Black Garterbelt

Maxwell's Demon Weeps

Shockingly, the Garterbelt was the only site in the nation to run a delightfully bawdy remembrance of George Carlin.  This is why YPTR gets the big bucks, kids.

Elsewhere, Mr. Louis Bayard tries to get the known universe behind grown-up nerd Gore Vidal.  Alas:

...Vidal's strength as a critic is that he refuses to matriculate into anyone's school. An exhaustive study of the "Art Novels" of Barth, Barthelme and Gass leads him back to his first conclusion: "I find it hard to take seriously the novel that is written to be taught." But the road that leads him there is cobbled with dazzling insights. "I suspect that the energy expended in reading 'Gravity's Rainbow' is, for anyone, rather greater than that expended by Pynchon in the actual writing. This is entropy with a vengeance. The writer's text is ablaze with the heat/energy that his readers have lost to him."

As the poet once wrote: This is stupid stuff.

Given that Pynchon admits of actual criticism, we're going with this preposterous assertion, and we're going to call it dazzling insight?

Well, OK, you got me on this one. The true story goes that Pynchon knocked GR out in a couple of weeks in late 1966, slipped it under the tweedy dupes of the literati like a whoopie cushion, and spent the next few years undercover as the Frito Bandito.  (Honestly, the timeline makes a lot of sense; you can look it up.)

Christ, I'm willing to look the other way if you want to pretend that chickenshit is chicken salad, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to lick the plate.  Have a little respect for yourself, man.

Hooked on Dildonics (Redux)

You know I wanted to go out this week on a note of unabashed positivity.  And you know I love the Ward Sixers.  But I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with them on the LongPen, I think.

In response to Matthew Tiffany's cry of fraud regarding the Doomsday Device, Ms. Ellis responds:

But who is being scammed? Maybe, possibly, those book collecters who want to believe that when they pay big bucks for a Signed First Edition the book was in contact with the venerable writer's very own personal fountain pen.

It's only a cheat if you think that the experience of the author *actually touching* your copy of her book has some kind of mystic value.

The work is all that REALLY matters. And what's so wonderful about the LongPen is that it nullifies the fetishization of the "autograph." When you get a LongPen autograph, you DO get to chat with the author on video (an experience that is somewhere in between getting a letter and an in-person visit) and you get a note in your book actually meant for you, in a reasonable facsimile of the author's handwriting. It's an experience at least as legitimate as mailing the book to the writer and getting an autograph that way, actually.

And Mr. Lennon?

Most people ask a writer for an autograph because they liked the reading or book, and want to commemorate their having talked with the author. I've asked for lots of autographs this way, and people generally seem happy to to provide them and say hello.

But every medium-sized city on up has at least one Weird Dude (always a dude) who has like multiple copies of your book, with acrylic wrappers on the dust jackets, and wants you to sign them all. "Just your name," they say, with a tiny bit of desperation. As if, should you write, "To Weird Dude, good luck with your search for a girlfriend! Best wishes, J. Robert Lennon," you would ruin everything.

And you would, because they are not trying to commemorate a pleasant human interaction. They don't give a crap about your book. They barely look at you, in fact! No, they're squirreling away your stuff in the unlikely event you become super famous, and then they'll get to make a huge profit selling the signed editions on eBay.

The Weird Dude really brings to light the whole problem with autographs...the fact that a story is ephemeral, and takes a different shape in every reader's mind, and that this is the entire point. That a story is a seed for the individual imagination. That the physical book is not the important thing--let alone one's contact with the author.

[...]

It isn't that Condalmo's wrong, per se, but he is missing the point that author autographs overall are just kind of pointless. And if you're as famous as Margaret Atwood, you could spend your whole damned life sitting at a pressboard buffet table gazing up in exhaustion at the Weird Dude, and why not make something that can obliterate that experience from your life?

Yes, I see their points. 

Hooked on Dildonics

He was naturally a thirsty soul, and was soon tempted to repeat the draught. One taste provoked another, and he reiterated his visits to the flagon so often, that at length his senses were overpowered, his eyes swam in his head, his head gradually declined, and he fell into a deep sleep.

***

Sweet Christ, the LongPen is back.  Thought I was still asleep.  Thought, mad as I am, that this thing would be revealed as the sad hoax it longs to be.

In case you have forgotten:

Author Margaret Atwood's unlikely invention, the LongPen, is moving into a record store and several bookstores in Canada, the United States and England for a trial run that could bring fans and their idols closer together.

Its makers are courting notables in the world of music, sports and film to start using the remote-controlled pen, which allows people to sign autographs from anywhere in the world and chat with others via videoconferencing.

Spokesperson Bruce Walsh says shops with a LongPen kiosk could soon become hubs for celebrity sightings of a new kind.

"You could potentially see the talent in their dressing room, somewhere, and they could actually sign into a bookstore," says Walsh.

"It doesn't really matter, if there's a kiosk set up, you can sign all kinds of different kinds of talent into wherever the kiosk happens to be."

Kiosks will be set up at the World's Biggest Bookstore and HMV's flagship record store in Toronto, Barnes & Noble in New York and Waterstone's in London beginning after Labour Day, and could expand elsewhere if successful, Walsh says.

The device -- built by Atwood's Toronto-based company Unotchit -- comprises a video screen and digital writing pad at one location and a video screen and automated pen at another.

Until now it has only been used by authors trying to reduce the rigours of book tours.

In recent days, authors Norman Mailer and Alice Munro used it to appear at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in Scotland, while staying on this side of the Atlantic.

Neither would have been able to appear at the festival had it not been for the LongPen, says Walsh.

This thing haunts me in my sleep.  Why?  Perhaps because it combines the thrill of an Alice Munro appearance with the excitement of a kiosk?

Now, honestly, is this meant to benefit the reader in any way?  I see where it benefits Norman Mailer, because he doesn't even have to put on his pajama bottoms to be adored.  I see where it benefits his publisher, because they don't have to spring for air travel or send over some poor erstwhile Communications major to try to cajole Mailer into his goddamn pajama bottoms.

For the reader (or fan, as they would have it)? I rather think it exploits a mild tendency towards starfucking, then rubs the reader's face in it as the dumb point glides across the leaf.  If you're not hearing the death rattle of either yourself or Literature as this transpires, you're not paying enough attention. 

Hyperbolic?  Ah, friends, watch this video and gaze upon Alice Munro--bless her heart--and then tell me that to my face.

Social network marketing!

Patrick Bateman salivates over the LongPen.  I pray this isn't really happening.

***

What is it they want from the man that they didn't get from the work? What do they expect? What is there left when he's done with his work, what's any artist but the dregs of his work, the human shambles that follows it around?  (Gaddis)

I used to be "with it," but then they changed what "it" was.

When I desire deep thinking on the state of modern culture, I go directly to Tom Wolfe.  After all, it takes a man of uncommonly level perspective to liken his "pimped" Cadillac to a 16th-century cathedral.

Here's our man TW on blogs.  Happy birthday, blogs.  Hope you like GET OFF MY LAWN:

One by one, Marshall McLuhan's wackiest-seeming predictions come true. Forty years ago, he said that modern communications technology would turn the young into tribal primitives who pay attention not to objective "news" reports but only to what the drums say, i.e., rumors.

And there you have blogs. The universe of blogs is a universe of rumors, and the tribe likes it that way.

I have a rumor for you, in fact, my dear fellow.  I hear that you disappeared up your own ass in 1985, thereby forming the densest white dwarf ever recorded by science.

Not that it matters, but the architects of this travesty went on to ask TW about his favorite blog(s):

Mr. Wolfe, "weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless 'information,' " says he no longer reads blogs.

No, he gets quite enough of that sort of thing standing in front of the mirror, talking to his reflection.

Love Hurts

Analyzing bad listmaking is like analyzing bad lovemaking; better we just bleach the sheets & forget this ever happened.

That said, in "100 Blogs We Love," the near-absence of blogs related to books, music, sports, booze, and pornography leads me to the conclusion that the editors of PC World aren't the type of people your pal the Rake would be proud to call Jim. Quoting Nabokov.  Whom they have clearly no use for.

(Via "Fast" Eddie Chizzamp)