingsworth Ct is the point at which the three meet, thus forming the apotheosis of the sublime coordination I feel -- a sublimity which is completely insensible to me when I stand at that intersection, in an apparent paradox for which it's easy to find several metaphors. This intersection is, though, what clued me into the source of my frissons in the massive coordination of powers and lives represented by this two-block microcosm. My feeling here is oceanic in that I can sense the scales of those currents that tug and push at me as I make my way through every space. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 17th, 2009|08:41 pm] |
Looking intensely at a woman asleep conjures up around her an innocence, an aura of security bordering on folly: I never could fathom how one could abandon oneself in that manner, eyes closed, to another person's gaze.
-Julien Gracq, King Cophetua I'm interested in how the word "profile" came to designate an online portrait in words and images that one creates for oneself. The choice of that word seems strange not only because, if we take a metaphor from the visual arts, to draw oneself in profile would be possible only with a fairly complicated set of mirrors or with a photograph; but also because its journalistic meaning emphasizes the object's exoticism and the reader's distance -- none of which is the function of an online profile. Instead, people try to seem approachable, cool perhaps. And if exaggeration takes place, or obfuscation (as in choosy MySpace camera angles*), it's of a rather standardized kind.
Rather than thinking of "profile" as expressing the gymnastic near-impossiblity of capturing one's own profile (be it literal or metaphorical gymnasticism), we can imagine instead that it expresses the experience of the profile's viewer. My idea is that to fill out a profile is the secondary act here: viewing it is always primary. To look at somebody in profile suggests the voyeurism and anonymity of looking at an online profile. The viewer's gaze is protected by her peripherality. Likewise, perhaps, by conceiving oneself in profile, one escapes that gaze.
Maybe this is something that we've always tried to create: a way to position oneself perpendicular to the gaze of the other; a justification for doing so. This would be the strategy of the geisha who, in looking away, also creates unfettered access for the other's gaze. In our own culture, we have our individualism which revels in attention, even as it (putatively) pays it no mind; as its glance is perpendicular to the other, at some supposed tack of the supposed monad self.
*I remember seeing a profile in which a young man in a trucker hat was photographed looking about 60º away from the camera, which was held above him, and it made my entrails squirm in sympathetic embarrassment because the shadow on the parking lot behind him revealed that he was taking his own picture -- not itself shameful, of course, except when veiled behind a threadbare spontaneity. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Mar. 11th, 2009|11:20 pm] |
|
Every morning as I wake up, my cell phone presents me with two options: snooze or dismiss. Since I usually see these words literally first thing in the morning, they never look quite right to me, even in my waking hours when they aren't accompanied by a dancing clock icon. Now I can only see the excess in each of these words: "snooze," its o's seem to stretch to enormous lengths that could only be pronounced with the most bovine exaggeration; meanwhile, the three s's in "dismiss" turn it into a cipher whose absurd awkwardness makes me lose interest in its object before I'm even out of bed. |
|
|
| Remarks are not literature |
[Feb. 12th, 2009|09:54 am] |
Geometric Regional Novel
By Gert Jonke (trans. Johannes W. Vazulik)
Dalkey Archive, 2000, 136 pages
(read 2/10-2/11)
 The notion of a public square as the main character of a novel could not be more appealing. Not only does it have the potential to be a meta-character, shaping and distilling the village's shared characteristics and struggles, but its role lends itself to comparisons with an island or a stage on which appearance is more or less compulsory (the well is in its center). A public square as a character could make visible the creative process of constructing the everyday. When major events occur, they occur there as well, shaping in turn and being shaped by that everyday.
Our main character in Geometric Regional Novel is meticulously described, down to its number of tiles (although that number is not amended once the trees are uprooted entirely), but fails to make that everyday visible on anything like a consistent basis. Every other chapter is devoted to a description of some modification made to it, some event there (usually quite dramatic: a troop of acrobats, soldiers recruiting young boys, a flood) and finally, its traversal by the narrator and his 2nd person interlocutor.
But instead of acting on that stage a nuanced portrayal that includes creativity by the people in a bottom-up process, Jonke chooses to portray his village square almost entirely as a site for the exercising of bureaucratic power. Regulations are written out at exhaustive length, making up some of the book's "experimental" content. Nor are the edicts of the state necessarily stiff and formal; worse, they're whimsical. The village square becomes the site of convergence not only for the people of the village, but also the whims of nature and government. When the citizens are described, it's as impotently grumbling or positively cleaving to their leaders. It's not the lack of individuation that I mind, but the lack of will.
Jonke's tone in the narration both mimics and mocks bureaucracy, but the technique of obsessive observation he uses is so close to the real thing that it sees no way out; instead, two mirrors face each other and create an infinite regress, letting only bureaucratic power be seen as far as the atoms of the individual's "soul." And I use that word advisedly, since the faults I see in Geometric Regional Novel parallel the faults that Michel de Certeau criticized in Foucault: that his method of researching history was so bureaucratic -- it imitated so perfectly the power structures he sought to critique -- that it was only natural if all he could see was bureaucratic power.
Let me offer instead a model of observation from the bottom up that I would have hoped to see Jonke at least broach in this novel. You've perhaps heard of the Japanese man whose blog is dedicated to a single vending machine and its changes. He has taken a photo of the same vending machine almost every week day for about 3 years now, and offers comparisons of his daily snapshots with the pictures he took a year ago on the same day. What was invisible to consumers -- the tastes of the people nearby, the way that marketing works -- becomes visible, and allows knowledge to disseminate. This model of observation shows a man not passively being acted upon, but watching the careful calculations and modifications of those who watch him. What arises from this inter-level loop is not the cynical exercise of the same kind of power (we know who will win that battle, who is better practiced at its exercise), but a new consciousness of how our "new nature" (to quote Barthes) works at many levels simultaneously.
The idea of Geometric Regional Novel is so vastly appealing that I wanted it to succeed. I would love to see a novel that explored a single place with nuance and affection, even if that affection were not unmixed. Jonke's idea is fantastic, but the story he made of it wallows in the murk of rote mocking of bureaucracy, banal experimentation, and thoughtless conclusions. |
|
|
| An anecdoted topography, askance. |
[Feb. 9th, 2009|11:58 am] |
Most of my waking time at home is spent on my bed, which is without headboard and makes, as such, a better platform for the performance of my tasks. Upon coming home, that is where I head directly, usually placing my backpack beside the bed and my computer on a slatted chair at its head. For this habit, I've consciously trained myself to sit cross-legged for long periods. I had meant to do it before since I love the compactness and inwardness of such postures; but always opting instead for a desk, the chance never came. My legs no longer ache, even after hours, but my back does, and so I switch into reclining postures now and then. The best possible configuration of myself while on my little stage is cross-legged, back straightened as rigidly as I can sustain, and a blanket covering my entire body save my face and a single hand (alternated between left and right) holding a book open on my lap. The blanket fits over me like a tea cozy and makes me feel like a pleasant monad.
I sleep and work on only one half of my bed -- the northern half, as my bed is situated along an east-west axis -- and so the other half is perpetually filled with things that I do and do not use in my work on the bed. Roughly, it's shaped like a fully reclined human of my size (187 cm), and so I think of it as a proxy which always occupies the bed. This proxy consists of a set of interchangeable organs whose present components and configurations form a sort of self-portrait, albeit one that is often a day or two behind.
I begin from the east:
1) Two belts, one of green fabric, one of black leather. I use the former as a hint of color in otherwise grey and brown outfits, and as such, have thought of it as a band of parsley whose stem encircles my waist. (In this metaphor, the rest of my body would be a steak well done to the point of greyness, I suppose.) The second is stiff -- a sign that I don't wear it often. It was given to me by my parents many years ago (over 10, if I had to guess) and was only worn recently when I couldn't find my favorite belt: a brown leather belt presently resting on my iliac crests.
2) A white plate with embossed flowers, belonging to my roommates. I ate an organic, tiny apple off this plate last night. I sliced it, removed its core, and brought it up to my room; apples are eaten sliced around here partly because of my morbid fear of losing my teeth.
3) Nail clippers. I have at least three pair because I find them so easy to lose. (This is the only one whose location I know; see!) When I had a car, I would clip my nails while driving, stupidly. There was always a disposable razor in my glovebox too, in case I had missed a spot while shaving. (My facial hair is soft enough that a few dry swipes with the razor isn't overly irritating.)
4) A solution of carbamide peroxide for the removal of earwax. I reached for this white tube late one night in a waking fit when the angle of my head had somehow made my cerumen extremely irritating. Hearing out of my left ear was impossible, and so I dozed as the solution softened it.
5) A grey scarf. There is a woven pattern on this scarf which I think is called cable knit (I could look this up, but I won't), and I've been preferring this to the trendy H&M keffiyeh that I had made much use of previously. This is mostly because downtown Portland has been packed lately with young people collecting money for children in Gaza, and my wearing a keffiyeh makes me a too-easy target for their solicitations. This scarf is exceedingly soft, and I like to rub my cheeks on in the same absent minded trance as that in which I bite my lips.
6) A bookmark from ____ ____ Books. This is where I worked for a year, originally as a temporary employee and finally as a permanent one whose music was vetoed more often than anyone else's. This book mark has been the site of many frantic notes taken when I find a reference to check out later: "Bergson - Creative Evolution," "Sterne - Tristram Shandy," "mansuetude," "Parfit - Reasons & Persons," "pleonastic," "Buñuel," "Lost faith in metaphor."
7) Two menus from a local Thai restaurant with handwritten dinner specials on them. I was walking past this restaurant near my house when I decided to stop and look at the menu. The proprietress, whom I first thought was a Buddhist nun because of her grey dress and knit cap, came out and handed me the first menu. I asked if they served lunch on Sundays and she said, after a pause which later made me feel very bad indeed, that they could. Once inside, I saw that I was the only person, was served a very good lunch and, upon parting, was given the second menu and a frequent visitor card.
8) A legal pad. Much abused, this poor legal pad now holds my French vocabulary and grammar notes; still on its first page are notes for an entry I published here many months ago. I can't remember what it was used for before this, but I seem to recall a similar notebook holding class notes and renderings of the names of literary theorists in my shoddy, child-like katakana.
9) A reusable grocery bag from the chain H-E-B. Because I was determined to not check luggage when traveling to and from Texas over the holidays, I had to bring on board the plane a reusable grocery bag filled with laundry, gifts, and food. The bag was the largest one that we could find at H-E-B and has a flowered pattern, about which my mother expressed some anxiety that I would feel embarrassed. Arriving back in Portland, an unshaven man in his thirties recognized the logo and told me a little bit about his time in Austin. We walked side by side for a while but, already exhausted from the plane, I couldn't imagine putting sufficient effort into keeping the conversation from descending into awkwardness for who knows how many more blocks: I entered a produce market and bought three tangerines.
10) Five books: The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium by Harry Mathews: I dip into this one now and then and consider its excellent first lines:...confidence in words, Twang. I suck my tongue for your chervil-and-lavender flavor. This afternoon I went to the Beach to see a new hotel, the Brissy St. Jouin. But I haven't read it yet; The Great Fire of London by Jacques Roubaud: an excellent novel made more excellent by the re-reading which finished on Saturday morning in public over a cafe au lait; French DNA by Paul Rabinow: this book seems almost unbearable from the little bit I've read of it so far, but I expect I'll try again before I have to return it to the library in two weeks; The Form of the City Changes, Alas, Faster than the Human Heart again by Jacques Roubaud: I like to read his poems about streets, which cause me to fantasize about a city whose mental apprehension doesn't come easily -- a city whose streets deserve poems; King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov: finished over 10 days ago, this book has lingered on my bed, despite not lingering in my mind overly much.
11) The hands-free headset for my cell phone. Late at night, when O. calls me, I lay the phone on my stomach and speak facing the ceiling, my arms tucked under my three blankets.
12) Store-brand cough drops. These were chosen over the sugar-free kind, over which I would have chosen coughing. I found a Halls cough drop in my backpack -- this was three or so weeks ago, when I had come down with a cold -- and found that, even though both claimed to be cherry flavored, the Halls was noticeably more palatable. It occurred to me after I had sucked on dozens of cough drops over the course of a week that I don't know what menthol is.
13) My diary. About which to speak here would be altogether too strange.
14) Two pens. One of these is my presently preferred model, a Uniball, the other my formerly preferred model from when I didn't write nearly so much by hand. I feel that my present choice is more refined, but of course I do: I change preferred pen models frequently, each time choosing a finer point and a sturdier feel, though always one with a retractable tip (I click the pen as a fidget).
15) A petroleum jelly moisturizer. Not only does my habit of biting my lips absent-mindedly lead to their being intolerably chapped in the winter, but I also have eczema on my hands. Before sleep, I slather my hands with the moisturizer and slip a pair of socks over them to keep from waking up covered with the slatherings of my Ur-slathering. No few misgivings about using a petroleum product on my person accompany these uses, but I've found nothing that works so well.
16) Many, many socks. See (15). |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Feb. 2nd, 2009|08:03 pm] |
A minor effort, long in the making: I've started keeping track of what I read on a website called LibraryThing. (You should feel free to add me to your friends there if you use the site too.) I've even written a few reviews, which, while writing them gives me satisfaction, in re-reading just seem non-sequitur; still, they remain online for that double reason that most of my reviews are of more obscure books (I can't see the point of adding a review to a book with several dozen already) and that I hate the idea of not simply retracting something, but deleting it entirely.
What I'm finding remarkable, though, is the chance to wonder -- this time with evidence -- whether I read widely or aimlessly. It's surprising, as much as I love drawing up plans, that I don't make more reading lists than I do. Instead, whatever catches my eye at the moment is the next thing I read; or, occasionally, whatever long-requested book is being held for me at library comes next.
The last several books I've read are as follows, from most to least recent:
- King, Queen, Knave by Vladimir Nabokov (fiction)
- A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor (travel writing)
- A Study of Writing by I.J. Gelb (unfinished) (lingustics)
- I am a Strange Loop by Douglas Hofstadter (science/cognition)
- Extreme Measures: The Dark Visions & Bright Ideas of Francis Galton by Martin Brookes (biography of a scientist)
- Graphs, Maps, Trees by Franco Moretti (literary theory mixed with very unsatisfying cartography)
- One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand by Luigi Pirandello (fiction)
- Obsession: A History by Lennard Davis (history)
- On Being Human by Erich Fromm (psychology)
- How German Is It = Wie Deutsch Ist Es? by Walter Abish (fiction)
- Law in a Lawless Land by Michael Taussig (anthropology/diary)
- The Journalist by Harry Mathews (fiction/diary)
The anxiety that such a list provokes is obvious. I jump from genre to genre so frequently that I don't so much risk losing the memory of the book in a blur of similar books, but that the book floats loose from any context. This is probably a natural enough result of the Great Disappointment that was graduate school, my discovery-cum-resolution that academia was not for me, and so on. It may still that for now I'm without a passion, save the longing to learn and its equal, the passion (in its Latinate sense) to avoid wasting my time and efforts again. |
|
|
| Fetus in fetu |
[Dec. 9th, 2008|12:44 pm] |
In a dream, I had emigrated to Germany and taken a job delivering the results of DNA tests. On one assignment, I rode a train out to a field of identical apartment buildings under thick nimbus clouds and informed a woman that her 3 year old son was not hers. She was overjoyed, but the woman to whom I delivered the child was so upset that she got everyone in her building to leave in protest and to cover their floors with coconut shavings before they did so. On the train ride home, I was musing over my experience when I told another rider about what I'd just done. "Did I do the right thing?" I asked her in German. "No matter what you would have done, they wouldn't have been pleased," she replied. She was an American who had lived in Germany for 40 years.
Suddenly, I found myself at a concert or festival in France. Green lights swept across the crowd as word spread that I had just had a dream about emigrating to Germany and taking a job delivering the results of DNA tests. Everyone was so interested in my dream that I was being impelled towards the stage where I would recite it for them all. My first translator was Sparrow, a poet who does speak French; but as I tried to organize my dream into some kind of coherent story, he disappeared. My second translator, a young brunette, disappeared in the same fashion. The crowd grew restless and actually began to chant in anticipation of my dream, so a hip-hop act was sent out to appease them. I was flustered by this point, and I told the director that I not only didn't speak French, but was having terrible stage fright. He nodded and said only, "They're used to people stringing words together." Looking over the stage at the crowd, I gathered my courage. |
|
|
| The Fourth Month Sky |
[Dec. 8th, 2008|05:34 pm] |
"There was something indefinably pleasant about the Fourth Month sky and the trees were a lovely expanse of new green."
-- The Tale of Genji, Murasaki Shikibu (trans. Seidensticker)I reread this phrase several times, wondering why I found it more affecting than I would have found a statement about an April sky -- wondering how a Westerner is supposed to parse this reference to the lunar calendar, which would have been invisible in the original. I hate to think, of course, that it's just the use of a different name and a foreign system of time-keeping that gave me pause. Borges said, in reference to Genji, that "what interests us is not the exoticism — the horrible word — but rather the human passions of the novel." So if the Fourth Month piques me, it's not, I hope, simply by giving me reason to reflect on some mysterious essence which the name "April" had shielded from my view, but that the ordinal system of naming months reveals a view of time in which noticing the pleasantness of the sky and the "new green" is especially touching. I wonder whether giving months the names of ordinals is more appropriate in a society given to nostalgia. References to the Heian Period as an age of decline occur regularly throughout Genji, with some characters saying that even the ability to play music -- but how could they even pretend to know this? -- had suffered sadly since its height among the ancients; likewise, nearly every conversation labelled "intimate" is later said to be about old times. Giving months numbered names would allow a more easily gauged distance between the past and the present, even within the space of a year, just as numbered years almost inevitably make us ask, "Has it really been so long?" The business of putting distance between the past and present -- objectifying it enough to make it suitable for nostalgia -- means making a linear story, and the ordinal names of months seem to demand a certain clarity in the order of events. And if we're able to spread analogies across onomastic fields, we can say that the Japanese naming system for months makes our own system seem as whimsical as the Indian system of giving proper names to single-family houses does today. When we consider how converting names to numbers is always touted as an increase in efficiency, it's worth considering that the ordinal system for naming months might seem positively bureaucratic. The affection a Westerner might feel for the quote that began this entry, then, might stem from an apparent contrast between lingering enough to notice the sky and the relentless ordering of time within a system that denies any essence to a month outside of its numerical position. This is the easiest way that the humane, perhaps, can appear to modern people: as the exception, even as the ineffectual. |
|
|
| Keep calm, carry on (6/20) |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|08:59 pm] |
It's gone from a matter of slight pride to a matter of some mild annoyance that this Werner-Herzog-ified corner of my conscience won't let my forthcoming move to the other side of the continent consist mostly of a few hours' unpleasantness 30,000 feet in the air. No, some part of me wants a bit of an ordeal when I move from Albany to Portland, Oregon just six weeks from now. Of course, there will be a week with my family in Texas, but that's no ordeal. I feel the need for something solitary, something scenic -- a leisurely way of marking the transition that I like to imagine this move signifies and enables.
Moving to Albany from Texas was terribly interesting, as I suddenly found myself compelled to drive about 32 hours over the course of 4 days (one of which was spent resting in Pittsburgh). I plumbed the depths of boredom on that trip -- at one point, I resorted to reading aloud every sign I saw in a high-pitched, extremely enthusiastic voice -- but it also gave me a sense of scale that I could use a metaphor for "how far I've come." It was all but unbearable at times, though I hardly had the option not to bear it once I left Texas. I was frequently in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by weird combinations of Jesus and adult movie stores, or by accents that I couldn't understand. Sometimes I think it's just what we need to have no choice.
I wonder, then, about taking the train from Texas to Oregon, and would like your input on the subject. Please know that, if it sounds like my mind's made up, it's not. But I don't want to regret not taking up this opportunity now that it fits me so perfectly. See, I'm not going to anything but the city itself. I don't have any friends there, nor a job there, nor commitments, nor restraints on my time; and if it won't be (I use that word again) unbearable, I'd like to arrive knowing what it meant to get there. |
|
|
| Bland of the free (5/20) |
[Jul. 23rd, 2008|07:46 pm] |
Health food, in particular, seems especially prone to the recent trend of placing lists on food packaging declaring all the substances of which the contents are "free." These litanies can run up to half a dozen items, and are often placed in colorful boxes or even starburst designs -- all of which adds an air of celebration and relief to the product.
Of course, celebration and relief are emotions appropriate to freedom (a word now so loaded it can perhaps best be approached through its use on food packaging) as it pertains to a heavy yoke having been lifted, or a burden which one learns that one does not have to bear after all. The idea of freedom, though, is rather meaningless without the possibility of oppression and necessity, which leads me to wonder what the opposite of these alimentary appellations might be: would a product which is not dairy-free be dairy-laden? or something which is not soy-free be held soy-captive? or be soy-sullied?
The degree to which these antonyms are ridiculous is the same degree to which it's ridiculous that food manufacturers seem to hope that their "gluten-free" products will be greeted with a certain joy, whereas a phrase like "no gluten" on a label might look sullen by comparison. This, though, is only the rational way of looking at it -- the side of us that knows the two phrases are perfectly equivalent -- while consumption is a thoroughly irrational undertaking, containing as it does elements of both identification and aspiration. What we must consider is the idea of health food consumers as a discrete group with characteristic ideas about themselves and the modern world.
With brand names like "Back to Nature" (which I can't help but interpret as a command in want of an exclamation point) and "Eden Foods," it's clear that health food manufacturers (and therefore the consumers [I should point out now that this includes me]) seek to distinguish themselves by their purity -- the converse of this distinction being, of course, that mainstream manufacturers are estranged from nature and despoilers of what is otherwise Edenic. Collectively held ideas about what foods are polluting emerge, which means that we should refer to the anthropologist Mary Douglas; explaining her idea of food taboos as symbolic ways of maintaining the integrity of the body politic by closely guarding each body's orifices, she writes, "I suggest that food is not likely to be polluting at all unless the external boundaries of the social system are under pressure." This she writes specifically about the Brahmin caste and about Jews, both of whom are minorities the lapse of whose vigilance could quickly bring about their end as a distinct group.
This, to me, explains in large part why health food consumers seem to respond well to the notion of their food being "free" of various (and occasionally dubious) taints; rather than being a demographic, a certain sense of aspiring to be a fully functioning "social system" has developed among likely consumers of health foods -- one that I think I can safely label environmentalist. The "freedom" from certain ingredients, then, becomes a way of creating in one's body the idea of freedom from a mass culture where finding virtually anything without high-fructose corn syrup is a chore.
Later in her book Purity and Danger, Douglas writes that if a metaphysical system has no way of tilling the evil and tragic facts of life back into its system, it not only stultifies itself by creating a too-static environment, but risks having to go through life with a forced smile and eyes closed to the easy falsifiability of its ideas and rites. This is what concerns me -- that environmentalists want their freedom too free, and will continue to move the bar of purity from organic to biodynamic to local, from gluten-free to GMO-free to soy-free. These are the marks of coolness straight out of any high school, not the marks of sustainability. |
|
|
| The rude prude (4/20) |
[Jul. 16th, 2008|09:36 pm] |
I continue to thrash under the yoke of my promise to update this thing 20 times in the (rolling) month. But you know, I am enjoying actually producing sentences, paragraphs, and assemblages thereof; it makes me feel wholesome and proud. I don't have it in me to preach about my big ideas today, so I wanted to share a story that occasionally comes up whenever I talk about writing.
It concerns a class that I took at my undergrad institution, where I was an English major with a real crush on the novel form. And the faith that I had, or, really, love -- if faith implies a belief that the object of my devotion could change something larger than myself -- lead me to take a couple of creative writing classes. The first was a great experience, and a number of my college friends came from that class. It's not surprising to say that sharing writings fosters intimacy, but we were all in love with literature together -- celebrants at a temple, almost -- and our orisons, though flawed, were as sincere as can be.
The second began as badly as the first had been joyful. It was lorded over by a professor who foisted his writings upon us, including a class-long reading of one his stories, and seemed to always be in possession of a coffee cup of an almost medieval pride in non-ablution. His stories, though, generally concerned a certain subset of the rural poor, and dripped a kind of sentimental (English majors can read, "New Critical") tobacco juice -- which was one of the first times I had been able to meet a writer whose writings were populated more or less entirely by characters who would have hated him (even if it was far from the first time I had thought about that phenomenon).
But so I say "lorded" and "foisted" and "began badly," because by the third class, group criticisms had begun, and the professor, who I heard from another graduate of the department, apocryphally it turned out, had moved to something like Montana, proved positively expert at getting people to be nasty in critique. I don't remember if the recipient of that first critique actually welled up in tears, but I do remember his look of not knowing what had just hit him. By the time my turn for critique came, I was in a fighting mood. Luckily, too, since my story (inspired by what happened to Karlheinz Stockhausen after September 11th) of an academic being wildly misquoted and eventually sequestered in his house by angry protesters was pretty much reviled by half the class, the rest being split evenly between ambivalence and enjoyment. It was panned for its (who would have guessed) "linguistic acrobatics," and several people suggested that the story existed simply as a convenient vehicle for certain obscure words that I slipped into the story in no subtle quantity.
Very well. I was hazed. I took it without anything too unseemly, and had the pleasure after that of going through the rest of the semester without expecting another group critique (our second story was to be critiqued by the professor alone, since we critiqued only one story per class). But then, one day, I was called a prude. By the professor. I had protested that a certain sex scene in a classmate's story came out of nowhere, had said that I didn't think it was "earned." And the professor called me a prude.
I'm not sure why, looking back, I was so annoyed by it; it was really that the situation was inappropriate to judge my prudery, given that I was speaking in a critical capacity. But I felt a tremendous annoyance that carried me a month into finishing my final story, by which stroke I tried to remove any possibility of that name's being used in connection with me again. I contrived a plot that was capacious enough for every nauseating thing I could think of at the time: there was dried, chunky vomit, scat fetishism, binge drinking (please combine these last two for the most accurate picture of what this story described), self-help, hooking up, and more. Kevin called it "kaleidoscopically disgusting."
It goes without saying, perhaps, but the professor loved it, and only wished that the class could have critiqued it. I got an A- and the comment that he could see me writing seriously some day. |
|
|
| The Bookseller's Pique (3/20) |
[Jul. 12th, 2008|11:19 am] |
It's no secret that publishers often ask authors to change the names of their books in order to fit what their market thinks of as an appropriate title for a book. But those expectations of appropriateness can create some rather humorous bottlenecking as publishers flock to a certain onomastic scheme and then, once they've surfeited the public on that trope, abandon it. I'd like to point out the two naming schemes that seem most prevalent today as formulas for the naming of books.
The first is one that I'll call The Occupation's Female Relation, and its members fit into the formula suggested by my own meta-title perfectly. We can only speculate on why no nieces or grandmothers seem to be named, but here follows a few examples of this genre:
- The Zookeeper's Wife
- The Time Traveler's Wife
- The Tale of the Allergist's Wife
- The Astronaut's Wife (There seem to be no fewer than three separate books and a film bearing this title.)
- The Bonesetter's Daughter
- The Abortionist's Daughter
- The Gravedigger's Daughter
A second trend is one I'll name The Eccentric Conflagration; its titles are a little tougher to pin down, and my Google skills failed me somewhat when I was searching for examples. Nonetheless, all of them concern a grouping whose purpose (or at least name) is somehow, as the following show, triangulated between nonsensical, paradoxical, and quirky --
- The Tea-Olive Bird-Watching Society
- The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
- The Master Butchers Singing Club
- The Buenos Aires Broken Heart Club
-- all of which exude an almost pained specificity that, even if it doesn't explicitly include hyphens, begs silently for them to be added in the mind of the reader. (I would add that, in the case of the second title on that list, hyphens would save it from being parsed as concerning a society that bakes or eats both literary and potato peel pies, rather than one that concerns itself with "literary [things]" and "potato peel pie[s].")
If it seems obvious that there would be trends in the naming of books, it's somewhat less obvious why -- for surely not all of these were altered by the publishers, but were voluntarily named by their authors. If it is a case as simple as the now chronic appendage of the lowercase "i" to the beginning of tech products -- a case of hoped-for high sales simply by association with a single best seller -- it's an explanation that is simple in itself, but somewhat more complex and not at all heartening in the explanations for which our specific examples seem to beg. For in the first, we seem to be reverting to a way of referring to women by their relations to (almost certainly) male characters; and I would point out, too, that this is a reversion to, really, pre-novelistic schemes of reference, since novels featuring female characters were previously named, primarily, by eponymous means (Jane Eyre, Pamela), and secondarily, either by a place name (Bleak House, Wuthering Heights) or more abstractly (Sense & Sensibility, The Wings of the Dove) -- never by that character's relation to a male.
And in the case of the books which fall under my meta-title of The Eccentric Conflagration, I can only suggest that the frantic specificity of their titles lies in stark contrast to the realities of a nation in which people cannot seem to gather for anything other than the most officially sanctioned, banally celebratory functions. If their titles are any indication, it seems that these books contain a myth of a non-internet world so packed with clubs and societies that there is room for niches and sub-niches. But isn't the whole idea of a common naming scheme for popular literature mythological in nature? Doesn't it appeal to a sort of folk consciousness of some unarticulated desire? |
|
|
| Nathaniel H., Author of the Dymaxion Chronofile (2/20) |
[Jul. 10th, 2008|02:25 pm] |
|
Apropos of perhaps my most irritating writerly tic, I recall a story that Borges somehow neglected to write. It concerns a sort of cross-generational guild which has, for several centuries now (I emphasize that they began before modern bureaucracy), passed along a single sentence, endlessly qualified, in an attempt to make both its assumptions and its conclusions incommensurably orthodox. What had started as a grammarians' union had come to find that their charter was itself the most perfect place to practice their art, each generation dealing with the last's legacy by a few swift quotation marks and a clause or two. Esoteric indeed! But I'll leave it to some future Borges to tell you what the scholars made of it once they tallied up the parentheses, the dashes, and the semi-colons; for, considered in ratio to each other or as marks on pages, unaccompanied by words... that is supposed to be the greatest beauty that the guild has produced. |
|
|
| Proposal for a practice (1/20) |
[Jul. 9th, 2008|04:18 pm] |
My idea is that it's all too easy to view places not as spaces to inhabit and explore, but as sets of permissions and prohibitions -- the latter being a passive sort of behavior, not at all conducive to either synthetic or analytic intelligences, but rather only to a reactive skill which might be called social: on the one hand, there is an urge to ask questions of a place, why it is the way it is, why it is at all, what keeps people coming back or staying away; on the other, there is the desire to step immediately beyond the physical setting into the behavioral implications for oneself, asking questions only of that variety.
Let me give an example where I believe a hint of these differences can be seen in our language. Think of the difference between being "at home" and "at your house"; while the former has connotations of (these are examples from my own life) going barefoot, often switching from jeans to pajamas or a robe, dropping some of the decorum worn outside the home, the latter is more ambiguous, my apartment being by definition located in a building with other apartment units, on a block, in a neighborhood, and so on. In short, if being "at home" means allowing the idiosyncrasies of my own behavior to come to the fore as a norm, being "in my apartment" contains an element of arbitrariness, as if it's not only random that my apartment is mine rather than somebody else's, but that the years through which I've built up the behaviors I exhibit when in my apartment are just as random.
What I propose as a practice -- my biases should become clear here, if somehow they haven't been so far -- is to actively locate oneself several times a day, starting from your specific location, be it a certain room, a cubicle, a street corner, or whatever, and moving outwards from there in imagination. So from the specific location, one can move to imagine the building or the wing of the building, trying to understand how that one specific room interacts with the other spaces in its building -- or, just as fruitfully, does not interact; and from there, the imagination can wander outside, taking in the dynamics of the neighborhood, the city, the county, and so on (all the while centering the mental image on the present location of the imagining individual), until one finds oneself sitting at one's desk (as I'm doing now), placed on a map of one's state. Only the most ambitious, the most practiced, and Rhode Island residents can go beyond that level -- my own mind boggles if I try.
 As an aside, the image of myself simultaneously standing at a street corner with all its specificity and standing on a map of New York near the intersection of the Mohawk and Hudson rivers is where this whole idea came from. I had just returned from Oregon and was feeling especially oddly situated here, when I came to marvel at, first, how strange it was that I should be in Albany, New York (of all places!), then, how strange it was that I should think things could be otherwise; for the image of a map makes every fact both natural and arbitrary, obliterating questions of personal narrative amidst all the dots which splay out and duly mark the most soul-devouring ghetto and the liveliest city in the same pure black.
The point of my proposed practice becomes a perambulation, ultimately, of the self, taken through the time-honored route of defamiliarization. But where, for example, a readymade succeeds at defamiliarization through a mere change in context, the sort of locative practice I'm proposing adds context in such great heaps that the self is more or less buried. And when the self is buried, a kind of auto-anthropology can ensue, closely followed by what I don't know.
But this goes back, as well, to what was for me the most moving image from that recent series of pictures showing the uncontacted tribe in Brazil. I share a sort of melancholy with these people living in this clearing just a few meters wide, ready to be swallowed up and forgotten by the forest the first week it's left unattended; for all of us, the limits of our worlds are finite, obscured, be it by the fiction of a map or by what must be a tiny earth, covered entirely by forest. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|12:13 am] |
The last two years have been an existential shit storm (don't blame yourself if you didn't know [but certainly don't tell me either way]), and an essential subtext within the last year of it has been a relationship to writing that moved from complication to paralysis before I knew what was happening. When I finished with grad school, it seemed like I was suddenly presented with the only meal that I could eat for the rest of my life. Because, in truth -- verily and forevermore -- the only thing I can imagine myself doing to keep myself interested and vivacious long-term is writing; or it's like I'm an anthropologist, faced with a sort of tribal scene that, sans the anthropological method, I wouldn't be able to bear.
But to bear anything, I first have to develop a practice of writing that can sustain me -- "If you don't seek the Buddha on warm summer days, he won't visit you in the cold of winter." I've tried making this a bona fide practice many times, each failure reinforcing the previous until I got to the point that to sit down and try to write was enough to guarantee a feeling of failure over the next few days. This is, of course, intolerable.
I should add, though, that I've not been a complete failure at establishing other intentional practices as part of my daily routine: not to brag -- because, really, could there be a worse thing to brag about? -- but I've been able to meditate all but daily for what will be in a couple weeks a full year. Knowing that I can change my habits when I put my mind to it, I have a resolution: for 20 of the next 30 days, I'll write and post the fruits -- be they banal, or sublime, I'll post them. And I hope you'll be around to scold me if I don't. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jul. 5th, 2008|04:34 pm] |
There's gum in the sink,
like a bloated New Zealand.
Unknown provenance. |
|
|
| The park in the morning |
[Jun. 17th, 2008|10:28 pm] |
The park in the morning is a line of aged men, alone in large sedans or mid-size SUVs, encircling the pond. The park in the morning is the liturgical procession of their synthetic blend polo shirts. Or the park in the morning is a formation of newspaper chevrons opened over steering wheels.
Sine qua non coffee makes vapor puffs on windshields, waning when sipped by the aged men who pause to look straight ahead. And when they do, I can look at them more or less with impunity, myself staring at them staring as I walk to work through the park in the morning. They do not look to either side, but content themselves with the view of the vehicle in front of them or the more immediate surroundings of their perpetually tidy automobile interiors; which is to say that they are happy simply knowing that they are in a scenic place, like diplomats who meet in exotic locations only to spend their visits in windowless rooms.
And this interests me, for the park in the morning is a Confucian cruising ground, a space rigorously ruled in its decorum and in its membership, but inviting a certain permeation of those rules -- just as people all seem ecstatic when somebody on a subway acknowledges that she's sharing that space with others and begins talking to them. I know this because I read about it on the internet. |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[Jun. 5th, 2008|02:25 am] |
Throughout my body as one longish heart I know the destiny of human society will be to live turned inside out with all consequences on the table. Those sequences making up any observing are to become themselves observable. Observable events are potentially reproducible ones; eventually, from these sequences a whole new perceiver or a new other might be generated.
-Madeline Gins, Helen Keller or Arakawa |
|
|
| (no subject) |
[May. 3rd, 2007|06:55 pm] |
Just dropping in to creep you out.
Also, to let you know that I've been writing over here and kindly request your presence. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
chronofile's journal