I rarely choose to read a book on account of a review in the papers. Of course sometimes (rarely) I’m reminded by a review that a book has come out. But in those case I have already decided I was going to read it – or not. There are other recommendation sources.

Last week I read E. L. Doctorow’s Book of Daniel (1971) because of a nice little essay in the Review-section of The Guardian. I was impressed.

Last year I read Jonathan Raban’s Surveillance after reading a review in The Guardian which made me curious.

No, this is not an entry on ‘recommendation systems’ (friends, blogs, other books, literary history, social networks, Amazon).

No, this is not an entry on the dire state of reviewing (in the newspapers).

I just thought there are 3 types of (good) novels (not counting the bad ones) after realizing that I did not have the desire to re-read The Book of Daniel however impressed I was.

1. novels that you read with pleasure; and as long as you read, you feel that your time is well spent. But after finishing such a novel, you forget about it.

2. novels that you read with pleasure, feeling very impressed. After finishing you will talk about such a novel to others, and you will remember something of it actively for a long time. Yet you do feel that you will never feel inclined to re-read it.

3. novels that after finishing leave you desiring to re-read them. Because you know there is so much more to discover.

Surveillance for me is category 1.
The Book of Daniel is category 2.
The Recognitions (William Gaddis) is category 3.

Then there is category 4. That’s Finnegans Wake. Books you would like to read for ever.

BTW The Book of Daniel is concerned with the history of Leftism in the United States, bridging the Rosenberg-case (and thus socialism/communism) with the Sixties protest movement through a fictional son & daughter of the Isaacsons (= Rosenbergs). Interestingly, the real children of the Rosenbergs did not seem suffer at all from all the psychological ‘damage’ that characterizes the protagonists of Doctorows novel. (See for this Garber & Walkowitz Secret Agents).

Since a few months I work on the Macbook. Ever since I have at least wondered once a day how the design-team of this computer could’ve come up with the idea of the glossy mirror-screen AND implement it. One user-test in a real world situation would’ve shown that it has severe shortcomings. Whenever I write, I look at myself thinking through the the screen that carries the words I am typing. Who wants to look in the mirror all the time while writing, working, looking at webpages?

Or is this supposed to hail a new era of continuous self-consciousness?

Ik heb dan wel een nieuw batterijtje in mn Flightdeck gedaan, maar hij doet het nog steeds niet. Er zal wel ergens een draadje los zitten. Vandaar nog altijd de “ongeveer”.

Weersvoorspellingen: zon en buien met hagel. Wakker worden om half acht bij zonneschijn. Om half tien weggereden voor een ritje, voor een langzaam overtrekkende bui uit. Koud. Erg koud. Zonder handschoenen al snel gevoelloze vingers – en dat terwijl het al april is. Wel een fijn zonnetje en met de noordoostenwind ging het lekker, in hoog tempo. Mooie route. Voorbij Loenen kwam de Tourclub Abcoude me achterop, en tot Baambrugge – waar ze afstapten (vanwege de ‘Acht van Abcoude’, die vandaag werd gereden) – met hen meegereden. Omrijden bij Abcoude vanwege de werken aan de snelweg (de lelijkheid die je van verre ziet en die steeds vaker dwingt tot irritante extra lusjes). Tussen de voetangel en Amsterdam weer met een klein groepje meegereden. Al met al een ‘snel’ tochtje.

Marcusstraat – Ringdijk – Diemerpark – Muiden – Muiderberg – Naardermeer – De Horn – Googpad – Nederhorst – Vreeland – Loenen – Loenersloot – Baambrugge – Abcoude – Ouderkerk – Amstel – Marcusstraat

Een dag vol regen, en heel soms wat zonneschijn. Om 17.00 leken de buien voorbij en ging ik op weg voor een rondje. Ten noorden van Amsterdam waren de wegen droog, en de zon bleef schijnen. Wel nog steeds koud. De uitvalsroute langs het spoor naar Muiderpoort en dan over de Insulindeweg naar de Schellingwouderbrug is een goeie: rechtdoor, rustig en nauwelijks stoplichten.

Marcusstraat – Muiderpoort – Schellingwouderbrug – Ransdorp – Zuiderwoude – dijk – Uitdam – Durgerdam – Schellingwouderbrug – Muiderpoort – Marcusstraat

Ah, finally I booked a cycling holiday in the mountains again. A week. (Not longer, as I also would like to go on holiday with F.). From Bled to Bolzano, revisiting the Dolomites. Phew. Now it’s set. It’s this one: http://www.cycletours.nl/start/form.reisedisplay.php?REICODE=DON.

The DNK-concert yesterday was a fitting goodbye to the OT301-space. DNK moves next week to the new concert space of the Smart Project Space a little further on in Amsterdam-West, a little more luxurious, and larger: it seats 120 people.

As a goodbye sound artist Mark Bain made the whole building vibrate: using seismic sensors to detect the natural resonance of the building, he played that frequency back into the building. The result is amazing, you hear and feel the vibrations, your muscles and organs are massaged (depending a bit on how you’re build, it seems to work much better with other people than with me). And it creates a happening in the space: the audience sits, stands, experiences in silence, there is nothing to look at (no musical performance), only something to hear and feel. One concentrates on the sound and one’s own body. It is a ‘heavy’ contemplative experience, and a enjoyable one too.

Before that, we already had had much time to listen to all the sounds in the building and to the space itself. Four compositions of the very young composers Taylan Susam and Joseph Kudirka (two each), brought together under the banner of Boredom and Danger, left more space for silence than for musical events. (Which is not completely correct, as the silence can also be a musical event). It is very interesting to see how deeply these young composers (and performers) have been influenced by the Wandelweiser-group. Isolating sounds, small sounds, almost inaudible sounds, and creating space to make sure that we can listen to those sounds. (Apart from the first piece in which someone in the audience got the giggles, there was abolutely no sound from the audience, no coughing, or whatever). There are simply many more minutes of silence, in which you become aware of your own listening attitude, that moments with sound. (Although ‘silence’ is never silent). You become aware of the space (the building and its acoustic situation), of each and every sound – there is not any bit of the sound which is less important than any other bit. You hear everything, Everything counts. In that sense this minimalism is an absolute maximalism: every tiny change in the sound, in the breath, in the hairs on the bow of the cello, is equally important.

On the other hand there is also a conceptualist tendency going in their work. It was maybe strongest in the first two pieces. Seven Minutes or Trombonist by Kubirka simply consisted of a repeating of the same tone, held for about 10 seconds, followed by a much longer silence. The quite high tone was played in different positions each time, which made it a pretty virtuoso piece, though it didn’t nor looked virtuoso at all. Rather the opposite.

schoorel by Taylan Susam is a piece for one speaker, who over a period of a few minutes speakes the following words: It. Was. The. Most. Was. and then 3 words that I do not remember.

The high point for me was Solidarity by Joe Kudirka, subtitled ‘A Quilt for Christian Wolff’ – of all the four pieces this was the one with the most musical events. I think it was a score that could go in different directions, interpreted by clarinet (Taylan), ukulele (Kudirka), cello (Nia Hitz) and trombone (Daniel Ploeger), but also using tapping with the foot, whistling, and hand clapping.

Finally Taylan’s piece for anthony fiumara (2006) was again on the brink of audibility, and very very silent.

The total seriousness of these pieces makes them radical, and amazing, I find – though one might say that not all of them worked equally well. Maybe it still is the mark of really good ‘new’ art that it is at first difficult to accept, difficult to get, because it seems nothing, or too easy to do. The seriousness convinces me. And it makes you listen in a different way. It creates its own world, in which everything is relevant – that is a statement in itself, also ‘against’ the world. I would almost say that such music states “This is Our Music” (after Ornette Coleman).

Maybe I am reading too much in it. Who knows. Nevertheless, more than a hundred listeners came out on a monday night to experience it.

Next week DNK continues at the Smart Project Space.

http://www.myspace.com/taylansusam

http://www.dnk-amsterdam.com/index.cgi?dept=AGENDA

http://www.smartprojectspace.net/

Recent reading matter, that left me impressed…

Konrad Bayer: Het hoofd van Vitus Bering. (Another plug for what is the best Dutch publisher for translated literature: http://www.uitgeverij-ijzer.nl/).

David Markson: Going Down. (Pure “modernist” novel by one of the masters of contemporary “innovative” literature, from 1970, republished in 2005).

William T. Vollmann: Riding Toward Everywhere. (His latest, about hopping freight trains; in fact a treatise about freedom).

Another strange little video by Oorbeek: http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=0AT1kBE1ePU

Next week, thursday March 13th I will be doing a presentation in Groningen, at Sign (Winschoterkade 10, 20.00 – 22.30h), as part of Aymeric Mansoux’ and Marloes de Valk’s project Hello Process, in rand() we trust. Also speaking: Florian Cramer, Adger Stokvisch and Dave Griffiths. See: http://no.systmz.goto10.org/.

My first German-language publication will soon be available. It’s a text on locative art and the work of Esther Polak in McLuhan Neu Lesen edited by Martina Leeker, Kerstin Schmidt and Derrick de Kerckhove: http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts762/ts762.htm.