(download)

With apologies to Lou Reed...

If it weren't for Infinite Jest, I'd be making fun of tennis too.

First, a prefatory note...

I tell people I'm writing a book. I wonder if anyone believes me. I'm writing, I swear! As fast as I can! Actually, that's not exactly true. But I do have growing piles of content, focusing—and I'm using that term loosely—on the creative process, collaboration, the concept of the universal designer, and life in general. Imagine if Eat, Pray, Love were written by a philosopher slash programmer slash artist slash fixie rider slash aging internet boy genius. Is it really that formulaic? Maybe I could write a program to grind these things out. And perhaps I need to reevaluate what and why I am writing. Thoughts for another day…

An experience provides an occasion for working out how I feel about something. This is of course right out of Infinite Jest, right out of Gerhardt Schtitt's philosophy of tennis and sport, in which one should appreciate a difficult opponent, because it's only such a opponent that provides an opportunity to push yourself—beyond.

There's more than a little borrowing from Nietzsche going on there, but that's okay. It is to be praised according to David Shields's central argument in Reality Hunger, that all creation builds upon, reacts to, rebels against, argues for, elaborates on the past, whether the "past" refers to events or writings or works of art or movies. This observation—which is more an observation than an argument because it is so self-evidently true to me—is coupled with an exhortation to creators—and those who control the copyrights to the creators' creations—to take a chill pill and embrace unselfconscious appropriation.

Shields makes all sorts of other interesting arguments, for example about the limitations and perhaps exhaustion of fiction as a form when compared to the possibilities of the lyrical essay, and it was with all of this fresh in my mind that I wrote the following.

* * *

If our eyes are movie cameras and our ears microphones and they are always recording—a very wrong set of assumptions but still useful—then what we experience as our lives is a sort of movie, a meta-composition, a collage of whatever we attend to. And we are the editors and curators of this movie-collage-museum of experiences.

And if each person makes sense of this meta-work, if juxtaposition is the native habitat of human experiences, then we misunderstand and underestimate our audience by embracing the relentlessly linear.

Sussman and Abelson in their HP programming lectures based on SICP tell their students to embrace and trust recursion. More generally you need to trust abstraction. Trust reference and allusion and quotation. They all bear more than a passing family resemblance to metaphor, the embrace of the not-literally true in the service of truth.

I don’t really care about originality and I am not a stickler for APA style or other obsessive rules for citing sources, but I do think that Reality Hunger is a much better book with rather than without its appendix. The purpose of crediting your sources of inspiration is to introduce your readers to the things that turned you on. A quotation or reference or allusion or riffing-on is the tip of an iceberg, the iceberg being someone else’s thoughts, thoughts that your readers may want to investigate. So while I think it’s pointless to provide a scholarly citation when I say that your lack of faith disturbs me, because everyone knows that I’m quoting Darth Vader—or am I quoting George Lucas? If a novel is a big set designed to get to twelve important speeches that the author wants to present, as David Shields quotes X, director of Y as saying, it’s George Lucas that I’m quoting, whereas it’s Darth Vader if a character can be real and have an existence that transcends a work, as a snippet of a play I read in the Spring 2010 Lapham’s Quarterly compellingly suggests—because we all know that quote, or that quote has become a Shakespearian idiom that has become baked into the language so much that only readers of the OED care where it came from, I do think it’s important to realize that a good work acts as a jumping off point for discovery.

X=Stephen Frears. Y=High Fidelity, an adaptation of the novel by Nick Hornby. From section 379 of Reality Hunger. Aren’t you glad you know that now? It was a bitch to remember that and then find it and then remember it and then write it, as I am sitting here in One Shot Coffee typing into my iPad without my real keyboard, bouncing between the Kindle app, which takes forever to load and doesn’t let me copy text—fuckers!—and Simplenote, which is pretty cool but doesn’t remember where I was typing when I open it.

All of this research for you, my readers, is frankly exhausting and has distracted me from whatever point I was trying to make. But it was worth it, because now you know. And i want you to know, because what i want is my readers to get a glimpse of what I glimpse, and if you get distracted and absorbed by Reality Hunger, it’s fine by me, because while I haven’t yet finished it, it’s a worthwhile read. If you’re like me. If you’re not like me? Then I wonder why you’re reading, because I’m probably infuriating or boring or confusing you.

Loving a book is like loving a person. St. Exupery wrote that love does not consist of gazing at your beloved, but in looking out at the world together. A great book will say, Look, over there, isn’t that wonderful?! I could spend the rest of my life following up on subjects that caught my interest in Richard Holmes’s The Age of Wonder. David Shields’s Reality Hunger has similar potential, but only because of the part of the book he asks to cut out, the appendix that draws back the curtain and gives a glimpse of the gears and belts and cables and chains and shafts and pulleys and ropes and twine and spit and duct tape from which his creation is made. Some may want to superficially experience his book, but others will want to obsess over it, use it as a partial map to the landscape of humanity’s attempts to make sense of its place in the universe as well as its attempts to make sense of its attempts to make sense of its place in the universe.

Nietzsche said that a philosophy is a record of a great man’s attempt to make sense of the world and bears the marks of the phase of the person’s life in which the shaping master narrative of a thinker took form. And thus the errors of great men are more venerable than the truths of little ones, because they yield more: an opportunity for each of us to come to terms with the world.

Anything interesting is probably wrong, is probably an error, because all non-trivial statements amount to gross oversimplifications.

My e-mail signature—one of them, anyway—currently reads thusly: I know nothing with any certainty but the sight of the stars makes me dream. When I typed that in, I thought it was Vincent Van Gogh. I have read it in the liner notes of The Cure’s 4:13 Dream. About a year later, I heard than Van Gogh’s letters had been newly translated and were available on the web, so I looked up this quote and the closest I could find…was something much different, much less beautiful. I know nothing with any certainty, and yet the sight of the stars makes me dream still.

Here's a glimpse of our crew on the evening of December 10, 2009 as we prepare to tour a selection of South Philadelphia's Christmas light displays. Renee organized this event, as she's organized so many others—including the Greater South Philadelphia Lawn Sports Society and The Flying Fish Brewery Tour Bike Tour and Beer Hauling—and thanks to her, we saw some very interesting sights. (I guess people need to do something to keep their electric bills up in the winter…) The ride was followed up—of course!—by some drinking at the South Philly Tap Room.

I had my first ever opportunity to direct traffic, thanks in no small part to my yellow cycling windbreaker's resemblance to a bike cop's jacket.