2-inch pictures

My exposure to major works until my mid 20's wasn't unusual- 2-inch pictures with their caption stating the real size, dorm-room Dali posters, and perhaps a few slide shows. There are many reasons why seeing the piece on the wall of a museum is better which are obvious and enumerated elsewhere. But the textbook pictures have a side benefit- helping reduce pieces to ideas.
Seeing a piece in a museum imprints extra information. For me the Picasso picture with the boy and the horse is not frameless but framed by blank wall, then a passage way and a corner on the sides, it's perpendicular to the Mademoiselles D'Avignon, off to the left on the second floor of the MOMA. At its size (5 foot?) pedestrian traffic is a medium problem, making it difficult to view from far away. It has the typical 1/2 inch of wrapped canvas along the side; it hangs at a certain height. It's a picture on a wall.
Munch's Scream I have seen only reproductions of- hundreds of times in different sizes and styles (flat, blow-up doll, office toy) but they don't fix. Mentally it comes through more clearly, leaving only the wavy figure, the dark sky, and the bridge.

Tags: Painting Perception Barroom theorising

The rules

For the modern reader it may seem like there are no rules left, and things might be better off with some rules. Everything is allowed- incomplete and run-on sentences, new words, optional grammar. This isn't new, rather the rules are from a brief interim. A few hundred years ago none of rules were codified. But we aren't back where we started, we've come to the point where the writer chooses. Everything is destroyed and now each builds individually.
Kingsley Amis said not to start two paragraphs in a row with the same word which at first seems capricious but then appealing. It is a shift from a rule of communication to a truer goal, aesthetics.

So what choices are writers making?

Bernard Malamud's The Tenants begins

Lesser catching sight of himself in his lonely glass wakes to finish his book. He smelled the living earth in the dead of winter. In the distance mournful blasts of a vessel departing the harbor. Ah, if I could go where it's going. He wrestles to sleep again but can't, unease like a horse dragging him by both bound legs out of bed. I've got to get up to write, otherwise there's no peace in me. In this regard I have no choice. “My God, the years.” He flings aside the blanket and standing unsteadily by the loose-legged chair that hold his clothes slowly draws on his cold pants. Today's another day.

It's easy not to focus on the “living earth” sentence. The purple prose initially pushed me off so it wasn't until now that I remembered there are no earth smells in a New York City tenement. There is rotten food, frying bacon, the many scents of air freshener, body odor, smoking reefer, and hair chemicals. Melted cheese, cigarettes, and one-note perfume.
I also admit to distrusting the horse analogy, which I imagine would cause heart-stopping fright rather than unease. The “lonely glass” was also confusing but I blamed it on myself. I assumed that a lonely glass was some other piece of home design that I was unfamiliar with like a sideboard or a bedstead. Or a poetic phrase for a mirror. The other idea is that it is a glass which is lonely, perhaps because it smells the living earth. But based on my glass looking experience I don't think you can see yourself in a glass from more than a few inches away.
The other thing about the paragraph is the voice changes. He and I are one. It's potentially confusing but there is opportunity here- the creation of two simultaneous streams: an intelligent outside 3rd person and the primitive id of the first. It's “he” who spots the "loose-legged chair" and “I” who has "no choice". The quotes in the third sentence from the end provide the final level, a 0th person. This is not how the character is feeling or what he does but a "literal" thought.
Despite my apprehension this goes down easily enough.

Tags: Books Stream of concious

Ragtime

Reflection happens in the time between actions and Ragtime is a steady march of action. This is a history book with personality, which is what it's meant to be. After a while I compensated by reading quickly through it.

They went into the streets and were somehow absorbed in the tenements. They were despised by New Yorkers. They were filthy and illiterate. They stank of fish and garlic. They had running stores. They had no honor and worked for next to nothing. They stole. They drank. They raped their own daughters. They ...

They may come away with a few more ideas about history. They won't remember the characters.

Tags: Books

Ethically Aware

While creating my latest posts I went to Flickr to retrieve the photos. There I found the tremendous awareness of ethical issues in the blogosphere that I'd always suspected. Although the majority of my posts about bad art

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politics

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or literature

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received little attention. The images from ethically aware company American Apparrel did quite well.


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Darn you one page authors

You Shall Know our Velocity by David Eggers begins

Everything within takes place after Jack died and before my mom and I drowned in a burning ferry in the cool tannin-tinted Guaviare River, in east-central Columbia, with forty-two locals we hadn't yet met. It was a clear and eyeblue day, that day, as was the first day of this story, a few years ago in January, on Chicago's north side, in the opulent shadow of Wrigley and with the wind coming low and searching off the jagged half-frozen lake. I was inside, very warm, walking from door to door.

Egger's book dramatically exceeds Siverson's. This is beautiful, the sentences move with both rhythm and simultaneity so that the experience is of absorbing instead of reading.

It continues

I was talking to Hand, one of my two best friends, the one still alive, and we were planning to leave. At this point there were good days, good weeks, when we pretended that it was acceptable that Jack had lived at all, that his life had been, in its truncated way, complete. This wasn't one of those days. I was pacing and Hand knew I was pacing and knew what it meant. I paced like this when figuring or planning, and rolled my knuckles, and snapped my fingers softly and without rhythm, and walked from the western edge of the apartment, where I would lock and unlock the front door, and then east, to the back deck's glass sliding door, which I opened quickly, thrust my head through and shut again. Hand could hear the quiet roar of the door moving back and forth on its rail, but said nothing.

I'm not sure there's anything wrong with the “quiet roar” and it didn't register the first time. This is still excellent and maybe a book can't sustain that opening for four hundred pages but there is a drop. The only problem is the graphical concealment. The first paragraph is the first page, “Everything” is "EVERYTHING".
I read the opening thinking that there was no debate, this was coming home with me. I took a quick glance at the second page but the second page was the second paragraph and in much smaller print. Complaining here is a bit much but I have troubles with this trend.
These are likely not marketing ploys. The argument could probably be made that the large size of the first page was symbolic- it indicated the text was different from the others. But two arguments about why this happens in general are worth taking a look at.

• This is where the effort naturally goes. The amount of thought that goes into beginning a book is necessarily large and the first sentences may represent the process of encapsulating all of it.
• The beginning is less involved with the business of the book. In this case after going through the setup Eggers had to introduce the characters, setting, action, and conflict; he had to get stuff done.
  

Damn you one-page authors

Davitt Sigerson's Faithful begins

Nick Clifford watches the fan sweep a white ceiling, looks down into the vortex of white sheets, and smiles at his Möbius strip of a milk white girl. An undersea swirl of straight black hair. A light, mouth-breathing sleep. Gaudí seashell feet, the heels round, unflattened, no evidence of weight bearing because she skips, she floats, she glides. Nearest to him is the right little toe, curved slightly toward the others. Nick imagines running a fingernail down the sole, imagines the foot curling in response, the unconscious grasp, the pinks pinker, a reef alive with baby suction. A waking stretch, the foot touches Nick on the side of his head, and Trish is up, laughing.

There is bad work here, “she skips, she floats, she glides” but there is effort “a relief alive with baby suction” and good stuff “Möbius strip of a milk white girl”.

There was a poor paragraph on the next page.

Trish flops on the bed, rooting for him, giggling and gobbling. Yes, it's God he must thank, to grant him even a taste of this. Gin and spare time helped: but how could it have become four weeks from just four hours? She saw his good heart. Finally someone did, and valued it. Which is what got her to the Chelsea Town Hall? That's a lot of credit on a good heart. The dick fattens in her mouth. Must let the wife do the work this time, she's the boss. Still, he can say I love you as much as he wants now, and he wants to.

But on the jacket were these spurts
"Undeniably vivid, capturing the dreamy intentsity of... desire with poetic shorthand."
The New York Times Book Review

“In elastic, often startling resonant prose, Sigerson mines both the ugliness and the ecstasy of sexual obsession”
Seattle Weekly

"Sigerson displays an intuitive understanding of the contemporary complexities of love and desire, and the power- through instinct, not caprice”
Vanity Fair

"Who can resist Sigerson's masterful manipulations"
Los Angeles Times

In the bookstore, needing a book for a blank period of time, based on the excerpt and the reviews, I bought it for what the cover shows to be $12.95. Over a sandwich I gave it its chance but it only kept taking.

Nick cuffs the side of her face. Johnny exhales and watches him. The little beeping sounds get louder. He's trying drunkenly to find a word. He searches for it, only to remember that of course he's already looked it up, quite recently.
Johnny says, “It's ok.”

He does this. She does this. He does this. She does this. The rhythm of a Chelsea nightclub. Johnny is a girl and this is sex, and it monotonously drives the book. Subject (pound), verb (pound), object (pound).

“What”
“It's OK. It's good. Nick isn't getting it. Johnny keeps looking at him. “I like it.”
Nick hits her again, open-handed, but harder. “I ...”
“It's-I'm just a bit deaf you know?
Nick takes out his dick and puts Johnny's head down on it. She sputters a little, but sucks. He can feel tongue, teeth throat. He pulls out of her mouth, raises her up by here ankles- those legs- ands starts to fuck here. She's so ready. In and in and in. He takes a breast, squeezes the nipple and twists it hard.

I'm wearing myself out and feeling used so here's the rest of the paragraph with the first two words of each sentence. She stares. Her long. So many. He wants. Fuck, smack. He hits. Johnny's head. He hits. It's good. She isn't. Her mouth. She is. Nick is. He sees. He keeps. Johnny doesn't.

How much do you think you missed?

Nat Henhoff gets the scoop

I am then accurately quoted by Forward as saying: "They made a mistake in saying [Khalidi] can't teach because of his political views. [They] should have brought in a a team teacher for the course so that it wouldn't be a one-sided indoctrination."

Village Voice March 22nd

"Wonderfully acted, outrageously comic!"

is Martin Amis' blurb for Mood Swingers which is based on Dead Babies a book he happens to have written. Of all the words in this phrase only "acted" is truthful and even then demands the removal of the exclamation mark. Perhaps Martin was on a few of the pills depicted on the cover.
DB is outrageous as well as well-paced, surprising, and fun stemming from all the drug use, misogyny, sex, violence, creative cruelty, pathetic midgets and staggering redheads. This isn't the “outrageous” quality of Coupling, The Office, or Ab Fab but it gets the same treatment- the calculated delivery of lines which are supposed to shock. So the line “You are going to feel this up in your gut” is made queasy parody delivered as a piece of repartee.

Tags: Film