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Thrillseekers!
When I started reading fiction, as a child, I read adventure stories. Books were, I was told, a way to go places one could never really go, to do things one could never really do. When I wrote stories, I wrote about flying couches and other planets and purple monsters. I saw fiction as a way out of the boring (stable) life my parents had created for me, as a chance to create a new, more exciting world.
I saw fiction as fantasy for most of my youth, until my junior year of high school. That year, I took Mr. Kilmar’s advanced composition course. He made us read Confederacy of Dunces, among a dozen other great works. It was like realizing television has more than one channel. I saw for the first time that literature was meant for more than excitement, for more than entertainment. Ignatius J. Reilly’s story was amusing, sure, but it definitely wasn’t an adventure like I was used to. There was no globe trotting or war fighting. Nothing terribly exciting happens in Confederacy of Dunces.
It was a revelation. My old adventure stories, my dog-eared Hardy Boys and Boxcar Children books, suddenly seemed cold and boring (the revelation that Mr. Kilmar had ghostwritten a Boxcar Children book didn’t help). Those books were just made-up stories, and anyone could make up a story like that. Confederacy… was different. No one but John Kennedy Toole could have written that book. It was personal and weird and not always pleasant. And I cared about the hero, not because he was the hero, but because the author cared about him. People who I used to think were weird became suddenly interesting. The book had made me see that the interesting things in life were not across the world, but at the grocery store and at school, in my own backyard. I saw people as characters for the first time, understood that they had motivations different from my own.
Then, senior year, I took advanced literature with Mrs. Arnold. If Mr. Kilmar taught me to really read, Mrs. Arnold taught me to really write. The course centered on English-language literature of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was not enough to just understand the plot anymore. Now I had to read as a writer. Mrs. Arnold made us read Sons and Lovers. I did not like Lawrence on my first read.
Confederacy… was one thing, that was funny. But Sons and Lovers? It’s so boring! There must be a hundred pages of the main character pining for his teenage love. I hated Lawrence. So whiny, so redundant. Why do we need to hear over and over about how much he loves this stupid girl? Arrggh!
Then Mrs. Arnold led us in dissecting the book. Oh. He’s supposed to sound whiny. That’s how teenagers sound to adults? Wow. So all that boring stuff is supposed to be tedious? It’s supposed to make me feel squirmy? I understood it, but I didn’t like it. Why not leave all that stuff out? Realism is great, but to a point. Come on.
And that’s sort of where I stayed for a long time. I added a morose flourish to my writing in college, after my parents got divorced, but it was just a tweak to the romanticized realism I was stuck on. ”Real life, but more,” could have been my motto. I was trying to capture real life, but without all the tedium. Just the good stuff. I read Hunter Thompson. I felt like he got it. Living life, writing the interesting parts down, seeing through the bullshit. That’s what I wanted to do.
I dropped out of college and starting living downtown. My friend Brad moved in. Brad liked different music than I did. I was still on Bright Eyes and similar “enhanced-realism” songwriting. Brad liked noise music. I thought it was just noise. Brad was patient. He traced the lineage for me, the punk ethos, the avante-garde sensibility, the situationalist methodology. He played me a mini-CD by a group called “Destroy 2″. Just a drummer and a Japanese guy screaming for 30-second songs. They recontextualized music. A cover of the Beastie Boys in that arrangement blew my mind.
It was totally new, but referenced the old. It made all music make more sense. The droning chaos of this version made the original, with its melody and rhythm and structure, seem standard and uninteresting. It made me better understand difficult passages in literature. The painful parts make the beautiful parts. Ah, the importance of juxtaposition.
Noise music is a terrific depiction of modernity. It is so bombastic, so constantly “exciting”, that it becomes monotonous. To create a climax in a song made up of distortion and feedback is difficult. The true climaxes of noise music are actually decrescendos: a measure of rhythm eight minutes into ten minutes of a car being dismantled with a circular saw. It is the boring little things that make a story, and life, exciting.
March 26, 2009
“Nobody reads anymore.”
- Steve Jobs
I’ve been reading a lot lately about the death of reading. Shuttered newspapers, slow ebook reader sales and falling literacy rates, it’s argued, all portend the demise of the written word. To fill the void, those holding a still-fogged glass over literature’s ashen mouth offer us its replacement: image-based language. The king is dead, long live the king.
Flickr, YouTube and Google, they say, have the vocabulary for this new language languishing on their servers. All the “words” need is a taxonomy, an index, and fixed definitions. No problem.
Image-based language cannot approximate written language because of its difficulty with precision. Photographic or cinematic mise en scéne in all but the most controlled set-ups is imperfect: accidental signifiers appear, meaning is unfixable. Fine for impressionistic art, but less valuable for philosophical wrangling. We use abstract symbols to describe the world, because its reality is beyond our complete grasp. We cannot create the whole of existence from scratch. Images are terrific when used to depict the world as it exists. They fall shorter when asked to depict the world as it is experienced. Readers subconsciously fill in the blanks, the parts of the universe the artist couldn’t or didn’t summon, that viewers have unpurposefully completed for them. This new language of images is doomed to such fundamental imprecision as to be practically useless.
The problem of imprecision in language is important because it plagues us already. Language has always altered over time, but our time is unusual in the amount of words whose incorrect pronunciations or definitions have become standardized. Our fondness for colloquial misappropriations intertwines with our society’s utter disdain for propriety and formality in conversation, knots our collective tongue and we speak as the deaf. Our stilted English already feels the lack inherent in any image-based language. It is a language of greetings and concrete things – free from ideas, from action and abstraction alike. It is direct as a river of Hemingway prose, but bereft of the emotional undercurrent.
And so what will the visual vocabulary created by our tongue-tied culture look like? We supposedly see its unorganized protolanguage on YouTube and MySpace. Will we be crass Eskimos, with a hundred “words” for fart? What is the visual equivalent of “sorrow”? Will our new visual language need interpreters? Genetic and environmental differences in ocular sensory perception among different people seem to make a high-res hieroglyphics so much less universally approachable than our current arbitrarily abstract system. How do you translate images? So many questions.
If Steve Jobs is right about reading, as, sadly, he might be, we’re staring at a future of human interaction impossibly less nuanced and expressive than its already stunted present.
