A O Scott takes a Bullet

Journal sielwolf's Journal: A O Scott takes a Bullet 8

Journal by sielwolf on Tuesday May 23, 2006 @10:33PM

Waiting for ENG 102 ...you fell up out of bed, onto your feet, your jeans slid up your legs and they carried you back out of my door, down the stairs, off in your car and out of my life.

Gone- out of my memory.

There is nothing like a good book- but all things equate to it. Nothing's like a good blowjob then. And goodness is both universal and immutable. We have no more conversations. But there is little truth to people's declarations of goodness.

Good books all handed down to us from a regal authority. In each hand are two things that I find completely interesting. The first was the The Modern Library of the World's Best Books, the horribly managed and illogical list ranking done by the Modern Library. When the critics complained that since they where asked only for "good books" but not to rank them the editors made noise and yet stood by a list that had A Brave New World at number 5. When run as a reader web poll later the list was a grown D&D nerd's wet dream, stocked only with Ayn Rand and Reverend L Run Hubbard's magnum opii (with LotR and To Kill a Mockingbird thrown in). Really, who here HASN'T read Mission: Earth?

[Good. You don't have to go to the deathcamps.]

Both don't bode well for the literary list, either managed or un.

So in my right I have the latest NYTBR Best Fiction of the Last 25 Years with accompaning A.O. Scott article. I'll spare you the suspense and tell you that Morrison's Beloved won (by getting 18 of some ~200 votes) along with works by Roth, McCarthy and DeLillo filling out the top.

Bill Simmons' (The Sports Guy) had an article out of his archive recently about the frustrating nature of lists: they are almost always wrong but that is the point because they are designed to generate conversation on something and having them with both obvious and subtle flaws just heats up the talk to watercooler levels.

The same here: The Book Review drops this science and soon you have Joel Achenbach's readers sounding off about the state of American Letters and the dull blade that is the modern American mind. You can tell when it hits a mass when a limited run phrase (here "American Letters" used to describe US fiction in a deliciously Thoreauean way) starts popping up everywhere. It's Sporatic Grammar Depth: the average citizen given a word in context and it floats in the front of their memory for a few weeks, getting dropped as often as possible. Of course out of the flat palette of normal vocabulary the one phrase sticks out (ding) becoming a sort of radiological tracer on a meme's genotype. With your eye close enough to the petri dish, you can see the diffusion. Want another example? See "polemic" and Fahrenheit 9/11.

It's hype, it's noise. It's a great way to fill the empty white expanses of our lives. It forms the foundation of all the useless chatter online. And maybe it'll get people to buy something en masse. But... why the fuck should anyone care about books?

Misconceptions and Contrafactuals

The list was this: it is a set of books by septagenerians that most people haven't read. Well or people DO read them. Some of them anyway. I guess the idea that people are forced to read Beloved in college and grad student's write about it speaks to its depth and importance. That the movie came and went and no one remembered goes unspoken in polite company like a deformed child kept upstairs. No, there is something darker... making heavy footsteps up there. The noise of weight dragging. *clomp* *slide* *clomp* *slide* Can we ignore it?

The reality is no one reads anymore, reads what we tell them. The reality is a historical one: anachronistic empires eaten from inside by inevitability.

Like all media, literature has to deal with a smaller slice as it coexists with many, many more media (television, music, movies... stop me if you haven't heard this before). For a literature it is the most painful as it held a monopoly on off-the-shelf consumption entertainment before the LP and the television. People had three options to entertain themselves when they got home: beat their wife, fuck their wife or read a book. Things pretty much stayed that way for a long time.

Now the problem is as technologies advance each new turn is both more rapid, more accessible and more disposable than its predecessors. Music was passive. Television removed the need to even imagine anything. The last great artform will be a feed dropped right into the thalamus that puts users in a permanent blissful catatonia. A long interrupted dream of no character, taste or smell. It never grows old. We never grow old.

Television was the real killer. Music up through the 80's was a limited affair of 40 minute LPs. At some point you had to flip the record or find another. Television was perfectly able to provide flickering images as long as you wanted. Literature had met its match.

[Here is the same article you've probably read before, in myriad forms. Imagine all the same points here so I don't have to repeat them. No, imagine all of them, each of their most perfect aspects preserved and blended seamlessly into a hybrid of all those best forms. The Liger of Death of Book Articles; the best article ever]

-and somehow A.O. Scott got involved. *ugh* Haven't I complained about this guy enough? Can he ruin something ELSE please? He's the fucking Chuck Klosterman of the NYT; poison tentacles everywhere. His line on the above feature reads "A. O. Scott is a film critic at The Times. He is writing a book on the American novel since World War II."

One: why is their fucking film critic writing about books? This guy has taken all movies, the Believer and N+1 and turned them from slam dunk articles to unbearable unfinishable shit. So obviously you want him upfront on the Book Review *rolls eyes in a manner like a madman*

Two: could we not be any more obvious with our sell? He just HAPPENS to be writing a book on this very subject? "Gee, sir. I'm sorry I shot you. Good thing I'm with AETNA and we're having a one-time only sale on our Life Insurance Policies!" Worse this means one thing: he's going to make a big point, light a cigar in the crater and cast around one of those "Yeahmutherfuckawhat?" looks. *psff*

Ubik (Or Dead People who Don't Know It)

The big climax (more trickling ejaculate in reality) of Scott's piece was that all the authors in the list where all pre-Baby Boomers. In fact the Baby Boomers have no great authors even in what should be the golden era of their literature.

Roll Credits. And you are supposed to walk home with a feeling of shame and disgust that not only did your parents not beat you hard enough as a child but they couldn't even write one damn good book to save their lives.

Well, uh, no. The first is the bias of the NYTBR's Oh-So-Secret Ballot. Sorry, that does not a good statistical sample make.

"But you don't know who w-"

Exactly. Fuck unvalidated data. In the VV&A business unvalidated data is no different than no data; nothing dressed up in actorly lab coats and scientificologicalian newspeak.

Scott gives some hints: the list is people who the NYTBR thought had a good enough grasp on literature to say something. This you can understand. Again just check out what the "readers" out there selected for Modern Library's list. But this selection reeks of preconception biases. Just think: who would the NYTBR select as its list of 200 or so voters? Let's give a roughed out example: English-speaking, educated, published author or literature editor who is in contact with New York Times. Probably well off, 30+, white.

So... folks not like you or me. And that's saying something, since we *makes horizontal circular motion between us* are probably in a demographic adjacent to this set. Reading this? Then you're probably English-speaking (probably primary), college educated, 21-40 with an internet connection and a technical savvy to explain wasting time on /. or blogger. Online polls? Only slightly better at getting a good statistical sample.

But the NYTBR used these voters... so what can we say about them then?

Singularity and Canon

Let us consider the aardvark, er, average english lit major. Freeze him. This fellow is stuck at a moment 18 to 22 years from his birth. All events after this haven't occured yet. So at this point in time the future bears no weight on him save a ghastly all-encompassing foreboding. What DOES he have? A retrograde view of all Earthly literary effort.

It goes: incomplete Sumerian epics, the Greeks, the Bible, Beowulf, Le Mort de Arthur, Shakespeare, and on into the 18th century...

wait a minute, where in time is this lit major anyway? Hmmm, well let's place him at two points in time: 1952 and 1965.

So... 19th century. Up to this point the Canon looks to our dumb humanities goof like a range of a dozen or so mountains with two obvious high peaks (the Book and Bill S's works). In the 18th century or so there's a split as several world literatures (French, British, American, German) come about creating a widening range of work. Sure, there are still obvious crests (Goethe, Twain, Melville, Flaubert) and after two years our lit major has gotten a good sample just because of the small pool.

But he knows, everyone knows that in the 20th century comes an explosion of all media, not just literature, and *here* the shallow water ends at a great precipice that falls down to the black trenches of the ocean.

Technology-production relationships. As technology improved, books became cheaper, a larger variety was available and demand met it. Technology went so far as to allow specialization (magazines) and disposable instances. The sky was the limit.

In the 20th century this created an elbow in the pool of books and now there were genres and high and low literature and flavors and types and so many books that no one could translate them all. Parallel efforts creating exponential growth.

And now our english lit student couldn't just read everything. Anyone who's done Design of Experiements knows this: its only novel and elementary cases that allow for exhaustive testing. To test a domain thouroughly one has to sample across the entire space and do so smartly (i.e. a Taguchi method) so sample-points can be used to infer along dimensions and such (readers and critics do this a bit anyway. Shit, throw someone an author and they'll give you a book. Which one? Probably the one they are best known for or the one most identifiable with their style).

The problem is that humanities don't work that way. For one the space is to highly dimensional (or even mappable to dimensions due to subjectivity) and one can't walk the edges easily. Also, the humanities love scientificity and not science. The artifice of academia and form and manner are all important. Strong fundaments and rationals and models fool them like a luddite in a cockpit.

So given 100 years of hyperactivity in publishing what is an english lit major to do?

Cocksuckers United

Why do I hate Anne Proulx? Not only does her writing suck technically it is that very criminal abuse of grammar that is her supposed gift to the world and she mines that fucking shit mercilessly. She talks like shit and gets airs because of it.

Huh?

I can't completely blame her. A lot of other people are at fault. At fault for not hitting her with the tough-love realist critique of her writing. For pumping up her attitude. Maybe they where bored and decided to have a laugh. Well too late now.

Our anonymous lit major is the same. What sense can he, a complete novice, make of modern and contemporary literature? He can't. So he uses available authorities: teachers and peers. What does he look for? Truth?

HAHAHAHAHAH!!! Aaahhhh *wipes away tear*

No, the same thing Proulx did: kudos. He fishes into the deep blue water and any fish he finds he keeps. This might be simple bootlicking of a TA's syllabus or not knowing any better that this little book is the same as twenty others. Even better if you get the opposite reaction. Some chick blow up at you when you mention admiring Patrick Bateman? Fuck- SCORE!!! She was a bitch anyway. And she totally cockblocks anyway because she can't stand guys falling all over her roommate and spends most of the weekends alone on her bunk crying to herself.

It's commodity diffusion. Why do people hold onto brands of any interchangeable thing (detergent, cola, corn, cereal)? Because of peer interactivity and group inertia. You like Coke because more people like Coke than Pepsi or you like Pepsi because its more of an elite taste than the more popular Coke. Whatever. In a vaccuum with no real attractors we as humans still congregate, stratify and order. It's our way.

Our lit student, circa 1952, has then a landscape. Not of books but of cliques. Preferences. People may see movies or go and listen to music but everyone reads. The noise is differentiated by local biases around him: the preferences of his teachers and friends. People he knows, things he's already read. This lifts those books up, high, so they too become peaks and mountains where once where only rolling hills. All those mountains are people. Dead souls, hanging. The great works where read, repeated, carried as waves echoing across the collective. More and more go and be buried there all the time. The only difference now is choice: of how we selected where the new mountains will be.

Now 1962? There is real competition. Television. The weight factors are much less. People read... well, read, in the past tense. And so the factors are longer, deeper. They pull still from those same elements uses in 1952. The previous generation's choices become our canon even as new authors till on new soil.

The problem is all new authors behind a wall. Time has placed them on this side of the entertainment media singularity. Like a low fog the works around us are unclear, indistinct. The sun rises and falls and we only see the shadows of the mountains, far far off, still over everything. At a loss we pull from them too drawing out the old peaks further...

and you end up with a list of authors all born before World War 2. They are the only thing we can see, that we can agree on. The thin rail with ocean all around it has blossomed out into wide open spaces hidden from us by landscapes of trees all around. We can't tell if these new masterworks are better than old, so we stick with what works.

Even further

But then this is all academic. With the entertainment singularity the interest of the consumer became less tied to the small cadre of publishers. The voices of critics fell onto a shrinking body of true believers. A great divide, between high and low fiction.

Will we ever see a World-defining and Important Work anymore? What have people done or seen in the name of the Bible? From Shakespeare? There's a reason why they are by far the most quoted sources and form the two bookends of the Canon. And even Huck Finn gets play in American anecdote and as the periodic target of censor.

But would any significant group of people get excited or moved to action by Beloved or Blood Meridian? Underworld? Wow, 'Hysterical Realism'. Can I go home now?

And the best selling authors of our time: Tom Clancy, Stephen King, Dan Brown, Jackie Collins... how many of them do you think probably read any of the books in the NYTBR top ten? If I was truly bored I might offer that the leaden prose of The Da Vinci Code was in response to the freeform of Hemingway. But then that would get in the way of it being a thinly veiled screenplay bound as a book.

The Great Literature of interest to the NYT and its circle now flies oblivious to the outside world (and them to it), carried only by inertia. Pedestrians on the same sidewalk; the sort of concept that might make the NYTBR purr with excitement forty years ago.

Talking Incredibly Loud and Extremely Close

You want me to pick the most important book of the last 25 years? Fine. How about The Turner Diaries ? Shitily written, obvious and hyperracist this book at least has a bodycount on it. Motherfuckers formed revolutionary cells multiple times because of it. Assassinated radio jockeys, blew the facades off of buildings. Translated and disseminated across the world. It is not some white room product of the paranoia of our age but the very article. It is transparent flame. Us in all of our anti-fag, anti-kike, anti-spade, anti-government glory. No, it's more than that. It is joyous self-fiction and aggrandizement. James Frey, Kaavya Viswanathan, Cold Fusion, Dianetics, PETA, and Kim Jong Il. It is a caricature of our world in high-contrast that is safe in its moral certanties. Go and listen to any closed circuit of partisan dialogue and you will see The Turner Diaries as its inevitability. The gap in our thinking we are pulled into. There are no facts here, no compromise, no construction. It is only absolutism and destruction and the glories beyond hellfire.

If I Where a Catfish

What then, of these very great books that none of us ever read? John Updike recently talked at the DC Book Expo about staving off the forces of free text dessemination. The fear was a playlisting of literature, dilluted and empty. But releasing from fear and conceiving of the future it doesn't need to be dark.

The knowledge of the world is on the shoulders of small and great men before us. Mothers and archtypes and celebrities and faceless mobs. And though we rarely consider it, our lives are propped up by multitudes of technologies and ideas we never grasp and never will. But these ideas aren't just held at arms length, often they are integrated and used without need for full realization of their contents.

The Great Idea as Black Box.

If I know I can administer a drug to save lives why do I need to know where it came from, who discovered it, or what they ate?

Everyone here should say "well, because that information might be vitally important."

Yes, but right now?

"Well no."

So, when.

"... sometime..."

So how about sometime then? ANYTIME. If the information I have suffices let me pass with only that limited use of bandwidth. However, if depth is necessary or vital, leave me handles there so I may dig down into the world and know it as I've always been there. It is a pull paradigm yes, but in the opposite direction. Let me pull myself so that I see with those very eyes. Information converges in space leading to perspective. We teach because we wish to instill that view of the world. But information, wide and disseminated, if perspective too could be carried.

Our minds are as a billion ghosts, inhabiting our bodies for the most part but then emphereal as we let them pass between everyone else. Too see as they do, as they all do. And to know the world as they would see it. All things shared at all times. A great living world taking root in this world.

Jakob Boehme said that reality was God divided among himself as his omniscience could not perceive limitation. So the world was made and all-seeing became blindness became perception became fallability. And from those components they are all grouped up building and constructing a greater thing and at once through a single doorway walks and it so ends with God as he once started from parts and nothing and abyss. All things, all knowledge, everywhere.

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