We are not inclined to think of the book as technology. Indeed, it seems utterly foreign to our modern conception of tech, an antique thing in an age of silicon and diode light. But make no mistake: bound, linear text is a technological medium, as is the medium upon which it’s based — the phonetic alphabet (if we accept Marshall McLuhan’s definition of media as “an extension of the central nervous system.”) However, unlike other mediums, the book requires our participation — and by that I don’t mean our concentration, but rather our active involvement in its creation. What the needle is to the polyvinyl disc, or the projector to the celluloid strip, we are to the printed page––we are the instrument, the player, abstracting images from the text and spinning them in our heads.
The only writer I can think of who treats literature this way is Tom McCarthy. One of the preeminent avant-gardists of our time, McCarthy is literature’s Tesla, a writer for whom text is code and storytelling is transmission, a signal emanating from some indescribable airspace. Much of this is outlined in McCarthy’s essay Transmission and the Individual Remix (subtitled “How Literature Works”), in which he describes the acts of writing and reading as an antenna/receiver relationship. Literature is merely our method of broadcast, as we pick up on and modulate past signals — “their cadences, and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops” — and re-transmit them. What we think of as “tradition” is thus a kind of alternating current, shuttling back and forth between sources at various voltages and amplitudes. All creation, McCarthy argues, is synthesis: poets and novelists are like DJs, who sample and patch in order to create something new (a process he describes as “plugging literature into other literature”). Everything is constantly in flux, as voices overlap and tropes are encoded, from Aeschylus to Shakespeare, Homer to Joyce.
Mall death is self-evidently symbolic. A mall emptied of everything that made it what it was captures the imagination—which is why there are fascinating YouTube channels dedicated to the phenomenon, and evocative photographs of the sad heaps of naked mannequins and empty aisles and tattered EVERYTHING MUST GO banners fluttering in the dark. But symbolic of what? A dead mall, while eerie and odd and an urban eyesore, is strangely difficult to interpret. Tempting to see it as an Ozymandias-like portent of the collapse of capitalism, but it’s surely not, or not quite: Capitalism is thriving even if most of those living under it aren’t.
Whittling the ecological impact of buildings down to their electric bill makes a strong environmental case for new construction, which tends to have tighter fitting windows, central air conditioning, and other state-of-the-art systems. Once you consider the impact of construction itself, however, the argument for preservation gets stronger, in spite of your drafty windows and oil-burning furnace.
From the moment I opened that day’s bag and arranged its contents on my cutting board, I slipped into forty minutes of not thinking about the pandemic. Everything was so neat, so organized, and with such a clear projected outcome. It was a brief period when I could create some kind of order in the middle of all the upheaval, and before long, I became something entirely new—not just a person who cooked but someone who enjoyed it.
If the male writer’s goal is to neither render judgment on his female characters nor reduce them to stereotype, “is there anything left?” It’s a telling question for both subject and author, the former trying to do the women he loves justice, the latter attempting, for perhaps the first time, to work in a sincere, rather than satirical, mode.
Pacifico finds his answer in a kind of wistful reportage, striving not to interpret these women but simply to portray them.
How closely can we know the minds of others? In Aysegul Savas’s novel “White on White,” the narrator, an unnamed graduate student, moves to a European city to study the cathedrals in neighboring towns and plumb the medieval imagination. The narrator is researching depictions of Gothic nudes, an unusual topic, we’re told; the figures that decorate cathedrals and illuminate manuscripts are usually clothed, their garments rich with symbolism. But the lack of existing study is a draw. “I wanted to research an ambiguous topic,” the narrator says, “whose greatest challenge would be one of consciousness: to view the naked human form as medievals did.”
Hustvedt takes solace again in absence: her mother’s amputated breast, a wound both psychic and physical. Her mother’s desire to show her what is missing, and Hustvedt’s eagerness to look, is the basis of their intimacy — and for Hustvedt, in these essays, it is the basis of knowledge and feeling.
By affirming this link between memory and water, between body and country, Gorman points to the importance of remembering what came before us. Like water, memory ebbs and flows, and like a country, our body responds to the current.
Small, not especially
sensuous, not the kind
of shape to give one
power, not a flower,