"This city of stone and stridor is not a sentinent perpetuation of Old New York...it is in fact quite dead, its sprawling body imperfectly embalmed and infested with queer animate things which have nothing to do with it as it was in life." --H.P. Lovecraft, "He"
July 20, 2004
2004 2004
I find myself reading between two and three books a week. I read while I eat. I read on the subway. I read at work when it's slow and I read before bed. I read on the toilet. The main thing I do when I'm not unconscious is read. This week I read Platform and The Secret Lives of Dogs. Last week I read Random Family and Night Falls Fast. This week I read The New Yorker and maisonneuve and Ready Made and Scientific American and Entertainment Weekly. Same thing last week and the week before. Really, what can I say or do about any of this reading. What have I learned, what am I retaining? Who can I talk to about these things I'm reading and in what sense would it even be an interesting conversation? I find myself tongue-tied around new people. I dread the times during the week when someone asks me what I've been up to, because I've done almost nothing but read, and I have nothing to say for it.
It's a myth that writers should be widely read. Too much reading essentially turns the mind off. It's passive, like watching television. It follows the same myth that writers require a distinctive "voice," that such a thing even exists. What it comes down to is that Blake loved Milton. Shakespeare loved Marlowe. Eliot loved the metaphysical poets. Etc. Too much reading relies on the idea that eventually one will find his or her personality by being exposed to a thousand of them. As if it were to be just as natural that, having watched a thousand TV shows, I would be prepared to make a new TV show distinct from the rest of them. What I need instead is material, support, and a limited idea.
I think this polyglotism is at the heart of what writers like Dale Peck find so bloodless and dull in "postmodern" writing. I think the question is simple: good writers read a few things passionately and carefully, and bad writers see all things as fair and equal. If postmodernity means "inclusive as to a wide range of sources treated equally" then postmodernity is always bad. So, the way I see it, when Barthelme wrote, he wrote in response to French Surrealism and German Expressionism, because that's what he loved. He was great. When Barth wrote, he wrote as all things. He was a polyglot, and, in my mind, incredibly tedious. They were not of the same mind at all, and can't be lumped together. There is no postmodernism, then: only writers who love what they do, and writers who are boring professionals.
Dale Peck wants a return to "the traditional satisfactions of fictional narrativebelievable characters, satisfactory storylines, epiphanies and the like." Never mind that there is not a single character in, say, Shakespeare's work, or Homer's, who affects me because of his strict adherence to believable standards of human behavior. Yet their "satisfactions" are as traditional as it gets. Peck is all wrong for a different reason. He's been made as squishy by too much reading as the writers he despises. Both Tolstoy and Dickens are models for him, as is, for some reason, Jonathan Safran Foer. He probably includes Shakespeare, too, since he'd look ridiculous if he didn't. Six of one, half dozen of another. Postwar writers made themselves sick by reading too much, perhaps, but they had a choice, and a few of the smarter ones backed off. Dale Peck, however, is the thalidimide flipper baby of postmodernism. He has no choice--fully embedded in the process he most despises, he was born to be sick before he even started.
The practice of writing these days has become the practice of not being mortified before your peers. Everyone's a professional, a consultant, of literature. No wonder no one else pays attention to it.
Which is to say that I have to stop reading so much and start going to a few more parties.
12:49 AM
The story of Phineas Gage just kills me. Until Cormac McCarthy uses Gage's story as material (in which case I will line up to read the results), I am indebted to use this as material for my book. In fact, some time ago I decided I would grow out my beard until I finished a first draft of this thing. Now I look just like a young Oliver Sacks.
It drives me crazy to think there's a squelchy little brain beneath this perfect head of mine.
Speaking of the brain: According to John J. Ratey, author of A User's Guide to the Brain, there's a new treatment for depression. So I read today while planted on my stool at the bookstore, ostensibly looking out for potential shoplifters and keeping the entrance to the bookstore clean and well-ordered. Ratey declares that depressed people and researchers, after struggling for decades with antidepressant drugs and, before that, Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT--in which the depressed person is sent into a convulsive fit three times a week by way of electrodes on the scalp--some 50,000 people still use this method today), now have Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to look forward to. "A coil of magnets placed against the patient's scalp sets up a magnetic field inside the brain, which excites neurons...unlike ECT, this technique can target a specific region of the brain, notably the left prefrontal cortex, where activity is often lower than normal in depressed people." Apparently this method is a real panacea--though still "experimental," Ratey says, "in one study patients showed a 50 percent improvement on a commonly used depression rating scale--better than that seen in most antidepressant drug or ECT treatments." Ratey continues to point out that TMS may also be used in the treatment of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder and Parkinson's Disease.
It just so happens that St. Mark's Bookshop has a very powerful magnet on hand.
You've probably seen those molded-plastic gates at the doorways of record stores and bookstores. We have them, too--the gate has sensors which respond to little magnetic strips hidden within the pages of most of our books (not all, though--the assumption is that anyone furtively stuffing books into his pants isn't going to stop to check). These strips set off a loud series of beeps when the pass by the sensors. Unfortunately, this alarm is also set off by other store's books, as well as by library books, keychains, cell phones, and by invisible, free-floating clouds of possible electromagnetic energy: the usefulness of this machine is limited only by the Bookshop's employee's tolerance of it. Often we'll hear the alarm go off to see an empty-handed middle-aged woman standing in between the gates, looking around wildly and rolling her neck like a Rodney Dangerfeild monolouge. We'll just shrug and brusquely motion her to move along.
Anyway, we swipe books at the register against an enormous black magnet that looks a little like the big black monad the monkeys scream at in 2001: A Space Odyssey, but tipped over on its side. It has a very leaden heft. It polarises the little magnetic strip in the book so that it can soundlessly pass through the gate.
eyeing the magnet, I read the little passage I had been reading to the night manager at St. Mark's and told him to help me find my left prefrontal cortex. "Well, it's pretty obvious," he said. "It's in the front and to the left, and I guess it's closer to the top of your skull than to your forehead. Right in front'll just have smell receptors in it and stuff." Very scientifically I picked up the magnet and held it to my head. Nothing happened at first. The new guy started telling me about how Japanese baseball players often have "magnetic shirts" they wear to treat injuries--it's the belief in certain circles that magnetism helps bones heal. Just then I began to imagine I felt a little pull, like a swirling sensation. Very subtle. Imagine what your brain feels like when you're whistling softly, then remove entirely the whistling, and that's what it feels like. Like a soft thrum, barely perceptible. Sort of riding on the outbound territories of placebo. Then I started to get a headache and quit.
Later in the evening, Elaine Equi came into the store. We tend towards small talk when she makes her weekly visit to the store, talking about recent books we've enjoyed and our shared alma mater. After the magnetic treatment, however, I became effusive. We talked for awhile about the recent windfall of interest in John Clare, and I began to tell her about the beauty of Marvel comics, about my longstanding Psalms to the Silver Surfer project, and about how Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were to American History what Mallory and Tolkein are to British History--the necessary arbiters of fantasy in real time, the imaginative placemarkers around which real history is told. I was firing all guns. Wow, she said (she really seemed interested). That's a really great idea. You need to get that on paper. Oh, by the way, did you happen to know that my husband is in advertising? Maybe he can help you find some work. Here, give him your number.
Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation, people.
2:26 AM
Greg Purcell | noslander2006@yahoo.com
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