Why Read

Why Read?

• I just can't look outside of what it might be like to have an intellect and sensibility formed by interaction with texts. Or can I? After all, I sympathized heavily with Alvarenga (an illiterate man, lost at sea) - so perhaps, after all, this is the answer to the vexed question of why we should read: so as to anticipate, understand, and so connect with the non-literate realms that surround us - whether we be separated from them by reason of space or time or technology.
• So why read? Read because short of meeting and communing with them (and perhaps, because of this, writing about them), reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding.

Kafka's Wound

• Kafka at 19: "The most important or charming was the wish to achieve a view of life (and - this was necessarily bound up with it - to convince other people of it in writing), in which life maintained its natural heavy rise and fall, but at the same time would be recognized, no less clearly, as a void, a dream, a floating."
• The adult Kafka reached a mystical appreciation of his youthful velleity, characterising it as a desire both to expertly hammer together a table and at the same tim "do nothing". The inanition would validate the craftsmanship involved, freeing it to become "even bolder, even more resolute, even more real and, if you like, even more insane".
• Borges: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant."
• Kafka: "Concealment has been my life's vocation."
• Once bitten by a mania for associative thinking, you can't tell where you might end up.

A Care Home for Novels: The Narrative Art Form in the Age of Its Technical Suppression

• The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonplace world, or any number of invented ones; the capacity words have to move between the imagistic and the concretized, expressing all shades in between; and the diacritical capability of the extended prose form itself, which unlike any other art form is able to enact self-analysis.
• The hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance which conflates it with political elitism.
• Debord: "The perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy; it wants to be judged by its enemies rather than its results."
• In postmodernism (we claimed erroneously), we weren't overtaken by new technologies, we simply took what we wanted from them and collaged these fragments together, using the styles and modes of the past as a framework of ironic distancing, and hence reasserted the primacy of the message over the medium.
• McLuhan: "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance." And surely here too he's right: all the opinions and conceptions of the new media amount to nothing set beside the way they're actually used. McLuhan also states: "The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception."

The Last Typewriter Engineer

• Rasmus Malling-Hansen's proto-typewriter of the 1860s, the so-called "Writing Ball", was used by Nietzsche, among others.

How Should We Read?

• When someone reading complex passages of prose - ones, say, that attempt to convey human lives in all their complexity - is placed in an MRI, we see that the parts of the brain employed when actually talking, walking, or making love, are illuminated by the very act of reading about talking, walking, or making love.
• By reading indiscriminately, I learned to discriminate - and learned also to comprehend: for it's only with the acquisition of large data sets that we also develop schemas supple enough to interpret new material.
• Understanding, engagement, and enjoyment all rest on an ability not only to suspend disbelief, but also suspend comprehension - to allow oneself, as one reads on, the sweetest luxury, that of doubt.
• I still cleave just as strongly to the idea that it's in the oscillation between textual monogamy and polygamy (or polyandry) that we find our true love of - and engagement with - reading.

Junky

• Camus' The Fall, Sartre's Nausea, and Junky are all three works in which an alienated protagonist grapples with a world perceived as irretrievably external and irredeemably meaningless.
• "I live with the constant threat of possession and the constant need to escape from possession, from Control." Burroughs saw the agent of possession implicated in the killing (of his wife, Joan) as external to him, "a definite entity". He went further, hypothesizing that such an entity might devise the modern, psychological conception of possession as a function of the subject's own psyche: "since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded."
• Burroughs' own conception of himself was essentially fictional, and it's not superfluous to observe that before he began to write with any fixity he had already become a character in other writers' works, most notably, On the Road.
• By the time Burroughs was living in Tangier in the late 1950s, his sense of being little more than a cipher, or a fictional construct, had become so plangent that he practised the art of insubstantiality with true zeal, revelling in the moniker "El Hombre Invisible".
• Burroughs was the perfect incarnation of late 20th C Western angst precisely because he was an addict. Self-deluding, vain, narcissistic, self-obsessed, and yet curiously perceptive about the sickness of the world if not his own malaise, Burroughs both offered up (and was compelled to provide) his psyche as a form of Petri dish, within which were cultured the obsessive and compulsive viruses of modernity.
• "A series of faces, hieroglyphs, distorted and leading to the final place where the human road ends, where the human form can no longer contain the crustacean horror that has grown inside it.

Literary Time

• Indeed, perhaps the best way to think of narrative at all is as a means of reducing almost infinitely long sequences of events into ones short enough to fit onto the page.

On Writing Memoir

• Nietzsche: "Memory says 'I did that.' Pride replies, 'I could not have done that.' Eventually, memory yields."
• What we're engaged in as reflective self-consciousness is the construction of some sort of narrative.
• Surely even our own being becomes alien to us, once it has passed over into the void of even the recent past? I find it surpassing strange to try and recall, in true detail, what I was thinking and feeling any given day last week, let alone last month, year, or - gulp! - decade.

Apocalypse Then

• Yes, just as no one ever looks forward to senility, followed by death, and only takes each day as it comes - so everybody is nodding away on the great over-heated sun porch of our planet, unable any longer to apprehend the speed of change, as our cloudy minds continue to intercalate.
• The fact is that around 1900 a certain space was shattered. It was the space of common sense, of knowledge (savoir), of social practice, of political power, a space hitherto enshrined in everyday discourse, just as in abstract though, as the environment of and channel for communications; the space too, of classical perspective and geometry, developed from the Renaissance onwards, on the basis of the Greek tradition (Euclid, logic) and bodied forth in Western art and philosophy, as in the form of the city and the town...
• Anthropic climate change is not a heater that can be switched off. The unified electrical field softened us up for the impact of the internet and the web - just as the Holocaust and Hiroshima rendered us curiously complacent about our ability to act collectively to avert disaster. The entire world has become leery of being the boy who cried wolf: so unwilling to trumpet the bad news, lest we open ourselves to the mutual accusation of... scaremongering. Yes, this is how the world ends: with 9bn-odd souls trying to avoid a social solecism.