Fly Melon

This amuses me: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/31/fashion.celebrity.

Read Laura Kipnis’s The Female Thing: Dirt, Envy, Sex, Vulnerability.  [A point in favor of the Oxford comma, for those interested: it allows you to omit the ‘and,’ though that’s not technically grammatically correct.]  I acquired it on a recent trip to Strand.  Having gone in to purchase two specific books, neither of which was in stock, I left with four completely different books.  The blurbs on the back of Kipnis’s book, though positive, point out that the strength of the book is not its even-handedness, its cogence, its thoroughness, or its evident but not over-stated intelligence, but rather sauciness.  In fact it isn’t particularly even-handed, cogent, etc.  Kipnis writes books that create buzz.  She revels in setting contradicting ideas side-by-side, gesturing at their deficiencies with a roll of the eyes, then ending the paragraph with a snarky comment and tromping off to the next inconsistency. 

Her observations are interesting, particularly those that touch on women’s own ambivalence about how they wanted to be treated, how they want to act.  I particularly enjoyed her discussion of pornography, a section of which culminates like so, “Pornography’s critics take porn very literally, as if it purports to be social realism, but a better comparison would be sci-fi, another genre that takes the ‘what if things were different?’ approach to bodies and societies….Sexual synchrony between men and women—what an interesting prospect to contemplate.”  Of course the production of porn is a social reality, a fact that gets in the way of any attempts to generalize about whether the fantasy is harmless.

Back to the family, there’s a portion of the “Sex” chapter in which Kipnis reels off a spate of historical facts about higher infant mortality, the practice of naming an infant after its dead sibling, infanticide, child abandonment, sending children to wet nurses following birth and to foundling hospitals or workhouses when economic circumstances dictated it, then concludes that the maternal instinct is “a culturally specific development, also an economic luxury.”  She drastically oversimplifies here.  Certainly there’ve been external circumstances in various societies throughout history that have amplified or restricted expression of this instinct, if it exists.  But that doesn’t mean there is not instinct—only that the current cultural response to it is one that might be altered.  Kipnis wants us to bring about a “culturally specific” instinct that puts equal weight on the paternal instinct.  Fair enough.  Educated women with reproductive control are by far less likely to procreate, which means that birth rates in first world countries have declined.  The trend is due, at least in part, to the fact that women get the short end of the stick.  Haha.

Kipnis touches on many controversial issues, makes a few pithy observations, then moves right along—and I can imagine a reading of her book would provide fodder for arguments for months.  And she leaves you wanting to know more, at least in order to make your own case.  Good stuff.

Took a break from 2666 to read The Mystery Guest: An Account, written by Grégoire Bouillier and translated by Lorin Stein, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux.  I came to it through a back issue of n+1.  Someone in my office mentioned a Paris Review article on watching for fire, but a previous article of his—“My Life and Times in American Journalism”—sounded more pertinent to my own life, so I borrowed the back issue of n+1 to take a look.  The piece itself was disappointing.  First off the writing wasn’t particularly good.  It was a straightforward confessional piece, whiney in the usual way.  Philip Connors, the author, assumes the reader’s on his side and, further, that the reader thinks he’s intelligent and worthy.  And at the end of it all, he leaves, walks out of a copy-editing job at the Wall Street Journal, and you share his disgust but you’re relieved to part ways.  I agree with the person who lent me the magazine—it’s the two excerpted Frederick Seidel poems, and the bit of the story on which they impinge, that make the piece worth reading.  Seidel’s poetry is dangerous and outrageous, but dapper.  I’m delighted to know that the WSJ published a Seidel poem every month for a year.  It is a good tonic.

Scanning the rest of the issue brought me to an excerpt of The Mystery Guest.  I remembered the title from Mark Sarvas’s blog, The Elegant Variation, on which he’d posted a very fetching picture of the cover—it was designed to conjure the label of an expensive bottle of wine, a Margaux, which makes an appearance in the story.  [And just to further complicate things, I’ll mention that the introduction to the excerpt prompted me to read my first Susan Sontag essay.  Because the first line of The Mystery Guest is, “It was the day Michel Leiris died,” and I hadn’t heard of Leiris.  The introduction helpfully made mention of the Sontag essay, so off I trundled to my well-stocked if disorganized book shelf to locate Against Interpretation.  I want to learn more about Leiris, but won’t go into that now.]

Bouillier-via-Stein has a masterful way of illuminating the little interior explosions that make up the day-to-day life of a truly neurotic person, and he makes them funny without downplaying their real impact.  Like this:

“Yes, despite my turtleneck-undershirts a woman had taken an interest in me of late.  And to my shock my turtlenecks didn’t put her off, even though most women feel an instinctive, to my mind legitimate, revulsion toward men in layered turtlenecks, unless they somehow find them attractive—but I gave those women a wide berth then and still do.  At any rate she wasn’t one of them; she just seemed not to notice my sartorial neurosis, for which I was profoundly grateful.  At the same time it frustrated me.  I was unnerved that my turtleneck-undershirts didn’t bother her, never even gave her pause, when it would have made me feel so much less burdened and alone, would have meant such a sharp rise in the value of her affections, if only I’d known that she loved me with open eyes.  But no, she saw no secret meaning in my layered look, so there I was, misunderstood at her side, furious, divided, unfairly and hatefully demanding that she adjust to my turtlenecks when it was exactly her easy acceptance of them that had brought us together in the first place, and everything about us is so twisted and convoluted, and isn’t every piece of luck that comes our way a trap in disguise?”

I suspect that many of the people who read this book and enjoyed were also neurotics, or normal people who have their moments of neurosis.  A blurb from GQ on the back cover of the paperback proclaims the reader will “see [her] own scaled-down reflection” in the book.  More like scaled up, though it may be more a matter of noticing and thoughtfully engaging with the mix of dire / decisive / delirious moments that occur when we, for example, pick up the phone and find ourselves suddenly speaking to the person who broke our heart years ago without a word of explanation.  This sort of scrupulous “accounting,” as Bouillier calls it, seems similar in a way to the life-blogging that we’re seeding so much of now, but exponentially better.

Section Four of 2666 is incredibly dark.  The Sonora murders, herein referred to as the Santa Teresa murders, embody the apprehensions of mayhem, helplessness and terror that plague the characters, most of whom are intellectuals by trade, in Parts One, Two and Three, but Four is “The Part About the Crimes.”  It is horrific.  I have described it as a litany of deaths, over two hundred pages.  Many women’s names were never known; many are similar in appearance and must be differentiated by the few items of clothing in which they were found; many were victims of similar crimes—vaginal and anal rape, murder by strangulation and fracture of the hyoid bone.  Bolaño writes about each case with great care.  It is fiction but he seems to take great pains to present every available detail, which nevertheless rarely takes up more than a page and a half of space.  The bodies pile up, the women begin to blend together, but still it continues.  The stories of the police inspectors, interwoven with those of the women (none of the inspectors are women) take up more space.  The inspectors undergo training, pursue romantic involvements, solve other cases.  No one solves the murders, at least not so far, and I’m about halfway through. 

This morning on the subway I read an account so unsettling I almost fell over.  It is about a bunch of young gangsters, recently jailed, locked up and tortured in the prison laundry room by a group of inmates, while the guards look on.  I won’t quote from it because the passage is intricately constructed and extracting one or two of the more immediately disturbing lines would sensationalize the writing.  But my stomach dropped as I read, my knees felt week, and I had to stop and rest the galley on my hip while drawing a few deep breaths.  We were under the East River.   I spent the day wondering whether I should be reading such things.  How is this sort of reading any different from tabloid consumption or reality TV?  Does reading about atrocities make us callous, or does it help us understand?  Are responses beyond the knee-jerk “this is bad” even necessary?  We know the murders are bad, and we know, to use a similar case of recent nonfiction writing, that the torture Philip Gourevitch describes in Standard Operating Procedure is bad.  Is there any point in pushing beyond that?

The thought that I come back to is that if, too use a metaphor that’s perhaps simplistic, there is really a monster under your bed, ready to attack, you’d best pull up the covers and get a good look at it.  Then it may turn out to be only a pile of dirty socks and junk mail, no monster after all.  Or, is the case here, it may be that the accretion of familiar objects has really coalesced into a malignant creature, and maybe you can disassemble it or at the very least remain separate by maintaining your ability to see, really see it. 

Also that, in writing the horrific, narratives, at least traditional narratives that purport to make sense of things, may read like arrogant nonsense.  A recitation, hewing as closely as possible to the bare facts, is all we can swallow.  As Bolaño’s novel draws closer and closer to the murders, it seems less and less like a fiction. 

A year ago, I shared a meal with the web developer for the Charlie Rose Show, who gave me the dirt on this new-fangled Kindle device, then still in testing with Amazon. The big innovation, he explained,
was that Kindle would use actual ink particulates which would be rearranged with every “turning” of the “page,” obviating the need for backlighting, an eye irritant and a waste of energy. It sounded like a good idea—sort of an Etch-a-Sketch with a mind of its own—and said so. But then my dinner companion came out with, “Of course, books as such are a dying medium.”

Are they? I couldn’t shoot back an “Of course they are not a dying medium” or even “They are only a waning medium.” I’ve only been involved in the book industry a bit over two years, but the question of our imminent demise seems to pop up every day. I wasn’t wonderfully tech-savvy in college, and as an undergraduate who made regular visits, whether for work or fun, to one of the most comprehensive research libraries in the world, it hardly seemed possible that books might disappear. Now, I learn, Google execs are projecting a future in which all books (*all books*) are digitized.

Robert Darnton disagrees, in a bracing article, “The Library in the New Age,” published in the June 12, 2008 issue of The New York Review of Books. (Read it here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21514.) Darnton’s broader argument is that, while the long historical view of most topics will provides a sense of continuity (plus ça change..), where the sharing of information is concerned the main continuity is “the inherent instability of texts.” First he outlines the major technological breakthroughs: written word, scroll, codex, printed book.–. The codex (along with the paragraph break and chapter divisions) was an improvement over the scroll because it allowed readers to engage with large ideas by segmenting them. I would add that with web reading we now seem to be regressing to the scroll-sensibility. Web sites and Kindles may delineate “pages,” but there’s much less of that firm sense that you’re holding in your hands the entirety of a story or argument, which you can navigate through spatially. That spatial sensibility provides useful reinforcement when working with ideas. Web reading doesn’t quite have it, and that lack must play at least some role in the tendency of online writers, particularly commentators, to fudge.

That physical interaction can be helpful in grappling with big ideas. It’s a sensory reinforcement, a comfort blanket of sorts. That reassurance may have something to do with why, as Darnton notes, marketers of the French version of Kindle attached a book-smell sticker to the devices. Charming! But that rather misses the point. Yes, there are those of us whose love of ideas is all tangled up, for better or worse, with a lust for the book-as-object (the right type-set, paper, cover design). Darnton is in that number, I am (see my galley-glorification, below), and so are many others. But we’re the minority, I know, and by laying too much stress on that aspect of the debate, we do our cause a disservice.

In trying to reach an opinion, a person must be able, at some point, to stop researching and say “here is the information—now what do I think of it?” There must be a moment and means of reckoning—otherwise intelligent discussion becomes scattershot. We need limits, because limits provide a space for independent thought, and enacting limits seems nearly impossible when you have web-link upon web-link and reader-comment upon reader-comment which may, just may, lead to that critical bit that will shake up your whole way of thinking.

This has implications for both the presentation and the volume of information available on the web. More for the presentation, though. The ability to filter information is crucial, and one of the basic skills required write research papers. Darnton talks about his own experience as a newspaper reporter and recounts the mistrustful attitude toward newspapers of British citizens who’d placed bets on the outcome of the American Revolutionary War. This is the part I found bracing. It was as if Darnton were clucking “tut, tut! Assessing information sources has always been hard work!” There is, as almost any serious person who uses the internet will tell you, a lot of fluff out there. So also in the publishing world. (See Twelve founder Jonathan Karp’s recent Washington Post op-ed, here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/27/AR2008062702868.html.”)

The question is not so much whether it’s possible, at the moment, to sift through information and arrive at a carefully thought out conclusion about, say, whether it’s possible to staunch the effects of global warming. The question is whether we are disincentivizing writers and readers to do that kind of thinking, and whether the end result of that may be an erosion of our ability, as a culture, to think critically and analytically. I’m talking not only about the book in its current format, but also about the public accountability, the acclaim, the money, and the industry resources (like a good editor), that now go hand in hand with book-writing. These things aid in the development of the ideas. If all books go online, if book publishers go out of business, if e-books take over—our best writers may retreat to the realm of professional or academic (or bad!) writing, leaving non-specialist self-propagandists to duke it out online without moderation.

Darnton doesn’t think that books will disappear, but his parries are based mainly on historical, not commercial observations. Mediums degrade, he points out. By the numbers, Google cannot possibly upload every single book. (And isn’t the proposition of entrusting *all* our books to a single corporation, er, terrifying?) Another aspect of serious research and evaluation, Darnton notes, is comparing different versions of texts to pick out incongruities—another point against e-texts.

This piece has become a sort of manifesto without a conclusion but, since this is supposed to be a blog post and not, after all, a chapter in a book or even a discreet essay or article, I’m going to rein myself in and hit the “Publish” button.

If any brave soul has made it this far, I’d love to hear your thoughts.