Category: Lit & Crit

Stick a fork in us, we’re doneStick a fork in us, we’re done

“Man is the pie that bakes and eats himself and the recipe is separation.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Attention surfeit disorderAttention surfeit disorder

“Living in an attention economy means dealing with not only a scarcity of time to consume information (and people as information) but also a scarcity of empathy. Attention deficits become double-sided; we don’t have enough to focus on what’s important, and we don’t receive enough to feel solid. Intimate communication becomes inefficient as its cheap, token abundance makes it less effective. All of it fails to convince; it all raises more questions of trust rather than answers.” – Rob Horning, “Living in Microfame”

Breaking through the matrixBreaking through the matrix

“Social media can make the feeling of belonging seem like an alienated accomplishment measurable in discrete amounts of individualized attention. But belonging is also a matter of fleeting, spontaneous empathy, moments of presence in which we’re not just watching and tracking others but experiencing an underlying mutuality.” – Rob Horning, “Living in Microfame”

The maelstrom of the marketThe maelstrom of the market

“We all document ourselves and are documented against our will, and these documents can always circulate uncontrollably, accumulating misinterpretations and subtexts, causing theoretically limitless amounts of collateral damage. Part of this damage takes the form of entrenching our friends in a marketing matrix.” – Rob Horning, “Living in Microfame”

Planet of incarcerated whoresPlanet of incarcerated whores

“Social media, as well as the pervasiveness of cameras and other surveillance apparatuses, have the potential to persecute anyone as though they are an undeserving celebrity due for a takedown. In a world where motion-sensitive cameras lie in wait to transmit images of your walking down the street in real time to online observers for judgment, where facial- recognition technology can durably attach all the insults to your name, where privacy is increasingly interpreted as secrecy and the mere procedures of exposing anyone are seen as blows against power, we are all subject to unexpected and unwanted scrutiny. Yet at the same time, in a social environment that’s increasingly congested by transparency and competing and unceasing claims for recognition, we must clamor for the attention we do want and find ingenious (if not exploitive) ways to get it. Not only are we all under surveillance but we are compelled to then justify why we’re being watched. This stems from social media’s seemingly objective measures of individual reputation and influence (Klout is merely the most egregious of these), which we ‘deserve’ by being active online — turning our thoughts, opinions, friends, and relations into useful marketing data. Social media provide the infrastructure for the economic mobilization of the personality, in which our efforts to ‘be ourselves’ must confirm themselves by being demonstratively productive.” – Rob Horning, “Living in Microfame”

That’s not what Big Pharma saidThat’s not what Big Pharma said

“A good doctor does not carry a remedy to his patient, he lets the patient teach him what the remedy is.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Sings to mineSings to mine

“Words are the language of lies and evasions.  Music cannot lie.  Music talks to the heart.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

For instance, while turning into a toadyFor instance, while turning into a toady

“A good life means fighting to be human under growing difficulties.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

That about covers itThat about covers it

“A decent human life should contain discipline, and exertion, and adventure, and be unselfish.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Do it well, tooDo it well, too

“We don’t need art to express ourselves. If you are sad, then cry. If you are angry, destroy something. If you don’t like something, say no to it. But if you want to make art, then do it because you want to make art and not for any other reason.” – Slovenian Damien Hirst (interviewed by Jesse Darling in “Being Damien Hirst”)

The commodification of the transcendentThe commodification of the transcendent

“My definition of art is very straightforward: Art is what is sold as art, and that’s it. When someone buys something, believing he or she is buying art, then it is art. If you pay for something because you think it’s art, you’re basically creating art: the buyer creates art, not the artist. This is what’s going on in the art world, although they won’t tell you that—they don’t believe in art, but they do believe in selling art.” – Slovenian Damien Hirst (interviewed by Jesse Darling in “Being Damien Hirst” (emphases in the original)

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, or notYour mission, should you decide to accept it, or not

“Every new generation of artists is faced with the task of originating new forms of work that fall outside the margins of established commodity. In other words, to create work that  is uncommodifiable, though it will not remain so for long. This is the cycle, the dance, the lie at the heart of the avant-garde, and everyone knows it. As the art market sets crunchily to work figuring out how to sell the unsaleable, the best or cutest or savviest of the new generation are called to join in the carousel or production line, churning out their visionary, uncommodifiable commodities, which have acquired in the meantime a price tag in accordance to their very resistance to commodity status, their rareness, their avant-gardiness. Avant-garde simply means as yet unsold (though we’re working on it); ‘outsider’ art denotes that-for-which-we-can-see-no-buyer.” – Jesse Darling, “Being Damien Hirst”

The power of maybeThe power of maybe

“The ‘scientific’ life itself has much to do with maybes, and human life at large has everything to do with them. So far as man stands for anything, and is productive or originative at all, his entire vital function may be said to have to deal with maybes. Not a victory is gained, not a deed of faithfulness or courage is done, except upon a maybe; not a service, not a sally of generosity, not a scientific exploration or experiment or text-book, that may not be a mistake. It is only by risking our persons from one hour to another that we live at all. And often enough our faith beforehand in an uncertified result is the only thing that makes the result come true. Suppose, for instance, that you are climbing a mountain, and have  worked yourself into a position from which the only escape is by a terrible leap. Have faith that you can successfully make it, and your feet are nerved to its accomplishment. But mistrust yourself, and think of all the sweet things you have heard the scientists say of maybes, and you will hesitate so long that, at last, all unstrung and trembling, and launching yourself in a moment of despair, you roll in the abyss. In such a case (and it belongs to an enormous class), the part of wisdom as well as of courage is to believe what is in the line of your needs, for only by such belief is the need fulfilled. Refuse to believe, and you shall indeed be right, for you shall irretrievably perish. But believe, and again you shall be right, for you shall save yourself. You make one or the other of two possible universes true by your trust or mistrust–both universes having been only maybes, in this particular, before you contributed your act.” – William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” (emphases in original)

Blind yourself with science!Blind yourself with science!

“Is it not sheer dogmatic folly to say that our inner interests can have no real connection with the forces that the hidden world may contain? In other cases divinations based on inner interests have proved prophetic enough. Take science itself! Without an imperious inner demand on our part for ideal logical and mathematical harmonies, we should never have attained to proving that such harmonies be hidden between all the chinks and interstices of the crude natural world. Hardly a law has been established in science, hardly a fact ascertained, which was not first sought after, often with sweat and blood, to gratify an inner need. Whence such needs come from we do not know; we find them in us, and biological psychology so far only classes them with Darwin’s ‘accidental variations.’ But the inner need of believing that this world of nature is a sign of something more spiritual and eternal than itself is just as strong and authoritative in those who feel it, as the inner need of uniform laws of causation ever can be in a professionally scientific head. The toil of many generations has proved the latter need prophetic. Why may not the former one be prophetic, too? And if needs of ours outrun the visible universe, why may not that be a sign that an invisible universe is there? What, in short, has authority to debar us from trusting our religious demands? Science as such assuredly has no authority, for she can only say what is, not what is not; and the agnostic ‘thou shalt not believe without coercive sensible evidence’ is simply an expression (free to any one to make) of private personal appetite for evidence of a certain peculiar kind.” – William James, “Is Life Worth Living?” (emphases in original)

Those were the daysThose were the days

“There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wigs could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a ‘Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.’  But those times are past.” – William James, “Is Life Worth Living?”

We call them our hometownsWe call them our hometowns

“There are cities where work is a prison and time a goad and love a burden.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

You can do it all by yourselfYou can do it all by yourself

“Art is the only work open to people who can’t get along with others and still want to be special.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Get ’em while they’re hotGet ’em while they’re hot

“Moments of vivid excitement are what make life worth living, moments when a man feels exalted and masterful.  We can get them from drugs, crime and gambling, but the price is rather high.” – Alasdair Gray, Lanark

Old and underwayOld and underway

“I say to you, sir, when I detect that superior look of youth in your eye, that you are wrong: I am not, even now, different from you.  I am as young and stubborn—except for a certain sclerosis of tissue and thought, except for an overt appearance of the hide, which sags and flaps in the wind, except for the bloodshot eyes and the dirty, careless dribblings of egg and whiskey on my shirt bosom and moustache.  I am as young, sir, as you.  I do not feel any different: I still desire—I still know the look of the rosy young flesh of a young girl.  Men were young in my day, too, sir.  Men were poets in my time, sir.  And by the Almighty God, young fellow, they aspired to glory and knowledge and art for art’s bloody sake just as much and with as fine a passion as any of you.  Do not forget that, young man.  We were just as dashing a set of young blades as any of you.” – Joseph Stanley Pennell, The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters

Shields up. We’re going in. Ahead slow, helmsman.Shields up. We’re going in. Ahead slow, helmsman.

“There is something reassuring and even restorative about a voice that is not too encroached upon by the intricacies of the world, anxieties of psychoanalysis, or the implications of a mechanized disenchanted planet. That is to say, the sculpting of the prose itself is not deranged by the catastrophes that surround us, though the catastrophes may or may not be present in the representation of the world. There is stoicism in this model of storytelling. Affability too. Faith in creation. Lack of faith all too often produces an ironizing narration, a distancing of the author from his tools and spawn. Sheepish authorial embarrassment, pointing giddily at the fictitiousness of fictions. Is that a remnant of capitalist, bourgeois prejudice against mere made up stuff stinking of idleness?” — Elvis Bego, “Dr. Aira: In Defense of Short Books”

Literary LevittownsLiterary Levittowns

“Having spent some time lately reading American journals, I would say that much of the writing is of a high caliber, there is plenty of fantastic thinking in fiction out there, but one also notices in too many places something like a common house style. A style learned, pruned from the lectern. Too many writers keep building a clearly programmatic, indoctrinated structure, peopled with programmatic, indoctrinated gestures toward the heart. The prevalence of rhetorical pathos through fiction, a cornucopia of sincerity. Sincerity is prolix. And once that first novel is contemplated, the forests rustle in terror. Here’s another ‘sweating, free-dreaming maniac with another thousand-pager,’ as [Martin] Amis put it.

“Sincerity is inelegant, it doesn’t know condensed articulation. It always ranges exclusively horizontally and settles flat around its subject. It does not and cannot penetrate, though it may try. It may be adequate, polished, but one is tempted to ask: is it necessary? Is it urgent?

“Authentic fiction is not sincere; it transmogrifies fantasy into truth. But truth and sincerity are not synonyms. Fiction wants to leap into the space of meaning and self, even when the setting is panoramic, horizontal. W.G. Sebald, whose books really mostly consist of short prose fictions, is always relentlessly arcing inward this way, and a page of, say, The Emigrants yields more in the way of cerebral stimulation (the heart too is pinched, but not cheaply, not feebly) than a thousand of those other, earnest, sincere ones. The sincere artist itemizes easy facts and turns them into easy truths. Or rather, does not turn them into anything: they stand there naked, never having been dressed.

“And all these educated writers: there is something vulgar about all that competence. Although I’m not sure authentic writing can be taught, it is certainly possible to teach all the right-sounding, writerly, artisanal gestures. Curiously, the preoccupation with Voice produces an amazing amount of very similar narrative voices: all those cute first-person narrators.” — Elvis Bego, “Dr. Aira: In Defense of Short Books”

Infinitely AmericanInfinitely American

“Big books, big Novels, as Martin Amis diagnosed long ago, seem inherently an American addiction. America, vast in space and in ambition, seems to goad its writers to impose a brazen intentionality onto the marketplace. The American writer’s appetite must be omnivorous, his palette the trunk of a sequoia, his cast not smaller than a minor duchy, a perversion of Dostoevsky. And yet how often you read one of those baggy monsters and there’s nothing there but explosions of trivial pleonasm. The imagination slumbers, the talent something that happened to other people. That’s one tendency. On the other hand you have those endless, sentimental, middleclass novels of domestic interaction, a perversion of Chekhov. Whether it is the vastness of the country or its multifariousness, each year brings a thousand thousand-page bricks, each usually a tomb for dead language, and a desiccated, catastrophically pious imagination. For each DeLillo, a thousand of these others, for each McCarthy another thousand tumble forth in unison.

“Byron used to say that he never saw a doctor without thinking, Here’s a man who missed his vocation. For me, a trip to the bookstore does the same, once I’ve read a page or two of almost any of the fat new books huddling on the shelves. So much misplaced ambition. So much banality. Often you see material perhaps sufficient for a five-page story stretched to six hundred of the soporific best.

“Who writes these things?

“Often, it seems, it’s some person burnt out in the workplace, hoping for an easy career change. Imagine, I can sit at home, and get paid to make shit up! And the air thins along with the crowns of trees.

“I also think about all those MFA programs in, gasp, Creative Writing. (Are there other kinds of writing? Even The Da Vinci Code is some sort of creative writing, so why the modifier?) Are they improving or simply flooding the bookstores? Are they too narrow in their catechism? Do we have too many writers?

“I am reminded of that story by Will Self, ‘The Quantity Theory of Insanity,’ and the idea of a finite amount of mental equilibrium. Does talent not figure in the same way? There are only so many good and great writers at any time.

“Let us assume that a thousand new-minted writers exit the universities with their writing diplomas each year. Of these, reasonably, only a fraction can be good, good meaning necessary, the rest adequate. Don’t get me wrong, I think a genuinely gifted writer could use a few years intensely scrutinizing his work with other gifted, literate people. Above all, with other gifted readers. But how many are those? And the art (not the habit) of reading is as endangered in academia as out of it.

“Now, many of the best and most prestigious literary journals are run by MFA programs, edited by MFA writers, filled by MFA writing. Notice the circularity, like in a consummated nightmare.” — Elvis Bego, “Dr. Aira: In Defense of Short Books”

But it’s not a whoreBut it’s not a whore

“Literature, for everything else that it is, is also in the business of pleasure.” — Elvis Bego, “Dr. Aira: In Defense of Short Books”

Now get to itNow get to it

“You have to write the thing you feel is missing from the world, that’s not on the bookshelves, the book that you would want to read if you’d heard about it, the book that you long for. And you have to be really honest about what that is. You can’t necessarily write the book that will earn you the respect of other people who are the guardians of the culture. Because you appointed them to be. That can’t  be the motive. You have to write the book your heart wishes existed.” — Elizabeth Gilbert (from interview by Rachel Khong in Rumpus)

Getting it sorted outGetting it sorted out

“I hold that an attempt to control the Senate on the part of the Executive is subversive of the principles of our Constitution. The Executive department is independent of the Senate, and the Senate is independent of the President. In maters of legislation the President has a veto on the action of the Senate, and in appointments and treaties the Senate has a veto on the President. He has no more right to tell me how I shall vote on his appointments than I have to tell him whether he shall veto or approve a bill that the Senate has passed. Whenever you recognize the right of the Executive to say to a Senator, ‘Do this, or I will take off the heads of your friends,’ you convert this Government from a republic into a despotism. Whenever you recognize the right of a President to say to a member of Congress, ‘Vote as I tell you, or I will bring a power to bear against you at home which will crush you,’ you destroy the independence of the representative, and convert him into a tool of Executive power.” – Stephen A. Douglas, Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas

In the valley of the shadow of youthIn the valley of the shadow of youth

“In the Valley of Youth, through which all wayfarers must pass on their journey from the Land of Mystery to the Land of the Infinite, there is a village where the pilgrim rests and indulges in various excursions for which the valley is celebrated.  There also gather many guides in this spot, some of whom show the stranger all the various points of common interest, and others of whom take visitors to special points from which the views are of peculiar significance.  As time has gone on new paths have opened, and new resting places have been made from which these views are best obtained.  Some of the mountain peaks have been neglected in the past, but of late they too have been scaled, and paths have been hewn out that approach the summits, and many pilgrims ascend them and find that the result is abundantly worth the effort and the time.

“The effect of these several improvements has been a natural and usually friendly rivalry in the body of guides that show the way.  The mountains have not changed, and the views are what they have always been.  But there are not wanting those who say, ‘My mountain may not be as lofty as yours, but it is easier to ascend’; or ‘There are quarries on my peak, and points of view from which a building may be seen in process of erection, or a mill in operation, or a canal, while your mountain shows only a stretch of hills and valleys, and thus you will see that mine is the more profitable to visit.’  Then there are guides who are themselves often weak of limb, and who are attached to numerous sand dunes, and they say to the weaker pilgrims, ‘Why tire yourselves climbing a rocky mountain when here are peaks whose summits you can reach with ease and from which the view is just as good as that from the most famous precipice?’  The result is not wholly disadvantageous, for many who pass through the valley are able to approach the summits of the sand dunes only, and would make progress with greatest difficulty should they attempt to scale a real mountain, although even for them it would be better to climb a little way where it is really worth the effort instead of spending all their efforts on the dunes.

“Then too, there have of late come guides who have shown much ingenuity by digging tunnels into some of the greatest mountains.  These they have paved with smooth concrete, and have arranged for rubber-tired cars that run without jar to the heart of some mountain.  Arrived there the pilgrim has a glance, as the car swiftly turns in a blaze of electric light, at a roughly painted panorama of the view from the summit, and he is assured by the guide that he has accomplished all that he would have done, had he laboriously climbed the peak itself.

“In the midst of all the advocacy of sand-dune climbing, and of rubber-tired cars to see a painted view, the great body of guides still climb their mountains with their little groups of followers, and the vigor of the ascent and the magnificence of the view still attract all who are strong and earnest, during their sojourn in the Valley of Youth.” – David Eugene Smith, The Teaching of Geometry (1911)

FlatlandersFlatlanders

“Just as a being may be imagined as having only two dimensions, and living always on a plane surface (in a space of two dimensions), and having no conception of a space of three dimensions, so we may think of ourselves as living in a space of three dimensions but surrounded by a space of four dimensions.  The flat being could not point to a third dimension because he could not get out of his plane, and we cannot point to a fourth dimension because we cannot get out of our space.  Now what the flat being thinks is his plane may be the surface of an enormous sphere in our three dimensions; in other words, the space he lives in may curve through some higher space without his being conscious of it.  So our space may also curve through some higher space without our being conscious of it.” – David Eugene Smith, The Teaching of Geometry (1911)

A point from which to beginA point from which to begin

“We have enough objects of charity at home, and it is our duty to take care of our own poor and our own suffering, before we go abroad to intermeddle with other people’s business.” – Stephen A. Douglas, Political Debates Between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas

Applied practical geometry (safe for home use)Applied practical geometry (safe for home use)

“An interesting application of the theorem relating to similar triangles is this: Extend your arm and point to a distant object, closing your left eye and sighting across your finger tip with your right eye.  Now keep the finger in the same position and sight with your left eye.  The finger will then seem to be pointing to an object some distance to the right of the one at which you were pointing.  If you can estimate the distance between these two objects, which can often be done with a fair degree of accuracy when there are houses intervening, then you will be able to tell approximately your distance from the objects, for it will be ten times the estimated distance between them.” – David Eugene Smith, The Teaching of Geometry (1911)

It’s not over till it’s overIt’s not over till it’s over

“I shall never forget how you received the news of the secession of South Carolina.  I happened to be in your room with you when the mail was brought in, and when you read of the actual passage of the formal and solemn withdrawal by that State from the Union, you cried like a little child, exclaiming: ‘My God, you Southern people don’t know what you are doing!  Peaceable secession!  There can be no peaceable secession.  Secession means war.  The North will fight you, and fight you hard, and God only knows how or where it will end!’” – from D. F. Boyd letter to General W. T. Sherman, July 17, 1875 (quoted in Memoirs of General W. T. Sherman)