et cetera

Two quotes from an article about a secondhand bookstore in Kansas City which is burning books in protest at the decline of the industry. The quotes are from the two owners of the store.

“This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,” Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

“There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books,” Leathem said.

Now is as good a time as ever to mention that subscriptions to Harper’s now include access to the entire history of the magazine in beautiful digital facsimile. This includes the interesting string of articles on the decline of literary culture starting with the despicable fame-craving pleas of Jonathan Franzen, continued by the avant-hipster cries for a worn-out experimentalism of Ben Marcus, and capped by the sublime classicism of Cynthia Ozick. Indeed, you might read the overblown pieces by the younger men in contrast to the measured wisdom of the older woman as exemplifying the very decline all pieces ostensibly address.

At one point, Leslie Shatz, the sound designer, described Mailer’s perfectionist quest to capture the sound of a punch in the face. “Norman said, ‘The sounds of punches in movies are all phony,’ ” Shatz recalled. “He wanted me to record his own punches. He was a boxer, of course. So we were in my cutting room with a portable digital recorder, and I remember thinking at the time, I’m watching Norman Mailer hit himself and I’m not stopping him. He hit himself at least twenty times—in the face and the chest—until we finally got it right. I saved that sound effect, and I’ve used it in about twenty movies since. I always tell other directors, ‘You hear that? That’s Norman Mailer punching himself. He’s in your movie.’ ”

Mark Singer, “Tough Guy“, in The New Yorker, 21 May 2007.

On a day off, I am strolling around the vast internetwork, looking and listening. I feel sorrow on finding that the wonderful guitar player Rod Poole was killed in his adopted home of Los Angeles last week. I have been listening to his masterpiece The Death Adder on and off since it was posted at one of my favourite music weblogs towards the end of last year. It is an incredible piece of music, a 45-minute long improvisation on solo guitar with just intonation. It is difficult to believe that it really was improvised, given the structural complexity of the piece. There is something so calming about the tuning. It feels elemental, Pythagorean. One biography of Poole now says that he was “assassinated”. It is hard not to feel that way when someone who made such beautiful music is killed by a stranger, in a parking lot, after an argument about a collision that did not occur. Looking back at the posting of that piece of music, I notice that Greg Davis also downloaded the piece, and I begin to read back through some of his weblog. Last year Greg performed John Cage’s spoken word Muoyce (1983), and curious to know more, I search for some more information. Google provides a lovely result—the first thing it asks is “Did you mean: music”?. I am sure Cage would have enjoyed that. Reading about just intonation reminds me to listen again to La Monte Young’s The Well Tuned-Piano, which reminds me in turn of the beautifully typeset Ubuweb edition of Young’s Selected Writings, which concludes with this poem–

The Large Hadron Collider

Some Search Phrases That Have Landed People Here

• observing people at bus stops
• develop a theory
• i paralleli!
• problems with garbage
• how do you get underwater lights to automatically dim
• speculation in philosophy
• poems about sex and skateboarding
• stop reading and start writing
• desolate
• “weakness in the legs” and “balance” and “slurred speech”
• money falling