Another frustrating incomplete article

I may never finish writing this article, but here's an initial draft.

Infinite louda

I agree with Adam-Mars Jones when he says, in his review of James Wood's The Book Against God, that "[...]it is hard to be engaged by a novelist so awkward with figurative language[...]". He quotes this sentence as one of his (expectedly three) examples: "the air slowly labelled her white cheeks with two pink dots." I have a small theory as to how that sentence may have come about, and it assumes the following causal chain of authorial reasoning:

1) The verb `labeled' is inspired, probably spontaneous. At this point the phrase `The air labeled' is in the author's mind. He's probably asking himself: "What did it label?" to which the immediate answer is "her cheeks, of course".

2) The phrase "The air labeled her cheeks" is already encouraging, and needs only something a little more specific, because as it is it seems only puzzling "How can the air `label' anything?" At this point the author feels a conflict between his desperate need to cling to his beautiful and outre verb `labeled' and his awareness of the fact that the reader may not know what he means if he leaves the phrase untouched. This is usually a dangerous place to find oneself, inasmuch as it could lead to a string of frantic additions and deletions that could in turn lead to an abject abandonment of one's subject at the expense of `honing' a single sentence. More often than not what emerges is not only imprecise but also has the feeling of self-consciousness about it. Here Wood, oddly enough, has tried to qualify his airy metaphor with an absurd numeric attention to detail, "The air labeled her cheeks with two pink dots". Why "two"? The sense of relief that Wood no doubt felt at this happy rescue of his valuable sentence must have at least been qualified by his intense literary consciousness, his knowledge of his forbears and how they would have frowned upon this unseemly display of a figurative skill that is more bluster than brawn; must have at least kept him tossing that night.

`The Actors'

My latest female character is 40, married for 15 years, and has a husband that for the most part ignores her. Mrs. Ghosh (the character in question) is the secretary and part-time store manager of Selbeck Inc., and in the course of her routine has cause to meet with and speak to Jonathan Sweetwater, former bartender and current Selbeck Inc. employee. Their interactions, as seen (in third-person) through both Mr. Sweetwater's and Mrs. Ghosh's eyes, will form the first part of The Actors (the title of the novel that I will attempt to begin over the next several months). I'm of course not very sure as to where The Actors will take me; this is my third novelistic attempt in as many years, and none of the previous ones have amounted to much if measured purely by word-count. In fact, much of why I'm writing this novel has little to do with my being convinced that I have something substantial to say. I find myself gripped by a consternation nowadays, a certainty that my lack of novelistic output is a natural result of an inability to express myself rather than (as I would like to hold) a reluctance, and my beginning the The Actors is more directly correlated with an immediate need to dispel such a consternation than (say) with a burst of meaningful creativity that is supposed to propel such fictive pieces.

I have some goals for this novel. I want to finish writing a second 100000-word-ish novel with a greater consciousness of structure than was evident in my first. I want to mime a free indirect speech style that does not degenerate into character slang at any point (thereby drawing attention to itself) but instead is content to stay in the background, gently framing characters using their emotional adjectives (and adverbs, which, contrary to my unformed notions in the past, can be very important esp. when they are owned by a character) rather than the author's. I want to leave behind, for now, the obsession with the unreliable narrator that gripped me all of 2008, until I understand exactly what kinds of unreliability are interesting (as opposed to simply gaudy). Above all, I want to see if I can tell a story that draws my characters more sharply than any combination of descriptions, psychological or otherwise, can do. The last will possibly be the greatest challenge, because it seems more a structural aspect than a purely metaphysical one, bringing about questions of economy (like `is this paragraph appropriate here? or at all?') and organization (`What chronology is best?' `How will the present tense be used?') that are strictly external to any conception of character. I have, needless to say, ignored structure so thoroughly in my survey, these past many years, of modern literature and its precedents, that to now internalize its concepts seems daunting.

Speaking of metaphysical questions: I have one such here that I have been unable to articulate for sometime now: On a plane of pure consciousness, do males differ fundamentally from females? That is to say: it is unquestionable that both genders are capable of feeling, but is it possible that we not only feel about different things (like men about sports and women about jewelry) but feel about the things we feel about in different ways? (I can't explain this any better, I'm afraid. Perhaps a discussion would help. :) )

I rarely put up links for their own sake, but this one made me laugh out loud (for the first time in a few weeks).

Contains, as it surely must, several rather revelatory reflections about the nature of mathematical collaboration and approval. The author, William Thurston, is a Fields Medallist and Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.

The elementary rule of three

From The Economist, March 14th, 2009:

For over an hour, Chiranjeevi, or “the immortal one”, as the actor has been known for three decades, addressed the multitude on March 10th. Except for one dreadful hush, the clamour of an estimated 400,000 was unceasing. When he attacked the corruption of AP’s ruling Congress party, it rose. When he accused the state’s main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of neglecting the poor during its previous rule, it soared. When Chiranjeevi promised to scatter both parties in AP’s state election and India’s general one, which will be held simultaneously next month, the din was tremendous.

From Terry Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

From William Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics:

This inner motivation might lead us to think that we do mathematics solely for its own sake. That’s not true: the social setting is extremely important. We are inspired by other people, we seek appreciation by other people, and we like to help other people solve their mathematical problems.

Eagleton on Spivak

Like most questions of style, Spivak’s obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites (‘Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas’), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins ‘At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise’ combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak’s language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

Why not feel?