Thursday, August 02, 2001

I have been waiting for this book for five years. In 1996, Granta published works by the authors they deemed the Best Young American Authors (that is, under 40). Most of the selections were crap, but there were some jewels. Ethan Canin's For Kings and Planets and the complete works of Sherman Alexie, mostly -- and the excerpt from Allen Kurzweil's "forthcoming" novel. I was intrigued by the voice of a fussy young librarian discussing his French wife's artistic messiness, and really taken by the description of the book cage she built for him and his collection of call slips and catalog cards.

Here it is, and you know what? I should have gone on waiting. I had hoped that the clash between his fussiness and the chaotic modern world would lead to a fine story. Given the passage I quoted yesterday about the color distinctions in crack vials, I kept hoping. But rather than exploring the confrontation, Kurzweil withdraws his narrator into a constructed antiquarian world, shutting him off from the vitality of life. A strange old man hires the librarian to solve the mystery of an empty space in an 18th century Wunderkammer. Librarian gets a crush on the old man (nonsexual, of course; the only non-hetero character is a lisping, pirouetting Chelsea-dwelling devotee of Marie Antoinette). Old man betrays librarian. Librarian gets revenge. Revenge doesn't satisfy him. So he trashes his carefully ordered world in favor of writing down the story itself. (Or, as he says, "Invention trumps inventory every time.")

The story he writes is, of course, the very book we've been reading. Didn't see that one coming. The superficial pomo narrative inversion gets better: The old man's novel-in-progress is Kurzweil's first novel, A Cabinet of Curiosities. Unlike masters of narrative inversion and trickery like Calvino and Nabokov, Kurzweil isn't nearly deep enough to explore the ramifications of such doubling-back. The narrative's structure is as lifeless as the old pocketwatch the librarian is chasing down. Sure, it's intricate, and mechanically interesting, but it's not lively, spontaneous, or the least bit moving or intellectually challenging.

Kurzweil shows a lot, and rarely tells. The problem is that what he shows best are things -- the book cage, the Automat, the watch -- and the intervening passages are boring. The librarian gets pissed at the old man for derailing his research and stealing his life. But why? I still don't know.

The very best bits of the novel are the library details -- unlike Nicholson Baker, Kurzweil not only likes librarians, he actually gets a big kick out of riffing on some of their oddities. I have to appreciate any novel that knows what KWIC indexing is, and that devotes a chapter to a Dewey number building contest called "Class Struggle".

I'd be happy to list more neat stuff, just to save anyone the money that might be spent on this book.

Saturday, July 28, 2001

Sunday, July 22, 2001

I finished Phelan's Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor. A few years after getting tenure himself, and months after his wife got it, he kept this journal to track what life was like once tenure had been achieved. The journal is uneven, to say the least -- at times it reads as if heavily edited, especially in terms of the way names and pronouns are omitted when he refers to unlucky colleagues, while at others, he employs first names or abbreviations ('PR', or 'ABD') without any gloss. I couldn't figure out whether he was writing for himself or for an audience, and this should make all the difference in these kind of cases. I suspect he wrote for himself, then decided to publish it, resulting in the unevenness.

I responded really well to the sections in which he discussed the fraught relationship between prof and advisee (in fact, a few times, when he expressed worry over procrastinating students, I was motivated to go work on my own damn thesis). Other themes that emerged, especially the anxiety of the academic, were less resonant. At one point, he criticises two colleagues for their reactions to the result of their applications to become full professors (one got it, one didn't). The successful one is too high, and the unsuccessful one 'too scarred' by the experience. Yet throughout the journal, his professional ups-and-downs (conference attendance, publication, interviews at other schools) are cataloged in excruciating detail, heavy with emotional thrust.

The problem with reading journals (or blogs, or autobiographies...) comes from the very fact of their existence: You're stuck in someone else's head, for good or ill. In the end, I wasn't all that happy to be stuck in his head. There was far too much self-absorption coupled with dismissal of others' emotional states. I think most telling was the time when a friend from grad school interviewed at Phelan's school for a senior position. Other faculty were concerned over the friend's spotty publication record, but Phelan advocated for his friend -- going so far as to write a letter to the full professors -- and the reason for his enthusiasm seems mainly to have been his impression that if the friend were hired, they would be closer than Phelan felt to any of his present colleagues. I was also bothered by the lack of any reflection on his station in life -- his position is a privileged one, and he never records any qualms about where he is, or what he is doing with his life. His life consists of attacking other critics, devising his own theories about ways to read lit, and running. Hardly the stuff of inspiration, or even, when it comes down to it, interest.

Monday, July 16, 2001

Saturday, November 11, 2000

I finished Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai recently. It was wonderful, and as I read the last 10 pages, I found myself in tears. As I get farther away from it, however, I see more and more structural flaws in the book. This shouldn't detract from the emotional/intellectual impact it had on me, but it does, kind of. The character of the child prodigy, Ludo, is very well drawn, and the kid grows up in the sweetest, hardest, most incredible way. His mother Sibylla's less well-crafted -- she's so blurry, you never really get a handle on her. It's interesting that all the reviews I have read of the novel focus on the first section (without ever saying so), where Ludo's a 6 year old who already knows four or five languages. The reviewers completely ignore the other 350 pages, in which, at eleven, he goes on a search for his father, considering and rejecting a succession of men. I suppose I had a problem with the fact that he only considers the famous and highly intellectually-endowed men -- that's a weakness in the entire work, too great a focus on the life of the mind, and a complete avoidance (lack of knowledge? I think so.) of the life of the heart, stomach, bladder. The poor kid is never physically touched by his mother. I think that kind of sums it up.

Saturday, September 09, 2000

I woke up early this morning to finish Idoru by Wm. Gibson. It really got to me, especially the visual and intuitive depiction of what I guess we'd now call data-mining by Laney. And Rei Toei as the accidental emergence of AI, the potential for her transformation into something biological....I loved it.

Last Monday I finished up Gibson and Sterling's The Difference Engine -- I seem to have been a steampunk fan long before I heard the term: Victorians and information are two of my ongoing obsessions.

And before that, Sterling's nonfiction Hacker Crackdown.

Friday, August 18, 2000

Last night I finished Julian Dibbell's My Tiny Life. I started it back in December, but only picked it up again a few weeks ago. I'm torn about my opinion of the book; on one hand, I like anything that has to do with OOP, Moo's, and Xerox PARC. And at times his writing is deft, persuasive, and really evocative. But on the other hand, the narrative with all its asides to "dear readers", &c., got too cloying for me to accept and enjoy it fully. It's a historical document, at this point, a meditation on Lambda MOO (which soldiers on, btw; I logged in a few days ago, and 196 people were connected) at a time of Web inundation. And I like historical documents, especially the odd and oblique ones. In that sense, then, it's a very valuable and interesting book. His consideration of whether there is rape in cyberspace is balanced, but not detached, and provocative. Yet I can't help feeling slightly put off by his cutesy authorial voice; that's what lingers most, and it shouldn't.