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recent thought / activity
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tiny hopes
I'm actually pretty happy with the slightly fevered tone of yesterday's Virgin Suicides write-up, and am giving some thought to re-tooling it into a piece for the Bright Lights Film Journal, whose self-described identity as "a popular-academic hybrid" feels like a pretty comfortable fit for the film stuff that I've been writing lately. I've also been giving some consideration to submitting my "ludic failure" paper to Game Studies. There's also been some behind-the-scenes activity circulating around "the book" this week, the results of which will be announced here as soon as some paperwork settles. Stay tuned. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, personal, projects, writing
Friday, February 15, 2008
where i've been and what i've been up to
It's been a pretty busy couple of weeks around here: between teaching, personal commitments, work on the novel draft, and a cluster of Number None shows, my free time has pretty much been maxed out, no time to create much in the way of substantial new blog content. I haven't even mentioned, for instance, that the first draft of the "Novel of Adequacy," now titled Meanwhile, is completed. If you want to see how complicated it got by the end, you can check out this crazy interactive diagram I made with IBM's fun little data visualization website, Many Eyes. (Make sure to zoom in by clicking-and-dragging or the thing will just look like an undifferentiated dense heap of datapoints.) Parts of the novel are still pretty messed up (for instance, there's one cluster of characters who haven't yet been integrated into the main mass) but it's getting close to the point where it is maybe ready to be put out there for comments. I'd like to get all the chapters through a second draft first, but in any case, if you're interested in reading some of it, just ask. The other thing I didn't manage to get around to mentioning recently is that Number None got a nice mention in Time Out: Chicago, as part of an article on the Chicago "drone scene." It has a photo and everything (I'm the guy with his head cocked in the back row). It's nice to finally be mainstream, I guess. I've also been quietly posting more book reviews over at LibraryThing, I'll post a bunch of those here tomorrow. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing
Tuesday, March 20, 2007
recent reading II Sorry things have been so quiet over here in blogland lately. I've been writing a lot elsewhere, mostly in the form of steady progess on the Novel of Adequacy (currently titled Meanwhile, although that might change). I just wrapped up Chapter Nine, and the chart has been complicating pleasingly. I'm working on a few other visualizations of the book's network; expect them to appear here if I ever finish them. In other news, still broke, which means I've been continuing to churn through summer reading. Who wants capsule reviews? Who Controls the Internet? Illusions of a Borderless World by Jack Goldsmith & Tim Wu Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness by Chris Kraus Demonology by Rick Moody Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, by Steven Johnson On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt I might write up a more thorough critique of the Frankfurt at some point, we'll have to see. And, despite the fact that I finished the Moody book only under some (self-imposed) duress, my interest in literary fiction does seem to have re-awakened after the slumber of the last few years. Consequently, I'm looking for recommendations: use the comments link down there if you want to plug anything. Labels: book_commentary, novel_of_adequacy, writing
Sunday, July 02, 2006
what i've been doing There haven't been too many substantive posts on this blog lately, sorry about that. A lot of my online time has been spent doing research for an attempt to write the so-called "novel of adequacy" that I first started talking about back in October. At the time I was feeling pretty down about my ability to write such a thing, but in March, coming back from the East Coast microtour, something suddenly "clicked" in my head and I thought "I know how to do this." We'll see if my intial confidence is borne out by the actual thing itself, once it comes into the world. I will say that the writing process is going remarkably speedily: I've been working on it for only about a month and I've finished six chapters, or what will be probably about a quarter of the book. Anybody who wants to read it as a work-in-progress, don't be afraid to get in touch. In other news, Chris and I have been working on finishing the new Number None release: the fifth "official" full-legth, to be entitled Edison | Orison. I'm not exactly sure when it will be released (we're thinking of shopping it around to other labels instead of self-producing it) but it's good to think of the thing as almost done. We're working on track order this week, and when we're done I'll post a listing: hopefully the track titles will seem appropriately provocative and cryptic. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, number_none, personal, writing
Thursday, May 18, 2006
everything devices | acepos Sniffing around Kio's links at del.icio.us, I came upon a free e-book (by Lion Kimbro) called How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think. ("I'm going to miss you," is what CJO told me when I told her I'd started looking at this book.) I haven't read much of it yet, but I've been enjoying the pages of acronyms in the back. The first acronym in there is ACEPOS, for "Absolute Cosmic Eternal Perfect Ontological Structure," a product that Kimbro warns us is outside the scope of his notebook-based system. "The structure maps an individual's brain, not the universe," Kimbro says. "Don't even try," he continues, "madness that way lies." Those of you who know me will probably not be particularly surprised to know that I'm immediately tempted to hack Kimbro's system to create an ACEPOS, madness be damned. I'm sort of being tongue-in-cheek when I say that—I don't really believe that a totalizing system can, in fact, be made (at least not without stopping time)—but it's true that for a long time now I've been intrigued by structures / forms / frameworks / systems which can position all sorts of disparate information into some sort of meaningful relationship. Imaginary Year readers may remember Fletcher's desire to write a book-length poem, Everything, which is one manifestation of my desire to build an ACEPOS-like system; my blog-posts back in October about the "Novel of Adequacy" are another. I don't think I'm the only artist-type out there tempted by this idea: I just got done reading Proposition Player, a Matthew Ritchie monograph, and throughout it Ritchie speaks in ways that seem driven by a desire to illustrate or model the entire universe. (Ritchie also references Joseph Beuys as an inspiration in this regard.) I've also been reading two books of poems that might be said to function as "Everything Devices" of a sort: Juliana Spahr's This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and Geraldine Kim's Povel, both of which take very different approaches to the predicament at hand. Expect me to write some more about them later. Labels: creative_process, novel_of_adequacy, writing
Tuesday, March 21, 2006
writing opacity In a piece on Gertrude Stein and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Guy Davenport describes the main movement of twentieth-century lit as being "a movement from assuming the world to be transparent, and available to lucid thought and language, to assuming ... that the world is opaque. This would seem to be the assumption of Joyce, Borges, Beckett, Barthelme, Ionesco." To this list, you could add most major American poets since probably Charles Olson. My short list would include poets like Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Leslie Scalapino, and Charles Bernstein: all writers who seem to me write in a way that acknowledges the inability of any written work to articulate the totality of the phenomenal world (to make it "transparent") and so accepts the reality that both author and reader exist in a state of near-total occlusion. Taking this reality as a given allows these authors to write in a way that plays off of it, that in effect depends upon it in order for their work to take on its particular set of qualities. Davenport again, on Olson's long poem "The Kingfishers" : "[The Kingfishers'] seeming inarticulateness is not a failure to articulate, but a declining to articulate images and events which can be left in free collision." This idea of "declining to articulate" the relationship between things is of increasing interest to me: one of the difficulties with what I've been calling the Novel of Adequacy is that it has to describe all the linkages that connect that suburban American teen to that woman in China in a way that both feels mimetically true and retains narrative interest. This is an enormous task, and one that leaves out far more important connections than it manages to illuminate. I feel like most of the poets I've discussed in this post would be more content to leave the woman and the teen in "free collision": to simply juxtapose the two of them, and jettison all the laborious claptrap-construction involved in drawing out the link narratively. A reader would grasp the point that the two figures are interrelated, even if he or she were unable to fully articulate the exact particulars of the relationship: in fact the work would partially be about the fact that for the vast majority of us, these networks of interrelationship are best characterized by our partial (or total) ignorance of them. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, poetry_commentary, writing
Thursday, October 20, 2005
agnosis "One of God's greatest mercies is that he keeps us perpetually occluded." "[Max] Ernst shares with [Ernst] Mach the phenomenological doubt that we witness anything except in agnosis. What we understand of an event is very little compared to our ignorance of its meaning. The greater our sensibility, the sharper our skepticism, the more we are aware of the thinness of the light that is all we have to probe the dark." This is part of what makes any attempt to write the Novel of Adequacy so inadequate. Because any facet of the Big Big Picture that you focus on means (necessarily) that there are an infinite number of other equally important facets that you'll ignore. I think Pynchon maybe understands this better than anyone-- "Oedipa wondered whether, at the end of this (if it were supposed to end), she ... might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, destroying its own message irreversibly, leaving an overexposed blank when the ordinary world came back." Part of what makes Pynchon so great is that he basically decides, counterintuitively, to take our state of perpetual occlusion and play it for laughs. There are other kinds of responses out there: the history of postmodern fiction (from Tristam Shandy all the way up to, say, Ben Marcus' The Age of Wire and String) can be read as a series of responses to the realization of how inadequate our interpretive mechanisms really are. Still more to come. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing
Saturday, October 15, 2005
a fiction of adequacy II When trying to think of novels that contained something of the sweep and attention to detail that would qualify them as examples of the type of fiction I talked about in yesterday's post, I came up with the following (very short) list: Don DeLillo, Underworld Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (and possibly The Crying of Lot 49 & Vineland) Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon That's about it, really. If anybody else has suggestions that they think might qualify, use the ol' comments link down there. The shortage of good examples underlines a nagging concern that I have when talking about this stuff, which is that I'm not even entirely sure that a novel is the right fictional form for representing the Big Picture of the present. But if not a novel, then what? I still kind of believe that it might be "do-able" with a serialized form like Imaginary Year—I was happy with the way that I was able to integrate a ground's-eye view of big geopolitical events (9/11; the war in Iraq) into that work. There are other fictional forms that might also be well-adapted for telling "this type" of story, too: maybe an "augmented reality" fiction like 2001's Majestic or 2004's I Love Bees? Or maybe a graphic novel, full of complicated Chris-Ware-ish diagrams? Ware is a master of drawing out an impossibly complicated Big Picture and then zooming in and transfiguring a data-point into a narrative. If only I could draw better. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing
Sunday, October 09, 2005
a fiction of adequacy I composed this post in my head as I was lying awake last night between 4 am and 6 am. I am looking for a fiction that can both adequately (not sentimentally) represent the experience of a woman in China who works removing copper wire from discarded computer monitors and adequately (not ironically) represent the experience of a suburban teenager who does chaos magic rituals online. A fiction that charts the complex global movements of capital (see Mark Lombardi) but which hasn't lost touch with the fine grain of everyday existence as lived by actual people. I have a vague sense of what such a fiction would look like, but I seem to increasingly feel like I lack both the research skill and the imaginative capacity to produce it. Labels: novel_of_adequacy, writing
Saturday, October 08, 2005
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