raccoon : notes and scavengings

Eigenradio is a project of MIT's Brian Whitman that performs real-time analysis on dozens of radio stations and then spits out a computerized fusion (or statistical distillation?) of what it hears. The end result resembles a constantly-mutating piece of avant-garde electronica, shot through periodically with nearly-recognizable shards of contemporary pop music. Totally brilliant.

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Saturday, November 29, 2003 ::

11:48 PM ::

american rites, manners and customs

Guests in town, a birthday, and a trip to California, where I stayed with some of my oldest and most beloved friends.

Had the opportunity, while out there, to see the Diane Arbus retrospective at SF MOMA, which I really enjoyed. The best thing about the show was the (expertly selected) excerpts from her letters, journals, and other writings, which really led me to a new assessment of Arbus' body of work.

One particularly interesting piece of supplementary material was a grant proposal she sent to the Guggenheim Museum, to study "American Rites, Manners, and Customs":

"I want to photograph the considerable ceremonies of our present because we tend while living here and now to perceive only what is random and barren and formless about it. While we regret that the present is not like the past and despair of its ever becoming the future, its innumerable inscrutable habits lie in wait for their meaning. I want to gather them, like someone's grandmother putting up preserves, because they will have been so beautiful.
There are the Ceremonies of Celebration (the Pageants, the Festivals, the Feasts, the Conventions) and the Ceremonies of Competition (Contests, Games, Sports), the Ceremonies of Buying and Selling, of Gambling, of the Law and the Show; the Ceremonies of Fame in which the Winners Win and the Lucky are Chosen or Family Ceremonies or Gatherings (the Schools, the Clubs, the Keetings). Then there are the Ceremonial Places (The Beauty Parlor, The Funeral Parlor or, simple The Parlor) and Ceremonial Costumes (what Waitresses wear, or Wrestlers), Ceremonies of the Rich, like the Dog Show and of the Middle Class, like the Bridge Game. Or, for example: the Dancing Lesson, the Graduation, the Testimonial Dinner, the Seance, the Gymnasium and the Picnic. And perhaps the Waiting Room, the Factory, the Masquerade, the Rehersal, the Initiation, the Hotel Lobby, and the Birthday Party. The etcetera.
[...]
These are our symptoms and our monuments. I want simply to save them, for what is ceremonious and curious and commonplace will be legendary."

Labels: art

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Wednesday, November 19, 2003 ::

4:55 PM ::

fifty-two

When I finished reading Louis Jenkins' The Water's Easy Reach, I officially completed the fifty-second book I've read this year, which means that, on average, I've read at least a book a week. The full list lives here.

I've never before managed to maintain a reading log for more than a couple of months at a time (a spotty attempt from 2001 lives here and a second one here). Now that I've got one that covers a whole year, I'm thinking about analyzing it for trends... all part of the bigger project of trying to figure out exactly what it is that I like. In December or January I'll do some crunching on the data-set of the year's list and I'll post the results here.

What my number-crunching won't reveal is whether fifty-two is above or below my normal yearly average. It's probably above—not only because a fair number of books on this list are fairly slight poetry chapbooks, but also because the very knowledge that I was maintaining a list made me oddly conscious of the half-finished books lying around my apartment at any given moment. Knowing that I could add a book to "the list" if I completed it sometimes gave me the extra incentive to finish that book rather than starting a new one.

That's not to say that I finished everything I started reading this year. The following are some books that I read beyond the first page, but didn't complete. I have ordered this list according to snarkiness:

Shamanism : Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy by Marcus Eliade
Amount completed: approximately 20 pages
Reason for quitting: this book is probably the text on shamanism, but it's not really very friendly to a general audience. There's 600-plus pages of hard-core data here: more than I need. (I may yet read Daniel Pinchbeck's Breaking Open the Head, though.)

The Druid Source Book edited by John Matthews
Amount completed: one article
Reason for quitting: Pretty much same as above. Druidism is interesting, and the book is probably great for some people, but I'm too much of a neophyte to be particularly gripped by debates about which particular trees Irish druids venerated.

John Cage : Writer edited by Richard Kostelanetz
Amount completed: probably 90 percent
Reason for quitting: I read everything that was interesting, which was most of the book. I skipped some of the drier journalistic reviews and some of the more technical articles. I would also have skipped the mesotics if there were any... I love Cage but have never found his mesotic writings to be even a little bit interesting.

Glamorama by Bret Easton Ellis
Amount completed: maybe sixty pages
Reason for quitting: Every once in a while, I start to believe the Bret Easton Ellis hype. Maybe he is a great satirist, I think, and I'm just missing something... then I read something he wrote and am disabused of that notion for another several years. This book has one joke: celebrities, models, and trendsetters are shallow. This is the kind of satire that could only seem "cutting" to people who work for Conde Nast.

Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse
Amount completed: forty pages; skimmed the rest with mounting horror
Reason for quitting: This is an absolutely dreadful book, inexplicably admired by lots of people with otherwise good taste. Following the pattern of self-help literature, this book makes up a new jargon through which to interpret (read: over-simplify) the world. Like many other pseudo-philosophies, this one seems momentarily like it might just explain everything, only to utterly detonate upon the slightest contact with the real world that we have to live in.

Labels: book_commentary

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Tuesday, November 18, 2003 ::

9:39 AM ::

ideological migraine

I'm still reading Cryptonomicon, and on lots of levels I'm still enjoying it: it's full of lots of fun geeky bits, and just sentence for sentence it's snappily written and acutely observed. I've read over two-thirds of the book now, and I intend to finish.

But one thing keeps bothering me, and that's the ideological difference between Stephenson (or Stephenson's characters) and myself. This isn't a new problem for me: even when I read Snow Crash, I thought to myself "this book has some problematic subtexts." But in Cryptonomicon they're not really subtexts anymore, they are the text, and attempting to ignore or gloss past those passages of the book gives me a sort of low-level migraine.

So I might as well just grapple with them directly. Premises put forth in the book that I'd take issue with include:

that the work of female cultural critics is primarily motivated by issues they're having with their boyfriends
that "post-modern, politically correct atheists" are essentially socially retarded because they have lost their "instruction manuals"
that the Nelson Algren notion of "hard work = success" is the most valid way to think about the American class system
that racism is primarily a matter of intent (that you cannot be unintentionally racist)
that couples who talk about their feelings with one another have boring sex
that women control the world through a conspiracy designed to control and monitor male ejaculation

Admittedly the book presents that last premise in a pretty tongue-in-cheek fashion, but at best it is the kind of joke that a lame stand-up-comic would make, and at worst it is the kind of statement that helps to justify the paranoia of the really hard-core anti-feminist types. (Stephenson should know this: he is, almost above all else, a writer who has a keen sense of the way ideologies and beliefs can travel virally from mind to mind.)

If he could hear me raise these objections, Stephenson would probably accuse me of being one of those emasculated, feelings-oriented, sensitive males that are so easily offended. But it is wrong to take offense when someone basically insults you or the people you care about over and over again?

Labels: book_commentary, rants

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Friday, November 14, 2003 ::

1:20 PM ::

book interface

It's taken me a while to get my mind around Amazon's new "Search Inside" feature—the sheer size of the data-entry operation that must have been necessary to get it up and running still boggles me. (Let's not forget to thank the low-paid overseas workers who helped make it possible.)

That said, I like it that some people are beginning to think about how to use the Amazon tool as a kind of interface system for the world of books.

Steven Johnson writes: "[W]e should also be able to use it to search our own private libraries of books we've already purchased."

Great idea! I wonder how long it will be before some clever Amazon developer writes up some gewgaw that will allow us to do exactly that. (Johnson develops his idea a bit more here.)

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Thursday, November 13, 2003 ::

11:45 PM ::

paypal.asp.scr

Got the following e-mail tonight from donotreply@paypal.com:

"Dear PayPal member,
PayPal would like to inform you about some important information regarding your PayPal account. This account, which is associated with this email address will be expiring within five business days. We apologize for any inconvenience that this may cause, but this is occurring because all of our customers are required to update their account settings with their personal information.
We are taking these actions because we are implementing a new security policy on our website to insure everyone's absolute privacy. To avoid any interruption in PayPal services then you will need to run the application that we have sent with this email (see attachment) and follow the instructions."

This reeks of scam to me. Google doesn't seem to have any info about "paypal.asp.scr," the attachment, but until the actual PayPal site puts something up about all customers being required to update their account settings, I ain't running it.

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10:43 AM ::

all that we wake to this morning

Geegaw links, with reservations, to this interesting poem by Juliana Spahr. I like its fundamental trick: the use of an archaic rhetorical mode to articulate some of the trillions of details that wash over us in the contemporary world. Sort of like if Walt Whitman were doing NPR's Morning Edition. (I should remember to go visit the Shampoo website more regularly; I often enjoy the poetry I come across there.)

In other poetry news: after reading my post on Simic, my old pal Darren D. recommended Thomas Bernhard's book The Voice Imitator, comprised of 104 paragraph-long stories. These six excerpts make the book look pretty appealing.

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Tuesday, November 11, 2003 ::

3:46 PM ::

raccoon mix exchange

New CD, Because, now available through the Raccoon Mix Exchange.

Track listing:

tv pow - cornered at the drake hotel
the microphones - map
the books - read, eat, sleep
cornelius - count five or six
ladytron - blue jeans
stafraenn hakon - talkn
fennesz - caecelia
the blow - sweetheart, pt. 1
clinic - the second line
deerhoof - hallelujah chorus
kepler - our little museum
ladybug transistor - i found a reason
manitoba - everytime she turns around it's her birthday

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Monday, November 10, 2003 ::

11:32 AM ::

bedtime stories for adults

Reading lots of prose poems lately, as short little breaks from Cryptonomicon. The really outstanding volume in the pile is Charles Simic's The World Doesn't End. The narratives arranged here are situated unclearly in time (there are skyscrapers but no computers or even telephones) and occasionally drift into the realm of the fabulous (characters like guardian angels and ambulating dead make appearances)—as a result the book reads something like a collection of children's tales, and it evokes a sense of wonder and potential that I recall deriving from books I read as a child. At the same time, the book is not truly "childlike"—if this is a book of "stories," it is a book of especially ambiguous, open-ended, lyrically dense stories, distinctly more rewarding to the sensibilities of adults than to those of children. I could not wish for a book with a better sense of balance.

Coming soon: more Cryptonomicon.

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Tuesday, November 04, 2003 ::

12:02 PM ::

narrative density

I'm currently reading Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (thanks Angela, thanks Crystal). Stephenson is an unusually confident writer, and when this confidence doesn't curdle into arch-geek arrogance (which it does, on occasion) it makes his prose a lot of fun to read. I'm also impressed by the breadth and scope of the narrative—I've been thinking a lot lately about just how much one can wedge into a book and still have it tell a story.

Let me try to explain what I mean this way. Cryptonomicon (at least the first 200 pages of it) is essentially about three main characters, Shaftoe, Waterhouse, and Randy. Assign each character a color and the basic structure of the book could be graphed out like this:

Whereas Imaginary Year, which has shorter chapters, which focus on a wider array of characters, would look more like this:

The number of characters is one thing (but not the only thing) that contributes to what I think of as a book's overall density. Density is something that I look for in a work of fiction, but of course there's a trade-off—the more characters a work has the less it has the opportunity to develop any one of them; the less it can be said to cohere as a quote-unquote story. Technically there is no reason why a book could not focus on, say, 100 different characters, giving each a single short chapter, but is it possible to write a book like that without losing the pleasures of narrative? (I can imagine some sort of meta-frame, which would allow someone to say "this book tells the story of a city" or "this book tells the story of 100 generations of a family bloodline," or whatever.)

Another thing that contributes to a book's density might be the number of digressions from the plotline. Again there's a trade-off: the more digressions a book contains, the less it can be said to even have a plot. (Some of my favorite books (e.g. Nicholson Baker's The Mezzanine) have very little plot but are merely a series of great digressions strung together.) Cryptonomicon is occasionally digressive, but most of those digressions (at least so far) connect up in some way to one of the three "master narratives" of the book, making it fairly dense but still narrative-driven.

I would say that Cryptonomicon is more dense than something like Moby Dick, which contains its share of relevant digressions but focuses on one main character, but less dense than something like Infinite Jest, which has more characters, more digressions, and less narrative cohesion.

Is it valid to think of density and narrative as being at opposite ends of a continuum, with straightforward narrative (one protagonist, minimal digression) at one end and with something like avant-garde poetry (extremely dense linguistic constructions with no narrative coherence) at the other end? And, if so, (this is the question I keep asking myself), where do I want my work to fall on that continuum?

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Sunday, November 02, 2003 ::

3:27 PM ::

gertrude stein's motives II

I recently cracked out The Party Train, an anthology of prose poetry I haven't really looked at since graduate school, and the introduction quotes Gertrude Stein as saying that Tender Buttons represents "my first conscious struggle with the problem of correlating sight, sound, and sense, and eliminating rhythm."

Weird. The book strikes me as an attempt to de-correlate sound from sense, but maybe that possibility isn't entirely ruled out by that quote. But this business of eliminating rhythm strikes me as totally strange, because one of the things that impressed me about the book is its musicality: it seems veritably obsessed with the rhythm of language.

"To bury a slender chicken, to raise an old feather, to surround a garland and to bake a pole splinter, to suggest a repose and settle simply, to surrender one another, to succeed saving simpler, to satify a singularity and not to be blinder, to sugar nothing darker and to read redder, to have the color better, to sort out dinner, to remain together, to surprise no sinner, to curve nothing sweeter, to continue thinner, to increase in resting recreation to design string not dimmer."

I mean, it's not iambic pentameter, but that sentence certainly doesn't strike me as one from which the rhythm has been eliminated-- or are GS and I just using the word differently somehow?

Labels: book_commentary, poetry_commentary

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