Maria Fischer’s ‘Traumgedanken’

Unbelievably cool:

The book “Traumgedanken” (“Thoughts on dreams”) contains a collection of literary, philosophical, psychological and scientifical texts which provide an insight into different dream theories.

To ease the access to the elusive topic, the book is designed as a model of a dream about dreaming. Analogue to a dream, where pieces of reality are assembled to build a story, it brings different text excerpts together. They are connected by threads which tie in with certain key words. The threads visualise the confusion and fragileness of dreams.

On five pages there are illustrations made out of thread. Their shape and colour relies on the key words on the opposite page. This way an abstract image of the dream about dreaming is generated.

In addition there are five pages where a significant excerpt from a text of the opposite page is stitched into the paper. It is not legible because the type’s actual surface is inside the folded page. This expresses the mysteriousness of dreams and the aspect of dream interpretation.

More at Maria Fishcer’s website.

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Was Jared Lee Loughner politically motivated, insane or just plain stupid?

Pop quiz: there’s a guy who’s been getting a lot of attention lately who had a long history of mental illness which ended in tragedy, an obsessive focus on grammar, a distrust of the American government, who toyed with the idea that the world we experience is not real- who am I talking about?
Jared Lee Loughner, who shot and killed six people in Tucson Arizona whilst trying to assassinate Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, right? Or David Foster Wallace, about whom all of the above statements are true. Two very different people, both left legacies that the United States, and the world, is struggling to come to grips with. Despite the similarities listed above, nobody would argue that Wallace and Loughner belong in the same rough category- hell, I might lobby to have them recognised as belonging to different species- Homo Sapiens Superior and Homo Sapiens Vulgaris respectively.
The gulf that separates the two is immense, but a vast proportion of it is taken up by one single factor: intellect.
Continue reading

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What could have been: works that would have entered the public domain this year

See anything you like in the picture above? The chances are that even a basically literate person will know and perhaps love one of the books and films in the picture above- there’s my favorite Hitchcock film and favorite stage play right next to each other. Well good news, because all of the above works (and 2/3 of the Lord of the Rings books, On the Waterfront, and the songs ‘I’ve got a woman’ and ‘Shake, rattle and roll’) are now yours! Yes, you can now distribute, remix, adapt, mash-up and reinterpret anything from the year 1954, and all for free! Think of the possibilities for spreading the great cultural achievements of the 20th century and creating new works for the 21st, think of-

-And we’re back in the room, take a deep breath. The above is what could have been had the US not passed the 1976 Copyright act (which became effective in 1978) on the world’s behalf and extended the time in which it takes for a work to be considered to be in the public domain from 56 years to 95. I’m afraid that you’ll have to wait until 2050 before releasing any of the above works in the popular ‘and zombies’ genre, which really puts a damper on my forthcoming Milwaukee Braves/New York Giants/Zombies mash-up, Sports and Zombies Illustrated.

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Making Sense of Modernism

Despite his gain in knowledge and power, Christopher Marlowe’s sixteenth-century Doctor Faustus strikes an increasingly saturnine pose. His freedom from Christian authority, bought at such great cost from Mephistopheles, comes to be experienced as loss: not just loss of grace, but loss of meaning and of purpose, too. At the last, as we hear him here, he strives once more for the re-enchantment of the world. He can even see that symbol of the sacramental universe, ‘Christ’s blood’, ‘stream[ing] in the firmament’. But it’s too late; God has departed. In his wake, modern Faustian man is free, but rootless, liberated but cut adrift from the resources that had once furnished his life with meaning.

Such is the similarly plaintive refrain that runs through Professor Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?. Not that you would know this, given the silly-season furore that greeted the author’s much-publicised criticism of the greats of contemporary Anglo-American literature. Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, even Philip Roth – all are, admittedly, the recipients of Josopivici’s critical sting. ‘Reading Barnes’, Jospovici writes – and the Guardian gleefully quoted – ‘like reading so many of the other English writers of his generation, Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Blake Morrison, or a critic from an older generation who belongs with them, John Carey, leaves me feeling that I and the world have been made smaller and meaner’. If these ‘precise’, ‘cynical’, and unrelentingly ‘ironical’ writers, having snuck out from under ‘Philip Larkin’s overcoat’, clearly annoy Josopivici, then at least he finds Philip Roth, a man frequently and perhaps unthinkingly hailed as ‘our greatest living writer’, funny and thought-provoking. ‘[B]ut only as good journalism can be funny and thought-provoking’, Jospivici adds, just in case his personal enjoyment be mistaken for objective literary praise.

More at Sp!ked

Also, Carles at Hipsterrunoff is now podcasting, and you can listen to episode 1 here. The content is virtually identical to HRO in its written form (there are no MP3s of relevant buzzbands, for example) but does allow the listener to realize that Carles has a very, very sexy voice.

UPDATE

You can now call Carles from Hipster Runoff at any time, day or night (mostly night) to discuss your problems, chillwave and Zooey Daschenel or just to hear Carles’s sexy voice (mostly the latter).

Also again: it’s 2011. Here’s a picture of Michael Jackson dressed as Hitler.

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Introduction to Electronic Literature: A Freeware Guide

Over on his Free Space Comix blog poet Brian Kim Stefans has compiled an incredible introduction to electronic literature- one hundred documents that will soon form part of a virtual seminar course on the subject.

The website that I am creating for this anthology will contain the essays in .pdf form (reset, since many of these pages are nearly illegible), a .pdf of the edited book with my editorial commentary, a page of videos I often use when teaching, a “ten week course” that is a series of essays, links and assignments based on my course, and other materials such as a bibliography, via Amazon’s “listmania” feature, of electronic literature books.

This is not a complete overview of the state of the field, or an attempt to create a “canon.” If the image here is skewed or flawed, it’s only because it’s meant to be a launching pad for an independent investigation of the genre, either as a scholar or artist.

More at Free Space Comix

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The Philosophical Underpinnings of David Foster Wallace’s Fiction

When the future novelist David Foster Wallace was about 14 years old, he asked his father, the University of Illinois philosophy professor James D. Wallace, to explain to him what philosophy is, so that when people would ask him exactly what it was that his father did, he could give them an answer. James had the two of them read Plato’s Phaedo dialogue together, an experience that turned out to be pivotal in his understanding of his son. “I had never had an undergraduate student who caught on so quickly or who responded with such maturity and sophistication,” James recalls. “This was this first time I realized what a phenomenal mind David had.”

The experience seems to have made an impression on David as well. Not long after he arrived at Amherst College in the early 1980s, he developed a reputation among his professors as a rare philosophical talent, an exceptional student who combined raw analytical horsepower with an indefatigable work ethic. He was thought, by himself and by others, to be headed toward a career as a professor of philosophy. Even after he began writing fiction, a pursuit he undertook midway through college, philosophy remained the source of his academic identity. “I knew him as a philosopher with a fiction hobby,” Jay Garfield, a professor now at Smith College who worked with Wallace at the time, remembers. “I didn’t realize he was one of the great fiction writers of his generation with a philosophy hobby.”

More at Slate.

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James Frey’s Literary Production Line

When he was working on A Million Little Pieces, Frey told us, he wanted to write in the tradition of Tropic of Cancer, “A Season in Hell,” and Paris Spleen—transgressive works by transgressive authors. As he pointed out, heavy hitters never write like the established writers of their own time. Hemingway used short, declarative sentences; Miller wrote about sexuality in the first-person present tense; Mailer blurred the line between fact and fiction. These men created their own styles. Frey said Mailer even told him, right before he died, “You’re the next one of us.”

Frey said he never considered whether A Million Little Pieces was fiction or nonfiction—and anyway, before the memoir craze of the nineties, it would have been published as a novel. “If Picasso painted a Cubist self-portrait,” he suggested, “nobody would say it didn’t look like him.” Much of his performance for us echoed comments he’d made to journalists. “My best friends are almost all artists,” he told a Canadian reporter earlier this year. “I have very few friends who are writers … I’m a big fan of breaking the rules, creating new forms, moving on to new places. Contemporary artists like [Richard] Prince, Hirst, and Koons do that, but there are no literary equivalents. In literature, you don’t see many radical books. That’s what I want to do: write radical books that confuse and confound, polarize opinions. I’ve already been cast out of ‘proper’ American literary circles. I don’t have to be a good boy anymore. I find that the older I get, the more radical my work becomes.”

Frey also talked to the reporter about how contemporary artists make their work. “A lot of artists conceptualize a work and then collaborate with other artists to produce it,” he said then. “Andy Warhol’s Factory is an example of that way of working. That’s what I’m doing with literature.” At the end of the seminar, Frey elaborated on this concept and made an unexpected pitch. He was looking for young writers to join him on a new publishing endeavor—a company that would produce mostly young-adult novels. Frey believed that Harry Potter and the Twilight series had awakened a ravenous market of readers and were leaving a substantial gap in their wake. He wanted to be the one to fill it. There had already been wizards, vampires, and werewolves. Aliens, Frey predicted, would be next.

If you don’t mind feeling angry enough to cry blood, read more at New York Magazine.

My apologies for the lack of activity lately- I’ve been breaking in a new computer. Many thanks to Dell for building a laptop with a single USB drive, saving me from the horror of being able to have a mouse, external hard-drive and iPod plugged in at the same time. Oh, and the pop-up to tell me that I’ve plugged in headphones that has finally allowed me to answer the question ‘did I plug in my headphones?’ (I had, it turns out). Currently I’m flipping a coin to decide whether The Body or Agalloch get my nod for album of the year.

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Jurassic Park and the Utopia Wars

More at Bookslut

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Tom McCarthy’s C And The Pointless Resurgence of Experimental Fiction (which is actually Modernism)

If all goes according to plan, one of these vacuous, privileged indie butter-dumpsters will be the next Gertrude Stein.

The blitzkreig of publicity surrounding Tom McCarthy’s novel C has claimed at least one victim, myself, and will certainly drive sales, establishing McCarthy’s writing as authentic within relevant demographics and, combined with ubiquitous availability of the book itself in Waterstones and Borders will certainly allow publishers Random House (a subsidiary of the Bertelsmann AG transnational media group) to move a considerable quantity of product. Not to be glass-half-empty, but there seems to have been some sort of logistical error that is preventing copies ordered on Amazon, the world’s biggest book retailer, from arriving any sooner than two weeks, as opposed to the next day. Also, it’s not available on Kindle or Apple’s bookstore yet- somebody really dropped the ball there. This said, the product’s transparent dust jacket really says ‘premium item’ (though from a distance makes the book appear to be a laminated library copy) and its reflective quality makes it a valuable piece of social capital to facilitate social-networking. All in all a successful product launch in a difficult marketplace.
One of the key impediments to Tom McCarthy’s product ‘making mad bank’ is the term ‘experimental’. In both interviews and articles he has to deal with this ugly word from the pre-Web 2.0 days. He is right to say that “People use that term when what they actually mean is ‘not conforming to a certain type of realism’, and that’s just as much a literary convention as anything else.” Not only is the term alienating, it’s inaccurate: ‘experimental’ implies cutting-edge, and the experiments performed in C were completed in the forties- he’s formulating general relativity when he could be discovering the Higgs-Boson. He may have a hard-on for the early twentieth century in his own confused way (he has issued a futurist-style “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” and has written a book that is essentially a hand-job to an imagined time when literary and personal authenticity were still possible) but unless he’s aiming for a Dieselpunk demographic then he needs a rebranding. In fact, all of experimental fiction needs to be rebranded. By me.
From now on Experimental Fiction is going to be Alternative Fiction.
Could any term be more perfect for (former) experimental writers who endlessly repeat Waugh, Joyce and Johnson’s experiments? Alternative music hasn’t managed to make anything innovative in the past twenty years and is sustained largely by producing artful simulacra of 4AD, Merge and K-records back catalogues. With a little imagination on the part of Random House’s marketing team the International Necronautical Society could be the next Wavves and Do the Dew!
It’s time to celebrate literature’s holding pattern. It’s time to outdo alternative music with half thought-out nostalgia. If alternative music is predicated on all good music being made before the musicians were born then writers should work under the premise that no great literature was produced after their grand-parents were born- I’m imposing a strict May 4th 1939 limit on all formal innovation and subject matter.
Wonderfully for writers, the alternative tag means they don’t have to do anything that they aren’t doing already. They can sign to a major publisher, use expensive marketing campaigns to move their product and maybe one day get an endorsement from Mountain Dew. Look at Vampire Weekend- rich white guys playing what sounds like Huey Lewis and the News soundtracking the Lion King and, rightfully, everybody loves them! If they had set out to ‘experiment’ with a non-’Hip to be square/Just can’t wait to be king’ sound they would have never been able to endorse disappointing U.S president Barack Obama’s campaign.
The problem with ‘experimental’ is that sooner or later somebody might take the word seriously.

Further recommendations for the future of Alt-fic:

• Big-name Editors picking unpublished writers from obscurity/Williamsburg- I want a Dave Sitek of grammar.
• A way to make books lo-fi. Possibly some sort of heat process or acid treatment.
• Can M.I.A write a book? She probably should.
• Lydia Davis should be photographed with her boobs out on Lastnightsparty.com.
• The Andrew Wylie agency signs an exclusive deal with Mountain Dew.

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Why Don’t More Writers Buy Books?

Why Don’t More Writers Buy Books? – Signatures – GOOD.

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