Cosmopoetica

[image by caese]

In Borges I keep seeing the roots of Pynchon… particularly in stories like "The Babylon Lottery" and "The Library of Babel." Consider this passage from "The Babylon Lottery":

The Company, with divine modesty, eludes all publicity. Its agents, as is only natural, are secret. The orders which it is continually sending out do not differ from those lavishly issued by impostors. Besides, who can ever boast of being a mere impostor? The inebriate who improvises an absurd mandate, the dreamer who suddenly aways to choke the woman who lies beside him to death, do they not both, perhaps, carry out a secret decision by the Company?

If Pynchon didn’t have this story buried somewhere in his psyche when he wrote The Crying of Lot 49, he should have!

The enigma posed by the Library of Babel seems to be (in part) that which is being addressed by some post-avant and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry:

One of these books, which my father saw in a hexagon of the circuit number fifteen ninety-four, was composed of the letters MCV perversely repeated from the first line to the last. Another, very much consulted in this zone, is a mere labyrinth of letters, but on the next-to-the-last page, one may read O Time your pyramids. As is well known: for one reasonable line or one straightforward note there are leagues of insensate cacophony, of verbal farragoes and incoherencies. (I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one’s hands… They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion, we shall see, is not altogether false.

And then a bit later in the same story:

It is pointless to observe that the best book in the numerous hexagons under my administration is entitled Combed Clap of Thunder; or that another is called The Plastic Cramp; and still another Axaxaxas Mlö. Such propositions as are contained in these titles, at first sight incoherent, doubtless yield a cryptographic or allegorical justification. Since they are verbal, these justifications already figure, ex hypothesi, in the Library.

I love and am terrified by this line, again from "The Library of Babel":

…the certainty that everything has been already written nullifies or makes phantoms of us all.

This is exactly how I feel.

In a way I know is important but am unable to articulate, David Foster Wallace is clearly connected to Borges. Where Borges articulated an idea of the infinite and the related, intertwined and tangled problem of time, where Borges rode the waves of his intuitive understanding of the endless paradox of no origin and no destination (or all origin and all destination), where Borges found something comical and comi-tragic and happily absurd– even admirable– about the infinite and the infinite-regress and the inevitable solipsism… Wallace wrote from within the infinite, painfully self-aware, with increasing desperation and a hopeless idealism that couldn’t be cornered or buried deep enough no matter what he tried to do or what his head knew…

Read "The Library of Babel" and "Funes the Memorious" and "The Babylon Lottery" and see what you think.

It’s beautiful and terrible that the experience of reading Borges I am having at this moment (everything that happens to us happens in the now) can’t really be shared with anyone. I can tell one of my few friends capable– by virtue of their experience and interests and particular place in life– of empathizing and understanding to go read "The Library of Babel" right now but it is exceedingly unlikely anything will come of it. In fact, such an attempt might be subtly (or not so subtly) harmful, undermining in some small way that friend’s confidence and attachment…

ut nihil non issdem verbis redderatur auditum

Translated:

so that nothing heard is not repeated (retold) in the same words…

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Authors Borges notes (in the “Prologue” to the Artifices book in Ficciones) he "continually reread[s]":

• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Thomas de Quincey
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Fritz Mauthner
• George Bernard Shaw
• G. K. Chesterton
• Léon Bloy

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Being a book reviewer must be fun if only for the occasional chance to sharpen one’s knives on some inane romance writer’s leathery hide.

[cosmopoetica reviews jong clitoris nixon]

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More on authors trying to assert copyright on historical “fact” vis a vis the DaVinci Code. Am I the only one that finds this sickly funny? The authors of Holy Blood, Holy Grail are just trying to have their cake and eat it too…

[cosmopoetica copyright]

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Bert Webb writes:

A new — or new looking — book is a treasure.  In my experience, however, I have found that a well-marked book, becomes more like a treasured friend — one that you enjoy seeing again and again.

[cosmopoetica, reading, books]

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A somewhat testy review of Dennett and, occasionally, his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.

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A good profile of Malcolm Gladwell in the New York Times:

…beneath the social science data, Gladwell is selling something for
which there’s always a market. “I’m by nature an optimist. I can’t
remember the last time I wrote a story which could be described as
despairing,” he said. “I don’t believe in character. I believe in the
effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people’s
behavior.”

[cosmopoetica, gladwell, profile, nyt]

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Jeanette Winterson on the publishing that should not be:

“First, we stop publishing books that needn’t be books. People who don’t really read don’t really need books — so let them have Jordan and Becks in lots of other ways.”

[cosmopoetica, books, publishing, winterson]

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I’ve been enjoying Paul Ford’s Ftrain site for most of the morning. At its core is a blog of anecdotes, mini-essays, and fictions, as you can see from the front page. But I like the way it provides multiple points of entry: the typical reverse-chronological list, the much less common forward-chronological ordering, and the almost never seen true hierarchical index. You can navigate the indices from any point, including the hierarchical index using a small popup info window with information and links like:

This is Laundromat by Paul Ford, published Wednesday, October 12, 2005. It is part of Walking/Riding, which is part of Semiautobiography, which is part of Story

.

The author link is necessary because he writes under a couple of pseudonyms.

I also appreciate the collector’s instinct demonstrated by his Anthologies which, together, comprise a digital commonplace book. Clearly I am fond of those…

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The part of me that used to work in a library likes this kind of light subversion…

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Breakfast with Brontosaurus

I have only three criteria for whether a work should be read and reread and taught to others, and they are: aesthetic splendour, cognitive power, and wisdom

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Lone Star Statements, by Matthew Baldwin

“Recently, Time magazine published a list of the 100 best novels. But the praise of professional critics hardly matters to the book-reviewing readers at Amazon.com. A compilation of the best of the worst… about the best.”

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Gina at a sad day for sad birds quotes this piece from Ben Lerner’s Lichtenberg Figures, a timely reminder that I really need to get my hands on this book:

The dark collects our empties, empties our ashtrays.
Did you mean “this could go on forever” in a good way?
Up in the fragrant rafters, moths seek out a finer dust.
Please feel free to cue or cut

the lights. Along the road of magnitudes, a glyph,
portable, narrow–Damn. I’ve lost it. But its shadow. Cast
in the long run. As the dark touches us up.
Earlier you asked if I would enter data like a room, well,

either the sun has begun to burn
its manuscripts or I’m an idiot, an idiot
with my eleven semiprecious rings. Real snow
on the stage. Fake blood on the snow. Could this go

on forever in a good way? A brain left lace from age or lightning.
The chicken is a little dry and/or you’ve ruined my life.

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One of the recurring, chain-letter-like questionnaires floating around the lit blogs right now asks if the reader has “ever had a crush on a literary character.” If you haven’t, then you either need to start reading books that don’t have any pictures… or give up on the enterprise altogether. Maybe reading’s just not for you. Double points off if you’ve only had crushes on television and/or movie characters.

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QUICK SYNOPSIS: An entertaining look at a fascinating mechanism of the human mind– rapid cognition– and how it works (and doesn’t work) in the real world. A must-read for anyone who has ever thought about how people think, pop-science afficionados, Malcolm Gladwell fans, and lovers of entertaining writing… in short, just about everyone.

Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a fascinating look at the science of “rapid cognition”– those snap judgments that get right at the truth of the question or situation with seemingly no evidence or contemplation. Some examples that Gladwell gives:

• A tennis coach who can watch players toss the ball into the air and unerringly predict whether the serve will be fair or not
• An art historian who correctly intuits that a sculpture is a fake despite the same sculpture having been authenticated after months of study by museum experts
• A behavioral expert who watches 15 minutes of videotaped conversation between couples and predicts with 90% accuracy who will stay together and who will be divorced five years later

Deep in our subconscious is a cognitive machine that can be led astray by thinking too much or– as Gladwell convincingly shows– trying too hard to explain our choices. Impulse and instinct can be powerful tools, borne of our natural ability to “thin slice” and recognize patterns in our environment, events, and people based on remarkably thin slices of experience.

This isn’t a textbook or a scientific treatise, but an engaging account of thin slicing and pattern recognition as it happens in the real world, and high level overviews of fascinating experiments. A few more examples:

• Students are given 10 sentences to unscramble, believing that their verbal ability it being tested. Seeded in the word lists, but not part of the meaning of the completed sentences, are words that connote old age: Florida, gray, bingo, wrinkle. Students unscrambling the sentences walk out of the room more slowly than students unscrambling sentences without those words. They actually act old.
• Given far less resources, technology, and armament in a war simulation, a Marine Corps General playing the part of a rogue nation soundly defeats the American military apparatus by relying on intuition and instant decision-making.

But the pressure to discount our instincts and look before we leap and avoid judging a book by its cover aren’t to be wholly discounted. Thin-slicing can come at a distinct cost if the instant cognition we are counting on goes awry or is influenced by our environment. The Amadou Diallo shooting– a young black man shot 43 times as he tried to show his wallet– is an example of the tragic result of thin-slicing gone wrong with police officers, an occupation in which their very lives can rely on the thin-slicing but who are at the same time can’t help but be deluged with the kind of influences (images and situations) which are detrimental to successful thin-slicing.

Gladwell doesn’t shy away from this at all, but presents persuasive (and sometimes mind-boggling) studies showing how environmental cues warp our abilities:

• Simply being *asked* to identify their race on a standardized test resulted in a *50%* decrease in test scores for blacks
• Warren Harding is elected president purely on the basis of appearing presidential
• Being short is as much of a handicap to achieving corporate success as being African American or female

Even trying to explain one’s choices can interfere. People asked to pick out photos they’ve seen for brief amounts of time before fail significantly more often if they are asked to first describe the pictures they have seen. The flash of insight that allows us to see faces and make quick decisions are surprisingly fragile, subject to being lost as they are passed from one hemisphere of our brain to the other. As Gladwell puts it:

“Insight is not a lightbulb that goes off inside our heads. It is a flickering candle that can easily be snuffed out.”

It seems clear from the research that these destructive forces can — to some degree– be countered in apparently obvious ways (sensitivity training, exposure to positive images) and our ability to thin-slice can likewise be improved with training. How much? What about people who are remarkably non-visual without being autistic? How do we know when to trust our gut and when to step back and use cautioned, reasoned analysis?

I don’t know and Gladwell doesn’t either. There’s no easy and no single answer. It took me a few days to realize that my disappointment at the end of the book was because of that fundamental irresolvability, not through any weakness in Gladwell’s writing. _Blink_ isn’t a book that aims to provide a prescription for living… it isn’t “Rapid Cognition in 24 hours” but a witty and entertaining foray into the still largely unknown workings of the human brain.

[cosmopoetica blink gladwell]

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Booklust asks why Jonathan Franzen’s the author everyone loves to hate. I have no idea. He’s an excellent writer, judging not only by The Corrections, but from his wonderful collection of essays How to Be Alone which was full of pieces that had me nodding my head in agreement. And he spurned Oprah, as so many of his detractors wish they would have the balls to do.

I admire that Franzen lays it on the line with a very personal narrative style. It opens him up to (sometimes fair) ridicule, but it seems to me that some of these “critics” need to unclench their kiesters and pay a little attention to all the good stuff he is writing. And knock it off with the jokes about how he looks too. Who cares? It just makes me completely discount whatever other relevant points the speaker might be making.

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I’ve tried like hell to get into Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell which according to many, many review should be something I would really enjoy. But despite great physical production values, a good idea, and generally satisfying writing, all the little pieces don’t come together for me into something I could enjoy. Or yet finish.

I couldn’t put my finger on the problem until I read Jennifer Howard’s review. I think she has it exactly right– the book is a kind of pastiche written from a distant, detached perspective that ultimately robs the story of most of its (admittedly great) potential. Tolkien, for all his obvious flaws– and despite his academic credentials– at least wasn’t afraid to invoke the epic sweep, to try to bring the reader to see the grandeur in his tale, to show some enthusiasm and excitement for his subject. In fact, the parts that move me the most in the Lord of the Rings trilogy are the small asides alluding to a vast and deep history of which we are seeing just one part– I cry every time I get to the Appendix entries about the characters leaving Middle Earth! Clarke has instead written a history bereft of emotion and connection. I’ll try again with this book, I am sure, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope that my opinion will change.

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Hmmm… if Kasey and one of his students are both in the Best American Poetry 2004 Anthology does this mean the post-avant literary elite will have to stop slagging it? Or will it still all suck except for those two poets– I mean poems since we know it’s all about the work, not the hip-factor associated with the poets, right?

Congrats to Kasey, though, since I happen to think that being included in the BAP is a real honor and in this case a well-deserved recognition.

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I’ve been reading Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet (read an interesting review from the Guardian, see the Amazon listing). Written under the heteronym Bernardo Soares, the Book of Disquiet is a journal of sorts, a kind of writer’s notebook in the guise of the observations of a bookkeeper about art, literature, and emotion. In short, about the stuff of life itself.

He writes of Omar Khayyam:

Someone like Omar, who is who he is, lives in only one world, the external world; someone like me, who is not who he is, not only lives in the external, objective world but in successive, diverse, internal worlds that are not subjective. My philosophy, even though it longs to be the same as Omar’s, cannot be the same. The result is that even though I really do not want them, I have in me the very philosophies I criticize, as if they were souls. Omar could reject them all because they were alien to him. I cannot reject them because they are who I am.

Or of poetry and prose [Pessoa is generally considered Portugal's greatest poet]:

I really believe that in a perfectly civilized world there would be no other art but prose. We would leave sunsets to the sunsets themselves, taking care, perhaps, in our art to understand them verbally by transmitting them in the intelligible music of color. We would not sculpt bodies, which would then keep, by being seen and touched, their mobile relief and their soft warmth. We would build houses only to live in them, which is, after all, whast they are really for. Poetry would exist so children could grow toward prose; poetry certainly does have something infantile to it, something mnemonic, auxiliary, and primordial.

This is not the kind of book you want to read sequentially, or all at once. Instead dip into it as you would cup cold water to your lips during a long hike… too much at once and you will ache despite your thirst. Most of the sequence to the pieces has been put there by editors anyway, who put the book together from a disordered set of scraps in a chest found after Pessoa died.

Incidentally, The Book of Disquiet would be a perfect candidate for hypertext, or a blogging effort like Pepys’ Duary or the nascent BlogThoreau. I doubt, given our Draconian copyright laws, that it is in the public domain. Yet another reason Free Culture and the Creative Commons should be well studied by everyone interested in the arts.

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So who was first? K. Silem Mohammed, John Latta, Nick Piombino, Josh Corey– that’s just from my last 20 minutes of blog-reading… there are probably others. Jonathan would have an interesting list, I bet, if he weren’t busy being snarky to Greg@Grapez.

Many good things to buy! Too many…

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