De File

As you may have gathered from seeing some of the photos I've been posting lately, I am sorting through files for material that I had set aside or forgotten about. Maybe I'm searching for the place where I lost the thread that will lead my out of the labyrinth. Maybe I'm just trying to impose a sense of order on my "archives", which have truly gotten out of hand in the past half decade of emotional and, to some extent, emotional paralysis. Either way, I hope to get inspiration to resume projects that have been lying dormant, such as the idea of keeping regular notes on the reading I do, whether for pleasure or work (which are really the same thing for me, since I do love what I work on).

I found this entry about a book that profoundly affected me during my second year in Tucson. It's difficult -- and rather painful -- to put myself back in the mental space of that summer, before I had the semester from hell in the fall, which set my professional life on a downward course, and the disillusionment that beset me the following spring. But I remember the novel well enough to know that I can still stand by my words. It has actually been a while since I approached the analysis of literature in this way, since I teach mostly new media these days, so it's good to be reminded that I undertook this task on my own back then, without any pedagogical or professional reason. Anyway, here it is:

Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941)

(New York: Vintage, 1992)


Thursday, July 25, 2002

This was Nabokov’s first book in English. I began reading it last summer as preparation for teaching Pale Fire in my undergrad postmodernism class, but only this week mustered the energy to read the last fifty or so pages.

But I liked it a lot. It’s another one of those faux author books (not unlike Pale Fire, of course) in which the narrator relates his search for information about his recently deceased half-brother, the novelist Sebastian Knight, who was, like the narrator, born and raised in Russia, but emigrated to England and became a writer of beautiful prose in a second language. . . just like Nabokov.

The writing is really beautiful, particularly in the lyrical passages (including those tour de force bits where Nabokov has his narrator “quote” from Knight’s novels). Here’s a nice sentence from early in the novel, picked mostly at random:

“I could perhaps describe the way he walked, or laughed or sneezed, but all that would be no more than sundry bits of cinema-film cut away by scissors and having nothing in common with the essential drama (16).”

These details, in other words, are, if not for the birds, then at least for the cutting-room floor, as the trope goes.

When the narrator looks through the possessions Knight has left behind, he gets a glimpse into his half-brother’s attitude towards language:

Between some legal documents I found a slip of paper on which he had begun to write a story -- there was only one sentence, stopping short but it gave me the opportunity of observing the queer way Sebastian had -- in the process of writing -- of not striking the words which he had replaced by others, so that, for instance, the phrase I encountered ran thus: “As he a heavy A heavy sleeper, Roger Rogerson, old Rogerson bought old Rogers bought, so afraid Being a heavy sleeper, old Rogers was so afraid of missing to-morrows. He was a heavy sleeper. . . ” (37)

The “found” sentence reads almost like Beckett. I really like the way it gives us both insight into Knight’s character and a sense of distance between him and our narrator.

The end of the novel is, of course, much fresher in my mind. I know from reading Nabokov’s later comments that he took a dim view of psychoanalysis. Yet the passage in which the narrator describes the dream he had right before Knight’s death shows a lot of overlap with Freud, though with a pretty sharp turn away from the idea that every part of a dream is laden with massy portent:

I was sitting on a crate or something, and my mother was also in the room, and there were two more persons drinking tea at the table round which we were seated -- a man from my office and his wife, both of whom Sebastian had never known, and who had been placed there by the dream-manager -- just because anybody would do to fill the stage (185)

For Freud, of course, the “dream-manager” would be understood in relation to the unconscious. It’s not clear that we’re dealing with a person or a thing here, but it’s certainly possible to conjecture the latter. The dream, incidentally, goes on for several pages, giving a really good feel for the sudden shifts in narrative and character that occur in dream life.

The conclusion of the book turns on a “reading” of Knight’s last novel, The Doubtful Asphodel, itself about a dying man. The narrator’s dream, coming on the heels of a discussion of the novel, reprises the theme of a last word that promises to reveal everything. The feeling is very similar to the one you get reading the description of being on the verge of revelation in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, particularly the scene with the dying sailor. And, since Pynchon took at least one course with Nabokov at Cornell I believe, it wouldn’t be remiss to read that scene in Pynchon’s novel as a reference to Nabokov.

At any rate, the description of the end of the dream, which parallels the end of Knight’s last novel, has a truly wonderful sentence that captures the essence of the problem:

I know that the common pebble you find in your fist after having thrust your arm shoulder deep into water, where a jewel seemed to gleam on pale sand, is really the coveted gem, though it looks like a pebble as it dries in the sun of the everyday (188)

Water here seems to stand in for the artistic medium in two senses. It changes the color and appearance of the pebble. But the pebble wouldn’t look the same in a plastic cup of water, either. It’s what the water does to the light hitting the pebble, the distance it puts between us and what we desire, that makes the pebble really shine. The abstract implications of the metaphor aside, I just love the way it captures something we’ve all experienced as disappointment and then turns it back into delight.

Saturday, July 27, 2002

When he learns that his brother is near death, the narrator boards an overnight train for Paris. His description of the limbo between sleep and wakefulness is great. I especially liked this part:

The train moved on again. My spine ached, my bones were leaden. I tried to shut my eyes and to doze, but my eyelids were lined with floating designs -- and a tiny bundle of light, rather like an infusoria, swam across, starting again from the same corner. I seemed to recognize in it the shape of the station lamp which had passed by long ago (192)

The part about seeing those designs with eyes closed reminds me of being a little kid, shutting my eyes tightly and looking towards the light in order to see those patterns. The last bit does a great job of capturing the sensation of detecting the passage of lights in series out the train window, while trying to sleep.

The last paragraph of the novel provides some resolution, though I found it a little unsatisfying. But the conclusion definitely typifies Nabokov’s game-playing with the notion of authorship:

I am Sebastian Knight. I feel as if I were impersonating him on a light stage, with the people he knew coming and going… And then the masquerade draws to a close. The bald little prompter shuts his book, as the light fades gently. The end, the end. They all go back to their everyday life (and Clare goes back to her grave) -- but the hero remains, for, try as I may, I cannot get out of my part: Sebastian’s mask clings to my face, the likeness will not be washed off. I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows (203).

It might be a good idea to revisit this novel sometime soon, since I often mention it in conversation and also have a suspicion that it could provide insight into the way I used to view the construction of identity and, to some extent, continue to do so. And it would be nice to rekindle the sense of awe I had when first encountering the book, realizing that it was Nabokov's first novel in English.

I should also note, rereading these reading notes, that the way I read the book, with most of it finished during the summer of 2001 and the rest in the summer of 2002, suggests that, as in other areas of my life, I felt the need to bridge the vast chasm that September 11th, 2001 opened up in my psyche. I was the same person, a year later, but entirely different.

For so long now, I've been holding off making work on my long-term pursuits public, because I can't seem to find a format that suits them or, better said, me. Years ago, I'd hoped to turn this Live Journal into such a place, but it always felt a little too self-indulgent to go on at great length about the same topics over and over and over.

The problem with this reluctance, though, is that it has deprived me of the benefits of what I'll pretentiously and awkwardly call "externalization." When I do post something here, I remember it better and usually end up referring back to my post later on, as I return to the topic.

It could be that Google+ ends up providing that kind of "placeholder" medium in the future, once I get my new phone. Right now, though, because I was inspired by siyeh's reappearance on Live Journal today, I'm going to take tentative steps towards repurposing this mostly fallow blog towards that end.

Anyway, one of the projects I've been working on for a long, long time -- the project that motivated me to start this journal and title it "De File", in fact -- concerns a cluster of related topics: archives, collecting, memorabilia, what I call the "documentary impulse." And this Nick Paumgarten article, in this week's issue of The New Yorker, does a remarkable job of provoking questions about all of them.

Yes, it's about the Grateful Dead, which, with all due respect to my Deadhead friends, have never been a significant preoccupation of mine, musically or otherwise. But I remember, during the brief period when I attended their shows, being fascinated by the people who were set up to record them. I had the distinct impression that I was witnessing the future in that strange sight, even though the equipment was there to keep the past close at hand.

It wasn't simply that the band's openness to being documented in that way, without strings attached, pointed the way towards a world where sharing content, however legally, was paramount. I also recognized, on a crude, pre-theoretical level, that the unique perspective captured by each taper was as important as the concert itself, in the abstract, if not more so. That is, what was being documented wasn't the show from the simulated "God's Ear" of the soundboard, but the experience of listening from a location that could never aspire to the illusion of objectivity.

Here's a telling passage from Paumgarten's piece (which, because of the way The New Yorker configures their site, is easiest to reproduce as an image):

That final sentence, "We like what we like," is one that resonates for me in relation to my other big long-term project, centered on questions of taste. But the take-home point from this paragraph where my interest in the "documentary impulse" is concerned is the way in which a sense of perspective, of distinctly mortal "thereness", is precisely what makes the recording in question special to those who care about it.

There's a wealth of good reading in this piece, if you are anywhere as interested in this kind of thing as a I am, as well as plenty to excite any of you who may be Grateful Dead fans. I don't want this placeholder of a post to reach the length where I will start feeling bad for its fragmentary, hastily assembled character, so I'll bring this entry to a close simply by noting the title I gave it and how that bears on my project. Specifically, I'm always fascinated to ponder the paradox that the urge to capture an experience by recording it, in some fashion, ends up either creating a backlog of archives that bear heavily on the present -- often literally -- because they are stored away and not reexperienced or leads to a situation in which spending time reexperiencing the past through these recordings takes time away from living in the now.

I've written about how time-consuming it is for me to sort through my "archives" many times in the life of this journal. Whether I'm attempting to find room in my overstuffed office at home, rearranging boxes in the garage, or looking for something buried deep in my storage space, it's almost impossible for me not to get more emotionally involved in the process than I should. And, yes, that's why I should radically pare down my possessions, since there's always something bittersweet about handling them and especially so now, when even once-happy recollections can only be viewed through blue-colored glasses.

Since we just watched the extended edition of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on the big screen this past Tuesday, I can't help but think of the scene before Frodo & Co. enter the mines of Moria, when the voice of Saruman comes to Gandalf, reminding him that the dwarves who hollowed out the mountain were greedy and dug too deep. To be sure, the "Balrog" that I awoke in my latest excavations in our garage is outwardly far less fearsome than the one Gandalf must confront in Moria. Yet his whip is just as treacherous, threatening to pull me down into the abyss at any moment.

But since I have yet to muster the courage to turn my back on the past and, indeed, have repeatedly vowed to myself not to start tossing things out wholesale as my mother once did during her mid-life crisis in the late 1980s, I am faced with the far more delicate and laborious task of sorting through all the material I once set aside for posterity, deciding what still merits the designation of "keepsake" and what can now be dispensed with. To make this project even harder, I am also the one who has to make sure that similar decisions are made for Kim and Skylar's possessions in the process.

For all of the force with which Kim insists on keeping her past at a distance these days, she still has plenty of mementos boxed up in the garage and storage space. And Skylar is, if anything, worse than I am about deciding that something of hers can be given or thrown away. Sometimes this extra burden comes with benefits, as it did this afternoon when I was able to bring Kim some of the art she has had stored away since we moved to Tucson. Nevertheless, having to stay mentally strong, not dispensing with an item until I'm absolutely sure that neither I nor they will regret its loss later, is very tiring.

That's why I try to take a break periodically in order to focus on whatever positive outcomes have accompanied the process. Tonight, looking through a stack of small and medium-sized memorabilia, I decided that it was unreasonable to write about each special rediscovery individually -- I'm apparently going through one of my infrequent level-headed phases -- but came up with an alternative plan: to make one of my "scanner collages" featuring some of my favorites:

If you're curious about anything you see here, I'll be happy to try to explain what it is and/or why it matters to me. For starters, everything in the collage dates from the happiest decade of my life, beginning with my year as an exchange student in Germany and ending in 1996, the year when I finally figured out how to write the way I wanted to about culture and, not coincidentally, also the best year Kim and I had as a couple, from the adventures we had backpacking to our wedding and New Orleans honeymoon. In that brief window of time, after her destructive relation to alcohol had diminished and before the pressures of trying to have a child or becoming parents or moving away from the Bay Area had taken their toll on our affection for each other, we were well matched.

While getting ready for my imminent trip to the Bay Area -- I leave for the airport in two hours -- I naturally found myself doing the least practical thing imaginable, namely rifling through my many piles of "special" items I'd meant to scan and write about in search of the double-exposure shots of UC Berkeley's Greek Theater I shot in May, 1989. It actually didn't take that long to get what I wanted. And I secured the added bonus of seeing other photos from that roll, which was taken over one of the most emotionally exhausting stretches of my life. This one condenses the mixture of sadness and joy, fear and promise that marked that period, a confused state of mind that led me to the long-term relationship in which I would go on to spend the better part of my existence:

That was a very odd time for my family and my relation to it, filled with the sort of drama that our Northern European heritage normally filtered out. But what I remember best about the three week stay at my parents' house in Maryland during which this photo was taken is the unbearable heat and humidity -- they still hadn't fixed the air conditioning unit that broke shortly after we'd moved there a decade before -- and the way it drove me to drink beer during the day as my then-partner and I watched coverage of the Tiananmen Square uprising. That and late-night television sessions in the basement featuring, of all things, reruns of the series Hart To Hart.

Today was Skylar's penultimate day at her elementary school and her last with any semblance of routine. It made me think of her second day there, back in 2004, which was her first with any semblance of routine. As long ago as that was, I remember what it felt like to pick her up, happy-as-can-be, from the after-school program and realize that we'd made the right decision in sending her there.

Six years later, I still feel the same way. Despite the extent to which even the best schools in Arizona are underfunded, her elementary provided about as good an experience as it's possible to get while still submitting to the discipline of a large institution. She loves it. And so do her parents. That's why her recognition ceremony tomorrow -- sort of like a mini-graduation -- will make all of us a little sad. But the joy of watching Skylar exit on a high note will more than compensate for our feelings of melancholy.

Earlier today I briefly found myself inside a dust devil. Unfortunately, I realized what was happening -- I'd just opened the car door and stepped outside -- too late to close my mouth and inhaled a lot of what I not-so-affectionately call "particulate matter." I soon started having the sort of asthma that makes me feel like a grown man is standing on my chest. The odds are good that I will cough tonight when I should be sleeping.

Strangely, though, this highly unpleasant and typically Tucsonan experience motivated me to make it a dust-themed day. Since I had to go downtown anyway to drop Skylar and her mother off to see the musical Mamma Mia, I decided to stop by the St. Vincent de Paul. While I was in Seattle, I spent time poring through the massive stock of LPs and 78s at Ballard's Bop Street Records. The fun I had reminded me how much fun I have finding treasures in that kind of environment. A thrift store is different, surely. Like Moe's Books in Berkeley back in the day, Bop Street knows what things are worth and prices them accordingly. Because the owner is constantly buying up collections, however, and has a small staff, there's no way that the stock can be properly catalogued. What you find is the product of serendipity, most often coupled with great patience.

The pickings at the St. Vincent de Paul were thin today. I was reminded, comparing today's experience to the time I've spent in Seattle and Bay Area thrift stores over the past decade, that the majority of this area's population is and was culturally -- and frequently also financially -- impoverished. The goods people are willing to give away usually aren't much good. Still, I did find a few things worth taking home: a volume in the Time-Life international cookbook series from the late 1960s that I had yet to acquire, a pretty orange polyester flower print dress for Skylar and a Fodor's travel guide to Germany from 1972 with an Olympic Supplement.

That last item typifies the sort of thing I love to find. Like Walter Benjamin wandering through nineteenth-century arcades made not to last, long after they had passed their prime, I am drawn to material that is either figuratively or, in this case, literally dated. I especially like items that have yet to acquire the aura of the potentially lucrative collectible or which have seen the window of opportunity for such a second life come and go without becoming more valuable. The sort of things, in short, that people give away only because it's easier than finding room for them in the trash or because they can claim them on their taxes.

Even if the items I find in this category aren't worth obtaining -- and my threshhold is pretty low, as you might surmise -- their inert uselessness can still be transformed into knowledge that gives heat. Among the things I learned today are that Polaroid cameras are now turning up in thrift stores like grasshoppers; that the majority of workplace filing cabinets in this town did not meet professional standards of durability; and that a number of local residents who have passed on tried to satisfy their nostalgia for cooler climes with bad oil paintings of birch forests.

More importantly, given my work on music, I was struck by how many duplicates there were in the store's numerous albums full of 78s. In some cases, light classical pieces and famous arias from when opera was still a popular art form -- Puccini from when he was still an active composer, for example -- predominated. In others, Tex Williams and other cowboy-themed songs were in the majority. There were few traces of jazz and none of the foxtrot records that filled bins in the basement of Bop Street.

But there was plenty of dust. Each time I turned the page of one of these albums a little cloud puffed up. I remembered the scene in A Charlie Brown Christmas when the eponymous anti-hero tells the girl who is reluctant to play opposite Pig Pen that she should think of the dust he sheds as historical matter from the ancient Middle East. Particulate matter is the residue of a past we would otherwise only be able to access immaterially. While I'd rather inhale it in measured doses, instead of a single lung-compromising burst, I also don't want to spend my time in a world where every surface has been sanitized.

The other day I wrote about how changing the place where I write has had a positive effect on my thinking. When I look up from the laptop screen, I'm seeing books that inspire me to make connections between them and whatever is currently in or on my mind. Describing this circumstance again tonight, I decided to say that this relationship, between what's near -- the screen -- and what's far -- the bookshelves, has given extra body to my work. But then I realized that this formulation, which sounds a little too much like a commercial for shampoo, is more interesting than what it seeks to capture.

Reading and writing are invariably more bodily in nature than we are inclined to think. Where we sit, what the lighting is, how much we've had to eat or drink: these physiological factors play a crucial role in our experience of those activities. There's a reason why magazines like The New Yorker have been running ads for literary accessories since their inception. The person reading the magazine while suffering from a headache or exhaustion is both aware that her or his body is conspiring against the task of reading and doing her or his best to suppress those surges of unease by focusing on the text as if it were not part of the physical realm.

Today I spent a long time sorting through crates and boxes of books and moving them around in my office, the garage, and the storage space. Although the task eventually wore me out, I was initially happy to be doing it. There's a big difference between reading a piece online, where all cats are, in a sense, gray and reading it in a bound volume you can hold in your hands. I don't mean to devalue online learning, which occupies much of my time. It's just that there's knowledge conveyed in the physical experience of holding a book that can only be distilled indirectly for cyberspace.

Recently, when I was talking to a former student about to take his doctoral exams, I explained that I had prepared for my own by both reading and listening to books on tape. When I took my orals, I found that the material I had take in by ear was more readily available for conversational improvisation than the material I had only read on the page in silence.

I wonder if something similar is at work in the distinction between reading a book and reading online. I find that the absence of distinctive visuals in internet content tends to make it less clearly resolved in my mind. I often remember details from a book in a process where look and feel are inextricably bound up with the words I summon from the depths of memory. In the absence of such mental props, I struggle.

All my months of sorting have given me a better sense of the scope of my "archives" without doing much to instantiate a new and improved attitude towards them. Sometimes I feel the first stirrings of an urge to be rid of the rubble. But then I remember that it's less the result of natural destruction than of the aesthetic impulse to construct ruins that precede the passage of time. Pas faux? Perhaps. Still, to dispense with the material would be to invalidate my existence, which is mine whether it's authentic or not. Maybe I just need to acknowledge that I'm less an anantiquarian than a purveyor of pre-distressed goods.