"The mid-Neolithic: perhaps that's when it all went wrong"

Like many people, I read Spurious (the blog) for years, before Lars Iyer came out with Spurious (the novel), and now its follow-up, Dogma. I have wondered how non-readers of the blog experience the books, but for me there's a strange, not unpleasant, sense of deja vu. I think I prefer the experience of the books; I used to get overwhelmed by the blog. Of course, I was easily overwhelmed by all my blog reading, wasn't I? Didn't I fall so far behind, that the prospect of catching up was first implausible, then laughable? Weren't there, in fact, well over a thousand un-read blog posts, from well over a hundred blogs, sitting there waiting my attention when Bloglines announced it was closing shop? Did I bother with RSS feeds after that? I did not. I did not take to Google Reader. Oh, I started it up, added several of the old standbys, with no doubt the best of intentions, but never used it. Aren't there likely by now tens of thousands of items in my reader? I'd never be able to clean it up!

Yes, blog-reading quickly became overwhelming. But Spurious was even more so. Frankly, few of the blogs I liked best posted daily entries, so I didn't have trouble keeping up with my favorites. Spurious was the main exception (yes, there were, and are, others). Oh, the new posts came fast and furious! I didn't know what to do with them! It didn't help that Lars wrote long, interesting essays about figures like Blanchot who I wanted to know more about, writers I was just beginning to approach, but those entries, the ones that I wanted to puzzle over and understand, were quickly eclipsed by others, many just as worthy. Then came the W. entries, and I completely lost touch. Didn't I blog about this already? I did:

Will they be long ones? Will I have time to read them? If not, will I remember to get back to them? I don't want to click, afraid to lose them. I could check the actual blog, but no. Too easy; contrary to normal practise. I leave them for a while. Another day goes by, another new one. More. I see there are now eleven new Spurious posts.

So I wrote almost exactly three years ago (yes, I did just quote myself). In fact, fuck eleven, there'd be easily 45, 50, 60 unread Spurious posts sitting there, mocking me, mocking not only my slow reading, my ability to keep up, but mocking my slow writing. And, again, are they all W. posts? Am I in the mood for the W. posts? How can he write so much so quickly? Haven't some of these appeared already? (Didn't he make a practice of re-posting?) Where are the essays? (I demand essays! I want Blanchot! Kafka! Gene Wolfe!!) Why all the W. posts? Of course, when I'd finally take the chance, he was ready for this, as if on cue (I'd offer you a link for this, but I don't think it matters by now):

Reading Scholem makes me melancholy, I tell W. on the phone. He knows everything! He's an expert on all matters! That's because [he] studied for 40 years and then wrote, says W. How many years did you study? Are you studying now? But you're writing, aren't you? You're writing constantly.

I laughed! I did. I even, literally, laughed out loud. True! I wrote how I didn't always get the W. posts, how I'd often skim them, looking for the other longer ones. But when I took the time to actually read them, I found them very funny indeed. In truth, I found that they read much better in big gulps, ten or twenty entries at time, more. Which is only fitting, now that we have these novels.

It's always a fairly random decision, which book to read next. I picked up Dogma, looked it over. I'd liked Spurious (the novel), liked it quite a bit, but wasn't sure I was quite up for revisiting our 21st century Laurel & Hardy of the Apocalypse, Mercier & Camier of the End Times. So I flipped through it and saw this passage:

The Humility of Pain: now there's an album title, W. says. Jandek has seen things, experienced things, of which we can have no understanding, he says. He is a man of despair, of complete despair. But he is a man of God, too. Doesn't Jandek always gather his musicians for a moment of prayer before going on stage? 'Lord give us strength . . . Lord protect us'. We're not capable of God, W. Says.

Ah, yes! Lars' Jandek obsession! We wrote about this before, didn't we? Yes, yes we did. I never did follow up on that blog post (which was anyway really about Bill Callahan), by listening to any more Jandek. I still have just the one cd, which I listened to but once, maybe twice; I don't even know where it is. I, somehow, did not expect to see Jandek in these pages. But why? Why shouldn't Jandek be here? Why shouldn't it all be here?

So, with that passage, my decision was made: Dogma it is. Soon enough, the boys were in Nashville, on the lecture trip to America. I remember these, too. I hadn't had time for them, on the blog, had I? (Or had I? I remember both: having time, not having time; being bored, not being bored. It depended, I suppose, on when they appeared. As I said, entries were often re-posted.) The trip seemed to last weeks on the blog, though, didn't it? But it's only a few pages in Dogma. Lars and W. are overwhelmed by the vastness of America, its stupidity, its suburbs. It defeats them. But aren't they always defeated?: "Hasn't he always lived in this way, wandering around America with a moron?"

It's all too easy to invoke, as I already have, Laurel & Hardy and Mercier & Camier, Vladimir & Estragon, but the comparisons come easily with good reason: W. and Lars are examplars of the friendship of cruelty (the cruelty of friendship); the books are incredibly funny. Lars bears the brunt of the abuse, but then he's also the narrator: who's the more cruel? (And is Lars' flat the most unpleasant flat in literary history? The creeping, living damp of Spurious is joined in Dogma by an unholy swarm of rats.) Dogma is, if anything, both funnier and deeper than Spurious. Laughter in the face of despair. A sense of having come too late, much too late, the singular problem of Modernism. Intellectuals with no redeeming project; or projects, but no sense of urgency; or urgency, but no sense of the appropriate. A ridiculous sense that they themselves are a danger to society:

We should shoot ourselves, W. says. [...] and there would be a great rejoicing. But that's just it, isn't it: there would be no rejoicing. No one would see, no one would know what the world had been delivered from.

How is it that we've escaped detection?, W. wonders. How is it we've got away with what we have? It would restore faith in the world if we were hunted down and shot. At the last moment, the gun held to our temples, we would laugh in gladness because we would know that justice had been done. It would all make sense! The world would be restored!

That we're still alive, W. says, is a sign of the nearness of the end.

Coming too late is one thing. But were they possibly too stupid to notice the contribution they might have made, even so?:

Perhaps we've already had our idea, our great chance, W. says, as we climb up the hill towards the church. Perhaps it's already occurred to us, and we've forgotten it: what a terrible thought! Worse still, perhaps it was something we exchanged in conversation, something that passed between us and was immediately lost amidst the general inanity.

All kinds of serious topics (philosophical, literary, historical, economic) are touched on, with passing wit and apparent intelligence, before being made ridiculous. The problems are not ridiculous (they are all too, devastatingly, real), but what can be done? W.'s project is capitalism and religion (I recognize my own project in his: but what do I do with it? what can I do with it?); he riffs on the disaster of agriculture (italics his: words are liberally italicized in Dogma; Thomas Bernhard would be pleased, but not just for this). Have I not been reading about this very thing, that agriculture itself was the bad turn? (Don't I find it a ridiculously compelling argument? After all, what can even be done with the knowledge?) Where did W. learn about this? Playing Civilization 4, naturally: "The mid-Neolithic: perhaps that's when it all went wrong, W. muses." Now that's a fall, isn't it? But what a fall!

W. and Lars start an intellectual movement, of sorts, inspired in part by the Dogme 95 film movement, which included Lars von Trier. Original as ever, they call it Dogma. There are numerous rules, as these things go. It has its successes, such as they are:

Our third Dogma presentation was perhaps our pinnacle. Did we weep? Very nearly. Did we tear our shirts? It was close. Did we speak with the greatest seriousness we could muster—with world-historical seriousness? Of course! And did we take questions for one another like a relay team, passing the baton effortlessly to and fro? Without doubt!

W. spoke of nuns; I, of monks. He spoke about dogs; I, about children. We thought the very stones would weep. We thought the sky itself would rain down in tears. W. invents a new Dogma rule: always speak of nuns, and dogs.

In our fourth Dogma presentation, we spoke of love, the greatest topic of all, says W. But there can be no love in the modern world, W. says, there can be no such thing as love. I spoke of my years with the monks, of divine love and mundane love. I spoke of agape and eros. And then W. spoke of philein: the greatest kind of love, he said.

We were like a tag team, we agreed afterwards. Like two wrestlers succeeding each other in the ring. We should always use Greek terms in our presentations, W. says. That should be another Dogma rule: always use Greeks terms that you barely understand.

One of the rules of Dogma is that Dogma is personal: "Always give examples from your own experience. No: the presentation in its entirety should begin and end with an account of your own experience. Of turning points! Trials! Of great struggles and humiliations!" In this sense, this review, indeed this entire blog, amounts to a Dogma presentation. So be it. In any case, Dogma is a fucking funny book; you should read it.

No general illumination, or: Some literary Links

I check in with Bloglines and I see that there is a new Spurious post, or two, or three. Will they be long ones? Will I have time to read them? If not, will I remember to get back to them? I don't want to click, afraid to lose them. I could check the actual blog, but no. Too easy; contrary to normal practise. I leave them for a while. Another day goes by, another new one. More. I see there are now eleven new Spurious posts. Overwhelmed, now I've got blog homework; I've got to catch up, the temptation to skim will be strong (it's worse with some other blogs: I see I've let Arthur Silber's new posts get away from me again: 26, Bloglines tells me--how long has it been?!?--and I know his are going to be long).

I click. And right away I'm laughing:

Reading Scholem makes me melancholy, I tell W. on the phone. He knows everything! He's an expert on all matters! That's because [he] studied for 40 years and then wrote, says W. How many years did you study? Are you studying now? But you're writing, aren't you? You're writing constantly.

Ha! I admit I used to glide right past these W. entries. I didn't get them. What's to get? What is my problem? Anyway, in recent months, they've become my favorite Spurious offerings. Which is not to disparage the others. For example, another recent post has Lars musing on Blanchot (and later on Jandek):

Some writers know to get out of the way of the work, to let it live. Know that the work belongs to darkness, that the ochre beasts should be discovered by the uncertain light of a reader's torch, and that there should no general illumination, no way of seeing the whole, and all at once.

Blanchot for me is, in a sense, still to come, if only because I've deferred continuing with The Space of Literature (continued to defer?), for now (though who knows I could pick it again up next week). I've deferred, yet this doesn't stop me from foolishly, impatiently coveting other Blanchot books. Lars above is referring metaphorically to the caves in Lascaux, fresh in my mind from reading the opening to Blanchot's Friendship, via Amazon's online reader:

It is certainly true that Lascaux fills us with a feeling of wonder: this subterranean beauty; the chance that preserved and revealed it; the breadth and scope of the paintings, which are there not in the form of vestiges or furtive adornment but as a commanding presence; a space almost intentionally devoted to the brilliance and marvel of painted things, whose first spectators must have experienced, as we do, and with as much naive astonishment, the wondrous revelation; the place from which art shines forth and whose radiance is that of a first ray--first and yet complete. The thought that at Lascaux we are present at the real birth of art and that at its birth art is revealed to be such that it can change infinitely and can ceaselessly renew itself, but cannot improve--this is what surprises us, what seduces us, and pleases us, for this is what we seem to expect from art: that, from birth, it should assert itself, and that it should be, each time it asserts itself, its perpetual birth.

This thought is an illusion, but it is also true; it directs and propels our admiring search. It reveals to us in a perceptible manner the extraordinary intrigue that art pursues with us and with time. . .

It continues, of course, and I want to read the rest of it right away. I want to have a small pile of Blanchot's works, which I could dip in at my leisure, following strands as they arise. But I must wait.

On a related note, I was quite taken with Jonathan Littell's lovely meditation on Blanchot, presented by Steve Mitchelmore at This Space. Here's a small, representative passage (translation by Charlotte Mandell; italics in original):

It's not that the text that results from this experience – poem, story, novel – is deprived of meaning, is not shot through with elements referring to the reality of life; rather it's that these elements function (to use a comparison that Blanchot would no doubt have discreetly avoided) like what Freud called the manifest content of dreams: the rags of reality they cloak themselves with so as both to manifest and veil their truth, their very reality. Thus, if writing is related to truth – and it certainly is, it has to be, or else not be at all, or in any case fall outside of the realm we designate by that mysterious word, literature – it is not by way of knowledge. Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: it simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory "understanding" ("Reading either falls short of understanding or overshoots it," writes Blanchot), but precisely a reading. "Reading is freedom," Blanchot tells us, "a freedom that can only say yes." Yes to what? To experience; to the experience, usually born in anguish, of the one who writes, which is answered by the experience – by turns casual and transfixed by "the rapture of plenitude" – of the reader. Two experiences thus facing each other or rather tangential to each other, in any case radically irreducible to one another.

It's funny, though I've struggled with some of the language Blanchot uses, at least in The Space of Literature (no doubt because of my very limited engagement with philosophy), I persist because what I have gotten resembles what Littell suggests here, which in turn does a better job of evoking the relationship of the reading experience to truth, to reality, than most anything else I've encountered.

Elsewhere, at Blographia Literaria, in a post ostensibly about Gayl Jones' novel CoRregidora, but which deals mostly with Sven Birkerts' 1992 review of Jones' Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature, Andrew Seal says the following (italics are his):

The idea that modernism is not overwhelmingly relevant to every literary object is perhaps one of the most radical positions one can take at the moment. Our feelings and affective associations (even more than our ideas) about modernism structure everything about the categorization, evaluation, and historicization of literary objects.

I hope to have more to say about Andrew's very interesting post, but just want to say here that it seems to me that this kind of conclusion relies on a certain common view of literary Modernism, one for sure held by critics like Birkerts (and Louis Menand, as displayed in his recent essay about Donald Barthelme in the New Yorker; subscription required): that Modernism was merely an extended moment in time when aesthetic experimentation in its own right was in ascendence, in an all out cultural war to "make it new". As indicated through my many previous posts on his writings, I find Gabriel Josipovici's take on Modernism to be much more interesting and fruitful. There may have been a moment, but rather than a pitched battle against the establishment, it is "a crucial moment in the history of art, when art arrives at an understanding of itself", and that, for art, in the world in which we live, this moment is ongoing, unending, still to come. (Contra Menand who, defining two prevailing views of post-modernism, writes: "It can mean, 'We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.' Or it can mean 'No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.'" In either case, Modernism happened, and we can move on.) Incidentally, I think there's an interesting discussion to be had about how this conception of Modernism relates to those writers not fitting comfortably in the European tradition, such as those discussed by Jones in her study, another reason I found Andrew's post of value, even if he uses Birkerts conception of Modernism.

Finally, on that note, Steve tells us of Carcanet's forthcoming publication of two novels, in one volume, from Josipovici: very exciting!

You Have to be Careful With the Essential

It's somehow not surprising that Lars at Spurious, one of our more enigmatic and literary bloggers, should be attracted to the music of Jandek, one of our more mysterious musicians. I have but one of the approximately 50 Jandek releases, but there is a hard-to-describe something--at once distancing and inviting--something which I can sense may draw me in further, though I haven't yet made the needed effort. I really know very little at all about him or his music.

Lars says:

Sometimes I think there's nothing I want to hear except for Jandek and nothing I want to think about except for Jandek. Everything else is pointless, non-essential. I listen to Comets on Fire and Espers and Boris and all that sort of thing. It's good, all good, but not essential. I listen to Mark Kozelek, which is nearly essential, and Bill Callahan and Michael Head - all very good, close to essential, but not quite essential. But you have to be careful with the essential, not to come too close to it. You need distance. You need time and space set aside. Sit down on the sofa. Do nothing else. Listen to nothing. Just Jandek. Just that: Jandek.

This more than anything I've yet read makes me want to spend some time with this music. But I come here, really, to talk about Bill Callahan, otherwise known as Smog. Because, for me, Bill Callahan's music is essential. I have and listen to a lot of music, but if I were forced to get rid of the bulk of my collection, Smog would survive. And if I were further forced to pare down to a tiny select few dozen albums--there would be much Smog remaining.

To Lars the essential requires distance, as well as time and space. The other music he references here can all be found in my collection (Michael Head aside, who I've not heard of), and they along with much else help form my daily soundtrack. But a lot of it is excellent aural wallpaper. Smog I listen to almost every day at work, too, his unlikely words and baritone voice piping in my ear while I'm doing something else, which would seem to not be the optimal use of this kind of essential music. The difference is Smog calls to me at odd other times. Those times when I'm home alone. After midnight. The quiet hours (though much of his music is plenty noisy).

Lately I've been listening continuously to the most recent Smog recording, A River Ain't Too Much To Love. A new album comes out next week credited to "Bill Callahan". Why the switch? Have we seen the last Smog record? Or (smog)? Will it make a difference? When A River Ain't Too Much To Love was released in 2005, I liked it right away, but it's not till recently that it's come to rival the very best of his music, which I consider to be, for example, 1997's Red Apple Falls or 2000's ill-titled Dongs of Sevotion. That my favorite had been ten years ago should not be taken as implying that the man's fallen off. He has not. Rain on Lens, from 2001, and Supper, from 2003, are both full of interesting, prickly music. Not to be ignored if you're interested in looking into Smog. (While we're at it, don't miss the great Wild Love (1995) and The Doctor Came at Dawn (1996), either. Or Knock Knock (1999). Ok. So I'm a fan.)

Reviewers have, with Callahan, all too often fallen prey to the tendency to attribute the opinions and attitudes in the songs, some of which are unsettling, to the man himself--the pitfall, I guess, of the music being the singular vision of one person, in a culture obsessed with personality, conditioned to only take art seriously, somehow, when it's factually true. Not to mention 40 years of confessional singer-songwriters. Callahan distances himself from this by the mere use of the Smog name, of course, but this doesn't stop people. (I can't imagine the adoption of his own name at this late date will do much to prevent this.) But his songs are true, the way art is true, true to themselves, to the singer, to the situation.

Callahan gives us excellent, quotable lines ("Whenever I get dressed up/I feel like an ex-con trying to make good", from "Ex-Con" on Red Apple Falls), but the unexpected grace notes are perhaps more striking. One of my favorite moments is in "Red Apple Falls" itself, when the singer pulls back from singing about the widow who "says it's hard to live/on the lonely version of love I give", reminded of the time his brother died, his parents "slowly trying to do themselves in/inch by inch/day by day/and the telephone ring's/like a banshee wail". This is a slow, dirge-like song, with minimal instrumentation, some acoustic guitar, piano. When the words "banshee wail" are sung, Callahan's voice is subtly louder, punctuating the startling moment.

One of the standout songs on A River Ain't Too Much To Love is "The Well", and it has a moment that has bothered me. As the song begins, over a minimal repeating guitar figure and simple drum pattern, with violin, the singer "could not work/so I threw a bottle into the woods", but he "felt bad for the doe paw/And the rabbit paw" (I love this). He runs into the woods and encounters "an old abandoned well", "With a drip hanging from the bucket still". Periodically the words are punctuated by a more insistent drum beat, which retreats to the original pattern. The singer pulls the boards off the well and stares into the "black black black". Then comes a great touch: "I guess everybody has their own thing/That they yell into a well". He yells his yell, into the black, only to find the drip has dropped onto his back:

I knew if I stood up
That drip would roll down my back
Into no man's land

So I stayed like that
Staring into the black black black

Then comes the line that nearly upends it for me: "Well they say black is all colors at once". Except that they don't. "They" conventionally say white is "all colors at once". I've stumbled on this line since I first heard it nearly two years ago. But I've decided to let it go, not least because he could merely mean that black absorbs all the colors of the visible spectrum and reflects none of them (oh come on! he could totally mean that!). But more importantly, the idea suits the song. It's true. In the specificity of the moment, it works. He sings:

So I gave it my red rage my yellow streak
The greenest parts of me
And my blues and I knew just what I had to do

I had to turn around and go back
And let that drip roll down my back
And I felt so bad about that

But wouldn't you know
When I turned to go
Another drip was forming
On the bottom of the bucket
And I felt so good about that