“uniting the separate but in such fashion as will retain the sense of separation” (the architecture of prisons and casinos, gather but keep isolated) –why the fragmentary will stick out as positive in the arts– no false attempts at unity
Du Bord against art on the grounds that it is simply the most realistic part of something essentially unreal — a representation of an escape that quells the need for actual escape–; against that, Kundera, that the novel is the essence of the spirit of play Du Bord was after in “real (political) life”? (the novel, not at all political, or a form of political joking, is a part of real life.)
…is there a comparison with plato here, “banishing homer”. both use artistic means to disparage great artists while asserting the pre-eminence of political (over artistic) life.
…also (and this doesn’t diminish anything) much of this can be parsed out of Shakespeare –being “all clothes” — world is a stage– seeming and being, and so on.
(it doesn’t diminish anything yet one will think: instead of undertaking political activity, why not just read Shakespeare? do only that)
… the artist aware of the spectacle he makes of himself. (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, aware of, worried about, the image of the saint they were making)
It would be an interesting thing were you to write at the same time as you think, and if you could describe all the time and all that is in the time that you type and think in, a la a seismograph of words, “but you cannot.”
So what is written thought contains thought that is the crystalization of thought before and after it. Written thought, for one thing, is the result of the thought of a person at work, and not the thought of a person idle or distracted, not the thought of a person concentrating on a work or on a state that is other than that which is involved in writing.
Written thought is, for example, not the thought of a person working at another tool (or is it). Written thought is not the same as the one concentrating on their love, or on their being.
Written thought is the thought, if it can be called that, of a person at work with a tool of a certain kind. (Or not: it is some remembered thought, or it is not thought at all that is involved
Perhaps I’d meant to say, an element of written thought is that it is the sort of thought one does while handling a tool, while of course not all writing is of that kind.
I think of Henry Miller as having once written something in this connection but it’s common experience: of thinking of great things to write that disappear when one sits down to write — when one is in the presence of the tool, which generates its own order of thoughts. Possibly?
awareness while reading … [1] of things not pertaining to reading (ambient sounds and air temperature, cold feet, uncomfortable chair, people entering room, etc.); [2] of things pertaining to reading but are not reading (hands on the page, turning the pages, knowing to turn the pages); [3] of things comprehended through reading [4] of being distracted by (1) as well as by associations produced by (3)
–what is reading — must it involve comprehension– can one comprehend one’s reading without being aware of it– for example, read and understand but have one’s mind somewhere else–
“understanding exaggeration” (why do we do it, and why does the unexaggerated truth not communicate the true extent of what’s we’ve experience –when we’re mugged by three guys, it must be five– the kid so smart he got straight a’s must have got them all in college level classes as well– and so on
Pale King, a couple mentions of ‘neon’ in section 22, long one.
Wallace’s conversation without interlocutors, conversations where it doesn’t quite matter whose speaking beyond what they say, continues to contribute to this notion of literature becoming this expressed interior conversation
Du Bord…. Awareness as ‘doubling’ (Was Agee ‘doubling’?) ‘double entendre’ of as the world turns, twin buildings he fatefully confuses… Foot and hat. (concordance of 22…)
sometimes shows itself as an unfinished worked stylistically as well as structurally — passages that are not quite at full strength.
Contrasting Pale King with the Mezzanine… idea that Baker condensed something experienced many times into one experience of lavish detail…. Wallace, while nodding to the existence of detail, remains faithful to the experience of observation rather than to the thing observed– you will observe something different the first time you experience it than you will the second or hundredth time…
a “calculus of writing” whereby the always changing subject of experience is presented over the always changing object
Metafiction. idea, there is no metafiction here. Wallace really is trying to write a true and meaninful memoir insofar as the legal notice will allow. But the presence of the legal notice (like a gravitational body?) distorts the straightforward presentation of fact.
unfinished works as a topic do intentionally unfinished works (a cezanne painting) differ from unintentionally unfinished works (the Pale King) (are the Trial, The Pale King and A Man without Qualities similar types of unfinished works.)
Like Ulysses’ Cyclops chapter (also elsewhere in Wallace) the technique of interlarding narrative bits with historical/ informative bits. (sect.36) (does maybe War and Peace set that precedent)
Pale King as unfinished response to Infinite Jest — to vice or evil of distraction (the Entertainment) a failure to deal courageously with boredom against the virtue or benefit of focus (The Tax Return, The Mindless Task requiring thought) which is to deal courageously with boredom.
[Is Pale King, like an Infinite Jest, a Hamlet reference?] (x) –no
Today read of a camera prototype which automatically edits out the undramatic moments, about the exact opposite of my own ideal. Of what does the undramatic consist? (However: is drama itself a camera of this type? is the stage a frame intended to emphasize that — things do change — life does occasionally happen?) Might more stable societies require that kind of assurance?
Proposition, that one’s talkative self and writing self are not to be understood as united, under the verbal, but to be at odds, for sharing the same source, and depleting it, the one from the other.
(I would say though: political commentators, for example, seem to write as they speak, and it will seem their speaking does not exhaust the font of their writing. For another sort, having spoken is having expressed, so why express again in writing?)
There’s an invisible machinery behind the content of a blog, by which the content is made available — invisible to readers. Now, at least, finally, visible to writers.
Already known… Again it seems that the literary practices of the early 20th century project the technological changes of the latter half.
philosophy appears to the subject to be writing first of all but writing that arises from the very core of the subject and an attempt to reach to the very peripheries of whatever it, (they, he…) might have to do with
fiction appears to the subject to be also writing but with its perspective shifted to the peripheries of all the subject might have to do with, with all his experience, looking to see if that experience has a subject, if that subject has a core (subject meaning the writer himself, herself)
behind this I the ego appears shifting– where the “clever English gentleman author” is only ever entirely within himself — entirely within Henry Fielding– who is writing Rings of Saturn?
“two man parade”
Idea that one should stop resisting that one is a “cutie-pie” and find a way out of the wilderness for cutie pies
“beneath the veneer of the other’s ideology is one’s own realized ideal.”
A page that won’t turn in my Spanish book (the thumb of my right hand on the corresponding side of the soft cover book) –a page in the glossary of the elementary Spanish dual language reader. I am on the R‘s but need to get to the S‘s so as to look up sigilosamente. My thumb is currently holding on (down) —
If I slide my thumb down the side too far I will likely wind up in the T‘s. If I don’t slide it down enough my thumb presses on the page without achieving anything, without having “slid” […] I will be looking at my thumb on the side of the book
.i`` * ^ / . . . . . ` `~ 