/via perpenduum

“hear the capital letters. walk the capital letters, motherfucker.”

/via this isn’t happiness.

/via This isn’t happiness.

/via imjustcreative

AFTER ALL MY JIBES against the decontextualizing power of the search engine, it is to Google I go this morning, hoping to track down the source of Nabokov’s phrase “aesthetic bliss.” And indeed, five or six entries locate the quote from his afterword to Lolita: “For me a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss.” The phrase has been in my mind in the last few days, following my reading of Netherland and my attempts to account for the value of that particular kind of reading experience. “Aesthetic bliss” is one kind of answer—the effects on me of certain prose styles, like Nabokov’s own, or John Banville’s, or Virginia Woolf’s. But the phrase sounds trivial; it sounds like mere connoisseurship, a self-congratulatory mandarin business. It’s far more complicated than any mere swooning over pretty words and phrases. Aesthetic bliss. To me it expresses the delight that comes when the materials, the words, are working at their highest pitch, bringing sensation to life in the mind.

Sensation . . . I can imagine an objection, a voice telling me that sensation itself is trivial, not as important as idea, as theme. As if there is a hierarchy with ideas on one level, and psychological insights, and far below the re-creation of the textures of experience and inward process. I obviously don’t agree, nor does my reading sensibility, which, as I’ve confessed already, does not go seeking after themes and usually forgets them soon after taking them in. What thou lovest well remains—and for me it is language in this condition of alert, sensuous precision, language that does not forget the world of nouns. I’m thinking that one part of this project will need to be a close reading of and reflection upon certain passages that are for me certifiably great. I have to find occasion to ask—and examine closely—what happens when a string of words gets something exactly right.

…

Concentration is no longer a given; it has to be strategized, fought for. But when it is achieved it can yield experiences that are more rewarding for being singular and hard-won. To achieve deep focus nowadays is also to have struck a blow against the dissipation of self; it is to have strengthened one’s essential position.

Birkerts has his occasional moments of grumpy-old-man mode in trying to defend the readerly habits of his profession against the jackals roaming the web. No need I think.

Modern media is still incredibly unskilled at prompting and rewarding extended periods of concentration. That doesn’t mean media makers don’t try to accomplish this, it just means that even the best contemporary media manages only to impress its demanding audiences for a few minutes.

In today’s media environment that we flit from item to item; we are often judged socially by the speed, precision, and humor of the connections we can (re)produce. The skills of concentration have shifted, however, is concentration any less essential now than fifty or two hundred fifty years ago?

While readers and writers of novels have had hundreds of years to perfect (and vary) their techniques, we consumers and producers of contemporary media are making rapid strides, but still lag far behind. Despite the vast differences in tools and techniques, the goals remain similar: to focus, reward, and transform concentration, and thereby, the known limits of thought, imagination, and feeling.

Imagine, however, an argument proceeding the opposite direction. How might Birkerts defend—against a monk or scholar of the sixteenth century, accustomed to long periods of study, thought, and contemplation—the powers of a 400 page (or less) story to stoke and reward the abilities of human concentration?

To take another example, Goethe might well have thrived in our era, and would likely have challenged us and contributed to our society similarly as he did to his own culture. His own age saw many radically explosive transformations of media, politics, thought, art, and human self-identification. For Goethe, and for his friend and colleague Friedrich Schiller, aesthetic bliss was defined as a fleeting experience, often occurring by surprise. Bliss was composed of paradox and emotional complexity (and even instability), available because of, not despite, the chaos and change present in the experienced world. For it is chaos and creative transformation, not the precious contemplation of treasured objects, which make possible the world and all those who live in it.

If anything, Birkerts’s concerns are much too “Presbyterian” and ignore the bulk of thinking and writing of the early Romantics, who revolutionized the imagination and its abilities to connect creative observation with aesthetic bliss.

Audio of Billie Holiday at YouTube

/via the Guardian’s Clip joint

By the time they had lived seven years in the little house on Greentree Avenue in Westport, Connecticut, they both detested it. There were many reasons, none of them logical, but all of them compelling. For one thing, the house had a kind of evil genius for displaying proof of their weaknesses and wiping out all traces of their strengths.

—Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (1955)

/via The Footnotes of Mad Men

/via Tablet Magazine

“Dude” is a magnificent specimen for discussing language change in general, because its meaning has shifted and shimmied a ton in a relatively short period of time.

The above piece points to a 2004 article and supplementary materials (including the brilliantly named “Dude Corpus Coding Sheet”) by Pitt professor Scott F. Kiesling.

Dude indexes a stance of effortlessness (or laziness, depending on the perspective of the hearer), largely because of its origins in the “surfer” and “druggie” subcultures in which such stances are valued. The reason young men use this term is precisely that dude indexes this stance of cool solidarity. Such a stance is especially valuable for young men as they navigate cultural Discourses of young masculinity, which simultaneously demand masculine solidarity, strict heterosexuality, and non-conformity.

In Boulder I hear “homey” and “bro” fairly regularly (not directed at me). I find both words awful (though not as awful as the Bay Area’s “hella”) and don’t recommend their use by sentient folk. With the right amount of Lebowski irony, however, “dude” can at times be precisely the right word to use.

Mark Tansey

/via Design You Trust

Katy Homans / Christian Boltanski

Der Nister (Pinchas Kahanovitch, 1884-1950) wrote a remarkable book, with many sparkling passages, such as:

And Moshe continued to object.

Had a stranger been a witness to this discussion, he would have seen—he would have imagined—that he saw before him a tall ladder and two people mounting it from different sides. One climbed calmly, easily, step after step, and achieved his ascent without the least difficulty. On the contrary, his very climbing seemed to lend dexterity to his feet, enabling him to climb father, higher; while the second man, on the other side, who wished to follow the first, was afraid of heights. As he mounted, he kept his eyes fixed on the other climber’s feet. He studied them, imitated them. And yet he could not profit by their instruction because the other one’s climbing pace was not his pace. And besides he was afraid of heights. They made him dizzy.

The end of it all was that when Moshe had used up all of his accumulated knowledge and laid it all out on the table, he grew weary seeing that despite his struggles there was no sign that he had made any sort of structure at all; while his antagonist seemed to be standing on a high fortress that had been slowly and surely constructed, and from whose height he looked down at his adversary as if he were looking at a child armed with worthless, childish means, who was getting himself ready to do battle with an adult. (p. 96)

This scene sets the stage and tone (strange power vs. unexpected helplessness) for what follows. At this stage the reader is unsure which of the men (if either) to be aligned with, and in the pages that follows remains (along with the other characters) as much caught off guard by Moshe’s diminishing powers as by Luzi’s certainties.

Translation Copyright © 1987 Leonard Wolf.