Category Archives: ideas

There’s a facet of my socioeconomic-generational set’s consciousness that is feckless, effete, unengaged, delusional, and inconsistent: On Shane Jones’s novel “Light Boxes.”

Posted on August 28, 2010 | 5 comments

I’ll start by saying I live in Brooklyn, I wear plaid shirts, I ride a bike, I say the word “sustainable” to describe things that I think are cool, I’m from the upper-middle class, I’m white, I go to graduate school, I like Wes Anderson movies, I like indie rockers, I’m a naive socialist, I think about growing my own food, I try to not use petroleum but I actually use a lot, I play guitar and banjo and ukulele, I use a computer all the time, I have this blog, I have other blogs, I like photography and drawing, I read novels, and I read literary magazines.

That is to say: I’m a hipster. At the very least I’m part of a socioeconomic-generational set that looks over its shoulder constantly wondering if it’s a hipster.

I don’t want to write about hipsters, per se. I want to write about the novel “Light Boxes” by Shane Jones.

I want to propose the following : (1) Shane Jones’s “Light Boxes” represents a facet of the consciousness of my socioeconomic-generational set. (2) Shane Jones’s “Light Boxes” is feckless, effete, unengaged, delusional, and inconsistent. Therefore (conclusion), A facet of the consciousness of my socioeconomic-generational set is feckless, effete, unengaged, delusional, and inconsistent.

(1)

The novel was published by Penguin Group (after Publishing Genius Press put out a chapbook of it). Penguin has published many well-known, highly regarded writers. It is a publisher that imbues its literature with legitimacy. The fact that Penguin chose to publish “Light Boxes” should indicate to us that the novel might carry this legitimacy. At the very least, this means the novel should be analyzed and contextualized; that is, used for the extrapolation of truths about the people and the historical moment surrounding its creation.

Shane Jones was born in 1980. In the acknowledgments section, he thanks a series of young writers by name and, more generally, “the world of online literature and independent literature.” Here are the people and the historical moment that produced this book: educated individuals/writers under or around 30 in the year 2010 somewhere in the English-speaking Global North.

That’s my socioeconomic-generational set.

(2)

This is a summary of the story, found on the back cover of the book and on Shane Jones’s website:

“The inhabitants of a closely-knit town are experiencing perpetual February, and that means unending cold and darkness. It turns out that a god-like spirit, named February, is punishing the town for flying, and bans flight of all kind, including hot air balloons and even children’s kites. It’s February who makes the sun nothing but a faint memory, who blankets the ground with snow, who freezes the rivers and the lakes. As the punishing weather continues, children go missing and adults become nearly catatonic with depression, all but giving up hope. But others find the strength to fight back—and launch a war against February.”

Here is why I think the book is feckless, effete, unengaged, delusional, and inconsistent:

(a) There are metaphors instead of analogies, but the metaphors don’t actually mean anything. Opening to a random page, I read the line “Her bed is a mound of snow and teeth.” Why?

(b) Like its metaphors, the book is just a perceptual canvas with no purpose, like the clothing store Urban Outfitters and the movie “Where The Wild Things Are” (which was directed by Spike Jonze, who wants to make a movie out of “Light Boxes.”)

(c) There is constant mention of ‘clouds’.

(d) It made me write this in the margin on page 26: “it’s as if we can occupy a fantasy world of two-dimensional humanity hoping that truth will come to us. we sit and read literature like this as if we’re eunuchs in some feudal court, prancing around with velvet clothes and bells attached to our shoes trying out-somersault one another while beyond the windowless walls of the castle billions of people live dynamic and variegated lives, in many cases suffering at our expense.”

(e) There are lists throughout the book, as though it were a draft.

(f) Some pages have only one sentence.

(g) The sentences all sound like this one: “I vomit ice cubes.”

(h) Thaddeus, the main character, doesn’t react when Bianca, his daughter, is killed. Many similar moments of emotion are skipped or merely sketched.

(i) It’s sort of fantasy, but sort of not. For example: Thaddeus goes to a group of owls and asks them where his daughter is and “remembers that owls don’t talk.” He feels foolish for thinking that they do, but throughout the book ants carry things out of the stomachs of foxes who have ripped them open themselves and bears wear coats with buttons and veins grow from the slit veins of men living in the sky.

(j) The novel is about writing novels.

(k) Is it really a novel? It can’t be more than 20,000 words.

(l) Chapter titles are inconsistent. For example: Sometimes a chapter with the first-person account of a member of the war effort is called “War Member,” but other times these chapters are called “War Effort Member.”

(m) The “evil” villain is a depressed writer that feels guilty for being depressed. There are no other evils than this.

**

Given premises (1) and (2), we must conclude that there’s a facet of my socioeconomic-generational set’s consciousness that is feckless, effete, unengaged, delusional, and inconsistent.

I’m a member of this set, which is frustrating. When I finished the book I threw it on the floor and looked at myself in the mirror and I asked, “Really?”

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Regarding Joshua Cohen’s Novel ‘Witz’

Posted on July 29, 2010 | Leave a comment

Dear Mr. Cohen,

I’m sorry. I’m letting go. I got through 200 pages and I can’t do it. I don’t look forward to reading Witz anymore. I don’t look forward to bringing it with me to places. I’m no longer proud to be reading it. I have to put it down.

It’s the style of the thing. The way the sentences are put together. The grammar is yiddishized, which I appreciate, but the predicate and subjects, backwards they are. Which would be fine if the bodies of the segmented worm-like sentences didn’t go on in impassioned lists of unengaging noun-phrases, choking on themselves, on their mundane details, which seem important but aren’t. They take up pages and pages. So when a verb happens, when action occurs, I’m either lost in the list or I’ve lost interest.

When I do understand what’s happening I find myself asking you thematic questions that start with “why,” like: Why kill the Jews? Or more superficial questions, like: Why kill them on such a cliche night as the turn of the millennium? And even logistical questions, like: Why is the subtitle “The Last Jew in the World” present in your Library of Congress title, but nowhere else on the novel itself?

Though the accusation that this book is a Jewish Gravity’s Rainbow has been rejected, it feels to me like that’s what’s happening. I like that idea. I like these kinds of books. I read V. and Gravity’s Rainbow. I read Infinite Jest. I read Gass’s The Tunnel. I like this kind of thing. Plus I’m young and Jewish. And you’re young and Jewish. This should be the perfect book for me.

But I find myself rolling my eyes at it. I’m falling asleep reading it. I rarely feel like I’m inside it and I feel confused when I feel like I am. In a word, I’m disappointed.

Maybe the heat is getting to me in Brooklyn. Maybe I’m not doing something right. I don’t know. I’m willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. You’ve spoken publicly about these kinds of concerns, and you have interesting things to say. I’m flexible. I’m still willing to read it. I want to want to read it. Is there anything you can suggest? Some encouragement? Some promise or hope? Something?

Sincerely,
David Backer

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Benjamin Kunkel, Benedict Anderson, and the Fate of the Novel

Posted on July 23, 2010 | Leave a comment

The first sections of Imagined Communities by Benedict Anderson read like an unknowing echo to Benjamin Kunkel’s recent piece in n+1 regarding the fate of the novel. In that essay, appearing in a forthcoming collection about the future of books from Soft Skull, Kunkel recounts the publishing industry’s past and juxtaposes it with the digital present. His conclusion is that the novel is on its way out.

While Kunkel uses Regis Debray as his theoretical launchpad, Anderson is a different–but just as helpful–resource.

***

Glossing on Fevbre and Martin’s work The Coming of the Book, Anderson points to the emergence of the novel as the emergence of a particular kind of consciousness, one that indicates the birth of an imagination capable of imagining a nation.

The Coming is a history of printing and full-length manuscript publishing. It gives us facts like this: Martin Luther’s theses could be found all over Germany in 15 days because of print-capitalism.

Anderson says the proliferation of the printed word in the form that it proliferated–the novel and the newspaper–show the birth of a “meanwhile” consciousness, one that is aware of multiple story lines occurring in time simultaneously but in different places. He opposes this to a consciousness that sees different events inhabiting the same place at the same time. The distinction comes from Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. Benjamin calls “meanwhile” time  “homogenous, empty” time and calls the latter “deific.”

Deific time reigned in antiquity. Anderson gives two clear examples of it. (1) A 14th century depiction of the birth of Christ where Mary is dressed like a peasant girl from the 14th century. Here Christ’s birth happens at year 0 but also, it seems, in the 14th century. (2) Christ’s crucifixion and Isaac’s sacrifice, the latter viewed as a prequil to the former. God sees all these events ocurring without timeline, without linear chronology–Abraham and Christ, Mary and 14th century fashion–and so does deific time.

Evidence of homogenous-empty (meanwhile) time is first seen in novels. A character does this and that and, meanwhile, another character does that and this. Then they meet. (It’s also seen in newspapers, where stories are told of events all over the world connected only by the day they occur.)

Anderson argues this kind of storytelling, homogeneous-empty, wasn’t happening in longer literary works before the novel. It was this kind of thinking, among other historical factors, that allowed our species to concieve of ourselves as belonging to a group composed of people we don’t actually know.

—

A big question mark punctuates the fate of the novel. The economic crisis hit the mammoth, aging publishing industry in ways it’s not recovering from. Technologies are evolving that present words in new ways. Instead of the printed word we have the digitized word. Fiction lives and breathes on the Internet and in e-books and e-readers and iPhones. If Luther were to write his theses now, they would be everywhere in the world in 15 seconds. What does this mean for the novel?

This is where Anderson is helpful. We can use his application of Benjamin’s time distinctions as a lens to look at the novel’s fate.

Our main question might be: Do these technologies constitute another change in our consciousness of time? Do they indicate a third kind of consciousness, different from deific and homogeneous-empty? Or are they just evidence that we’ve carried homogenous-empty time out to its fullest extent?

Lets say “Yes” tentatively. If the emergence of the Internet and related digitizations indicate a new consciousness of time then maybe the novel will become obsolete, just as other cultural artifacts underwent radical changes during the transition from deific time to homogenous-empty time. In this scenario the novel becomes a  stepped-upon rung of the ladder of our evolution, replaced as an art form in the popular mind like the orchestra was replaced by the band and the painted portrait by the photo and theater by film.

But even if we say “No” we get a similar answer. Lets say these technologies don’t indicate a new consciousness but rather they’re just a full flourishing of homogeneous-empty time. In this case the novel still has a predominantly historical role to play. The novel indicated the birth of homogeneous, empty consciousness and now that that consciousness has matured. We may have to build a monument to the novel’s importance, say our goodbyes, and expect a future that excludes it from the main stage though it helped to build the stage itself.

Either way you look at it, applying Anderson’s distinction yields what may be a disturbing concept: It’s neither the publishing industry nor its product but rather us, the human being, that’s changing as our technologies advance. Kunkel quotes Jonathan Franzen to this effect, “Haven’t we all secretly sort of come to an agreement, in the last year or two or three, that novels belonged to the age of newspapers and are going the way of newspapers, only faster?”

Our digitization is evidence  of a change in our consciousness, so it makes sense that the novel and its role in our lives must change with us.

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