I do want to tell Baker that one of my other favorite novelists (Bruce Sterling) is a big fan of Harman's work. In any case, Baker's long list of heuristic travails that beset the all too human is quite funnhy in context and certainly worth the price of admission. Joe Bob says check it out.
[Update- Guerilla Derridean David Roden (of the Open University's Mind, Meaning and Rationality Research Group), defends Metzinger from one of Harman's criticisms HERE. I'm going to go read Harman's article now.]
One thing that fascinates me aesthetically is when people come up with interesting and plausible readings of a text that are consistent with everything the text says, but radically at odds with the author's intentions. Salon dot com has a really nice slideshow of ten prominent cases of this, where the another artwork reinterprets an earlier one, called "What if the villains actually were good?"
Graham Harman has the announcement of an Edinburgh University book series on Speculative Realism HERE. His book on Quentin Meillassoux will be the first in the series.
The thread is HERE. I wrote my part of the thread early this morning while wrangling two children so it came out a little bit more disjointed and harsh than I intended. It is clear from what I said that I have immense regard for Roderick Long as a philosopher, but the fact that my views on Rand as a writer and philosopher have moderated significantly because of this is not at all clear from what I wrote (not that I' am or would every be an objectivist; Presbyterianism is fine for me).
The thing I genuinely like about Rand's fiction is that she romanticizes just being competent. So the guy who shovels coal but actually works at being competent at it is treated as heroic just in virtue of trying to do it competently. This is probably a holdover from growing up in the Soviet Union? I don't know, but I don't know any other American novelist who does this to the extent that Rand does. There is a lot in her fiction I don't like, but I find this aspect genuinely moving.
I just finished Alan Campell's excellent Scar Night, Iron Angel, God of Clocks trilogy.
One of the interesting things in it is that for most of the three books, the world is pretty relentlessly hostile to human beings in a way that is just profoundly disturbing. The gates of Heaven have been closed so everybody ends up going to Hell after they die. The gods expelled from Heaven are pathologically awful. And Campell's Hell is really very convincingly hellish. And this goes on for centuries across many possible universes (new universes are opened up when time travel goes awry). And when heaven is finally reopened (only because of our heroes, and it is clear it could have gone the other way), all but one of the universes in the multiverse has to be left to die out in order for reality to be saved.
Good fiction almost always makes you look at things a little differently. Campell's books made me realize how incredibly bizarre it is that almost all of the popular debate about theism concerns the extent to which the universe is either fundamentally benevolent, on the one hand, or, on the other, just indifferent to sapient life (Spinozism being the best one can (and should!) do with a fundamentally indifferent universe). In the popular press, it's almost always someone like Dawkins or Dennett (really just impoverished Spinozism) versus theists with their benevolent universe.
What's weird is that if you can conceive of the universe as being benevolent or indifferent, then you can certainly conceive of it as being fundamentally malevolent. I think that Schopenhauer is the only Western philosopher who really saw things that way, with the basic amount of animal pain on earth just sort of damning any possible justification for existence. Of great classic prose writers, perhaps only Lovecraft really calls forth a fundamentally maleficent universe. But he is a tremendously influential fiction writer. Both he and Schopenhauer are sort of literary equivalents to the Velvet Underground. Only a couple hundred people bought their albums, but every one of them went out and started a pretty good band.
But the popular debates about theism never consider the possibility that our actual universe may embody the most frightening aspects of Lovecraft and Schopenhauer! It's always a war between indifference and benevolence.
I don't know how any of this fits in with my own Christianity. For very selfish reasons I often equate my own faith with the belief that things are ultimately beneficent, that at the very least (and perhaps one can hope for more than just this) the universe is evolving the way it should.
But the evidence we can measure certainly supports Schopenhauer's assessment of reality. And I'm not sure how the many comforts I get from Christian worship and faith fit in with Jesus' injunction to pick up the cross if you want to follow him.
I think the only way to square that circle is if you really do only enter into a state of grace (which Leonard Cohen likens to one ski sliding down a hill) when you manifest Jesus' love. The beneficence is that if you can manifest this love, then your suffering can have meaning and be justified. And the proper pleasure of Christian worship is when it inculcates this love.
Perhaps that's too nakedly utilitarian. I don't know. It fits with Schopenhauer to the extent that when in a state of grace we experience a loss of self. Though he would properly find it really perverse to describe that as union with God. I'm not sure too much hangs on whether it's described that way or not (certainly people who would not describe it that way have been in states of grace).
In any case, I highly recommend Campell's books. Great steampunk, fantastic characters, wonderful understated love story between an angel and failed assassin, and also one of the best extant literary descriptions of Hell.
Speaking of being in a state of grace, here's an example (keep watching if it's not clear at first; this kid really owns Cohen's masterpiece; it's a tremendously beautiful thing).
There ought to be a category for the kind of popular anthropology at which Lileks excels. He's a national treasure. His website is one of the best things on the interwebs, containing:
Matchbook Museum.Lovely examples of commercial art in its smallest, most portable form.
Comic Covers.Unusual or risable examples of old comic book cover art. Part of Comic Sins.
100 Mysteries. Chewing through a big box of public-domain Hollywood mystery movies, one at a time.
I just found out that Graham Harman has a book on Lovecraft and realism coming out in 2011 (cover blurb of book HERE). This is incredibly exciting to me for reasons I'll explain when I have time for a longer post.
One question I've been concerning myself with is why Kerouac's On the Road is so much better than everything else he wrote.
There is a clear biographical answer. The "scroll version" he wrote in two weeks on coffee (not Benzedrine, as the myth has it) was actually like the fifth time he'd written up the material, and he was transcribing very well worked out and commented on by friends routines at that point. Then he massively rewrote the scroll version once and then his rewrite was massively rewritten again by an editor in the tradition of Max Perkins (who effectively co-wrote Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Wolfe).
Kerouac himself began to believe the myth of "spontaneous bop prosody," thinking the first write was in some way holy. While this worked really well for his unpublished until after he died Visions of Cody, which consists in a bunch of poetic sketches, his narrative stuff after Road is much worse for not being rewritten.
But this does not answer the question. What is it about, say, Dharma Bums that makes it so much worse than On the Road? I think I've figured this out.
On the Road is very impressionistic. The narrator does not reveal very much of his inner life. He just tells you everything that is going on with the people, events, and places around him. We really only get a view of him in terms of how people react to him (e.g. when the Joan Burroughs character, I forget her in text name, says "Same old Sal" after he does something particularly naive). But somehow by the end of the novel there is a sadness in what he writes. He realizes that Cassidy is not really a saint, but he still can't stop thinking about him and the promise he once held. This, plus the strange spiritual stuff (i.e. his dream of the snake that he tells people about, etc) is in part why it is the great American novel, we see the narrator go from innocence to experience.
With Dharma Bums you constantly get the narrator's editorializing about what is going on. The feeling is that the writer is narrating here, not the narrator who is acting in the fictitious universe. And some of it is deluded. Unlike with Road, there is no distance between the writer and the narrator. Maybe if he had used everybody's real names (i.e. Gary Snyder instead of the ludicrous "Japhy Ryder") this would not have made everything ring as falsely as it does from a novelistic perspective. It's maddening, because parts of Dharma Bums is brilliant. What you have is a fantastic, albeit extremely rough draft about somebody desperately trying to embrace Buddhism to try to deal with the tragic aspects of life, but it doesn't really work and he still has to drink himself insensible. With On the Road, the writer was aware that the promised liberation of Cassidy et. al. wasn't going to make up for the tragic aspects of life, but through rewriting he very skillfully shows the narrator slowly coming to grasp this.
Kerouac was always too smart and too attuned to the tragic to buy into the liberatory promises of either the beatniks or the hippies (and Dharma Bums was part of the hippie canon). But he bought into his own bullshit about the writing process, one that totally misdescribed how his masterpiece was written. Given the man's talents, and how this led his other books (e.g. Desolation Angels) to completely degenerate into hastily scrawled, psychologically obtuse diary entries, this in itself is a pretty big tragedy I think.
One question I've been concerning myself with is why Kerouac's On the Road is so much better than everything else he wrote.
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