Occupy Wall Street Library

The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad edited by Andrew Hsiao and Audrea Lim, Preface by Tariq Ali

This suggestion comes from one of the Occupy Wall Street Librarians. “What are you guys telling everyone to read?” I asked. He immediately picked up this book, which he said was one of his favorites. “Verso is a great publisher generally,” another guy who was stacking books added. “We like everything they publish.” (We do too.) The Verso Book of Dissent is an anthology of voices of resistance from every part and era of human history. The texts are ordered chronologically; the first is a text called “The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant” written ca. 1800; the last few entries include statements from Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo, and the journalist Muntazer Al-Zaidi, who threw his shoe at George Bush in protest of the Iraq War. The curatorial scope of this book is impressive–along with essays and speeches, there are songs, pamphlets, even jokes. “What is socialism? Answer: The painful transition from capitalism to capitalism.”

Empire by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

If you’re looking for one of the orienting works around contemporary politics of resistance, I’d say you should pick up Antonio Negri’s and Michael Hardt’s Empire. They introduce the au courant term of the multitude and try to resuscitate or reimagine a translated form of Marxist ideas on revolution. Another suggestion: “Society of Control“ by Gilles Deleuze.

Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

I got my copy of Anti-Oedipus today and felt compelled to quote a part of Foucault’s preface to the book. Powerfully relevant to the OWS situation. Here is Foucault praising Anti-Oedipus (I italicized particularly relevant instructions for a “non-fascist” revolutionary form-of-life):

“This art of living counter to all forms of fascism, whether already present or impending, carries with it a certain number of essential principles which I would summarize as follows if I were to make this great book into a manual or guide to everyday life:

*Free political action from all unitary and totalizing paranoia.

*Develop action, thought, and desires by proliferation, juxtaposition, and disjunction, and not by subdivision and pyramidal hierarchization.

*Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.

*Do not think that one has to be sad in order to be militant, even though the thing one is fighting is abominable. It is the connection of desire to reality (and not its retreat into the forms of representation) that possesses revolutionary force.

*Do not use thought to ground a political practice in Truth; nor political action to discredit, as mere speculation, a line of thought. Use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the forms and domains for the intervention of political action.

*Do not demand of politics that it restore the “rights” of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to “de-individualize” by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generator of de-individualization.

*Do not become enamored with power.”

Among the Thugs by Bill Buford

Bill Buford’s fascinating look at soccer hooliganism in England in the ’80′s and ’90′s sets out to understand a simple question: what changes a group into a crowd. Groups form constantly, but it takes some special energy to make that group into a crowd, capable of acting as a unit and thinking together without thinking individually. More troubling, though, is the corollary: can we separate a certain kind of boisterous crowd energy from its inclination to violence?

The Decline of the West by Oswald Spengler

Oswald Spengler’s diagnosis of cultural decline is a strange book, but at its heart is the issue of group identity, of the importance of being part of a culture and of the desire we feel to immerse ourselves wholly in something outside the individuality we experience, often painfully.

The Concept of the Political by Carl Schmitt

What takes an issue or group beyond the confines of existing institutions and into the realm of true politics. Schmitt’s troubling thesis, that all political identities boil down to value-neutral distinctions between friends and enemies, between those who threaten and must be countered and those who do not, is difficult to reject and yet more difficult to accept.

State of Exception by Giorgio Agamben

Any reading of Schmitt is naturally entailed by the reading of Giorgio Agamben. Schmitt made possible the definition of the sovereign as “he who decides on the state of exception”; Agamben explores this enigmatic “state of exception” and finds troubling conclusions. Formerly an emergency suspension of civil rights and liberties during a national time of crisis, the state of exception has now become “a permanent paradigm of government”. Presumably “democratic” governments now routinely suspend the law (excepting themselves from the same statutes that constitute their nominal existence) in order to maintain an impermeable atmosphere of violence that paradoxically creates and supports the laws of inclusion/exclusion. Agamben writes, “To show law in its nonrelation to life and life to its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of ‘politics’…The only truly political action, however, is that which severs the nexus between violence and law.” Might this severance possibly be advanced by OWS?

Up, Simba! by David Foster Wallace

Written in 2000, before 9/11 and the financial crisis, at the tail end of a long period of prosperity, it is fascinating to look back at DFW’s diagnosis of a certain sadness and pain lurking behind U.S. young peoples’ retraction from the political process. In our much more troubled times, it provides an enlightening glimpse into the long-standing failings of our political institutions. How do we engage smart, idealistic young people in a meaningful way? This book asks what that might look like, and whether it is still possible.

Slavoj Zizek Speaks at Occupy Wall Street 

Excerpt:

“What do we perceive today as possible? Just follow the media. On the one hand, in technology and sexuality, everything seems to be possible. You can travel to the moon, you can become immortal by biogenetics, you can have sex with animals or whatever, but look at the field of society and economy. There, almost everything is considered impossible. You want to raise taxes by little bit for the rich. They tell you it’s impossible. We lose competitivity. You want more money for health care, they tell you, “Impossible, this means totalitarian state.” There’s something wrong in the world, where you are promised to be immortal but cannot spend a little bit more for healthcare. Maybe we need to set our priorities straight here. We don’t want higher standard of living. We want a better standard of living.”

After Nature by W.G. Sebald

Ice preserves a body while erasing it from the earth’s surface. An image painted on an altar freezes the suffering of Christ while it robs his flesh from the vault of heaven. The exiled creature of regret remembers that place of solace while he dismantles it before the eyes of his victims. His readers. The creature vanishes. He does not return home. He bequeaths a postcard of torment. A ship’s log from a voyage replete with nighttime raid on unfortified ports. Catalogues of ransacked relics. A book of tarnished vanity.

Mike Davis on John Carpenter’s They Live and the Occupy the World Movement

Mike Davis, prophet of the City of Quartz and other groundbreaking books, suggests that we put on our “dark magic glasses” and discover the “subliminal deceptions of capitalism” that should not merely make us angry but unify us, despite our differences in age, class, and race, in the effort to “cultivate the generosity of the ‘we’.” Davis offers 5 imperatives for the movement. The time for chewing bubble gum is over.

Judith Butler’s “Bodies in Alliance and Politics of the Street”

I worked on Wall Street a few summers ago. I remember thinking “this is very clean” and “look at all the cops” and feeling acutely aware that there were multiple surveillance cameras pointed at me as I walked from my train across those cobblestones. It tickled me that the street was lined with stores that sold things like hundred-dollar fountain pens and J. Peterman-style safari hats (“Gifts for your WS boss”?). Three years, a subprime mortgage crisis, and several bail-outs now color my recollection, but at the time I observed the policing of the area around the notorious bull and saw it primarily as post-9/11 security theatre. Even then, it absolutely like a physical space reserved for and created for the financial elite – maintained and guarded devotedly by the state.

And so I suggest some readings on space. Specifically, Henri Lefebvre’s La Production de l’espace (1974) (The Production of Space) and this essay by Judith Butler. Their thoughts on the social production of space as the relationship between bodies strike me as particularly relevant to reflecting on a family of encampments that insist on their productivity without clear direction or demands, and to considering (or reconsidering) OWS’s vocabulary of “occupation.”

Excerpt:

In the last months there have been, time and again, mass demonstrations on the street, in the square, and though these are very often motivated by different political purposes, something similar happens: bodies congregate, they move and speak together, and they lay claim to a certain space as public space. Now, it would be easier to say that these demonstrations or, indeed, these movements, are characterized by bodies that come together to make a claim in public space, but that formulation presumes that public space is given, that it is already public, and recognized as such. We miss something of the point of public demonstrations, if we fail to see that the very public character of the space is being disputed and even fought over when these crowds gather. So though these movements have depended on the prior existence of pavement, street, and square, and have often enough gathered in squares, like Tahrir, whose political history is potent, it is equally true that the collective actions collect the space itself, gather the pavement, and animate and organize the architecture. As much as we must insist on there being material conditions for public assembly and public speech, we have also to ask how it is that assembly and speech reconfigure the materiality of public space, and produce, or reproduce, the public character of that material environment. And when crowds move outside the square, to the side street or the back alley, to the neighborhoods where streets are not yet paved, then something more happens.

Atomik Aztex by Sesshu Foster

Crazy, the power of distraction a man has who is bored, intimidated, or embarrassed by his work: working in the country (at what? At rereading myself, alas!), here is the list of distractions I incur every five minutes: spray a mosquito, cut my nails, eat a plum, take a piss, check the faucet to see if the water is still muddy (there was a breakdown in the plumbing today), go to the drugstore, walk down to the garden to see how many nectarines have ripened on the tree, look at the radio-program listings, rig up a stand to hold my papers, etc.; I am cruising.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

For Geoff Dyer’s protagonists, life seems like one long concatenation of distraction. They set out (or put off) doing one thing and end up doing twenty other things, yet somehow they manage to circle back to something like original purpose. In other words, Dyer’s protagonists are highly successful failures. They are world-weary slackers who get sent on exotic writing assignments; impotent men who manage to have tons of sex; procrastinators who get the work done; do-nothings who do.

In Dyer’s most well-known book, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, the protagonist has only one goal: to write a “sober” academic study on D.H. Lawrence. It sounds easy and straight-forward enough. Unfortunately, the “I” in the book—Dyer himself, we are told, though the words “a memoir” are conspicuously absent—suffers from something a little more serious than writers’ block. He suffers from chronic indecision.

At the start, Dyer describes not his desire to write the study of Lawrence but his desire to write a novel. He waffles back and forth between the novel and the academic study until he finally decides to apply himself “wholeheartedly” to the study of D.H. Lawrence. Rather than simplifying the picture, he is again confronted with an exhausting list of further decisions. First, he must decide where to live in order to compose the book (Paris? Rome? Greece? Oxford?); where to go to “research” (Taos? Oaxaca? Taormina?); and what books he will need to read and to consult.

After much mental rallying, Dyer moves from Paris to Rome with determination. “I was ready to begin my study of Lawrence,” he declares. “The only trouble was the heat.” Turns out, he can’t write in Rome because it’s too hot. In Greece, he is ready to start anew, but the setting is just too ideal: “It was impossible to write on Alonissos, it was impossible to read . . . it was actually impossible to do anything.” Then, another attempt in Oxford: “Now that I’m here in Dullford, in England, all I want is to be back in Rome.”

In the span of the book, Dyer travels all over the world in order to find a setting or starting place that will feel “just right” (a homophonous command?) so he can begin his study of Lawrence. He is desperately in want of inspiration. Not finding any causes him severe agony. Here, great storytelling is happening, even if nothing is happening. If distraction is dread of the present moment, then the present moment is automatically charged with conflict. Because what is happening right now is always the worst possible thing that could be happening—each undesirable situation supplies enough drama to prod the reader on. It is almost guaranteed, under this method, that the reader will keep reading.

“I made a serious mistake in Rome,” Dyer laments in one of many such passages, “a mistake of such magnitude, in fact, as to jeopardise any chance of going on with—let alone completing—my study of Lawrence. From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject I lose interest immediately.”

Contradicting claims exist simultaneously. Dyer claims he is one of these writers who must write as he goes along, which means he must have generated some pages during this ordeal. But since he keeps insisting he’s made “no progress” we think he’s written nothing. For example, one section trails off with some vague ellipses and a page break, after which Dyer begins a new entry. (This is on page 123, in my edition–already halfway through the book.) “Well, it’s been a hectic couple of months. Action-packed. You won’t believe what I’ve done. Only bought a flat in Oxford. Yes, really. Unbelievable but true. Oxford! Now if there’s one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford.”

Then, pages fly by while he’s still in Oxford. As one reads, one can’t help wondering: so now, is he writing this all down in Oxford, the place where it’s impossible to write? If not in Oxford, then where? It is difficult to imagine Dyer sitting down long enough to compose anything. Yet as he keeps telling us of his failure to write, the book continues to move forward; the pages continue to materialize. In fact, we do learn things about Lawrence. We are entertained. There are scenes, descriptions, and dialogue. It is a real book.

If Dyer (the writer in the book) isn’t writing, then who is? Of course, the only way Dyer (the author, not the character) can write so well about not writing is that he is not the narrator, that he is putting in the work, and he never intended to write an academic treatise on Lawrence in the first place. The book was intended to be about a writer who can’t write. And because of Dyer’s ingenious use of the first person, this book is better than metafiction, it’s magic; the book seems to write itself spontaneously alongside life. We truly experience what it’s like to struggle (aptly, wrestle) with a goal. The journey, the cliché goes, is more important than the destination. But this isn’t a trick that can be pulled twice, and thankfully Dyer hasn’t, yet.

At the very end, Dyer/the narrator sums up the book’s itinerary in one short paragraph:

And there you have it. One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D.H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence.

We understand that when he says “our studies of D.H. Lawrence” he means very generally any goal or ambition we have in life. Even if the study will never be published (except that it has), we must keep going along.

Read Dyer’s new book of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

Darién Gap

Monday

May 16, 2011

Dear Nate,

It was good to get a nice long stretch of the Andoumboulou songs from you, but because it looks as if they have incorporated the parts treating the continent of “Mu,” at first I didn’t know where to address this letter. Perhaps, when I have a chance to visit, you might explain why you chose to destine the land of Mu to the same fate as its hapless cousin, Atlantis. Queen Moo, Le Plongeon’s lone refugee from the Maya island of Mu, has been dispatched from Egypt back to the jungle. And by jungle I mean sea. But you know what I mean.

You are starting off from history. But, where you think you mean history, you mean song. And, where you think you mean song, you mean history. Lorca is a good place to start, but before I get into that, I will remind you you wrote this: The thin bread of duress sounds to me like the duende of deep song which elsewhere you described as “a sound of trouble in the voice,” or when the voice stretches so thin that it feels as if it might snap. Because the duende of deep song originated with the gypsies, whom legend tells were the exiled Egyptians of old, the song is inherently one of migrants. Your Haitians here are the reminder of the tradition of poetry that crosses national borders, the sea-weary drift of the refugee’s boatlifted music.

For this reason, I think that where Olson wrote that “SPACE is fundamental fact” for the mind born in America, you started from the premise that he meant Americas and not America. Later, he probably did but only got there with his work in Yucatan, viz. after Call Me Ishmael. Anyway, to my ear your drift is the sound of the borderzone — in form the transportable point of encounter between this world and that. Place and moment of mobility and syncretism. That world and this at once. You might see how I’m winding my way back to Lorca.

Spicer got Lorca. Got duende fully — so that he could confront Lorca only where Lorca was, where the dead are. There’s a moment in the movie Sugar Hill when Sugar is responding to Mama Maitresse: Where does the power come from? From the living among the dead. Who can use the power? The dead among the living. This comes to mind, although I think it was the opposite for Spicer (and Lorca). But that is neither here nor there. Lorca wrote that the deep song singer Torre said to him: “what you must search for, and find, is the black torso of the Pharaoh.”

But you know all this. The real reason I write is because I wonder how deeply deep song has penetrated the Americas. What is the connection to the Pharaoh in the Americas? Lorca was in Harlem and heard duende in the explosion of music and poetry in that place at that time. And you have written on the relationship between the black aesthetic of duende and the motile harmonics of Coltrane and Miles. But what about since that time? Where does your duende today stand? Where do I find the deep song in the latest stretch of the Andoumboulou music?

You open Splay Anthem with Glissant and Olson, respectively: “a place of encounter and resistance” and “and all motion / is a crab.” In my mind what you intend to index here is the borderzone. And I don’t mean just any borderland between two nations (although that may be a part of it), I mean the portable potential of encounter viz. the condition of movement. Sauer was keen on migration as the basis of cultural growth, with the true space of culture being where migrants meet and their paradigms can cross-fertilize (in a spiritual understanding this is where they can cross over): outside enclosures, beyond borders. Movement thus = culture growth. But more specifically I think that movement across a bordered area (i.e. through a borderzone) makes for a particular kind of culture; migrants make their own kind of music.

In the “Song of the Andoumboulou: 50,” you write: Fray is effect of strain as it is shown on a fabric but if the fabric is unwound I think of Cecilia Vicuña who relates that “in the Andes, unspun wool is cosmic energy, pure potential.” Stray is what the migrant is. Spar is a wooden boom that supports a sail, therefore a instrument in movement but also a type of pugnacious activity. Rasp reminds me of your “rasp / our lone resort.” And Bray is a loud, harsh cry. They may or may not be a place but they are surely a zone of arrival, “came to… come to… came to… come before,” a culmination of departure that is still only transit point to next departure. You arrive before you arrived because upon arriving you will have had to leave. But where are you arriving from and leaving?

I think that, without a specific national context, you are moving the area as a cultural zone, one to which access is immediately available. This is migration, pure potential but also mix-up. And across the confusion there is a thin line, a harsh chorus, a fray strung into a bray.

I hear Bray and think of Brer and hear a Brer in his Bray:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEwqHCKiyCA

“As long as you’re to the point, son… but when you walk, remember what you see.” In the song Brer is shouting into a mirror, “you ever seen a bigger fool than me?” And I think of your writings on Coltrane: “who uses the upper and lower registers of the instrument as though they were two different voices in dialogue with one another, in a sometimes quarrelsome conversation with one another, in competition with one another… It makes for an unruly agonistic sound in which it seems that the two lines of articulation are wrestling, that they are somehow each other’s contagion or contamination.” This you call “a crippling of the voice that paradoxically is also an enabling.” The migrant, in this case Sweetback, whether moving southward or northward or inward through an outward stare in the mirror of history and social fact, rasps a frayed bray.

I hear it elsewhere:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs1awMgySgU

Where before strength was disability, here disability is strength. Brittle bones in pursuit of a mirage of capital. But in either it is a quality of the off-key. It is audible in your lines. In the same essay that I was referring to before, where you relate limping to strength, you talk about the African Loa, Papa Legba, “one of the gods of vodoun, candomblé, and lucumí… god of doorways, gateways, entrances, thresholds, crossroads, intersections.” Here is where I would add borderzones. Borderzone, on a large scale, is the national crossroads. Or, better put, it is the crossroads putting you past the nation. What makes us limp paradoxically provides us with a secret power. And, here, I am thinking of a context specific to the geography of the Americas.

While our near borders get increasingly policed and transit + transfer across them criminalized, the main facilitators of transfer get either (1) made into criminals when before they were not or (2) radicalized in crime or (3) which is (1) then (2). The culture that must necessarily form the conditions of this kind of zone of encounter will have as its basis criminal underworld. Or, I will suggest, just underworld: Whose patron saint is Malverde, whose psychopomps deliver death and deliver unto death. And their music is, you surely know, stranger to sense of key.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7G3mp4GBew

In the last song, an explicitly borderzone corrido, Mario Quintero Lara bemoans the “frontera roja,” or the red frontier, so-called due to the endless bloodshed ensuing from the traffic of narcotics from Colombia to the United States. The corrido, originating as a news outlet for the illiterate, was transformed under the mainstream hegemony of radio into an outlet for communications from outsiders (i.e. the oppressed, drug traffickers, etc.). In the 1980s, the narcocorrido exploded as a genre of murder, racketing, immigration, and smuggling, sometimes with a critique of political corruption underpinning these things. Confronted with the immediate menace of death and devastation, the singer of the narcocorrido can never turn back; his passage has already been purchased. His voice is consigned to a red frontier, a straying and a spar in which he is surely to die.

Like the gangster rap which arose alongside the narcocorrido (sold early-on in the bootleg cassette stands of the swap meets and in vehicle trunks across Los Angeles), the musical form has claimed its victims. Chalino Sánchez, which Hydra writer Jose-Luis Moctezuma has dubbed the Tupac of the corrido, was much like the rapper slain in his 20s; who, before he was killed, wrote a song where, as with Tupac in his Niggaz Done Changed, he is speaking after being killed. A communique from the afterlife:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1R1ILsAxI_0

In one of Sun Ra’s interviews, he speaks of the grim mirror relationship between the negro and the necro, with attention to the sonic emblem of the ‘crow’ contained in both words, animal guarding the entrance to the necropolis. The narco, I would add, is today also a narcro. And this is due to the historical upshot of economic circumstances. And you start off from history. But history is song. What song did you hear when you stood on that overpass looking west?

What desert music? A narcrocorrido rising from the fiery asphalt of the 101? A song of Santa Monica and Western? Where did you stand? I think the point is that it was borderzone. It doesn’t matter where you stood or who sang. Nonetheless I think you are saying that a new imagining is necessary and at hand. Mu must return to the waters because Queen Moo must return to the jungles from where she came. Not because she must leave but because her presence must be a constant arriving. To have this be, we must reimagine the migrant in our world. The Nazis killed the gypsies and in the United States they hunt the migrant. This cannot be allowed. Queen Mu, of muthos and music, must move. “She closed her eyes but went on looking at us, an opaque stare which confirmed her voice’s stridency and strain as of a time and place we hadn’t gotten to yet.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9jFTDPwluF0

In short, I follow you in your call to reimagine our borderzones and what it means to cross over.

Sincerely,

Edgar

Author and Activist Alaa Al-Aswany leading a Cultural Salon. (photo credit: NYT)

Note: Many links are unavailable as the Egyptian government continues its internet ban.

On Friday, January 28, during the most violent of Egypt’s protests since they began on January 25, WikiLeaks released several US Embassy Cables which discussed the increasing role of bloggers as political activists. The media has focused predominately on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as centers for activism and mobilization. However, blogs and contemporary literature fueled the revolution in another way–by igniting discourse.

Blogs, though still censored, are able to bypass traditional publishing outlets which are heavily controlled by the government. The world of internet blogging allows people to air their opinions more freely. According to one anonymous blogger (name X’ed out on cables), blogging allowed Egyptian youth to talk about topics that were “unimaginable five years ago.” Topics range from Muslim/Christian tensions, the military, women’s rights, sexual harassment, and job scarcity. The cables report that the majority of bloggers are between 20 to 35 years old, the same demographic that led Tuesday’s uprising.

The language of the blogosphere carried over into other mediums. Blogs are mostly written in colloquial Arabic, or, 3ammeya, which is different from the Classic Arabic that is used in literature. Blog talk is synonymous with street talk: slangy, intimate, frank. Writers and activists felt a need to talk about the issues of the street, what every day Egyptians are feeling and experiencing. The most influential books in recent years became popular because they pushed the censors, told the truth, and incorporated populist landscapes into their work.

These kinds of books are often the most difficult to get published. Even after publication they risk getting pulled from the shelves. “Writers must fight against censorship but also support literature…We live with censorship. We must survive with it. We don’t accept it but we live with it,” says Khaled al-Khamissi, the author of Taxi. There are variations to this strategy–some writers choose not to publish in Egypt at all. Some writers publish (though still at risk) with small presses, often safeguarding that their books will never get read by the people. For Alaa Al-Aswany, a lifelong struggle with government agencies leads him to publish with an independent press, and in this case, his book does get read. The overwhelming results speak for themselves. (More below).

Two books that have met critical and commercial success in Egypt despite problems with censorship are Taxi by Khaled al-Khamissi (2007) and The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al-Aswany (2002). Both are bestsellers that have been translated into many languages, drawing attention to Arabic literature internationally. Both writers have a shared disinterest in linguistic pyrotechnics and showy elitism, and declare their works as books for the people. Both are bloggers and political activists.

Taxi is a book that captures the pulsing smog and shimmer of Cairo’s streets through a series of interviews and anecdotes with Cairo’s taxi drivers. The book contains beautiful moments, but more so there are ugly, painful realities that are being uncovered daily as the protests continue. The dialogue is written in blunt colloquial Arabic and gives much-needed voice to the ignored populous; Khamissi highlights this with an epigraph from Paulo Coelho’s Maktub, which tells the story of a humble juggler who, despite his own embarrassment, juggles two oranges before the baby Jesus and is rewarded by being the only monk present allowed to hold the infant on his lap. “I have tried to relate these stories as they are, in the language of the street–a special, blunt, vital and honest language quite different from the language of salons and seminars that we are used to,” Khamissi writes in his introduction; these are “words that need to be said.”

Between the bribes taxi drivers must pay to the police and the duplicity of the government and the unwelcome influence of rich foreigners, Taxi‘s 58 small vignettes add up to a scathing expose that reveals the corruption and injustices of Egyptian governance. It is a government that has dealt heavy blows to its poorest and least educated.

Taxi drivers are often too old, too young, too poor, or too well-educated. They work under inhuman, backbreaking conditions, their lungs assaulted daily by fumes and dust. The passengers they carry through the sprawling city all have stories of their own. Every story in Taxi has thousands of real-life counterparts. (The vignettes are called “fictional dialogues,” although they are obviously about real people and events, perhaps to escape libel charges.)

In Story #18, the cab driver reveals to the “narrator” that his son is in the Cancer Institute and that the medical fees are insurmountable. While the narrator pities the driver and gives him a large tip, the narrator’s friend scoffs: “That’s a story that’s repeated often. That must have happened to me a hundred times. We’ve become a nation of beggars. You’ve never heard that?” This episode is fittingly placed one-third of the way through the book; at the moment readers begin to question the likelihood of so much suffering in a “democratic” country. Perhaps this is the only real disclaimer Khamissi offers, as if to say: I am human too, I can only draw conclusions through what I observe to be true, and even if only half these stories turn out to be true they should be enough to break your heart.

Alaa Al-Aswany has been a political activist longer than he has been a novelist. (His father was a famous activist-lawyer.) Since 1993, Al-Aswany has written a column of political and social issues. He hosts a cultural salon that has become such a liability that cafe owners have screamed for his group to go away. (The cafe owner later apologized, saying he was being watched by government officials.) Al-Aswany is also a member of Kefaya (“Enough”), a grassroots coalition that opposes the presidency of Hosni Mubarak.

This week, Aswany took to the streets alongside young Egyptians, demanding justice, equality, dignity. He writes in The Guardian’s “Comment is free” blog: “A democratic regime might fail to beat poverty, but the people enjoy freedom and dignity.”

The Yacoubian Building is a novel about how Egypt under the current regime fails to provide these very basic human rights–freedom and dignity–to its people. The novel interweaves the stories of characters from all classes and walks of life. They are residents in the Yacoubian Building, an actual historical building in Downtown Cairo.

There is the wealthy, aged Zaki Bey el Dessouki, an inveterate womanizer who speaks French, drinks Johnny Walker Black, and gets vitamins shot into his ass in preparation for his women visitors. There is Taha, the idealistic son of the building’s bawab, who gets his dreams crushed by the corrupt police system, and eventually joins an extreme Islamist group. Equally disheartening is Taha’s girlfriend Busayna, a beautiful young woman forced to endure sexual harassment on the job. But as there is no justice for her, no one standing up for any woman; she has to find other ways to survive. A homosexual newspaper editor falls in love with a poor police officer and the doomed relationship leads to a crime of passion.

Of all these stories (and there are more) the most sickening are the stories about the machinations of government officials who are as corpulent as they are corrupt. Even Mubarak makes an appearance in this novel, although he is referred to only as “the Big Man.” The Big Man never comes out of the shadows, but the characters always know he is there, demanding 50 percent of the profits, or else.

True, this is all “fiction,” and in fiction we are presented with holograms, not flesh and blood. But Al-Aswany relates a telling anecdote in the preface to The Yacoubian Building. Years before, he had been trying to publish a novel in which the protagonist mocks the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil who said, “If I weren’t Egyptian, I would want to be an Egyptian.” A younger Al-Aswany had naively believed that the opinions expressed in his novel were no big deal, as it was the sentiment expressed daily on the streets. (Also echoed by Khamissi, who was forced to take out certain well-known stories and jokes that would have landed him in jail.) So, in hopes of being published, Al-Aswany took his novel to the General Egyptian Book Organization, a government agency funded by tax payers. After the employee of the committee looked at his book, he said:

“I can’t possibly publish this book.”

“Why?”

“Because you insult Egypt.”

“I don’t insult Egypt.”

“You make fun of the leader Mustafa Kamil.”

“I don’t make fun of him. I love and respect Mustafa Kamil. The one who makes fun of Mustafa Kamil is Isam Abd el Ati, the hero of the novel.”

“Do you want me to believe you don’t agree with what you said even though you’re the one who wrote it?”

Al-Aswany and the employee continued to argue about whether a fiction writer could be responsible for the views of his protagonist, as if the writer were the protagonist. The anecdote ends with the employee requiring Al-Aswany to write a disclaimer to say that he, the writer, shared none of the opinions of his protagonist. After Al-Aswany wrote the disclaimer the committee nevertheless refused to publish the book. Eventually, Al-Aswany stopped seeking out government agencies.

The Yacoubian Building was published by a small but renowned press, Dar Merit, which took great risk in publishing the book. “I have no choice but to praise the Lord,” Al-Aswany says in describing the events that followed. The book quickly became the bestselling Arabic novel and stayed there for five years, taken down to second place only after the publication of his next novel, Chicago. He writes that Egyptians approach him daily in the streets to thank him for writing his book. This kind of outpouring comes only from the writing–earnest, convincing, unsettling–of the truth.

Post Script: AlJazeera’s license has been revoked and they are to close their bureau in Cairo today (1/30). Additionally, the Arab world’s largest book fair, that would be taking place right now in Cairo, has been postponed indefinitely.

Best Book for the Chronically-Paranoid Manhattanite

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Paperback, Vintage)

Most consistently-read book on the subway for the early part of 2010, and deservedly so. Lethem deploys line after line of careful, streamlined prose which contain a wild logic insidiously persuasive in its precision. There’s a lot going on in this book, as with all of Lethem’s work. Plot-wise, there are firecrackers exploding all over the place; we have no idea which conflicts and dilemmas are most dire, but somehow this constant feeling of panic suits the book well. Double entendres, hidden meanings, uncanny duplicates, alternate universes, desires too nebulous to satisfy — this is reality filtered through Lethem’s lens. The cast of characters, briefly: Astronaut-fiancee lost in space, writes beautiful tear-inducing letters to love-object Chase Insteadman, protagonist and retired child star who befriends legendary rock-critic-turned-recluse Perkus Tooth of the constant debilitating migraines; a posse consisting of protege/femme fatale Oona Laszlo; a homeless guy named Biller. Other minor characters include a celebrity acupuncturist, an enormous Second Avenue tiger on the loose, two eagles, a poetically-inclined weed dealer, sketchy government types (naturally), something called a “chaldron,” and cameos by such elite art institutions as The New Yorker and Criterion. I spent a summer week reading this book out loud with my sister inside our insufficiently cool New York apartment, and then stumbling outside at night into the city’s sticky, stifling streets. Why is this city so…grid-y? Why is it never possible to remember the faces of your taxi drivers? What does it mean when pigeons circle a church steeple? After this book, you see everything differently.

An excerpt:

January 8,

C.,

Severed-foot disposal in a pocket biosphere is really a daft problem, one I hope you never need face, love. We considered air-lock ejection, a sailor’s funeral, but to send my pedal appendage spinning down to Earth, or worse yet, to trigger a mine, seemed florid, flamboyant, a bit of a flambe, and not in the least flame-retardant, even if we wrapped it in a foil boot. (If we had a thousand feet among us, a millipede’s supply to lop off and defenestrate, maybe we’d kick our way out of this crate!) So we opted for a somber burial in the Greenhouse, under the shade of the tallest of the mangroves, though in truth it meant a slightly watery grave after all, stuff seeping up through the muck to swallow the foot, bubbles of mud detaching and floating among us during our tiny, foot-size ritual observances. Sledge, having scooped up the dead bees from the shelf in the Nursery, embedded these in the gunk to form a ring of bee emissaries, the better to passport the foot into whatever afterlife it deserves. Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstisav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.

Afterward, back to work or to moping in our various private nests. I’m not so much an occasion, anymore, for renewed bonhomie. My ailment is another ambient backdrop now, another machine falling apart with no parts to replace the scrapped ones, another grim dispatch from the various quadrants of the deadly dull but not yet quite deadly enough condition our condition is in. My cancer is a mood. We all of us up here have our moods.

Now a part of me will never touch Earth again, Chase.

Happy New Year!

Footloose,

J.

Best Book for the Young and Aging Hipster

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (FSG)

The Ask is thematically similar to Chronic City but the real schizophrenia in this book is found in Lipsyte’s syntax. By now there must be something we can call “The Lipsyte School” of stylistic followers and imitators. To see it at work, working, is awesome and miraculous; to see a cheap imitation of it not working is cringe-worthy. Lipsyte, however, has so perfected his art that he rarely ever makes us cringe. When he decides to leap the semantic distance of a canyon he will do it and make it to the other side, effortlessly. A sentence like, “But I was biased, and not just because I often loved my son,” inverts expectation so quickly the humor could easily be missed. At readings, Lipsyte will read the sentence slowly and let the laughter ripple through the audience. Readings is where Lipsyte’s language really comes alive. He’s best as narrative monologuist — standup comedy as high art. The punchline often comes at the end of the sentence. Modifiers are unexpected, atypical, sacriligious: “Horace, after all, was [the students'] age. He had no health insurance, just hope.” It’s easy to picture Milo, the middle-aged, balding narrator employed at a “mediocre” arts institution (Lipyste teaches in the MFA program at Columbia) when he’s sitting right in front of you. The book’s descriptions of hipster loft-living are scathingly accurate and hilarious. Scenes of fatherhood are another of the book’s strengths. The plot has been described by my favorite people as being “loosely hung, like a skeleton,” which I completely agree with. But don’t worry, the novelty of Lipsyte’s sentences make this a totally worthwhile, pleasurable read.

An excerpt:

“Gentlemen,” said our supervisor, Vargina, coming out from her command nook. “Did you send off those emails about the Belgian art exchange?”

Horace swiveled back to his monitor with the mock panic of a sitcom serf. Vargina took scant notice of our talk, tolerated foul banter for purposes of morale. But the fact remained, we had forgotten the afternoon’s assignment. The gods of task flow did not easily forgive.

Where we worked was in the development office of a mediocre university in New York City. It was an expensive and strangely obscure institution, named for its syphilitic Whig founder, but we often called it, with what we considered a certain panache, the Mediocre University at New York City. By we, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean once.

Our group raised funds and materials for the university’s arts programs. People paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk. Still, the sums didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the cutthroat world of arts education. Our job was to grovel for more money. We could always use more video cameras, more caulk, or a dance studio, or a gala for more groveling. The asks liked galas, openings, recitals, shows. They liked dinner with a famous filmmaker for them to fawn over or else dismiss as frivolous.

Best Book for the Irreverent History Junky

Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh (Seven Stories)

Linh Dinh has written some of the most influential and widely-taught books of poetry and prose poetry, and his novel debut is equally groundbreaking. Love Like Hate paints an intimate picture of Vietnam before and after the Fall of Saigon, when the country reunited under communist rule. Dinh follows a family through two generations and traces the trajectory of a nation through the details of domestic circumstance. Hoang Long, captain in the ARVN and imprisoned patriarch of the family, comes from a wealthy landowning clan of South Vietnam. He marries Kim Lan, the daughter of a “wannabe Frenchman.” She eventually becomes the owner of a cafe called Paris by Night, and represents the resilience of the average Vietnamese citizen caught in the middle of a war they perhaps don’t quite understand. They are the transition generation: those who are forced to radically shift deeply ingrained ideologies and loyalties and consequently reemerge believing nothing. During the time Hoang Long is in reeducation camp, Kim Lan marries a Chinese-Vietnamese (more allegorical implications) who triumphs by ousting Hoang from his own home. Kim Lan’s two children represent the polemical divide in Vietnamese youth: the daughter embraces Western culture and elopes with a rich, well-read punk-rocker, and the son marries a submissive, uneducated fishmonger from the countryside. In the end, we are left wondering if the fate and future of Vietnam are nestled somewhere in between the two poles or if it rests with the daughter, who comes into adulthood with the last words of the novel: “The next day Hoa turned 18. THE END.” The bluntness of the statement leaves an unsettling peace, one detects perhaps a note of bitter resignation. On a stylistic note, Dinh proves the age-old mantra that poets often write better prose than prose-writers.

An excerpt:

Her father was a wannabe Frenchman, or, rather, an aspiring Corsican. He had studied at Lasan Taberd, a French school in Saigon, and supposedly spoke French, although no one had ever seen him talk to a Frenchman. His conversations were sprinkled with a dozen or so French words, such as moi, toi, bon, and ecoutez.

“Ecoutez! Do toi want to drop by moi house this evening?”

The only book he had ever read was a biography of Napoleon, which he kept rereading until he knew all the details of Napoleon’s life better than Napoleon himself. He was one of those people who simply assumed that whatever they happened to be thinking about had to be of immediate interest to everyone else. Looking up from his crumbling book, he would ask Kim Lan’s mother, “Did you know that Napoleon was only five foot six, only an inch taller than me?”

“Why are you always talking about that man? What has he ever done for you?”

“Did you know that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper, which contained arsenic? Isn’t that amazing? Did you know that Napoleon only had one testicle?”

“What’s wallpaper?”

“It’s something they do in France. You wouldn’t know.”

He kept a nearly full bottle of Napoleon on the highest shelf of a glass cabinet, flanked by upside-down snifters and brushed by cobwebs dangling from the ceiling. Even an adult standing on tiptoes could not reach it. He admired the liquor’s amber glow and aroma, appreciated the bottle’s elegant shape and brown-gold label, but had no stomach for cognac itself. He began each morning with a croissant and a cafe au lait, chain smoked Gauloises, and snacked often on pate chaud. Once a week he had to have a steak au poivre or a steak tartare, which he ate while scanning his wife’s face for hints of amused disapproval. “What are you grinning at?” It also irritated him to no end that she could never tell cheese from butter. The only cheese she had ever tried was Laughing Cow, which she always enjoyed with a banana. The sight of his wife holding a banana in one hand, a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese in the other, chewing happily, always made him seethe. I’m married to a monkey, he’d think.

A dory is a small fishing boat, not built to rough high seas, but designed to bring catch in from waters along the coastline. When I received a preliminary copy of Small Anchor Press’ Dory Reader in the mail, the first in what will be a serialized run of “disparate authors” throughout 2011, one author every month in your mailbox, I had the impression that the nautical motif was fitting in that the editions were compact, bringing poetry to my door, in effect using handmade craft to bring catch in from the whipping waters. But as I sat down with the first issue, poems by Jen Bervin, it became apparent to me that a dory, although modest in size, still conveys something from a larger body. The point, in other words, is to fish.

The analogy of the production of poetry to local fishing, as it might be understood by somebody like Olson in Gloucester, or Ferrini for that matter, or even Merrill in Stonington, presupposes a field of imagination in which culture is sustenance, and the poet the fisher just in with a net full of wriggling vittles. It should come as no surprise then, that Bervin (the first poet published in the series), has (through Ugly Duckling) published “NETS,” in which she strips “Shakespeare’s sonnets bare to the “nets” to make the space of the poems open, porous, possible—a divergent elsewhere.” Showing her erasures of Shakespeare in light gray print, her fish are given in black. The famous 18th becomes:

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate;
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimmed;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st.
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Letting the catch show through the erasures, her work in the Dory Reader is more evidently reticulated, or woven in such a manner that net shows. Lines of poetry, which appear embossed on the page, are painted over so that you see the bumps or shape of words pushing up against the shrouding brushstroke. Thicker strokes make some text unreadable. Varying thicknesses of paint therefore produce a range of readability or unreadability. Not every fish slithering in the catch, it seems, is meant to be ate: “the best part of the weaving/was the drawing pressed/up against threads so/carefully arranged/to look simple/ … /the best part of the drawing/was how the whiskers emerged/like comets on the face of/a leopard.”

Like a catfish trawled from the lower waters, Bervin’s poem captures a fitting emblem for the Small Anchor project. Not only do they publish original work by new poets, they are also bringing to the surface older albeit rarely seen works, such as Joe McElroy’s “Preparations for Search,” a much-speculated-upon section withheld from his 1987 work, Women and Men. Although I am told that the cover of the book is meant to convey “a coastline at the same time as representing a graph of randomness,” I cannot help but be reminded of Mandelbrot’s graphs for the fractalization of the English coastline in his famous essay, “How Long is the Coast of Britain?” The idea of auto-perpetuating self-similarity upon which Mandelbrot bases his theory of fractals is a good way to think about the publication of a piece of an author’s work, an unseen or unnoticed leaf-tip leading back in similar patterns through branches to the beastly tree.

Other hand-bound, limited edition works published by Small Anchor include Kimiko Hahn’s A Field Guide to the Intractable, Bridget Talone’s In the Valley Made Personal, and, forthcoming, Professional Human Beings, by Pauline Cavillot, a book of writings and interviews from New Orleans, with poems by Brett Evans, Michael Ford, Bill Lavender and Frank Sherlock. But subscriptions to the Dory Reader 2011 close in two days (December 15th). The series, which will feature one poet each month and will include printed and audio material delivered to your mailbox, features Jen Bervin, Sarah Dimick, Autumn Giles, Christian Hawkey, John Jodzio, Hoa Nguyen, D.A. Powell, Matthew Rohrer, Sarah Sala, Chris Sawyer, Betsy Wheeler, and Matvei Yankelevich. With the series beginning next month, the chance to get ‘on-board’ rapidly departs.

The career of artist Paul Chan has taken many surprising turns; the most recent is the founding of his new e-book publishing house, Badlands Unlimited. The venture has prompted both excitement and dismay, because wherever Chan’s attention goes, the public goes with it. Chan’s past projects have actively engaged political issues–(the 2004 election in Now Promise Now Threat; the Iraq war in Baghdad in No Particular Order; Katrina in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans)–so one can’t help but wonder if there is a note of protest in this latest gesture.

Badlands’ presence at this year’s NY Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter, seemed both incongruous and momentous. Their Kindles and iPads floated alone among a sea of paper ephemera and book objects. An unspoken rule was officially broken; one got the feeling that from that moment on art books would undergo a radical revitalization process. Armed with the ability to reflect on history and see into future problems with enviable astuteness, Chan always seems to know exactly what needs to happen and when. I interviewed Badlands’ Director of Operations Ian Cheng about their project: what they (Paul and Ian) hoped to accomplish, what they feared. . . what they did in the office on mescaline. . ..

HYDRA: Aside from the ability to publish art books with more speed and ease, was there anything else motivating the founding of Badlands? Was it a sort of intervention on behalf of the art book industry? Or against?

BADLANDS: Paul was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with traditional art book publishers. They made great books no doubt–Paul has worked firsthand with some great publishers–but they couldn’t see that the historical distinctions between books, computer files, and artworks were rapidly dissolving. Badlands was started as a way to publish books and works that embody the spirit of this dissolution, and moreover books that we really wanted to read and experience but that didn’t exist yet. We’re not against paper books or the art book industry or tradition. We want to publish books in an expanded field. We want to be present in the art publishing landscape, but not have to belong there.

H: Some digital writers and artists who create strictly for the screen view the switching of mediums as inevitable and necessary, because art has to engage the present; make it new. For them it’s an issue of aesthetic integrity. So is Badlands taking a similar stance in renouncing physical matter? I’m thinking how your new downloadable e-book Mans in the Mirror is in 3D, and each page kind of lunges out at you with its own holographic physicality–a new kind of sculpture.

B: I think Timothy Leary tried to renounce physical matter once. But we’re nowhere close to being as tripped out. In any case we relate to physical matter and love physical matter because our bodies are still physical. We publish paper books and artist editions in tandem with e-books. Maybe we can say that virtuality is simply a part of the present, but that it doesn’t have to be antagonistic or zero-sum with the material world.

H: Do you think the screen destroys the reading “experience”? Scrolling isn’t the same as flipping pages, the glare of the screen isn’t the same as paper between your fingers, etc.

B: Well, whatever you think of the iPad, its touch screen is still an acknowledgment that people want to come into tactile contact with immaterial information–to physically move through the virtual. I think “the new” will be dissolving of boundaries, integrative, and strangely mundane or second-nature in this way.

new_books.gif

H: What do you say to critics who insist that the screen simply does not relay information like a book object? Is that a valid argument, or is the goal of the e-book to create a totally new kind of reading experience?

B: At the NY Art Book Fair and elsewhere, we’ve gotten an equal number of enthusiastic responses and fearful, angry responses about our e-book venture. The fear is that e-books are going to replace and kill off physical paper books. This fear is reinforced by the fact that the e-book form is in its infancy, and the first instinct of many book publishers doing e-books, e-book designers, and interface designers is to simply mime the experience of reading a physical book transposed within a digital space. This seems to offend a lot of book lovers, the thought of a simulation of a physical book taking the place of the physical book.

Then there’s the new media tendency to create e-books that are actually interactive apps, with all the bells and whistles of 90s CD-ROMs, a mania of animated distractions that seem to say, “Look! Reading doesn’t have to be a chore!” Which ends up obliterating the activity of reading itself. All of this is just an identity crisis in the gestating infancy of the e-book form. At Badlands we recognize this infancy as a moment of freedom, an opportunity to re-imagine how text, image, and sound can come together to expand the fundamental activity of reading. What that actually looks and feels like is the question we are asking, in the form of the books we make.

The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake

H: It is interesting to think about how we engage or disengage when we come in contact with a book object or electronic device. I liked the message at the beginning of The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade’s Sake (which I read on the Kindle): “Please turn off all other electronic devices, including mobile phones, pagers, electronic games, media and music players, and delink from all connections that may interfere with the reading experience.” If I was Justine and I was in a room with Marquis de Sade, he probably would have said the same thing: Like, “Ok. Now it’s time to get serious.” Do you think that the act of writing or making a book is like an assault on the reader? And that the problem with modern readers is that we refuse to be totally, utterly assaulted and consumed by one source? (I mean “readers” in the general sense; not just readers of text, more along the lines of Jacques Rancière when he calls for a community of “readers and interpreters” of art.)

B: At its very best, reading is an immersive experience. But to commit to being immersed is really hard these days. Digital space is both glorious and horrifying because desire can be enacted so immediately–desire for information, counter-information, images, contact, response, pleasure– (although not necessarily fulfilled). On the other hand, activities that demand sustained focus– art-making, writing, exercising, watching a movie, even getting to sleep– all require their own set of rituals to prime you, to commit your attention and your body for a duration to come. The message at the beginning of the Sade e-book is partly a joke, but it’s also a rudimentary primer. It’s something you have to pass through that will ready your attention and cue your focus into the e-book.

H: It reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story “Oblivion,” where a couple’s formerly-adequate sleep-priming rituals totally stop working. Not being able to transition fully from state to state is almost the contemporary status quo, right? Like sometimes I dream about my gmail inbox screen.

B: Actually I recently dreamt that I could check my gmail from within my dream, without having to wake up to do it. . . Maybe what you’re describing is a feeling of dislocation, which is different from being lost. There’s no sense of panic or alarm attached to dislocation, it’s just a condition. But when you’re in a state of dislocation, your attention easily enters into a competitive economy, it becomes scarce. Maybe the activity of making new priming rituals for sustained attention could be what raving was to inaccessible health care services.

H: The Sade fonts are really fun and actually strangely addictive. Whatever you type, no matter how mundane–(“Hi, Mom!” becomes “I see hetero-I see trans-incest, lustmurder” in the “Oh Dr. Ebing” font)–the message becomes very sexualized and rhythmic. It turns us all into Sade, really, this insatiable sex writing machine. How do you imagine or hope that users will interact with these fonts?

B: Maybe couples having communication problems will write disarming letters to each other using the fonts. I’d like the fonts to be in competition with YouTube cat videos as the 21st century way to say what we can’t say.

fonts for Mac + PC + Linux

H: (For Paul) The Phaedrus Pron reading at the NY Art Book Fair was really incredible, and I’ve been to more readings than I can count. I was like. . . experiencing a word painting. (Especially in the “Oh, Gertrude” section.) It was visual, sensual, I saw gradations of color, smelled smells. . . anyway, it is hard to verbalize. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say (in recent Opening Ceremony interview) that (à la Socrates) “We are given messages from the gods, and we become mad because we are only vessels for these divine messages”?

B: Divine messages drive people who think they hear them mad. They also and usually sound mad when those same people try to speak those messages. This, for Plato, was not necessarily a bad or wrong thing, since these divine messages held the secrets to another kind of order. A divine order, let’s call it. I’m not sure, however, if Plato would hold madness in such high esteem if he rode that D train at 3am.

H: What’s next? What are you guys working on now?

B: We have exciting things in store for the upcoming year. Newly translated conversations by artists, experimental e-books, works of grossly applied philosophy, and more. . .

downloadable e-book made under influence of mescaline

H: Okay, and the making of Mans in the Mirror. . . the entire office under the influence of mescaline!? Any stories to share about that?

B: Part of being a new young publishing house is to constantly maintain a coefficient of vulgarity in everything we do. We chemically abolished quality control and completed the book in a day and were very professional about not touching each other. The results speak for themselves!

The n+1 editors are some sensitive altbros. Original photo: NYT

Upon first reading, Mark Greif’s NYT essay on “The Sociology of the Hipster” inspired in me something of an epiphany. I did not wonder, as I have since, if the empty tenor of his article (more zen than nihilistic; more antiseptic than cynical) was cultivated from some number of pre-“making it” years cobbling together a living by writing laudatory commercial copy for academic literature. My brain did not assemble the manifold Marxist ironies, identify the doctrinal heresies. No – instead I was hit with a simple clarity of divine proportions. I knew exactly what I thought about the essay, and I knew that thought’s name. I knew its name could not be spelled out; it had to be abbreviated: “WTFC.” Who The Fuck Cares.

I must emphasize that although I am now aware such an acronym pre-existed my kneejerk brainstorm (or so Urban Dictionary tells me), at the time I had never heard or seen such a term used. Yet out of the electronic detritus, the chaos of feeds and links – pushing past the dusty volumes of critical theory I’ve stored away in my memory out of loyalty to my alma mater, that dying figurehead of that dying species, the public intellectual institution – this is what came to me, springing forward, pure and resolved: WTFC.

I can see a younger, less “wired” version of myself getting spitting mad about Greif’s essay. I’d wave my arms around and say something about self-importance, and lack of class consciousness, and Bourdieu, and Marx, and the takeover of the Times by the Style Section, and the bourgeoisie, and the narcissism of armchair intellectuals, and even more stuff about class – most likely butchering the points that have been concisely and cogently phrased here and here, and in Bourdieu’s own work (which serves as its own response to Greif’s project).  I probably would have been annoying, a little hypocritical, perhaps shrill – displaying much worse than the quiet dignity with which Greif put forward his 1000 words of nothingness.

So what joy to find a new tool in the toolbox, to discover how my psyche has secretly cultivated a nuanced practice of micro-engagement – a way of responding to things that are not worth fretting over in the larger scheme of things, but are significant within particular echo chambers I frequent, or are just irksome enough to call for detractors to voice their dissent if and when they are bored at work, all while maintaining healthy emotional distance. Micro-engagement: small assertions of my taste as applied to your ideas or philosophies, but pls note I can’t be bothered to spell them out. Micro-engagement: it makes me one very blasé hipster.

Taste is not stable and peaceful, but a means of strategy and competition … These conflicts for social dominance through culture are exactly what drive the dynamics within communities whose members are regarded as hipsters.

Mark Greif, The Sociology of the Hipster (Nov. 12, 2010)

My spontaneous acronym-creation branched – I speculate – from the practices of limited-scope voice I have developed with Internet’s help over the last 10 years: the upvote and the downvote, the tumblr heart and the reblog, the retweet, the hashtag, the 1-5 stars, the facebook “share.” If NYT has not yet installed a rating feature for me to actualize the irritation brewing inside me (“this was not funny! this was not useful! this was not cool!”), my brain will invent its own noncommittal platform, allowing me to express in four very capslocked letters the vague disapproval I feel vis-a-vis Greif’s unselfconscious insularity while maintaining a grasp on proper perspective. That perspective being: this is far from an important topic.

Hydra has previously mulled over how the Internet affects the human cognitive process – whether it short-circuits our logical functions, whether it degrades our attention spans, whether it presents potential for new modalities of creative learning and/or teaching. It was a fascinating experience to be confronted without warning by a personal demonstration of how the brain can be cultivated by the digital milieu, by the “habitus” of constant abbreviation and meme-making. (Couldn’t help it, Bourdieu is my dawg).

Although much has been said about the Internet’s encouragement of intellectual micro engagement, less critical thought has gone into the idea of emotional micro-engagement. By this I do not mean to invoke the “oh my god our children will never be able to have friends IRL” luddite fearmongering of the early 2000s, nor to make claims about the depth of feeling that can be achieved by online dating or gchatting. What I am referring to is emotional micro-engagement with current events, with newspaper and magazine articles, with essays, with literature, with the products of that industry we call content.

The closest thing we have to a treatise on this phenomenon is, ironically enough, the Alt Report / Hipster Runoff – and that’s more a performance of emotional micro-engagement than an explication. Still, instructive. Reducing emotions to a few limited options: <3 u. miss u. h8 u. Because how should we feel about the troublesome race and gender dynamics in Diplo’s relationship with Skerritt Bwoy and daggering, and how can we feel anything about it without warping things out of perspective, without taking too seriously something that is kind of inane and frivolous to begin with? (Here is one suggestion: don’t publish a book on it.)

Developing practices of limited engagement may be dystopic to some. It stinks of empathy fatigue and insincerity – those hallmarks of hipster apathy. But the reality is that there is too much content for everybody to care deeply about everything (a problem we at Hydra aspire to perpetuate). The question is not whether to approach the world with seriousness (as explored in this previous Times piece featuring n+1 and the Believer), but when, how, and how much. One might call it the equitable  (ethical?) distribution of one’s passions. New media has changed the parameters, if not the question, of that experiment.

Moreover, there is value in being able to respond to a premise without reifying or legitimizing it. I could write a letter to the NYT editor expressing my grievances regarding Greif’s essay, but then I would be complacent in the newspaper’s choice to publish the piece.  I would be overstating my opposition to the essay, holding up its merits as something to be debated, when in actuality its primary effect was to cause my eyes to glaze over.

But in this new collaboration between me and my friend Internet, there is potential for us to stay in the conversation while de-legitimizing the content we encounter.  By platform-switching (pushing an excerpt of a Times article to a tumblr, for example) we can say without words: “This does not belong in the book review section, and not just because people shouldn’t be allowed to review their own books. This is at most a ‘note’ on Facebook that I do not wish to be tagged in.” Twitter may or may not make us a social movement in the aggregate, but it achieves something on the individual scale irregardless:  it lets me put Greif’s “sociological investigation into the hipster” on the same plane as my mother narrating her television shopping network adventures — lets me care about his essay and its goals the exact amount that it deserves to be cared about, which is just barely at all.  #wtfc: micro-engagement makes this a position statement, an ethos.

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“What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation” was published last month.  It is available at New York and LA bookstores and at the n+1 store.

Sinnreich addresses his illustration of a broader notion of the artist to the protectors and supporter of copyright law. I will leave the technical legal issues up to the experts; Ms. Wong, the court is yours. However, I’m particularly interested in Seinrich’s approach in hashing out a concept of art which implies the development and lifespan of the art work beyond its original production. Oftentimes, Sinnreich’s concern, surely noble and important, with tackling a stale copyright law, steers him away from really raising the pivotal questions about how the work of samplers and produces calls into doubt traditional notions of art.

Do we limit our definition of artist to the individual, who as originator, brings into existence the work of art? Or do we take the art work as our central point of focus and stretch the notion of artist to all those who participate in disclosing the aesthetic life of that work?

For instance, are we to say that the funk break in James Brown’s infamous “Funky Drummer“ begins and ends with Clyde Stubblefield’s recorded percussive patterns, or are we to draw the lifespan and force of its aesthetic resonance to the thousands of musicians and DJs who sampled it? As new technology becomes more accessible and widespread, we’ll continue to see more people contributing to art and culture in this sort of way: configuring, sampling, mixing, and reformulating. But they’re not circumscribed to those activities; some creative mixers succeed in critique and imaginative works of creation, from DJ Shadow and The Avalanches to Situationist comic strips.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUyKdaNKHzo

The Avalanches “Since I Left You” record employs thousands of samples

There’s certainly still an author of the art work sans purity. In a sweaty and hot studio Stubblefield got down dirty on the drums and sent a shock wave to the hiphop generation already pregnant and ready to burst in the South Bronx alleyways. Are we then to say that those who sample an original piece participate within the art work? Do they collectively disclose the possibilities and meanings of that art form into a broader nexus, or narrowed tunnel, or spiraled perspective? In employing a collage of references, do such samplers take on the combined role of historian and artist? Should we even call these art samplers artists? Harbingers of art? Mere imitations?

To what extent does art belong to the author, or to the samplers, or to the public at large anyway?

Read a clip of Sinnreich’s book at Truthdig.

Addendum: Cruising the blogosphere today I stumbled onto a new documentary project on the remix, Kirby Ferguson’s “Everything is a Remix.” While the title is an unfortunate exaggeration that robs the remix of any definite character, the first part of the documentary does a good job contextualizing the remix in a broader historical framework of post-war art.

Everything is a Remix from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

You can follow the documentary’s blog here.