et cetera

There is an excellent article in the latest Harper’s by Alec Wilkinson, a veteran staff writer at The New Yorker, describing the work of a husband and wife team who spend nearly two hundred days a year travelling America with a boat to search for the drowned. This is Wilkinson’s first piece published with Harper’s, and I like very much that the brief biographical note appended to the article does not mention The New Yorker.

An aside.
One of these days I will write a long essay here about Harper’s and The New Yorker, explaining why Harper’s is clearly superior, flawed though it is by the omnipresence of Lewis Lapham’s imperious ego.

Another aside.
Lazily entering the phrase “new yorker” into my browser search bar just now, I forgot that I had it temporarily pointed at the OED, and discovered that the second possible disambiguation there is:

B. adj. (attrib.). Found in or characteristic of the magazine The New Yorker (founded 1925), noted for its urbane and sharply observed view of American life.

Followed by the following quotes:

1934 Fortune Aug. 75/1 No advertising man is believed, by the editors, ever to have understood a New Yorker joke. 1948 Hearst’s Internat. May 175/1 Literary critics and editors of other magazines are always referring to ‘The New Yorker style of writing’. 1959 Times Lit. Suppl. 2 Jan. 4/2 He surveys the established Old Guard.., the new ‘realists’.., the New Yorker School. 1992 New Yorker 3 Feb. 65/1 (advt.) The design is distinguished and very New Yorker: Eustace Tilley-patterned endpapers.

(A search for “harper’s” results in the suggestion to try harping, vbl. n.)

End asides.
One of the most remarkable sections of the article is a passage briefly enumerating the stories of the bodies this couple has found. The following is a small part of this:

Chad and EJ over at Three Percent have been hyping the Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño to the point where I have been unable to resist going off to read something about his work. Most interesting to this unreconstructed lover of massive novels is news that his giant, posthumously published novel 2666 is about to appear. Together with Jonathan Littel’s Les Bienveillantes, this must be one of the most anticipated translations of the year.

An excellent introductory essay on Bolaño’s work is Natasha Wimmer, “Roberto Bolaño and The Savage Detectives” [PDF], from which the following quotes are extracted.

According to his mother, he taught himself to read when he was only three, and he wrote his first story when he was seven, about some chickens who, to the consternation of the other barnyard animals, fall in love with a duck.

Together with his best friend, Mario Santiago, the Chilean poet Bruno Montane, and their few dozen followers, Bolaño disrupted the readings of poets whom they held in contempt, shouting out their own poems.

“The scorn I felt for so-called official literature was enormous, though only a little greater than that I felt for marginal literature”.

“Listen: I don’t have anything against autobiographies, so long as the people writing them have penises that are at least a foot long when erect”.

Links to reviews of The Savage Detectives are available over at Complete Review. I think I’m going to have to read this once I am done (finally) with The Recognitions and Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Hail the summer. More here when.

Some favourite recent searches that have landed people here:

• whirled music from corrugated tube
• this thought is not mine
• why sport?
• petty anonymous writer
• anonymuncule
• first chicken

Last night I was very fortunate to see a performance of work by Ha-Yang Kim at Roulette.

The first piece, Metasmatter, was performed by a mixed sextet comprised of piano, flute, violin, cello, bass clarinet and percussion. This is a wonderful eclectic piece clearly influenced by jazz and Balinese music, and was performed with much exuberance by the assembled musicians.

The second piece, not listed on the original program for the evening, was a performance by Kim and percussionist Nathan Davis, who have frequently worked together as the duo Odd Appetite. They played Sotong, a small and delicate work of Kim’s, originally scored for theatre, involving a loop of cello recorded and repeated through guitar pedals coupled with delicate melodic counterpoint on cello and metal percussion instruments.

Sotong
[audio:http://www.oddappetite.org/audio/Sotong.32.bounce.mp3]

The third piece was a debut performance of Threadsuns played by the Flux Quartet, who announced Kim as their newest member. This was easily the highlight of the evening. The piece is in three movements. The first movement is a bracing, discordant rush of halting themes that reminded me of the filmic soundscapes—Decasia and Gotham in particular—of composer Michael Gordon—which indicates something of the magnitude of the sound the quartet was able to generate. The second movement is a restrained and subtle exploration of microtones and harmonics, a frail echo of the first movement, as if we were standing amid the final ripples of a wave smashed against the walls. The third movement is a gradual extraction of the melodic core of the themes hinted at in the earlier movements, culminating in a beautiful unrestrained outpour of sound ascending to the climax. Like all of the work performed, the piece as a whole exhibited a pure blend of traditional Eastern and contemporary Western musical influences, and a perfect balance of traditional and experimental lines of musical heritage. In introducing the piece Ha-Yang described the origin of the title in Paul Célan’s Fadensonnen, and how the piece represented for her a vision of the sun as a symbol of wholeness in contrast to the fractured nature of the contemporary world—and it is natural to superimpose the image of a fitfully rising sun over the work as a whole.

(William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 700).

Kim’s debut record Ama was released last year by John Zorn’s Tzadik label, and we can only wait patiently for a recording of Threadsuns.

Somehow it slipped through my radar, but the monthly music bible otherwise known as Wire underwent a recent website renovation that included the launch of the weblog Mire. It’s just what you would expect from a magazine with the self-described intent to “wage war on the mundane and the mediocre”—in the first few months there have been posts on the degeneration of the vocabulary of art criticism, a link to a rare Dopplereffekt live set, and the only accurate review of the new Portishead album I have seen anywhere online (there’s a similarly scathing companion piece in the latest print issue), to wit:

As for the new album, it screams out lack of ideas: devoid of the vinyl crackle that might have given it some relation to the ‘hauntological now’ of Burial or Philip Jeck, I can only hear it as clapped out coffee table miserabilism ten years past its sell-by date.

As they say at Boomkat, who gave the album a characteristically hyperbolic review (they have to sell records after all): Essential.

The long bare corridor was brightly lighted and empty, until a young man with a thin face, a slightly crooked nose, and a weary expression which embraced his whole appearance, passed them. —There, there’s the guy who was working on this, he’s one of the writers. Hey, Willie… But the weary figure went on. He was carrying two books, one titled, The Destruction of the Philosophers, the other, The Destruction of the Destruction. He rounded a corner away from them muttering, —Christ. Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ, Christ.

William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 734.

Willie, a figure glimpsed on the fringes througout the novel, is widely interpreted to directly represent Gaddis himself. This is the last appearance he makes. The corridor is in a television studio, and the project referred to is a television series called The Lives of the Saints. The books he is carrying are English translations of Tahāfut al-Falāsifa (تهافت الفلاسفة) by Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (ابو حامد محمد ابن محمد الغزالی) and Tahāfut al-Tahāfut (تهافت التهافت) by Abū ‘l-Walīd Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad ibn Rushd (أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد), more frequently translated as The Incoherence of the Philosophers and The Incoherence of the Incoherence respectively.

Christopher J. Knight, William Gaddis, and Tom Smith, “The New York State Writers Institute Tapes: William Gaddis”, in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4, Winter 2001, pp. 667–693.

CM: Gaddis never graduated. Apparently, there was some incident, and he had to leave school.

de K: The story I heard was that he was at the Hygiene Department, being measured or weighed or examined or something. And he was either smashed, or very, very angry about something. Anyway, he jumped out of a second-story window onto the street. And he was, I think, cashiered from the college for that reason. He was very, very depressed and angry, I think, at the time. He didn’t like being in college in the middle of the war.

“Ormonde de Kay talks about William Gaddis in an interview with Charles Monaghan“, The Gaddis Annotations, 24 December 1993.

Benjamin Apthorp Gould, Investigations in the Military and Anthropological Statistics of American Soldiers, Published for the US Sanitary Commission by Hurd and Houghton, New York, 1869, p. 235.

Liane Schmidt, Baudouin Forgeot d’Arc, Gilles Lafargue, Damien Galanaud, Virginie Czernecki, David Grabli, Michael Schüpbach, Andreas Hartmann, Richard Lévy, Bruno Dubois and Mathias Pessiglione. 2008. “Disconnecting force from money: effects of basal ganglia damage on incentive motivation”, in Brain, Vol. 131, No. 5, May 2008, pp. 1303-1310. [DOI]

Abstract. Bilateral basal ganglia lesions have been reported to induce a particular form of apathy, termed auto-activation deficit (AAD), principally defined as a loss of self-driven behaviour that is reversible with external stimulation. We hypothesized that AAD reflects a dysfunction of incentive motivation, a process that translates an expected reward (or goal) into behavioural activation. To investigate this hypothesis, we designed a behavioural paradigm contrasting an instructed (externally driven) task, in which subjects have to produce different levels of force by squeezing a hand grip, to an incentive (self-driven) task, in which subjects can win, depending on their hand grip force, different amounts of money. Skin conductance was simultaneously measured to index affective evaluation of monetary incentives. Thirteen AAD patients with bilateral striato-pallidal lesions were compared to thirteen unmedicated patients with Parkinson’s Disease (PD), which is characterized by striatal dopamine depletion and regularly associated with apathy. AAD patients did not differ from PD patients in terms of grip force response to external instructions or skin conductance response to monetary incentives. However, unlike PD patients, they failed to distinguish between monetary incentives in their grip force. We conclude that bilateral striato-pallidal damage specifically disconnects motor output from affective evaluation of potential rewards.

First Paragraph. In 1981, a 25-year-old businessman became dramatically inactive following encephalopathy caused by a wasp bite. The patient would spend hours lying awake on his bed, asking no questions and expressing no interest in anybody. When stimulated, however, he was able to perform complex activities, such as playing high-level bridge. This was the first description of a syndrome characterized by a lack of self-initiated behaviour with preserved expression of motor and cognitive abilities when externally driven (Laplane et al, 1981). Here, following Laplane and Dubois (2001), we term this syndrome ‘auto-activation deficit’, although further cases received various names, such as ‘athymhormia’, ‘psychic akinesia’ and ‘reversible inertia’ (Luaute and Saladini, 2001; Habib, 2004). Typically, these patients do not complain about their situation and do not feel bored, frustrated or depressed, even if they correctly acknowledge that their behaviour has radically changed. When asked about what they think, they may say that their mind is empty or blank. When receiving good or bad news, they may show appropriate emotional reactions, but without external stimulation they rapidly return to their habitual neutral state. Brain scans have revealed that such a syndrome is due to bilateral lesions of the striato-pallidal complex (Laplane et al, 1989).

A Brief Note on Methodology. Regarding skin conductance as a measure of desire, the authors write that “skin conductance, which has been shown to reflect autonomic sympathetic arousal (Bauer, 1998; Critchley, 2002) [...] is considered in our case to reflect affective evaluation of the monetary incentives”. However, given the coarse nature of the instrument and the existence of a wide range of distinct studies in which it has been taken to measure other psychological variables, we certainly cannot rule out the hypotheses that it reflects in this case the subject reacting not with desire for the monetary “incentives”, but instead with fear, anger, stress, startlement, or sexual arousal. Indeed, who among us has experienced the dull blankness of mind induced by such wasp bites?