One of our favorite writers-to-hate Jonathan Safran Foer has a new book—or sculpture, as he describes it—called Tree of Codes. Foer slices—literally—words out of his favorite book, The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. I haven’t read the book (Foer’s not Schulz’s), or even held it in my hands, but something about the premise is striking, memorable, so memorable that it sounds familiar… But more on that later.
In an interview with Vanity Fair, Foer talks about the materiality of the book. He says he likes to break the spine, take it into the bath with him, etc. And I admire these things because I agree. I like books too. So why is it that I agree with many of his sentiments and yet dislike the idea? Is it just because it’s Foer? Ultimately, yes, there’s something about Foer that makes me doubt his authenticity. But that’s my issue, not his. And I’m sure there are tons of people who will probably piss themselves with delight at his cleverness. I’m just not one of them.
But his pages are striking. Look:
And yet, like I said earlier, lordy, this seems familiar. Oh, yes, that’s right. It seems familiar because I have seen something like it before. Where was it? What was it? Oh, yeah, that’s right. It’s an old idea.
Furthermore, the strength of a book like Tree of Codes lies in the reader’s unfamiliarity with a book like Tom Phillips’ A Humument. For one, Phillips’ text is by far more visually striking, while serving the same function. They both obstruct an original text by bringing into focus certain words. They both create new narratives.
Phillips does something different though. The erasure of words becomes the flesh of the text. The book becomes richer, denser. Foer’s erasure literally leaves nothing but a skeleton. Whereas Phillips draws attention to Mallock’s A Human Document by raising choice words above the din of his artwork, Foer effectively deems irrelevant Schulz’s unchosen words by cutting them out, discarding them, throwing them away.
Yes, both Philips and Foer have the same aim: they both work to create a new narrative out of an old one, they’re both “finding poetry”—whatever—but their modes of creation yield different ends. I would argue Phillips creates a homage, whereas Foer becomes the artist cherry picking this and that word, trashing what he sees as irrelevant. In that Vanity Fair interview, he says The Street of Crocodiles is his favorite book. When I read my favorite books, I see each word as integral, relevant, building towards a sentence, a narrative. I could not approach Proust or Beckett with an x-acto knife, or worse yet, a pair of blunt scissors. Maybe we just have different understanding of text. Yes, that’s probably it. Indeed.
[Thank you to Jeff Barbeau for telling me about Foer’s new book.]
Tags: a humument, jonathan safr, tom phillips, tree of codes
Austin Kleon’s book Newspaper Blackout has a similar aim and comes with a helpful intro that touches on more precedent: Caleb Whitefoord’s “cross-readings” (reading across newspaper columns) in the 1760s, Thomas Jefferson’s scrapbook-style edits to the King James Bible, Tristan Tzara’s dada manifesto in 1920s Paris, many others. I do like that a major author (and moreso the printer, die Keure in Belgium) is challenging the way major print-run books can be sculptural, even if the results from the text are middling.
Fantastic post, Lily. I read about Foer’s book on Friday and thought, “This has been done time and again.” That’s fine, of course, Lots of ideas are re-appropriated to good ends. I will, in the coming weeks, likely be frustrated by the “breathless” admiration as you so aptly put, only because lots of writers have tried this before. I will definitely check out Phillips’s book.
jonathan safran foer taking a bubble bath
this is really intriguing
haven’t read any Foer
but may check him out now
thanks, roxane. yeah, my discontent has less to do with the content or idea of the book and more to do with how “cutting edge” (pun intended) people will think Foer is. Phillips is fantastic, and his book is a visual feast.
i’m dreaming of it now.
Crispin Glover did the same thing with two of his books
he is also 10000x cooler than JSF
Also, Mary Ruefle’s A Little White Shadow does this with whiteout. It’s a beautiful little book.
I like Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and this book looks neat, though I probably won’t go to the trouble of buying it.
I think this blog sometimes substitutes looking cool and espousing a certain attitude and personality for really examining the art it claims to examine. Like Pitchfork, although actually Pitchfork has improved considerably on this front.
I suspect HTMLGiant would readily champion Foer’s EL&IC if it were written by an unsuccessful writer or published by an approved publisher. Certainly the site has championed weaker writing and writers.
I say these things from love and with respect. I love the giant, hate the haters, but the tendency to shit on Foer in particular always strikes me as pretty childish.
Jen Bervin does it with sewing. Look: http://jenbervin.com/html/desert.html
Hi Mike: This is fair. In my original version of this post, I had a paragraph discussing how much I actually enjoyed EL&IC, or at least I enjoyed parts of it. It’s difficult to maintain the voice of a child, but in the end, the narrator’s precociousness was almost cheating. Whereas I loved the cleverness, it’s a way to circumnavigate the difficulties of writing a child. (It’s a trick I’ve used before. Easier to write a smart, almost wise, child, than a real child. It is easier to write the abnormal, the *exception* than the norm.) My qualms with Foer have more to do with his usurpations of things with tradition, while trying to pass them off as original, Foer is creator, rather than Foer as follower of an entrenched tradition. As I said before, this may be my own qualm with him. For all I know, he may give plenty of credit to his predecessors.
EL&IC has flaws. For instance, it uses too many precious tricks. That being said, when I first read it, I liked it well enough. I even recommended it to my partner. Which does not mean I was not critical of it.
BUT, but, I think it’s unfair to say Giant as an entity would/would not champion a certain writer. We are a diverse group of contributors, each with his/her own aesthetic philosophy. I’m just meant JSF is a writer who is easy to hate on. That is, he makes it easy. This hate is, in no small part, a jealous reaction, and I’m the first to admit my own flawed disposition.
I tried to deal with the “hate” in my opening paragraph. My treatment of his text seemed fair, in my opinion. But please feel free to disagree.
I like how you contrast Philips erasure vs. Foer’s—one adds and the other subtracts—but I think Foer’s method of creating this book is more complex than that.
A boy-genius cutting away with his safety scissors at an old book is exactly the image Foer was going for, but that’s impossible. There would be no way for Foer to mutilate his copy of Schulz and create this same book–cutting one page would make word salad on the next. I’m sure it was much more pedestrian: he circled the words he wanted. This book is a reproduction of a twee act that never took place.
This is maybe the most manipulative novel I can think of. A reader has to move the current page away from the rest of the book to prevent the underlapping (?) pages from interfering. That means reading a book with a page at a 90 degree angle in one hand and a head tilted to the left. The genius is in being able to make a printer print a fetish object like this, and then have people contort themselves to understand it. Performance art, not sculpture.
the problem with the way foer did it is not that he cut words in some kind of posthumous insult to schulz, but that he did so publicly and not privately. this is the kind of exercise that could be fun to do with a book you love (and street of crocodiles is badass and exactly the type of magical book that this works for), but i see absolutely no reason why i would read this after having already read the original schulz, and anyone that hasnt read the original should discover it for themselves, not read foer’s highlights
*Phillip’s
clowny clown clown
and it costs 40 bucks or something
i dont know. the first thing i notice about foers book that makes it seem to me at least kind of unique is that it is functioning through multiple layers of pages at a time. seems like each turn of the page will yield new words but keep words from multiple previous/future pages (depending on whether you are reading the left of right page) until its those pages turn to be turned/disappeared. The left side will always refer to previously read words and the right side will always refer to future words. im interested in reading this. it may be a very unique way of moving through text.
I don’t think there are left hand pages. In the pictures they look blank.
I don’t think there are left hand pages either. I don’t think the book could be read that way. Or: they cheated. But I think you’re right, Darby, about the palimpsest quality, or, maybe Queneau’s Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, the multiplicity of readings, looking through old anatomy texts with celophaned pages.
i like this. thank you.
hi
actually i don’t say anything about this book at all in my comment.
gavin said:
which is what i was responding to. “liked it fine enough” doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, it doesn’t surpass “ok” to me. which is what my comment was responding to.
Anyone read Woman’s World by Graham Rawle? It was kind of amazing. Here’s a note from the Soft Skull site: “For five years Rawle labored 17 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling 40,000 fragments of text from women’s magazines to produce a tale that moves with the pace of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of story.” Every word lifted, as I recall, but it flowed well, and the voice, coming from these old magazines, was hilarious.
oh, you’re right. i would be more impressed if there were lefthand pages.
Thanks for the very reasonable response.
I do think it’s a little unfair given that you haven’t got the book and we don’t usually require writers to explicitly acknowledge their sources. I’ve got no idea why he should have to do that. If he were to say “THIS IS AN ENTIRELY ORIGINAL THING I’M DOING” I would feel differently. As it stands it seems as if it would be condescending to explain these things have been done before — of course they have. And as Darby says below, I actually do think there are rather massive differences between what seems to be the reading experience here and what you provide above.
I agree EL&IC has real problems. Again, though, I suspect we would collectively ignore these problems if they were present in the text of a more likeable, “indie” author. It’s true that HTMLGiant is a diverse entity and obviously there are exceptions — Kyle Minor likes a lot of stuff we generally agree to hate, so does Roxane I think, etc. — and obviously you’re not responsible for HTMLGiant’s overall tendencies, so that criticism isn’t really directed at you, but at the community as a whole, which I think really does exhibit a preference for “cool” over the selfless pursuit of beauty. I guess it’s frustrating to me that we have these tendencies as a group, that it highlights the stuff I like least about myself. I sometimes find myself, in my own writing and reading, absently wondering “How would this go over at HTMLGiant” and then I feel like the stupidest person in the world.
it would be oulipian for there to be left hand pages. that would’ve sold me.
What’s wrong with Foer, exactly? It can’t just be ‘precious tricks,’ right? I think I read more than half of Everything Is Illuminated and liked it fine enough. Like I like Stieg Larsson and Zadie Smith and Stephen King and Jonathan Franzen. Not really that offensive, as far as the whole world of bad writing goes, but maybe I need to read closer? If one doesn’t like it because it sells so well, and gets so much press, and he’s so young and connected and rich, then perhaps those are reasons to hate things. I’ve probably hated things for less. This refiguring of Schultz might surely suck, though, which of course is a reason to not read it.
i don’t think it’s supposed to be a derivative of the original text but rather it’s own object. i’m not even sure it’s supposed to be read—the delight shown in the video isn’t one of reading but of seeing. thus, the integrity of the text isn’t important, it’s the springboard from which the new object came, this object only owing ‘inspiration’ to the Schulz book. and we clearly aren’t supposed to be fooled that it was an actual book to which JSF took an exacto to, given, as it’s been pointed out, there are no left-hand pages. he worked with the printer to create an art object—the way a lot of artists work with fabricators to make their concept of a work material. maybe as keedee is saying it’s really more of a performance than a sculpture, the transformation of the original text to new object being so apparent—transparent—in its design, a ‘show’ being made of that transformation.
Mike: I openly admitted from the “get-go” that I haven’t read the book. Nor do I think Foer needs to acknowledge precedence, but there is something telling in the Vanity Fair interview about his approach, which seems–at times–like tempered self-congratulation.
And I’m not sure “cool” over the “selfless pursuit of beauty” is quite right. I can’t speak for any other contributors here, but “cool” isn’t the first (or even in the top twenty) word I would use to describe myself. I have a certain aesthetic, yes, and I like to read what is new and exciting, sure. But generally speaking, Foer – outside the confines of HTML – has more “cool” factor than most of us here. I’d probably have more success if I buddied up with him, as opposed to… well… almost any other writer in our age range. ALSO: don’t feel stupid. I worry over every post and comment I make. I am constant worrier.
Mary Ruefle has a neat essay on erasure in the current Quarter After Eight. She refers to Artforum asking people what they believe to be the greatest work of 20th century art; William Gass named A Humument.
would foer think this is totally original? probably not. i haven’t read schulz, and i certainly don’t care if foer is or is not trying to pay homage to the author of his favorite book either. does anyone thing rauschenberg was honoring de kooning when he erased his painting? fuck no. (the only difference in this case is that we know what the original work looks like/contains, but so what?) i don’t think you need an understanding of a text in order to ‘remix’ it and still create something compelling. so ariana boussard-reifel’s ‘between the lines’ piece (http://www.benrudlin.com/smithereens/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/IMG_0273.jpg) is sculpture, but this isn’t? because foer’s left in some words that might evoke narrative or plot or whatever? maybe i’ve been reading too much david shields, but i find foer’s new ‘book’ interesting, despite my ambivalence towards him.
anyone think*
this is been the most astounding way i’ve ever seen it done. i would kill for a copy of it; the images i’ve seen look SO BEAUTIFUL.
this is gorgeous
I would love a box filled with all the words Foer cut out… That Boussard-Reifel piece looks neat. I’d like that too.
I think what’s offensive is their mediocrity. It’s like, Yeah, okay these books are fine. There’s stuff in them that is good. They’re not entirely draining to read. But they don’t fucking sparkle, ya know? It’s like the entire part of the world that support english language “literary fiction” is so easily amused that the stuff that makes loads of money is purely mediocre. That is what’s offensive about it, because I don’t want the mediocre, I want the fucking excellent.
oh yeah, i’m totally aware of this, i don’t mean to imply otherwise. but gavin was clearly establishing that these books were not fucking excellent to him, so I was offering the way that i treat things. i.e. this shit is offensive to me because ______.
i mean, on the one hand i feel like there is some hegemony in place that is perhaps coloring peoples’ views of such books as fucking excellent. i don’t necessarily believe that somebody’s inherent reaction to a book isn’t colored by some sort of outside force, excepting situations where someone encounters a book in a void (which, really, rarely happens, and even in that situation, the situation itself can be an operative affectation). when i read books in high school my reactions, perhaps subconsciously, were often somehow distorted by the fact that I knew I was reading what was considered a Great Text, and thus I would read hard until I could find the greatness myself.
I’m not saying there’s an easy way to change this, but I think it’s systematically built into society in the same way, say, the ultimate necessity of capitalism, the marginalization of women, gays, blacks, etc is.
Taste is ultimately relative, but ignoring the fact that there are societal pressures, or ‘ideas’ that are distorting taste is a dangerous thing to do.
I thin oer hum
Johannes
that crispin glover album seems terrible
it like makes me feel bad
crispin glover seems really unchill
my impression of crispin glover is that he is really unchill
I agree. If we ever go to dinner or the zoo or whatever, let’s not invite him.
My library has a copy of this. It is beautiful.
Well, it is a nontraditional publication, which I’m sure cost some cash mo-nay to make. I may not buy it for $40 but I’d like to check it out in the bookstore. Street of Crocodiles is a badass little book. I wonder… what’s more problematic: $40 for this or story and poetry collections and chapbooks, all fewer than 100 pages, some only 50 pages, asking $15 per?
It’s funny to me that you’re criticizing this book as mediocre — is that what you’re doing, MK? — w/out having read it.
I read Everything Is Illuminated when it came out and thought it was on fire. The energy, the language, the sense of humor, the characters, the story. I think readers soured on Foer after the preciousness of the Super Kid voice in the next novel and the didactic stuff in the Don’t Eat Meat treatise. I didn’t want to read a novel w/ a kid voice and I know veggie arguments and so wasn’t interested in that either. But this new work? It could be something else.
Another reason I’d like to check it out for myself.
jonathan safran fower taking a bubble bath and smiling smugly to himself
hi
actually i don’t say anything about this book at all in my comment.
gavin said:
which is what i was responding to. “liked it fine enough” doesn’t exactly sound like a ringing endorsement, it doesn’t surpass “ok” to me. which is what my comment was responding to.
Anyone read Woman’s World by Graham Rawle? It was kind of amazing. Here’s a note from the Soft Skull site: “For five years Rawle labored 17 hours a day, seven days a week, assembling 40,000 fragments of text from women’s magazines to produce a tale that moves with the pace of a thriller, with as many cliffhanging chapter endings and swerves of story.” Every word lifted, as I recall, but it flowed well, and the voice, coming from these old magazines, was hilarious.
The thing is, fucking excellent is relative. These books might not sparkle for you but they probably do sparkle for others. I totally understand where you’re coming from but what you’re saying is very subjective.
oh yeah, i’m totally aware of this, i don’t mean to imply otherwise. but gavin was clearly establishing that these books were not fucking excellent to him, so I was offering the way that i treat things. i.e. this shit is offensive to me because ______.
i mean, on the one hand i feel like there is some hegemony in place that is perhaps coloring peoples’ views of such books as fucking excellent. i don’t necessarily believe that somebody’s inherent reaction to a book isn’t colored by some sort of outside force, excepting situations where someone encounters a book in a void (which, really, rarely happens, and even in that situation, the situation itself can be an operative affectation). when i read books in high school my reactions, perhaps subconsciously, were often somehow distorted by the fact that I knew I was reading what was considered a Great Text, and thus I would read hard until I could find the greatness myself.
I’m not saying there’s an easy way to change this, but I think it’s systematically built into society in the same way, say, the ultimate necessity of capitalism, the marginalization of women, gays, blacks, etc is.
Taste is ultimately relative, but ignoring the fact that there are societal pressures, or ‘ideas’ that are distorting taste is a dangerous thing to do.
my bad. i thought you were talking about this whole thing being mediocre w/out giving it a shot. i’m w/ you then, man. i don’t have enough time in my life for the simply mediocre.
True, true. I would love to see someone (you?) write about the offense of mediocrity. It’s something I talk about with my students quite a bit.
I think you make some valid points about social pressure on reading, but I also think it’s important to read any text as it is, or how it’s meant to be read. I think Milan Kundera called this something like letting the book teach you how to read it. So then we approach the reading unbiased.
I have some trouble w/ critics who fail to read a text as it’s written and make all kinds of assumptions about what would ostensibly make a work “better.” If a work of art has any intention behind it, then it should have its own internal logic. I believe it’s our jobs as readers to read per the rules of the written work. If we don’t like it, whatever, fine, that’s that. But at least we’re reading it on its own terms.
All this is coming from your statement about reading hard to the find the greatness in a rubberstamped Great Text. I like to approach everything I read wide open — not assuming it’s great or not great. Well, I guess I’ve already chosen it to be in the ballpark of my tastes — which are indeed great, everyone will agree — from checking out excerpts and a synopsis, but once I’ve cracked open the book, I try to get into it as is and see where it goes and where it takes me. These are the most valid arbiters of (personal) taste I know.
well if nothing else, it looks really cool
jonathan safran foer slowly washing his hairy chest with a loofah
My sort of uber-immersion in the last half-decade to post-structuralist thought finds my knee-jerk reaction being to disagree with the idea that it’s best to read the book how the book tells you to read it, because I think that presupposes that all texts are “readerly texts” (vs. Barthes & co.’s “writerly text”).
Also, I think no matter how you are reading the book, even if you are trying to read the book with the internal logic of the book, it’s completely impossible to escape, say, almost a decade of people saying that Ulysses is brilliant, or that Citizen Kane is the best movie ever made, etc. And I mean, even deeper than that, but perhaps I should save that for the actual post that i will probably do on this.
From my own experience, the idea that I have to read a text (whatever the medium of the text) according to how the author wrote it is frustrating. Harry Kumel’s Daughters of Darkness is one of my favorite movies ever made, and Kumel himself has gone “on record” talking shit about it, espousing how it’s a shit movie and it was only made for cash. Jess Franco talks about how he hates half of his movies. If I were to buy into the cult of the author I would have to dismiss these texts too, no? I will probably continue to exist that the author-God is an antiquated concept, especially with such progressions in “art” of stuff like Flarf, or found footage, etc. The artist is providing a shape, yes, but more often than not there are a lot of variables that are being left open, and the author is not telling you how to deal with.
(don’t know what’s up w/ posting replies w/ this system, anyway…) just wanted to say I look forward to reading more of your thoughts on this stuff, and sure, yeah, of course, you can read a text however you like, and always there will be “art” or connections that happen outside of the intention of the writer, but I think it’s less respectful or fair or honest (?) to the work and the writer to, say, interpret — i.e., read via a post-structuralist lens or whatever other critical theory happens to be in vogue at the time — rather than just read or accept the story on its own terms (I don’t know how else to put it; maybe what I’m talking about is impossible?) with what Shunryu Suzuki calls “beginner’s mind” (no expectations, nothing “extra” imposed on the text beyond what the text gives us). I mean… what do I mean? Yes, we can read on multiple levels, which is important, I think, and part of the reading experience with all good lit, I’d say, but the fundamental level, I believe, has to be meeting the words on the page where they’re coming from. And if the work is designed as such (I’m not talking about “found footage,” but novels) then it will ask us to read on multiple levels, which is different, maybe, from reading through a critical lens that disregards the fundamental intention or multilayering of the story. Am I making any sense?
My library has a copy of this. It is beautiful.
Brian Dettmer cuts up random books into art that he then sells. http://theopenend.com/2009/01/22/brian-dettmer-book-autopsies/
you have an incredible library.
what were they called / where could I find out more about this?
B.S. Johnson’s novels are completely original works with the same general openness of re-imagining of traditional narrative. The Unfortunates is a novel of twenty or so pages in a box and placed together randomly. The reader shuffles the pages and reads in the order they decide. Alberto Angelo has holes in the center so the reader can cheat and see what is happening ahead. I haven’t read the Vanity Fair article, or much of Foer’s work, however I like the idea of new elements being presented to dissect, destroy and allow the reader to discover a work they may or may not be familiar with, seeing something new for the first time is always exciting. With all creative works the way it should be seen, I feel, is to extricate your own views of the creator and look at the work for its own merit. Does the piece succeed, or not? That is what should be asked.
“The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was “Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau’s home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther’s “personal Jew,” a dentist).Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.”
– How Shultz passed away. Maybe an author that was murdered callously like an abandoned pet dog should have his worked praised and not cut to pieces. It’s like Speilberg’s ‘Shindlers List’ and Polanski’s ‘The Pianist.’ The former creates a mystique of a tragedy, and the latter allows the truth of the tragedy to reveled authentically, no tricks.
It’s not what you do but the way that you do it.
I sleep with The Humument under my pillow.
“truth” disclosed or indicated by human making is not the opposite of “no tricks”
in human making, there is no “no tricks”
–
gimmicks – here we go again – gimmicks – man, I’m tired of people saying we rely on gimmicks – what is this?! – the world is nothing but a big gimmick, isn’t it – wars, napalm bombs, and all that – people getting burned up on tv, and it’s nothing but a [big] gimmick – yes, we do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAIhiinaw8
what were they called / where could I find out more about this?
his character is really funny in “hot tub time machine”
I think that what Foer has done will probably bring more people to read Schultz’s work than a simple plug in an interview would have done. That being said, there probably are other ways to show one’s appreciation. I’m not saying Foer did the best, or that it was even his intention to get people to read Shultz’s, but I think it’s possible people will do it, and that a lot of them might do it as a result of Foer’s book. I, at least, added it to my list of books to read (not Foer’s book, Shultz’s). But that’s more a credit to the discussion on this thread.
Schulz* . . . . . jesus christ.
“readily as glaciers”
All of you are jealous of Jonathan Safran Foer, and can’t stand that he too reads the same quirky, cool books that you do and can craft legitimately avant-garde stuff AND get published! This “Oh this is nothing new!” bitterness over his latest book is just pathetic.
Dizzy: Yes, I would love it if I were rich and married to Nicole Krauss, if I lived in a fab brownstone, if publishers were barging down my door, sure. What’s not to want in there?
“truth” disclosed or indicated by human making is not the opposite of “no tricks”
in human making, there is no “no tricks”
–
gimmicks – here we go again – gimmicks – man, I’m tired of people saying we rely on gimmicks – what is this?! – the world is nothing but a big gimmick, isn’t it – wars, napalm bombs, and all that – people getting burned up on tv, and it’s nothing but a [big] gimmick – yes, we do
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tAIhiinaw8
Oak-Mot
http://www.amazon.com/Oak-Mot-Crispin-H-Glover/dp/0962299715
http://www.librarything.com/work/541907
and Rat Catching
http://www.amazon.com/Rat-Catching-Crispin-H-Glover/dp/0962299707
http://www.fright.com/edge/rat-catching.htm
I guess Rat Catching is more Dada/Burroughs cut-up than pure omission, but whatever, he rules
The album has a few cool things in it – the readings are interesting and Clowny Clown Clown is funny. Some of it is more ridiculous than I can handle, like the masturbation rap.
re: unchill – he has this constant tension/nervousness that I like but I wonder if it’s put-on which makes me suspicious of him
the strength of a book like x lies in the reader’s unfamiliarity with a book like y
For me, this is rarely true. Knowing a bit of the history of a technique, plot, method, or whatever doesn’t usually dissolve its effectiveness in the ‘next’ case; it doesn’t even dilute an appreciation for the inventiveness of the copier. Knowing that a means or resource isn’t ‘original’ doesn’t even stop a text from being surprising. – Probably due to my jejune, untutored “understanding of text”.
literally leaves nothing but a skeleton
As each page is turned, the visible three-dimensional word-stream (going left-to-right, top-to-bottom) then changes; “skeleton” is, metaphorically, an emaciated metaphor for such directed excavation.
effectively deems irrelevant Schulz’s unchosen words by cutting them out
The “unchosen” words are, effectively but perhaps not to much effect, negatively highlighted by their having been chosen for excision. The 3-d series of words that each page excavates as a function of the series of pages is not the product of selecting only, and the only, ‘integral, relevant, narrating’ words; rather, the translation of Schulz’s series of words has been mined for imposed integration, relevance, narrative.
– which is different from other textual deformations . . . how?
How is this physical snipping more a “trashing” than the other marrings of text mentioned on this thread? How does scribbling over, whiting-out, or sewing ‘shut’ putatively deemed-irrelevant words “create homage” more than cutting them out with the bluntest scissors in the world??
The JSF is a softcover and it’s going to cost $45 in Canada.
Even though I don’t really want it, I will probably feel compelled to get it. Hype gets me every time. I might even buy Glenn Beck’s new mass market paperback Christmas book. Because of the hype.
If you come to my bookstore in Canada, I will give you 15% off both.
He’s one of a million great things in Dead Man.
I was curious about this, and found Foer saying in an interview that a part of what he wanted to show was that all books are/can be sculptural objects. It is sort of an interesting answer to, say, digital books, yes? So, point in his favor there.
At the same time, the man’s books make me sort of gag. Literary skill-wise, dude married up.
SHUT UP
SHUT UP
YOU DON’T KNOW JSF
YOU JUST JEALOUS
IT’S MY BODY I’LL DO WHAT I WANT
An interesting series of responses. Glad to see you making reference to A Humument – a masterpiece. Laurence Sterne was pretty inventive when it came to experimental writing – see http://www.blackpage73.blogspot.com for artist / writer responses to his Black Page in Volume I of Tristram Shandy.
The black page blog is fascinating. Thanks for the tip.
And yes, it would feel wrong to talk about this new Foer book without discussing Phillips.
Yeah, Foer is easy to hate. Mostly because of his young success. I haven’t read a word of any his books, but I’ve flipped through them. I don’t think I will ever actually read one. Too many other books to read for which I harbor no inbred resentment. But I like this book as on object. When I think about the difficulty involved in publishing such a thing, it gives me a little thrill.
Get ready for it kiddos: JSF’s press is sending me a review copy, and I can’t wait to see how wrong I am about this book! I can’t wait to see myself “eat it.” So strangely delightful.
explain to me how this is in any way “avant-garde”
I would argue Phillips creates a homage, whereas Foer becomes the artist cherry picking this and that word, trashing what he sees as irrelevant
You know, I’m (preemptively) annoyed by the reception this will likely receive by those ignorant of its precedents (A Humument was the first that came to my mind, but the grand tradition of centos (which admittedly don’t work by physical transformation) is lurking in the background as well), but if you’re going to say things like that, and end the post so passive-antagonistically, wouldn’t it be nice if, instead of saying what you would argue, you actually so argued, rather than simply recording your impression that “Foer effectively deems irrelevant Schulz’s unchosen words by cutting them out, discarding them, throwing them away”?
(How is it that Foer “effectively” does that, while Phillips doesn’t effectively deem irrelevant those words of Mallock which he doesn’t choose, covering them up with his own gaudy colors, asserting his superiority by defacing all of the text but those parts he can put to his own use? Whereas Foer approaches Schulz’s text respectfully, merely excising, not writing over, certain bits, and making the places where he’s made excisions apparent as just, and only, that—areas where the original has been removed.)
Given the starting point of finding Foer inauthentic (and really, is there any concept as ultimately pernicious as “authenticity”? It’s something which can, after all, always be doubted, whose presence (if it isn’t simply chimerical) guarantees little, and whose employment tends to lead to prejudicial dismissal or embrace), such negative valuations are a foregone conclusion, and (frankly) at times seem forced.
I mean, even the claim that Phillips’ text is more visually striking is simply tossed out. Phillips’ pages are certainly more varied and decorative, but I personally find the spareness of (the images of) Foer’s quite striking, as against the lushness of Phillips’.
It’s not Foer’s fault that fawning critics won’t know their history, and it’s not as if not having been the first to do something is (or ought to be) any knock on those who do it second and after. But really, how does the strength of Tree of Codes depend on one’s unfamiliarity with A Humument? Neither, I presume, is interesting or worthwhile solely on account of its actual or presumed novelty. Only if one’s reaction is “oh, it’s been done” would its strength so depend, as far as I can tell, but that’s a bad reaction.
I guess I’m puzzled by the trajectory of this post, which starts off by acknowledging that there’s nothing wrong with Foer’s having done what he did and even that the author’s suspicions of inauthenticity are the author’s own problems, then seems to go on the offensive as soon as the precedent is brought in.
(I apologize for the disorganization of this comment; something about tiny edit windows far away from the post bring it out.)
Woman’s World is certainly a feat, and occasionally has some interesting juxtaposition, but I thought that in every other respect it was a total letdown.
Oh man, really? I remember the voice being so great, like a running TV ad from the ’50s or something, and the story was kooky. I do recall going, alright… you know, at the big revealing scene, but whatever. I thought it was a good time.
[…] 2)Lily Hoang reviews JSFoer’s (“[a] favorite writer-to-hate”) Tree of Codes here. […]
Erasure is a long practice in poetry. One great example is Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (from Paradise Lost), and in recent years a number of poets have been playing with this form–Jen Bervin’s Nets comes to mind. Wave Book has an erasure machine people can play with here: http://www.wavepoetry.com/erasures/
I think people hate on Foer and Eggers more for their public personas than their work–both writers are upper-middle class dudes who love to proselytize and posture.
Did anyone read that ridiculous book written from the perspective of some rich dude whose spent his entire life in NYC about how people shouldn’t eat meat?
regardless of who “did” this, i think the major feat here would be in convincing a printing company to print/cut the book. all those die cuts?! holy crap. it’s a performance piece wherein JSF makes printing companies dance many dances.
i wonder what bruno schultz would think?
Looks like Foer acknowledges his debt to Tom Phillips: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/24/jonathan-safran-foers-book-as-art-object/
[…] of the conceit, the anonymity of the reviewer, and the fact that HTMLGIANT’s audience has surely seen the cut-up trick a million times before—it all adds up to a perfectly coherent statement about what kind of […]
[…] experimentation. VE next published Jonathan Safran Foer’s infamous Tree of Codes. One dismissive reviewer compared Foer’s book to A Humument, saying that Foer did nothing that Tom Phillips […]