Tuesday, November 11, 2003

I feel as though I've somehow lost my voice here, in these personal writings.  I write so much highly-opinionated academic goo these days, that it's hard to come here and write in a more non-dogmatic style.  I feel as though I'm changing a lot, but I don't have the time to really sit down and contemplate what that truly means.  That makes me a more than a bit uncomfortable.  I was lying in bed last night, thinking about an idea for a novel that I've been mentally chewing on for a while (not that I intend to actually write a novel anytime in the near future, or perhaps ever, but I from time to time have ideas that seem best-suited for fiction).  Upon thinking about this idea the following morning, in full wakefulness, I realized why I will never be a novelist of the sort that would compel me as a reader (and that fact implies a lot of deeper stuff about my character, I think): When I think of novels that I might write, I often think of ways in which I could borrow this or that personality trait from various friends or family members, and use that to highlight something I consider incredibly wrong about our culture.  But I can't for the life of me imagine how I would then turn these little symbolic puppets into characters that one might like, or care about.  Curmudgeonly lack of empathy is what it boils down to, I'm afraid.  I'd be a mean-spirited Swiftian satirist, a Martin Amis without the benefit of wonderful prose.  A jerk.  To my credit, I doubt I would ever have the heart to actually write such a thing - I do have innumerable warm feelings about the actual, physical human beings in my life.   It's simply to say that I despair a bit over my too-developed ability for abstraction.  So, if I ever wrote a novel, it would have to take place in the historical past.  I would like to write a novel that somehow dealt with the events in France of May, 1968.  But that would involve research, for which I currently have no damn time. Anyway, about this aforementioned abstraction-thingy.  I was reading the November issue of The Believer (about which I will say more later) this afternoon.  There's an interview with David Foster Wallace, in which he addresses the culturally-endemic myth that grappling with serious mathematical abstraction sometimes causes mental breakdowns of various sorts (e.g. A Beautiful Mind, etc.)  To contextualize this a bit, DFW just published a book dealing with the concept of infinity, particularly in the work of Georg Cantor, who did some work involving set theory in which he proved that some infinities can be larger than others (a simple way of conceptualizing this is to consider that the set of natural numbers {1,2,3...} is an infinite set, and the set of even natural numbers {2,4,6...} is also.  It looks like the first infinite set might be quite larger than the second infinite set.  Which is weird and mysterious, and probably damned difficult to actually prove.)  I haven't read the book, and probably wouldn't understand it if I had.  One tangential  point of this book seems to involve stripping these sorts of problems of their purported ability to drive the ostensible problem-solver mad.   Anyway (and I am really drifting here, I know), in this interview DFW mentions abstraction as both "a feature of math and an engine of neurosis."  I find that entirely resonant and true, if you think about it a bit.  I value my ability for abstract thought, and profoundly dislike the ways in which the product of that thought too-often sets me down in a very, very bad place emotionally, in just about equal measure.  And so it is a heretofore unexplored paradox of my character that I choose to engage in work that involves a frequent degree of abstract thought.  By the way, I know I'm always writing stuff like "if you think about it," or "upon further consideration," etc. here, without ever really getting into my own logical exegesis of the question at hand.  I know that is lame, but I don't have time, and I sometimes just write these entries as notes to myself, so I will remember to think harder about certain topics at a later date.   Whatever.  That doesn't make it any less lame, really. The Believer is a really great magazine.  I recently purchased a subscription.  It's charter kind of vaguely involves engaging a lot of intellectual/literary review and discussion, while at the same time avoiding the ugliness that has become so endemic in the world of literary criticism & journalistic book reviewing.  If you're not a big follower of the incidentals of the literary world, this may not seem so interesting.  But, over the last few years, there has been a strong tendency towards very mean-spirited, vituperative literary criticism, so The Believer is, in many ways, intended as a corrective to that.  That wouldn't mean much if the writing in The Believer was not so uniformly excellent, but it has been consistently very good and enjoyable.  It is refreshing to read enthusiastic, insightful, long (even leisurely) reviews about books that a writer liked a lot.  It's expensive, but there are no advertisements.  The Believer also features an interview with a philosopher in each issue.  I always enjoy this immensely, but this issue's interview with Sissela Bok is particularly excellent.  It's excellent for many reasons, but I was particularly fond of it because she mentioned one of my favorite philosophers (and novelists), Iris Murdoch.  I was so profoundly happy that someone finally said, in print, that the Alzheimer's cottage industry that has posthumously sprouted around Iris Murdoch is a damn shame, and something that Murdoch herself would never, ever have wanted.  So many people know of her, vaguely, as "the writer with Alzheimer's," while knowing absolutely nothing about her work.  I don't think there's much justification in some vague notion of a detailed history of her illness somehow "helping" those who care for others with this disease (and we can discard the notion of it "helping" those actually suffering from the disease, for obvious reasons).  It's just a damn shame, and it is not bad to say that it is somehow, incredibly, horribly perverse that it happened to a person who seemed to reside largely in the realm of intellect.  It is just a horrible fact that is honestly best turned away from, in the most sympathetic way possible, and focus placed instead on the absolute vibrancy of her life before.  I reference her work all the time these days, and I just. don't. think. about. it.  I just do not. You know? About a year ago, my girlfriend, knowing that I am an admirer (this is not a strong enough word - I absolutely revere her mind) of Murdoch's work, brought home the DVD of Iris (the movie about her storied love life, and eventual descent into Alzheimer's-related dementia) home for us to watch.  I watched about three minutes, and started sobbing unconsolably.  I couldn't watch it.   I'm out of time!  Good afternoon, gentle readers. Oh wait, one more thing:  This month's Believer also has an article about the use of physical description, or its lack thereof, in modern literature.  It names Saul Bellow as one of the last, and best, practitioners of this method (let's call it plumbing the depths of character through flawless evocation of the surface).  I agree, I agree, I agree.  (I agree - I even wrote this same thing in a amazon.com review of Ravelstein that I wrote a few years ago.)  In contrast, there is a long appreciation of Saul Bellow in the recent issue of Atlantic Monthly (by no less than Martin Amis), that makes not a mention of this unparalleled (and defining) ability of Bellow's.  This is how good The Believer can be, if you like that sort of thing. Okay, one more (I'll have to edit this entry later, so it doesn't seem so idiotic).  Here is a website offering definitive proof that Paul McCartney died around 1966, and was subsequently replaced with another godlike musical genius who looked exactly like him.  2:51:43 PM