m a rk s us s m an

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Shorthand became a way to build, solidify, and perfect a kind of professionalized middle-class virtue. Shorthand allowed its practitioners to improve themselves economically (through increased employment opportunities), mentally (through enhanced literacy), and in some sense spiritually through what was for some a nearly monomaniacal dedication to craft and the transubstantiation of the spoken word to the written word.

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Laughing At/With Nathanael West

I've been writing something about Nathanael West, and I had occasion to go back and look at a conference paper I presented on The Day of the Locust from about six years ago. It's not very good! But I did find some paragraphs I kind of like.

“It was another joke. Calvin and Hink slapped their thighs and laughed, but Tod could see that they were waiting for something else. Earle, suddenly, without even shifting his weight, shot his foot out and kicked Calvin solidly in the rump. This was the real point of the joke. They were delighted by Earle’s fury. Tod also laughed. The way Earle had gone from apathy to action without the usual transition was funny. The seriousness of his violence was even funnier” (111).

Tod, and therefore the reader, has no access to the motivations behind Calvin and Hink’s provocation of Earle. But “the real point of the joke” is not the joke itself – it’s the violence the joke induces. The violence and the transition-less passage from joke to violence is the source of the laughter. Moreover, because “the seriousness of the violence” paradoxically amplifies its humor, the line between humor and violence is, for all intents and purposes, erased. Violence is only funny when it is real violence, as opposed to slapstick or comedic violence. For Calvin and Hink, the humor is funny and meant to be funny. But as readers, we’re left with a comedic moment that isn’t meant to be funny. The staging of comedy is pretty grim in itself.

This performative contradiction is the engine of West’s book, both in its status as a black comedy and as a critique of what West sees as a particularly American mode of violence. In an oft-quoted letter to Malcolm Cowley, West notes that humor is bound inextricably to every facet of his writing. “I’m a comic writer,” writes West, “and it seems impossible for me to handle any of the ‘big things’ without seeming to laugh or at least smile … I tried to describe a meeting of the Anti-Nazi League, but it didn’t fit and I had to substitute a whorehouse and a dirty film. The terrible sincere struggle of the league came out comic when I touched it and even libelous” (Veitch ii). In the Shoop episode, then, the collapse of the violent and the comic represents a serious issue for West’s practice as a writer. For him, this issue is cultural.

I guess I've been thinking about The Day of the Locust and laughter not just because I'm writing about it again, but because, in the time between when I originally wrote the conference paper (early 2009) and now, comedy's become, I don't know, more "important feeling." West's sense of the comic and the violent are nearly indistinguishable from each other -- he thought that Americans required ever-more extreme forms of entertainment in order to satisfy the desires that mass culture imbued in us. And eventually, the only thing that satisfies the need is not just comic representations of violence, but actual violence.

You could make the argument that he was right, and that the real and figurative violence on reality shows just fulfills his fictional vision. But we're also in the middle, I think, of a kind of comic elevation. I'm hardly the first person to say this. Certain stand-up comics (Louis C.K., Hannibal Buress, Maria Bamford, Marc Maron I guess) are looked at more as artists than entertainers, things like "Too Many Cooks" exist and rack up millions of YouTube views, people seem more generally willing to extend aesthetic leeway to comedians, comedies, comics, etc. So if West was right about the way that, under the conditions of mass culture, violence and comedy have become indistinguishable from each other, he didn't predict (couldn't have been expected to predict) the way that the comic has, in some ways, elevated itself above the expectations people have of mass culture.

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We reserve the term “automatic writing” for the writing experiments conducted by psychologists like William James, the Society for Psychical Research, and the surrealists — “unwilled” writing that ostensibly gives the writer access to obscure regions of their selves. But there is a kind of automaticity to transcription as well, one that bypasses the will in a more total and impersonal way.

Sentences cut from a presentation I'm currently writing  

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By restricting oneself to transcendental conditions lying outside all nonhuman reality, by walling off concrete things and their powers from the ontologist's playroom, philoso­phy has withered from a theory of reality into a theory of human access to reality. And phenomenology is no less guilty of this step than Anglo­ American philosophy of language. Both schools approach the things them­ selves with a series of dithering preliminary steps that never seems to end.

Graham Harman, Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things

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Knowledge workers would be the heroes of a coming new society, an "information society," in which they were the chief "symbolic analysts," all the the while rehabbing the urban core as a "creative class." The tone of all values being revalued ... would become ever more strident and unhinged. Meanwhile, office designers worked patiently at realizing the material conditions for the utopia, when it arrived, so that it might feel at home. Perhaps creating the right space for knowledge work, the story went, would finally make it a real thing.

Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Office 

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On "My Struggle: Boyhood Island," which explores the pains & pleasures of boyhood. You can’t choose your parents, as they say, and that means everything.

I wrote about the new Karl Knausgaard volume. The review is long, but so is the book.  

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The idea of a manly, ripped clerk has its contemporary counterpart in the health-crazed office workers of today, whose biceps stiffen and shift like packs through their shirtsleeves, though they rarely lift more than boxes of files of a planter of ferns at their workplace. The office--and the fears of physical degradation it engendered--might in fact have given birth to our modern idea of the gym.

Nikil Saval, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace

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Maybe it's time to start using tumblr more? 

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The traditional terminology, white flight, implies a kind of natural expression of preference. In fact, white flight was a triumph of social engineering, orchestrated by the shared racist presumptions of America’s public and private sectors. For should any nonracist white families decide that integration might not be so bad as a matter of principle or practicality, they still had to contend with the hard facts of American housing policy: When the mid-20th-century white homeowner claimed that the presence of a Bill and Daisy Myers decreased his property value, he was not merely engaging in racist dogma—he was accurately observing the impact of federal policy on market prices. Redlining destroyed the possibility of investment wherever black people lived.

The Case for Reparations - The Atlantic

[marksussman-blog]

This stupid Esurance commercial has made its way into the article I'm writing about Zora Neale Hurston, instutionality, and writing. On the one hand, the commercial is just another repeat of the hacky notion that old people don't understand technology and that is funny. On the other, though, the way it goes about illustrating this tired joke is through a concept that media scholars J. David Bolter and Richard Grusin have called "remediation."  The commercial's joke is about the way that Beatrice doesn't understand that the Facebook "wall" is actually metaphorical wall, not a literal wall. Her failure to understand the metaphorical nature of our way of speaking about new media leads her to misunderstand the entire logic of information dissemination on the web. In other words, she doesn't just "not get" digital media, she doesn't get the difference between the digital and the analog (a form of catachretic misunderstanding so widespread we could just nickname it Stevens's Fallacy, wherein, in an attempt to find a metaphor appropriate for a process you don't actually understand, you pick the wrong one and thereby misconstrue the nature of the process itself). 

So what does remediation have to do with Zora Neale Hurston? A lot, I'm thinking. Hopefully I'll post more about it soon. 

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The television viewer cannot write anything on the screen of his set. he has been dislodged from the product; he plays no role in its apparition. he loses his author's rights and becomes, or so it seems, a pure receiver, the mirror of a multiform and narcissistic actor. Pushed to the limit, he would be the image of appliances that no longer need him in order to produce themselves, the reproduction of a "celibate machine." In reality, a rationalized, expansionist, centralized, spectacular and clamorous production is confronted by an entirely different kind of production, called "consumption" and characterized by its ruses, its fragmentation (the result of circumstances), its poaching, its clandestine nature, its tireless but quiet activity, in short by its quasi-invisibility, since it shows itself not in its own products (where would it place them?) but in an art of using those imposed on it.

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life

De Certeau both forecasting the development of the thinkpiece economy and failing to recognize that even the "art" of consumption would quickly become a commodity in its own right.  

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Zadie Smith in the NYRB. Oof.

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The responsibility of adjunct intellectuals | Al Jazeera America

Academics write for the public more than ever before but are hampered by precariousness of their profession

Yuuuuuup. 

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This year, I'm making a simple resolution, much like my friend's. I encourage you also to consider it. I won't go so far as to advocate critical anarchy or suggest that we all stop debating why some cultural endeavors succeed while others fall short. (For starts, that's way too fun.) But I have decided this, as a start: I'm going to banish the word "should" from my cultural vocabulary. As in: I really should read that new prizewinning novel. Or: You should go see "Her." Or: I've never finished "Moby-Dick," but I really should.

All of the Pleasure. None of the Guilt. - NYTimes.com Sternbergh is really giving short shrift to guilt here. Some books are more difficult than others. Moby-Dick is more difficult than most. Sometimes it's totally enthralling, but there are long stretches where it is pretty boring. But we read Moby-Dick with the expectation that the enthralling bits will help us understand the nature of the boring bits. Let's put aside the fact that I'm ostensibly a specialist in American literature and therefore pretty much required by my chosen profession to have read Moby-Dick. If I hadn't felt guilty about not having read it, I might never have made it past the first 60 pages. And I'm glad I have. Boredom, revulsion, guilt: these are part of the struggle of reading, viewing, whatevering art. They are part of the texture of our engagement with culture, and often enough they mediate our ambitions. One other small note about the piece. Defending the idea that discarding "should" is the same as abandoning cultural hierarchy, Sternbergh also writes, "Once the old labels are discarded, you're forced to advocate for what you love -- whether it's a Korean revenge film or the novel of Jane Austen." "Defending what you love" is pretty sad way to think about critical debate, or the practice of criticism itself. Criticism is not just, or ought not to be, just the defense or critique of taste.

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The minute I get to be governor of California, I mean to get me an over-sized plane and a spirit-level and fix this state so it can be looked at without rearing back. EPIC nothing! LEVEL! Level California! And I do mean L E V E L !!!!

Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

Hurston as earthwork artist.

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Marianne Hirsch on Israel-Palestine at MLA 2014.