American Prometheus

Eugene Henderson suffers.  In the middle of his sixth decade, he yearns to ‘burst the spirit’s sleep’, to experience the deeper truths of life.  Tired of his American life, Henderson takes a trip to Africa, to the ‘bed of mankind’, in the hopes of silencing the voice of desire (‘I want, I want’) in his soul by smothering it with rich experiences  – experiences he believes can only be found ‘off the beaten track’.  Henderson flees the ‘privation of high conduct’ that plagues his life in the States.  Into Africa he journeys with his guide, the native Romilayu, seeking something like religious epiphany, a revelation to stir the sediment of his soul.  After a brief but fateful encounter with the Arnewi tribe, Henderson finds himself among the Wariri and in the company of their king, Dahfu.  It is Dahfu that prods Henderson awake and it is from Dahfu that Henderson – and, by extension, the reader – comes to understand the primary theme of the novel: the acceptance of death as a part of life.

Kill Screen

There has been little in the way of meaningful criticism about the video game medium to date.  By this I mean the kind of discussion about video games that generates further discussion, that is not a terminal point, that encourages the spread of ideas and debate and the contemplation of its place in our society, and that views this medium as an art form as revealing of human nature as any other.  Though, as to the last point, there has not been a video game yet that has moved me in the way great art does, for all the smart sociological commentary that has been produced.

But now there is a new movement in the critical approach to video games; a true dialectic of this distinctly modern medium is about to begin.  A new magazine called Kill Screen will soon be launching, and founding editor Jamin Brophy-Warren promises to take a different approach than the traditional review/preview format of video game magazines:

“I find a lot of games criticism horribly boring,” he says. “They read like CNET reviews — a complete focus on the technical aspects of the game. That works well for a reviewing a flat-screen television, but it’s a terrible way to write about games. If we continue to buy into the delusion that games are merely software and should be evaluated solely on their graphical fidelity and feature set, then we cannot expect the medium to go forward.

“So if you mean criticism as it’s widely practiced in game writing, then absolutely not. But if you mean writing that is critical of games as art form, then of course.”

Thanks to Gamasutra for the news.

Censorship is a cancer

Stop the spread.  Let the Australian government know your opinion.  I would urge all those interested to submit their opinion.  This can be as easy as filling out a questionnaire, so don’t be lazy.  I will be doing not only that, but also submitting a longer essay on why I believe an R18+ rating should be introduced for video games.  Once submitted, I will post said essay here also.

You have until 28th of February, 2010 to submit your paper.

http://www.ag.gov.au/gamesclassification

McCarthy to auction typewriter

The New York Times have published an article (via TEV) on the failure of Cormac McCarthy’s typewriter, a machine on which he wrote “every book [he has] written including three not published.”  McCarthy estimates “about five million words over a period of 50 years” have been written using the instrument.  He plans to auction his typewriter, with the proceeds going to the Santa Fe Institute, an NPO with which he is affiliated.

But what value does this machine have?  Well, Christie’s estimates it will reach upwards of $15,000 USD.  Glenn Horowitz, the man handling the auction said, in reference to the “complex, almost otherwordly fiction” that has been written on the typewriter, that “it’s as if Mount Rushmore was carved with a Swiss Army Knife.”  As apt as the analogy is, it also highlights the fact that the real worth of the machine is incommensurate with the value of the work produced using it.  It can only be of real value to the magpie collector of antiquities, or the enthusiast of obsolete technology.  Who would want a pocketknife over Mount Rushmore?  It’s not the hammer and nails that matter, but the house you build with them.

Twitter, twits and the ‘death of narrative’.

In a recent newspaper article, Ben Macintyre, regular columnist for The (London) Times, deplores the threat to narrative posed by the internet, in particular by social networking websites such as Twitter and Facebook.  The article opens with a tautologous list of the ‘jargon of the digital age’: ‘click, tweet, e-mail, twitter, skim, browse, scan, blog, text.’  It is a list that, Macintyre writes, ‘reflect[s] the way that the very act of reading, and the nature of literacy itself, is changing.’  If it is reflective, it is a list like a curved carnival mirror that distorts the true image.  To click might be seen as an analogue to turning a page; ‘tweet’ and ‘twitter’ are, for argument’s sake, the same thing; skim, browse, scan – who hasn’t done at least one of these while leafing through a book (not to mention the synonymity of ’skim’ and ‘browse’); and there is no reason why an e-mail or a blog can’t themselves be a medium for narrative.

Heima

Paragons of post-rock, Sigur Ros, feature in their film, Heima, playing in its entirety over at Pitchfork.  But hurry, you’ve only the remainder of this week to watch what is an amazing document of their tour of Iceland.  I have personally seen this film (I own it) and I can assure you that the quality, both sonically and visually, is as pure and pellucid as the images of icy water and open sky that it contains.

A Nobel for Müller

German writer Herta Müller has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, 2009.

Silk’s Iliad

The Human Stain

by Philip Roth

Rage – Goddess, sing the rage of Coleman Silk.

Lives unravel.  Threads catch on unforeseen misfortune and the lace of our lives falls apart.  Philip Roth’s novel, The Human Stain, is the story of one such unraveling, that of college classics professor Coleman Silk.  It is also about the unraveling of three other lives: college janitor and Silk’s mistress, Faunia Farley; Faunia’s ex-husband and Vietnam War veteran Lester Farley; and, to a lesser extent, the woman who succeeded Coleman as Dean of Language and Literature at Athena college upon his resignation in disgrace, herself a model of institutionalised intelligence, equipped with the parlance of both the cynical graduate and French gentility, the woman Delphine Roux.  Roth, with his grand irony, weaves together the stories of these unweavings with his consummate hand, building in layers and daedalan braids an intricate web of dissolute threads, reminding us in the end that for the lives of all of us, for the most proud and humble alike, it is Klotho who spins the threads, Lakhesis who measures them out and Atropos who holds the shears.

Autodidactic dreams…

I have them.

Thanks in large part to the novels of Philip Roth, I have begun constructing reading lists – broad surveys of streams of knowledge that I feel I should know about, towards which I feel a have, à la Trilling, a ‘moral obligation.’  It is Roth’s grasp of broad movements in modern American politics and history – a mastery he is not alone in possessing- that has made me only too aware of my woefully incomplete knowledge of the cultural, political and social history of my own country, Australia.

And so it is there that I begin, in Australia, at Australia’s beginning.  Here is the first list, one that will take me some time to work through, one that is by no means exhaustive nor particularly canonical, but one that will certainly provide a broad spectrum of opinion that can be further refracted from white to black and everything in between:

Blainey, Geoffrey – “A Short History of Australia”

Clarke, Manning – “A Life”

Durack, Mary – “Kings in Grass Castles”

Facey, A. B. – “A Fortunate Life”

Flannery, Tim – “The Birth of Sydney”

Flannery, Tim – “The Birth of Melbourne”

Ginibi, Ruby Langford – “All My Mob”

Ginibi, Ruby Langford – “Don’t Take Your Love To Town”

Haebich, Anna – “Spinning the Dream”

Hill, Barry – “Broken Song”

Hill, David – “1788 – The Brutal Truth of the First Fleet”

Hirst, John – “Freedom on the Fatal Shore”

Hirst, John – “Sense and Nonsense in Australian History”

Hirst, John – “The Australians”

Jones, Philip – “Ochre and Rust”

Kenny, Robert – “The Lamb Enters the Dreaming”

Kennealy, Thomas – “Commonwealth of Thieves”

Morgan, Sally – “My Place”

Pilger, John – “A Secret Country”

Smith, Babette – “Australia’s Birthstain”

Tink, Andrew – “William Charles Wentworth”

More lists will follow as I construct them.  Ambitious?  Yes.  Exciting?  Absolutely.

Coraline

Be careful what you wish for.  It’s an admonition that for centuries has been dealt out by tarot reading gypsies, brewed from the breakfast silt of tea leaves, or more simply, gleaned directly from the skin of the would be Aladdin by purveyors of palmistry.  For millennia it has served as a literary device: from Odysseus  and the temptations of Circe, Trojan prince Paris’s catastrophic pride, down to the nightmare realisation of Victor von Frankenstein’s dream, and beyond, characters throughout history (both fictional and non) have constantly acted upon their desires with a thought only for the reward, sparing none for the consequences that their actions will bring them.

‘Be careful what you wish for’ can be found in the oldest literature right through to the most modern because it works; indeed desire is, hermeneutically, the ultimate cause to the effect of the Present: toxic was the apple for both Eve and Snow White.

‘Be careful what you wish for’ is a lesson that, if unlearned, can lead to all manner of turmoil.  We are fortunate in that we are provided with endless pedagogical instruction with just this message at its heart.  Most recently, there has been the stop-motion animation film, Coraline.

Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name by Henry Selick, Coraline is beautifully crafted: dazzling when it’s bright, eccentric when it’s odd, truly menacing when it’s scary, and absolutely charming for its entirety.

The Book of Bruno

A small, quiet man, Polish author Bruno Schulz required little physical space to exist, and indeed seemed to prefer it that way – he left his birthplace only a handful of times.  This is a trait shared by the literature he has left behind; it is unassuming – there it sits on my bookshelf, the tiny penguin on its spine showing the whites of its eyes, wide and fixed on the edge of its narrow perch.  In his half-century of life Schulz produced two slim collections of stories, titled Cinnamon Shops (retitled The Street of Crocodiles in English translations) and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass.  Along with several other short pieces published in various journals, these two constitute – a vast epistolary corpus aside- the bulk of his known literature.  He worked between the shadows of two great wars.

McSweeney’s Columnist Contest

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency website is running a competition for a new regular columnist (or, rather, three new columnists).  All the details are here.

Good luck!

Michael 06:09

News of the death of Michael Jackson is unavoidable.  It is dominating every media outlet; it is the thread of a thousand posts on a thousand internet forums.  I’ve not yet ventured onto any of the giants of internet social networking, but I can only tremble at the thought of the Jackson-mania running rampant and spilling in bursts of one hundred forty words or less from the fingers of the horde as they sit at their computers and tweet (without the beauty of birdsong).  The members of the notorious meme factory ‘4chan‘* must be working double-shifts this weekend.  This is how an icon of pop-culture dies in the era of the Internet: a timeless cannibalistic ritual: the machine consumes its own.

The Chosen People

I sat in the library yesterday, writing.  A man – whom I took to be Jewish – sat across from me reading periodicals from the United States of America: The Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal.  The stuffing from a much-loved child’s toy plumed from the top of his head; his face could have been a model for any number of gargoyles perched atop Gothic castles.

In his eyes there was kindness.

Abscence and the PEN

I have recently returned from a holiday and shall be posting more content soon (after I finish reading Montaigne’s Essays).

In other news, via The Elegant Variation, American writer Cormac McCarthy has won the PEN/Saul Bellow award ($25000 USD) for ‘excellence, ambition and scale of achievement over a sustained career’, and deservedly so.

Anarchy

I wrote in a book today.  A published book.  It is the Penguin Classics edition of The Complete Essays of Montaigne.  Beneath the page that says, simply: ‘Book One’, I wrote today’s date, and initialed the entry.  It is written in black ink.  It is something that I plan on doing regularly, this annotating of my books.  Let the content rule over its container.

A literature treasure trove

While I might be late coming to the party, there are gifts to be found in abundance here, at the Paris Review.  Many of the interviews with notable novelists and playwrights over the past six decades are available to read.  Well worth your time.

A Bull to Build a Herd On

‘The Swede.  During the war years, when I was still a grade school boy, this was a magical  name in our Newark neighborhood, even to adults just a generation removed from the city’s old Prince Street ghetto and not yet so flawlessly Americanized as to be bowled over by the prowess of a high school athlete.  The name was magical; so was the anomalous face.  Of the few fair-complexioned Jewish students in our preponderantly Jewish public high school, none possessed anything remotely like the steep-jawed, insentient Viking mask of this blue-eyed blond born into our tribe as Seymour Irving Levov.’

Fernando Pessoa

Damian from Damian Kelleher Reviews and Fiction has posted an essay on the South Wing website concerning the interesting work of Portuguese author and critic Fernando Pessoa.  For those of you not familiar with him (myself included), this essay provides a concise introduction to a seemingly fascinating artist.  Check it out here.

Murder, Mystery and Chess

The U.S state of Alaska is famous for its salmon, its forestry industry and its beautiful wilderness.  This land of great, yawning grizzly bears waiting for leaping salmon to join the salmon-pink tongues already in their mouths, the forests of spruce and birch, mammoth glacial drifts moving in melting slow-motion – this wonderland is no longer the exclusive domain for god’s finest natural creations, but has also become (in 1948) home to His chosen people, the Jews.

Golem Crafting with Michael Chabon

Crafting a golem, as any rabbi will tell you, is a dangerous business.  One need only think of that popular patchwork icon of horror, Victor von Frankenstein’s monster, to know that they have the nasty potential, like any creation,  to turn against their creator.