German angst on art and beauty

Book: Death in Venice and Other Stories


Author: Thomas Mann


Published: 1988 (Bantam, this collection); 1897-1912 (original story publication dates)


Pages: 263


Hoo, boy, does Thomas Mann ever have conflicting issues with his chosen profession.

He's this great chatty German with a keen sense of existential dread and how beauty (and lust disguised as high-minded appreciation of it) can wreck an artist especially easily. His character-to-character dialogue has that real-life rhythmic panic of "Oh fuck how much of what I actually feel should I say?", which is not something I expect to come across so clearly from a pre-modern writer. Snaps for him.


Or maybe his 1988 translator. That's a problem I have with translation; how much of the text is lost when it jumps languages? Witness Kafka's "bug" vs. "cockroach" vs. "vermin" opening. Maybe I should just learn German? 


But then I'd be the shitty translator and have no one to complain about but myself, and as Mann proves in his giant blocks of monologue on the nature of Art and the Writer's Role in it all, that is some boring-ass prose. It stops his narratives dead until the hunchback re-meets the lady who makes him feel the pang of being an outcast, or until the shopkeeper yells at the religious dude to stop waving that knife around because that won't make him take the obscene picture out of his shop window, or until the tubercular wife of a count stops playing the piano for a smitten writer. 


See? He's got some good stuff. You just have to get past his angst. I bet he was FUN when his writing was going badly.      

Predictions of the digital age

Book: Digerati: Encounters with the Cyber Elite

Author: John Brockman

Published: 1996 (HardWired)

Pages: 335

Irony is reading a physical book all about how the world is going digital and how we should adapt or risk getting left behind.

What Brockman did was gather up all his influential friends and acquaintances from the industry, sat them down one by one, and interviewed them about where they thought the Internet and the World Wide Web were headed and what they and the world at large needed to do about it.

And then he typed it and sent it off to get bound in paper and glue and cardboard and to sell on one of the platforms most of his interviewees predicted would be dead by now (to be fair, they’re getting sort of right).

Reading fifteen-year-old predictions about the Internet feels a little like reading Nostradamus; it’s a faddish way of retroactively proving that psychics really do exist. Although the people interviewed for this book were far more actively engaged in the innovations they talked about, their projections were still vague enough to apply correctly to what the Internet has become without knowing if 2011’s Internet is exactly what they were thinking in 1996.

A good bit of why I liked reading this was so I could nod my head and mentally mark off what we’ve innovated from these Suggestions of the Future.

• Interaction and personalization will always be king in a medium that’s simultaneously broadcaster and audience.
• As long as we have such a thing as technology, we will have people worrying about whether or not we’re spending too much time on it.
• Ease of access, cheapening of speed, and building of communities are the steadiest foundations on which to build Internet interest.
• Nobody will ever care about interactive TV.

I really, really wish Brockman had hosted round table talks/arguments and just recorded those verbatim, or at least left his questions in so on the page his interviews would get some of that interaction action they all yap on about. That way he would’ve caught some great arguments that would have taken all these sentiments, which were thought-provoking but difficult to get through in big chunks that said basically the same thing.

“You sly dog! You’ve got me monolouging!”  

Anyway, this was a sort of interesting book, but it’s by no means necessary.

A brilliant scattered mind

Book: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays

Author: David Foster Wallace

Published: 2005 (Little, Brown and Company

Pages: 343

David Foster Wallace’s “Host” (about talk radio and how it got to be such a broadcasting juggernaut) is the only essay to use these box-and-arrow digressions instead of footnotes. But it illustrates perfectly what it’s like to read his writings.

“Did you know that US lexicography even had a seamy underbelly?”

No. No, I did not, but now I do, and it’s this ability to deeply mine such subjects with such a fiercely churning analysis and absurdity detector that makes David Foster Wallace one of my new favorite authors.

Yeah, this book was dense as hell, but it was worth the work and the headache I nursed after gorging on it.

(A bookstore clerk from a Charleston trip I took told me that Consider the Lobster is the best gateway into DFW’s writing. That was a couple years ago; cut to last weekend when I went with my boyfriend to the Boarder’s out here. It’s closing, which means everything’s on sale, which means you better believe we combed that entire place of half-empty shelves, which meant I found this book and decided it was time. When I run out of books from my old pile, my been-waiting-patiently-for-who-knows-how-many-months-slash-years pile, I’m going to find Infinite Jest and the three bookmarks it requires.)

His literature and language essays are the most…straightforward isn’t the right word. The most linear, I think is better. He talks about the Great Male Narcissists in a review of John Updike’s Toward the End of Time; he talks about Kafka’s humor (did you know Kafka even had any humor? I sure didn’t) in written speech; he talks at very long, interesting but also long, lengths about authority and usage of American English; he gets right to the heart of why sports memoirs are so disappointing but why he keeps buying them anyway: he keeps looking for the transcendence he sees in the great athletes when they’re playing their game, convinced their physical eloquence will translate to the written word.

YES. That. *nodsnods* I kept doing that while I was reading.

I’ve wanted to read DFW since I read an article in Rolling Stone about his suicide. He just seemed so passionate and talented and like he was actually doing something to combine those two strengths. And then in a reporting writing class I took, our first assignment was to read a commencement speech he had given; it was about trying to find the transcendent in every day, and, frankly, it’s the best advice I’ve gotten about how to deal with the real world.

So I respect DFW, a lot, as a writer and as a thinker. His writings make me feel justified and hungry about finding pathos in the deep meanings of things. No, it’s probably not a good idea to take comfort from a suicidal artist of any sort. But I do.