Month: February 2013

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p3Kod7vzbQk]

After reading Mark Binelli’s Detroit City Is the Place To Be and Jonathan Franzen’s notorious essay on the state of the novel, “Perchance To Dream”, Alexander Nazaryan compares the decline of the great American novel to the decline of Detroit as an industrial powerhouse:

I guess what I am calling for is the literary equivalent of “rightsizing,” in the lingo of urban planners. The concept suggests that we reclaim cities by returning them to their core functions, by shedding the sprawl that doomed them in the second half of the 20th century — the same cultural sprawl that has diluted American fiction. Writing of Detroit’s plan to rightsize back in 2010, The Economist was glad that “harsh realities have produced radical thinking,” praising Mayor Dave Bing for recognizing the “painful necessity” that the Detroit of bustling factories could never be again. In fact, Detroit’s automotive industry has become back: not enough to return the city to its halcyon days, not enough to heal the scars of its decline, but certainly more than doomsayers would have expected a decade ago. It has done so by becoming leaner, smarter, no longer peddling Hummers, thinking of green energy and efficiency as more than just the fads of coastal elites.

Publishing will have to do the same thing if it wants to save the literary city. It will likely have to look at smaller presses that are publishing less but editing more, who are repacking classics in unexpected ways, who are finding ways to be beat Amazon at the ebook game.

Caption for the above video:

This Landsploitation Short explores the Detroit Book Depository as a scene of memory and forgetting, departing from an exploration of crumbling texts to raise questions about print, media, preservation, and the role of history in the age of digital archives.

Adam Kirsch tackles contemporary essayists:

Essayists such as Rothbart and Crosley and Sedaris, one might say, represent the prose equivalent of reality TV. They, too, claim to be recording their lives, while in fact they are putting on a performance; and they, too, count on the reader to know the rules of the game, the by now familiar game of meta. What makes this kind of performance different from the performance of a fiction writer is that, by “acting” under their own names, they inevitably involve motives of amour-propre. The essayist is concerned, as a fiction writer is not, with what the reader will think of him or her. That is why the new comic essayists are never truly confessional, and never intentionally reveal anything that might jeopardize the reader’s esteem. “Love me” is their all-but-explicit plea.

Alan Jacobs chips in two cents.

Michael Bourne states that “there is no tale sadder than the biography of Truman Capote” in all of American letters. He seizes upon this revealing passage from the author’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms:

[A]ll his prayers in the past had been simple concrete requests: God, give me a bicycle, a knife with seven blades, a box of oil paints. Only how, how, could you say something so indefinite, so meaningless as this: God, let me be loved.

Bourne’s take:

This is the leitmotif for Capote’s entire life and career. All his characters wish only to be loved, and finding it impossible to be loved in any conventional way, seek love wherever they can find it, sometimes creatively, sometimes in ways that destroy themselves or others. In Other Voices, Joel’s father is alive, but reduced to a pathetic grotesque, a quadriplegic kept in a box who can communicate only by dropping red tennis balls to telegraph his distress. Instead, Joel finds his father figure in his deliciously odd Cousin Randolph, who watches him from an upstairs window wearing a woman’s dress and towering white wig. At the novel’s end, Randolph in drag beckons to Joel from the window, and Joel, finally understanding who he is, goes to him “unafraid, not hesitating,” pausing only briefly to look back “at the boy he had left behind.”

Previous Dish on Capote here and here.

(Photo of Capote in 1959, via Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew Gallix ponders the purpose of intentionally difficult, almost unreadable books:

If literature cannot be reduced to the production of books, neither can it be reduced to the production of meaning. Unreadability may even be a deliberate compositional strategy. In his influential essay on “The Metaphysical Poets”, TS Eliot draws the conclusion that modern poetry must become increasingly “difficult” in order “to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into its meaning”. The need to breathe life back into a moribund language corrupted by overuse, chimes with Stéphane Mallarmé‘s endeavour to “purify the words of the tribe”. The French writer was very much influenced by Hegel, according to whom language negates things and beings in their singularity, replacing them with concepts. Words give us the world by taking it away. This is why the young Beckett‘s ambition was to “drill one hole after another” into language “until that which lurks behind, be it something or nothing, starts seeping through”.

Related Dish debate on the opacity of poetry here.

Ned Beauman surveys the online recreational drug marketplace, which is largely made up of experimental chemical compounds. The drugs, “still legal or quasi-legal because no legislative body can possibly keep up with an enterprising chemist,” are usually sold under various names – bath salts, plant food, pool cleaner:

These websites don’t just have shopping carts and checkouts: they also have user reviews, product alerts, seasonal sales and multiple worldwide delivery options. (“Really great product these pellets are. compared to the “o5” pellets, and the 6apb powder ive had from numerous sources, these absolutely blew me away. 2 pellets made for an amazing reaction, the 5apb adds SO much to the mix. Also, top notch customer support and service, as usual. Shipped same day. rc-lab is always a pleasure to do business with.”)

But Beauman fears that online clearing houses have a major problem:

Methoxetamine, methiopropamine, ethylphenidate, etizolam, benzofuran, camfetamine, pentedrone—who can keep up? The merchants can give you the best customer service in the world, but the one thing they can’t do is explain the effect of these drugs and how much you might want to swallow, because, remember, they’re only selling plant food. Could it be that, just when it seemed like the internet was robbing the drug world of all its dangerous glamor, the problem’s actually just been flipped upside down? In the old days, you knew what you wanted but didn’t know where to get it. In 2013, you can get almost anything but have no idea what it is.

Earlier Dish on synthetic drugs here.