tearing up the ‘script

15.03.2009 in Worlds, real & imagined

At the heart of Clay Shirky’s impressive new essay is a reference to Elizabeth Eisenstein’s work on the transition between manuscript and print culture, with its redrafting and recasting of social and institutional frameworks. What’s not mentioned (only because it’s not pertinent to Clay’s argument) is the extent to which manuscript culture had itself gone through significant changes in the century before Gutenberg: private copy-shops in large cities served a bourgeois clientele whose interests lay outside monastic and academic remits. With apologies for the dodgy teleology, literary production was ripe for print.

The easiest comparison, perhaps, is to the multimedia CD-ROM of the early 1990s. (Amy Virshup’s 1993 piece on Voyager reads like ancient history now.) Except I’m not sure that’s right, and can’t help thinking that we’re still not quite at the revolutionary moment. Although as Clay points out, we won’t know it until long after it happens.

On the other hand, I glance at the scattershot reports from The Week of Two Conferences, and can’t help thinking of so very many Lilliputians binding Gulliver.

DFW, flame-keeping

4.03.2009 in Literary, mainly C18

There’s been a slow turn in the privacy of unpublished manuscripts. Kafka knew Max Brod wouldn’t burn his papers. TS Eliot married an executor who would keep his secrets. David Foster Wallace knew that taking his life would release The Pale King to the world in whatever form his next-of-literary-kin deemed fit. And release him from it.

I don’t know at what point it became clear to me that life’s escape velocity marks something profoundly banal, an overwhelming sense of just-can’t-be-doing-with rather than a doing, but it’s not a sensibility that bears long acquaintance. Perhaps you can take pictures, compare for critical purpose with ‘negative sensibility’, get the full range of ‘[a]t the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a “criticism of life”‘… at bottom is the bottom, and it’s where writing stops.

your starter for nine

9.01.2009 in Literary, mainly C18

(and there is catching up to do.)

Poetry as data. Visualise, make concordances, chew it up. Skirt sacrilege.

because all responses to Matt Webb are really just pointers to Matt Webb

17.11.2008 in Worlds, real & imagined

The obvious mental leap from the extended present is to ‘Vexations’, but it’s a different creature, counted out one bean at a time. (And I’m sure that enough has been written on Bach as an intensely Protestant musician, graphing the headspace of the listener in variation.)

There’s a meditation focused on the shape of one’s own breath, and a rarer one that seeks to discern the breath of others.

we ask too much of writers.

17.09.2008 in Worlds, real & imagined

Orpheus went to hell and back, and lost what he went there for anyway.

We strive to fill the gaps of antiquity, scan palimpsests from rubbish-tips, train every fragment of the spectrum upon them. The lacunae, though, are part of the story.

What we have is what we have; what we’re given, we should be grateful for.

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