waste

On self-effacement and the second person

When one contemplates the matter only as far as the shallows, as they do who have only meagre worldly knowledge and prefer to keep themselves safe for theory and theory alone, one may well hold that to create a completely self-effaced text cannot really be very hard to do at all.  Granted, some well-worn phrases, those that the creator has made a mark of her hand (or, as the case may be, her pen), become verboten, and one becomes forced to resort as replacements for them to new means—and when they are not so compact as the old, nevertheless they are more than capable of the work set before them, an only one's cleverness meets the task.  However, one reasons, one can take care of these obstacles, and perhaps even make the task performable by some standard method or other, so that the process that makes texts of the sort we here speak of can be encompassed by two steps: 1. the creator sets pen to paper (or, as the case may be, hands to keyboard) and lets words flow as she normally does, not concerned to keep an eye on her end goal or to harness, and not express, her self.  2. The standard method gets fed the typed or penned text and operates, well, standardly, and at the end we see the new text, that has had the self of the creator completely effaced.  One does not deny that there's a tendency to shove the self forward, and perhaps holds that that tendency makes necessary the development of a standard method.  One refers, perhaps, to the most well-known of those named for the one who embraced God and the monastery after he was saved from stormy death by the holy Anna, who held that man's breast encompasses a tendency to want to be the one who marches at the head, who proceeds before all others and leads them, and beats on leather stretched over wood, and makes a racket to serve her own ego: "The small ask the world to set them at the head rank. They have, after they are born, that tendency to be the leather-beater. … And when we are grown, we have yet not grown past that tendency." So there are obstacles.  They can, these shallowpates assert, nevertheless be overcome.  Easy-peasy.

However, when one approaches the depths of the matter, one learns posthaste that the above-sketched method can never work.  For who can say that the new text, that pretends to be self-effaced, does not show the creator's self all the more?  Granted, there has been a long tendency among Westerners to hold the contrary, to hold that one who's held close and has small external freedom to move has a freedom of her self whose smallness corresponds.  Often we see the flesh made the agent that cramps man; some noncorporeal element, that gets called the essence of man, stands as opponent thereto.  We can see that tendency already when we look at Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans, whose credo expressed the hope that we may be chastened, for we were placed here to be chastened! And the same comes long years later once more to Gerard Manley H., whose poem "The Skylark" compared man's essence to "a dare-gale skylark scanted by a grey cage", and man's flesh to a "bone-home, mean home".  And yet, and yet!  May the case not be, rather, that exactly when there appears to be nearly no freedom to express the self, the power to express the self becomes stronger than ever before?  Frost's well-known apothegm that concerns nets and ball games seems meet here, as does Charles Taylor's remark (alas the words themselves escape attempts to be located) to the effect that agents of the modern age sew from whole cloth models that they then follow, merely to have a sense of the allowable and the not.

And who's to say that the dare-gale skylark doesn't catch one's eye for one reason alone, namely, that the fowl scants and the cage checks freedom, as the water flows fastest when the area's the smallest, as one sets a gem to be shown to advantage?  Mettle tested, the real self emerges; the clash and clangor of battle forges one and makes one what one really all along was; or perhaps the self emerges when one creates art—smacks of folderol not worthy of one's earnest regard, maybe.  That doesn't mean chatter of that sort's completely bad.  There may well be a jot of correctness there.

Take once more the credo that says one can efface the self to the last drop. One can represent to oneself how that can be done, perhaps, by a devoted creator of texts—Mallarmé, say. Can a creator of that type really get to her goal? No. For can one not always say, "There's no trace of the creator to be located here, and only of the works of Madame Bovary (say) can one say that, all the more so when one attends to the manner of the creator's absence!".  That's to say that self-effacement can take many forms, and maybe to each creator there's one form for her alone!

Now let's contemplate what, were self-effacement gotten, were to follow.  To do that we look at Canada, whose sons are renowned the world over for self-effacement, modesty, and the tendency to downplay talents. Can one deny that, were the second person to be removed from Canada—were there no one to address, or by whom to be addressed—then were one's days beneath that sky wholly bland and colorless, wholly grey and flavorless? As a general credo, then, we have what follows: when the self gets effaced, there corresponds for the one who's effaced a greater need for the second person, to, when to express the accord as follows makes sense, replace and render whole the lost self.  (Shades of Plato: the beast that had two backs, that made the gods fear.)

The treatment of the second person here has not been very good. Look, then, for more on that aspect at a later date.

On free improvisation

These Welte, Duo-Art Pianolas, Ampico all over the place what they'd done was to make the transient permanent, given the fleeting nature of music of great performances of great music a permanence that's the heart of authenticity, that preserved the whole concept of authenticity stood Leonardo da Vinci on his ear holding painting an art superior to music because of music's evanescent quality can't lose it no, don't have to write it down I can't forget it, it's beautiful, simple and beautiful like discovering space is curved good God, just the sheer simplicity of it the, where Occam's razor looked on beauty bare got to write it down before it gets lost, before it gets stolen before I have a chance to write it down like everything else because if Gould hated the idea of being between Bach and the Steinway if he could be the Steinway he wouldn't need Glenn Gould when Welte's reproducing apparatus put Debussy into the piano then you wouldn't need Debussy. You wouldn't need Grieg you wouldn't need Gershwin or Paderewski or any of them because you'd have their authenticity and the whole concept of authenticity preserved, the music itself and the fleeting performance brought together forever, given permanence that's the heart of authenticity like the, there must be some law of physics for this, for the or maybe it's, maybe I've discovered one. No more piano! Absolutely no artist, no more so-called legendary performances oh my grandmother heard Paganini, absolutely fabulous they said he was in league with the devil yes one of these dangerous demons with lives and energies of their own you can't control that force you to do things you wouldn't otherwise or Gottschalk? Louis Moreau Gottschalk?

(Wm. Gaddis, Agapē Agape pp 40–41.)

Nihilist seeks nothing

Being moved by various considerations to view this month's LRB personals section (and how odd that their classifieds includes a "blogs" section), and being disappointed with its selection, I located a big honkin' list of them.  Very satisfying.  But wait, isn't there a sort of tired trope that pops up in a surprising number of them?

I wrote this ad to prove I’m not gay. Man, 29. Not gay. Absolutely not. Box no. 2205

They don’t call me naughty Lola. They call me Brian. Brian, 57. Box no. 23/07 [A reference to the book, They Call Me Naughty Lola]

‘Scarface’, ‘Mad Dog’, ‘Pretty Boy’, ‘Baby Face’ – if I had an underworld crime nickname it would be ‘Screwed by Ex-Wife’s Solicitor and Currently Sleeping in a Caravan’. Man, 42. Screwed by ex-wife’s solicitor and currently sleeping in a caravan. Box no. 14/06

I’d like to dedicate this advert to my mother (difficult cow, 65) who is responsible for me still being single at 36. Man. 36. Single. Held at home by years of subtle emotional abuse and at least 19 fake heart-attacks. Box no. 09/08

If I were a type of shrub I’d be euonymus. Go figure. Euonymus-esque woman (37) Box no. 18/11

There are other, less obvious instances of this trope, too, as with the bad whistler and the man incapable of making any point whatsoever.

A nut for some seasons

The walnut is autumnal and wintry, the pecan for autumn alone; to spring belongs the pine nut and almond, and almond's cousins peach, plum and cherry to summer.

Mrs Dalloway said she would buy the fluids herself

It seems appropriate to do as I'm doing now, and merely assemble some links regarding what one of them calls "appropriative writing", and some oulipian stuff, most of them having only lately been found by me because, looking in my Oulipo Compendium for the entry that I could have sworn was called "Poetry Amidst the Prose" and being unable to find it because it's actually (and more accurately) called "Blank Verse Amidst the Prose", I went searching online for mentions of Oulipo, poetry, prose, and Fitzgerald.  So here is a history of appropriative writing which has inspired me to wonder why I can't find Ashbery's "To a Waterfowl" online and instructed me that Bryant wrote something other than "Thanatopsis", but his "The Dong with the Luminous Nose" is online; Marjorie Perloff on Bök's Eunoia and someone else; Lethem on plagiary, in which one learns the origin of the name of the first Nurse With Wound album and what Burroughs' cut-up method actually is, which one hadn't known before.  Previously I had thought I might actually, you know, write some stuff about this, and mention offhandedly Aby Warburg and "The Metamorphosis of Plants", but perhaps it will not be.  I will, however, quote some stuff from the Oulipo Compendium, which is really delightful and makes one wish one knew French, starting with the bit of blank verse I was looking for.  One reads first that

English-speaking amateurs used to complie poems using unintentional lines of iambic pentameter in the writings of Dickens; more recently, John Updike has concocted a poem consisting of extracts from Samuel Johnson's notebooks. In Lipo, Jean Queval, noticing the  frequency of alexandrines in the prose of Victor Hugo, similarly combined them into rhyming poems.

An abundance of blank-verse lines in English prose usually indicates an incursion of solemnity of melancholy. The following example is assembled from F. Scott Fitzgerald's account of returning to a "lost" Paris, a story called Babylon Revisited.

And, if one doesn't pause to wonder if Paul Saint-Amour knew that about Dickens, one will rush headlong into this metered verse:

He saw, when he arrived at the apartment,
That Marion had accepted the inevitable.
"We haven't had a doctor for a year."
The room was comfortably American.
"I've got a vile hangover for the moment.
"I wish you and I could be on better terms."
"I should think you'd have had enough of bars."
"I want toget to know you," he said gravely.
But that was the beginning of the end.
And Marion, who had seen with her own eyes
The things that he would now always remember,
The men who locked their wives out in the snow,
Wanted his child, and nothing was much good now.
Has Marion said anything definite?
"My husband couldn't come this year," she said,
"As soon as I can get a governess—"
And everything was gone, and he was gone.
"What about coming back and sitting down?"
"Can't do it." He was glad for an excuse:
"We're going to see the vaudeville at the Empire."
We were a sort of royalty, almost infallible
("Daddy, I want to come and live with you!")
But she was in a swing in a white dress,
And swinging faster and faster all the time,
And kissed her fingers out into the night.

The entry cross-references cento, which cross-references it, as is, of course, right and proper.  It's not (I admit) as good as I remembered it.  I should also like to copy out this description of Bibliotheque Oulipienne 78:

Jacques Jouet presents us with a new treatment of the famous "sealed room" problem dear to Gaston Leroux and Edgar Allan Poe. A murder has been committed. A body is discovered in a room with no possible means of entry except through a door, which is locked from the inside. How did the murderer enter, or, if he was already inside, how did he leave?
The murder in this case has happened in London, but two French detectives, Dupin and Déjeux, are summoned to solve the case. There are six important elements which may have contributed to the victim's death: a piece of ebony, a tar stain on his leg, a lump of pasta, a photograph of a monkey, a stick-on badge and a bird with a blood-stained beak. The two detectives soon work out that all of them played a part in the murder and that the murderer is a constraint, the sestina. The careful reader wil lindeed notice that the six elements are mentioned six times in varying orders, following the sequence of end-words in a sestina.
But who was the victim? Our detectives are able to identify him thanks to the N+7 method. He is a macchabée (a slang word for a corpse). The wood is a piece of macassar (a sort of ebony), the pasta is macaroni, the badge is a macaroon, the bird a macareux (puffin), the monkey a macaque, and the lump of tar macadam. These are the six nouns in the Robert dictionary which separate macchabée from mac (pimp). The victim, then, is non other than the infamous MacHeath from The Beggar's Opera.

Awesome.

Hmm

I wonder if we know the same Dave.

In which one procrastinates

Let's not even get into how I might have wound up here, since the truth would probably drive you mad and I couldn't bear to lie.  Let's just leave that since arriving there—somehow—last night I've been tinkering with a solution to it that I still don't really think can be right but which I went ahead and implemented twice anyway (once in Python and once in Haskell).  The idea being that the reshuffled keys will form one or more cycles, and when different letters of the person's name fall in different cycles, the original name will pop out again after a number of iterations equal to the least common multiple of the lengths of cycles.  So that one wants to find some number n of cycles, 1 ≤ n ≤26, such that the sum of the lengths of the cycles is less than or equal to 26 and the lcm of the lengths of the cycles is maximized.  And that one can discover this by partitioning 26, etc.

I continue to be suspicious of this because the uploaded programs claim that after you've got four unique letters in your name, increasing the number of unique letters doesn't make you worse off.

Barnett Newman rocks my world

Fuck yeah. One wonders how much of the effect is due to the evocative names he gives many of his paintings.

The fact that I've only read the first thirty-odd pages no doubt means that this is premature in many ways, but I'm pretty certain that the biggest flaw with Johanna Drucker's Sweet Dreams is her unexplained and unjustified assumption (which one might have thought would be called into question precisely by her arguments in nearby arenas) that there is such a thing as fine art.

The unexpected copulation of ideas

Gaddis, in his speech on receiving the National Book Award for A Frolic of His Own:

At any rate, an early review of my work made a point; the reviewer said, this was my first book forty years ago, "What is this book about? Mr. Gaddis doesn't say." And this is Norbert Weiner, if you remember him, on entropy. He says, "We are always fighting nature's tendency to degrade the organized, and to destroy the meaningful. The more probable a message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems."

And this is, I think, part of the danger that I see at work, though I won't name names. But I don't need to, because they make millions of dollars a year, books that are in McLuhan's realm, pretty warm media, requiring no effort whatsoever except some degree of literacy. (The Rush for Second Place, p 130)

(This is not of course itself a particularly original or unusual idea either now or at the time of its delivery; its interest here perhaps lies therefore more with the identity of its expresser.) Following which, wishing but unable to recall where it is one read about people who for great stretches at a go express, and presumably understand, themselves in more or less set phrases and clichés (candidates include It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken and The Ethics of Authenticity), one turns to Steven Moore, "David Markson and the Art of Allusion", in the Barth/Markson "number" (as it calls itself, that number being two, apparently, of the tenth volume) of the Review of Contemporary Fiction and reads that [t]he function of the disproportionately large number of literary references and allusions in the text [of Going Down] is to show how certain artistic works can define, nurture, even ennoble for some characters their feelings of alienation and inadequacy. (p 168) and later, of, but not in these terms, the recently acquired but as yet unread by me Springer's Progress, that the elliptical references function here not only as a representation of Springer's thinking process—a kind of literary shorthand—but as the writer/reader's equivalent for the private references and intimacies that two lovers usually share—literary allusion as pillow talk (p 173; in which connection he gives the quotation fom Samuel Johnson that I have made my title).  To give a bit of the flavor of the ellipticality of the allusions, and the independently worthwhile texture of the prose, I reproduce the snippet of text that Moore reproduces; Jessica Cornford, one might want to know, is Springer's current lover; she away, he is at a bar, having, or about to have, or at least valiantly fighting off, a sexual experience (I wouldn't, not having read the book, know):

Norma Miljus again? Third time he'll spot her in the two weeks. Buttressed bum and buttery boobs, recalls, acres of supplest forage. Requiting wench as well, what's to fear?

Come-hithering hi from Beverly Allerdice also, saloon's aswim in aloneness, third of a nation ill-fondled and ill-humped.

Won't, won't. Toss the drunken dog one bone named Cornford, lifetime's Pavlovian dedication down the stews.

A child said, What is the ass? fetching it to him with full hands.

Final scrotumtightening image of her as elevator swallowed him, altarwise by owl-light in her doorway framed. A grief ago.

Imagining Ohio also, house on a hill. Dappled things, for Christ's sake? And brinded cows?

Ein Jessbetrunkener Mensch. Small rain down, forgot in his letters. (122) (p 172—"(122)" being of course Moore's own annotation as to the page of origin in Springer's Progress of the preceding.)

(I got three—how'd you do? Moore identifies eight—nine actually, but it hardly seems right to count knowing a little something something about who Pavlov was in with the others, since Pavlov's name is right there, and I was taught that that makes it a reference, not an allusion.) Whatever else these allusions might be doing, they seem to be the bits and pieces of verbiage and ideas in terms of which Springer thinks about himself and his surrounding, not just the "private references and intimacies" of two but the more public references one might deploy not just in conversation with oneself but with others in one's circle, who have the same or a similar background.  (It may be true that "the literary references and puns they bandy back and forth are not meant to echo the way people talk—even well-read people" (p 173), but (a) it's hard to tell how much that "meant to" is supposed to be doing here, whether or not Moore takes himself to be denying that that is the way even well-read people talk or just that the goal of the allusiveness is to capture that way and (b) even if that isn't the way even well-read people talk, the difference is one of quantity, not quality; the allusions surely don't come so thick even in one's thoughts, where it's always easier, but they do come, both in conversation and thought, providing the marks by which one proceeds.) That is, it's just what you'd expect of such a person; to hear from Springer some horrendously jejune cliché, say about the strength and effects, ill and well, short- and long-term, of his feelings concerning Cornford, instead of an adaptation of Novalis on Spinoza, would in fact be the less probable, and possibly more informative, of the possibilities.  Here, of course, the fact that one can quite easily describe oneself as drunk on another in egregiously masscult pop-song and perhaps indeed cliché ways (though the fact that none comes to mind may mean that on the last point I'm off, or it may mean I'm just underexposed) means that the only thing saving "Ein Jessbetrunkener Mensch" for high culture is its having the specific form it has—as is also the case, for that matter, with the absence of a hyphen in the otherwise not really remarkable "scrotumtightening". (I can't help but wonder if Moore's description of Robert Burton and Sir Thomas Browne at the very bottom of the preceding page as "word-drunk bibliomaniacs" was made in anticipation of the Jess- und Gottbetrunkenheit to come.)

So I suspect that Moore's not quite got it all right when he explains that passages like the above are "like extended in-jokes shared between author and reader", in that they would be spoiled if one had to explain that "scrotumtightening" is from Joyce, "third of a nation ill-fondled and ill-humped" takes off FDR, and (this is one I actually recognized) "dappled things" and "brinded cows" are from Hopkins' "Pied Beauty".  (Of course I'd recognize that.)  Because to some extent the point seems to be that the air is thick with allusion, that whatever it is that happens, Springer will refer it back to some cultural thing or other, or at least pluck out its phrases rather than any other to describe it.  The content of these allusions in particular doesn't seem particularly important, and it's that which really would make them the sort of clever in-jokes which would be spoiled by being pointed out.  Which is not of course to deny that there's a sort of pleasure to be had from recognizing the allusion by oneself.

My thinking this may be influenced by the fact that I will put in an allusion just because it comes up as I'm thinking or what I'm saying or writing seems to have a place for that particular shape of expression, regardless of anything else; this actually is a feature of my conversation and even this post, which has an only slightly altered quotation from The Recognitions a few paragraphs up.  It shouldn't be hard to find as the prose suddenly becomes noticeably better, but it doesn't really serve much of a purpose beyond that; even the propriety of getting Gaddis in crosswise to something otherwise focused on Markson is accidental. 

The function of the allusions in Going Down as Moore identifies them, the defining, nurturing, and ennobling (ennobling, yet!) of certain sorts of self-conception are obviously quite positively framed; typically the self-understanding of one whose resources are more limited when it comes to high art and who employs, therefore, clichés and the low is not thought so highly of.  If one is going to make that kind of distinction, there had better be something better about understanding yourself in non-clichéd ways—a sort of internalized version of what we should be grateful for:

Only artists, and especially those of the theatre, have given men eyes and ears to see and hear with some pleasure what each himself is, himself experiences, himself wants; only they have taught us to value the hero that is hidden in each of these everyday characters and taught the art of regarding oneself as a hero, from a distance and as it were simplified and transfigured—tthe art of 'putting oneself on stage' before oneself. (Gay Science 78)

(And cf. Wilde in "The Decay of Lying", and Moore's statement that "despair is for them as much a literary experience as a psychological one":

A great artist invents a type, and Life tries to copy it, to reproduce it in a popular form, like an enterprising publisher. … The imagination is essentially creative, and always seeks for a new form. The boy-burglar is simply the inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. … Where, if not from the Impressionists, do we get those wonderful brown fogs that come creeping down our streets, blurring the gas-lamps and changing the houses into monstrous shadows?

.) And to be ennobling and nurturing the allusions should be more than just the desultory expressions of the way one thinks, something like positive influences thereon; here lurks, of course, the danger of self-deception; and anyway it's not clear yet that the ability to relate one's own experiences back to examples from the illustrious past does one much good, or anyway much more than being able to relate them to examples from contemporary work, or even conventional wisdom.  Each will tell you what sort of situation one is in and how such things proceed and are to be concieved of, after all.

(Throughout I've been ignoring the distinction between the purpose of the allusions for the author and the purpose for the characters who make them, of course, but on the other hand, I still haven't read either Going Down or Springer's Progress and don't even own the former, so, you know, all things with time. Looking over the above it seems an even greater mess than I thought it would turn out to be when I began it, but hey.)

Zotter steps up

Vosges may have a bacon chocolate bar, and the owner may be certifiable, but Zotter is clearly in the lead as far as chocolate-based insanity goes.  I got a bar today (yet untasted) of their with-stuff-in line called "Spicy Chicken Ensemble + Chilli", which contains not chicken but some Advocaatish liqueur; thinking this might be a clumsy translation of something that sounded remotely appetizing in German I went to their homepage (turns out that in Austria it's called ... "Hot Chicken Ensemble + Chilli", which doesn't really help me).  Check out these flavors, some of the more bizarre of which I list below:

Coffee, plum, bacon (plums marinated in wine)
Cheese, walnuts, raisins
Lemon and polenta
Pineapple-pepper
Beer
Beet and galangal
Cranberries and cepes
Celery, truffles, port
Date and shiitake
Mare's milk with oats (deep-fried oats!)
Sweet potato, mocha, rosemary
Tomato and olive oil
Tofu and sake

Beer might not really be that strange.  There are various wine-containing bars that I haven't listed, after all.  And some of them are probably really good (coffee/plum/bacon!).  But they are at least unconventional.

xmmsalike2

Since the old version was found useful by at least one other person than me (and actually I think it showed up in some other project as well) I'm making a new version of my python module for interacting with xmms and its descendants available.  I just wrote it now so I haven't, I'm sure, caught all the bugs.  The motivation behind this is that the new version of audacious no longer supports the simple socket- or ctypes-based method of remote interaction (the xmmsctrl.h/beepctrl.h era), and only supports dbus, which, like their decision to use XSPF instead of M3U playlists, probably is has technical justifications but is mostly annoying to me.  (Actually the ability of dbus to send out notifications is likely to be extremely useful, so.)  The new version (witness my incredible source control system in action!) can interact, using the same interface, to either dbus- or non-dbus-using xmms descendants, though I've only actually tested parts of the dbus interface and that only with audacious—despite the supposed existence of a standard dbus interface for media players, I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the different players (xmms2 supposedly also has a dbus interface, as does bmpx, which—holy moly—interfaces with soulseek) actually work differently.

None of the notification capabilities of the dbus players are reflected in the code; this is partially a stopgap to enable my old tools to continue working.  However, it wouldn't be difficult at all to add that stuff.

An annoyance: with the ctypes method, one could have a daemon running without needing to check whether or not audacious was running.  But with dbus you need to wait until the relevant app is running to connect.

Aptly named

Learned Hand (who was not just aptly but awesomely named) wrote:

Borrowed the work must indeed not be, for a plagiarist is not himself pro tanto an 'author'; but if by some magic a man who had never known it were to compose anew Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn', he would be an 'author', and, if he copyrighted it, others may not copy that poem, though they might of course copy Keats's.  (Sheldon v. Metro-Goldwyn Pictures Corp., 81 F.2d 49 (2nd Cir. 1936), aff'd 309 US 390 (1940), quoted in Paul K. Saint-Amour, The Copywrights, p 7).

This would be before "Pierre Menard" was published even in Argentina, though of course there is this salient difference, that Pierre Menard was acquainted with the Cervantes while Hand's hypothetical poet is ignorant of the Keats.  Nevertheless, to think to put in that last clause, one cannot but applaud him.

One of the same sets of circumstances in which the above was relevant also saw me making mention of Alvin Lucier's I Am Sitting In A Room, with which I am more impressed each time it comes up.  It turns out that the familiar 45-minute rendition available on Lovely Music isn't the original recording; there's a shorter, much more whistly 15-minute version, which the kind folks at Ubuweb have made available for free; this has the advantage over the longer one, of course, that you can see how the whole thing works in a third of the time, though the decay (naturally) is unable to advance as far in it as in the longer.  What called it lately to mind was a discussion of the theories of Schopenhauer and Gumbrecht (as a representative of Heidegger-flavored view which one can nevertheless get something of a handle on), for both of which—at least for the latter of which as one of the professors developed it and for the former of which as one might think it—it seems relevant.  With regard to the latter one of the ideas put forward was that the oscillation between presence and meaning effects Gumbrecht talks about is (though he tries to portray himself really as neutral actually) to lead to the gradual dominance of the presence effects; given the way I Am Sitting In A Room works, it should be fairly obvious how one might be led to make that connection.  With regard to the former, if one ignores Schopenhauer's actual comments about music and looks at his comments about art in general, such pieces as Sitting, and even more others of Lucier's such as Music On A Long Thin Wire, seem custom-made to show, not the will, but facets of its objectification.  What Schopenhauer says about the arts even in that regard always seems more far-fetched to me the more, say, representative the art under discussion is (and this goes for Gumbrecht as well), to the point where his comments about literature seem strained indeed; architecture, contrarily, seems fairly plausible:

…we can assign it no purpose other than that of bringing to clearer perceptiveness some of those Ideas that are the lowest grades of the will's objectivity.  Such Ideas are gravity, cohesion, rigidity, hardness, those universal qualities of stone, those first, simplest, and dullest visibilities of the will, the fundamental bass-notes of nature; and along with these, light, which is in many respects their opposite.  (§43)

This seems more or less plausible, at least for a certain sort of architecture. Despite Lucier's claim in the text of the piece itself, Sitting does seem to illustrate some fact regarding the world's structure, or at least that of a little bit of it, beyond what is immediately available to the ordinary perciever.  It has to be brought out by art.  One could even claim that the will's discordant nature is brought out by the piece: after all, doesn't it proceed by tearing down the initial highly articulated sounds of Lucier's speech and wearing them into a uniform nothingness, just as the will's objectification in humans is to lead to its eventual quieting and self-nullification?  And with Music On A Long Thin Wire, how much more are basic physical relations being brought out!  In an extremely brief interview about the piece Lucier says It's one of the major pieces that I think I made.  It's an essential piece, describing most of the work that I've done.; I'm not that familiar with his work (the only other thing of his I have is Bird and Person Dyning), but one can see what he means, I think.

I also like both pieces because, like this shirt, of an instantiation of which I am now the delighted possessor, they are exactly what they claim to be.  He really was sitting in a room.  That music was made precisely by vibrating a long thin wire.  There's a green square, and there's a swan.  Beautiful. It's like the gang in Japan whose name is "Street Gang".  I feel like important work is being done here.  I was also a big fan of the orange juice stands in Berlin shaped like gigantic oranges.  At last, clarity!

The wanton is an agential Oakland: there's no there there

To breed an animal that is permitted to promise—isn't this precisely the paradoxical task nature has set for itself with regard to man? isn't this the true problem of man? ...

I wouldn't be terribly surprised if this hasn't come up before, because interest in wantons (in the Frankfurtian sense, of course, and not in the actually more interesting Goreyan long-drawn hoarse erotic sighs sense) seems to concentrate on the supposed lack of any agential authority they enjoy, and not on the fact that they would be extremely frustrating to deal with, but then again, it also wouldn't be that surprising if it has, since (for example) Korsgaard's apparently wanton Jeremy, the example of whom recurs in at least three places (though, to be honest, I continue not to see exactly what's wrong with him on her narration) supposedly partakes of the inability effectively to commit himself described below, and Frankfurt's occasional fairly moralizing remark to the effect that ambivalence is an enemy of truth, since the ambivalence of the ambivalent person "stands in the way of there being a certain truth about him at all" could be developed in this direction; at any rate, I certainly haven't checked in the at least two months since the following occurred to me if anyone's made the claim before, even though I have occasionally tossed around the thought of doing exactly that and maybe even seeing if it can't be made more thorough and generally interesting and whatnot—basically it concerns promising and ensuring one's own future actions.

In order to have this kind of command over the future in advance, man must first have learned to separate the necessary from the accidental occurrence, to think causally, to see and anticipate what is distant as if it were present, to fix with certainty what is end, what is means thereto, in general to be able to reckon, to calculate,—for this, man himself must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, in his own image of himself as well, in order to be able to vouch for himself as future, as one who promises does!

Any given wanton's whims may in fact lead him to do precisely what wants doing in any stretch of time; he may be moved at one point to make a promise and at a later point to perform the action which fulfills the promise.  But he was never permitted to promise; he couldn't really vouch for himself.  This is true also true of the wanton from principle who, like Emerson, writes on the lintels of his door-post "whim".  Nietzsche is describing a sort of wanton.

…and the things one wants to do

A professor of mine at Chicago once opined (I think I've recounted this elsewhere, actually) that the purpose of a liberal education was to enable one to make clever or witty or learnéd or allusive or some such sort of conversation as that at cocktail parties.  I hypothesize that the reading of Markson's recent work might serve a similar purpose.  At any rate.  Here are two quotations, taken from Markson, Reader's Block, p 146, and from Sepp Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence, p 97, respectively. I pass over in silence the anecdote concerning Sophocles and treating the same subject which one finds in Plato as being too well known to need reproduction.

Tertullian has it that Democritus deliberately blinded himself in old age by staring into the sun.  So as not to suffer the sight of beautiful women he could no longer possess.

I want my students to live or at least to imagine that moment of admiration (and perhaps also of the despair of an aging man) that gets a hold of me when I see the beautiful body of a young woman standing next to me in front of one of the computers that give access to our library catalogue—a moment, by the way, that is not all that different from the joy that I feel when the quarterback of my favorite college team in American football (Stanford Cardinal of course) stretches out his perfectly sculpted arms to celebrate a touchdown pass.

As an exercise, consider what the possible purpose—and what the actual effects—of the addendum in the second quotation might be.

The things one does

I have lately read the 2007 Christmas Cracker of John Julius Norwich, and present excerpts from two of the inclusions and a third integral.  The first has been reproduced from a different commonplace book (Thistles in Aspic, assembled by a Thane of Cawdor, of all things to be), the second is from an eBay listing for a pair of leather pants, and the third comes from a 1657 translation by George Thornley of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe (though in truth I suspect he only prepared one such translation that year).

Emerald, Lady Cunard on Lord Valentine Thynne: So witty and handsome… one of the great lovers. Anne Islington adored him, and Miss Winifred Barnes, the musical comedy actress, fell over a very small cliff for love of him.

I can explain those pants and why they are in my possession. I bought them many, many years ago under the spell of a woman whom I believed to have taste. She suggested I try them on. I did. She said they looked good. I wanted to have a relationship of sorts with her. I'm stupid and prone to impulsive decisions. I bought the pants.

For there is no medicine for love, neither meat, nor drink, nor any charm, but only kissing and embracing, and lying naked together.

Longus in the last appearing to take issue with Ovid.

Pinkhead Smartweed

This being the name of some grass in a relatively recently installed garden at UCI.

Not its given name, mind you.  One couldn't address the grass with it.  It is rather the name of the sort of grass.

Which isn't to say that one could address that.

Though it does sound like the sort of name that one could use to address someone.

Belonging, no doubt, to someone whom one would not wish to address.

One would probably not wish to address the grass, either, but for different reasons.

There are figures in the garden, which is in three parts, each part having a figure in the center which is surrounded by a decoration thought to match the figure conceptually.

By "figures" I mean statues of poets, mostly.  Not, for instance, squares or architectural diagrams.

One's language being frequently imprecise in such ways, I have discovered.

One might want to address the figures, which have names, though a response would be long in coming.

Shelley Shelley Percy

I am morally certain that something has gone wrong with this sentence, which nevertheless managed to appear in the New York Times in an article about architect Marion Mahoney:

Each consists of 1,400 typed pages and nearly 700 illustrations, making the book at once too unwieldy—and too precious—for general distribution.

(In the print edition, at least, the Times' em dashes aren't flush against the words they set off, which I at least disprefer, but I suppose that reasonable persons can disagree about that.) This is very upsetting to me.

Chocolate Overdose is almost certainly the least characteristic artist on the Rune Grammofon roster, but what's nearly as shocking as its presence on the label is Whatever's release date of 1998: has Rune Grammofon actually been around that long?  It's not as if I would have known.  But apparently Supersilent's 1–3 came out in that year as well.  This is of a piece with my generally being temporally adrift when it comes to music in the 90s.  Is it really possible that Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, Tilt, and Thrak all came out in 1995, that Cul de Sac's been around since 1991, and that the same Chicago that gave rise to the Smashing Pumpkins also supported Weasel Walter, the Scissor Girls, and Jim O'Rourke? I tend to imagine that none of the interesting music from the 90s could possibly have actually existed then, since it's so far removed from anything I experienced.  And yet, and yet.  (And still there are lacunae into which one could easily fit a stadium in my knowledge in this as in every other arena; somehow, however, if one displays familiarity with obscure, everyone will assume familiarity with the clear, no matter how many individual cases of ignorance one cops to.)

If anyone knows anything interesting about centos, particularly in connection with authorship, I would be interested in knowing about it.