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Amy McDaniel helps run the Solar Anus reading series in Atlanta, where she was born and raised. By writing and teaching, she provides for herself and her dog, Annette. She co-edited From the Second Line, a collection of her students’ essays about Hurricane Katrina.
As the new year and decade begin, I’m thinking about intervals. Most instantly, a year seems to be a more natural interval than a decade. Roughly the same things happen each year. There will be a shortest and a longest day and the air will grow warm and then cool again. The arbitrary part of a year is in its stopping/starting point. Nothing is magical so far as I can see about where we choose to end one year and begin the next. If anything, I’d prefer to wait until mid-February or so to conclude all of last year’s business and begin anew.
A decade in the natural world seems to mean not much. But what about in a lifetime? Age 0-10, age 10-20, age 20-30, and so–these seem a bit more adequate as era-markers. Even in the 1800s decades were given sobriquets. There were the Hungry Forties (think potato famine) and the Gay Nineties (aka the Naughty Nineties; aka the Mauve Decade). But not before that; what about modernity made the decade seem like a definable, describable, identifiable interval?
Day is perhaps the truest time-interval. The sun will rise and set. While a year is a real thing, a felt thing, it is usually too drawn out and diffuse to pinpoint or summarize in a word. If you say that 2003 was a good year, I will know that it took the space of time for you to make that judgment. Mid-year, there is no telling. But a day has a character and a shape detectable even as it passes. It is defined by its largest moment. It can be remade no more than once, and the next day may be something else entirely. “Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning” (Ps. 30:5).
These are time intervals. Modern space intervals mean very little (inch, mile, pint) and exist only for the purpose of standardization, ratio.
Then there are language intervals.
I conducted a very scientific Secret Santa survey, and out of three people polled, only one person got a gift from their HTMLG Secret Santa, yet all three sent gifts. I was one of the people I polled, and I was NOT the person who got a gift. I want my gift! Also, this poll conclusively indicates that only 66 2/3% of Santas sent gifts. It’s not too late. Your recipient will still appreciate a gift, even now! I know that because 2 out of 2 people who did not get a gift yet said so. You will still be loved and praised despite your (forgivable) tardiness.
But for those who did receive a gift, what did you get? Tell me how excited you are! I need that right now.
The writer was a tumbler. If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and…you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. — Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost
I think of this quotation a whole lot. I think a whole lot of this quotation. Blake’s interview of Andrew Zornoza made me think of it, the 14 years in the making part. My friend working around the clock on what will be a short non-definitive but brilliant biography made me think of it. Avatar and not wanting to see a movie that proposes to break new ground, that promises to change the way I think of the movie experience, made me think of it. Immodesty is dishonesty. To think we’ll never read another book after this one. To think we’ll never see another movie, or that ever after we’ll see movies differently. To think we won’t amend and mend and expand and retract our thoughts about art-making because this time we’ve gotten it right. What hubris.
This is not to equate modesty with small physical size. This is not to equate modesty with lack of ambition. To pack, select, winnow, whittle, fit, shape, pat, balance, attend, await, and weigh the materials of life and art to make a book is honest hard work–backbreaking, eye-straining, near-impossible work, and the reward always comes too late.
A quote like this gives postmodernity a good name. To admit to sweeping up shards, gathering scraps of broken meat, to allow that one book can’t hope to contain the Whole, or even any one whole. The days of circumnavigating the globe, the days of the brave frontier have passed. Foreclosed. We have now vaster materials, but smaller places to put them in. What possibility, what call.
A few weeks ago, in the comments section of my post on affect, Roxane brought up the idea of having a reading group for Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation by Brian Massumi. She also said her teacher advised reading Massumi alongside wine; her suggestion was a complex red. Thus Massumi and Malbec.
My copy is now in hand, so I’m ready. But to give others a bit more time, let’s say we’ll discuss the intro and chapter one (“The Autonomy of Affect”) in roughly two weeks. So if you’d like to participate, order the book and read those sections by Saturday, January 16.
My other thought is that a different person might profitably lead the discussion for each chapter, on a chapter per week schedule. So if you would be interested in committing to lead a chapter discussion, either by posting about it if you are an HTMLGiant contributor or guest-posting under my auspices if you aren’t, please email me at my first and last name at gmail. There are nine chapters, so in case not enough people want to do this, please let me know if you’d be willing to host two chapter discussions. However you’d like to go about leading the discussion is totally up to you.
If you aren’t willing to lead a discussion (that’s cool!), but you plan to follow along/guzzle vino/discuss, do say so in the Comments so that I have a sense of whether this is something people really want to do after all.
2007 was the Year of the Fact. 2007 was the Year of the Bus.
2008 was the Year of the Body. 2008 was the Year of the Future.
2009 was the Year of Lagom.
This is my alternative to resolutions. Sometime in January, usually within the first few days, I settle on a key word or two for the coming year. It is perhaps a bit like a resolution, as I hope that the words guide the year somewhat, but this guidance is pretty undefined, and the year may work in reaction to the word. The Year of the Bus was probably closest to a resolution–I planned to ride the bus more, and I did.
Lagom is a word I learned at a Unitarian church that I thought about joining (I took a lover instead). It is translated from the Swedish as “enough” or “in moderation,” but lagom isn’t just enough; it’s enough plus some. Enough is only enough to survive on; lagom is enough to live on and be well. Everything in moderation, including moderation.
Year of is also less personal, less private. It doesn’t belong to me, though other people may disagree about what it’s the year of, certainly. I am not going to specify how I came up with this Year Of; you can fill in your own blanks, if you decide that you agree. And without further ado:
2010 is the Year of the Program.
2010 is the Year of the Filter.
What words did you learn from songs? I learned laxative and libido from Nirvana, dildo from Beck.
A lot that’s happening on this site right now, in posts and in comments, has somehow coalesced around a few themes and texts that I first explored seriously in a college course I took, called Excess, that focused on, well, the literature of excess, or transgression: Sade, Bataille, Sacher-Masoch, and films like Irreversible. It was taught by Paul Mann, poet and author of Masocriticism, which, as its title suggests, radically exposes the viscera gaping from the act of reading and interpreting texts. He writes,
The text never recognizes us. It neither assents to nor dissents from our reading, our desire. Whatever validations we establish, it remains silent throughout our reading.
At the end of each reading, it returns as a Greek.
At the end of each masocritical scene, one is abandoned to the absolutely otherness of the other. One suffers an utter loss of agency, out of and against which a new scene or new reading must be projected.
This formulation of the text recalls Bataille’s vision of the sun burning itself up with no consideration for the life that its combustion nurtures, a concept that is central to much of Bataille’s work (including the essay whose title I stole for the reading series I run w/ Blake and Jamie Iredell in Atlanta, Solar Anus). The way Mann equates the sun with the text deepens this idea of reading as hyper-sensory experience. READ MORE >
Time to find the perfect indie lit bonbon and send it along to your recipient! If you signed up for Secret Santa, you will have just received an email with a link to find out who your person is. Follow the link, click on the name, and you should see their address. If you do NOT see their address, it means they forgot to enter it. You can actually anonymously ask your recipient their address through Elfster. Just go to the exchange home, click on “Send a message” and check the box next to “The person you are giving a gift (anonymous)” and then ask their address.
But it would be much easier for everyone if those of you who haven’t inputted your address would simply DO SO NOW! To do so: GO TO THE “YOU” TAB on Elfster, then click on UPDATE YOUR PROFILE, and then ENTER YOUR MAILING ADDRESS and hit CONTINUE and then CONTINUE again and you’re golden.
Thanks to everyone who is participating! Start cyber-stalking your recipient NOW! I know I am…
Right before Thanksgiving, I came down with some kind of one-off swine flu and convalesced at my parents’ house before leaving with them to spend the holiday in coastal Florida. The day we left, I had to teach all afternoon and leave directly after, leaving no time to collect the books from my house that I so dearly wanted to read at the beach (my glory box of 10 for $65 from Dalkey had just arrived). Instead, I had under 5 minutes to grab whatever I could from my parents’ house.
This seemed a bit like a realer, truer version of those desert-island lists people make. For if you were actually stranded, you wouldn’t be able to come up with an ideal reading list; you will be stuck with whatever is at hand. Luckily, my brother and I have both stashed at our parents’ books that we’d bought forever ago and hadn’t gotten around to reading or taking to our own places, so there were some good options–just zero time to pick carefully among them.
I ended up with, among other volumes, two French Dual Language books and Samuel Beckett’s Watt. By the time I arrived at the beach, my ambition of trying my hand at translating by covering up the English side of French books and then checking had dissolved. I felt a bit unequal to Watt, too. I’ve loved Beckett since I first saw some productions of his plays in Paris, and since then I’ve read a few other plays. But I’ve only read his novels in grad school, where the blows of Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable were softened by my most excellent teacher, David Gates.
Since then, I have felt, somehow, as if I couldn’t withstand Beckett’s prose on my own, the dead weight of his sentences, his spine-twisting anti-proverbs, the desolation, the threat. But there I lay, on a brilliantly sunlit balcony overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, staring into Beckett’s considerably less sunny universe. And now I’m going to try to convince you why you, too, should turn, or return, to Beckett, Watt specifically. READ MORE >
***ESSENTIAL INDIE-LIT SECRET SANTA UPDATE: For those of you who ALREADY signed up, you MUST enter your MAILING ADDRESS. You weren’t asked for it automatically yet. Your recipient will, obviously, need it. So, GO TO THE “YOU” TAB on Elfster, then click on UPDATE YOUR PROFILE, and then ENTER YOUR MAILING ADDRESS and hit CONTINUE and then CONTINUE again and you’re golden. If you haven’t signed up yet, sign up and do this after you sign up.***