About a month ago I read a book that had long been recommended to me by my friend Chris Sartinsky, Correction by Thomas Bernhard. If you’re not the kind of person who judges books by what happens in them and what they’re saying, the book is a delight. The rhythms of speech, even translated from German, are beautiful, and the language is playful and active. Linguistic texture is very important to me while reading, it’s one of the main textures that’s important to me while reading, though many different textures are important to me while reading, textures of the space, the reality, of other things I haven’t quite articulated but may eventually get to with more study, are all very core to my experience while reading, in summary it can be said that my reading experience consists largely of the textures, of textures and rhythms and flavors, to the point where, if someone says, for example, that a book is “full of sharply-observed characters” or “very smart about [such and such],” a “tour de force,” “a masterpiece,” or some other such faint praise, I begin to get suspicious that it has no texture, no texture whatsoever, and I feel a kind of sludgy despair at the prospect of reading it. Usually I don’t, I read something different and weird and textured instead and I’m glad I did.
But the theme of Correction, in terms of its content, its ideas, what it’s trying to say, or one of the things it’s talking about, regardless of what the author is trying to say, I don’t know what his intentions were, that Austrian maniac, but anyway a theme I discerned in it comes into play. Without giving too much away about Correction, part of what its subject experiences is a cycle of self-annihilation, where he starts with a thesis of a few hundred pages, whittles it down through hard work to more and more concise forms, and eventually destroys it. He, Roithamer, ends up applying the same process to his own life, correcting himself out of existence. This is kind of a danger for me, the first in my writing, the second in a much milder sense than in Roithamer’s case, where I tend toward social withdrawal rather than anything more drastic. First, the writing. My own writing, particularly my writing I’ve tried to do for this Substack, doesn’t have too much or too many of the characteristics I actually want in writing, and so I write something up, then revise, then revise, and eventually end up with no piece. For example, last week, the day before Yom Kippur, I thought I had something to say about Yom Kippur. I wrote about it on Wednesday, Thursday, Monday, Tuesday, and eventually today, and it turned out to be no good. I felt bad about it, and I think the feeling bad is generally a worthless thing, although some kind of reckoning is a good thing. The theme of the piece, the thing I was trying to look at, was the fact that Yom Kippur’s central conceit is kind of ridiculous. You’re supposed to apologize to everyone you’ve wronged over the last year, which is kind of an imposition on them for your own benefit, in other words another wrong. But of course that’s a cop-out. It’s bad apologies that are bad. You could make good ones. If you really cared, if you feared having to actually do Yom Kippur and come across as an asshole with an obnoxious apology, what you’d do was build a good apology. What you’d do is, as soon as you did a wrong, you’d apologize and fully follow through on restitution and correction, and not necessarily in that order. That’s somewhat interesting to me. There might be some way to edit out the apology, or the part of the apology that is gross and self-serving and wallowing or whatnot, and do some kind of genuine correction.
Anyway, that’s about as much as I have on the apology analysis. Just, it’s interesting. Right after Yom Kippur, while in the midst of writing the piece, I started listening to the audio series, “podcast,” they say, meaning “broadcast from an iPod,” a term which has outlived the iPods, though broadcasting has come back into style, improbably, with the demise of cords from the internet, anyway it’s outlived the iPods, all of which now live inside phones and are terrible, the music tech doesn’t work anything close to well anymore, and Apple never atoned for it and never will, plunging instead into the bright shiny edge of the little remaining shimmer of new future we have as we backslide in other ways, faster and faster, as the climate collapses, another thing for which we’ll never atone and still aren’t, anyway I listened to the so-called podcast Say You’re Sorry by Lux Alptraum (one of my favorites) and Siona Peterous. It’s pretty good, asks some good questions, doesn’t answer them, but what does, it’s pretty good, pretty damn good actually, so far, I’m four of five episodes in, on the subject of apologies. I recommend checking it out.
I do have one apology of my own. I genuinely am sorry for not producing better writing in this Substack, sort of the literary equivalent of a comedy bringer show, now that I think about it. I know it bothers me more than it bothers you. Cuts to my core. I thought I was a better writer! I thought it would be easier! I thought I knew more than I did! I made some bad calls. But mostly people didn’t want refunds, and people do or don’t want more writing of mine to read, and they’ll make that decision on their own, and so it’s just for me to try and make better writing, which I’ve been trying to do for most of my life. I think right now I’m in a bit of a rut, between voices, as it were, I used to have one clear voice, but I sort of don’t feel it any more, and I haven’t found a new one yet, these things take time, to use the title of a brilliant performance art piece I just saw by Le’Andra LeSeur, but in a much different and more banal context, when it comes to things like finding your voice, or finding a new voice when you’ve aged out of your younger voice, these things take time, and whether I have time to find a new voice, or develop the writing, with so many more important things going on in the world, or unimportant tedious things for that matter, whether that happens there’s no guarantees, but I sure hope I do publish! Thanks for believing that I could get better, maybe I will.
I guess the thing I want to say is, there’s something in a book that has a maniacal devotion to voice, that you can feel and that disturbs, and I don’t even know if I buy Correction as a statement or anything, more of a feeling and distinct impression, and that’s a thing worthwhile. I remember my friend Antonio, one of many, many people I haven’t adequately kept up with, that’s another thing, by the way, leading to a lack of Yom Kippur apologizing, that so many of my apologies are apologies for not keeping up, but the same tendency to get overwhelmed and sluggish and sucked into anxiety pits, the same tendency that led me to not keep up with so many people, those things that led to my not keeping up still exist, and will cause the same problems to recur, which means the apology is just a means of perpetuating a cycle, anyway my friend Antonio, who I hope still considers me a friend, Antonio says to me, he says, art isn’t about truth or usefulness, or representing the world, sometimes what’s in the world is inadequate, and, I forget how he says it, but he made the world of fiction and creation, this whole different thing, sound much more interesting. I think he was right, is what I’m saying, whether or not I can make things that live up to that in anything I create, I think he was right and that’s a good description, what he said but I can’t exactly remember, I recall it creating a good impression, and I still have an impression but not the words, of what to try for, when it comes to whatever you call art.
And then you also gotta be a good person (this Antonio didn’t say to me, he was against the idea of trying to be a good person, explicitly against it, which was a point of disagreement, though I strongly suspect reading between the lines that he harbored some hope for it after all, which was why we got along, and also because while I didn’t agree with him about whether or not someone should be a good person, I thought his suggestion was a good adjustment in terms of urging me to abandon the aesthetics of being a good person, or at least, when I found myself engaging in the aesthetics of being a good person, a flaw I continued to have despite his warning, continue to occasionally indulge in despite the interventions of myself and others, when I catch myself engaging in those aesthetics I remember his argument against morality, which was presented as a full-hearted argument against morality, but which I took as a warning against the corrosive effect of believing in morality on the quality of your work/presentation/self, so whenever I found myself engaging in the aesthetics of a good person I thought back to his warning against morality and decided yes, I was really full of it, I still am being full of it, it’s best to get rid of that shit) you also gotta be a good person, you gotta actually do that, and that’s a different matter than your damn art, and not something where an sort of internal beautification or perfection is much good, it’s all about constantly finding bigger things in the world, or maybe smaller things, as in seeing people, where they are at, no small thing it turns out, but either way it’s something outside you. Others can say more than me what it is, and of course beyond decency there’s your role as a cog in the system, or many simultaneous cogs in many overlapping systems, and your seeing those systems and opposing those systems, systems which are about to grind us all to dust, and if you’re trying to be a good person, whatever that is, I guess finding ways to get us any relief from that grinding-to-dust is a good thing to do. But it takes politically wiser people to speak to how to do that. Meanwhile I am working on different writings, which hopefully will come to fruition through actual revision, not maniacal correction or simpering atonement but a lively revision, as inspired by Kiese Laymon, but for which you’ll just have to wait, or not wait, if that’s your preference, opting instead to, as the button says, unsubscribe.
ANYWAY, SOME THINGS TO READ, I’M OUT FOR NOW
This was the best piece I read on Norm MacDonald, who died of the horrible disease of cancer last week. It really dug into his comedic style, what made him virtuosic and also in some ways isolated. It also talked frankly about his bad politics and his sexism, which was always visibly a problem and which, I didn’t know until he died, extended even to sexual harassment. It’s a good way to write about someone like that, I think. Neither hagiography nor erasure. It made me think of another guy in comedy who had similar tendencies, and I had been a big fan of his art but then heard these disturbing things, and I no longer wanted him in power, which I believe he had at the time but subsequently stepped down from, for unrelated reasons I hear, but what is he doing these days? Has he been contained? I’ll ask those who know more. Maybe he will read this piece and it will help change his heart, if he is capable of such things, I tend to think people are, but also people fake it, well I wish the best to those trying to push him into better patterns or at least out of the way of being able to harm.
Milkman, by Anna Burns, remains one of my favorite books ever written, not to say that it’s the best book ever written, how would I know, I’ve read hundreds of books, maybe, but that’s still no significant proportion of the books ever written, of which I’ve read almost none, anyway Milkman has some rhythmic similarities to Correction (Bernhard, remember, not Franzen, who doesn’t have quite the rhythm from any excerpt I ever read of him), and similar gifts of matching psychology to language, makes similar use of repetition, but unlike Correction is fundamentally sane and correct, and I think it reaches really deep into humanity and a whole people in a kind of beautiful way. I also just care more about Northern Ireland, or, as I enjoy people accidentally calling it, “Ireland,” than I do about Austria, what goes on in Austria is for the Austrians and decidedly not for me, by their decision as well as mine, if you catch my drift, though I did admire the rich texturing Bernhard provided of a certain type of Austrian setting and mindset and lifestyle.
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