Subversion, breakdown, and crisis in meaning are leitmotifs of the age. Woolf identified its prevailing sound as “breaking and falling, crashing and destruction.” Grammar was violated, syntax disintegrated; and Joyce’s Ulysses was the “calculated indecency of a desperate man who feels that in order to breathe he must break the windows.”
The Modernist Novel: A Critical Introduction, Stephen Kern
Chilling new comics short at Bad Space. Ordering the structure of a novel as a mixtape metaphor. Read that, then go back to the Bad Space comic and look at the tonal shift in panel 6.
James Joyce is still following me around. A magnificent essay from Jessa Crispin:
Ulysses is a symbol, all right. But in these times, it’s a symbol for all the wrongheaded and frustrating ways we talk and think about the way art is made and received and appreciated. There are better, and more accurate, ways of thinking about Ulysses that explain why this maligned, beloved, and still controversial novel holds such a power over our understanding of what art does.
It is big, it is furious, and it is very, very sharp.
This is a gorgeous idea: The Body Of Horror – Music Inspired By The Cinema Of David Cronenberg.
“Everybody’s a mad scientist, and life is their lab. We’re all trying to experiment to find a way to live, to solve problems, to fend off madness and chaos.” – David Cronenberg
—You behold in me, Stephen said with grim displeasure, a horrible example of free thought.
– ULYSSES, James Joyce
The wind is booming here, and I want to try something new in the “digital notebook” framework here, using a legacy title. Listening to this while I try the thought out:
I hadn’t noticed this, and will likely forget it again, so I’m making a note: the Bandcamp phone app now allows for queueing and playlists. I have bought (checks site) 1355 records through Bandcamp, so this is a good thing for me, except that I will now spend days trawling through those 1355 records building playlists I will hardly ever use.
Probably the most expensive photograph in the world, apparently. Also, world photos from the month of January 2022 from Foreign Policy. Though I certainly still miss the flow of imagery from Instagram on the desktop, my RSS feeds are still highly visual — and I don’t have the tug of IG on a phone to go look at some nice photos for a few minutes.
Nathen Chen didn’t even take his phone to the Olympics: “so as to escape the cognitive drain induced by “the urge to scroll for hours through social media.” He brought his guitar instead, choosing to replace dopamine hacking with high quality leisure.” In leisure reading, the Guardian has a short primer for starting with James Joyce – I’ve been dipping back into both Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake over the last several months. Ulysses remains beautiful:
Old and secret she had entered from a morning world
And FInnegan’s Wake remains the exhausting, if often lovely, work of a man who should have been beaten to death for compulsive punning:
Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen’s maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rushlit toofarback
(But lovely!)
The oaks of ald now they lie in peat yet elms leap where ashes lay.
“Analysis of a colossal anthropological dataset that systematically collects characteristics of societies around the world throughout all of human history and prehistory shows that an important bottleneck preventing growth in ‘collective computation’—the ability of social groups to solve problems—may be the development of writing systems.”
Studies suggest that writing systems emerge only when cities emerge. James Joyce said of Ulysses that if the city of Dublin was destroyed tomorrow, “Ulysses could be used to rebuild it brick by brick.”
The story line as a means of organizing data has tended to disappear in many of the arts. In poetry it ended with Rimbaud, in painting it ended with abstract art, and in the movie it ends with Bergman and Fellini. One way of describing our situation in the electronic age is to say that we have come to the end of the neolithic age.
I found a Marshall McLuhan book I hadn’t read: UNDERSTANDING ME, a collection of interview and lecture transcripts and manuscripts. The culture goes through cycles of “rediscovering” McLuhan every few years: I cited him in a talk I gave in Brighton in 2012 and got a flood of email expressing delighted disbelief that I had mentioned such a prized archaeological entity. In the quote above, McLuhan actually brushes his tracks from the ancient sand: he was both media theorist and James Joyce scholar, and would likely have been of the opinion that Joyce’s ULYSSES was the peak of storyline as organising data. Joyce voiced the opinion that if Dublin had been obliterated the day after publication, it could be rebuilt down to the individual brick from ULYSSES, such was the density of the work. The Modernism it ushered in was supposed to free us from the “perfected” novel. Robbe-Grillet later made similar points.
Rian Hughes once accused me of being the last Modernist. I was never an ergodic writer, nor a steely postmodernist. I always kind of liked that tag. But perhaps not in this. I feel like, in McLuhan’s phrasing, that that Neolithic urge, for the basic organising of data into story, is indivisibly human. The electronic age didn’t knock that out of us. Electronics simply became a new tool in our storytelling Neolithic paw.
A thought to develop, maybe. Good old McLuhan. Still giving me ideas to test myself against after all these years. He should never have been forgotten, not for an instant.
UNDERSTANDING ME, Marshall McLuhan (link)
(written summer 2015)
I took a break, because I had work to do and it was too damn hot to multitask. Please enjoy this giant E.coli by Luke Jerram as recompense:
Aether are making ambient-music glasses:
The glasses have built-in Bluetooth open-ear audio speakers embedded in each temple of the sleek frame, which delivers pleasant sound that adapts seamlessly to the surrounding environment. Isolating ambient noise yet never blocking it out, the captivating wearable design lets users engage with the world around them while customizing their own personal soundscape at any given moment.
This may be worth following up later:
Serial Reader might be onto something. The free app currently offers around 800 public domain novels (here are some hot titles from 1921), and will dole out your chosen book in daily 20-minute bites. To some, that might sound like a miserable approach to reading canonical literature: How, for example, are you supposed to get swept up in the profane and tidal lilt of Ulysses if you put it down before you’ve even had a chance to look up “heresiarch”?
pubg.queue.push(function(){pubg.displayAds()})But I can see the appeal. As someone who has to read for a living, any kind of for-pleasure text is usually reserved for bedtime, which means 15 minutes of groggy and glazed page-skimming… So why not just take that 20 minutes and put it somewhere else, when I’m more alert?
I can’t remember where I picked this tin cup up. I presume an airport somewhere in Canada. “Exit, pursued by a bear” being the famous stage direction from Shakespeare’s THE WINTER’S TALE. ( Here’s David Tennant absolutely killing Just A Minute on his first attempt, talking for sixty seconds about it.) For the writer’s wandering mind, this joke cup is in fact a writer’s cup.
I like having a few tin cups around because I don’t want to take wine glasses into the garden. I am clumsy. And working.
I haven’t done anything to this garden in probably six or seven years. Honestly, I’m quite fond of the wildness of it. But the edges are closing in, and I can’t grow food out here. So, Thursday morning, I kitted up and came out here with tools, determined to at least clear the round patio area by the east fence, which had turned into a mysterious dark glade. Now, I like a mysterious dark glade as much as the next person, probably more, but this isn’t a big garden and I need that space. As I write this, my hands and the soles of my feet are covered in hotspots and I have a full-body ache, but the round patio is clear. Once I put the PVC mini-greenhouse (bought six or seven years ago) in place, I poured myself a tin cup of red wine, sat in the shade and thought about writing.
Three or four years ago, George RR Martin had this to say about writing:
I think there are two types of writers, the architects and the gardeners. The architects plan everything ahead of time, like an architect building a house. They know how many rooms are going to be in the house, what kind of roof they’re going to have, where the wires are going to run, what kind of plumbing there’s going to be. They have the whole thing designed and blueprinted out before they even nail the first board up. The gardeners dig a hole, drop in a seed and water it. They kind of know what seed it is, they know if planted a fantasy seed or mystery seed or whatever. But as the plant comes up and they water it, they don’t know how many branches it’s going to have, they find out as it grows.
Most of my idols were architects, I think. Alan Moore had a famous “big piece of paper” for BIG NUMBERS that had every action for every character in every issue of the planned series. Here’s a photo of a photo:
Here’s a curiosity – in the early 80s, Alan visited New York, and wrote (was this in ESCAPE magazine?) about meeting Howard Chaykin and learning that Chaykin painstakingly worked out AMERICAN FLAGG’s structure in advance. There were no more details than that, but at the end of that decade Alan was structuring a book on a vast graph. I always strongly suspected that Chaykin influenced Alan to be an architect. One of Alan’s earlier touchstones was Thomas Pynchon, whom I conceive of as more a gardener. I start to see James Joyce in some of Alan’s latter work, and ULYSSES is a work of architecture.
I wanted to be an architect, deep down. When Jonathan Hickman appeared, his ability to visualise and fling these huge structures up into the air was a fascination to me. (PAX ROMANA, perhaps his least-loved work, is one I revisit every couple of years – in my head, it links to Matt Wagner & Tim Sale’s wonderful “Devil’s Reign” sequence, and back to Delany & Chaykin’s EMPIRE.)
It was a shock to me when William Gibson turned out to be a gardener. I remember him talking about SPOOK COUNTRY, starting with a compelling image that stuck with him, and just… writing. Discovering what the book was about as he wrote it.
As a writer, I am, I think, a bad architect. I make myself start with an outline, and then I wander. I plough the fields and scatter. A case in point is CASTLEVANIA Season 3. I knew pretty much where I needed every character to be by the end of the season in order to achieve the strict requirements of the fourth and final season. Everybody had to be in place for the last act of the story. I ploughed the field in straight lines. But the field was way over there, and I just went over there in any way that felt right. And, frankly, I think I ended up kind of next to the field in question, rather than at its gate.
I’m bad at plans. I try, but I always end up winging it.
But I grew a lot of stuff along the way – the Flyseyes monologue, which I think was one of the most successful pieces of writing in the whole season, just kind of happened. Grew out of the dirt I’d tilled. Structurally, it was probably one of the worst things I could have done. But stories are not structure. Structure is a set of signposts, and only in the most austere modernist nouvelle roman would you find a set of signposts presented as a story. It’s your story. You can touch each signpost by any route you choose, and decide to skip one or two if they’re not necessary to the journey. Or even if not necessary to the journey that pleases you. And you can pause to raise a plant or two along the way.
Sitting out here in the garden, it may be, at this late stage, that I have to accept that I’m not a great architect, and perhaps it’s okay to be a bad gardener. Build the raised bed, score the lines with a trowel, scatter the seed and accept that the wind and the rain will cover the lines and that I won’t know what grows out of it all until it happens.
Yesterday I had a meeting at the British Library. I was expecting a sit-down in a side office. Instead, I was conveyed down into the guts of the building.
It has several sub-basement levels, not all of which are accessible on all the lift shafts. The ceilings are ribboned with conveyor belts, which transport materials from all over the building to the reading and listening rooms in the public library. The red trays on the conveyor travel at about a mile an hour — it can take forty-five minutes to transport any one requested article — because some of the Library’s materials are too fragile to survive any faster movement.
In a sealed room sits a signed recording of James Joyce reading from ULYSSES, preserved in conditions approaching that of Mars.
I saw twenty-inch vinyl records made for the armed forces by NBC, handled Edison wax cylinders, and met an engineer trying to pull a digital transfer off a 78 made out of gelatin and glass. Great marches of travelling racks full of music, scripts, radio capture and field recording. It’s only being there that drives home that they keep everything.
The cultural breath of the whole country, and every form of culture that enters it — it all goes here.
I didn’t want to leave. It was like living in the heart of perfect Albion for a moment.
(originally written 28 Oct 2015, recovered from morning.computer)
