Author Archives: andrew gallix

The Disintegration Loops

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On William Basinski‘s The Disintegration Loops (2001-03), Haunted Ink:

It’s impossible: no one could create a script this contrived. Yet, apparently, it happened. William Basinski’s four-disk epic, The Disintegration Loops, was created out of tape loops Basinski made back in the early 1980s. These loops held some personal significance to Basinski, a significance he only touches on in the liner notes and we can only guess at. Originally, he just wanted to transfer the loops from analog reel-to-reel tape to digital hard disk. However, once he started the transfer, he discovered something: the tapes were old and they were disintegrating as they played and as he recorded. As he notes in the liner notes, “The music was dying.” But he kept recording, documenting the death of these loops.

These recordings were made in August and September of 2001. Now, this is where the story gets impossible. William Basinski lives in Brooklyn, less than a nautical mile from the World Trade Centers. On September 11, 2001, as he was completing The Disintegration Loops, he watched these towers disintegrate. He and his friends went on the roof of his building and played the Loops over and over, all day long, watching the slow death of one New York and the slow rise of another, all the while listening to the death of one music and the creation of another. […] What’s he created here is a living document: a field recording of orchestrated decay. […]

[E]ach of the six works employs a different, repeating loop that slowly deteriorates into oblivion. […] What we hear on The Disintegration Loops are not poetic images of nature or beauty but nature and beauty as they truly exist in this world: always fleeting, slowly dying. What makes these works so memorable is not the fact that the loops are slowly disintegrating but the fact that we get to hear their deaths. In a very real way, we experience the muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life. What’s more, these muddled, ugly, brutal realities of life are, in their own way, incredibly beautiful, perhaps more beautiful than the original, pristine loops ever could have been.

[…] This is the sound of entropy, the sound of life as it decays and dies before our ears. And like all living things, these sounds struggle and claw for life with their last, dying breaths. Their deaths are a memorial to Basinski’s past. That he dedicates these works to the victims of the 9/11 terrorist attacks is fitting. I can think of no better tribute, no better response to a tragedy of that magnitude than a work as beautiful and as fragile as this one.

The Influence of Unread Books

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An extract from Umberto Eco‘s This is Not the End of the Book published in The Guardian on 22 May 2011:

There are more books in the world than hours in which to read them. We are thus deeply influenced by books we haven’t read, that we haven’t had the time to read. Who has actually read Finnegans Wake — I mean from beginning to end? Who has read the Bible properly, from Genesis to the Apocalypse?

And yet I’ve a fairly accurate notion of what I haven’t read. I have to admit that I only read War and Peace when I was 40. But I knew the basics before then. The Mahabharata — I’ve never read that, despite owning three editions in different languages. Who has actually read the Kama Sutra? And yet everyone talks about it, and some practise it too. So we can see that the world is full of books that we haven’t read, but that we know pretty well.

And yet when we eventually pick them up, we find they are already familiar. How is that? First, there’s the esoteric explanation — there are these waves that somehow travel from the book to you — to which I don’t subscribe. Second, perhaps it’s not true that you’ve never opened the book; over the years you’re bound to have moved it from place to place, and may have flicked through it and forgotten that you’ve done so. Third, over the years you’ve read lots of books that have mentioned this one and so made it seem familiar.

We Are All Bartlebys

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An extract from Tom McCarthy‘s “David Foster Wallace: The Last Audit,” The New York Times Sunday 14 May 2011:

…Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern “systems” novel — which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The data-psychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is “weak or defective in the area of will.” Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in “The Pale King,” nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he’s writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, though, the play’s author hasn’t worked out yet. […]

…Wallace’s writing is haunted by modernism’s (very plural) legacy. One of the nicknames for the David Wallace character in “The Pale King” is “the young man carbuncular,” a moniker straight from Eliot’s “Waste Land.” Kafka’s “Castle” is explicitly invoked; and so, implicitly by the unfinished clerk-at-desk play, is the entirety of Beckett’s drama.

But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying — or, to put it another way, the writer who cannot will himself to complete the act of writing. In effect, all the I.R.S.’s clerical serfs are Bartlebys; through them, and through this book, he emerges as the melancholy impasse out of which the American novel has yet to work its way. America’s greatest writer, the author of “Moby-Dick,” spent his final 19 years as a customs officer — that is, a tax inspector. To research “The Pale King,” Wallace trained in accounting. We’re moving beyond haunting to possession here. Bartleby, of course, ends up dead, leaving a stack of undeliverable papers. This is the inheritance that Wallace earnestly, and perhaps fatally, grappled with. The outcome was as brilliant as it was sad — and the battle is the right one to engage in.

Quotes

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“A reviewer said about my third book, a collection of linked stories, that if I kept going in this direction (i.e., toward concision), I’d wind up writing books composed of one very beautiful word. He meant it as a put-down, but to me it was wild praise.”
– David Shields, “Life is Short; Art is Shorter,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2 May 2011

Quotes

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“Writing is about expressing something new and exploring the form in new ways. So unless you want to churn out thrillers or misery memoirs, you can’t work from a pattern book. You need to autodidact.”
– Will Self, in Janet Murray’s “Can You Teach Creative Writing?” The Guardian 10 May 2011 [p. 1 of the EducationGuardian section]

Quotes

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“The best way I can articulate it [what makes a piece of fiction work] is to say that a piece of fiction — or really any work of art — has to have at its core some kind of irretrievable loss. There are an infinite number of irretrievable losses — we experience new ones every day.”
– David Bezmozgis, The New Yorker 14 June 2010

Marc-Edouard Nabe: The ‘Unacceptable’ Face of French Controversy

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This appeared in Guardian Books on 23 March 2011:

Marc-Edouard Nabe: The ‘Unacceptable’ Face of French Controversy

An incendiary commentator on modern-day French society, the writer has chronicled the strange death of France’s joie de vivre


[Me, myself and I … Marc-Édouard Nabe. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex Features]

Marc-Édouard Nabe has always relished playing with fire, but never more so than when he burned what would have been the fifth volume of his journal. His main motivation was to avoid being trapped in a Shandyesque race with time, ending up pigeonholed as a diarist. Nevertheless, he went on to describe this event in Alain Zannini, his 2002 novel, which was so blatantly autobiographical that it even bore his real name as its title (Nabe, short for “nabot” — midget — is a nom de plume). The implication was clear: having lived his life in order to narrate it, Zannini had gradually become Nabe’s creation. What, then, would happen if the writer were to stop writing?

This ontological question is raised in L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire (The Man who Stopped Writing, 2010), which begins with the author-narrator’s paradoxical assertion — given the length of the tome, let alone its very existence — that he has forsaken literature after being dropped by his publisher. “A publisher paying me to write books nobody reads,” he deadpans, “I thought this would go on for ever.”

For the best part of two decades, the real-life Nabe had received a monthly wage from Les Éditions du Rocher. When this stipend was suddenly withdrawn, following a takeover in 2005, the author decided to take legal action. Throughout the lengthy lawsuit, he expressed himself by means of posters, which his hardcore supporters pasted all over the walls of France’s major cities. He also maintained the fiction that his authorial days were over, so as to remain in character while writing his novel about writing no more.

The appearance of L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire thus came as quite a surprise, not least because Nabe chose to go down the self-publishing, or rather “anti-publishing,” route. The minimalist jet-black cover has a whiff of piracy about it: no barcode, no ISBN, no publisher’s name or logo; the spine remains bare. On the front, the author’s name is reduced to “Nabe” as if it had become a brand, and on the back you only find a number, indicating that it is the writer’s 28th published work (and seventh novel). The book is exclusively available through an official website and a handful of highly unlikely retailers (a butcher’s, a florist’s, a hairdresser’s and two restaurants at the last count). By cutting out the middleman, Nabe claims to be able to make 70% profit, instead of the usual 10%, on each copy sold. The initial print run — funded by the sale of his paintings (Nabe is also an artist and jazz guitarist) — sold out within a month. The novel was even shortlisted for the prestigious Renaudot prize, a first for a self-published volume in France.

This declaration of war on the publishing industry is in keeping with Nabe’s image as a latter-day écrivain maudit. Initially accused of being a neo-fascist (partly because of his predilection for Céline and Lucien Rebatet), Nabe is now frequently depicted as a pro-Palestinian leftist. His first television appearance, in 1985, proved so incendiary that he was beaten up by a leading anti-racist campaigner. Looking every inch the provocative young fogey, complete with centre parting, bow tie and retro spectacles, he declared that every day he shoots up with a Montblanc pen full of “utter hatred of humanity”. A great admirer of Jacques Mesrine, Nabe famously befriended the flamboyant bankrobber Albert Spaggiari as well as Venezuelan terrorist Carlos the Jackal. Following 9/11, he produced a pamphlet entitled A Glimmer of Hope and, since then, has repeatedly argued that Osama bin Laden is only acting in self-defence. In 2003, he even travelled to Baghdad, where he protested against the invasion of Iraq in typically Gallic fashion: by writing a novel. These antics may have earned him a large cult following, but Mazarine Pingeot summed up the views of many when she declared that Nabe was “unfortunately” a great writer.

Great or not, Marc-Édouard Nabe is an important figure on the French literary scene. Along with Michel Houellebecq, he is one of the only authors to have chronicled the strange death of France’s joie de vivre. With its rogues’ gallery of modern Tartuffes, L’Homme qui Arrêta d’Écrire is a roman à clef that lampoons every aspect of contemporary Parisian life, particularly its incestuous literary milieu peopled with floppy-haired Beigbeder clones. This, alas, is one of the reasons why the novel probably won’t be translated: most references would be lost on a foreign readership. The names of all the famous people who appear have been slightly doctored (Depardieu, for instance, becomes Depardieux), signalling that they have stepped through the looking-glass of fiction. As one of the characters remarks, a mere typo can plunge you into another universe.

This grey area between fact and fiction has been the stomping ground of many a French author since the late 70s, when Serge Doubrovsky coined the word “autofiction“. In recent months alone, both Régis Jauffret and Christine Angot have been sued for fictionalising real-life events and individuals. Zannini/Nabe, whose entire oeuvre is haunted by the figure of the double, once said that his novel Alain Zannini — in which Zannini and Nabe meet — was told in the “double person singular”. Sometimes, however, I really is another, rather than just the other half of a divided self.

Although no oil painting, Houellebecq is Dorian Gray to Nabe’s picture — the acceptable face of controversy. Or at least this is Nabe’s spin on events. In the early 90s, both men lived at the same address (103 Rue de la Convention in the 15th arrondissement) facing each other, like bookends, across a cobbled courtyard. Both belong to the same generation, come from similar lower middle-class backgrounds, had domineering Corsican mothers they rebelled against and established their reputations by courting controversy. Nabe was the senior partner in this relationship, up until the success of Atomised in 1998.

Abandoned Novels

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A short extract from Dan Kois‘ “Why Do Writers Abandon Novels?” The New York Times 4 March 2011

“A book itself threatens to kill its author repeatedly during its composition,” Michael Chabon writes in the margins of his unfinished novel “Fountain City” — a novel, he adds, that he could feel “erasing me, breaking me down, burying me alive, drowning me, kicking me down the stairs.” And so Chabon fought back: he killed “Fountain City” in 1992. What was to be the follow-up to his first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” instead was a black mark on his hard drive, five and a half years of work wasted.

That’s why you’ve never read “Fountain City,” just as you’ve never read John Updike’s “Willow,” Junot Díaz’s “Dark America” or Jennifer Egan’s “Inland Souls” — all abandoned by their authors after years of toil and piles of pages. Chabon, though, has recently published the first four chapters of “Fountain City” in the literary magazine McSweeney’s, complete with annotations that in turn bemoan and belittle the book that stole so much of his life before he put his misery out of its misery.

Why would a novel be, in Chabon’s parlance, “wrecked”? Authors, always sensitive creatures, might abandon a book in a fit of despair, as Stephenie Meyer initially did in 2008 with her “Twilight” spinoff “Midnight Sun,” which she declared herself “too sad” to finish after 12 chapters leaked to the Internet. More dramatically, in 1925 Evelyn Waugh burned his unpublished first novel, “The Temple at Thatch,” and attempted to drown himself in the sea after a friend gave it a bad review. (Stung by jellyfish, Waugh soon returned to shore.) More dramatically still, Nikolai Gogol died a mere 10 days after burning the manuscript of “Dead Souls II,” for the second time.

Sometimes success intrudes on a writer’s plans, transforming what once came easily into an impossible slog — as happened to two old friends, Harper Lee and Truman Capote. Lee had written more than 100 pages of her second novel, “The Long Goodbye,” before “To Kill a Mockingbird” was even published in 1960. But the attention accompanying the wild success of “Mockingbird” slowed her output to a trickle. After years of fitful work, she seems to have given up, telling her cousin, “When you’re at the top there’s only one way to go.”

Capote, meanwhile, published chapters from his long-gestating “Answered Prayers” in Esquire, and the resulting fallout — longtime friends, recognizing themselves in the barely veiled portraits of desperation and decadence, cut Capote off — infuriated and hurt him. “What did they expect?” he asked his editor. “I’m a writer, I use everything.” Some think that Capote wrote more, but that the chapters were destroyed or lost; many, including his longtime partner, Jack Dunphy, believe he never wrote another word.

Then there are novels abandoned for the dullest of reasons, one as familiar to M.F.A. students and National Novel Writing Month participants as it is to the pros: The novel just isn’t working. …