“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Friday, February 19, 2016
suggestions for black history month
I'm thinking that for black history month we should imagine equality among the races. That would mean, for instance, that black median household income would have to triple - triple - to be on parity with white median household income. That means black unemployment would have to drop a whole 5 percent. If white unemployment were at the same level as black unemployment, we would be talking about a depression. That means that at a minimum, of the eleven million people per year who are served with warrents or have to spend a night in jail or make bail or are otherwise processed through the American gulag, only 10 percent, rather than 40 or 50, would be black. Wow, what a picture. America without apartheid. It is only a dream if we don't demand it, speak it, and talk about it 12 months of the year.
Wednesday, February 17, 2016
so much depends upon
So much depends, in the William Carlos Williams poem, on a
red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water. Lily Briscoe, in To The Lighthouse,
thinks “so much depends… upon distance.” The echoes here are arbitrary – and yet
not entirely so. These are both modernist promts, both programmatic and
surprisingly inside the programmatic space, in the art, which is no longer, if
it ever was, innocent of the frame that it knows it will eventually bear. The
innocence of the past is, of course, a construct of nostalgia, but it is, as
well, a necessary fiction for getting us started, for the project of being
contemporary. At some point in that project, retrospectively, we know we will
have to dismantle that innocence, expose its never-was. But so much depends
upon timing, here.
I’ve been working on my novel this month, trying to finish
it up at least to the point of sending it out with a few chapters uninhabited,
but planned – and I’ve been immersed in Woolf, from the diaries and letters to
the novels and the esssays. My materials
in my novel are Williams, that corruption in the American grain, but certain
formal ideas keep going back to Woolf. For
Williams, the poem was a machine made of words. I think Woolf would reject that
description, finding it too obscuring, too foreshortened, too denotative. At
the same time, she would have appreciated, or at least placed, the gesture, the
intended shock. She, too, was out to shock the genteel tradition. Woolf’s sense
of the distances that so much depends upon is, I think, to use the vocabulary
of the time, more organic than mechanical. This is the scent Wyndham Lewis,
that piggish misogynist, picked up.
This isn’t to say that Briscoe’s aesthetic is Woolf’s m.o.
So much depends upon what the novel is supposed to do. Woolf is a novelist of
networks rather than monuments – of dispersed inspirations, with their
elliptical, filamental connections, rather than of focused worldviews, with
their concentrated centers, their Blooms always departing and always coming
home. For her, I suppose you could say, as much depends on the rain coming down
to glaze the red wheelbarrow as on the wagon itself. Distance is a matter of a
shift of attention that is both part of the scene and fashions it – it is part
of the way, in the current of revelations in which things light up or darken,
we capture the state of attention and its exterior referent without ultimately
privileging one or the other. She has, accordingly, less time for the crowd –
for the voice of the people which flows through Williams – given the fact that
the multiple voices can only be handled through an intolerable simplification
of their grains and aspects. Complexity, in Wolf’s terms, requires a more
simple grouping in order for art not to muddy its insights entirely. Proximity is achieved, but at the price of
completeness.
And yet .. there is the marvelous city scene in Jacob’s
Room, which certainly attempts and succeeds in the same way that Joyce’s
Wandering Rocks succeeds – in the city as a sort of multi-tasked, alive scene.
That is something, a means, that I want to steal for myself.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
The query letter gag: an American tale
The “sell your novel tool-kit.” The “How to write Irresistable Query Letters”. The “50 Successful Query Letters”. The flourishing subgen...
-
You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t...
-
The most dangerous man the world has ever known was not Attila the Hun or Mao Zedong. He was not Adolf Hitler. In fact, the most dangerous m...
-
In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came...