Stuttering & Linguistic Development or Stuttering to Linguistic Development or Stuttering Words or Words Are Stuttering or Stuttering, Just Stuttering

David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, Ghostwritten) is one of those keystone contemporary writers for me, one to whom I often look for inspiration and reminders that there are still modern writers being published whose work is both challenging and satisfying, intellectual and human, entertaining and philosophically concerned. In short, he's one of those writers who I'd prefer reading one of their lesser works than most other writers' best, because even a faltering David Mitchell is superior and more worthwhile a read than a lot of what's out there these days in the big glut of literary acclaim.

To mark the publication of his most recent novel The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I have in queue and am working towards dilligently, he gave an interview with Alec Michod for the splendid gift to literary levelheadedness, San Francisco-based Rumpus; in it, he shed a little personal insight on something about which I've thought for a long time: stuttering, speech impediments in general, and how that affects and/or develops a person's linguistic understanding and, to use a writerly phrase, their inner voice, the vocabulary and the speech going on inside our heads and not the one with which we speak. I've always had a sneaking suspicion that growing up with a pretty nasty stutter instilled in me from a wildly young age a deeper appreciation and thoughtfulness about language, how it works and functions as a mechanism for expression, and how important words and communication are, if simply because I had to pay closer attention to words when reading aloud in class or speaking to people, friends, family, strangers. When I knew certain words or parts of words or whole phrases would be difficult for me to get out, I'd have to find ways to navigate around that, by substituting other words, by altering my pronunciation or rhythm to avoid a total, ten-feet-tall obstructing stammer which would not only render me unintelligible but make me look like an idiot. For a young mind, there's something startling and unjustly unfair in realizing that the words in your head cannot match the words springing from your tongue no matter how hard you will them to do so. The words, in a sense, become much more important to a mind tweaked that way. Communication and lack-of-communication (where our words fail) are much more intimately experienced to a mind and a body tuned that way, in a person who deals with those very things per diem. And if the words cannot come out through our lips the way we want them to, well then we have to resolve to find another mode of communicating. When approached by certain words I'm incapable of pronouncing without embarrassment, the easiest thing to do as a kid was expand my vocabulary--find new ways of saying the same thing. It's no surprise a person like this might find solace in the literary arts, the silent and absorbed processing and conveyance of words during which silence is elemental. All of this might even help to explain why, when I'm writing or when I'm reading (i.e. engaged in a nonverbal sort of communique with the author), I'm so excited and alive in a totality that's much more elusive elsewhere. It's the clearest way for for me to communicate, to express myself, and where, at last, the thoughts I'm expressing accord with the thoughts in my head (for the most part). And assuming how we ourselves communicate with others, an exchange of thoughts and ideas, is one of the many processes by which we understand ourself, this can present a problem; if we have an onerous time effectively expressing ourselves or making our desires and sentiments clear to others, a certain crisis of self can result. We are, after all, social animals, part of whose happiness is derived from our interactions with other social animals caught in the same struggle--escaping loneliness, fleeing a permanently confined existence bunkered within our own heads, in which safety is substituted over genuine connection. This, gladly, can be done through verbal or literary dialogues, but my guess says a combination of both is the most satisfying. Reading Dante or Oscar Wilde and speaking with a friend or a stranger about an important topic are two different beasts, both of which are equally important and both of which can, I believe, help inform a person's sense of belonging and community. There's something equal, although different in nature, in feeling a connectedness (which is a form of interfacing in a way) with a thinker from long before you were alive and engaging a living contemporary person in conversation. And if you're talking to a stranger about Dante and Wilde and how they, the historical writers, may have viewed or written about the contemporary world, well now you're just vibrating that big old string of the cello belonging to collective history and playing a wonderful, soaring tune.

The interview takes it in a couple different directions, (much as I've unexpectedly done here with my small bout of self-cross-examination) but it's all highly fascinating stuff--very intriguing to think about.

Mitchell: There’s always the problem of getting what you’re thinking out into the world, isn’t there? I think possibly genes and certainly environment makes us a walking bundle of archetypes, and as a human and as a writer one of my major preoccupations is incommunication. Isn’t it true how everything contains its opposite? How can you have a knowledge of beauty without knowing what ugliness is? Or, or—do you know what I mean? A phenomenon contains its opposite. To have a knowledge of phenomenon is, by default, to know about the opposite. This leads, among other things, to a fascination with words. We aspire to be master communicators, right? But that must also mean we are deeply versed in non-communication, in fluffing it, in getting it wrong, in duff sentences, in not saying quite what you mean and the consequences of that. Stammering makes me an expert in that. I’ve obviously thought about this link a lot, because one of the questions people ask me a lot is “If you hadn’t stammered, would you be a writer?” I think I would have been, but I would have been a different writer. I wouldn’t have had this theme of incommunication. I can identify at least three ways in which they are related. One is—

Rumpus: Stuttering and writing?

Mitchell: You scan the sentences ahead and you see the danger words, the words you won’t be able to say, and then you re-engineer the sentence to be able to go around it. That’s a practical crash course in sentence construction. That, in turn, leads to a practical crash course in register. If you realize you can’t get out the second syllable “less” in the word “useless,” you substitute “futile.” That might fix the vocal problem, but it creates another problem. If you’re amongst a bunch of thirteen-year-old boys, you can’t say a word like “futile.” Everyone will think you’re mad. But again, it’s bloody useful stuff for a writer. You learn your registers. I mean, there they are, all these fancy words, some of them on high registers and others on less educated registers. If you’re a writer and you use a word like “autodidacticism” to describe a character, it completely saves you from having to mention that that character went to college. As a consequence, you develop a higher vocabulary, because you need substitutes.

Rumpus: You need four different words if you can’t say one, for example.

Mitchell: Precisely. I think—I can’t prove it, but I suspect our interior voices are far richer than our spoken voice. If you are one of those people who speak in perfectly mellifluous, complex sentences, I would humbly suggest you think them instead of saying them. It is, of course, impossible to be able to compare a writer’s inner voice and his spoken voice in the quality of the diction and the grammar, but I like to think that stammerers’ inner voices are going to be far more articulate and sharper than someone who isn’t affected by a speech impediment.

Rumpus: Stammering, then, clearly seems to have contributed to your fluency with different voices. Is that why you’re such an apt literary ventriloquist?

Mitchell: I hear what you’re saying, and here’s a new thought for me: perhaps it’s a craftily manifested wish fulfillment on my part. The times I’ve thought I wish I could speak like that guy, or I wish I could chat somebody up unstutteringly. I wish, I wish, I wish—I wonder if that “I wish” is fuel or a kind of power.

I had a close friend growing up who lived next-door. He too had a speech impediment, not a stutter per se but something else a little more sloppily complicated, a fractioned manner of speaking; he spoke fast, as I did then and tend to still do now, and logjammed. We spent whole chunks of time together, baked to leather under the sun, in trees or half submerged in creek water, chomping through a bag of peaches, our chins sticky and sweet, neither one of us concerned about screwing up our words around each other; and while at times I may not have understood what he was saying nor do I believe he always understood what I was saying (at least without asking for him or myself to repeat something) I think we grasped each other on a much more intuitive level. We understood frustrations and confusions and how to deal with them, and we understood patience and maybe leaving room for and being okay with the messiness of language, which is to say we were beginning to understand what it means to be alive.

Check out the interview in full at The Rumpus' website.

Tempus Fugit

"I wonder if it’s possible to have a second chance at life? I don’t think so. I’m not afraid of death — I’ll just be one of the million, billion grains of sand in the desert…"
Klara Behrens, 83

In 2008, German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta put together this accumlatory project, Life Before Death, twin sets of portraits of terminally ill indviduals before and after they die. In addition to the portraiture, Schels and Lakotta recorded interviews and conversations with the dying men and women over their final days, uncloaking much about both the bitter reality of death and the strangely wonderful (and oft bittersweet) process of being alive. It's a quite chilling and movingly gripping collection. This is, I realized halfway through writing, a collection two years past its prime, but that takes nothing away from the immediacy present therein, no matter what the date is. In fact, my being two years past this collection's prime seems somewhat appropriate given the fatal thematics of the collection. The only thing ever-lasting is death, mortality being the most permanently relevant topic out there. Not the most uplifting set of images but neither are they ignorable or unimportant. These images provide reminders of the brevity and the fragility of the lives we lead, and I'm grateful for the bravery and kindness of the individuals represented here in allowing their most frightening, vulnerable moments to be shown, albeit long after they can see it.

Alcohol & Art

Just in time for the weekend, right here. And no, this has nothing to do with the stupid mythopoeia regarding mostly-in-the-minority self-destructive artists and addiction. Florida State University chemistry labs has been whipping up some gorgeous work for a company called Bevshots, whom quite literally ferment art out of your favorite alcohol and/or cocktail. Below, for instance, is what a little bit of Chablis would look like hung up on one of your walls. Pretty, huh? Right. And tasty. So now you can sip on some Chablis whilst admiring your hung mural of Chablis, discussing with friends both how good this Chablis is in your hand and also how you managed to procure an artistic expression of Chablis, getting all meta in the 21st century and subsequently blowing the rickety minds of everyone within thirty feet of you. 

How they do it: taken at 1000x magnification on old school 35 mm. cameras, this is a labor of love, folks, one in which patience goes beyond virtue into simply a part of the process. In order to get the perfect shot, this can take up to three months and upwards of 300 camera clicks.

Your standard red table wine, looking like fluorescent stems of some kind of beautiful faunal growth.
What we're seeing here are basically crystallized carbohydrates. Now that they've crystallized, they've become full-on sugars and glucose. After squeezing from a pipette a droplet of liquor or cocktail or lager onto a slide, the liquid is then allowed to dry on this airtight container, the drying of which can take up to four weeks alone; once dry, it's then placed for examination under a high-powered microscope with an old school 35 mm. attached. Depending on the number of impurities (pure vodka, for instance, has very few impurities, as compared to a pina colada, which is naturally chockfull of them), the dried constituent parts may fall apart or not dehydrate properly, which accounts for some samples requiring so many attempts.

The Piña Colada, due to its inherent complex sugars and citric acids, behaves like a doll and dries out well, thus it looks spectral when glimpsed through a microscope--winding up here resembling a very alien, very twisted, and very trippy butterfly pattern. Check out how there's almost an origin of left-to-right movement here, the dark brown spot in the top left-hand corner from which the rest of the image sprawls out.

The intense, florid, breezy, wild shapes and kaleidoscopic colors come from the chemists shining light on top and through the bottom of the slide, both of which seem to ignite these potent samples into a whole other realm of colorization, a sinewy world of molecularly psychotropic pigments capable of pleasing both your Fink Floyd-fan friend of your abstract art-fan friend. 
A tasty and refreshing White Russian, languid-streaked and bleary; a devastatingly disoriented image of a planet and its outer atmosphere.

The Irish pale lager is traumatizing in a way, alien and raining apocalyptical brecciated coal.

Check out the rest of them, and there are plenty more fascinating ones, here at Art. Distilled. Oh, and I hope wherever you are you were able to catch the lunar eclipse tonight. I was hoping for the fog to keep away for one night but no such luck. It's a dense topo of ghosts out there right now, murky and pale, foghorns and all. Major solar eclipse coming up in about a month, though, so let's keep our eyes on the skies. 

Thank You, Jennifer Egan

In a discussion with the contributing Rumpus writer Alec Michod, he and the protean fiction writer Jennifer Egan predictably found themselves talking about genre, whether she thinks about genre, what her opinions on genre are if she considers genre at all in her process. After admitting she doesn't gift genre much consideration--as a limiting device--and considers it your standard consumerist selling tool, which she is one hundred percent right in saying, she had this wonderful addition; and if I could shake her hand and say thank you all the way from her native San Francisco I would:

"How about Cervantes? How crazy is Don Quixote? Even nineteenth-century novels, which are supposed to be so staid, they’re actually not. I reread Middlemarch recently. It’s narrated by a really flexible, intrusive, at times quite strange, overbearing, but also very funny and arch narrator, and it’s not even a first-person narrator. Although at times the narrator addresses the reader in the first person. I think if you did that now you’d be perceived as being a little out there. I mean, I do think we’ve gotten really quiet about pushing any limits, all limits, as fiction writers. I would love to see more craziness out there. The novel began as this completely weird outpouring of strangeness. It was there from the beginning. It’s inherent in the form. At least the possibilities are there, but I feel like we’re not exploiting the possibilities as much as we could be. I just want to feel some playfulness happening on the page, and if genre has started to hold people back, then it’s time for genre to disappear. Or change."

Please, please, please, por favor, let there be more craziness out in there in our novelists; let us push the limits a little bit more; let us be brave and write with a little more abandon; let us be a little bit more honest with the very world about which we write: a complex, wild, confusing, messy, terrifying, beautiful, exciting and anything but simplified maelstrom. 

Read the whole interview here. Egan's latest novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad, is out now and demands reading. Put down your beach read and get on a different level.

Camille!

Not a stranger in the least to weirdly surreal and bizarre dreams, most of which have no direct ties to anyone I remotely know, my most recent was tamer than usual but exciting no less. The extent of the dream: Camille Pissarro sent me a text message. Idiot that I am, I didn't open the message for a long time, choosing instead to ride the powerful wave of self-importance in being the fortunate recipient of a text message from the illustrious French impressionist. By the time I finally decided to open the message I woke up, tangled in sheets, furious, to whooshing eyefuls of inflexible historico-reality: Pisarro is long since dead and cannot send text messages. What I wouldn't give to read that goddamn message, though. Not that I believe in any hidden codices in dreams or that it's the subconscious' way of directly addressing the conscious or any of that unfounded dream interpretation sophistry, but I think it'd be interesting to see what I'd imagined a text from Pissarro would say. 

Before my girlfriend left for Rome a few days ago, we were on the topic of dreams. She told me about a juicy little dream she had in which she was stuck in Louise Bourgeois' boudoir, the renowned, idiosyncratic recently deceased sculptor of whom my girlfriend is a massive admirer, and how the closet assumed this otherworldly, Narniaesque closet-of-infinite-proportions aspect, and how at the tail end of the dream Bourgeois kindly reached into her jungle of a closet and handed over a delicately bewitching orange blouse which belonged to her, and the tender, sweet moment of irreality that this was but also how damnably necessary it and other sleep-enshrined moments like this are, where our irresistibly tireless and unremitting imaginations conjure up these lucid, bleary moments where possibilities and impossibilities shatter against each other. Even her voice, as she was retelling me these details of the dream, rose to a heightened, honeyed, lost-in-joyousness quality which was so haltingly inspiring and gorgeous. 

Bourgeois' Arch of Hysteria 1993, Polished Bronze, Tate Modern

I say necessary because I sincerely believe dreams are necessary, vital aspects of human beings. Whether we remember them or not, I think we need them, as a form of gray matter Olympics, cerebral exercise, a refreshing dive into a deep sea of murky relations after which we might be just a little bit better off in acting out our day to day, perhaps boringly real lives. Enjambed to this, also interesting to me are the ways in which not only art but the artists themselves, their countenances, infiltrate our lives and run amok over our dreams and provide a strange betrothal between those two things, so often in ways of which we can't even be entirely aware; and then there's the inverse of this relationship, where and how art and artists are influenced and fueled by their dreams, both daydreams and nocturnal ones; how art (the best of it, at least) resides in this liminal category between dream and reality: something simultaneously strange and alien and familiar, just the way it has to be, perfectly normal. There's a whole dialogue going on there with, I think, the cumulative effect being the creative state, a limbic somewhere between abeyant dream and loosely controlled consciousness; the creative process we wind up with is this war-torn intercourse, and the work produced between these two things is this abandoned, six-limbed freak of a child that just seems to somehow make sense, which nobody wants for themselves but about which everybody wants to know more, and so we read, we view, we listen, we offer ourselves to whatever medium the art takes and, through it, seek to understand more of ourselves. 

I don't want to imagine a life without dreams. If we need water during the day to survive, then it's dreams we require at night to keep us alive. From them we wake up believing in the philosophy of More, which states: we are capable of so much more; we have yet to explore so very much; in our world we may still yet find new methods of thinking about and approaching our lives; there are more solutions that we haven't found than there are problems; we must never stop thinking, must never stop inventing the illogical; we are not finished, not even close.

Epitaphs

If you're not a David Foster Wallace fan--which, of course, you should be--you most likely won't enjoy this book, although you might find some insights into the creation of his works and his goals, which may or may not alter the hitherto-formed opinion of him: Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is the entire transcript of a five day interview with then Rolling Stone reporter now novelist David Lipsky who was commissioned by Rolling Stone to interview the thirty-four year old writer on the last few days of his Infinite Jest book tour. The interview, while completed, was eventually axed and never included in the pages of Rolling Stone. This is a good thing, especially considering the fate of David. This is not an interview and these are not words and passages that should be lost inside the monthly pages of a culture magazine; they belong in a book. These are seminal words by a seminal author from a exquisitely grand, humane mind and heart. 

Already two-hundred and sixty pages in and nearly finished, I was hooked instantaneously. The result here is that we are afforded an extremely intimate and well-handled portrait of David Foster Wallace at his height and can see him at a moment of such hype and infamy, when he himself was beyond a little rattled by all the furor, for who he really was and will be remembered as, and hear him discuss his work, what he wanted for it, and why he made the authorial decisions that he did; beyond that, we get a human rendering of David, who in all the critical commentary and endorsement surrounding him can, I feel, become lost; and it's the human side of David Foster Wallace that is the most important because, as far as avant-garde writing goes, it's the human side of things that he never lost sight of. I can't encapsulate everything they have discussed thus far nor can I summarize what they will go on discuss; they discuss everything, leave it at that. The result here is that we are afforded a passing glimpse into the humanity of a man we are all a little bit lesser-off in not having around anymore. The dynamics of this relationship are wonderful and touching, in being able to watch these two, both young budding novelists at the time, evolve from the stilted roles of interviewer and subject that can at times seem like a tactician match between two tense people thrown together, each trying to gain an upper hand, into an honest to goodness friendship full of warmth and kindness. Knowing the way in which this story ends, not this novel, but this life; knowing the way in which David's life ended, makes this read one of the saddest and most moving things I've read in years.

"If you can think of times in your life that you've treated people with extraordinary decency and love, and pure uninterested concern, just because they were valuable as human beings. The ability to do that with ourselves. To treat ourselves the way we would treat a really good, precious friend. Or a tiny child of ours that we absolutely loved more than life itself. And I think it's probably possible to achieve that. I think part of the job we're here for is to learn how to do that. I know that sounds a little pious."

There are multitudes of moments like the one above, where Dave manages to put together a passage in which he just nails certain contemporary issues that face us as a generation of people, of thinkers, of artists, of writers, or just simply a generation of human beings. He can seemingly wax extemperaneously as well on pop culture and cinema as he can on high art, the power of fiction, and what it feels like, what it means, to be alive in the world right now, to use one of Dave's often repeated expressions, what it feels like on our nerve endings, on our nervous system, to be alive in this world at this moment, a moment in which we are incessantly bombarded by five hundred thousand bits of sensory feedback overload and information-laden bursts from all directions. This is required fucking reading. As is everything DFW ever wrote. 

Addendum:

Book finished. Book swirlingly heavy-hitting and superb. Migratory boatloads of quotes to copy down here. Too many. Too much general goodness. Goodness, quotes on what? Quotes on art. Quotes on love. Quotes on fame. On anxiety. On fear. On pain. On joy. On music. On Alanis Morisette. On Bush and "Glycerine" and how it's a complete rip-off (I knew it!) of a Brian Eno song but still a fairly okay song. On work ethics. On fiction. On the power of fiction. On the things that fiction can do that no other art form can do. 

String Theory is a proposed hypothesis that attempts to be a quantified theory of everything, the world condensed to a unified, understandable equation. Thus far, there's no evidence of this, nor any way to observe it even if there was. Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, however, is as close as you can come to a literary String Theory, a conversational theory of everything. 

This is Often

For as long as I can remember, my life has been a constant chess match with a depression of varying levels of hunger--depression being the frozen-faced Russian champion, me the jaded hopeful only trying to score a good move or two and secure a few days of clear-sky-headed freedom here or there. 

An understatement: I'm not very good at chess.

Vonnegut, perhaps in literary and gloomy commiseration, has always helped me along: 

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

As has Beckett:

"Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

There's a reason I get upset when someone makes the insensitive claim that books and art have never helped or changed anyone or anything--because it's soundly false. 

Born Free

M.I.A does it again. Long known for incorporating sociological and political themes and well-written, introspection-heavy lyrics into her otherwise buoyantly surging, driving, and melodic pop music, the first single and video pulled from the UK genre-smasher takes all that to new levels. The video below is, without a doubt, not safe for work unless you're into that field. Otherwise, the song itself is spotlessly clean. 

Obviously the video provokes more questions than it answers, as all good art should. Without going into a whole bunch of biographical information on M.I.A (whose real name is Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam and whose family's native country is the politically-fractured Sri Lanka, in which she spent some of her youth), the song and the video alone place its crosshairs on what seems to be an all-too-human tendency to erect barricades between fellow homo sapiens, to not only purposefully but cruelly delineate lines of normalcy and otherness between ourselves as an entire race of people. To say "we are right" and "that is wrong." The use of redheads as the symbol for this otherness is wry as well as terrifying. Of course all sorts of examples come to mind when watching the video: the Shoa, American slavery, genocides in South America, in early North America, Columbus' entire life, the Tamil struggle in M.I.A's own native Sri Lanka, present day Darfur. Even the Japanese-American internment here in the US. Few countries have been immune to this. The list of genocides and similarly-based oppression is, sadly, as long as time itself. Even Ireland, amongst Catholics and Protestants, the need to demarcate between acceptable and unacceptable--whatever that may end up being--seems integral. And yes, you can be sure that there are direct parallels to the recent immigration law passed in Arizona in which failure to carry identification is now a crime and those "suspected" of being in the country illegally are fair game to be arrested, detained. I'm not sure what kind of criteria is going to be used to constitute the basis of this round-up policy but it sure as shit doesn't sound empirical. How does an official decide someone "looks" like an illegal immigrant? 

So the question I've heard is what are we, then, to make of M.I.A.'s deliberately graphic video? What answers does the video provide? None. It's exposing. This is the prime difference between politics and art. Politics attempts to profess sagacity on topics whether it has this or not, a hardheaded surety which can often lead to violent acts such as this; art, on the other hand, asks questions, investigates, takes a camera with which it peers into the dark and murky unknown and attempts not to solve the confusion but show it, let those haunting questions and the accompanying images linger--because if they are done right they do all the work. There's a certain absurdity here, horrifying no less, but an absurdity that dominates, which makes the actions of these soldiers all the more terrifying. And still, it's an absurdity that doesn't seem so far. A ridiculousness that we seemed predisposed to laugh at in theory but somehow know we are every bit capable of such monstrosity unless we get on our feet and keep it from happening. 

Perspective

Speaking of Voices I Miss

Remember the days when Dave Chappelle was easy to find? When his half-hour comedy show or a replaying of one of his sidesplitting standup performances was more or less a guarantee somewhere? Splendid times, no? He still does standup now, quite a lot if I recall correctly, but the days of finding constantly new incarnations of Dave at any given instant are behind us; for that, I think we're gravely underfed of the kind of biting comedy we need. Below he gives a great bit ripping into new-agey manifesto The Secret and the tomfoolery and downright dangerous ignorance of this whole "positive thinking" spiritual self-help movement. 

A Poetic King of Literary Jazz

In Dave Eggers' extraordinary introduction to Barthelme's Forty Stories he writes down a pretty brilliant insight, one I've often found cropping up in myself when going through Don B's electrifying canon. He writes: "I had a tough time reading this book this time around, because it's one of the few collections that inspires me to the degree that every sentence I read makes me want to stop and write something of my own. He fires all my synapses and connects them in new ways. He sends a herd of wildebeest through my mind. It's a whole jungle full of animals, really, every color and shape, and he sends them all over my brain, screaming, defecating, fornicating."

Barthelme's fiction brims with possibilities, overflows with them. It is rebellious, defiant, inviting, hysterical, absurd, sad, life-affirming, and always moving. In every story--every sentence, every word--he demonstrates with aplomb what can be done within the framework of fiction, how much room there is for exploration of the form, how limitless and how kinetic it is, taking the question "What is a story?" and--rather than blowing it out of the water--he decides to drown it there instead, bloodlessly getting rid of such an outrageous question. "What is a story?" What is a human being? We shouldn't accept cookie-cutter answers to these complex questions, which demand multiple formulations and variations.

Sadly, Eggers also hits on another precision of thought, this one more disheartening, regarding the current state of the publishing industry. He begins the introduction asking a question: What would become of Donald Barthelme if he were to happen today, "if he were to burst onto the scene in 2004 or 2005 or thereabouts...what kind of reception would he receive?"

His short answer is clownish yet bitingly true: "People would be curious. Then they would probably be more or less dismissive. They might even club him in the street, using clubs meant for seals." His elaborative answer is less frolicsome, even more true: "We live in serious times, and though this is not Donald Barthelme's fault, he would pay dearly for it. The fact is that work like Don B's--which is playful, subtle, beautiful, and more like poetry (in its perfect ambivalence toward narrative) than almost any prose we have--would be seen today as frivolous, as unserious. There is in most quarters of mainstream fiction a newspapering process going on, wherein stylistic deviations are disallowed, where innovations in style are seen as a sign of disengagement. When reading contemporary work with distinctive styles, some readers become impatient and most critics become enraged. Tell us the story, they say. Just tell it to us, get it across, and get it over with. Spare us the frills."

Remember that Don B was, in his time, published in the some of the biggest of the big literary magazines. Today, the likelihood of that happening is suspect. Barthelme might have indeed found a publisher today, but would it be as robustly mainstream as it was then? Unlikely. Once again, Eggers, who was just on fire in this intro: "Things are different in this century, thus far. There is not much time for things that don't announce themselves and make fairly clear linear sense. And how often did Barthelme make clear linear sense? How often did his stories have a beginning, middle, and end? How often did he tell a story in a goddamn simple and easy way? Maybe once or twice, when he forgot himself."

Reading Barthelme is fraught with difficulties--but not the difficulties one would expect after reading all this--because, quite like Eggers, sometimes I just want to read Barthelme and not constantly feel the need to do writing of my own. Bathelme makes me want to write and write. Every sentence of his, the elasticity, the quantum leap of them, makes me want to write three or four or ten thousand of my own. But as far as distractions go, that's got to be one of the most welcome. Barthelme is the kind of reading experience that reminds one why we read--and why we write--in the first place: not simply to replicate or recapture experience, but to redefine it, to irradiate it. 

Thinking Tangentially

On parsing the similitudes between Klee and Walser, both being Swiss, I went ahead and dug through some of the Kardinsky-influenced, Bauhaus and surrealist master's quotations on art, life, and the convergence thereof. This, I adore:

"Nature is garrulous to the point of confusion, let the artist be truly taciturn."

Among many other fantastic characteristics (his musicality, his childlike sense of humor), Klee's use of and theories on color are most satisfying:

The Paul Klee of Prose

At the excited suggestion of one of my mentors, I've been reading the dismally little-known but incredibly talented, "bewitched genius" (Newsweek) Robert Walser, the Swiss-German writer whose uncanny way of looking at the world and metaphysical modernism was a precursor and an inspiration to historical and modern writers alike, all the way from Kafka and Christian Morgenstern to Max Goldt and W.G. Sebald. Regarding Walser, the lauded Herman Hesse put it simply: "If he had a hundred thousand readers, the world would be a better place."

What's refreshing about Walser (and there's a lot that's refreshing about Walser) is he seems to be equally at home and adept at writing three page flash fiction fables or anecdotes as he does writing longer stories and novels, which makes reading him at times a triple-layered experience, as each form presents a different style and a different way of storytelling and as a result a different emotional response from the reader. It's quite chameleonic and markedly different from many contemporary writers, who seem grounded in one form, one style--hell, even one story--and wary of veering away from that.

This short piece is the entirety of a story entitled "Nervous", a one paragraph block of interiority and slightly altered repetitive thoughts, a determined and flawed declaration of self, a tender, honest, and fragile introspection of aging:

"I am a little worn out, raddled, squashed, downtrodden, shot full of holes. Mortars have mortared me to bits. I am a little crumbly, decaying, yes, yes.I am sinking and drying up a little. I am a bit scalded and scorched, yes, yes. That's what it does to you. That's life. I am not old, not in the least, certainly I am not eighty, by no means, but I am not sixteen anymore either. Quite definitely I am a bit old and used up. That's what it does to you. I am decaying a little, and I am crumbling, peeling a little. That's life. Am I a little bit over the hill? Hmm! Maybe. But that doesn't make me eighty, not by a long way. I am very tough, I can vouch for that. I am no longer young, but I am not old yet, definitely not. I am aging, fading a little, but that doesn't matter; I am not yet altogether old, though I am probably a little nervous and over the hill. It's natural that one should crumble a bit with the passage of time, but that doesn't matter. I am not very nervous, to be sure, I just have a few grouches. Sometimes I am a bit weird and grouchy, but that doesn't mean I am altogether lost, I hope. I don't propose to hope that I am lost, for I repeat, I am uncommonly hard and tough. I am holding out and holding on. I am fairly fearless. But nervous I am, a little, undoubtedly I am, very probably I am, possibly I am a little nervous. I hope that I am a little nervous. No, I don't hope so, one doesn't hope for such things, but i am afraid so, yes, afraid so. Fear is more appropriate here than hope, no doubt about it. But I certainly am not fear-stricken, that I might be nervous, quite definitely not. I have grouches, but I am not afraid of the grouches. They inspire me with no fear at all. 'You are nervous,' someone might tell me, and I would reply cold-bloodedly, 'My dear sir, I know that quite well, I know that I am little worn out and nervous.' And I would smile, very nobly and coolly, while saying this, which would perhaps annoy this other person a little. A person who refrains from getting annoyed is not yet lost. If I do not get annoyed about my nerves, then undoubtedly I still have good nerves, it's clear as daylight, and illuminating. It dawns on me that I have grouches, that I am a little nervous, but it dawns on me in equal measure that I am cold-blooded, which makes me uncommonly glad, and that I am blithe in spirit, although I am aging a little, crumbling and fading, which is quite natural and something I therefore understand very well. "You are nervous," someone might come up to me and say. 'Yes, I am uncommonly nervous,' would be my reply, and secretly I would laugh at the big lie. "We are all a little nervous," I would perhaps say and laugh at the big truth. If a person can still laugh, he is not yet entirely nervous, if a person can keep calm when he hears some distress he is not yet entirely nervous. Or if someone came up to me and said: 'Oh, you are totally nervous ,' then quite simply I would reply in nice polite terms: 'Oh, I am totally nervous, I know I am.' And the matter would be closed. Grouches, grouches, one must have them, and one must have the courage to live with them. That's the nicest way to live. Nobody should be afraid of his little bit of weirdness. Fear is altogether foolish. "You are very nervous!"

'Yes, come by all means and calmly tell me so! Thank you!'

That, or something like it, is what I'd say, having my gentle and courteous bit of fun. Let man be courteous, warm, and kind, and if someone tells him he's totally nervous, still there's no need at all for him to believe it."

(The above story was taken from New York Review Books Classics' Selected Stories: Robert Walser, March 2002, NYC)

Also, incidentally, as I wrote that story out to instrumentalist artists Balmorhea's record All is Wild, All is Silent, the seven minute heart-swell song "Truth" came on, and the combined effect of those two tasks was fucking exhilarating.

Screaming Without Screaming

Berkeley historically has a great film series; this year has been no different. Beginning on January 27, they've been currently running an African Film Series that went until last night, February 24, showing a different film each week (this is only one aspect to their film series; they've got plenty more going on). The two films I recently saw there were astoundingly rich and moving and, of course, visually stunning. The first was Movement (R)evolution and the second one Nora; both were focused on the contemporary dance movement borne out of the young generation of Africans hailing from all different parts of the continent, wrestling with how to move modern African Dance forward. It was so wonderful to hear them speak not just about dance as an art form and a means of storytelling but of the unavoidable way these dances are tied into their countries, their continent, their politics, their traditions,their entire formulation of identity, and most importantly their future. 

The second film, Nora (winner of all sorts of awards), features one of the main dancers from the first film in a 35 minute dance-poem quatrain infused with brightness and energy that focuses on her youth, her life, and the events that eventually brought her to New York City. The cinematography and the imagery and the colors in this - not to mention the choreography - were quite literally amazing. Nora's a magnificent artist and a dancer; she plays herself, her mother, and her father, and the performance is consummate. Both of these films are incredibly necessary to watch. It was haunting and touching to watch and listen to these dancers discuss the history (national and continental) they were trying to tackle with some of these films -- genocide, slavery, wars of liberation, violence and injustice, all things the US knows all too well -- and to hear them wrestle with these notions of identity formed through country or nation or by rejecting these ideas; it's what gives this film such verve -- the raw emotion and the brave way these young artists are going about their passions. The central question at the heart of these film is: who is going to speak for Africa? It seems that so often when we hear about Africa we're hearing about it from an outsider, a face in the news. The answer that these films are shouting is "Africa must speak" and these silent, fluid, soft, punishing, excited, loving, angry, brutal, and delicate movements are their words. 

One of the dancers from the first film had such a brilliant quote I just had to put it down here. They were talking about dance as art and the body as a tool for expression, how the body is a direct source of identity and how it speaks for you even if you never utter a word, and how ultimately to be tied to a country or a national identity is a potentially flimsy, corrosive, insubstantial, and dangerous way of being:

"Perhaps my only true country is my body." 

Vingt-quatre minutes magnifiques.

Upon the release of their sophomore record (which is fantastic), Vampire Weekend gave a performance for Vincent Moon's Les Soirées de poche series of one-take recordings, which is sort of a tangential direction of some of his other one-take films. I'm not shy about saying that I regard what Vincent is doing as brilliant, in an almost obvious, "why didn't anyone else think of this? " kind of way; and this further demonstrates his beyond-secure position as a beacon, a stalwart, and a watermark of fantastic taste in the independent music world. As music videos themselves witness their slow demise into obscurity, Vincent Moon is stealing their last breaths and giving us something more, something infinitely improved, and something that digs at that moist spot of our hearts where we love to be dug. This is one of those Parisian loft concerts that makes you (or me, at least) want move to Europe immediately. So very amazing. Viewing this should a requirement for breathing.



Please, please, please visit and support Vincent Moon's projects. They're so fucking necessary in our world, which seems to do everything in its power to enforce a sterile, joyless, connectionless existence on us.
La Blogotheque
Les Concerts À Emporter
Les Nuits de Fiume
Les Soirées de Poche

Everlasting Desire

Normally I wouldn’t tack up any of my own personal writing here, but I recently did an exercise with a group of writers that was interesting and thought-provoking enough for me to mention, and I figured what the hell: it was a simple exercise, not an attempt at brilliance. Short and weak enough that I don’t really care, I’ll throw her on up here. The exercise is worth considering 

What was the first thing you can remember asking for as a child? Write about that, either through fiction, poetry, or fuck it - paint a picture. Art's pliant; whatever your medium, work it. What did you want? Why did you want it? What did it look like, taste like, sound like, feel like, etcetera. And did you get it? If so, was it worth it? And if not, then what? We’re social animals. As animals, we're marked by our desires. Pretty much all religion attempts to put a muzzle on desire, but they're part of who we are, earthly and humane and carnal desires. These may or may not be more substantial and impressive than the desires of, say, your standard housedog. Nevertheless, we, as people, don’t ever stop yearning, which can be both a good thing and a bad thing depending on where the crosshairs of our desires tend to gravitate. If there's an American author who wrote about desires in just the precise way, it's Kerouac, who said both "“My fault, my failure, is not in the passions I have, but in my lack of control of them” and “all human beings are also dream beings. Dreaming ties all mankind together," encompassing both the necessity for and the pitfalls of desire. I don’t need much in the way of confirmation that I’m a little bit (quite so) bizarre, but this certainly did the job. For the life of me I couldn’t actually remember any things, as in objects or items or other trinkets typically procured through a pecuniary exchange that I asked for; I did, however, remember asking for other things, slightly more impalpable and therefore impossible requests. Quite clearly I remembered the first thing I desperately wanted. To this day, I still think this is an important question.

“Space. Is there a way you can lower it down, like a big dark flag, the kind we have outside school?” I roved my eyes over them both: mom's face smaller than ever, round, stripped of makeup, and severe; my father's vice-like, narrow, an unkempt dusting of gray covering the skin of his chin that had softened with the onset of his fiftieth year. “Can you, can anyone, please bring me space." To drive home that I was serious, I had to keep looking around, back and forth between them. "Up there," I pointed, "haul it down here?” At six years old, I wanted space—as in an outer inner world, as in cosmological infinitude, as in room to breathe, as in dead and broken banana-colored stars hanging from the detritus coat hangers of a distant galaxy, as in my own room. They wanted me to clarify, always be clearer. A family (meaning the men) maxim: A man must be direct, like a gritty brick to the skull; he knows what he wants, but moreover, how to articulate it. “How would you measure it?” my father asked. Space? I hardly knew what he meant.  “How many teaspoons will it take?” my mother wondered, already reaching into one of her many silverware-clinking drawers glinting from the sun storming through the open windowsill. The sun, from space. “I don't think I have enough,” she admitted, her voice worn by pity to an entropic murmur. “We can't go to the store,” my father reminded us, glancing from the want ads to where I sat knees-to-chest on the kitchen floor digging my fingernails into cracks set deep in the wooden planks wounded by dropped knives and plates and other bluntly shaped objects that my father swore would set us back thousands, maybe millions, “not until next month.” Space. I pined for space. How could I adequately explain this, at that age, without sounding insane? Even now, how can I? Between matter and nothing, between walls and openness, between rutted pastures and solitary confinement, between a vacuum of darkness and a vortex of scarce-but-enough luminescence, I wanted space. I said, “Can you bring down space? I want to sleep next to it to him to her—to space.” 

On Life:

Few producers and directors, living or deceased, have quite as laureled and enshrined of a cinematic catalogue as Stanley Kubrick. From this writer's perspective, not one of his films is a throwaway and even his worst is metric tons better and more resonant than many modern filmmakers' productions. One peek at the indexes of utter tripe sold and mass-marketed into multi-million dollar grossing spectacles and it's almost disheartening to know that at one time serious movies had a serious place in the realm of Hollywood; now, their niche is more difficult to maintain and even harder to find - especially if you don't live in a large city where movies expecting to gain far too little for their effort are shown in smaller, historically-reputable theaters. Just for an example, Soderbegh's 2008 biopic Che starring Benecio Del Toro, which received its fair share of glowing reviews and awards, saw close to zero advertising and even less time spent in the few theaters gracious and venturesome enough to house it; on the other hand, James Cameron's Pocahontas and Midworld ripoff Avatar gets pumped with marketing and is still enjoying its insanely popular run in theaters. I realize in America a movie about Ernesto Guevara and by extension the historical facts surrounding the communism of the time might not have a wide appeal, but the point remains: what's contemporarily regarded as important and salient in this country, quite frankly, simply is not important or salient. Philosophically, Kubrick was also one of the most brutally honest and direct; he throws no punches, refuses to shy away from certain ignoble human truths, doesn't cater to any standardized Hollywood escapism tropes, and is uncompromising with regards to these characteristics.  An interesting facet to his work as a whole: all but his first two films were adapted from novels and he was known to write his screenplays in collabo with other writers, usually novelists. To be sure, Kubrick's work is not entertainment for entertainment's sake. But is that all we want? Is the only thing we want, to quote another bad movie, "to be entertained?" or do we seek more from such a golden medium? The above quote is as representative of Kubrick and his work as I can think of and in my opinion is one of the bravest, most responsible, admirable, and electrifying perspectives on life one can string together.

Kubrick's career began with a photography job at Look magazine seized while he was still in his late teens, where the cinematographic skills he would learn there would greatly inform his future filmmaking and visual aesthetic. His poor grades in high school precluded all hope for him to seek higher education of any kind; he didn't need it. 

L'heure est grave

Arcade Fire, whose husband and wife founders have strong familial connections with Haiti, has been active in helping the country for years. On their website they recently posted a charity outlet through which you can also help that has a guaranteed pipeline into Haiti. Partners in Health is a non-profit health care organization that has been working on projects in Haiti since the late eighties. Donate. Every five dollars helps. This is not the time for sympathy, thoughts, and prayers; this is the time for action. Donate. A little bit. 

http://www.arcadefire.com/

http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti

They wrote the song "Haïti" for their debut record back in 2004. I doubt they'll ever play nor will anyone ever hear it quite the same. 

Drawn-Out Intervals of Engrossing Boredom

New Scientist recently wrote an excellent piece on the  truth behind the excitement commonly associated and expected in scientific exploration.  The inside scoop revealed? It's boring. Astonishing discoveries aside, "Science is not a whirlwind dance of excitement, illuminated by the brilliant strobe light of insight. It is a long, plodding journey through a dim maze of dead ends. It is painstaking data collection followed by repetitious calculation. It is revision, confusion, frustration, bureaucracy and bad coffee. In a word, science can be boring." 

What immediately struck me in these opening paragraphs and caused me to reread them and by extension the rest of the article in a different mode of thought, was how analogous this was to art, to writing, fiction in particular (but only in particular because that's where my preoccupations are aimed by default and obsession). Books, like the scientific discovery (aren't books discoveries?), like the new knowledge or insight into humanity gained (can't and don't books provide both of these?), are the embodiment of stimulation, intellectual hunger and sated curiosity, filling those fortunate enough to read with a sense of the thrilling exploration of self, society, and world. Behind the pages and behind the covers and behind the sentences, for the artist, things aren't quite the same.

Sure, there is excitement in the process; there has to be, there must be. If there isn't exhilaration somewhere in the process, the praxis of writing daily, then you're doing it wrong. A colleague of mine recently put it this way: "process must be fun." One must find a way to adore and take from that boredom and frustration a kind of hunter's patient anticipation, hungry for the find, constantly searching. Without a doubt, though, the process can be a painstaking one filled with, as the article pointed out, dead ends, revision, confusion, bad coffee, long and plodding journeys marked with precipitous highs and hollow, lonely lows; on the other hand, when things are rolling, the adrenaline soars, pulls down clouds, a world-birthing joy. But it is, to use a well-worn cliche, a labor of love. Like science, all good art is an exploration, an experiment with the unknown that may or may not prove successful. Before an author can even begin to worry if his or her book will be critically successful or commercially successful, or even published, the author must worry whether or not everything will come together, whether the variables will add up and work, whether the experiment (because what is a book or a poem if not an artistic experiment?) will come to fruition, at least to the artist's designs. Characters come into the story that never spark to life the way they were envisioned and are axed; the point of view isn't working so it gets changed, a solitary sentence receives a day's worth of assiduous care just to make it sounds right and (one can only hope) carries the intended meaning. Hemingway wrote some of his endings thirty to forty times.

Somehow, the idealism behind this idea of a finished product and unleashing a glossy-covered book upon the world needs to meet with the blue-collar reality that it requires tireless work and effort; and it's not always going to be constant flood of intellectual breakthroughs, philosophical and human revelations, and worldly candlelight.That only comes by way of going through this "boredom", which isn't quite the same kind of boredom as, say, watching celebrities dance on television; that's an existential, purpose-questioning boredom. Much different. Boredom isn't even quite the right word. It's more of a murkiness that grabs hold of its victim, containing both moments of unharnessed wonder and seemingly impassable hardships. 

A few description in the article regarding astronomers as being most familiar with this kind of drudgery resonated with me. Astronomers, famous for "the long stare", pry patiently into the cosmos, waiting, waiting, waiting all with the hopes of snagging a glimpse of something spectacular, a supernova, looking through the lens of telescope to spot an exploding star, the wispy tail of a meteor burning across the sky, anything, without ever knowing if they will in fact ever be so fortunate.Metaphorically, this sounds similar to the job of an artist - except the artist doesn't have to wait. They can succeed where the astronomer is helpless; they can create their own supernova, their own galaxies, their own cosmic vibrations and electromagnetic spectra of whatever it is they want to shed light upon. 

None of this is to imply that science and art are complete equals; obviously, science serves to us certain things that art can never hope to do. Art won't cure any epidemics. The two do, however, stem from a similar root: an unquenchable thirst for knowledge; an endless series of questions about the world and our place in it and all that is entailed with us, our emotions, our aspirations, our fears, our morals, our decisions, our politics, our endeavors, everything; and a tenacious curiosity. In short, to push the envelope ever further so that we may better understand us, this heart-stopping perplexity we find ourselves thrown into, life. Together, they are a twin-chambered lantern with which we rifle through the folds, layers, and dark corners of the universe, our planet, and its people. The article, and Marie Curie, sum things up nicely:

"But here's the surprise. The Curies actually enjoyed their work. 'We were very happy," Marie wrote. "We lived in a preoccupation as complete as that of a dream."

Don't Read in Airports

Allow me to expound and clarify: Don't read in airports at six in the morning before moving across the country or even during the ensuing flight while being chained down into painful lethargy by a nasty hangover with cephalalgic tendencies. Or if you must read in those conditions, pick up something light, something easy, a book that's tantamount to a soothing breeze blowing through your hair, a book about two people falling in and out and in and out of love by a beach and at the end someone expectedly dies - in short, a book so transparent and immaterial you'll forget you ever read it. 

Don't, on the other hand, try to read a potentially wondrous, indescribably beautiful and heart-rending book by an author who proves just how flexible fiction can be and how much can be accomplished with ingenuity and gusto between the covers of a book while at the same doing something completely different with the novel form. The book? The People of Paper. The author? Salvador Plascencia, of Greater Los Angeles. For whatever reason, when I first opened this book almost two years ago, despite the feeling that I should be loving this book, that I should be obsessed with this book, I read through it on that flight in a blur and upon finishing, my reaction was a nonplussed one. Reading it once again now, under much better circumstances conducive, I was indeed consumed with the book and offered it wavelets upon wavelets of apologies.A truly wonderful read, a joy, and an exciting moment for contemporary literature.

I'm loath to get into the book because I think it's something that you just have to read and experience on your own but I will provide two things: In the most recent issue of Poets & Writers they listed Plascencia as one of the top 50 most inspiring writers living today (joining the ranks of Haruki Murakami, Cormac McCarthy, Dave Eggers, Anne Carson, John Ashberry, Toni Morrison,Joan didion, Thomas Pychon, CD Wright, among many laudable others which I'll post later in full) At 28, take that for what you will; and a quote from Salvador himself grabbed from an interview he gave to  BOMB magazine with Max Benavidez on the structure of his book, the somewhat comical state of publishing, and the necessity for the artist to do whatever is required for the story he or she is trying to tell: 

"As far as the physical appearance of the book goes: “design” is often taken to mean something that happens after the writing. And, without a doubt, the people at McSweeney’s are great designers in that sense, but the graphic and layout elements within the narrative are not just decorative. The columns, the blackouts, serve an integral narrative function. You can’t lay outThe People of Paper in a standard format. It doesn’t work. Harcourt, who is doing the paperback, had to use a larger trim size to make the book work. That was really exciting, that the physical object of the book had to stretch to accommodate the story.

What I find extremely interesting is the apprehension toward typography and design by many critics. You hear people say, sarcastically, Call me old-fashioned but I like my novels with words. The irony is, if you’re familiar with print culture and history, a book consisting of pure prose on a single column is a fairly recent development that has more to do with the standardization of printing presses and lazy publishers than literary tradition. There are limits to what prose can do, and sometimes it’s not a metaphor or lyricism that you need. Sometimes what the page needs is a darkened square. Lawrence Sterne taught us this in the mid-1700s."