books

Am reading Boris Groys' book Art Power and will attempt to take some notes as I go.

Based on three chapters:

-He is good at working through the contradictions of contemporary art--e.g., the continued enshrinement of objects in an age of Enlightenment egalitarianism, the classification of marketed art as "art" and the art of totalitarian societies as "not art"--and his standard rhetorical trick is to pile one nonsensical idea that we're all in denial about on top of another in a very logical manner and then to pull the rug out with some "aha" inversion that shows the shaky structure clearly. A few too many of these moments in a single chapter leaves the reader groping for some foundation, however.

-The best chapter so far is "On the New," where he explains the function of the museum as a place where real readymades (Duchamp) and fake readymades (Fischli/Weiss) are collected to provide some perspective on rapidly-changing objects and fashions outside the museum. Even the collected objects have a shelf life and will eventually be discarded, but their existence in a privileged space allows us to recognize the new, which he distinguishes from the merely different, perversely quoting Kierkegaard's leap of faith about the godly nature of Jesus Christ (who looks like a man, just as Duchamp's shovel looks like a shovel). Here's where the foundation starts swaying:

As I have mentioned, a new artwork cannot repeat the forms of old, traditional, already collected art. But today, to be really new, an artwork cannot even repeat the old differences between art objects and ordinary things. By means of repeating these differences, it is possible to create a different artwork, not a new artwork. The new artwork looks really new and alive only if it resembles, in a certain sense, every other ordinary, profane thing, or every other ordinary object of popular culture. Only in this case can the new artwork function as a signifier for the world outside the museum walls. The new can be experienced as such only if it produces an effect of out-of-bounds infinity--if it opens an infinite view on reality outside the museum. And this effect of infinity can be produced, or, better, staged, only inside the museum: in the context of reality itself we can experience the real only as finite because we ourselves are finite. The small, controllable space of the museum allows the spectator to imagine the world outside the museum's walls as splendid, infinite, ecstatic. This is, in fact, the primary function of the museum: to let us imagine what is outside the museum as infinite. New artworks function in the museum as symbolic windows opening onto a view of the infinite outside. But, of course, new artworks can fulfill this function for a relatively short period of time before becoming no longer new but merely different, their distance from ordinary things having become, with time, too obvious. The need then emerges to replace the old new with the new new, in order to restore the romantic feeling of the infinite real.

This is a lot of fun but basically insane. Am looking forward to similar convolutions in the later chapter "From Image to Image File--and Back: Art in the Age of Digitalization."

Steven Berlin Johnson notes that you can't copy and paste text from the Apple iPad's iBook application. You can highlight it...

but then all you can do is "bookmark" it:

you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private commonplace book, or email it to a friend, or blog about it. And of course there’s no way to link to it. What’s worse: the book in question is Penguin's edition of Darwin’s Descent of Man, which is in the public domain. Those are our words on that screen. We have a right to them. [hyperlink, emphasis added]

With the "NY Times Editor’s Choice iPad app" (yuck) you can't even select, Johnson notes--it's just a frozen screen of words.

You just have to laugh, hard, when people say Apple is "moving us forward" or "moving computing into the next generation."

[hat tip ED]

In his breakthrough four-part novel Book of the New Sun, 1981-84, Gene Wolfe served up a science fictional "dying Earth" adventure with artful language and plot convolutions, a future picaresque where the satirical targets are maddeningly, mind-twistingly unclear because so much of what we know and understand has decayed into sedimentary dust.

Yet for all its strengths the book isn't Nabokov or even Borges (as some claim) because it relies too much on the frisson of recognizing fanboy tropes buried beneath the elegant diction and narrative misdirection. "Ah, he's talking about a laser sword"; "That must me a dimensional doorway of some kind." A derisive term, fanboy, but the point is--you will never fully grok the book without some knowledge and love of an imaginative meta-text (or co-text, or side text...) based on heavy science fiction consumption. If you aren't interested in what a far future Earth looks like, altered by millions of years of wars, technological flux, and alien visitations, no amount of Shakespearean language, Barthesian storytelling tricks, or even the elusive mood of ennui that is Wolfe's special wrinkle on the genre, will make it interesting for you.

The later, annoyingly-similarly-named-one-hopes-not-just-for-marketing-purposes The Book of the Long Sun, 1993-96, suffers the same dilemma but is a more generous work in the sense that it might be possible to read it as political and religious allegory without caring about cybernetic thought transfer or the ecology of Dyson spheres. In other words, it more closely approximates the experience of living in the confusing, technologically-altered world we actually inhabit, rather than just recognizing alternate Earths genre writers have previously imagined. It also has a tighter story than New Sun's one damn thing after another plot. What follows is a severely abridged attempt to make sense of it [Caution: spoilers]:

In our far future (or is it our past? - nah), a visionary scientist sends an Ark out into space, carrying a cargo of plants, animals, humans, and robots in a Ringworldesque functioning ecosystem: a cylindrical hollow pod with cities, lakes, and mountains clinging to the insides via rotational gravity. Hundreds of years later, at the time of the novel, the Ark, called the "Whorl," has begun to break down. The scientist, Pas, died long ago but survives as a disembodied digital "copy" who can temporarily inhabit the bodies of individual humans living in the Whorl's city-states. He begins to send messages, disguised as religious revelations, telling the humans that they've reached their destination, a star with two habitable planets, and it's time for them to disembark the ship via waiting shuttles that will transport them down to their new home.

We don't know how long the Whorl has been parked in the system with the two planets, called Green and Blue. We also don't know when or how an inhabitant of Green, an intelligent creature of a species called "inhumi," came aboard the Whorl. Nevertheless, at the time of the book, the inhumu, Quetzal, has successfully disguised himself as a human and risen to the rank approximating a Cardinal's in the Whorl's Catholic-like religious order. He is a mysterious character: we know he is a vampire and flies around at night sucking the blood of children but he also helps the book's protagonist, Silk, on many occasions.

Only in the last few pages of this 1200 pager do we learn why Quetzal came to the Whorl: to guide humans down to Green, where they would be--livestock? presumably--for the inhumi. The narrative follows a group of people who land on Blue, escaping the Whorl after a series of battles among assorted city-states and their human and robot soldiers. Dying from a gunshot wound, Quetzal leads the escapees to a shuttle and recommends that they take it down to Green. After his passing, the shuttle's computer overrides his recommendation and lands the humans on Blue. Their ordeal is not over: we learn from a series of passing references that the shape-shifting, blood-sucking inhumi can travel between Blue and Green when the planets are in conjunction.

The reader may or may not then think back 650 pages to Quetzal's telling of the Adam and Eve story to one of his bishops (I admit I didn't). Here is an excerpt from the web page that did, Quetzal: His Nature and Deeds:

...Quetzal is an angel. Actually, he is a fallen angel, a demon, since during his conversation with Remora he tells the Adam and Eve story as related in the Chrasmological Writings and reveals the inhumi's intent among humanity:

"A-man and Wo-man like rabbits in a garden. The--what do you call them?...The cobra persuaded Wo-man to eat fruit from his tree, miraculous fruit whose taste conferred wisdom...It is all in the Writings. Or nearly all. A god called Ah Lah barred Wo-man and her husband from the garden...We seem to have lost sight of Ah Lah, by the way. I can't recall a single sacrifice to him. No one ever asks why the cobra wanted Wo-man to eat his fruit...In order that she would climb his tree, Patera. The man likewise. Their story's not over because they haven't climbed down."

So the inhumi are to be identified with the serpent in the Garden of Eden -- and of course in the Book of Revelation, Satan himself is identified as that serpent (Rev. 20:2)

The Quetzal story, which we thought was a subtheme, unexpectedly swells at the end to chime more sonorously than the rest of the book. Catholic convert and Lovecraft fan Wolfe chills with the idea of humanity fleeing Earth to a solar system where it will not be at the top of the food chain. The bits of Catholic dogma he mingles in the text suggest a coming test of faith the likes of which our long-suffering species hasn't seen. At one point the main character Patera Silk muses about the machinations of the Outsider (clearly the Judeo-Christian God): Evil exists so people will always turn to Him as the superior alternative--for their own good, not just for His vanity, Silk imagines. Without evil they would drift away from Him, His worst fear. The voyage of the Whorl assures more millennia of adoration, or salvation, depending on your view.

Richard Ford, The Lay of the Land (2006), excerpt of excerpt from Google books (the narrator is describing his son Paul; "Ann" is the narrator's ex-wife and Paul's mother):

[...] It was the time when Ann (for good reason) thought Paul might have Asperger's and was forcing me, at great expense, to drive him down to Hopkins to be neurologically evaluated. He was evaluated and didn't have Asperger's or anything else. The Hopkins doctor said Paul was "unsystematically oppositional" by nature and probably would be all his life, that there was nothing wrong with that, nor anything I could do or should want to since plenty of interesting, self-directed, even famous people were also that. He named Winston Churchill, Bing Crosby, Gertrude Stein and Thomas Carlyle, which seemed a grouping that didn't bode well. [...]