neil gaiman is, as ever, sensible:

I don’t think immediate tragedy is a very good source of art. It can be, but too often it’s raw and painful and un-dealt-with. Sometimes art can be a really good escape from the intolerable, and a good place to go when things are bad, but that doesn’t mean you have to write directly about the bad thing; sometimes you need to let time pass, and allow the thing that hurts to get covered with layers, and then you take it out, like a pearl, and you make art out of it.

i think this is exactly right. people say to me, sometimes, they do, “oh, i had my heart broken so i am going to write a poem about it,” or something along those lines, & i think that writing because you have been hurt is all well & good but that the name of that writing is rarely, say, “a poem” & is, instead, “a journal entry.”

which is fine; but you have to know the difference between them.

see, it is not only that immediate tragedy is too difficult to make art out of because it’s un-dealt-with, though gaiman’s right that tragedy is one of those things that resists being packaged-up & art-ed. it is also that tragedy is essentially incommunicable: others, no matter how empathetic, can never really get there, so to speak. you add Fact A to Event B and wind up with Tragedy P, & everyone can understand the mechanics of that—but good luck with Affect Y, which attends, but only for you, Tragedy P.

certain kinds of writing are not meant for the public eye. just because a thing is incommunicable doesn’t mean you shouldn’t write it down; simply putting a thing on paper is therapeutic for many people. but that’s precisely it: it’s therapy, not art. art is, in its most basic definition, an act of communication. if you can find a way of making your tragedy (or whatever) communicable—a little less personal, a little more social—then no matter how much it partakes of you, it will have that je ne sais quoi of art in it that makes things interesting.

if not, it’s not art. which is, again, fine. but no, i don’t want to read your poem about how your girlfriend dumped you.

gaiman’s bit about indirection is exactly the thing. if one is a writer, & one experiences a tragedy, it is difficult to keep that tragedy out of one’s writing altogether. writing is empathic; that is part of the point. & moments of emotional stress, rupture, fragmentation, et cetera are frequently the spark that makes good writing go. but it is necessary to let things take their course. all poems about breakups, if they are only poems about breakups, are the same poem. so stare at something else for a while. you’re not going to be able to not think about it anyway, so there’s no need to fixate explicitly.

writers have enough explicit fixation problems as it is.

the lurkers do not support me in email! oh no!

from a correspondent:

The three-book version of 2666 is actually cooler than the hardcover? I don’t believe you—please explain.

so i have tried. what follows is from an email &, as such, is in a rather different style. forgive me. i am lazy.

well:

for one thing i just do not like hardcover editions all that much. they are bulky & hard to carry around, which for a graduate student who has to carry around an ass-ton of books all the time is a big enough deal. also as objects they are sort of off-putting in that monolithic way. & they are more difficult to read in bed, as they require propping-up.

for things that are published in a series (e.g. if you are, as i am, a science fiction fan), QPs released by a single publisher can have a v. nice look to them on a shelf. i cite, e.g., orbit’s ongoing re-release of iain m. banks’s novels, which are quite lovely. a good QP has a durable & flexible spine, too, & is definitionally printed on acid-free paper, so the two major drawbacks of paperbacks (spine-creasing & paper-aging) are not in play. (NB: mass market editions SUCK.)

with respect to the bolaño release, specifically: for one thing i think it is superlatively awesome that FSG released both editions. some people are just hardcover fans, & that is their prerogative. but i think the boxed set is really nice for a couple of reasons. in addition to the reasons cited in the first paragraph, 2666 also has its own peculiar history for which to account, as i am sure you are well aware. now, i do not like to be dogmatic about these sorts of things, so the people who tell you that the novel was “supposed” to be published serially & therefore “must” be or “really had ought to have been” are being silly, & the whole affair is rather less straightforward than that. see the note from the heirs in the front-matter to 2666. but, as i am sure you know, the novel DOES have a strange relationship with its own seriality, if one can even call it that; though the novel is surely, well, a novel—a single entity that should probably be read as a whole in order to guarantee maximum reading pleasure & that surely does not make sense if read only partially (insofar as it can be said to “make sense”; i haven’t finished my read-through yet)—it does participate in seriality, or in, less elegantly, sectionality (the chronological progression implied in “seriality” may not in fact suit in this case), in a way that strikes me as programmatic. i do honestly like how the physical discreteness of the 3-volume QP reinforces the disconnect between the various strands of the narrative while maintaining sequential (rather than volume-specific) pagination & section-numbering—the implications of which contrast i am sure you do not need spelled out for you, even if you choose to discard my thinking here as being either a: over-thinking or b: overly attentive to the impact that the physical object has on its so-called “content.”

another, much more minor, point is the correlation between this sort of novel & its unexpected traction in the sci-fi community, which is known for loving a good serial, comic-book or otherwise.

& i don’t have a problem with the decision to divide the novel into three volumes instead of five (as there are five sections), as the first three sections are indeed much shorter than the final two, & the effect of the division is the same (except, perhaps, in terms of what might be called physical pacing) whether there are three or five (though, in the logic of seriality, having only two sections would imply something v. different for the structure of the novel as a whole).

as a last note, the v. lovely artwork for 2666 gets full display in the 3-vol. set, as each vol. is entirely devoted to one of the works, whereas in the hardcover, i believe, only the first predominates, while the second & third are relegated to the inside of the dust jacket.

i could probably live without the “praise for 2666” all over the box, but the box design is quite nice; besides, it is not really visible when on a shelf, but having the box is, i think, a nice final touch.

::

in other news i am thinking of beginning a campaign in support of QPs, as hardcovers are still & for no reason retaining their privileged place at the top of the publishing hierarchy.

YOU MUST READ THIS.

roberto bolaño’s 2666 is killer. i’m only part-way through the first book¹ (what with finals & all) but well hell i just have to recommend it right this instant.

a teeny tiny excerpt, to whet just the edge of your keen interest:

What a sad paradox, thought Amalfitano. Now even bookish pharmacists are afraid to take on the great, imperfect, torrential works, books that blaze paths into the unknown. They choose the perfect exercises of the great masters. Or what amounts to the same thing: they want to watch the great masters spar, but they have no interest in real combat, when the great masters struggle against that something, that something that terrifies us all, that something that cows and spurs us on, amid blood and wounds and mortal stench.

i’m not going to write a review of the thing, as i haven’t finished it & i hate book reviews. but the impulse is almost overwhelming;—which is, perhaps, recommendation enough.

it kind of makes me want to tear my hair out.

–
1. you should most definitely acquire the 3-volume boxed set of the novel, as it has been released in both that form & in hardcover from farrar, straus & giroux, & both forms are (in typical FSG fashion) lovely, but the thing was originally plotted to be in five parts & released sequentially anyway, & anyway the little QPs are easier to carry around, & it just looks so much more badass.

once more posting on the run, as is my wont:

netlabel rope swing cities has released an album by eleven steps called one week early, which you should run right out & download here.

rich warm tasty guitar-heavy soundscapey ambient. think i’ll probably lie in bed & have a listen right now.

steve’s website is here, & it has links to another release, as well.

overmetaphorization
leads to foolish & facile equations
the logic is flawed
its proponent a fraud
the conclusion an abomination

::

one occupies an ideology
which is modified methodologically
or one holds some beliefs
be they lengthy or brief
they may well emerge pathologically

—c.

01. If it doesn’t look human, it probably isn’t.

02. When encountering alien species on earth, remember: sympathy is overrated, and empathy is impossible. Automatically assume hostility. When encountering alien species off-world, try not to be a dick until you have to.

03. Talking to a potentially hostile alien life-form doesn’t always help, though sometimes it does.

04. Even if it looks human, it might not be. Never assume a human shape isn’t just a host.

05. Creepy people are creepy for a reason. Children are automatically creepy and are much more prone to accepting contact from alien life, hostile or otherwise.

06. Sometimes humans are the most alien of all.

07. Never question someone immortal, nearly immortal, or just bloody old. Especially if he has really great hair.

08. Get your snog on while you can, but try not to fall for someone of another species. Especially if you work for a top secret organization that specializes in alien technology and neutralizing potential alien threats. Do try not to shag the opposition.

09. However, do stay as close to them as you can. Unless they’re trying to kill you, which may or may not be obvious.

10. If you think you hear or see something, you probably did.

11. Really do try not to get separated.

12. Bring an extra flashlight.

13. The things in the dark are real.

14. Don’t turn your back. Don’t look away. Don’t blink.

15. Stay out of the shadows.

16. On the other hand, bright lights tend to be less friendly than you would think.

17. When in doubt, run. In fact, “run” should probably just be your default setting.

18. If your phone stops working, run. If the lights go out, you know what to do.

19. Learn how to use a gun, but it probably won’t do you much good.

20. Sometimes it’s smarter just to shoot to kill and ask forgiveness later. Or not ask forgiveness later.

21. Sometimes you just gotta drive a car into a building.

22. Never leave your keys in the ignition.

23. Never underestimate the value of a well-timed kick to the crotch.

24. Avoid London on Christmas. Avoid Cardiff in general.

25. If you find yourself in the midst of a particularly horrifying situation and/or you realize it’s the 51st century, blame Steven Moffat.

26. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity (cf. SEP)—nor of human courage and innovation.

27. Be clever. Use that unstoppable gob.

28. Each person has their own time at which to die. Trying to prevent the inevitable is a bad idea. Bringing people back to life is an even worse one.

29. The universe is full of strange and wonderful things, and some really horrible things, too. The past can be as strange as the future. Life is impossibly sad. But that’s life.

30. If you haven’t told someone you love them and you feel you should, for god’s sake TELL THEM ALREADY.

More great stuff on the so-called death of the book, this time by Clay Shirky, who reminds us that not only is it “impossible to be pro-book and anti-revolution”; being pro-book also entails recognizing that the form of the book is subject to change.

Prior to Gutenberg, most of the books in Europe were the Bible; scribal production was so slow that simply recopying that one book took up much of the available output. After Gutenberg, publishers began experimenting with new forms—novels, scientific papers, periodicals of all sorts.

That is, the kinds of information that effectively counted—that were of sufficient (or potentially sufficient) importance to merit a run on the printing press—expanded rapidly & irreversibly. As Shirky points out, a whole lot of garbage flowed into that vacuum & scandalized everyone.

But we managed, even though the volume of garbage hasn’t been reduced all that much. We’ve learned to identify the kinds of publications that interest us, & we’ve seen that a lot of the good stuff still rises to the top. Of course, some truly horrible shit still sells well; that’s the price you pay when you open up the means of production. But that’s been the case since the printing press took off, & trudging through the cesspool still seems infinitely more desirable than being handcuffed to the pre-Gutenberg Church monopoly.

It’s worth noting that most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient. Readily available translations of scripture did destroy the Church as a pan-European institution. Most of the material produced by the new class of publishers was flyweight. Scribes did lose their social function. And so on, through a battery of transformations including public scrutiny of elites, the international spread of political foment, and even literate women.

The thing I want to point out here—Shirky doesn’t take this tack explicitly—is this: while the current Most Loud Wringer-of-Hands (the literary establishment, which is part & parcel with the humanities) doesn’t actually need to control the means of literary production, it’s going to get itself into some Gutenberg-era Church-style trouble if it continues to insist that it does. The humanities has no good reason, really, to believe that we’ll all be out of a job if we fail to prevent the “death of the book.” When did we forget that our job isn’t to talk about books but to talk about thought & the words that express it?

This doesn’t mean that the literary forms to which we’re accustomed are going to wither & die. I doubt that people will stop writing novels & stories (& maybe even poems). I also doubt that people will stop reading such works. Will everyone have a filled floor-to-ceiling bookcase? I doubt that, but that’s a different question entirely.

What I do know is this: it’s altogether too late for the literary establishment or anyone else to enforce this notion that the physical book should be the privileged form for literary output. If we insist otherwise, we’re going to be in a fix, because there’s nothing we humans like less than being told what we can & cannot think or read. & the literary establishment has a great deal less clout than the Church had when it comes to enslaving people’s minds & enforcing censorship. But that’s the cast that a great deal of this death-of-the-book nonsense has taken on, & it’s really unbecoming.

Here’s the other thing: we’re supposed to be the least trammeled when it comes to freedom of thought & expression. We like thinking new thoughts & learning new things. Well, new things are happening, & if the literary establishment is going to keep telling us that the things that we’re interested in “don’t count”, then that’s too damned bad, but there’s a whole lot of really interesting artistic work being done & damned if I’m going to miss it. If the humanities won’t have us, we’ll take our clever little brains & go someplace that will.

The humanities only has one other choice: to change. As Shirky puts it:

It is too early to tell whether the internet’s effect on media will be as radical as that of the printing press. It is not too early to tell that there is nothing that happened between 1450 and now that comes close. It is also not too early to tell that we are in for a significant transformation of intellectual life, and the lesson from the last revolution is that the way to make society better is not to try to preserve the old forms, but to experiment, wildly, with new ones, including hybridization of the book with the web.

These are exciting times. This is, in fact, supposed to be the very stuff that we literary-critical types should be getting all in an excited, ridiculous, hopeful lather about. Technology is allowing us to innovate in ways that have never been possible, & we’re lucky enough to be here to watch these patterns emerge. Simple example: we’ve struggled for centuries with the problem of how to tell a four-dimensional, non-linear narrative within the constraints of the necessarily-linear page. We’ve seen remarkable solutions to this problem, from Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1756) to Pessoa’s Book of Disquiet (which doesn’t even have a publication date, really), to Milorad Pavic’s Dictionary of the Khazars (1984, which was published in two versions, male & female). These works aren’t going to get any less compelling than they already are; but the internet’s virtual nature allows us to remap space & even time with something as simple as a link. Really amazing things could happen in fields like genre or narratology (but that’s a rant for another time). For now, I’m just pleased to be here, excited at the prospect of seeing new forms of art & of learning to feel comfortable reading & thinking in ways that currently overclock my mental CPU to even consider.

But right now the humanities can’t seem to be able to look past its fearful visions of the upswelling of dross that we’ll have to sort through, or how much money we’re going to lose in our already-negligible book sales, or the horrifying idea that we might find ourselves, along with everyone else, having to learn how to read again.

I’m sorry, but that’s just bullshit.

(Thanks to Jacob from Conventioneers! for linking this in comments.)

this is just to say:

helios’s 2006 release eingya is basically a perfect album. if you’re unfamiliar with it, i highly recommend you go pick up a copy.

listen to &/or purchase tracks from the album on his myspace. (NB: the music player seemed to be kind of janked, so i don’t know if it just selects songs randomly from his oeuvre to play; some of his other stuff—especially stuff with vocals—i don’t think is quite as good. there’s a tracklisting for eingya here for reference.)

In a totally fabulous interview over at the Chicago Tribune, Cory Doctorow discusses technology triumphalism, the surveillance state, & the so-called “death of the book.” It’s brilliant, it’s cutting, & it’s about damned time:

The book audience is both contracting and graying. We on an industry basis need to find ways to go where nonreaders who are potential readers are: Put books in their way and not hope that they will come into the stores. This is one of the reasons I think the American Association of Publishers has got its head so far up its own ass it can taste its own fillings on the subject of Google book search. You know, if books aren’t in search results, then they are invisible to people who get all their information starting with a search result.

Not only those in the industry, I think; it would probably help if academia could just shut the hell up about the death of print & realize (or remember; I shouldn’t be too patronizing) that those who don’t innovate die. I’m sure there were people who thought that Gutenberg had ruined the fine art of the book—&I’ll bet they were emphatically shushed by scribes with the 15th-ce equivalent of carpal tunnel syndrome. Oh, yeah, & all of those people who could suddenly afford books.

Because the way to get people to read isn’t through scarcity. Academics are trained to believe (& we’re not the only ones) that scarcity is the truest measure of worth: the idea that no one else has had; the archival source that no one else has seen; the crucial article that no one else knew had been written—with the goal being that you will then go on to write the next crucial article, & the cycle goes on. Well, that’s too damned bad. (Look, I’m in academia myself, & not because it pays well; I think teaching kids to think is really worthwhile, & all of that other weird crap we do can be worthwhile, too; but right now I’m angry, so we’ll go with that.) You want people to read & think for themselves? Bring the book to them. Or, rather, make it so that they can actually go out & find what they want.

We’re used to our rip/mix/burn culture, now. Interactivity is a huge part of how we create; it’s gotten wired into our imaginations. & our intellectual hub is no longer the archive but the internet. We search; we aggregate; we find forums where we can argue & learn about what we read. & Doctorow’s right: if we can’t get it online, chances are good that we’re not going to get it at all. Just because I have access to a top-of-the-line university archive & stacks doesn’t mean it’s okay for me to sit by while these resources go largely unused on account of scarcity.

Here’s another thing. I do work in the 18th century. Most valuable resource in my line of work? 18th-ce Collections Online. Like pretty much every other member of my generation, my search-fu is strong. I’m a dab with an index, sure; but why traipse around the stacks when I could look it up online—& when looking it up online might even teach me something in the process, dump me into some unexpectedly brilliant channel of tangential search? Then I go into the archive (& oh, it is wonderful, & digital repro doesn’t begin to cover it).

But look. I hear constant bitching about how people aren’t reading as much as they used to. Fair enough; but keeping books off of the internet—making them more scarce—isn’t going to make them more valuable: it’s going to make them obsolete. Welcome to Irony. Now stop blindly opposing tech & people like Doctorow who are trying to help, & start thinking about what strange & wonderful things could happen to the book if we’ll aid & abet it. You could start by reading the whole interview, or read up at creativecommons.org, or go play with google books.

& remember: “the future is always weirder than you imagine.”

okay, so, i’ve just been listening to so much really stellar music that i have to tell you to go listen to it already. i can’t stop listening to this shit. some of it may be familiar, some of it not. i’m just saying.

first, an old album but totally awesome: pelican city’s (aka dangermouse) chilling effect (1999) (via anthony volodkin). downtempo/triphoppy. tasty.

a mix that i have been playing on loop for days because it is killer: ian vogel’s 2004 ambient/IDM mix, “cold day, warm hands” (available for download here—go check it out).

i’m on an glitch/ambient kick these days, so here are some other things you should have a gander at:

aspects of physics: marginalized information forms 1: ping (2004) (myspace).

near the parenthesis: go out and see (2006) (there are samples on tim’s website; listen to a sample from one of my favorite tracks, “under lights,” here; also, myspace).

um, a jesse kees album that i can’t find information about anywhere. ask me about it if i see you.

bitcrush’s 2004 release, enarc. pretty much everything he does is awesome. (links to tracks on his site; also, myspace.)

that’s it for now. go forth enlightened & get some new music.