Chris Blanc: Play and Projects: Blog

Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo took on the public art challenge, leading them to W.A.S.T.E. cash on some fancy radios, find hidden XML files, use computer programs to generate a 4,142 page equation that explained the signals but signified nothing, and finally crack the code to find the building is continually broadcasting the text of Thomas Pynchon’s “The Crying of Lot 49.” (Are they paying royalties on this or just betting that Pynchon is too cool to sue?) The whole explanation of how they broke the code is in this 18-page document (in PDF form, of course) ^{^}

Lest you forget, there’s this old page… San Narciso Community College Thomas Pynchon Page. Circa 1994, updated 1997.

Thomas Pynchon captured the imagination of many of us, but probably no work was more influential than The Crying of Lot 49 because in this short book, he stopped the goofy metaphor-play and tackled industrial society with a biting critique of the loneliness and randomness of survival in this time. It always made me think of a postmodern analysis of The Great Gatsby without the delicious layers of irony. It’s the clearest-sighted of his books and one of the most loved as a result.

POP legend Sir Elton John wants the internet closed down. “The internet has stopped people from going out and being with each other, creating stuff. Instead they sit at home and make their own records, which is sometimes OK but it doesn’t bode well for long-term artistic vision. We’re talking about things that are going to change the world and change the way people listen to music and that’s not going to happen with people blogging on the internet. In the early Seventies there were at least ten albums released every week that were fantastic. Now you’re lucky to find ten albums a year of that quality. And there are more albums released each week now than there were then.”^{^}

I don’t know enough about pop music to care either way regarding his claim, but it applies quite aptly to the world of fiction or as it was once called, literature. Over the past decade I’ve been the hovering dragonfly listening at parties, noting down potential scores in the realm of the Good Read, and I’ve prowled Half Price Books and indie bookstores until my feet hurt. At the store, it’s easy to make the first cut, and I took the rest home. Probably a hundred books over the past decade representing the “best” of the new work out there, from Vollman to Danielewski.

I’ve just gotten done throwing out the last it. It was dreck. I feel all of it is incredibly well-written, very aware of its market, and yet completely devoid of anything meaningful to say. These are novels by lonely artists about being lonely artists, and there’s no solutions, no growth, no desire for anything different. Most of what it seems to show off is the author’s cleverness, in that cloud-style postmodern style pioneered by Pynchon, where a general idea (sameness is entropy) becomes an umbrella for disconnected observations preached at you rather than shown.

It’s the self-satisfied novel, and it reminds me a lot of the rather silly blog postings I see around the internet. “Today I ate this, I watched this, and then this and that happened, and I thought this, and now I’m ready for tomorrow.” It’s like we’re so afraid of dying we won’t even acknowledge the day to day changes of life, so we’re hiding out in these little mental ‘hoods of our own creation. Literature should be, as Vonnegut put it, the canary in the coal mine not just of “society” but of our own souls. If these books were our soul guardians, we never had a chance.

Again, it may be said that there are three kinds of authors. First come those who write without thinking. They write from a full memory, from reminiscences; it may be, even straight out of other people’s books. This class is the most numerous. Then come those who do their thinking whilst they are writing. They think in order to write; and there is no lack of them. Last of all come those authors who think before they begin to write. They are rare. ^{^}

Is it too hard for us to admit that the reason the publishing industry is in trouble is that it is cranking out crap? We have no problem admitting the music industry’s decline for the same reason. When Hollywood has a bad season, we feel perfectly fine stating the obvious, that their movies didn’t make the cut. We can’t do the same for literature.

Over the past six years, I have picked up and tried to read the grand opuses of many new authors. I have to say that I’m less than impressed. Their technical skill is good enough, and they make witty turns of phrase easily. There are plenty of metaphors. The characters are fully fleshed-out. But I feel like I’m reading the end results of the world’s best creative writing course. It’s all method and no substance.

The average book now starts off with a few typical modern people in a typical modern circumstance. They’re broke. Their relationships have failed. They are alienated from their parents. Strangely, they never seem to question why this is so prevalent among all the people they know. Eventually, there is some cryptic and cathartic event, and after that, they accept fate. We assume they then become good consumers who watch enough television to numb the pain, or whatever it is.

These books ring hollow, and not just to me. Consumers are still buying a lot of books. They’re not finding any brands, however. Literature was once able to make brands because you could read The Sun Also Rises and think, not only was that well-written, but it was informative. I want to read more from that author, and other authors in the same literary circle, and people inspired by that author, and influences of that author. You weren’t buying a book as much as you were finding a whole line of books to explore.

Now, all of these books are about the same. You read one, you set it down. What changed in your mind? What changed in your life? Not bloody much. The characters and setting were different, but the story was the same, and no matter how “well written” it was, it was empty. So you forget about it 48 hours later, because it was like a TV program, just a restatement of the same ideas you’ve heard before. There was nothing intangible to link you to it.

In 200 years, people will read Jane Austen and Mary Shelley. They’ll read Ralph Ellison. They’ll read William Faulkner and William S. Burroughs, Oscar Wilde and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, Sophocles and Tennesse Williams. When they look at the books of the current time, they’ll see a gap in history, and wonder what people used to try to fill it.

From a recent interview with author William Gibson:

The trouble is there are enough crazy factors and wild cards on the table now that I can’t convince myself of where a future might be in 10 to 15 years. I think we’ve been in a very long, century-long period of increasingly exponential technologically-driven change.

You can see it in corporate futurism as easily as you can see it in science fiction. In corporate futurism they are really winging it – it must be increasingly difficult to come in and tell the board what you think is going to happen in 10 years because you’ve got to be
bullshitting if you claiming to know. That wasn’t true to the same extent even a decade ago.
^{^}

Gibson’s been through the cycle of trying to predict the future a few times. He probably winces everytime he thinks about the “three megabytes of RAM in that Hosaka” from Neuromancer, a book which admittedly shows its age in a time when 3MB is what a watch carries. With his newest, Spook Country, hitting bookshelves this week and sounding very much like Pynchon and Burroughs hybridized in the laboratory of Philip K. Dick, it will be interesting to see what conjectures he makes.

“I don’t write books to express any political philosophy I might have. Partly, I write them to discover what I do think about things. … I don’t want people to believe what I believe, but I love it if I’m encouraging people to ask questions and find their own answers.” ^{^}

Someday, all of these William Gibson interview links will be added.