Michael’s Comments (group member since Mar 07, 2009)

Michael’s comments from the fiction files redux group.

James wrote: "Sounds like a 21st century Twilight Zone episode..."

Sounds like a story waiting to be written JP. :)

Patty wrote: "R.a. wrote: "Well, I made it . . . Phew!

--R.A.
"

'bout time! yay!"

Good times.

I've actually been poking around the ol' MySpace recently. Feels like a ghost town in there.

Ladd Observatory, Brown University




"The late Prof. Upton of Brown, a friend of the family, gave me the freedom of the college obseratory, (Ladd Observatory) & I came & went there at will on my bicycle. Ladd Observatory tops a considerable eminence about a mile from the house. I used to walk up Doyle Avenue with my wheel, but when returning would have a glorious coast down it. (H.P. Lovecraft, Letter to Reinhardt Kleiner, 16 November 1916)

10 Barnes Street



This was the home of Lovecraft from April 1926 to May 1933, his most prolific period. This house’s address was listed as that of Dr. Marinus Bicknell Willett in The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Great article ("“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries..."), and GREAT opening photo. Thanks for sharing Newpops!

Hey Dan-man! If you are out there somewhere, hope you know we are thinking of you. Good luck on your new year over here on the Right Coast, and have a happy, happy birthday on us.

And hey Shel-man! Only 25 and so much you've already done, and so much more to do.

Love to all on this FF Holiday.
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Hugh wrote: "Are you doing... is anyone else doing... www.infinitesummer.org? I re-read IJ in January but am thinking of being a part of this.

Good tip Hugh. THANKS! I hadn't picked up on the whole Hamlet parallel, but now that I have it is like a bright light going off. I am enjoying this book - but I am afraid Wittgenstein's Mistress is going to waste because of it.

Thanks again.
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Infinite Jest is really heating up. Rounded the corner on page 200 recently and the book has gone from difficult to good to GREAT. It has really got my attention now and I just want to stop doing everything else and lay about and read it. I can see why all the fuss. This 1000 page puppy is excellent. RIP DFW.
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Chris wrote: "Genius. I love the tags: "ShadyGroup" cracks me up. Especially as "Enron" is one of the choices, right next to the Illuminati, Opus Dei and the Knights Templar. "

And Colonel Sanders' secret fourteen herbs and spices is right up there with the Ark of the Covenant, the umbilicus mundi, and time travel! Wonderful.

I'm stealing this code.

Maureen wrote: "just wanted to let you guys know that i seem permanently stopped at page 125 on this book. the rhythm of the prose was crazy-making for me so i've set it aside for now. as i mentioned to patty, in ..."

I had the same issue with Infinite Jest this past week. I was cruising along pretty well when I hit a 10 page paragraph around page 165. Stopped me dead in my tracks for the good part of the week.

Reading for pleasure shouldn't be this much work.

Jcamilo wrote: "In art, in great literature, Style is substance."

Now you are going all Aristotlean on me. Interesting perspective, but I don't know if I'd go this far.

Matt wrote: "let me short circuit this semantically - the minute it gets in its own way it is in fact not good writing"

Depends. Sometimes the writing can stand front and center, and still the underlying story, concepts, characters, yada, can be excellent; just the the writing itself is more than excellent. Just off the top of my head I am thinking of Poe in this. There is no way in hell his writing doesn't "get in the way". His actual writing - his word choice, his phrasing - is conspicuously, purposely on display.

Most of my favorite writers have the balls to do this. They know their story is good enough to support the chances they are taking with the *writing*. Cormac McCarthy is mentioned in the thread. And I think he is a good example.

F. Scott and D.H. Lawrence are another couple of authors I can think of off the top of my head who are confident enough in their material that they don't shy away from being adventurous with their prose. Maybe the author being reviewed here doesn't quite have a story as good as The Rainbow or Gatsby to work with, and thus her elevated writing can comes across as reaching.

"Obvious" is one thing - Bach is nothing if not obvious - but making up for a lack of substance with extra surface effort is another altogether.

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The following story is referenced at least twice in Wittgenstein’s Mistress:

Pope Boniface VIII wanted to commission some paintings for St. Peter’s and so he sent a courtier around to find the best painter in Italy. The courtier asked all the artists to give him a sample of their work to send to the Pope. He came to Giotto’s workshop, explained his mission, and asked him for a drawing which would give the Pope some idea of his competence and style. “Sure,” said Giotto; and he laid down a sheet of paper, reached for a brush dipped in red paint, closed his arm to his side to make a sort of compass of it, and in one even sweep scribed a perfect circle. “There you are,” he told the courtier, handing it to him with a smile.

“That’s your drawing?” asked the courtier, who didn’t know whether Giotto was pulling his leg. “Is that all you’re going to send His Holiness?”

“That’s more than enough,” said Giotto. “Send it with your other drawings and see whether it’s understood or not.”

The Pope’s messenger took the drawing and went away trying to hold his temper. Did that little painter think he was a fool?

When he got back to Rome he showed the Pope the big O and told him how Giotto had scribed it—freehand, without a compass. The pope and his advisors DID understand the achievement of that O and gave Giotto the commission.


Reminds me of Witt’s discussion of language as a “guide” in Philosophical Investigations. He explores there the nature of “rule” in language, or more generally the existence of “consistency”. One thing I really love about Witt is the interactive, participatory style of his writing. He is always asking the reader to play little thought-games to see how his concepts “feel” intellectually – much like Descartes in that.

#175 Make some arbitrary doodle on a bit of paper, – And now make a copy next to it, let yourself be guided by it. – I should like to say: “Sure enough, I was guided here.” But as for what was characteristic in what happened – if I say what happened, I no longer find it characteristic.


After many more examples, and a wider discussion of mathematical induction and intuition, Witt discards the notion of a private language:

#335 Now if it were asked: “Do you have the thought before finding the expression?” what would one have to reply? And what, to the question: “What did the thought consist in, as it existed before its expression?”

#340 One cannot guess how a word functions. One has to look at its use and learn from that. But the difficulty is to remove the prejudice which stands in the way of doing this. It is not a stupid prejudice. [Witt’s emphasis:]

#241 Speech with and without thought is to be compared with the playing of a piece of music with and without thought.


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Great to see the discussion warming up. I knew nothing about Elizabeth Bishop, and the reference in Alex’s post is fantastic (as well his entire post).

I have not finished the book, so please no spoilers please. Though it does seem we are in for somewhat a surprise regarding the narrator’s isolation. I am hearing two opinions on this supposed isolation: I) in a world without others (Alex), “efforts to retain meaningful language will fail”, II) even in a world without others (Patty) “If there is language there is culture.”

I’d come down immediately, and rather passionately, on Side II. Even in ideal isolation, a.k.a. “the forest of felled trees”, the process of making one’s voice heard has import. Maybe without societal meaning, yes, but aesthetically meaningful nonetheless. Just my two cents. Trying to lend some support here to all those writers out laboring in obscurity or under the impression their best friend will burn their work upon their deaths in any case.

Witt. proposed and rejected a concept of Private Language, but my sense is that even if he finds discussing such a concept impossible, he would not object to "passing over in silence" such a concept.

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Here is an interesting review of another of Markson's books.

Vanishing Point
David Markson
Shoemaker Hoard
ISBN 1593760108 $15.00 191 pp.

There's something exciting about delving into a book without necessarily knowing what it is about. Sometimes a book description can absolutely ruin the element of surprise or even hype up a book that eventually disappoints in between the covers. My experiment with the unknown occurred when I started reading "Vanishing Point" by David Markson (Wittgenstein's Mistress). Although I had read a brief but positive review (that I couldn't remember) of the book prior to receiving it, I had no idea what I was getting into it. And that's a good thing.

To be brief, "Vanishing Point" is a book of succinct little-known facts and quotes about famous artistic types from Voltaire, van Gogh, Shakespeare, and many more. ("Zora Neale Hurston's jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by the telling police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.") The facts are incredibly interesting, making the book hard to put down. But the author doesn't stop there. He writes the book in a unique form of syntax, slightly resembling poetry. ("Heidelberg, Fritz Wunderlich died in.")

As if that wasn't enough, the main character tries unsuccessfully to keep his own thoughts and opinions out of the book. Slowly but surely we learn that the writer, known only as Author, is a man with questions of his own, including questions about aging and why he has become so tired lately. This element of the book is reminiscent of the main character in the film "Adaptation." It is equally amusing.

I have to admit that from the beginning I wondered where this book of merely quotes and facts was going with no chapter headings and its strange syntax. (I even sneaked a peek at the description on the back cover after reading a few pages.) I soon began to realize that "Vanishing Point" is a brave and original endeavor in experimental fiction. It's a thinking person's book that readers will want to read over and over again, all the way to its shocking ending. Lovers of fiction, poetry, art, and history should all find something in this book to enjoy.

Emanuel Carpenter
Reviewer

Jono - what's the status of buying this direct online?

Patty wrote: "i thought the best essay in the book, the best essay ever was the one on Usage.
"

Yes! Who knew reading dictionaries could be so fun!! DFW at his best in this essay; the subtext on his family’s SNOOTy background which grows in the footnotes is a great counterpoint to his evolving, scholarly, argument in the main text, and serves as a great wink and nod to the author's pretensions.

There is some debate on the internet as to his conclusions - they make him out a grammar Nazi, where I see him making quite the opposite argument, i.e. that one must live multiple grammars (down to a personal grammar?) His initial catalog of possible “Discourse Communities” is a hoot: “And the United States obviously has a huge number of such Discourse Communities, many of them regional and/or cultural dialects of English: Black English, Latino English, Rural Southern, Urban Southern, Standard Upper-Midwest, Maine Yankee, East-Texas Bayou, Boston BlueCollar, on and on. Everybody knows this…Plus, of course, there are innumerable sub- and subsubdialects based on all sorts of things that have nothing to do with locale or ethnicity — Medical-School English, Peorians-Who-Follow-Pro-Wrestling-Closely English, Twelve-Year-Old-Males-Whose-Worldview-Is-Deeply-Informed-By-South-Park English…”

This essay can be found online here: http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave...

I’d be interested to hear other people’s opinions on the conclusions he reaches in this fun and thoughtful piece.

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Hi tribe. First time I've been near a 'puter in a week or so, so I thought I'd drop in. I've had both this book and DFW's Infinite Jest going this vacation, and I have to say I've found IJ more readable, more compelling. I'm about half way into this book so don't spoil it for me!

I can see how some have had a hard time liking this book. Waiting for something to "happen" seems a misplaced goal. The lack of breaks, heck the lack of paragraphs, makes reading it as a novel difficult. I am finding it goes down a lot better with me if I digest it in small chunks. But then I pick up Infinite Jest and I'm gone for a couple reading hours. So slow moving so far.

Shel wrote: "Hey, didn't JE have something on Witt. in Lulu?"

I checked, and he didn't. I'll ask JE again here for a Fiction Files exclusive, and have Will Miller do one on Wittgenstein for us.
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Margaret wrote: "Brian, you're so articulate. Your reviews are well writen, good or bad. I think it's nice that he was "delighted by it". This email says something about both of you."

Well said.

Shel wrote: "Well. I've only read enough philosophy to be dangerous at cocktail parties, and I don't know how you've done it but now you have me interested, Michael.

I am not sure about playful. Playful dies p..."

Shel: I think you mentioned previously that your husband is pretty fun with the philosophy. Can you ask him his take on Witt., and maybe get his take on this novel?

As for your comments; I haven't started the book yet so I have no idea, except for the blurbs on the cover, how the novel could relate to (here it comes) Wittgensteinian concepts.

Cheers,
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