I'm the author of the novels Solip, Say, Cut, Map, The Country, and The City. I've also written the nonfiction books EarthBound and Eat the Flowers. I'm currently publishing my novel A Task via Kickstarter in order to have an hourlong conversation with each of its first thousand readers. For a decade I published books through Sator Press, and for a decade I acted in film and television; now I help students at St. John's College. More info: kenbaumann.com.
To me fiction is not about ideas. It is above ideas. I make a divide between the holy, the sacred, the mysterious, the unexplainable, the implicit, the aesthetic, the moral, and the ethical on one hand, and the empirical, the functional, the explainable, the logical, the true, and the proven on the other. In short, the Holy and the Empirical. Literature belongs to the holy. You can do fiction, nonfiction, a mixture, who cares. Literature is above the distinction. It is sacred.
Strangely enough, Mr. Joyce has almost universally been denied the right to do on a larger scale what any Yankee foreman employing foreign laborers does habitually on a smaller scale, namely, to work out a more elastic and a richer vocabulary which will serve purposes unserved by schoolroom English… Those who cannot transcend Aristotle need make no attempt to read this fascinating epic. The ideas do not march single file, nor at a uniform speed.
from the manifesto of transition, a literary journal, published in 1929: “Tired of the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism, and desirous of crystallizing a viewpoint… Narrative is not mere anecdote, but the projection of a metamorphosis of reality.”
from Reddit: “In 1903 the Wright brothers flew for 59 seconds. 38 years later the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. 28 years after that, we landed on the moon. We went from gliding a few feet off the ground for less than a minute to launching rockets out of orbit, traveling for hundreds of thousands of miles, landing on the moon, and then returning, all within a single lifetime.”
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If you define technological growth/advancement as the continual manifestation of processes previously unexperienced, how would you define cultural growth/advancement? Is there such a thing? I sometimes think that evolution is a weird and harmful idea; so easy to term something as growth that may be more destructive in implicit or temporally stretched ways. Most of this relates to what I get in arguments about most of the time, anyway, which is: should there ever be an accepted utopia-pointed all-human goal? And if not, doesn’t the notion of advancement, even on a small (cultural; decade-to-decade) scale crumble? And, even smaller still: isn’t the (for now mostly inexplicable) emotional foundation for human action the purest and most reasonable foundation there is?
addendum: Also: if we say that technological improvement is understood as making new processes or making old processes with less energy, maybe we try to make our culture more efficient.
Above image from the enticing visual/literary production blog of Looper, a movie forthcoming from Rian Johnson (director of Brick, The Brothers Bloom, etc.) What I know about the movie so far: time travel & corporate sponsored murder & an excellent cast. Favorite time travel, in fiction or film?
Mark Leidner goes vocal in an excellent episode of Apostrophe Cast. I think he is locating a presence in the warped examination & worshipping of cinema in his words. Pretty and strong.
The Trolley Problem. Heard of it? Push the fat man, touch the switch, pivot the disc, kill the people. I think gestures and the power of certain images have more to do with the decision than ethics.
Douglas Coupland lays out 45 reasons to stay inside, or go outside, or move. If you have best guesses for the next 10 years, please posit them here.
The excellent David Peak and Mike Kitchell have new books from SOLAR LUXURIANCE, in an edition of 30 and 10. Grab one up before they’re gone. Here’s half a descriptor for Mike’s piece: One morning I woke up to find my browser open to an archive of an online Deleuze & Guattari mailing list. Scrolling through it I was struck by a narrative text by a user who went by the name of “rongrong.” Nobody at any other point in the archive made any reference to rongrong’s enigmatic post. I thought it was amazing, a hybrid theory/text that was interesting, distant, and intelligent. I decided, as an homage to the hidden mysteries of the web, that I would rewrite rongrong’s text, leaving occasional fragments verbatim.
1. See left. (an excerpt: Amsterdam Island, France-
Everyone who stays on Amsterdam for longer than a year is examined by a medical officer from the south of France to check that he is coping with the long period of restriction of movement and the confined, purely masculine environment. No woman has visited longer than two days. At night, the men gather in the small video room in Great Skua to watch one of the porn films from their personal collection. Each man sits in a row on his own. The loudspeakers emit grunts and groans, and the air is heavy with the musky scent of the bull seals.)
2. See fifty (unfairly forgotten films).
3. See the wheel turn (on Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time series).
We’re giving away some free stuff to you, our birthday party guests. We already ate the cake, so we can’t give that back (well, we could…), but we do have books & other stuffs. How this works:
We’re going to award a few random winners, and split up the stuff randomly. To throw your name in the hat, email us at our house (htmlgiant@htmlgiant.com) by October 10th!
If you’d like to add stuff to the prize pool, list it in the comments and we’ll add it below. THE GIFTS:
Nick Antosca on reading Lolita at 12. What was the first book that you felt dirty reading? I’d say mine was either A Confederacy of Dunces around the same age, or maybe The Godfather. Hard question for me because I was watching stuff like Terminator & Skinemax from about 5 on. You?
It’s impossible to support today the idea of the author as a divine entity… If we want people to approach poetry, it would be better to delete the myths.