BLDGBLOG interview with Jim Rossignol on his new book, This Gaming Life. It’s excellent, of course… I don’t really play games any more. When I read something like this or talk to poeple who work on games, I get an antsy feeling that I’m missing out, but where I would fit it into a twenty four hour day I don’t know.

Marjane Satrapi and Chris Ware in conversation with Françoise Mouly.

An extremely awkward but nonetheless interesting profile of Fang Lijun in ArtZine China. “…young Fang Lijun made a name for himself by writing and presenting a story called, Dickhead Confucius is a Stupid Pig.”

“Google says the algorithm already has identified employees who felt underused, a key complaint among those who contemplate leaving.” I’ve never been interested in working at Google, though it’s always described as some sort of heaven on earth and I certainly know people who are quite happy there. I can’t quite put my finger on it other than that their presentations on user experience often seems to consist of a series of studies conducted at great time and expense to learn something any competent designer could have told them immediately; the implication being that they daren’t give visual thinkers the same sort of liberty they give engineers. I can imagine feeling underused.

A couple of the curiously specific notes by the students of W.G. Sebald, from Five Dials number 5, The Collected Maxims:

It’s very difficult, not to say impossible, to get physical movement right when writing. The important thing is that it should work for the reader, even if it’s not accurate. You can use ellipsis, abbreviate a series of actions; you needn’t laboriously describe each one.

It’s always gratifying to learn something when one reads fiction. Dickens introduced it. The essay invaded the novel. But we should not, perhaps, trust ‘facts’ in fiction. It is, after all, an illusion.

I’m not quite understanding the great huff over Amazon’s new option to publish blogs to Kindle (a lot of other critiques seem to link back to that one). My first thought was that it’s one of the few ways that blog writers might get paid for actually writing. It requires neither the stomach for the questionable business of shilling for crap through affiliates and pasting up ads, nor the potentially irrelevant energy required to sell cupcakes and t-shirts. If readers care to pay a buck or two a month for the convenience of formatting and offline access, that’s fine (though pretty unlikely in most cases, especially the linky ones). The content itself is still free. Even if it generates next to nothing, the idea seems like a pretty revolutionary solution to having our electric cake and eating it too. Content is free, writers get paid. And at a higher percentage than traditional publishing, no? What am I missing here? Is it just that Amazon is the man? I admit, that’s a stumper, since Amazon’s monstrous share of that market is what makes the whole thing practicable… Seriously, this is not a defense, I really want to know what I’m missing. The negative response doesn’t seem very well articulated yet. Also no one seems to be asking the more concerning questions like, what are the implications of Amazon’s distribution rights for blogs that function even partially as writer’s notebooks? Could writers be prohibited from repurposing their own work elsewhere? What happens when devices start to more or less converge? Does Amazon hold the rights to your work on a Chumby? What about a portable TV? And how about those fridges with internet! The mobile, dorm size fridges, of course. And you know some enterprising smartypants will shortly stick internet in a Igloo lunchbox complete with social networking components that let your true friends automatically save your lunch (including that cake I was going on about) to The Cloud. Will Amazon own your lunch?

Oh internet, you are so nice sometimes! I think to myself, self, wouldn’t it be great is someone were embroidering their text messages? and voila! someone is.  Also, let me just state that punctuation is hard (for me). And personal. And even though I periodically decide once and for all where I stand on capitalization in titles, fancy commas, and exotic parenthesis, I usually can’t recall the decision the next day. Also I can’t spell, so maybe that will keep you distracted from the punctuation problem, in the way a broken thumb will keep you from whining about that headache. Hold out your hand, dear internet.

On the way back, as I passed through the park, I was walking for a few minutes alongside a woman with two little girls of about seven or eight. In tough and anxious little voices, the girls were describing a boy at school who would run up behind them and graphically simulate sex while holding their arms back. They said he would do it on their desks and against their chairs too. They repeated the boy’s words and mimed his gestures, their high voices trailing off in uncertainty. The woman, who had a fixed look of bewilderment on her face, kept shaking her head and saying it was awful. After a while the little girls seemed satisfied and began to tell her about a raccoon that lives in the park.

~

I’m posting my notes on the Ruth Franklin essay in The Emergence of Memory, parts of which bothered me so much. They aren’t very orderly. I’m still bothered and I still don’t totally understand why.

…This is really beside the point, though, because the question concerns the responsibility of writers to respond to incidents in their culture, not the responsibility of the average citizen to open his eyes when confronted with the ugliness of humanity.

All I can say is—what? I can not even imagine how someone could come to that conclusion after reading Sebald. Maybe the author is speaking for herself?

Calling foul on a work because the author didn’t experience the event personally (the reference to Dieter Forte) is thin, though understandable coming from someone who did. However, the next generation will always have some indictment of the previous. There is no way to form a complete historical picture from a single point of view. Inevitably the best contemporary critique will be missing more and more as time passes. That doesn’t mean the original was anything but true at the time.

After one generation (maybe even before) a gap in literature IS a gap in memory. It’s not just about a wish to have a personal memory of something that took place, though maybe that’s part of it. I’ve always imagined that Sebald was frustrated by the blank spot where there ought to have existed a second generation memory in his life. Something to respond to; something tightened, loosened, and worked over by the generation who experienced the events first hand. Instead there was just a blank.

Okay, the critique that a work aestheticizes disaster or pain often sounds glib to me, so I’ll try to pay closer attention. I think that the pattern of beauty can annihilate causality, but are we talking about the same writer? The narrator who is nearly crushed under the guilt of the his nation’s history? It seems more as though the repetitive pattern is descriptive of the psychic pain of inescapably going over the same ground again and again… That accusation in general is something that’s bothered me often in the last few years and is bothering me again here. It is one of those statements that needs to be backward engineered to make sure it stands up. What is it in the description of this painful thing do you think ought not to be there? And what would you like to see in it’s place? Especially in a case like this in which Sebald is attempting to focus the reader down from a series of flat statistics to a complicated empathy for the human beings involved, why is writing beautifully, using his craft to the utmost (and I don’t mean with a bunch of prurient flourishes—I understand that objection), anything other than a way to honor those people? It starts to look like the problem is more with that, with the idea of transgressing some moral hierarchy in memorializing the suffering of the wrong set of humans…

Objecting to descriptions of the fire bombings of Dresden in On The Natural History of Destruction with the assertion that World War II was a righteous war is missing the point to an astonishing degree. It’s like saying that because the war was justified the casualties on the wrong side no longer consist of human beings and so cannot be spoken of. The irony of that reasoning is monstrous… Oh, it looks like all this is addressed perfectly by Charles Simic in the next essay, Conspiracy of Silence. (Wow. Nice editing!)

…bombing is a form of collective punishment premised on collective guilt.

…for those who are bombed it feels like destruction for its own sake. Since the bombs can hardly get at the leaders wining and dining in their well-protected underground shelters, the innocent will always have to pay for their crimes.

~

So many helpful stories lately from people who think my child takes up too much of my time (but are not offering to babysit). When we were young our parents just let us alone, they didn’t hover over us so much. Oh! Well then. What exactly does that look like? If I’m already consciously allowing him to eat the cat food and play in the garbage bin more times a day than I’m willing to admit in public in order to have a blessed four minutes at a time to myself, I suppose the next logical step would be to simply stop to responding to him when he speaks to me. But who does that to someone they love? I wouldn’t dream of ignoring my partner or sisters when they are speaking to me, much less when they’re struggling excitedly to find the right words. Why would I do that to my twenty month old? It seems shocking that I would have to point out that he’s a person… A busy and extremely social person with a flair for the dramatic, who shouted yesterday as I tried to remove his bedtime snack, Oh no—I mean—this is insane! Beg you!

The machines of Kristoffer Myskja: Mysterious and a little bit funny (Apparatus #1). The videos themselves are serene and composed, more than just documentation.

Jan Vormann’s Dispatchwork (via Wooster Collective)

“Parasite is an independent projection-system that can be attached to subways and other trains with suction pads.” It’s a nice idea. I’d like to see actual footage, or better yet footage or work designed to be seen that way.

More Soon. See Disappointment and Tales of the Unexpected.

~

So much mention of coincidence in the interviews in The Emergence of Memory. I always think of coincidence in literature as a sort of deus ex machina. But the structure of Sebald’s work doesn’t require coincidence to hold it together. The coincidences that everyone talks about are more like a quiet illumination of connections that have always existed. They don’t, however, modify the construction of the narrative in any kind of an irreplaceable way. The narrative just seems to continue to find its own level, flowing around the connections. The narrator himself sometimes seems rocked by them, but often the impression they make on him is highly personal—concerning a birthday or a name. They feel like coincidences to the narrator, not necessarily to the reader. We understand why how the narrator might feel, but they aren’t personal to us…

I have a bunch of notes on the Ruth Franklin essay, but it is nearly impossible to make anything of them because I haven’t yet get got my hard copy of the book. Flipping through the broken electronic table of contents to try to figure out what on earth I meant is making me grind my teeth to a powder. In a real book I have a visual recollection of where ideas or sentences sit on the page or within the book. Here, ugh, all I do is crash the reader if I flip too fast. (Before I hear any more weeping and gnashing of teeth over how ebooks are too inexpensive,⁰¹ I would like to note that I have purchased exactly one ebook out of about forty in which the TOC or footnotes actually work, let alone the formatting. It’s mighty convenient to be able to carry around a little library in your pocket, but reading in this media is just that—a convenience, not yet a pleasure. Trying to flip through and recall a particular thought or idea is downright unpleasant. So I and a lot of other people I know buy duplicates of our favorites. Also—remember DRM? Everyone in my house who wants to read the same book has to purchase a copy. No used book purchases, no lending them out. And everyone knows that eventually we won’t own the books we’ve actually purchased. It’s only a matter of time and few changes of device and a few kinks in the system and boom, there goes everything. Nope, I think $9.99 is plenty for something so inevitably temporary and, at this point, so shoddily executed. Or to put it more politely, perhaps becuase of all that, we know we’re paying for an experience rather than an object, and our expectations of price reflect that.)