what I am reading Wednesday
Jan. 30th, 2013 03:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rushthatspeaksWell, at this precise second I am being incredibly distracted by the internet believing there will be new Gravity Falls on February 8th. I hope this is a thing that actually happens.
Anyway, the thing I finished reading most recently: Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy.
This is a book which I've heard about a lot in the context of punk rock; it came out in 1973. It is in fact Lesy's history doctoral dissertation, in which he juxtaposes the works of a commercial photographer who worked in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between about 1880 and about 1910, with various items of local news printed in the town's newspaper over the same time frame, along with excerpts from regional novelists, case reports from the local insane asylum, and the like. It's an explicitly didactic piece, meant to force the reader to consider the historical transition between the U.S. as a place in which there was massive westward movement of white populations and a place which has, since the 'frontier' stopped, every so often recapitulated the population movements which come with industrialization: the rural poor to the cities, the urban rich to an envisioned-Arcadian countryside.
So in short it's a list of everything terrible which happened to everyone in Black River Falls for two decades, i.e. the nightmares of the rural poor in a countryside two generations after the incoming white settlers began stripping it down to rock for a quick and unsustainable profit.
The thing is, I come to this book having spent a fair portion of my adolescence wrestling with these issues already. Which is to say I come originally from the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and have never had the artistic or historical temptation to romanticize the country or the whitewashed version of The American Frontier. This means that, as the choir Lesey is preaching to, I have a bit of leeway to poke at his methodology, since the fact that the life of the rural poor is bad now and was way the hell worse then is something I already knew and therefore his book does not gobsmack me on the emotional level as much as I believe he means it to. (The reason one hears about this book is that it really does gobsmack a lot of people. To this day. And, for managing that, I do consider Lesey to have achieved something. The reason I hear about this book in the theoretical context of punk is its use of planned and accidental juxtapositions to produce an effect in some viewers of significant alienation from their previous received ideas.)
His methodology... could be a tad more subtle. The photographs are amazing, they are of a world that has basically entirely vanished; I do not think it was necessary for him to mirror-image some of them on facing pages, or zoom in on specific facial expressions, or do other photographic manipulations. And there are a couple of pieces of text he cites as 'town gossip' which I am fairly certain are mood-setting and entirely fictitious. He had enough material not to need to do that either.
That said, after one gets through the Obvious Message, there is a thread of incredible strangeness here which makes the book still very compelling. The local paper, for instance, would announce whenever anyone had been committed to the local insane asylum, and give the reason why. Over the twenty years, more than five separate and unrelated people were declared legally insane when they became frustrated over their failure to make perpetual motion machines work. In at least two of these cases, the committal was brought on when the person petitioned the town for financial support for a machine they wished to build and for which they could not afford parts. Why perpetual motion? The paper does not say, and I for one haven't the foggiest. Or there's the window-breaking lady. During these two decades, she appears to have roamed Wisconsin breaking every plate-glass window she came near, until the police of whatever town she was in would round her up, hold her in jail for a few days, and then release her onto a train out of town. Whereupon she would repeat the cycle wherever her ticket let her off. There was never any effort to get her declared insane; the paper treats of her in a way that suggests that everyone just understood that sometimes somebody thinks the windows have it coming. She also clearly wasn't using the jails as a way out of homelessness, either, as she broke jail windows whenever left in a room with one.
This sort of thing can be very absorbing. But, for me personally, not sufficient to carry out Lesey's purpose, which was, as far as I can tell, to revolutionize historiography. Then again, how often does that happen anyway?
What I am reading right now: Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany.
Okay, you know what's really weird? Reading Dhalgren for the first time after having read a fair amount of Delany's erotica, that's what. And also knowing his memoir very well. Because a surprising amount of the small incidents in this book are stories you can also find in his memoir, and as for having read the erotica, I keep thinking I will know when there will be sex scenes in this novel and then there aren't but if you have been tracking the signals he uses for when there should be in his other stuff there so should be. And when you read Delany's erotica, there's a set of things in it you're pretty sure are in it because pornography as a genre requires them, and a set of things you're pretty sure are in it because they relate to whatever point Delany is specifically trying to make in that book, and then there are the set of things which turn up, not necessarily because they are Delany's actual real-life kinks, but because they are clearly things which mean something to him on a very deep level, which involves sex in some way, sometimes symbolically and sometimes not. And that last set turns up all over Dhalgren. And then when there are sex scenes in Dhalgren they involve completely different symbols from that set, except the sex scenes which are lightly-disguised bits from his memoir. Oh, my aching head.
In short, having trouble seeing book for layers of reader-brought context. Sigh.
Also, as of about halfway through I am liking it the least of his novels I have read, as it has left the efficiency of his early work behind and not yet achieved the clobber-you-over-the-head intensity of the later work. But it definitely could still change my mind; it has a lot of things going on, and I will need to see what he does with them.
Anyway, the thing I finished reading most recently: Wisconsin Death Trip, Michael Lesy.
This is a book which I've heard about a lot in the context of punk rock; it came out in 1973. It is in fact Lesy's history doctoral dissertation, in which he juxtaposes the works of a commercial photographer who worked in the town of Black River Falls, Wisconsin, between about 1880 and about 1910, with various items of local news printed in the town's newspaper over the same time frame, along with excerpts from regional novelists, case reports from the local insane asylum, and the like. It's an explicitly didactic piece, meant to force the reader to consider the historical transition between the U.S. as a place in which there was massive westward movement of white populations and a place which has, since the 'frontier' stopped, every so often recapitulated the population movements which come with industrialization: the rural poor to the cities, the urban rich to an envisioned-Arcadian countryside.
So in short it's a list of everything terrible which happened to everyone in Black River Falls for two decades, i.e. the nightmares of the rural poor in a countryside two generations after the incoming white settlers began stripping it down to rock for a quick and unsustainable profit.
The thing is, I come to this book having spent a fair portion of my adolescence wrestling with these issues already. Which is to say I come originally from the middle of nowhere in Ohio, and have never had the artistic or historical temptation to romanticize the country or the whitewashed version of The American Frontier. This means that, as the choir Lesey is preaching to, I have a bit of leeway to poke at his methodology, since the fact that the life of the rural poor is bad now and was way the hell worse then is something I already knew and therefore his book does not gobsmack me on the emotional level as much as I believe he means it to. (The reason one hears about this book is that it really does gobsmack a lot of people. To this day. And, for managing that, I do consider Lesey to have achieved something. The reason I hear about this book in the theoretical context of punk is its use of planned and accidental juxtapositions to produce an effect in some viewers of significant alienation from their previous received ideas.)
His methodology... could be a tad more subtle. The photographs are amazing, they are of a world that has basically entirely vanished; I do not think it was necessary for him to mirror-image some of them on facing pages, or zoom in on specific facial expressions, or do other photographic manipulations. And there are a couple of pieces of text he cites as 'town gossip' which I am fairly certain are mood-setting and entirely fictitious. He had enough material not to need to do that either.
That said, after one gets through the Obvious Message, there is a thread of incredible strangeness here which makes the book still very compelling. The local paper, for instance, would announce whenever anyone had been committed to the local insane asylum, and give the reason why. Over the twenty years, more than five separate and unrelated people were declared legally insane when they became frustrated over their failure to make perpetual motion machines work. In at least two of these cases, the committal was brought on when the person petitioned the town for financial support for a machine they wished to build and for which they could not afford parts. Why perpetual motion? The paper does not say, and I for one haven't the foggiest. Or there's the window-breaking lady. During these two decades, she appears to have roamed Wisconsin breaking every plate-glass window she came near, until the police of whatever town she was in would round her up, hold her in jail for a few days, and then release her onto a train out of town. Whereupon she would repeat the cycle wherever her ticket let her off. There was never any effort to get her declared insane; the paper treats of her in a way that suggests that everyone just understood that sometimes somebody thinks the windows have it coming. She also clearly wasn't using the jails as a way out of homelessness, either, as she broke jail windows whenever left in a room with one.
This sort of thing can be very absorbing. But, for me personally, not sufficient to carry out Lesey's purpose, which was, as far as I can tell, to revolutionize historiography. Then again, how often does that happen anyway?
What I am reading right now: Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany.
Okay, you know what's really weird? Reading Dhalgren for the first time after having read a fair amount of Delany's erotica, that's what. And also knowing his memoir very well. Because a surprising amount of the small incidents in this book are stories you can also find in his memoir, and as for having read the erotica, I keep thinking I will know when there will be sex scenes in this novel and then there aren't but if you have been tracking the signals he uses for when there should be in his other stuff there so should be. And when you read Delany's erotica, there's a set of things in it you're pretty sure are in it because pornography as a genre requires them, and a set of things you're pretty sure are in it because they relate to whatever point Delany is specifically trying to make in that book, and then there are the set of things which turn up, not necessarily because they are Delany's actual real-life kinks, but because they are clearly things which mean something to him on a very deep level, which involves sex in some way, sometimes symbolically and sometimes not. And that last set turns up all over Dhalgren. And then when there are sex scenes in Dhalgren they involve completely different symbols from that set, except the sex scenes which are lightly-disguised bits from his memoir. Oh, my aching head.
In short, having trouble seeing book for layers of reader-brought context. Sigh.
Also, as of about halfway through I am liking it the least of his novels I have read, as it has left the efficiency of his early work behind and not yet achieved the clobber-you-over-the-head intensity of the later work. But it definitely could still change my mind; it has a lot of things going on, and I will need to see what he does with them.
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no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 03:43 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-31 06:01 am (UTC)I really like Dhalgren, though it's been nearly a decade since I read it. I think it gets better in the last two hundred pages or so, if memory serves.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 04:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 05:45 pm (UTC)I have a dim memory of a French story in which one subplot involves a match-box-making machine, left unfinished after its inventor's death, that traps his son in the same obsession when he comes across the prototype in the attic; but that's more understandable, being an intra-family affair.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 05:50 pm (UTC)I agree, but I've seen a lot of art books of the 1970s and 1980s that do this -- I suspect it was one of the visual cliches of the time. There was probably some underlying theory about how blowing up the picture until it becomes blurred destroys meaning and thereby causes the viewer to realize that perceived reality is an artificial construction (instead of just annoying him/her).
If I seem cynical, it's the result of having been subjected to too many video works in art school.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 06:05 pm (UTC)You can see similar unwillingness to believe in a possible limitation to human endeavor in reactions to Relativity, in particular the light speed limit, in the twentieth century. "Einstein must be wrong, and I'll prove it!"
---L.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 07:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 07:27 pm (UTC)---L.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 08:07 pm (UTC)Excuse me while I link Monday's xkcd.
no subject
Date: 2013-01-30 07:00 pm (UTC)Oh, God, yes, please.
breaking every plate-glass window she came near, until the police of whatever town she was in would round her up, hold her in jail for a few days, and then release her onto a train out of town. Whereupon she would repeat the cycle wherever her ticket let her off.
Did anyone ever ask why? I am reminded of the character in Twentieth Century (1934) who is considered a harmless lunatic because he goes around slapping "REPENT!" stickers on everything, without being apparently religious himself: the police pick him up and he stops—being separated from his stickers—they let him go and he start again. It's not played for anything but screwball goofing and personal inconvenience, but I'm sort of wondering if this was a recognized way of going crazy in the early twentieth century about which nobody really thought anything needed to be done, except for the obvious of not letting that person near your windows again.
In short, having trouble seeing book for layers of reader-brought context.
Congratulations, I think you have made me want to read Delany's erotica, because Dhalgren was the second thing of his I read after a pair of short stories ("We, in Some Strange Power’s Employ, Move on a Rigorous Line" and "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones") and I liked it very much at the time and I was in high school and completely incapable of analyzing that particular angle of the novel if for no other reason than not knowing which were Delany's kinks or symbols versus the needs of the book. Where should I start?