Been getting quite a few rejections lately, which is alright. I'm pretty sure it builds character. I sent out a load of submissions at the end of the semester that I'm still waiting to hear back on. Haven't been writing or editing daily as much as I should be. Damn being home, it's so great/lethargic. I think being at Syracuse is better for my productivity. There's just a greater sense of urgency about getting stuff done, both schoolwise and funwise. At home, I just want to walk around in the woods or vegetate.
Wandering around in the woods for a while is a great thing to do after finishing a book. If you've never done it, try sometime. Helps to create equilibrium, I think, balancing the mental voyage with a physical one. Bonus points if the book itself involves wandering and/or the woods and nature, etc. McCarthy is good for this.
My radio show, which has been in the works for a while, will initialize pretty soon, either at the end of this month or the beginning of next month. There'll be more word on that once the official times and dates are figured out, but I've been spending many hours getting together a tentative programming schedule for the spring, and it looks pretty sweet. I'm kind of anxious but mostly excited to see how it'll play out, and I'm hopeful that it will work in the creative interests of everyone involved with it.
More on that soon.
I started
Hyperion by Dan Simmons the other day, which felt kind of typical sci-fi-ish at the very beginning, but grew into something surprising and entertaining a little ways in. It's not as language-oriented as all the other stuff I've been reading lately, which is alright, I think its important to of cleanse your mental reading-palate book by book so you're not careening headfirst through a clusterfuck of language that puts you at risk of burning out your literary fuse. Kind of like how they serve a palate-cleansing dish at fancy dinners. The same thing goes for books.
Finished Infinite Jest a few weeks ago. Damn,
The most rewarding part of Infinite Jest, after a month and a half of working through it, was the moment right after I read the last sentence and I sat and just stared at my fireplace for about half an hour, semi-catatonic with the sensation of having just finished a very long, exciting voyage that had stranded me at an unfamiliar location that was unsettling and astounding at the same time.
I would compare my state of mind after finishing Infinite Jest to the face that Dave from 2001 makes after traveling BEYOND THE INFINITE. (no bad pun intended).
My dad told me something hilarious after watching
Inglourious Basterds for the second time. He had watched it on his laptop, with a media player that, unknown to him then, could alter the speed of the video playback. He told me he had loved the ending after the first time he watched it, but the second time, he wasn't as impressed and was confused – because the ending played at its normal speed. As it turned out, he had accidentally set the playback speed to half its normal rate during the climax of the movie. Everything that happened, from the theater scene until the end of the film, happened at half the speed it was meant to happen. The building burned down in slow motion. All character dialogue was completely incomprehensible in its comically monster-like lowness. He said that at the time, he had seriously thought Tarantino had made the ballsy choice to render the entire ending sequence of his film in slow motion. It wasn't until he watched it a second time that he realized he had seen it wrong. Guess which ending he was more blown away by.
He told me he had known, even before the ending had happened, that he would find the finale amazing. The combination of critics talking about the ending, friends and colleagues talking about how great it was, and hell, just the enjoyable buildup of the movie itself, created a scenario: He would not simply enjoy the ending – he would refuse to let himself be disappointed by it. How many times have you read something by an author you're enjoyed before and given him benefit-of-the doubt for doing something that you would mock and criticize any other author for doing? There's really no such thing as uniquely individual taste, because everyone's taste is somehow influenced by outside forces, and while the things we love or hate do partially come from our own inner being, they are also just as much, if not more, influenced by the outside environmental factors that shape our tastes as well as our person in general.
All this made me think pretty intensely about books and movie I had been blown away by, but more importantly, things that I had been told in advance I would be blown away by, where there was maybe some subconscious incentive to be blown away sheerly because of the recommendation. This tends to be a pretty universal issue for anyone - the issue of how much of your taste is really your own individual taste, and how much of it is influenced by cultural tips that have potential to hotwire the way you come to be wowed by something.
This is especially easy to see in the information age, where an infinite sprawl of criticism sites, blogs, and all manner of arts journals have the potential to create tons of micro-niches in which any recommendation will be heeded by its audience as the absolute truth. Look at the latest series of albums that Pitchfork Media is harking as the Best New Music, then look at the Itunes page for each of those albums. If Pitchfork is recommending the most po-thuggin' hip-hop release alongside the whiniest indie-pop album, then iTunes will recommend the two albums alongside each other as if they shared an identical genre, all because a dedicated readership has aligned their own taste with anything Pitchfork recommends. We're all able to relate to this pattern in some way, and pretty much everyone is guilty of liking something largely because we were told to like it, or because we heard that we would like it. That's not to say we're all mindless sheep, we're just people, and in varying degrees, people can be influenced, some easier than others.
Pierre Bourdieu talksa bout all this on this in his essay The Aristocracy of Culture, talking about the role that taste plays in 'cultural capital,' that the discerning sensibility that a person acquires in distinguishing between 'good and bad art' is almost entirely based around environmental factors, and that class and the economic conditions of one's upbringing are perhaps the greatest influential factors on the types of taste a person acquires. The difference between your well-to-do friend making a thoughtful comment on the novel he just read and the maintenance guy telling you about the fine-ass titties he saw in
Titanic has very little to do with a person's own personal preference, but rather with the conditions that created that preference.
If you find this interesting, I highly recommend reading the Aristocracy of Culture in its entirety. The translated prose is mighty dense and kind of hard to slog through at times, but it's worth it for the points Bourdieu makes. Hey, maybe you're like me and enjoy the challenge of a good slog.
Getting back to Infinite Jest now. Parts of the book hit me on a particularly personal level because I could relate to the situation of going to the same school that your family ran – my dad was head of the english dept. at my high school. There were a few points where I really connected with Hal because of that. But the fact that I had been born into a family in which this situation existed was completely beyond my control – hence, an outside factor that affected how I related to the work. Not to mention, being born into a family that's inherently prone to literature-devouring was also key to enjoying the book.
The factors that influence how you 'get into' something, how one particular thing piques your interests or how you discover what you enjoy doing, are owed in part to your own actions, temperament, etc. but they are also outside your control in a lot of ways. Has anyone, from childhood, consciously sought out a particular thing that will largely inspire the direction of what you do in life? Have you ever sat down and thought, “I am going find a random catalyst of an event that will unexpectedly inspire me to do things and pursue a thread of life I would be completely ignorant of otherwise?” Sure, you can consciously put yourself in a setting that may affect an aspect of your person, but who knows what completely random turn of events you may be missing by doing that? What bag of money falling from the sky did Thoreau dodge by going to write Walden out in the middle of nowhere?
This probably isn't the most original subject to post about, but hey, it's the information age. I'm also making up for all the posting I haven't been doing lately.
