Category: The Dish

In a conversation about the novelist John Williams – most famous as the recently rediscovered author of Stoner – Charles J. Shields and William Giraldi compare his posthumous reputation with that of Herman Melville, riffing on why his writing resonates now:

Charles J. Shields: The literary parallel that comes to my mind is what happened to Melville. He died in such deep obscurity that more than one New York newspaper began his obituary with a sentence like, “The current reading generation will not be familiar with the name Herman Melville, but there was a time when the writer’s work was on everyone’s lips.” The Melville Revival didn’t occur until 45 years after his death. Williams didn’t die unknown of course in 1994, but he saw nothing during his lifetime like the attention that’s been given to his novels recently. And I bring up the Melville-Williams connection for another reason, too. You mention “the architecture of an expert craftsman.” As an experiment, I broke one of Melville’s shorter chapters in Moby-Dick into free verse — it read and sounded gorgeous. Williams was that sort of craftsman, too. … What’s your opinion about why Williams is being carried into the pantheon dead instead of living?

William Giraldi: Our need for beauty and wisdom is such that we will find it: sooner or later, one way or another, beauty and wisdom will have out.

Williams’s fate was such that he couldn’t be granted the laurels he deserved while living, and that’s a familiar enough story among great artists. Would he have been less resentful in life, less prone to drain the bottle and smoke his lucks black, had he been awarded the fame that his tremendous talented warranted? Impossible to say, since fame is its own kind of noose. I like your correlation to Melville because in many ways America was unready for Melville’s cosmic vision; it took the cataclysm of the First World War to bring Melville’s far-reaching mythos back into our grasp. Although nothing on that scale has happened to precipitate this Williams revival, I do think that entire zip codes of readers are thirsting for the purity and depth of Williams’s prose, for his expert craftsmanship, his gorgeous storytelling. Discerning people everywhere are fed up with electronic inanity, with the sovereignty of cyberspace. They feel blitzed by it all and are seeking the sane and lasting pleasures in the breed of literature Williams created, in those perfect sentences you mentioned.

Previous Dish on Williams’ Stoner here, here, and here.

Mark Slutsky describes his absorbing website, Sad YouTube, as being comprised of “[m]oments of melancholy, sadness and saudade from the lives of strangers, gleaned from the unfairly maligned ocean of YouTube comments.” In an interview, he expands on why he started the site and what might be its deeper meaning:

How did the idea for the site come? Was there a crystallizing moment? How long have you been running the site?

For a long time, I had noticed that there was something … else going on in the YouTube comment section. Something besides the usual racism, insults, obscure shout-outs and general noise.

Particularly on videos of old songs (either legitimate music videos or fan-uploaded audio tracks with slide shows or home-made clips accompanying the music), people had been leaving little stories. Memories they associated with the music, stories with such touching specificity and seeming honesty that they stood out among all the other comments. It intrigued, and honestly, delighted me in a perverse way, that in that part of the Internet universally acknowledged as the garbage heap of our civilization, I was finding such moments of beauty.

I knew that these comments were ephemeral; they’d either be driven so far down the page by the “bad” ones that no one would ever find them, or the video they were associated with would be deleted—either way, they’d be lost. So I started Sad YouTube in the fall of 2012 to preserve them.

You write, “I almost feel like you could write a Studs Terkel oral history of America culled entirely from YouTube comments on pop songs.” That’s fascinating. Could you talk a bit about that? What’s the value of an oral history? What can it capture or dramatize that others documents cant?

There’s a truth to oral histories that you don’t find anywhere else. You get stories, details and emotions you don’t find in any other form of history. Very few of the comments I’ve chosen tell stories significant or dramatic enough, at least from the outside, to make it into the news, let alone the history books. But each one conveys something about what it felt like to be alive at the time. Or what it feels like to be alive at all.

Phantom Terrains is an experimental tool that makes Wi-Fi audible by streaming digital signals to a listener’s hearing aids:

Each Wi-Fi element – such as router names, data rates and encryption modes – are assigned their own tones, which are sent to a phone and picked up using his hearing aids. The foreground and background layer of sound are built up through the strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these networks. For instance, distant signals sound like click and pops, while stronger networks play a looped song.

Frank Swain, who was inspired to create the project after receiving a diagnosis of hearing loss, describes what it’s like to use the platform:

In essence, I am listening to a computer’s interpretation of the soundscape, heavily tailored to what it thinks I need to hear. I am intrigued to see how far this editorialisation of my hearing can be pushed. If I have to spend my life listening to an interpretative version of the world, what elements could I add? The data that surrounds me seems a good place to start. …

“On a busy street, we may see over a hundred independent wireless access points within signal range,” says [sound artist and project co-creator Daniel] Jones. The strength of the signal, direction, name and security level on these are translated into an audio stream made up of a foreground and background layer: distant signals click and pop like hits on a Geiger counter, while the strongest bleat their network ID in a looped melody. This audio is streamed constantly to a pair of hearing aids donated by US developer Starkey. The extra sound layer is blended with the normal output of the hearing aids; it simply becomes part of my soundscape. So long as I carry my phone with me, I will always be able to hear Wi-Fi.

Listen to a Phantom Terrains “data walk” above.

James Poniewozik defends his decision to avoid a certain trope:

We all have our not-for-me markers with fiction: mine is kids in peril. It’s not that I can’t appreciate, even enjoy a series based on it; Broadchurch, about the aftermath of a child’s murder, was one of the best things I saw on TV last year. But when I’m off the TV-critic clock, these shows need to clear a much higher bar for me. …

It’s one of fiction’s jobs to face the worst of experience, not to leave an unexplained hole in place of terrible crimes, illnesses and accidents that–would that it were otherwise–do happen. Stories that handle the material with respect and awareness of its lasting consequence do a service; beyond the general role of art to reflect human experience, they provide a kind of emotional disaster preparedness.

But it’s also not anyone’s job as a viewer, or as a human, to face the worst in fiction, much less repeatedly. Again, I get why someone might make this argument. Like real-life violence–see the debate over watching terrorist beheading videos–the outrage that a fictional atrocity provokes makes people want to react morally one way or another. Either it must be a violation to portray this thing, and to watch it; or it must be an obligation, a mark of bravery, to bear witness. The counter-moralizing response to the one I talked about above is: you owe it to others–to real people who suffer and die–to confront this stuff. If you avoid certain kinds of dark material, you’re avoiding life, you’re in denial, you’re a wimp.

I have to side with the wimps here.