Author Archives: dan visel

volumes

The end of the year is heaving into view with its ineluctable retrospective urge. Trying to put together some semblance of a list of things that I liked this year, I came back to two books from the past year that I never got around to writing about: Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola: an Investigation and Bill Drummond’s 17.

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alysfabiola.jpgI first encountered Fabiola in the guise of an exhibition at the Hispanic Society earlier in the year. (It’s presently at LACMA. It’s a simple idea, of course: the Belgian/Mexican artist Francis Alÿs decided that he want to have an art collection, preferably one that could be acquired cheaply. At flea markets in Europe, he kept finding amateur paintings of the same theme, the little-known St. Fabiola. Fabiola is depicted in profile, looking left; she wears a red hood, pursed lips, and a solemn expression. It’s an image that was once well-known: all of these paintings were copying a painting by Jean-Jacques Henner which once hung in the Louvre, but which is now thought to be lost. Reproductions of it, however, were once widespread, and it was evidently a popular subject for amateur painters. Fabiola is not an imposing subject: a face in profile is easier than a face seen directly or at an angle, and her drapery comfortably accommodates flaws. Alÿs set himself to the task of collecting amateur paintings of Fabiola; he now has well over 300 which were displayed en masse at the Hispanic Society.
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Looking at all the paintings together, as can be done with the exhibit or the book, is weirdly fascinating: while all of the paintings are alike (a fold in the drapery of her hood always appears; there’s almost always a tiny peak at her collar bone), variations present themselves. Some canvases have holes in them; fading paint gives her a decidedly green countenance. Sometimes Fabiola has teeth. Occasionally she faces the wrong way or has a hood that’s the wrong color, but other traits securely identify her. There’s a dogged attempt at a Cubist Fabiola which doesn’t quite come off; some unknown artist did a very good job portraying her with lentils.
Turning to the catalogue, one learns that the collecting of Fabiolas is not quite as simple as one might imagine. This is partially because Alÿs set rigorous guidelines for himself and partially because the world is a complicated place full of complicated people:

Given these parameters, both printed reproductions and ‘fakes’ (those made specifically to pique this now-well-known artist’s interest) are rigorously excluded from the collection. In 1997 Francis Alÿs sent some sixty Fabiolas to be shown in the second biennial of Saaremaa, Estonia. When these works were shipped back to him, he discovered that almost thirty had been replaced with substitutes, crude versions made to simulate his originals, which had mysteriously disappeared. Wishing to conceal the fact that they had lost or otherwise appropriated his works, the Estonian organizers seemingly hoped to fool him into believing that the substitutes – the copies they commissioned of his copies – were actually works that he had collected. This subgroup of twenty-six examples, identified in the collection catalogue as A through Z, are notable for an acidulous orange-red in the palette and a cursory, loose handling. More recently, Alÿs discovered than an acquaintance with a certain technical proficiency had been making versions that he presented to Alÿs not as examples of his own devising but as chance discoveries made when visiting flea markets and junk stores. Alÿs immediately removed them from the collection. Among objets d’art, such as jewelry and dishes, he distinguishes those commercially manufactured from those that require the intervention of an individual hand, such as enameled objects.

(Lynne Cooke, “Francis Alÿs: instigator/investigator”, note 7, p. 63.) The catalogue scrupulously documents these fake Fabiolas: looking at their reproductions, one wonders if they feel quite as real as the collected Fabiolas. Certainly they seem to qualify: it’s the same image. Viewed together, they do seem ersatz: they’re too average, lacking the deviations made by the hand of the amateur.
The amateur quality of these paintings is what was most striking when viewing them at the Hispanic Society, a monumentally-scaled museum way uptown squatting in a neighborhood that looks as if it’s seen better days. The interior of the Hispanic Society is dark wood; small cabinets full of Spanish and Mexican folk art huddled beneath some of the paintings: it’s an old-style museum. Individually, the Fabiolas look shockingly out of place: these are, for the most part, bad paintings, the sort of paintings that the painters’ family members were selling at flea markets. They don’t belong in museums. Together they work: there’s an intelligence guiding them. What Alÿs is showing us isn’t, finally, these paintings of Fabiola, though each is presented with dignity, each scrupulously catalogued in as much as paintings bought at flea markets can be catalogued. Alÿs’s work is about how we look at images today. From a different essay in the catalogue:

We have become inured to hearing the echoes of a theory popularized by Walter Benjamin, in respect of which the work of art loses its “aura” in an age of “mechanical” (or, more precisely, “technical”) reproduction. It is worth remembering that Benjamin himself was thinking primarily of media, such as photography and film, where no ‘original’ exists, for hardly would amateur artists have crossed Benjamin’s mind. In the case of Fabiola, we have a prime example of a lost original, complemented by a vast array of heterogeneous reproductions. Instead of lamenting the loss of aura, we can use this particular example to emphasize the essential productivity of the process of reproduction. These multifarious Fabiolas may not, in the last resort, be recuperated by art history, but in testifying to the resilience of a historically grounded image they also enhance our awareness of the dynamics of contemporary visual culture.

(Stephen Bann, “Beyond Fabiola: Henner in and out of his nineteenth-century context,” p. 40.) Alÿs’s exhibition suggests that that we need to re-examine how we view image making. Dialogue from Tom McCarthy’s recent novel Men in Space, where a subplot concerns forging Russian icons in the Czech Republic, presents a view of originality that might be akin to that which Alÿs is presenting:

“You know, strictly speaking, your copy won’t be a copy.”

“Why not?”

“Because,” she shifts her weight as she turns to face him, “copying has always been part of the culture of the icon. These zographs travelled . . .”

“Zoo graphs?”

“Zographs: icon painters. Vitan, Nedelko, Chevinodola, the Zaharievs, and hundred of minor ones whose names I can’t remember . . . . They travelled around carrying little more than their tools and the Hermeneia, and they . . .”

“Carrying the what? The Ermenia?”

“The Hermeneia, with an H: the zographs’ rule book. It supposedly originated on Mount Athos, in Greece. They’d travel around, redoing already existing subjects: literally copying older paintings. So you get the same images repeating down centuries, mutating slightly with each iteration.”

“So Anton’s one’s a copy too?”

“Well, yes – but beyond that, for zographs, copies aren’t secondary pieces. They’re iterations of the same sacred event. Each time you iterate you partake of the event: belong to it, as much as the last iterator did. But . . .”

(p. 111.) This idea of valuing a copy not just because of how accurately it mirrors the original but rather as an instance of iteration might be worth giving close attention in the digital era.

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billdrummond17.gifThere are parallels, of a sort, in Bill Drummond’s 17, a rambling collection of essays chronologically arranged where Drummond attempts to sort out his relationship with the way music works now. Drummond is most famous as half of the KLF, a conceptual art project masquerading as a pop act (or maybe the other way round). He’s spent a good portion of his 55 years enmeshed in the world of popular music. Biography through music is nothing new, but the angle Drummond takes is distinctly different: he’s interested in his relationship not so much with music but with recorded music, starting with buying his first single, the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever” in 1967 and moving to the world of 2008, where almost everything ever recorded is instantly accessible via the Internet.
One thinks here of the line from Camus that pops up as a liner note for Scott Walker’s Scott 4, the point at which another career in pop music jumped the tracks: “A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.” Drummond’s book is partially a meditation on aging: time dilutes everything, and one one’s first love can’t possibly be equalled by one’s fifty-first love. It’s the logic of drug addiction: repeated exposure to anything weakens the force of each individual exposure. You could call it, if you wanted, anhedonia. At a certain point one grows conscious of this weakening, and people respond in either of two ways. Most common is by complaining that things aren’t what they used to be. (Dissecting this response in the post-punk world is something of a specialty for the preternatually wizened Mark E. Smith of The Fall, perhaps the crankiest man in rock music & sometime confederate of Drummond; see, for example, “Paranoid Man in Cheap Shit Room”: “Not as good as it was at 2:30 / this afternoon / nostalgia / spangles / late to mid 30s”.) Or this can be inverted, as when Falstaff complains that the problem with latest emissaries from The Man is that “they hate us youth!” in Henry IV, Part 1.
Drummond isn’t satisfied with either path, though he’s more Falstaff than bitter old man. He finds the same things to like in today’s pop music that he loved in his youth. But the changes that have happened to media have had an enormous impact. So he carefully picks a quarrel with the idea of recorded music:

Trying to explain why I think recorded music is in the process of becoming as dated as mosaic or pottery is pretty difficult when for most of us recorded music is the form of artistic communication that has had the most emotional impact on our lives.

(p. 143) Drummond’s response starts in a tried and true fashion: by writing manifestos, which were then printed up as posters (in classic Modernist style: red and black, Trade Gothic type) by his Penkiln Burn operation. Most of these are scores for creating new music; they can be read online here; there are audio recordings of the author reading many of them. There’s a similarity – which Drummond freely admits – in what he does with the work of the generation of Fluxus composers who studied with John Cage in the late 1950s. Artists like Yoko Ono and the recently deceased George Brecht wrote what they called “event scores,” musical composition stripped back to basics, a few lines of text that suggest a performance. These artists were rebelling against the tradition of performed music; fifty years later, Drummond is rebelling against the tradition of recorded music which has supplanted performed music, destroying the performance traditionally more thoroughly than Cage could manage.
But Drummond swerves off the Fluxus path with a pointedly arbitrariness. Most of his scores are centered around the idea of a choir of 17 people, giving the project as a whole its name of The17. (Various reasons are given for this, none especially convincing, but one suspects that the number was largely chosen to evoke the connection of adolescence with pop music.) Many of his scores run something like this:

Choose a building with five floors.

On the ground floor gather 17 people aged 70 and over. Ask them to make non-verbal sounds with their mouths on the note of F sharp for five minutes. Record The 17. Ensure their performance draws upon their wisdom.

On the first floor gather 17 people aged between 45 and 69. Ask them to make non-verbal sounds with their mouths on the note of G sharp for five minutes. Record The 17. Ensure their performance draws upon their bitterness.

On the second floor gather 17 people aged between 21 and 44. Ask them to make non-verbal sounds with their mouths on the note of A sharp for five minutes. Record The 17. Ensure their performance draws upon their arrogance.

On the third floor gather 17 people aged between 13 and 20. Ask them to make non-verbal sounds with their mouths on the note of C sharp for five minutes. Record The 17. Ensure their performance draws upon their boredom.

On the fourth floor gather 17 people aged 12 and under. Ask them to make non-verbal sounds with their mouths on the note of D sharp for five minutes. Record The 17. Ensure their performance draws upon their innocence.

Combine and balance all of the recordings so they can be played simultaneously.

Gather the above 85 members of The17 in one place. Play them back the combined and balanced recordings simultaneously.

Delete all recordings.

(Score 4, “Age”.) The key instruction here is the final one: “delete all recordings,” which appears in most of the scores that Drummond comes up with: his performances are, with a few conscious exceptions, site specific. The book catalogues his travails attempting to get his pieces performed, almost always with people who are not musicians, in a variety of locales. Sometimes his scores work, and both Drummond and his impromptu choir think the music they’ve made is the best thing they’ve ever heard; sometimes it doesn’t work, and Drummond duly records his failures. Certainly there’s an element of stunt in what Drummond is doing (as there always has been). But there is something serious in Drummond’s project: he’s attempting to get to the root of music-making, to think about how we respond to sound, both as we age and as media changes and becomes omnipresent. “Strange how potent cheap music can be,” goes the Noel Coward line; but it’s a potency that needs to be investigated and interrogated from time to time lest we forget about it.

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Is there a connection in these two books? They fit together, I think, as common responses to a world supersaturated with images, with music. If there’s a problem to be grappled with in the media world we live in, it’s one of volume: there’s too much content to sort through. This becomes, I’ve noticed, more acute for me at the end of the year: there’s the urge to make sense of the impossible mass of the year that’s just gone by. It’s important to remember that there are other ways of seeing, other ways of hearing.

nycip indie & small press book fair

Almost forgot about this: if you’re around New York this Sunday (December 7th), I’ll be on a panel at the New York Center for Independent Publishing’s Indie & Small Press Book Fair. The panel, at 2 p.m., is called “The Future of Independent Publishing” and is described like so:

As new technologies once again turn the publishing world on its ear, small presses are surviving – and thriving – by embracing alternative publishing models, from limited editions that treat books as collectable objects to innovative multi-media that make digital books more fluid, interactive and open source. In a conversation led by Buzz Poole (Managing Editor, Mark Batty Publisher), Alex Rose (Publisher, Hotel St. George Press), Ben Greenman (Editor, The New Yorker), Matvei Yankelevich (Founding Editor, Ugly Duckling Presse), and Dan Visel (Future of the Book) discuss how to maintain the dynamic relationship between publisher, author and reader in the digital age, and how to create books that reflect and respond to our interactive cultural landscape.

The Fair (which starts Saturday) is free and open to the public; it’s at NYCIP, The General Building, 20 West 44th Street, New York. It’s been a bad week for publishing, but maybe there’s hope with the indies?

the indeterminate dvd

On a clear day, Guy Maddin might be my favorite living film maker. He’s not to everyone’s taste (The Heart of the World, complete on YouTube, is a good litmus test), and I won’t attempt to convert the unbelievers. But anyone who would decide that Knut Hamsun’s Pan should be a Vaseline-lensed movie set on an ostrich farm inside the earth (Twilight of the Ice Nymphs) or who is making a movie about Raymond Roussel with John Ashbery can’t expect me to be rational and objective about what they do. Regardless of my sympathies, his work is formally interesting, and I think it bears scrutiny if we’re interested in how artistic forms change with technology.
While not entirely uncommercial, Maddin’s films set out to take filmmaking apart to its component pieces. Much of his work mines the aesthetic of the silent era of film making, particularly the German Expressionists, with grainy, high-contrast imagery, prominent use of intertitles, and grandly theatrical acting. Watching Maddin’s work reminds us that the form we know as the feature film is very much a constructed form, and we, as its audience have learned to read it. This is something we generally forget – the feature film has been around longer than just about anyone has been alive, and it’s as much a part of our mental furniture as the novel or the poem. But this wasn’t always so – in his autobiography, Luis Buñuel recalls watching early films in Spain:

In addition to the traditional piano player, each theatre in Saragossa was equipped with its explicador, or narrator, who stood next to the screen and ‘explained’ the action to the audience. ‘Count Hugo sees his wife go by on the arm of another man,’ he would declaim. ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, you will see how he opens the drawer of his desk and takes out a revolver to assassinate his unfaithful wife!’

It’s hard to imagine today, but when the cinema was in its infancy, it was such a new and unusual narrative form that most spectators had difficulty understanding what was happening. Now we’re so used to film language, to the elements of montage, to both simultaneous and successive action, to flashbacks, that our comprehension is automatic; but in the early years, the public had a hard time deciphering this new pictorial grammar. They needed an explicador to guide them from scene to scene.

I’ll never forget, for example, everyone’s terror when we saw our first zoom. There on the screen was a head coming closer and closer, growing larger and larger. We simply couldn’t understand that the camera was moving nearer to the head, or that because of trick photography (as in Méliès’s films), the head only appeared to grow larger. All we saw was a head coming toward us, swelling hideously out of all proportion. Like Saint Thomas the Apostle, we believed in the reality of what we saw.

(My Last Sigh, trans. Abigail Israel, p. 32–33.) Maddin has resurrected this idea of the explicador in his most recent films, a loose biographical trilogy about his youth in Winnipeg – Cowards Bend the Knee (about, roughly: ice hockey; beauty parlors; abortion clinics: Sarah Palin avant la lettre); Brand Upon the Brain! (orphanages; young detectives; gender confusion); and My Winnipeg (sleepwalking; urban development; nostalgia). Brand Upon the Brain! is the most ambitious of the three: for the release of this film last year, Maddin mounted a theatrical production, where musicians provided a live soundtrack, foley artists reproduced the film’s sound effects, and an interlocutor narrated the film.
Watching the film this way is a disorienting experience: the audience sees the film and is drawn into the suspension of disbelief elicited by film. But between the audience and the screen are those creating the sounds that are part of the experience: while on the screen the audience sees a man going up the stairs, the audience can’t avoid seeing the foley artists who are making the noises of the man going up the stairs. The Russian Formalists would have called this estrangement.
Brand Upon the Brain! has just been released on DVD by Criterion; watching it in this form is a very different sort of experience. Of necessity, it’s a reduction of the richness of sensory experience of watching a live production. (Watching a movie on DVD rather than with an audience in a theater is always a different experience. In a theater, we are part of an audience and should behave in a certain way: generally, we don’t shout at the screen, or answer telephones in the midst of things, for example, because we are conscious that we’re part of an audience and have been socialized to behave properly.) One can’t fault Maddin or the Criterion Collection for this: movies are, of course, supposed to make money, not everyone could go to the live performances, and sometimes, Russian Formalists be damned, we don’t want to think about estrangement so much as we want to watch a movie.
But it’s still worth watching Brand Upon the Brain! on DVD. In a nod to the film’s original production, the DVD contains eight different soundtracks – three different narrators recorded in a studio, and five different narrators recorded in live performances in New York. The film thus viewed can be very different – as a sample, here’s a scene from near the beginning with three different narrators. First is the default choice, Guy Maddin recorded in a studio:


then John Ashbery, again recorded live:


then Isabella Rossellini, recorded live:


What the viewer sees is the same; but even though the narrators say the same things, what the viewer hears is very different. Maddin sounds bored and dismissive of his imagined biography; Ashbery sounds like your crazy uncle; Rossellini sounds like she’s been brought in from some wildly different film, possibly a European imagining of things are in Canada. It’s worth emphasizing that the music and sound effects in these three clips are different, as they’ve been recorded live in the Rossellini and Ashbery performances.
This DVD is an odd artifact: the film that it presents is in a sense indeterminate, presenting multiple possible films. It’s a trick that I’ve never seen exploited before, which is strange: multiple soundtracks for a film have been possible since the Laserdisc appeared thirty years ago. This particular aspect of the DVD is not new; it’s just something that it’s taken artists a long time to explore. It’s odd, really, that at a point in time when more movies are viewed on DVD than in theaters more films aren’t targeted as specifically to that viewing environment. It’s also striking to me how slowly technology changes. Criterion’s Brand Upon the Brain! could effectively have been released on Laserdisc: granted, DVDs are more convenient than Laserdiscs, but there’s nothing tremendously different in the possibilities for presentation. Blu-Ray, the designated successor to the DVD, promises a Java support, enabling more complex features, though no one seems particularly excited about a new physical format for movies, and I imagine that it will be years before anyone does anything interesting with this. Technology doesn’t wait for our ability to work constructively with it.

art and technology, 1971

the cover of the art and technology catalogueA quite note to point out that LACMA has announced that they’ve posted the long out-of-print catalogue for their 1971 Art and Technology show online in its entirety in both web and PDF format. It’s worth looking at: Maurice Tuchman and Jane Livingston, the curators of the show, attempted to match artists from the 1960s with corporations working with technology to see what would happen. The process of collaboration is an integral part of the documentation of the project. Sometimes attempted collaborations didn’t work out, and their failure is represented in a refreshingly candid fashion: John Baldessari wanted to work in a botany lab coloring plants; George Brecht wanted IBM & Rand’s help to move the British Isles into the Mediterranean; Donald Judd seems to have wandered off in California. And some of the collaborations worked: Andy Warhol made holograms; Richard Serra worked with a steel foundry; and Jackson Mac Low worked with programmers from IBM to make concrete poetry, among many others.
One contributor who might be unexpected in this context is Jeff Raskin (his first name later lost an “f”), who at the time was an arts professor at UCSD; he’s now best known as the guy behind the Apple Macintosh’s interface. We’ve mentioned his zooming interface and work on humane interfaces for computers on if:book in the past; if you’ve never looked at his zoom demo, it’s worth a look. Back in 1971, he was trying to make modular units that didn’t restrict the builder’s designs; it didn’t quite get off the ground. Microcomputers would come along a few years later.

a leap into the post-industrial

I’ve just returned from a quick trip to India: with my brain yet furry from jetlag, I’ve yet to come to any understanding of what I experienced there, should such be possible. But while in Delhi, I picked up an enormous book entitled 60 Years of Book Publishing in India, a compendium edited by Dina N. Malhotra in 2006, which I made my way through on the flight back to New York. If you’re looking for an overview of the Indian publishing industry and how books function in modern India, as I was, this is a decent place to start. As you might expect, book publishing in India is enormously complex: 80,000 books are published a year by 16,000 different publishers in India’s 22 major languages. Translation happens between Indian languages and to and from non-Indian languages. Piracy is a major issue: a number of contributors bemoan the fact that anything published in Bengali is immediately pirated in Bangladesh (and shortly thereafter on sale in the shops of my neighborhood in Queens). It’s not hard to get any book copied and rebound in an Indian town of any size; pirated books are readily sold on the street.
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While there are Indian libraries, they’re not organized or particularly supported by the government. (The pictures scattered through this are from the Asiatic Society Mumbai, the city’s largest library open to the general public.) India’s linguistic diversity – a level comparable to that of Europe – is one of its great strengths, but this complexity has also complicated efforts to systematize knowledge. A more complicating issue is the issue of literacy, a function: while the country has made astounding gains since independence, adult literacy is still around 60%. An article by Mohini Rao entitled “Publishing Children’s Books” gives a sense of the space that books in India exist in:

India is a country of extremes and contrasts where the very modern and the very old coexist. On the one hand, we are anxious to use the latest printing technology and, on the other, there are some parts of the country where people have not even seen a printed book! People are at various stages of development. The Space Age has taken over even before the Dark Age could completely recede into history. We are facing the post-literacy problems even before achieving complete literacy. We are coping with the information revolution even as we struggle with pre-industrial problems. . . . According to the report of the committee on TV software, ‘. . . Electronic media like the radio and TV have the potential of transcending the literacy barrier and therefore also the class barrier.’ TV has made it possible for the non-literate masses to have access to information, and consequently, to the fruits of development without first crossing the literacy barrier. People belonging to the pre-industrial era can take a leap into the post-industrial era without passing through the stages through which the West had to pass.

(p. 257.) The prospect of a leap to the post-literate (however that might be defined) isn’t one that’s strictly confined to India. In a broader sense, it’s an issue the entire world is facing, and an issue that if:book has been engaged with since its inception if not always consciously. We look at reading and writing through an historical context that we’ve passed through: we can only think of what comes past the book by thinking through the book. No writing on technology can be entirely immune from this perspective. (A number of the articles in 60 Years, for example, offhandedly remark that the problem of book piracy in India will be solved at that point copyright is enforced as it is in the West, a position which seems hopelessly optimistic: copyright laws can’t escape Benjamin’s avenging Angel of History.)
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Much of the criticism of Sven Birkerts’s Gutenberg Elegies accused the author of being blind to the future because of the past. But Birkerts, I think, was right in a very basic sense: we can’t help but see the future through the lens of the past. The narrative of the Gutenberg Elegies is autobiographical, tracing a life constructed through books. The conversation that takes place on this blog is a product of the same forces, regardless of one’s preference for print or screen reading. We’d like the Institute’s values to be those of literate humanism: how do we account for a possible future post-literate population? The book to come belongs to everyone: it would be presumptuous to assume that everyone is like us, or should be like us.
If a lion could speak, Wittgenstein pointed out, we could not understand it. St. Jerome, patron saint of translators and noted lion-keeper, ordered his lion about, though he’s not recorded as listening to what his lion might have had to say. But understanding the coming position of the book in India and the world is probably not a matter of translation, which requires literacy, but rather one of transformation, a making of new forms. How can we start thinking about this problem in a sensible way?

children’s books and control

There’s a surprisingly intriguing exchange in a recent Bookworm program, where Michael Silverblatt interviews Françoise Mouly about her new line of children’s books, a spinoff of the Little Lit books she’s been putting out with Art Spiegelman. Not surprisingly, Mouly ran into resistance from established publishing houses when trying to put out the sort of books she was interested in; she took matters into her own hands, and started her own publishing house, Toon Books. In the interview, Silverblatt asks her about the psychology behind children’s book, a subject she’s thought about in detail:

Françoise Mouly vs Michael Silverblatt (excerpt) – Bookworm

FRANÇOISE MOULY: We’re being told certainly when we move around in the world of children’s book publishing that, you know, kids are into fantasy and you have to stimulate the imagination. And actually when I was doing this I learned so much that educators and teachers and attentive parents know: the opposite is true. Kids live in the world, and what they want, and certainly what they want from their books, they want order. And they want a way of naming things. And they want to be able to organize what is perceived as this chaotic series of sensory input into something that makes sense.

MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: In at least two of the books, and many children’s books besides, I recognize that craving for order is matched by the threat of chaos. What would happen if the child had its own way, or what would happen if chaos, say in the form of The Cat in the Hat, were to visit and gain access when the sources of order, the parents, are not at home. And so in another in the first series of books, Otto’s Orange Day, Otto gets only one wish from a genie, and Otto’s favorite color is orange. And so everything turns orange, and the story is – you see, I didn’t realize this before – implicitly about what would happen if the child were to get his own way in everything. It’s very, in its way, secretly authoritarian . . .

(The program can be listened to in full here.) The issue of control that Mouly brings up is interesting to me: it seems intuitively correct that children want a sense of order and control over the world in books. I’m curious what happens if we look at adults as well as children, especially in a world in which the book is being radically reshaped. Are we reticent to accept new forms because we still need this sense of control? A book on a computer screen is profoundly ambiguous: we have no sense of how long it might be, or where its boundaries are when it contains hyperlinks. We can’t control an electronic book in the same way that we could control a book in our hands when we were children. A question, then, which isn’t meant as rhetorical: is it childish to still want to do so?

a reading room

Alex Itin, the Institute’s artist-in-not-quite-residence, is having an opening soon. He says:
I will be filling four walls with a floor to ceiling installation of images extruded over the last several years for the Art Blog: IT IN Place: /itinplace/
The work will include drawings and collage made over the pages of Fluxus, Time Life Collectibles, and Ulysees. A selection of animations and experimental videos will be projected into the grid of pages.
The Opening is Friday September 26th from 6:00 to 11:00 at USSA Fine Arts which is located in Willamsburg Brooklyn, right along the Williamsburg Bridge, between Bedford and Berry Avenues:
109 South 5th Street #204
Brooklyn, NY

(718) 305-1676
There will be live music and refreshments. I hope to see you there. The installation will be up for about a month. Please forward the invite to anyone you think might be interested.
thanx,
alex

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recognitions

I came home from my first year at college, reeling from culture shock unrecognized until much later, to a job at the local natural history museum. I was in charge of their live reptile exhibit, a perennial summer attraction in Rockford, Illinois. By the summer of 1996, my third year running it, the live reptile exhibit had lost much of its novelty with the locals; the occasional lost family from Wisconsin wandered in, and every once in a while a VBS class would come to admire God’s scaly creations, but most of the time I was left alone with the reptiles in the museum, an old Victorian mansion built during times when Rockford had a more promising future ahead than its rust belt present.
Running the live reptile exhibit was not the nicest job I’ve worked at – biting, for example, has not been so much of a concern in my subsequent employment. But the museum was a couple of blocks away from the Rockford Public Library, and I was well stocked with reading material. Even to one as oblivious as myself it was clear that Infinite Jest had been the big book of the previous year; there were cloud-covered posters in the windows of Wordsworth’s. Over the summer I could catch up, I thought, and I made my way through the library’s copy of the book, then Girl with Curious Hair, then The Broom of the System, which I may have had to buy.
I was at a point in my life when I was impressionable, and Wallace made an impression on me. Part of what bowled me over about Infinite Jest was the sense of place embedded in the book. It’s a book about Boston, where I’d just spent the year; I couldn’t claim to be an expert on the city, but there were places that I recognized in the book. I don’t know that to that point I’d read anything about a place I knew: nobody writes books about Midwestern cities and towns, or if they do, they do it in such a way as to make it clear that all those places are entirely interchangeable. (I later accused Ben Marcus of writing the most honest book yet about how it is to grow up in the Midwest in The Age of Wire and String; he told me he’d never been there, but it sounded nice. So it goes.)
But that sense of connection, especially in something someone was writing now: that was important. Reading Wallace then was like reading Salinger on my own during high school, that same shock of recognition. Wallace’s writing exuded possibility to me in a way that others’ hadn’t. The was the knowledge that the world couldn’t be wrapped up nicely with a bow – obvious now, and an idea older than Tristram Shandy, but one that was surprising to me then. Helen DeWitt noted a Wallace interview where he explains his endnotes:

There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.

As a reader, I hear an echo in this of a speech by an artist in Gaddis’s The Recognitions, a book I’d immerse myself in no small part because of a comparison in a blurb on the back of Infinite Jest:

. . . Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you’ve broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it’s just . . . sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.

Others will find their own echoes. Thinking about Wallace for the past few days, I find myself thinking more about he affected me as a reader than about anything particular in his writing. In the years after reading Infinite Jest, I kept finding myself noticing things that Wallace had borrowed from others, which came almost as little winks – realizing that Johnny Gentle, Famous Crooner, had been appropriated almost wholesale from Ishmael Reed’s The Terrible Twos, recognizing with hindsight that the subplot about The Entertainment was a reworking of Joseph McElroy’s Lookout Cartridge, noticing, in short, that Wallace had been in every room I entered before me. Infinite Jest itself wasn’t really a book that I went back to, though I did eventually buy my own copy. I’d internalized it, and found the book had become a part of myself, something so basic that I found myself presuming that everyone interesting around me must have also read it. (This is a faulty assumption that would repeat: later, I’d catch myself thinking that everyone must have read Proust, that life without Proust was inconceivable.) I had been changed. Part of the reason I didn’t return to Infinite Jest was a fear that something so important wouldn’t be the same – returning to Salinger, I’d found his characters cloying and affected, coming off like the creations of a creepy old man. The books hadn’t changed, but I had.
For my money, Wallace’s masterpiece was “The Suffering Channel,” the last novella in Oblivion, which harrowingly explores a universal problem, “the subjective centrality of our own lives versus our awareness of its objective insignificance” through the lens of the celebrity-entertainment complex. (It is, for what it’s worth, a piece that I have been able to go back to repeatedly.) In a characteristic touch, a sinister production company has the Portuguese motto A consciência é o pesadelo da natureza. A character translates this as “consciousness is nature’s nightmare.” This is only half accurate, and I think it’s interesting what Wallace leaves out: the Portuguese consciência, like the Italian coscienza (famously used in the title of Svevo’s book), can mean both consciousness and conscience. Conscience is also nature’s nightmare; existence is always a moral issue, an idea that works its way through all of Wallace’s work.
I can’t claim that I knew Wallace – I met him in passing at a book signing, where he was kind and more generous than he needed to be. But certainly there’s a sense of kinship: to realize that you’re reading the same books that a writer once read. The book is Kafka’s axe to smash the frozen sea inside of us: to read can be to recognize that one is not alone in the world, to find yourself reflected in another’s language. The book Wallace signed for me I lost years ago, abandoned in storage above a carpet factory in Somerville; these things happen, and they’re not worth dwelling upon. But when I heard the news of Wallace’s death – late Saturday night, at the drunken end of an enjoyable wedding – it felt like I’d lost a part of myself. Part of that reaction is aleatory: Wallace’s writing found me at the right time. But it’s not entirely chance: so much of the power of language is its ability to transcend the body, to transcend the book.