"The great object of life is sensation -- to feel that we exist, even though in pain. It is this 'craving void' which drives us to gaming -- to battle, to travel -- to intemperate, but keenly felt, pursuits of any description, whose principal attraction is the agitation inseparable from their accomplishment." [Lord Byron]
If there is any real difference between what can be written and what can be put on film is this
sensation
What is appealing about Wittgenstein to our modern minds is that he tells of a future of 'description'
which is film
film and science go hand and hand
they both describe
both empirical
philosophy tried to imitate this
only describing, trying to be scientific
on film we can record a house show
where people come and rebuild some person's house
we see the person crying at the sight of their new wonderful kitchen
we 'know' why they crying
but we don't 'feel' their tears
or the language of their 'tears'
if there is language to their 'tears'
film can put this into art
'crying'
a writer must put it into 'language'
a writer would write, "She had lived with old kitchens with bad paint jobs all her life. She had never known or personally owned such a beautiful kitchen. Her heart became overwhelmed with such emotions at the sight of the new kitchen sink, the large table able to hold food for her three children and her husband all peacefully eating together. She could go to work knowing the whole day she would have a spacious kitchen with new appliances in it at home waiting for her. She daydreamed and could see clearly Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner being served in this beautiful kitchen."
A sociologist could write, "She was American and had been reared in the concept of ownership. Of owning nice things, of wanting to show her friends her nice things. The kitchen was a symbol of money, power, and even that God thought she had less vice than those with lesser kitchens. She had received what Americans call, "The American Dream" and felt overjoyed."
But the camera shows nothing but a woman crying at the sight of her new kitchen.
Friday, July 31, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Is the Novel Dead?
People painted before language
They painted on cave walls
when they got language (an instrument) (a technology) they started writing poetry and history.
Then came plays.
Then came novels thousands of years after starting in the 1400s really.
Painting is dead
How did painting die?
Did painting die?
People still liked looking at paintings in the 1800s and pretty much to Picasso.
An artist could experiment with a painting and a wide audience of laymen could enjoy it, talk about it, and maybe even start a riot.
Then at some point
Painting didn't attract wide audiences
Andy Warhol and roy lichtenstein kind of got something but not much, and then nothing came after.
It was like it split into two divisions
Those who wanted to experiment and be intellectual went one way, the way that the masses did not care about.
And the other people who were still innovative and could draw started making cartoons like Shrek.
I think novels work like this:
Novels started really becoming 'something' with Dickens and Dostoevsky. They took the form to new limits, probably because there were no limits. It wasn't even like they were being innovative. There wasn't anything for them base their novels off of really. Dickens and Dostoevsky were working within the same construct, newspapers would hire them to write chapters for their papers. They would sit and write them and send them to the editor like television shows are done today.
I don't think the word 'innovative' exactly works the same way it does with say Hemingway or Kathy Acker.
Then other people started getting obsessed with the idea of writing 'novels'.
But what is a 'novel?'
A piece of prose?
A story?
It contains poetry, it contains dialogue which is contained in plays, some even contain philosophy and psychology.
Some even contain history.
But what is it?
A story?
What is a story?
A story could be understood as a person telling another about some events that link up.
Is The Naked Lunch a novel?
William S. Burroughs would respond something like, "It contains an overall emotion and philosophy, but no it is not coherent concerning the events."
Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, for many of its pages does nothing but ruminate, not even really having events.
Novels have sensations.
Subjective sensations.
Novels live in the mind.
Novels can be interpreted in different ways.
Only one person can enjoy a novels at once, of course we could say it could be read out loud.
But read a novel out loud to a group of people, read a scene that takes place in a coffee shop.
Ask everyone in the room what the they thought the coffee shop looked like, and everyone will have a different answer.
So they aren't seeing the same time, say like a movie.
The movie supplies the coffee shop.
Every must agree on that coffee shop.
Or they would actually be lying.
But if of one person said concerning the reading out loud of the novel, "It looked like this coffee shop I used to go to when I was in college" and someone else said, "It looked like the coffee shop down the street from my house."
It would not be incorrect.
After Dickens and Dostoevsky the novel only grew.
People like Knut Hamsun and D.H. Lawrence wrote books that were based off the original form of Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, and Lawrence wrote very different books, but their origins were the same.
Then it goes to Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Then there is a real split in the 50s.
Of course there was Tristan Tzara and Kenneth Patchen.
But even they kind of got famous.
Then the 50s came what is considered serious literature or serious novels split, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Updike, and Phillip Roth went one way. And Kerouac and Burroughs went one way.
Mailer and Roth representing the proper side of literature. I don't think Mailer and Roth thought that though. I don't think they were young men thinking, "I'm going to make the proper pop version of literature."
They kind of of remind me of Barack Obama and Mike Gravel arguing at the democratic debates.
Barack Obama did represent something revolutionary and different. But Mike Gravel represented childlike truth, craziness, and even aggression that the Beats had.
Barack Obama is like Norman Mailer or Phillip Roth, saying to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, "Listen, I'm not the most honest, I'm not the most sensitive, I'm not a crazy lunatic. But I get the job done. I know how to work these assholes. I've read the same books you have, I share many of your same experiences. But I'm not an overly emotional person. I enjoy Dostoevsky too, but my house is spotless, my bills are paid, and I have a great credit score."
You have Richard Yates at this time, but he didn't seem to factor in it at all. The thing about Yates is that he was not the Avant Garde in terms of innovative literature. The genius of his books is his philosophy, that he could see or sensed a time coming when emptiness and boredom would start to be acknowledged. I'm saying it wrong, Yates just felt it before anyone else or would admit it before anyone else. I wouldn't say there is anything innovative about his vocabulary or scene structure. His scenes resemble plays and movies. Its his view of how the people are behaving though, that really I think gets us. Nobody talks about Yates' paragraphs like they talk about Hemingways or Joyce. I've sat with people and they've said, "You remember that paragraph in The Sun Also Rises where Hemingway did this?" And you remember that weird paragraph. With Yates you say, "Remember when that guy said this."
Which is different in terms of the word 'innovation.'
Yates is like Heidegger, people think Heidegger is like some badass genius. But the thing about him is that he sensed 'being' before everyone else, or that we getting to it and admitted it existed. Because when you say the statement, "Hopes and dreams" you referencing the philosophy of Heidegger, but if Heidegger never wrote Being and Time I don't think there is any reason to doubt that the new technology would have created a world where there was more leisure time and possibilities for employment and mobility which would have created the sentence, "What are your hopes and dreams."
I think from what I've read of Yates is that he thought his writing was special.
But I don't think Yates really comprehended what was special about himself.
It was that he was a philosopher or master sociologist but at the same overly emotional.
The 60s came:
Then came Capote and "In Cold Blood."
A movie book that combined fact and fiction.
The book wasn't real literature.
It doesn't have that personal experience.
That subjective reality Kerouac or even Roth had in Portnoy.
But this is the same time when the movie and television is getting steam.
Now we could say novels killed epic poetry in the same way.
People were used to getting their stories told in epic poetry, from Homer to the bible.
All in epic a poetry.
All the way up to Keats and Byron.
And then novels take over as the main device to tell stories.
Perhaps no different in terms of 'naturalness' than the car replacing the wagons.
Or the gun replacing replacing the sword.
Nothing special, nothing intellectual at all.
Just mere
Dialectical materialism.
After "In Cold Blood"
the novel and poetry seem to take two different turns.
One it became Kathy Acker, which was literature not remotely accessible by a large audience.
And the other direction was Easton Ellis, which was vulgar but still remained coherent and had no real philosophical agenda. Is Ellis actually saying something about getting high or he shittiness of upper class living? Or trying to say something about class, no, he's like Dennis Cooper. He compiles a lot of 'cool scenes' together. That's all, a bunch of really dirty nasty scenes of humans doing nasty things, which supplies a certain escape for the audience.
When I first read Ellis, I assumed he was some person talking shit about capitalism or the upper class. Then I read his interviews and realized he didn't care. He just wanted to sell books that made money and got him attention. Ellis is a great writer like Roth or Bellow, he does his job. You give Ellis some time, and he will write a book that makes money.
But American Psycho came out almost 20 years ago.
Now it seems
That the division is complete
You either write something totally normal that concerns vampires
or there will be no great fame or wealth.
I would not put this down to any conspiracy
Some have said on the internet, "But no literature is coming out that makes it to Barnes and Nobles tables concerning the poor and injustice of American society."
Something like that:
But an easy reply could be, "Yes but television covers it everyday."
Look at all those reality shows like Rock of Love and that Flavor Flave show, those shows of full of poor people crying and bitching constantly.
The possibilities for innovation for television and for books are completely different.
Television is amazing.
Us as writers of novels and poetry, might not think a show where people buy and remake houses is very innovative.
But is just as innovative as Bellow or Led Zeppelin.
Just in a different way.
They painted on cave walls
when they got language (an instrument) (a technology) they started writing poetry and history.
Then came plays.
Then came novels thousands of years after starting in the 1400s really.
Painting is dead
How did painting die?
Did painting die?
People still liked looking at paintings in the 1800s and pretty much to Picasso.
An artist could experiment with a painting and a wide audience of laymen could enjoy it, talk about it, and maybe even start a riot.
Then at some point
Painting didn't attract wide audiences
Andy Warhol and roy lichtenstein kind of got something but not much, and then nothing came after.
It was like it split into two divisions
Those who wanted to experiment and be intellectual went one way, the way that the masses did not care about.
And the other people who were still innovative and could draw started making cartoons like Shrek.
I think novels work like this:
Novels started really becoming 'something' with Dickens and Dostoevsky. They took the form to new limits, probably because there were no limits. It wasn't even like they were being innovative. There wasn't anything for them base their novels off of really. Dickens and Dostoevsky were working within the same construct, newspapers would hire them to write chapters for their papers. They would sit and write them and send them to the editor like television shows are done today.
I don't think the word 'innovative' exactly works the same way it does with say Hemingway or Kathy Acker.
Then other people started getting obsessed with the idea of writing 'novels'.
But what is a 'novel?'
A piece of prose?
A story?
It contains poetry, it contains dialogue which is contained in plays, some even contain philosophy and psychology.
Some even contain history.
But what is it?
A story?
What is a story?
A story could be understood as a person telling another about some events that link up.
Is The Naked Lunch a novel?
William S. Burroughs would respond something like, "It contains an overall emotion and philosophy, but no it is not coherent concerning the events."
Proust in Remembrance of Things Past, for many of its pages does nothing but ruminate, not even really having events.
Novels have sensations.
Subjective sensations.
Novels live in the mind.
Novels can be interpreted in different ways.
Only one person can enjoy a novels at once, of course we could say it could be read out loud.
But read a novel out loud to a group of people, read a scene that takes place in a coffee shop.
Ask everyone in the room what the they thought the coffee shop looked like, and everyone will have a different answer.
So they aren't seeing the same time, say like a movie.
The movie supplies the coffee shop.
Every must agree on that coffee shop.
Or they would actually be lying.
But if of one person said concerning the reading out loud of the novel, "It looked like this coffee shop I used to go to when I was in college" and someone else said, "It looked like the coffee shop down the street from my house."
It would not be incorrect.
After Dickens and Dostoevsky the novel only grew.
People like Knut Hamsun and D.H. Lawrence wrote books that were based off the original form of Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, and Lawrence wrote very different books, but their origins were the same.
Then it goes to Sherwood Anderson, Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
Then there is a real split in the 50s.
Of course there was Tristan Tzara and Kenneth Patchen.
But even they kind of got famous.
Then the 50s came what is considered serious literature or serious novels split, Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Updike, and Phillip Roth went one way. And Kerouac and Burroughs went one way.
Mailer and Roth representing the proper side of literature. I don't think Mailer and Roth thought that though. I don't think they were young men thinking, "I'm going to make the proper pop version of literature."
They kind of of remind me of Barack Obama and Mike Gravel arguing at the democratic debates.
Barack Obama did represent something revolutionary and different. But Mike Gravel represented childlike truth, craziness, and even aggression that the Beats had.
Barack Obama is like Norman Mailer or Phillip Roth, saying to Jack Kerouac and William S. Burroughs, "Listen, I'm not the most honest, I'm not the most sensitive, I'm not a crazy lunatic. But I get the job done. I know how to work these assholes. I've read the same books you have, I share many of your same experiences. But I'm not an overly emotional person. I enjoy Dostoevsky too, but my house is spotless, my bills are paid, and I have a great credit score."
You have Richard Yates at this time, but he didn't seem to factor in it at all. The thing about Yates is that he was not the Avant Garde in terms of innovative literature. The genius of his books is his philosophy, that he could see or sensed a time coming when emptiness and boredom would start to be acknowledged. I'm saying it wrong, Yates just felt it before anyone else or would admit it before anyone else. I wouldn't say there is anything innovative about his vocabulary or scene structure. His scenes resemble plays and movies. Its his view of how the people are behaving though, that really I think gets us. Nobody talks about Yates' paragraphs like they talk about Hemingways or Joyce. I've sat with people and they've said, "You remember that paragraph in The Sun Also Rises where Hemingway did this?" And you remember that weird paragraph. With Yates you say, "Remember when that guy said this."
Which is different in terms of the word 'innovation.'
Yates is like Heidegger, people think Heidegger is like some badass genius. But the thing about him is that he sensed 'being' before everyone else, or that we getting to it and admitted it existed. Because when you say the statement, "Hopes and dreams" you referencing the philosophy of Heidegger, but if Heidegger never wrote Being and Time I don't think there is any reason to doubt that the new technology would have created a world where there was more leisure time and possibilities for employment and mobility which would have created the sentence, "What are your hopes and dreams."
I think from what I've read of Yates is that he thought his writing was special.
But I don't think Yates really comprehended what was special about himself.
It was that he was a philosopher or master sociologist but at the same overly emotional.
The 60s came:
Then came Capote and "In Cold Blood."
A movie book that combined fact and fiction.
The book wasn't real literature.
It doesn't have that personal experience.
That subjective reality Kerouac or even Roth had in Portnoy.
But this is the same time when the movie and television is getting steam.
Now we could say novels killed epic poetry in the same way.
People were used to getting their stories told in epic poetry, from Homer to the bible.
All in epic a poetry.
All the way up to Keats and Byron.
And then novels take over as the main device to tell stories.
Perhaps no different in terms of 'naturalness' than the car replacing the wagons.
Or the gun replacing replacing the sword.
Nothing special, nothing intellectual at all.
Just mere
Dialectical materialism.
After "In Cold Blood"
the novel and poetry seem to take two different turns.
One it became Kathy Acker, which was literature not remotely accessible by a large audience.
And the other direction was Easton Ellis, which was vulgar but still remained coherent and had no real philosophical agenda. Is Ellis actually saying something about getting high or he shittiness of upper class living? Or trying to say something about class, no, he's like Dennis Cooper. He compiles a lot of 'cool scenes' together. That's all, a bunch of really dirty nasty scenes of humans doing nasty things, which supplies a certain escape for the audience.
When I first read Ellis, I assumed he was some person talking shit about capitalism or the upper class. Then I read his interviews and realized he didn't care. He just wanted to sell books that made money and got him attention. Ellis is a great writer like Roth or Bellow, he does his job. You give Ellis some time, and he will write a book that makes money.
But American Psycho came out almost 20 years ago.
Now it seems
That the division is complete
You either write something totally normal that concerns vampires
or there will be no great fame or wealth.
I would not put this down to any conspiracy
Some have said on the internet, "But no literature is coming out that makes it to Barnes and Nobles tables concerning the poor and injustice of American society."
Something like that:
But an easy reply could be, "Yes but television covers it everyday."
Look at all those reality shows like Rock of Love and that Flavor Flave show, those shows of full of poor people crying and bitching constantly.
The possibilities for innovation for television and for books are completely different.
Television is amazing.
Us as writers of novels and poetry, might not think a show where people buy and remake houses is very innovative.
But is just as innovative as Bellow or Led Zeppelin.
Just in a different way.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
Hiatus
I'm busy with summer:
If anyone would like a review copy of The Insurgent for review, interviews or articles in September please email me at noah.cicero@gmail.com.
Put your address in the email. I will probably not email you back.
If anyone would like a review copy of The Insurgent for review, interviews or articles in September please email me at noah.cicero@gmail.com.
Put your address in the email. I will probably not email you back.
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