César Aira: Real & Impossible

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1) EN PASSANT: “The idea… had been to create something equivalent to those figures that was both realistic and impossible, like Escher’s Belvedere, figures that look viable in a drawing but could not be built because they are but an illusion of perspective. Such a thing can be written, but one must be very inspired, very focused. I fail because of my precipitousness, my rush to finish, and my desperation to please.” — César Aira: The Literary Conference

Failure leads to something either merely impossible or merely realistic, both of which are unsatisfying. It is the combination of reality and impossibility that is interesting. Aira’s desperation to please prevents him from accomplishing the desired hybridization. Or so he says. In fact, the purported failure is itself a facet of the hybridization.

2) Speaking of César Aira, here’s a review of his latest novel, Varamo.

3) Here’s a bit of guitar work by JanCivil along with Tigress and the U-Fraidees on an arrangement of Satie’s Gnossienne.

Style, Logic, Sound

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1) EN PASSANT: In The Art of Fiction, David Lodge defines the experimental novel as “one that ostentatiously deviates from the received ways of representing reality — either in narrative organization or in style, or in both — to heighten or change our perception of that reality.”

There are many novels whose narrative organizations and/or styles are structured in order to heighten the reader’s sense of the ultimately random, disconnected, arbitrary nature of existence. But is there actually something about a narrative structure or style, any narrative structure or style, that makes it unambiguous in its ontological implications? Couldn’t another author take that same narrative organization and/or style and use it to heighten the reader’s sense of the fundamental interconnectedness and law-like order of existence? A literary style is like a religion: it can be used to justify anything.

2) William of Ockham: You may not be up to speed on 14th-century Scholasticism, so I thought it might be advisable to say a few words about William of Ockham. Willie was a Franciscan friar who also happened to be an unusually clear-headed logician. Among his many accomplishments, he is generally credited with the principle of parsimony known as Ockham’s Razor. This principle has seen a variety of formulations over the centuries, but basically it amounts to this: If you can make do with two things, don’t add a third. The third thing, the one Willie was most disinclined to add, was universal concepts. For him, there were only particular things: particular apples, particular angles, and particular assholes, a few of which did their best to make life difficult for Willie. So it tends to go for clear thinkers.

This distaste for universals is known as Nominalism. General concepts like “noun,” “number,” and “nymphomaniac,” are just contrived categories of the mind, convenient but without counterparts in the real world. As a Franciscan, Willie wasn’t too troubled by a lack of universal nymphos, but the absence of anything real corresponding to such handy generalities as “noun” and “number” was just the kind of knotty perplexity he liked to spend his time unravelling.

As you might imagine, the symptoms of Nominalism can be singularly pernicious. The intellect, unable to bond emotionally with abstract concepts, abandons its host to an existence as a mere particular, adrift in a universe of mere particulars. While other people enjoy the benefits of universals, the Nominalist’s world is an anemic realm of arbitrary labels attached only to such paraphernalia as rocks, roast turkey, and rear-end collisions. Existing as they do in this state of relentless multiplicity, Nominalists can be stubbornly obtuse, as if the forest were no more than a bunch of trees.

3) Bruno (Bounce not Latour): Something kind of interesting called Bruno Bounce, by Ruff Huaser.

4) And something you ought to look into: A very nice piece entitled Mirror, by qsblues.

Sinéad Murphy: The Art Kettle +

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1) EN PASSANT: “But Wallinger’s art work, though indiscernible from Haw’s protest, was not dismantled by the police. Haw’s protest, become art, had ceased to make itself heard.”

Indiscernible? On the contrary, they are quite easily distinguished. The fact that the photo exhibit was not dismantled was no doubt partly do to the fact that it had become “art.” But there were probably other contributing factors. Once the public protest became photographic, it also became a form of historical documentation. The censoring of these different kinds of entities (public protest, work of art, historical documentation) have somewhat different legal, political and social implications and can be enforced, or not, for very different reasons.

2) Monterey, CA with Goose
Photo by Jana Perinchief

3) Cool Jazz: Here’s a piece by shadesofdown called, Ocean: a beach and its tide.

4) Fiction & Truth: Fiction, no matter how many lies it tells, can only tell the truth about the world.

It is possible to imagine kinds of world very different from the world as we know it. It is possible to describe types of experience very different from the experience we actually have. But not any purported … description of a possible kind of experience would be a truly intelligible description. There are limits to what we can conceive of, or make intelligible to ourselves, as a possible general structure of experience. — P. F. Strawson, The Bounds of Sense

A Murky Blue Blast

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How far can a writer stretch metaphor and simile? In his book, On Being Blue, William Gass has this to say:

Throw down any pair of terms like dice; speak of arrogant bananas; command someone, as Gertrude Stein once did, to ‘argue the earnest cake,’ and the mind will do more than mix them in its ear. It will endeavor a context in which the command is normal, even trite.

Here are a couple of throws of the dice with which to endeavor a context that will provide more than a mix in the ear:

“When I opened the door, Sunk’s canary let out a blast of notes like knobs on a metal sponge cake.” (7 Remote Mysteries & 1 Delay)

“She and I had some murky chemistry going, but it proved to be too much for both of us. The post-coital thing was like being struck by mushroom lightning.” (The Case)

Riding the 747

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Creationists have argued that because life is so much more complex than anything non-living, it could not have come into existence through spontaneous natural processes. Life required the intervention of an intelligent designer. To think otherwise, they maintain, is to posit something as improbable as a tornado tearing through a junkyard and constructing a Boeing 747.

What follows are a few thoughts that emerged from my cerebral junkyard after reading about the above argument in Richard Dawkins’ book, The God Delusion. Some of these thoughts will have found their way here out of an appreciation of the comic possibilities inherent in the creationist’s argument, and some out of perplexity over Dawkins’ response to it. Since the argument is little more than a cartoon, I wanted to have some fun with both.

In The God Delusion, Dawkins characterizes the Boeing 747 argument as an argument from improbability. Perhaps he does this because he wishes to clothe his counter-argument (what he calls “The Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit”) in garments more technical than those worn by the argument he wishes to undress. But the argument is not an argument from improbability, regardless of the presence of the word “improbable.” It is an argument from incredulity. It has the form: I can’t believe x, therefore x isn’t true. In other words: I can’t believe something as complex as life could have evolved spontaneously through natural processes. Therefore, it didn’t. Continue reading →

A Certain Age + A Fugue

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Once you reach a certain age, the consequences of reaching a certain age become more salient.

Once you turn forty… the whole world is water off a duck’s back. Once you turn forty you realize that life is there to be wasted. Of course, once you reach a certain age, once you’re old enough to look around at the world, there’s nothing for you to do but drink. Once you understand that you live in the age of shit, there’s nothing else for you. After a certain age, life becomes administrative — more than anything.

The first two sentences of the preceding paragraph are from Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, by Geoff Dyer. The next two sentences are from Dogma, by Lars Iyer. The paragraph’s final sentence is from The Possibility of an Island, by Michel Houellebecq.

Here’s a piece of Ambient Music entitled Nowhere Fugue Part 1, by beansix at iCompositions.

Word Problems

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words
When I was maybe three or four, I overheard a neighbor say something that filled me with a peculiar dread. She was chatting with my mother and mentioned that her daughter, who was just learning to talk, had recently produced the extraordinary and unexpected phrase, ‘sand witch.’ I had no idea what a ‘sand witch’ was, or how one type of witch might differ from another. But for some reason, the idea of a ‘sand’ variety really scared me. My subsequent reluctance to approach the neighbor’s house eventually led my mother to ask what I was so afraid of. My relief was palpable when I was informed that a “sand witch” was a familiar lunch item, what I called a ‘sauinch.’

Another spooky word referred to something that supposedly existed on the far side of the low hill that backed our house: a ‘reservoir.’ Inexplicably, this word had become associated in my mind with being forced to breath the fumes of burning mercury, a poison that would, according to good authority, turn my bones to rubber. The top of that low hill was visible from our backyard, and the unseen reservoir on the other side produced an anxiety that I imagine was not so different from what ancient sailors must have felt when contemplating sea monsters or the edge of the world. And like most sailors, I was careful to stay close to shore.

The First Three Books

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I’m not sure how common it is for someone to remember the first three books they ever read. In my case, it’s easy enough because I was nineteen at the time. Stationed at Ft. Devens in Massachusetts, with nothing much to do on weekends, I would often take the bus into Boston, wander around aimlessly, have lunch wherever I happened to be when I got hungry, wander some more, then catch the bus back to Devens. On one of these weekends, strolling through Harvard Square, I turned a corner, entered Harvard Book Store, and did something I’d never done before: I bought a book.

Three books, actually, selected by some spur-of-the-moment, arbitrary scheme which I can’t remember. I had, up to that point in my life, never read, nor ever wanted to read, a book. I admit, it seems unlikely that someone could graduate from high school without ever having read a book. Nevertheless, that’s what happened. By reading no more than a few first pages and an occasional book jacket blurb, I managed to do whatever it was the public school system required of me — admittedly without any distinction other than an illustrious 1.2 GPA. So, when I left Harvard Book Store with Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul On Ice, Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, I was somewhat ill prepared to digest my purchase.

I’ve occasionally thought about re-reading those three books, wondering if, as my first, they might have left some distinctive and indelible trace on what was at the time a nineteen-year-old mind uncommonly free of any positive intellectual predispositions. But I doubt that reading them again would reveal much about my own personal history. The innocence is too long gone.