03.18.2004
the perils of quietude
I don't know what the hell I'm doing, Sam. I'm weaving all over the place, my mind's all scrambled, think i forgot to put the change in the parking meter. click click click. All scrambled, ivy and daisies. Look, Sam: for one thing I've been reading these weird "critical" things. I mean, that, I mean the capital C kind of criticism. What do you call it? I don't know, really, and so it makes sense that it's scrambling my brains. Here's a hint, Sam: if you don't understand why it's called what it's called, you probably won't understand what it says. Or that's what they'd say, maybe.
First off there was something on Silliman's Blog about anonymity and poetry. That was, anyway, what I think it was about. It was about context, Sam, and you can capitalate that however you want. Apparently when figuring out whether or not a piece of poetry is worth its chemical-base, you've gotta know who's saying what's being said. Or anyway that's the part I read in there that had me disagreeing enough that I couldn't decide whether or not that's what was being said. He writes things like "a poem without a poet's name is, in some very real sense, incomplete."
Let me pause here, Sam, because I pause an awful lot, as without the pausings I'd be forced to head straight, keep my eyes on the tractor, maybe follow an idea's trajectory from its alpha to its hole. In pausing let me say this: I don't think this entry was meant for me, Sam. It's obvious. This is a guy talking about poetry to people who talk about poetry. So I'm scraping the stuff off the surface here and I realize that, so I'm not criticizing this Silly man's post, per se. But I'm criticizing something, let's not be shineless about that.
'cuz, Sam, later on this guy says this thing: "That, in fact, is why Silliman’s Blog isn’t called something terminally cute, like so many other weblogs. Who, for pity’s sake, is sodaddictionary? Whether he’s a poet I love or hate ... and I do presume it’s a he, based on internal textual details ... there is nothing about that blognym that will ever cause me to pick up one of his books, simply because I wouldn’t know how to associate it."
He wouldn't know how to associate it, Pete. Or was I talking to Sam? Whatever. Maybe here's the root of my problem: I don't ever know how to associate anything.
So there was more of that, and then sometime (boy, this desk's squeaky when I'm typing, like there's some comedy-show's lovemaking couple hiding here,) sometime I backpedalled to a more regular recent haunt of my self and found 2Blowhards talking about TIPS. That's Towers in the Park, Pete, and apparently it's a description of some part of some architectural school (school?) called modernism. Now I've not been recently, nor ever, living in a cave, but I'll tell you this Pete: these art/lit-critic terms, "modernism" and "post-modernism" and (oh, whatever, there are others), these are words I've certainly heard about and read about and seen on pages and screens, but their meanings have never really gelled for me. This context thing, Sam, it's just not maybe for me.
The first thing I thought when I started looking at Michael's post over there was, "wow, those see-through towers in that one picture are fuckin' cool looking." Wouldn't you like to live there, Pete? See how you can see right in there, and there are no furnitures or walls or anything? Just straightplane floors parallel to the ground. It'd be like living in a big bic pen, maybe, or some other molded plastic bauble that I'd not throw away if I had it even if it was empty of whatever it was it came filled with.
Then right below that, there's this other twisty-curvy building thing. It looks like the future, Pete. I've always wanted to live there, but I'm always stuck living in the present.
Right below that though there's that ugly as hell bunch of white boatsail looking things. Someone dropped some pieces of something there on the shore, it looks like to me. But those other two...
So I read this thing Michael wrote, and all of a sudden I was forced to confront some actual explanation of this "modernism" thing, and have it contrasted to whatever it contrasts to. "Classicism," I think they call it, Sam. When I hear that word I always think of big facades with arches and how there are all those different words for whatever's at the top of old Greek pillars. What I don't think about, or never really have, is how these towers with parks around them actually seem to look pretty butt-ugly in practice. Because they do, at least in those pictures.
Except: I work in a building. It's a "tower" in some sense, though it's only got like 8 floors. It's shiny on the outside, and it's situated near another tower that's a few stories higher in such a way that there's this grassy, walk-wayed courtyard between them. I've gotta walk across that courtyard in the mornings sometimes to get a muffin. I like that courtyard. It doesn't look like fences and blowing trash and construction. It looks like a little bit of grass and stone walkways and stone benches where, when it's nice out, we can get some refreshing outsideness into our insideselves at lunch time.
The building I work in isn't in New York city though, or any of those other city-cities. It's in Reston Virginia. Do they still call these things TIPS in Northern Virginia? Cuz they're all over, and I've always thought some of them were pretty cool, and I've never felt dehumanized walking around 'em. Maybe I wouldn't want to live in one, but they certainly sometimes trigger a happiness in me, Pete.
Like I started off saying, Sam, this has been a long period of brain-scatteredness, and I haven't allowed myself to stop and digest any of it. I kept going today, too, and ran right into this article about science fiction's literary aspirations, by none other than some writer I've not heard of (Jonathan Lethem) who's a favorite of that right/left guy I'm always blogcommenting with about stuffs and whatnots. So I read that thing and kept again hitting this same question: what's all this about categorization? What's so bad about the direction Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama (which I may have read at some time but surely don't remember) took science-fiction? What direction did that book take science fiction? I like things Arthur Clarke's written, and I like some science fiction to really be that hard-tack kind that's written by scientists and mathematicians.
The problem here, again, is that I've got no real grasp of what's different about the stuff he's talking about. All through reading this tiny article I was again, as always, made to see how woefully few things I seem to read. I barely squeeze in a few books in a month, sometimes fewer; that's not enough to comprehend a single author's place in some grand literary/genrecentric universe, let alone to piece together some understanding of whole schools of writing and how they mesh. What I do feel okay with commenting on, though, is this thing about books in "reputable packages" vs. "gaudy paperbacks." I'm not entirely immune, I admit: when I get a chance to dig through the effluvia at a used book store I sometimes let the covers point me in a direction. Just now, for instance, I'm dying to read something about SPACE, about interstellar travel and all that. If I could get myself to my bookstore of choice I'd know to look for those things with the spaceships on the cover that all look like they were done by the same guy who did all that kind of stuff for OMNI back in the 80s. I'd for sure not be guaranteed a good find, and I'd for sure be missing stuff that might be exactly what I'm looking for but for whatever reason not have one of those spaceships on the front (maybe that guy was sick that week.) But I'd at least have a narrow enough field that I'd not just wander aimlessly for four hours until I wound up with some book about brain disorders that wasn't at all what I'm in the mood to read just now and so would wind up in the stack with all the other this-should-be-good-for-readin'-sometime-in-2037-when-I'm-on-a-spaceship-already-and-so-bored-with-reading-about-it-in-books books.
Of course the guy's point probably doesn't have anything to do with spaceships. It has more to do with his conclusion, which I for a minute there thought I might have been understanding until I got to that very last bit, where it suddenly sounds again like he's doing what I thought he was doing from the outset: complaining about a lack of respect and lack of cash for "sci-fi" writers.
Anyway, Danny Boy, maybe that's all the capital C Criticism I've read in the past few days; though I've been able to balance it by reading some posts over at blogcritics about American Idol. This stuff is maybe the other side of the coin: here's where we can all argue about stuff strictly on its own terms. I don't care where a bunch of (mostly) talented singers who are wanting desparately to be crammed into a mold fit in any context. I want to yell at someone because I think John Stevens and John Peter Lewis should be there because they fit so badly into whatever mold everyone's trying to squeeze into. No pretention to some deeper understanding of how things fit together can change the shape of this argument for me: I like this guy and you like that girl and I'm right and you're wrong and that's all there is to it.
What have I been reading, you ask? Hell, I dunno. I finished some Michael Crichton thing, Timeline. Good readin', that. Some good speculative unworkable science (hey, I dunno if it's unworkable. Whatever,) and some time travel and some platemail clad knights fighting and pillaging.
Before that there was Survivor by that Fight Club author whose name I can't spell. The best of the three I've so far read by him, it wasn't so depressingly nihilistic (though just about,) and there was this part where the characters were travelling cross country by hiding in sideturned halves of prefabricated houses strapped on the backs of tractor trailers. There was also a whole religion/cult idea going on, and there was one line in there that i don't remember but that I thought at the time was really funny, and then I thought it was even more funny when I thought about how utterly unfunny it would be if you hadn't read the book before reading it. How's that for context?
Whatever else I've read is currently lost in all of this, Lemmy. Let me just get myself ready for some sleep now, and if you figure out what the hell I'm trying to say you go ahead and let me know.
