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Level up your literature
LRB · John Lanchester: Is it Art?:
Northrop Frye once observed that all conventions, as conventions, are more or less insane; Stanley Cavell once pointed out that the conventions of cinema are just as arbitrary as those of opera. Both those observations are brought to mind by video games, which are full, overfull, of exactly that kind of arbitrary convention. Many of these conventions make the game more difficult. Gaming is a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable. It’s a bit of an irony that difficulty thrives in the newest medium of all – and it’s not by accident, either. One of the most common complaints regular gamers make in reviewing new offerings is that they are too easy. (It would be nice if a little bit of that leaked over into the book world.)
If by “difficulty” we mean the sort of linguistic experiment usually associated with avant-garde literature, difficult literature is more unpopular than it is dead. The avant-garde is there, it’s just even harder to find, ironically enough. In a world ruled by PageRank, isn’t popularity equivalent to non-existent? There are exceptions, but I’m not sure that we’re even talking about the same definitions of “difficulty” here. Getting through a few levels of Da Blob is probably difficult in a different way from reading a Ron Silliman poem.
I’d also question the idea that there’s ever been much of a market for experimental literature. What this seems to be is a reverse variation on the canard “they don’t make movies like that anymore,” when in truth the reality is that they never did. I see what the author is getting at here, and at first read it makes some sense, but it’s more clever than right.
(Via Lorcan Dempsey.)
Technorati Tags:
literature, poetry, writing
Poet vs theist
Allen Ginsberg Vs. John Lofton « A Nice Place:
GINSBERG: Do you ever have sexual fantasies?LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: None at all?
LOFTON: No, I said I am a Christian.
GINSBERG: You’ve never had any sexual fantasies!
LOFTON: Before I was a Christian, I had them, absolutely.
GINSBERG: And since you’re a Christian you don’t?
LOFTON: No.
GINSBERG: And when you had them, did they involve any dominance/submission fantasies!
LOFTON: Mine were pretty orthodox heterosexual kinds of fantasies. But there’s no doubt they were bad. And I am so glad that Jesus Christ delivered me from them.
GINSBERG: You have no erotic dreams now, at all, that you remember!
LOFTON: None that don’t feature my wife, no.
GINSBERG: Yeah.
LOFTON: It’s an amazing thing what Jesus can do for a person.
GINSBERG: Uh-huh.
This might be the most adversarial interview I’ve ever read. The whole thing is worth reading in terms of today’s “culture war.”
Technorati Tags:
literature, poetry, writing, ginsberg
More books
Three Percent: Best Translated Book of 2008: The Fiction Longlist
Just marking it for reference, but a lot of interesting looking books here.
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literature, writing, books, best+of+2008
Boom, dammit
Flavorwire » Blog Archive » J.D. Salinger is 90 — So Let’s Celebrate:
After the jump a roundup of the films, songs, and noted personalities (Salingerologists?) who have paid homage to the disaffected cannon.
You’ve always got to watch yourself around that disaffected cannon.
Technorati Tags:
literature, writing, salinger, seymour+glass
Craig’s sekrit agenda
When I posted an item for sale to NY Craigslist this morning I got this captcha:
Note the phrase. So much for all that booshwah about how it isn’t “the internet vs the MSM.”
Update: Hey, this is the 150th post!
Technorati Tags:
blogging, geek, craigslist, newspapers, web,media
Word of the day
pyroclastic |ËŒpÄ«rÅˈklastik| Geology
adjective
relating to, consisting of, or denoting fragments of rock erupted by a volcano.
DERIVATIVES
pyroclast |ˈpÄ«rÅËŒklast| |ˈpaɪroʊˈkløst| noun
Seen here.
Possible proof
This Modern World | Salon Comics:
Tom Tomorrow owes me the coffee that I just spit all over my desk. Read the whole damn thing.
Proust Roast
Bloomberg.com: Arts and Culture:
“A seven-line, handwritten 1922 poem in which Proust said his servant was ‘tall, slender, beautiful,’ may fetch as much as 12,000 euros, Sotheby’s said. A note that he scribbled to her a few hours before dying in 1922, still stained with the coffee he was drinking, could sell for as much as 8,000 euros. “
That “stained” was making me nervous.
Picasso used this paint
The Dark Ages: in celebration of the little black book – Times Online:
“My friend Robin Hunt, who is a research fellow at University College London studying trust in the digital age, e-mails me his thoughts on the phenomenon: ‘The democratisation of the BlackBerry (and the even earlier adoption of the all-tech iPod by the masses and not just the elite) leaves the posing class with nowhere to go except ‘by hand’. I travelled across Europe with Moleskines because sometimes sitting at a café, even with a shiny silver Mac, isn’t enough; you still look like an accountant. Also, writing by hand makes for such concentration of thought.’ Since the original Moleskine has gone, Hunt says that the new version is ‘utterly fake in a sense. You could say it is the riposte to the web.’ “
Ouch. And yet the Web itself has been responsible for the widespread adoption of said riposte. The ‘Skine (YEAH, baby) has become popular enough that its quality has suffered – the paper is crappier and the bindings split easily. There are better and less trendy notebooks out there.
The difference between Hemingway’s Moleskine and yours, though, is that his had Hemingway’s writing in it.