Read the review on The Outlet. Denon’s masterful long short story is translated by Lydia Davis and introduced by Peter Brooks, who hints at the mystery of the novella.
On my own ongoing investigation into the novella, for Electric Literature:
What makes a novella a novella, as opposed to a long short story or a short novel? Why does the novella seduce us, even though relatively few are published or taught? (You never hear, for example, “Mommy, I want to grow up to be a famous novella-ist!”) Deleuze and Guattari offer a few hypnotic thoughts on the subject, but even they abandon the question after only—and perhaps appropriately—half-contemplating it.
Towards a literary–psychological theory of the novella, writer and compulsive short-text reader Wythe Marschall offers a biweekly review of classic and contemporary works that may or may not fit your definition of the term.
By focusing on their playful relationship with theme—a constant seesaw between story and meditation, narrative-packed-into-a single moment and timeless “whoa” of profound human experience—Wythe hopes to pin down just what the novella does to its reader’s brain:
Can we situate “the novella effect” somewhere between the constrained, heightened consciousness of the short story and the taxonomizing–exhausting consciousness of the novel? Tune in every other week to find out—
Or, at least, to discover several novellas worth reading.
Thanks to Electric Literature, New Directions, NYRB Classics, and Melville House.
The man’s (invented) name was V.D., and he wrote about sex. Lulz.
Combining the ideas in the last two posts in this series—with attention to literature (artful verse; the continuum of texts figuratively documenting the human experience) and to the play of signs, myths, archetypes, and words—I end up with a theme for my class and a larger thesis to mull over and refine:
Literature is a fractal in form, in shape. It is made of feedback based on recursion. It evolves as it recurs, as it is iterated, as more of it is made. Literature evolves over time.
Literature has a fine structure, scaled arbitrarily. It can be analyzed at all levels: macro (genre or movement), meso (text), micro (sentence), and nano (sign). Each level is revealing. It is not enough to look only at the macro (as in a Wikipedia entry). It is not enough to look only at a text, to skim it.
It is not enough to dwell upon a few choice sentences. It is not enough to obsess over an image, a word choice, a myth recalled by an off-hand adjective. It is our job as critical readers to read at all levels—not all the time (that would be impossible), but as much as possible. This may require rereading, and it certainly helps conversation: You and I may have read the same text, but we may have understood it differently. We help each other as we combine levels.
Literature is too irregular to be easily described in traditional semiotic language. An epic such as Moby-Dick or Beloved is not just an advertisement, or a stop sign on the road. To talk about a literary text at all requires some level of appreciation of its otherness from other texts. If every text was literature, we wouldn’t still be reading Homer. We’d only read the Post. It is its irregularity—in literature’s case, its artfulness, its ability to affect human consciousness—that makes it both awesome (literally, fear-/religious love-inspiring) and difficult to pin down, at times.
This is not meant to diss the Post or comix or stop signs, BUT: Literature is the artful craft of verse, the manipulation of signs in a certain realm in which many big ideas—the whole of history and mythology and individual human consciousness and the stream of life that surrounds us and the abstract melting down of all of this, its reduction and manipulation and re-manipulation—construct a single text (and, because literature is a rainbow, that text is only one cell within the titanic body of literature).
Literature is self-similar, stochastically. A) What is similarity? Texts are not all the same. Duh. But they share similarities: They are non-arbitrary groups of signs. This sentence, for instance, did not come out of a monkey’s typewriter. Literature is also self-similar. We know it when we see it. We know why Moby-Dick is not the Post. It’s similar. But… not every literary text is the same. Moby-Dick is not the same as The Crying of Lot 49. Similar, generically, categorically. But different, specifically… (Literature is like the sign in this way.)
B) What is self-similarity? A literary text shows itself at each level of investigation to be itself. Moby-Dick is about whales, in summary; it’s also about whales, in every sentence. Self-similar. Many levels to view. Each level similar. Power through this self-similarity. Similar across the form: We recognize it as literature. Similar across itself: We recognize it as itself. But each level is distinct, each chapter is distinct. The literary text is a fractal. To the degree it is a fractal, it is literary.
To the degree it feels truly random (monkey typewriter nonsense), it is “bad” writing. To the degree its supra-claims (A NEWSPAPER OF IMPORT!) do not match its sentences, it is hypocrisy, popular or “genre” work, mere journalism. (It is, in any case, not literature, in the highest meaning of the word. Literature doesn’t have to be hoity-toity or exclusive. But it must have a definition we can at least kinda-sorta agree upon, as scholars, as writers, as critical readers.) The literary text must resemble itself, artfully, as a whole (an idea) and in each sentence.
C) “Stochastic” means “random,” but “stochastic” is a more musical term; it means “not-metered,” “non-metric;” it is therefore a less random way of saying “random.” Literature, verse, is a kind of music, after all; it is the metering of signs, trapped in language sounds, themselves trapped in squiggles on screen or on paper; literature, whether prose or verse poetry or unmetered poetry can be said to have a meter; that meter may of course be non-meter, but non-meter is still a kind of meter. (Prose has a relationship to meter.) All literature has meter. Very little literature, these days, outside rap lyrics, has “metrical” meter. Prose mostly has a stochastic meter.
D) So what is stochastic self-similarity? Literature does not consist, with a few exceptions, of the same exact words or sentences or even ideas repeated over and over again. Therefore, while it is self-similar at each level, it is self-similar in some other way than simple stamping, or copying and pasting. It is stochastically self-similar. Moby-Dick is not the same sentence about whales; it is delightfully new sentence after delightfully new sentence about whales set out in a non-arbitrary pattern.
Literature has a simple and/but recursive definition. We know it when we see it. But we sometimes have a hard time defining it or putting a name to it. We rely on jargon (”sign”); jargon is not universally intelligible. Yet literature is literature (a recursive definition): The problem is not in calling literature a spectrum of texts crafted artfully, but in doing so without resorting to language.
Literature has been with us since we first wrote down language; before that, proto-literature was with us in a different, oral form. We cannot imagine literature “from the outside;” our every phrase draws upon or alludes to or is shaped unconsciously by texts, and—especially in a world of text messaging, email, and the infinite superfast free flatness of the internet—we think textually. We are part of literature, living, and it is a part of us.
What the hell is this? It’s some literature, fools—deal with it. (Actually, I think this image relates to sign language, but I like it in general. Signs raining down, from the concavity of the umbrella. And those weird-ass smiley faces with double eyes… Already, a story is implied.)
The phone books are here! The phone books are here! Er, uh, I mean—the Suspicious Anatomy book launch is here! My first book! Check it:
Not since Galen’s De Elementis has been set in ink a single compendium of medicological knowledge so extensive & practicably useful as SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY Workbook No. 15: The Human Cranius. Having intrinsic value to all persons—piratical, mysterious, upright, or otherwise—The Human Cranius is a PEERLESS GEM of uncanny truth. If you are a living human, you should make frequent, unabashed forays into this field guide to your hideous secondary body—the cranius, an organ-matrix & carnival of fangs which is trying to destroy you even as you read this sentence…
From the genre-chainsawing minds of the Hollow Earth Society (Ethan Gould and, moi, Wythe Marschall) comes “the definitive guide to the horrifying world inside you”—finally available in lush, illustrated paperback!
In the tradition of John Hodgman, David Cronenberg, and H. P. Lovecraft, The Human Cranius explores an alternative anatomy at once mesmerizing and deeply unsettling. Gould and Marschall ask: What do we know about our own bodies? The answer: Very little…
In many ways, the art and human studies of modernity have given us the keys to our unconscious minds, but have left entirely to dry science (fixing plumbing, testing drugs) the workings of our bodies. What does it feel like to have guts? To face disease, age, mutation—in short, a self that is not only not whole but not even on its own side?
The SUSPICIOUS ANATOMY series seeks to address these physio–psychomological imbalances by producing, for your benefit, the entire unconscious of the body, the shadow-self, in words and elaborate images.
The official Human Cranius book launch, at Observatory Room in Brooklyn, will feature a lecture, medicological film snippets, and a live human dissection. Join us!
I think the idea here is to show you what the fonts look like laid out in newspaper headlines, &c. (And a truly lovely Q, no doubt.) But, as a potential buyer of type, I would be way more into reading the Dadaist poesy of the catalogue than ever ordering anything. Exhibits A through Zed, or approaching Zed, anyway:
That’s right, with OLD AMAZING TYPE, you can print stories about scandalous FRENCHMEN who cause MAIDEN SMILES—or tell the tales of FEARLESS YOUNG ROMANS hunting DELICIOUS ducks, with unconventionally fabricked backs…
Or go the Lovecraftian route and reveal the horrors of modernity—mechanized, occult practises; the stuff of hill-witches, complicated by disjointed phraseology and discontinuity (Lovecraft meets slam poetry meets Foucault meets W. C. Williams)—
Or just ogle NUMEROUS WOMEN—you can do that, too, with OLD AMAZING TYPE—
“Bird & club?” Whatever—you have so many options with OLD AMAZING TYPE! You can play a wacky instrument! Publish a book! Or tame a graceful beast and travel the open roads:
Or you could simply be amazed by the—
“Yo, girl—you brisk as hell…” I can hear the comeback of the saucy adjective already. (Or do I think “saucy” due to “brisket?”)
We will never know what these headlines meant to the printers who flipped past them daily. We no longer possess OLD AMAZING TYPE and so must invent its NEW SPECTACULAR equivalent, or else be satisfied with the cuttings above and their numerous physical cognates—rusted neon signs unfolding down to trash from the eaves of Gowanus warehouses and Williamsburg confectionary plants… phonography needles buried in the withered flanks of long-dead upscale haberdasher’s assistants who never could remember to look down before sitting on their settees after changing the record… curled playing cards, guides to whist… a list of copperplate fonts, its raw leather face cracking to reveal a red, card backing beneath, and some dead man’s ex libris looking down through the dark pages of the long-closed book, contemplating those NUMEROUS BRISK Dames and delicious mallards, their stockings, their stuffed livers…
Or, to say it another way: OLD AMAZING TYPE is amazing. I R inspired.
This spring, I was asked to teach a survey of literature from 1800 to today at Brooklyn College, but I didn’t want to teach a survey class with a boring title (nothing with the words “vista,” “perspective,” “lens,” “examining,” “investigating,” “tradition,” &c.). I also wanted an arbitrary organizing mechanism, something simple and flexible.
So I settled on a title, the Fractal Rainbow—literature as fractal, recursive; literature as a continuous spectrum of voices, blending into new voices, organized by period and style but each individual, a thousand strokes of light on the back of an eyeball—and on color-in-the-text’s-title as guiding sine qua non.
I would teach, I thought, “The Black Cat” and White Jacket and Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West and The Bluest Eye and “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Maybe The Green Child (but it proved too dang difficult to procure copies of this under-loved Surreal novel).
All this grand literary painting left me with a problem, however. At some point I would have to define in more detail what I meant by “the fractal rainbow.” Sure, it sounds like a Dream Theater concert DVD, or an anime I wouldn’t want to watch. But I like it, in part for its flatly fantastic(al) sonic quality (”frac” and the long vowels of rain, dream vowels), in part because it presents a puzzle.
Each person encountering the phrase has to test it against what they think it may mean, arriving somewhere unexpected. The phrase itself has a fractal quality of depth-plumbing leading not to an answer, but to more depths to be plumbed.
In a few posts, I’ll outline some of my ideas about the intersections of fractals, rainbows, and fiction.
A fractal is “a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is a reduced-size copy of the whole,” a property called self-similarity. Roots of mathematical interest in fractals can be traced back to the late 19th Century; however, the term “fractal” was coined by Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975 and was derived from the Latin fractus meaning “broken” or “fractured.” A mathematical fractal is based on an equation that undergoes iteration, a form of feedback based on recursion.
A fractal often has the following features:
It has a fine structure at arbitrarily small scales: It can be analyzed at the macro, meso, and micro levels.
It is too irregular to be easily described in traditional Euclidean geometric language.
It is self-similar (at least approximately or stochastically).
Deleuze-heads out there can already guess at what I mean when I say that literature is fractal. Elements at the lowest levels reverberate or straightforwardly recur at the levels of consciousness and even at whole-text levels—via paratext, the marketing of the fiction, the criticism and controversies and biographies and hagiographies surrounding it.
Look at the whiteness of the whale: It’s discussed openly, consciously; it recurs in imagery again and again; it pallors everything over, at the word-level, with the paleness of death, so all blanks and snowblind positivisms in Moby-Dick and even retroactively in White Jacket become the wall, the wall Ahab or any gnostic must somehow strike through… the whoosh of waves, white birds’ wails, winging harpoons whanging into whaleflesh, song of wind, wide openness, the hypnotizing whiteness of the sun, which is blindness. The term and chromatic qualia and death-signifier recur differently at each level, as whole chapters, as running motifs, and then as sentences, thoughts, and then as unconscious bits.
It’s not enough to teach the meso-level story; the text should be shown to be truly fractal.
I love storms.I write about them sometimes, and recently I’ve been reading the innumerable horror stories of Rudyard Kipling*, whose loud, hot, ceaseless summer storms are as terrifying as ghosts.
Weather makes for fine and often surprising metaphor. Rain isn’t always sad**, and even being struck by lightning, as in Aira’s An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, isn’t always horrible, or its horror—the pain and scarring—has the potential (forgive my electrical pun) to make its victim all the more human.
My friend Stephen Aubrey (who edited Suspicious Anatomy) delves not only into what the weather can mean but also into the dangers of its interpretation in his acclaimed Dark Heart of Meteorology, which is soon going up for two more nights in New York.
If you haven’t seen Dark Heart, you should. And even if you caught the last run, I am assured by Mr. Aubrey that his play is now 50% different and 100% better***.
Franklin Elijah White is traveling across the country on an increasingly quixotic and personal journey. Aided only by a slide projector and assorted meteorological equipment, he has a simple message: The weather is going to kill us all… Featuring a tour-de-force performance by Richard Lovejoy, The Dark Heart of Meteorology investigates the tensions between chaos and control and the intersection of the personal and the meteorological. [The Author adds—and the intersection of the romantic-ideal and the romantic-actual. Like the weather, love changes unpredictably and can set tall trees on fire...]
The show’s postcard, drawn by Suspicious Anatomy cocreator Ethan Gould:
Addenda:
*A storm of a different type hangs perpetually over Kipling’s oeuvre. But to hound the long-dead reporter for his Victorian chauvinism and occasional lack of spiritual generosity is only to miss out on so many truly lovely, harshly insightful stories—stories of spectral horses, clairvoyant Irish soldiers’ wives, midnight trips up sleepy, hundred-degree minarets, leper–temples, fated train rides, sociopathic kings, spent morphine needles, bedeviled hands of whist, and skin-tingling rains—rains that induce parasthesia, or “creepy causeless skin feeling” (thanks to my friend David for the definition of parasthesia)…
**Some are only happy when it rains. Some even choose to leave important items such as cakes out in the rain. Bizarre culinary practices aside, I love a good downpour, esp. when going to sleep.
***I made up the second number. But Mr. Aubrey did change the play significantly from its last run, and I’m an optimist.
****The Assembly = Stephen Aubrey, Edward Bauer, Ben Beckley, Jess Chayes, Nick Benacerraf and Emily Perkins.
Why these massifications of mass? Cormac McCarthy’s epic and Melville’s—upon which McCarthy’s is founded—are both highly visual, detailed, colorful, painterly works. Their stories (the authorized versions) are clear, even if their meanings will be debated for as long as humans are around to debate.
Ah, but here’s the genius of translation. Translation is not repetition for another audience, not performance, but re-creation, re-playing God.
Look at A Humument by Tom Phillips. Phillips admits the book out of whose guts his own visual-poetic masterpiece is painstakingly stitched is trash. He does not translate Mallock’s A Human Document, because that translation would be worse than unmoving; it would be offensive to a modern audience. Instead, he uses the field of signs of A Human Document to create an ongoing series of paintings, to tell new stories, to comment on the original, the author thereof, and the era that produced them both.
Or… he translates the book out of the book: Translates it into the painting; then out of the painting and into the multimedia product-event. A Humument has been published four times; you can buy prints of it from Phillips’s website; the book continues to grow, existing outside of time.
(Which iteration is definitive? This is the happy problem of Leaves of Grass, the bible, and all those classic unfinished texts, from The Castle to those last revisions of À la recherche du temps perdu, from Nabokov’s final emission to the unfinishable, shifting rhizomes of the internet—Wikipedia and its shadows [Uncyclopedia], any forum, the Atlas Obscura, this site…)
Two works I’ve written about here before also merge the media of “book” (word, story, argument, linearity, sound, consciousness-as-lighting-upon, abstraction and forms and modules of thoughts) and “art” (color, moment, muteness, instant all-comprehensibility, the unconscious-as-perceiving-everything, figuration and line and negative space).
What is Codex Seraphinianus by Luigi Serafini? Is it a book of “art” (a joke on us), or a “real” fictional encyclopedia (self-coherent, non-rules-breaking, so “realistic” as far as alien encyclopediae go)? Has the content of the Codex been translated from the alien, or into it? Can you articulate the distinction?
Book From The Sky by Xu Bing provides a final and I think highly molecular example. Xu made, over four years, a mesmerizing set of fake Chinese pictograms. They are technically ”devoid of semantic content” but so suggestive of content that these “pictures” of words serve as pseudo-words a la Serafini’s squiggles in the Codex, but moreso. (The Sky-words are made from elements which are real; Serafini’s squiggles can be examined at a microscopic level, but they yield if anything less meaning.)
Again, has Xu translated a book out of the infinite/infinitely strange heavens? Or has he translated human words into a higher form? Is the book so mesmerizing, for Chinese readers and non-Chinese readers alike, because it suggests we humans can never mean anything (the original title was An Analyzed Reflection of the End of This Century), or because we make meaning from everything, because we translate and transmediate everything?
I think books inspire pictures and music automatically, and vice versa. As I write, Deltron fades into Devendra Banhart, and I am surrounded by the postcards whose meanings (semantic, semiotic) I have forgotten but whose figures and negative spaces and limits and patterns call out to me to write a story about a pair of leopards who trade their spots with the clouds and so doom great blotches of sahel-grass to deadly shade…
My homies over at Electric Literature have done it again. In less than a year, they’ve become one of those sacred few “real” literary journals, pioneering how to make e-reading more friendly to literature pur sang: Their journal (5 great stories per quarter, $10 an issue) appears in print as well as on Amazon and Lulu, and via the Kindle and iPhone.
And now they’ve become the first literary publication on the iPad.
But the iPad app works on the iPhone and is free, so check it out.
Sayeth Scott and Andy:
Whether or not you go in for all the iPad hype, we found it’s a great way for us to feature everything Electric Literature does in one place. Our videos, audio, and imagery work together to enhance the reader’s experience without overpowering the literary content.
We designed the application from scratch, with the help of a young programmer who quit his job at Motorola and left Silicon Valley to study writing in New York.
*Confession: I find reading books on the iPhone irritating. Weeks ago I started Wodehouse’s Little Nugget, purely based on its hilarious name, and have only made it a few pages in. The charm of paper is still obvious. Then again, the iPad is commandingly bigger than its telephonic cuz. More tests to be conducted, perhaps sans Wodehouse…
Regardless, props to EL for being available. However it is that we read, we should keep doing so. That Kool-Aid I drank long ago. Reading expands the world infinitely in all directions. It’s cheap. And it’s even maybe a little hip. At least, the possibility is there, humming with charge.
I have a love-hate relationship with genre. I love horror, but I find reading anything after Lovecraft tedious, unsurprising, mirthless, and generally not very horrific.
I love fantasy, but as a kid I got burned out on the culture, and now I loathe to pick up any book with hulking sword-brutes and large-chested elfin princesses on the cover.
I love science writing of all kinds, but most science fiction softer than Gibson is masturbatory hyper-Kurzweil-ism—which can be pretty scary stuff, full of utopias I would not want to live in.
I love comics, but they’re the most hit-and-miss medium I’ve ever explored; so unless a friend puts a comic in my hand, I sure ain’t buyin it. Overall, I’m sure there’s good stuff out there. I just don’t have time to sift around and find it.
That said, my heart has a special place for werewolves, undead sorcerers, cyborg-cities, and of course for spandex-clad bad-asses with unconscionably bizarre powers. So, though I know little about Green Lantern—though I have in fact never bought a Green Lantern comic in my life—I was delighted when my friend Eric sent me a link to this Wikipedia page outlining the many different color-based Lantern Corps, the synesthetic-Freudian heroes and villains of the comic-cosmos.
For those who know even less than me about this phenomenon: In the universe of DC Comics, there are various, variously colored “power rings,” each fueled by a different affect, each giving its wearer the ability to fly and do pretty much anything else she can think of, provided the ring is sufficiently charged with the appropriate emotion.
The good guys and bad guys have naturally organized themselves into ring-mafias, the primary iteration of which, the Green Lantern Corps, functions as cosmic police (and is sometimes cosmic corrupt, and presumably has a good cosmic retirement package).
Here’s the ring-roster:
Green – powered by will, originally susceptible to wooden objects. (!!! I know, Gentle Reader, I know: An ultimate weapon, powered by will = scary shades of the Reich. But apparently, these are the good guys. The green rings seek out strong-willed moralists, somehow. Personally, sounds like a recipe for disaster, letting a metal bauble invest a particular human with nigh-infinite power…) [Also, secret weakness = wood? Really?]
Yellow – powered by fear.
Orange – powered by avarice. (This corps is run by someone named “Larfleeze,” who looks like a flaming horse-skull guy. Highly awesome. I would work for that dude.)
Blue – powered by hope. (But these only work in conjunction with green rings, as hope requires will to affect change… at least, according to the Philosophy Department at DC.)
White – powered by ???. (The white ring is the most mysterious and may be the most powerful. In comics, as part of the constant recolonizing of the minds of our youth, black tends to be bad and white good. Here, interestingly, it seems the cool colors = good and the warm colors = bad, with white and black thrown purely in for chromatic balance.)
Given my longstanding interest in how different literatures use different colors, particularly red and blue, I now feel an obligation to read about the exploits of these Corps. Blue to me is not “hopeful,” per se, though red could certainly be “furious.” Orange as avarice strikes me as random, but there is something fearful about yellow. I’m intrigued.
That said, I can’t help but think of other possibilities for these emo heroes, who must crap forth certain affect in order to fly through the dark void, doing battle and looking muscular (except as imitated below). I imagine rings powered by minor affects (confusion over which line at Whole Foods is shortest; fear that a speck in your tea is a dead bug and not just a loose particle of tea; love-hate, the feeling of the frenemy; &c.). Rings powered by dream affects (lust for objects; total reversal of normal affects; lack of fear; fear of self). Rings powered by winks, by kisses, by jokes…
The possibilities are staggering, as are the color combinations. (The red-orange ring with the gray band, for instance, is powered by haughtiness tinged with lack of surprise.)
“Suburb” means “under-city,” in the shadow of the city—which in the Bronze and Iron Age meant a hill. The suburb was physically below the “real” city. It simulated the city, in the shadows. It was and remains a para-city, beside and structurally similar to, but at heart different from a real locus of social, legal, religious, and economic life.
To simulate a city, a suburb must have housing but not community, shopping but not market, praying but not spirituality… It must have the sign of the real without the thing itself.
James Howard Kunstler illustrates the problem of the suburb and the poorly designed urb in a TED talk that somehow manages to be fierce, technocratic, and progressive while never losing a humorous edge. The problems with American places—cookie-cutter homes, forgotten squares, dead malls, removed-from-the-street buildings, and isolation and waste that engender one another and prevent society rather than frame it—are so dire they elicit almost instant sad-laughter. The jokes write themselves.
[Btw, I found this talk via one of artist James Roper's many deeply engaging art-blogs. Roper has great taste in weird anatomic, sexy, psychedelic, Gothic, geometric optical matter, which is to say my kind of taste.]
Kunstler’s perhaps dangerously American-centric perspective aside, he rocks the house, offering a few solutions and noting that local living will offer or force many us to come up with more as the years march on and the hydrocarbons disappear—or appear oozingly all along the Louisiana shore, like some dread tide forecast in Revelation—whichever.
Yet for now architecture and urban planning are classical, representing spaces, streets, life, and other people as “out there,” beyond—whereas cities are naturally baroque, confusing places and bringing us together… Baroque cities go everywhere, do everything from interlinked hubs that expand up and out but fold back on themselves, never expanding without doubling purpose and quadrupling links; the baroque does not like to recognize borders, and does not start with a form, but with a content that is already too much for its form, so that the form must be refolded and repurposed (The Highline, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi), already greening (giving life to, giving commerce to) the steel and asphalt…
I would now like to complement Kunstler’s investigation of the real problems of real spaces with what I know—that being the parahelpful, the goodnaturedly impractical, and the just fucking fantastic.
Specifically, I’d like to suggest we tackle real physical problems always with one eye firmly pointed to baroque imaginary physical (and temporal) solutions. To speak in plain Amerkan: Today’s architects should be taking notes from Doctor Who.
Enter Live Journal. Yes, Gentle Reader, I too was shocked that LJ still exists and is still a hub of internet thought and counter-thought. I was also glad, for here I found, courtesy a tip from illustrator and intrepid co-author Ethan Gould, A Partial Map of Your TARDIS (Subject to Change).
What is a/the TARDIS, I at first wondered? Gould informed me it’s a time-travel phone booth-… thing, used by the Dr.s Who (there have been several?) to do… stuff. I admit, I don’t know the show.
But that doesn’t prevent me from enjoying the Map—a complex alternative geography, a topology of time, space, levels of self, relationships with other, and pun that both stuns the aesthete’s eye and pleases the futurtect’s brain, or strokes the synesthete’s eye and punches the protomodernist’s head—whichever.
As spaces and representations-of-spaces collapse—as more people buy iPhones and Droids and so enter a world made always-partially-virtual by virtue of a constant back-and-forth between eye, hand, Google, and physical reality—we will need both the type of solutions Kunstler offers (how to use the malls that pointlessly blister the skin of our nation, how to get ourselves out and happy and doin stuff, and not locked into suburban bedrooms playing Borderlands and crying into our two-liter diet Powerthirsts) as well as the type of imagination, freedom, and excitement regarding the notion of space that this Partial Map (partially) exemplifies.
What is space—what do we want from it—a cafeteria, a cathedral, a drive-in, a disco, a passport office, a warehouse…
Really, consider space. Consider this:
Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, while just 366 million have access to modern sanitation, according to a United Nations study.
The question of space is deceptively simple. If we knew what we wanted out of space—how closely we wanted to be in contact with other humans, with trees, with grizzlies, with toilets, &c.—perhaps we wouldn’t have made the millions of now-uninhabited suburban dreadnoughts that sail motionlessly across America like the scattered head of a ripe drywall dandelion. Perhaps cell service would not have trumped sanitation in emerging industrial powers.
The classical problem of taxonomizing (classifying, boxing) spaces—and creating more and more iterations of each class—has trumped the question of use of spaces, enjoyment of others. The neatly virtual-classical has tried to remake itself over and obscuring the messily real-baroque.
In suburban America, humans have boxed ourselves away from one another, creating Byzantine cities, castle-towns dying as suspicious barons ward off trade and innovation, unlinked by rail, unwelcoming, never-congealing, without history, and so without future.
We may never be able to build a time-defying/space-expanding machine like the TARDIS (which serves ants, by the way, in the cafeteria) or inhabit lands like those pictured in the Codex Seraphinianus. But I think it’s good to jump-shark over the preconceptions of our reality—which we have more control over than Brutalism and the plague of big-box stores would make us think—and of our era—which is always already transforming into the next, a werewolf caught between man and beast.
Imagining impossible, baroque (constantly merging-with) geographies lets us place our consciousnesses into weird towns without those towns having to exist first. We show ourselves possibilities and discard rigidity.
Producing the new reality—fixing the problem—is another skill and far beyond the scope of my rambling. Perhaps post-World War II design has been too caught up, however, in the problem-fixin and left too far behind the emergent chaos of older cities, not to mention the wonder of the unreal.
For today, even as he finds “a lot to admire” in the Tea Party (his words, re: their pugnacious tenacity, or tenacious pugilistic rhetoric, or amiable backwardness, or something I don’t admire), conservative columnist and personal lit-nemesis Douthat admits that its most recent star has lost significant shine. Sayeth Douthat:
…it shouldn’t come as a shock that [Kentucky Republican and Tea Party boy-wonder Rand Paul] found himself publicly undone, in what should have been his moment of triumph, because he was too proud to acknowledge the limits of ideology, and to admit that a principle can be pushed too far.
Rand Paul, son of Ron “Ross Perot Redux” Paul, is looking to win the Party of Chai’s first Senate seat. But now he’s waffled on civil rights. Would he have voted to desegregate America? He didn’t seem sure, fearing government intervention in private practices such as excluding minorities from business, until those biased scoundrels—the Media—pressured him into clarifying his position as a bona fide 9/10ths supporter of the O.G. Civil Rights Act.
Boo, hiss, Mr. Paul. Waffling on a complicated budget bill? Take your time, read the fine lines. Waffling on waffles? Sure, consider pancakes. But waffling on civil rights? That’s so… old school. And not in the good way.
Now, I’m just as terrified as the next man of the secret alien commune in the Mojave where the Liberal Illuminati force Elvis to play badminton with Walt Disney’s headless body for their own amusement, but… A NAFTA superhighway “the width of several football fields” running straight from Mexico to Canada, cutting America in half like a government-cheese sandwich? That’s just crazy-talk.
(Plus, everyone knows a NAFTA superhighway would have to divert through the Babyhating Blue-State Coasts, forming a hateful wishbone that could eventually cross both oceans and be connected, on the Commie side, to Tokyo, and, on the Frog side, to Space Paris, from which we liberals receive our command-signals.)
[Double-plus, we don't have nearly enough oil to support the super-massive car-traffic of a highway "several football fields" wide. Unless Paul fears an army of Mexican, Central American, and South American immigrants bicycling furiously toward Texas, ready to take his job from him.]
Rand Paul does have some positive visions of the future, however: “I guarantee you it’s one of their long term goals to have one sort of borderless, mass continent.”
According to this article in the New York Times by Diane Cardwell, we’re taking the best of (our version of) Old New York and mapping it over the current city (New New York?), creating a simulation city: New-York-That-Never-Was-But-Should-Have-Been.
Cardwell focuses on the zombie-resurrection of chic West Village eateries. Other writers have undoubtedly examined various facets of this phenomenon: the olding of the new city, the creation of the New-Old New York.
Simulation and city-simulating fascinate me. First, I consider at work the ideal of New York (and, by extension, all of America) as eternally new, always remaking itself, changing, accepting new populations and growing and shrinking along unexpected vectors, so that once-chic neighborhoods become hoods, and hoods become chic, and populations at odds with one another are mapped asymmetrically onto one another, creating new generations of populations with new beefs and new-old traditions: “In Little [Origin Place], we’re going to do it how we did it back in [Origin Place].” (Or picture hipsters dressing “just like” Victorians.)
Simulation adds another level of complexity to this play, because it lets Evil Developer Guy or Artsy Small Business Dude simulate an “authentic to neighborhood X circa year Y” experience, and this new simulated experience continues to influence the “not-simulated” experiences surrounding it.
The trick is that every experience was, at one point, simulated. When populations moved into the City, they simulated the cities they came from. Russians brought Moscow; Cubans, Havana; &c. This is old hat, but worth repeating.
Simulation on a shorter wavelength (simulating one place in the same place—the Village in the Village—in 1960, a relatively short time ago) only changes the nature of what you’re simulating, why it’s appealing, and how you market it. Instead of harkening back to some eternal value or tradition, you’re exposing your process for your audience: “Come here because we’re just as new as they were, back then…”
To be “modern” (or Modernist), you must always be new against whatever is perceived as “old.” With our high old-new turnover, the “old” now ranges from the 1960s, for Baby Boomers, to the 90s of Tupac and Biggie, for students who were raised on Jay and Nas and have already forgotten even the Bush years and moved on to Weezy.
Metaphor-conjecture: City-simulating is the “reblogging” of old buildings, earlier styles, and bygone services in new social and physical contexts. You take a boring-”old” building (not old, yet not modern) and make it new by making it traditionally-old. You re-post a classic iteration of a classic meme, and the context around it makes it new, and it makes new the context.
Another ideal to consider: “Simulation makes it better.” Said in plain Amerkan: “Do ‘er over agin, boys. Second time’s a lucky charm.”
Look at Disney. Is your Land-That-Simulates-America-Better-Than-America-Actually-Is not grand enough for you, Walt? Simulate the Land. Make a World. Because every time you play God—as an artist, a CEO, a scientist—you might as well play God bigger and better than the last time.
From Cardwell’s article, emphasis mine:
“There’s so much that’s Vegas-y and Houston-y and random that you want a place that feels sort of timeless New York in a not-kitschy way,” said Clark Wolf, a restaurant consultant who worked on the latest revival, in 2009, of the Monkey Bar in Midtown Manhattan. “And of course you would want to re-create it in the current notion of what it ought to have been.”
Now a caveat: Humans have always done this. We’ve always gone back to tradition and built it over innovation, “exactly as it once was,” and it has never been “exactly as it was.” It’s always been innovation in “traditional-and-therefore-trustworthy” sheep’s clothing. To gives just one multi-example:
Rome made itself Greek; Constantine made Greek Byzantium into the New Rome; the so-called Founding Fathers made New York the (New) New Rome; New York makes itself the asphalt-and-steel-bound rod of splinters from every city; every city comes here to take back crap signifying “New York;” I can go to Tokyo and buy real New York crap that signifies the New Rome, which signifies Greece, which was a brutal Bronze Age seaside waste that the Greeks desperately fought to leave… Simulation implies a want, a want to make new, even if by making old. To harken-back-to, to legitimize.
Simulation is gimmickry, but it’s perfectly natural. We’re a species of charlatans. Drunken monkeys with the cleverness to build skyscrapers.
But again—old hat. Finishing off, from Cardwell:
During the Depression, [social historian Jan Whitaker] added, New Yorkers preferred old-fashioned fake-Colonial dining rooms to the sleek Moderne-style establishments that opened after the repeal of Prohibition.
Some people are funny intentionally, some accidentally, and some somnambulantly, totally without “getting it.” The Room, for example, is today billed as a “dark comedy,” thought it was obviously a very serious investigation of romance (I guess?) and, uh, cancer (?) when it first sloughed dreadfully out of the mental womb of its creator, auteur Tommy Wiseau.
Likewise, I thought, I thought—Insane Clown Posse must be an in-joke that has no out. How can they possibly “get it,” I asked, and still be or do “it,” whatever it is?
The answer finally came when ICP’s hilarious new video about miracles crossed that invisible, difficult-to-pinpoint memetic threshhold and became a megahit on the internet, which is to say, a true megahit, not one manufactured by advertising. (Remember Chinese Democracy, anyone? I don’t.)
ICP had to face up to their essential paradox: A. Are they so counter-culture and, well, insane that they deny that “it” (their steez) is all some bizarre joke? B. Or are they aware of the joke—in on the joke? C. Or can they have it both ways?
This Dave Itzkoff article in the New York Times pretty much answers this in favor of C. I never paid much attention to ICP (I’m not a big goofy clown rap enthusiast, personally), but damn, I do like magnets and giraffes… (My emphasis.)
SHAGGY 2 DOPE, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: In 1999 we made a movie called “Big Money Hu$tla$,” and that went over great. Then we started kicking around the idea we should make a prequel: “Big Money Rustlas.” It’s the main characters’ ancestors in the Wild West. It’s a satire.
VIOLENT J, INSANE CLOWN POSSE: When we’re talking to the Juggalos, it’s not always about chop-chop, kill-’em-up, you know? I guess some of it might come from having kids over the last five years, looking at everything from that perspective. I mean, a rainbow can be explained. But who doesn’t say, “Wow, look at the rainbow?”
SHAGGY 2 DOPE: If Celine Dion would have come out with that song, people would have been, like, “Oh, that’s a beautiful song.” But because it’s coming out of our mouths, all of a sudden, we’re retards.
VIOLENT: J I think we might have misused the word miracle. These things we mentioned in the song, they can all be explained. But what we’re doing is appreciating them. Even the infamous line “Magnets, how do they work?” I mean, yeah, we know how magnets work. But they’re still incredible. You can push something across the table without touching it.
SHAGGY 2 DOPE: Come on, man. The North and South Pole makes a rock magnetic, and if you touch a piece of metal with it, that becomes magnetic? That’s crazy.
VIOLENT J: I grew up in Detroit. We don’t have pelicans on every corner. We don’t have giraffes walking down the street. I’d rather be the dumbed-down guy appreciating everything than the guy who knows everything and doesn’t appreciate [anything].
[But...]
VIOLENT J: Two clowns floating around in space, swearing, rapping about wonderful things. I get that that’s funny to an outsider.
VIOLENT J: I know this sounds crazy, but I’m being as honest as I can: We planned all this out. Our tour starts in May. And then we have our nuclear weapon, which is the movie “Big Money Rustlas.” That comes out in August. This is all happening so perfectly for us.
As a friend of mine pointed out, they are funny not because they are stupid, but because their list of miracles is incongruous. Magnetsare cool. But how do you filter your list of miracles down to a few aspects of science and some animals uncommon to Detroit? I love this song because it spins the miraculous in a totally unexpected direction. Miracles are now neither religious nor scientific, human nor divine. They’re… insane.
So how does this miraculous incongruity work, literarily? ICP’s list of wonders is what Borges terms a Chinese encyclopedia—a list that cannot ever be coordinated, made sense of, or indexed, as a totality, even if each component makes total sense. So, yes, those things are all dope as fuck. Magnets, seabirds, long-necked mammals, optical effects, a pet cat (?), etc. But they can never really live on the same plane, in our minds. Hence hilarity.
The song is also an ultra-dope example of systrophe, or indirect definition, such as definition by an exhaustive list rather than by… a definition. This technique works, every time. People don’t respond as well to logical definitions (such as I just gave of 2 literary terms); people like examples, especially hilarious, exhaustive examples given to them by clowns with mental health concerns.
