Just finished reading Ballard’s Kingdom Come. So now it’s time to browse some interviews and reviews.

These are insightful:

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/generalfiction/story/0,,1867982,00.html (Ursula Le Guin’s trashing of the book).

http://www.ballardian.com/ (Look for the interview “Rattling Other People’s Cage’s”.)

http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=516. (Shaviro pretty much sums up the good points of the novel & I agree).

Though this might not be Ballard’s best novel ever, it is an interesting head-on attack of England’s suburban consumerism, and it’s tendency to racism. While reading I was reminded often of the scary Fortuyn-craze — sort of an attempt at political ‘revolution’ by the white suburban consumerist masses — in the Netherlands and it seems as if Ballard took a cue from that (though I don’t think he did really).

Of course there are the small “sociological essays”, a few lines with a theory of modern society. Vintage Ballard. The bits that make reading a Ballard-novel worthwile.

The plot is not as gripping as that in Cocaine Nights or Super-Cannes. And if I were a “normal reader” (but what is a “normal reader”? someone who reads a few pages to be entertained before going to bed, who reads for the plot?) I’d complain that the story is often a mess, especially toward the end, the plot is quite unbelievable and the characters are too flat. But hey, doesnt that come with a SF-view on modern society — a SF view that brings tendencies into focus by enlarging them, by extrapolating?

In any case, Ballard’s picture of England’s suburbia alongside the highway, the M25, is unforgettable.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_to_Read_a_Book, about the book (with this title) by Mortimer Adler.

“The idea of communication directly from those who first discovered an idea as the best way of gaining understanding is the basis for Adler’s argument in favor of the reading of the Great Books. He claims that any book that does not represent original communication is an inferior source to the original, and, further, that any teacher, save those who discovered the thing which they are teaching, is inferior to these books as a source of understanding.”

Well, one has to be very conservative-minded to truly believe this. (Yet, in reading philosophy I do prefer to go back to the source.) It is hard to combine with ‘reading & writing on the web’ — though the web makes checking sources easier. But that’s slightly different.

Btw 1: Adler distinguishes 3 types (stages) of reading a book: structural, interpretative, critical.

Btw 2: More stuff from the business/communication perspective — definitely not my world –. A look at the book titles sez all… Annotation to books by Matt Vance on Minezone: http://www.minezone.org/wiki/MVance/BookNotes.

I’m beginning to wonder why I’m looking at these things…. I’m just going through a lot of tabs that I opened while browsing & reading about blogging, tagging, reading & knowledge…

Picked up the current issue of thee Irish magazine on contemporary arts Circa (Online stuff here: http://www.recirca.com. And come across a very interesting interview with of San Diego-based art historian Grant Kester — had never heard of him. His work deals mainly with collaboration in the arts. It seems he has a much more interesting view on the state of contemporary art than Jacques Ranciere — or no, more precise, might have an answer to some problematic point in Ranciere’s theories. Good links from his university homepage: http://digitalarts.ucsd.edu/~gkester/.

More reading matter (on the train): the most recent issue of the Flemish arts magazine De Witte Raaf. This issue focusses on typography. De Witte Raaf has quite a close connection to the Jan van Eyck, with director Koen Brams as on of the editors & frequent contributors to the magazine. Some (not all) of the JVE-approach to artistic research is reflected in the theoretical approach & editorial focus of De Witte Raaf. This issue also has a long interview with Jan van Eyck’s advising researcher Filip Tacq. But my ‘favorite’ in this issue is Dirk van Hulle’s article on typography and full stops in Joyce’s Ulysses and FW.

De Witte Raaf online here: http://www.dewitteraaf.be/web/flash/default.asp.

Dirk van Hulle’s article: http://dewitteraaf.stylelabs.com/web/flash/content.asp?enz..

Which reminds me that if you would ask me which is the single most influential bookpage for my ‘taste’ of literature & design, it would be page 260 of FW. Or no, it would be the page in the Spectrum Encyclopedie, with the lemma on Joyce, that reprinted page 260 of FW.

(Btw, this is a Dutch encyclopedia from the nineteen-seventies that was organized in longer lemmata — in length between half a page, up to over 20 pages — with lots of cross-referencing: both links at the end of a lemma, indicating related articles, and ‘underlined links’ in the running text. My parents bought this encyclopedia when it was being published, which meant we would get a new ‘tome’ when it would come out. I have spent many many hours reading and browsing this encyclopedia. And I sometimes wonder if my ‘early’ interest in hypertext has been influenced by it.

The wikipedia entry is a bit on the short side: http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grote_Spectrum_Encyclopedie. Here’s what ‘bison’ says: http://cf.hum.uva.nl/nhl/bizon/grote_spectrum.htm.)

Which also reminds me that I haven’t yet referenced Jouke Kleerebezem’s most recent article “Onderzoek worden” (“Becoming Reseach”) — in Dutch –: http://dewitteraaf.stylelabs.com/web/flash/showfile.asp?enz..

The new Ballard is out. The new Powers coming up. The new Pynchon announced for 21st November. I missed that Mark Z. Danielewski had a new book published: Only Revolutions, A Novel. Described as “A pastiche of Joyce and Beckett, with heapings of Derrida’s Glas and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 thrown in for good measure”. Hmmm, with such a description I expect the book to be either very very good, or shallow and forgettable but funny.

Reading through Dewey’s famous and still very inspiring book on ‘the public’, from 1927. Still 2 chapters to go. Here’s my digest/summary.

All quotes from: John Dewey, The Public and its Problems, Swallow Press, Ohio UP / New York, Henry Holt & Company, 1927.

” [T]he consequences [of human actions] are of two kinds, those which affect the persons directly engaged in a transaction, and those which affect others beyond those immediately concerned. In this distinction we find the germ of the distinction between the private and the public.” p. 12

“When the consequences of an action are confined, or are thought to be confined, mainly to the person directly engaged in it, the transaction is a private one.” p. 12-13

“Yet if it is found that the consequences of conversation extend beyond the two directly concerned, that they affect the welfare of many others, the act acquires a public capacity.” p. 13

“The distinction between private and public is thus in no sense equivalent to the distinction between individual and social (…). Many private acts are social; their consequences contribute to the welfare of the community or affect its status and prospects. In the broad sense any transaction deliberately carrried on between two or more persons is social in quality. It is a form of associated behavior and its consequences may influence further associations.” p. 13

“It is not without significance that etymologically “private” is defined in opposition to “official”, a private person being one deprived of public position.” p. 15

“The obvious external mark of the organization of a public or of a state is thus the existence of officials. Governement is not the state, for that includes the public as well as the rulers charged with special duties and powers. The public, however, is organized in and through those officers who act in behalf of its interests.” p. 27-28

“[T]he problem of discovering the state (…) is a practical problem of human beings living in association with one another, of mankind generically.” p. 32

“[T]he state is the organization of the public effected through officials for the protection of the interests shared by its members.” p. 33

“[O]ur conception gives a criterion for determining how good a particular state is: namely the degree of organization of the public which is attained, and the degree which its officers are so constituted as to perform their function of caring for public interests.” p. 33

“But there is no a priori rule which can be laid down and by which when it is followed a good state will be brought into existence. In no two ages or places is there the same public.” p. 33

“The formation of states must be an experimental proces.” p. 33

“Those indirectly and seriously afffected for good or for evil form a group distinctive enough to require recognition and a name. The name selected is The Public.” p. 35

“What is the public? If there is a public, what are the obstacles in the way of its recognizing and articulating itself? Is the public a myth? Or does it come into being only in periods of marked social transition when crucial alternative issues stand out, such as that between throwing one’s lot in with the conservation of established institutions or with forwarding new tendencies?’ p. 123

“How can a public be organized, we may ask, when literally it does not stay in place? Only deep issues or those which can be made to appear such can find a common denominator among all the shifting and unstable relationships.” p. 140

“Attachement is a very different function of life from afffection. Affections will continue as long as the heart beats. But attachement requires something more than organic causes. The very things which stimulate and intensify affections may undermine attachements. For these are bred in tranquil stability; they are nourished in constant relationships. Acceleration of mobility disturbs them at their root. And without abiding attachements associations are too shifting and shaken to permit a public readily to locate and identify itself.” p. 140-141

“The new era of human relationships in which we live is one marked by mass production for remote markets, by cable and by telephone, by cheap printing, by railway and steam navigation.” p. 141

“The ties which hold men together in action are numerous, though and subtle. But they are invisible and intangible. We have the physical tools as never before. The thoughts and aspirations congruous with them are not communicated, and hence are not common. Without such communication the public will remain shadowy and formless, seeking spasmodically for itself, but seizing and holding its shadow rather than its substance. Till the Great Society is converted into a Great Community, the Public will remain in eclipse. Communication can alone create a great community.” p. 142

Just arrived in the post: Ballard’s new novel Kingdom Come. That’ll be my reading matter for the next days — that is, if I managed to tear myself loose from Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, a typical postmodern outfit, about an avantgarde novelist trying to write a murder mystery, with his characters discussing their creator. That sort of thing. All about writing and creation. Lots of display of virtuosity, long Joycean lists, lots of verbal invention. The sort of hyper-metafiction that I assumed I was tired of reading, but that turns out to be strangely attractive…

I walk into De Slegte in Maastricht regularly, I pass it on my way to the HEMA & am close when I go to the AH. This afternoon I walked out again with a well-filled plastic bag. Two cheap dvd’s with old horror-movies (Bela Lugosi, Claude Rains) (for the shared dvd-o-theque of F., my brother & me). The 1946 Modern Library edition of Ulysses. The 1969 hardback of Ida Gerhardts translation of Virgils Georgica that I read earlier this year & quite liked. Gilbert Sorrentino’s postmodern classic Mulligan Stew. In Amsterdam going to the public library every week prevents me from making these kind of acquisitions.

It seems that this year I’m also catching up on some Joyceana. First I read Alan McClellan’s Bloomsday, his theatre-adaptation of Ulysses — not sure if that was used for the movie at all. Nice enough to read, well, always nice to read a summary of Ulysses consisting of sentences from Ulysses.

Btw: I have never seen an English copy of this book, but the Dutch translation from the sixties can still be found in secondhand bookshops for a few euro’s.

Then I read Stanislaus Joyce’s My Brother’s Keeper, his account of the first 20 years from his brother’s life. Very valuable, especially wrt the brother-theme in FW (Shem & Shaun) — tho’ ‘der Arno’ (Arno Schmidt) exaggerated the case when he made sense of FW almost solely on the basis of the battle between brothers. (Schimdt translated both Stanislaus’ diary & this book). And that Stanislaus was a ‘blockheaded’ guy. He never went back to Ireland, never had a nice word for religion. Exile, silence, cunning. Well, for Stanlislaus it was rather, exile, silence, stubborn honesty.

& now I’m reading Stephen Hero. A surprise — it is a much better book than I had anticipated (yet it has its weaknesses), and it is much more outspoken wrt Joyce’s views on Ireland, Irish politics, culture & literature.

In between I read H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine. I could repeat here what I wrote earlier this year on Jules Verne — good story-telling & flat, overly optimistic characters, together given a perfect perspective on early 20th century-views on progression, science, society… and how it could possibly go wrong. An exploration & extrapolation of that optimistic ideology, typical of a changing technological world. What should I read to get the same for this, 21st century? Toffler? Sterling? Wired-articles? Hollywood SF-movies? Neal Stephenson? Willam Gibson? I wouldn’t mind an European view… (an no, not that of Houllebecq).

Catching up on 18th century literature (if one can catch up with a century of literature…): finished Diderot’s Le neveu de Rameau and Jacques le fataliste. Both in a Dutch translation.

I don’t know. Some people consider these 2 books by Diderot as favorites — because of the humour, the richness of ideas, hopping from one subject to another, because of the investigative attitude, the rationalism (not in a pejorative sense) for which nothing is holy. For the total negation of all ‘fundamentalism’ & dogmatism. But I don’t know. I admire these books, I read them with full interest — but sometimes I began to long for more thoroughness, less humourful wit. A theme or idea that is more fully represented, and not just dismissed after a while with a funny remark. Hmm, more, euhh, seriousness?

Just a personal remark re Diderot. As if it matters.

Could one draw a parallel between Diderot’s age (full of changes, also in the ‘writing industry’) & this internet age? A parallel between Diderot’s way of writing & style and the sort of wittyness that works in blogs? Writing in a conversational manner about anything that comes to mind — new music, theatre, acting, sincerity, politics, earning one’s living, metaphors, philosophers…

Hmm, maybe not.

(Maybe it’s just that Diderot doesn’t fit my sense of humour. My sense of humour tends to the banal — hence my love for Joyce?)