Wednesday Weltanschauung in a Box
What I've Finished Reading
Nature, it seemed, was as huge as Gormenghast
Titus Groan, at long last! I'm going to miss you, you weird stony bramble-garden of a book! Also, props to Baby Titus for developing a personality in the last ten pages or so, even if that personality is just "fussy baby who doesn't want to stand on a raft in the rain." Poor little guy!
Spoilers, sort of: [Time Ruins Everything]the Earl's library has been burned, the Earl and a couple of important officials have disappeared into the woods, and baby Titus has been Earled. The ceremony requires the new Earl to stand on a raft in the middle of a lake, holding a stone and a branch of ivy, but Titus is one year old, so he drops them both in the water, and his ceremonial necklace with them.
Talking about 80s animation last week made me think that Titus Groan could make an excellent animated series. Everyone is already grotesque. The massive Countess and her cats could fill an entire room; the twins could be crooked and crane-like and uncanny -- the architecture already reads as a combination of Dr. Seuss and Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Poor old Nannie Slagg is essentially a literary version of that unbelievably annoying nanny cat in Thundercats (I watched the pilot episode of Thundercats last week; it was disappointing). It's even curiously sexless despite its overbearing carnality? I think some kids would love it. I mean, the lack of a clear hero, and the fact that the manipulative amoral schemer keeps winning, might be a problem for studio execs and parents' groups, but you can't have everything all the time, can you?
What I'm Reading Now
[Watching Television] "Even as it flatters us for our powers of discernment, TV struggles to enforce our constant half-attention by assaulting us relentlessly with violent distractions. . . TV is violent not only in its literal images of carnage and collision, but in its automatic overuse of every possible method of astonishment. Here we might mention the extreme close-ups, high contrasts, flaring colors, rapid cutting, the stark New Wave vistas, simulations of inhuman speed, sudden riots of break dancing. Yet such a catalog of tricks alone would miss the point, because TV's true violence consists not so much in the spectacle's techniques or content, but rather in the very density and speed of TV overall, the very multiplicity and pace of stimuli; for it is by overloading, overdriving both itself and us that TV disables us, making it hard to think about or even feel what TV shows us -- making it hard, perhaps, to think or feel at all."
Well, ok. Watching Television was an interesting read, but I feel about it a little the way Mark Crispin Miller (author of the above) feels about sitcom irony. There's a distancing sameness that covers it like a layer of cling film, and a final impression that very little has been said. Car commercials, children's cartoons, sitcom dads, music videos, and news programs are all, it turns out, magnifying mirrors for Reaganism (a complex phenomenon made up of nostalgic sentimentality, political and economic cynicism, knee-jerk patriotism, and the use of marketable material goods as identity markers). What else are they? We just don't know. Watching Television seems like a good guide to how writers for The Nation felt about being alive in the 80s, but a very incomplete picture of what watching TV might have been like, for Nation writers or anyone else.
Which is all right, I think? I was just expecting something a little more multifaceted.
"Everybody watches [television], but no one really likes it," Miller claims, but I doubt that was any more true (on either side of the comma) in 1987 than it is today. Even I can think of TV from this period that I wouldn't hesitate to say I really like. Columbo and Quantum Leap are both genuinely charming and fun, whatever neoconservative and corporatist subtexts might be lurking. But what Miller means, and what the other authors of Watching Television mean when they say "no one really likes it" isn't quite that no one really likes it. I'm not completely sure what he does mean. Probably that we shouldn't like it, or that we are either ashamed of liking it or not worth considering, or that things with certain qualities (mass appeal or corporate sponsorship or association with novel technologies) are "liked" in a different way, somehow (shallower, more regrettable, more ironic, more numb), than things that no longer have those qualities.
Well, Watching Television was worth reading and it made me think, and it was only a dollar, so I'm calling it a bargain.
Plus, lots of diaries from No Place Like Home. I liked this anecdote from Margaret Dickie Michener (on March 21, 1850):
"Friday afternoon a company of Sons of Temperance cadets from Windsor came down and formed a society of Cadets here.They marched through the village with their regalia on and banners flying. Silas Hibbert was frightened when he saw them and told his mother there was war. I suppose he thought they were soldiers."
I didn't realize the Sons of Temperance were that early! I'd mentally lumped them in with the 1870s temperance scene. Well, shame on them for scaring little boys with their pseudo-soldiery. Margaret Michener is a newlywed and then a very young widow; soon after this incident her diary becomes a record of grief.
Just barely started The Light and the Dark. C. P. Snow's YA-esque televisual style couldn't be more different from Peake's, which is all right -- this will be my crisp and refreshing sorbet of mild interpersonal intrigue in well-lit modern buildings. Roy and Lewis are friends; Roy is some kind of prodigy; Lewis has a wife who is unwell and might not love him. Roy is up for a fellowship, but will a passionate indiscretion in his past prevent his election? Maybe!
What I'm Going to Read Next
When I went to the library, Denis Johnson's new book was in the "New Fiction" section. I thought, "guess I should read that". It's a GIGANTIC PRINT edition that is actually a little hard to read because of how large the print is. I asked at the desk if they had a non-large print edition -- I didn't want to take it away from the large print readers if there was another option -- but they didn't. So, large-print edition of The Laughing Monsters, plus more stuff from my bookshelf.
Nature, it seemed, was as huge as Gormenghast
Titus Groan, at long last! I'm going to miss you, you weird stony bramble-garden of a book! Also, props to Baby Titus for developing a personality in the last ten pages or so, even if that personality is just "fussy baby who doesn't want to stand on a raft in the rain." Poor little guy!
Spoilers, sort of: [Time Ruins Everything]the Earl's library has been burned, the Earl and a couple of important officials have disappeared into the woods, and baby Titus has been Earled. The ceremony requires the new Earl to stand on a raft in the middle of a lake, holding a stone and a branch of ivy, but Titus is one year old, so he drops them both in the water, and his ceremonial necklace with them.
Talking about 80s animation last week made me think that Titus Groan could make an excellent animated series. Everyone is already grotesque. The massive Countess and her cats could fill an entire room; the twins could be crooked and crane-like and uncanny -- the architecture already reads as a combination of Dr. Seuss and Disney's Sleeping Beauty. Poor old Nannie Slagg is essentially a literary version of that unbelievably annoying nanny cat in Thundercats (I watched the pilot episode of Thundercats last week; it was disappointing). It's even curiously sexless despite its overbearing carnality? I think some kids would love it. I mean, the lack of a clear hero, and the fact that the manipulative amoral schemer keeps winning, might be a problem for studio execs and parents' groups, but you can't have everything all the time, can you?
What I'm Reading Now
[Watching Television] "Even as it flatters us for our powers of discernment, TV struggles to enforce our constant half-attention by assaulting us relentlessly with violent distractions. . . TV is violent not only in its literal images of carnage and collision, but in its automatic overuse of every possible method of astonishment. Here we might mention the extreme close-ups, high contrasts, flaring colors, rapid cutting, the stark New Wave vistas, simulations of inhuman speed, sudden riots of break dancing. Yet such a catalog of tricks alone would miss the point, because TV's true violence consists not so much in the spectacle's techniques or content, but rather in the very density and speed of TV overall, the very multiplicity and pace of stimuli; for it is by overloading, overdriving both itself and us that TV disables us, making it hard to think about or even feel what TV shows us -- making it hard, perhaps, to think or feel at all."
Well, ok. Watching Television was an interesting read, but I feel about it a little the way Mark Crispin Miller (author of the above) feels about sitcom irony. There's a distancing sameness that covers it like a layer of cling film, and a final impression that very little has been said. Car commercials, children's cartoons, sitcom dads, music videos, and news programs are all, it turns out, magnifying mirrors for Reaganism (a complex phenomenon made up of nostalgic sentimentality, political and economic cynicism, knee-jerk patriotism, and the use of marketable material goods as identity markers). What else are they? We just don't know. Watching Television seems like a good guide to how writers for The Nation felt about being alive in the 80s, but a very incomplete picture of what watching TV might have been like, for Nation writers or anyone else.
Which is all right, I think? I was just expecting something a little more multifaceted.
"Everybody watches [television], but no one really likes it," Miller claims, but I doubt that was any more true (on either side of the comma) in 1987 than it is today. Even I can think of TV from this period that I wouldn't hesitate to say I really like. Columbo and Quantum Leap are both genuinely charming and fun, whatever neoconservative and corporatist subtexts might be lurking. But what Miller means, and what the other authors of Watching Television mean when they say "no one really likes it" isn't quite that no one really likes it. I'm not completely sure what he does mean. Probably that we shouldn't like it, or that we are either ashamed of liking it or not worth considering, or that things with certain qualities (mass appeal or corporate sponsorship or association with novel technologies) are "liked" in a different way, somehow (shallower, more regrettable, more ironic, more numb), than things that no longer have those qualities.
Well, Watching Television was worth reading and it made me think, and it was only a dollar, so I'm calling it a bargain.
Plus, lots of diaries from No Place Like Home. I liked this anecdote from Margaret Dickie Michener (on March 21, 1850):
"Friday afternoon a company of Sons of Temperance cadets from Windsor came down and formed a society of Cadets here.They marched through the village with their regalia on and banners flying. Silas Hibbert was frightened when he saw them and told his mother there was war. I suppose he thought they were soldiers."
I didn't realize the Sons of Temperance were that early! I'd mentally lumped them in with the 1870s temperance scene. Well, shame on them for scaring little boys with their pseudo-soldiery. Margaret Michener is a newlywed and then a very young widow; soon after this incident her diary becomes a record of grief.
Just barely started The Light and the Dark. C. P. Snow's YA-esque televisual style couldn't be more different from Peake's, which is all right -- this will be my crisp and refreshing sorbet of mild interpersonal intrigue in well-lit modern buildings. Roy and Lewis are friends; Roy is some kind of prodigy; Lewis has a wife who is unwell and might not love him. Roy is up for a fellowship, but will a passionate indiscretion in his past prevent his election? Maybe!
What I'm Going to Read Next
When I went to the library, Denis Johnson's new book was in the "New Fiction" section. I thought, "guess I should read that". It's a GIGANTIC PRINT edition that is actually a little hard to read because of how large the print is. I asked at the desk if they had a non-large print edition -- I didn't want to take it away from the large print readers if there was another option -- but they didn't. So, large-print edition of The Laughing Monsters, plus more stuff from my bookshelf.