Traces of a Symphony on Metal Plated Walls of Stalls with No Doors

What I Did in 2003 at the Proletariat

On Push, the Novel by Sapphire and Why I Am Not Going to the Movie Theater to see Precious Any Time Soon.

Stranger! henceforth be warned; and know, that pride,

Howe'er disguised in its own majesty,

Is littleness; that he who feels contempt

For any living thing, hath faculties

Which he has never used; that thought with him

Is in its infancy...

- William Wordsworth

I just read Push by Sapphire. I now have no desire to see the movie at least for some period of time. Maybe on video. Film has a way to make what is horrific, more horrific, what is wrong, oh so very wrong. I can handle violence in books in a different way from movies. I can stop. Take a walk. Look outside. Breathe deeply. Think for a while. Contextualize. I can wait for my brain to catch up to my body. Or for my body to catch up to my brain. Film (especially seen in movie theaters) doesn't allow this. The viewer is forced to ride forward without stopping and forced to see everything (or at least to hear it if you cover your eyes).

I loved Push. I haven't read Sapphire before that I can remember. But she does amazing things sculpting the language, the writing of her character, Precious. Precious wrote the book, the entire book is in her voice, in her grammar and syntax, using her vocabulary and her words. The book is a feat because it puts us into her mind and doesn't allow pity. We see characters in the book--social workers, teachers and the like--who react with pity and we immediately see how they fail to reach Precious, how she stumbles past them and they stumble past her. People fail her constantly. Constantly. And yet, the book is, in some sense, a story with an upward arc of learning and growth. And yet, it is not overdone. No one could call the book self-help or a story of uplift. Thank God. Things are just too complicated.

I got into literature, I think, because I am colorblind. Since I can't see color, I have been betrayed numerous times by my sight--painting the wrong colors, drawing wrong, seeing wrong, dressing wrong. Words provided a place not to worry about the fact that I see differently than other people. Words could not betray me in that way (though I have learned now they can still betray). I wonder what this has to do with Push by Sapphire.

Sapphire forced me to read Wordsworth for the first time deeply. I am sure I have read him before in some class at some time somewhere. When I first opened Push, I largely skipped over the baroque, stilted language of the epigraph by Wordsworth. But after finishing the book, I read the epigraph in a wholely different way. Sapphire made Wordsworth speak again in a totally different context, in a Harlem in the eighties context, in a USA 2009 context. Thanks.

So in conclusion, I won't be seeing the movie for at least a while. I'll just read Push by Sapphire and be sad and angry and sickened and inspired and then go take a walk in the sun and think.

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Push.

El chiste del día

¿Qué le dijo la tortillera al filósofo?

No hay masa ya.

A Review of JBAD: Lessons Learned by Danielle Adair

Ulises Carrión is a hero of seventies Latin American writing. He says something important in his essay “The New Art of Making Books:” “In a book of the old art words transmit the author's intention. That's why he chooses them carefully. In a book of the new art words don't transmit any intention; they're used to form a text which is an element of a book, and it is this book, as a totality, that transmits the author's intention.”

Recently, I picked up a notebook of sorts from Les Figues Press in Los Angeles that deals with experiences of the author, Danielle Adair, during a “twelve day embed during the month of November 2008 with the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division of Task Force Duke in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.” The book, From JBAD: Lessons Learned is printed as a notebook on a translucent onionskin paper that gives the book a feeling of impermanence and disposability. The text is constructed solely out of comments and statements made by the individuals she spoke with during her time as an embedded “journalist” in that camp. The book is also a webpage called First Assignment and comes with a photocard of people drinking tea and a tea bag that Danielle made as a kind of gift that comes along with the book. The title of her book seems to be tongue in cheek, i.e. in a loosely collected structure of quotations gathered from different speakers at the Infantry camp in Afghanistan there will be no report on what lessons she learned. The title is a provocation. It says, look here for the lessons I learned and then you look for the lessons and there is nothing actually there.

It is interesting to apply Carrión idea of the role of words in “new art” to the JBAD project. The words in Adair’s book do not have any intention (or if there was an intention of the speaker, it is recontextualized and altered by appearing in the book); in fact, the words are not even Adair’s. The project as whole—the book, the teabag, the photo card, the website—indicates an intention on Adair’s part to participate, to embed herself literally in something not-her-own, something foreign, a military intervention on the other side of a very large world.

Adair’s book seems to be a perfect example of what Carrión is talking about. A book that does not need to be read word for word, a book that can be skimmed, whose conceptual project is more important that the actual words on the page. As Carrión said, “Old art's authors have the gift for language, the talent for language, the ease for language. For new art's authors language is an enigma, a problem; the book hints at ways to solve it.” The quotes from the people around Adair in the camp attest to this fact; there words are enigmatic, fragmented, often deeply problematic. There is a hint of a solution in Adair attention to detail, to the voices around her, to deep listening. In another part of his essay, Carrión says that the new author has no intention; the sole intention is to “test the language’s ability to mean something.” Can these words, these dangerous imperial words about conquest and military intervention actually be made to mean something outside of their original context? Adair doesn't give us an answer, but she is definitely testing, experimenting and trying to find out.

I think I agree with Mr. A. O. Scott on this one.

How to use online space. How to connect online space with mental space. How to connect the two. How to let the air in and the sun peak through the blinds. How to let the public in without letting the personal out. How to print things here and let these things and their number contribute to greater growth and production. How not to hold onto things so tightly. How to do these things within this screen you are looking at. Spying into the ongoing life of a mind. A mind driven to jumping by hypertext.

°°°

Douglas: I have trouble with the notion that hypertext is necessarily nonlinear. Multilinear or polylinear, perhaps, but not nonlinear. There's the whole notion of perception -- there are cognitive psychologists who'd argue that our perceptual apparatus is prejudiced in favor of perceiving things in a linear, causal fashion. We create causality and sequences in the act of perceiving.

Nestvold: That's it -- we always read in a linear fashion, no matter what the narrative does.

Douglas: Absolutely. Otherwise, it would make no sense at all.

More of this conversation here.

°°°

Minds struggle to create meaning even when there is apparently none there in the beginning. Minds imagine stories out of nothing and create where nothing was there previously.

It is easier to write with hypertexts than without them. It is harder to write with hypertexts than without them.

Prehypertext hypertextual writing: Choose your own adventure books. Hopscotch/Rayuela.

I just want to explode when forced to read a book from beginning to end like a good child. This business of one word following another needs to be completely reconsidered. The most important thing is to involve the reader as an active participant, an accomplice even.

- Julio Cortázar (Through an unnamed translator. Ah, no one ever credits the translator it seems.)

Personally, I value the page in a different kind of way, like the feel of paper, like the skipping from one side of the book to the other.

Cortázar was experimenting with flow and story.

Now we can listen to Cortázar immediately within the text see:



It is never the same book then. The book changes with your own decisions about what to read and how to read.

Some people's blogs are just words with hardly any hypertexts or videos or photos.

Hopscotch is not an anti-novel. It is a contra-novel. That is a word closer to the truth.

Blogs are caught in the present constantly. A present which quickly receives a code for the time and date. I am listening to Cortázar speak now while I write about Cortázar. You can repeat this experience by listening to Cortázar and reading this or writing at the same time.

The sun is going down right now. It is setting through the eucalyptus trees.

Cortázar wanted to give all of us more options for how to read and to write.

Blogs also give you choices. If this is boring, you can go read something else. Maybe you would like to read Herta Müller. A story by the new winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Or maybe a story about a Turkish boy longing to be a Berliner.

There you are. There are lot of options. This text has to compete with all of those other texts in a very direct way. If you are bored, you can skip off somewhere else to see something else. Of course, with books, there is a similar experience, but in fact a click is easier, quicker and more accessible.

I just stopped writing for a while. I went and read a story at Words without Borders. I read the story I just linked to above about the Turkish boy from Berlin. The story is called Selam Berlin and it is by Yadé Kara. If you haven't already read it, I recommend reading it. Except now I am not in agreement with Words without Borders that the story is about longing to be anything. In fact, it is a very clearheaded story about a young man's sense of identity and belonging, not longing. The narrative is quite linear, but not for the online reader.

The online reader is constantly packaging and repackaging, ordering and reordering, constructing and reconstructing. I have a bad habit of constantly checking the front page of the New York Times. This is how I find things out. Plug into what is happening with the world. Ft. Hood. The health care bill.

Now I got distracted and read an obituary by J.M.G. LeClézio about Claude Lévi Strauss.

It's hard to stay focused in a hypertext world. How to read this straight through from beginning to end. The impossibility of reading the text I just wrote from beginning to end. Distraction is the point in fact.

Ya.

Que no me digan ñoño...