Thinking badly

Business first.  My vacation starts tomorrow; back a week from Monday.  Then the nightmare that will be Ubu Week begins.  I think bibliographing nicole is joining in around the same time, although she has recently had better things to do.  I remind any readalongers that there are no schedules and rules.  King Ubu, he’s the one who demands rules and disembrainings, not me.  Vacation to do list: 1. Write this post, 2. Go on vacation, 3. Ubu Week.  Got it.

I have had all sorts of bad ideas that have not made it onto Wuthering Expectations.  Also, bad ideas that have, a separate subject.  It is possible that some of those bad ideas are actually good ideas, that it is only my thinking that is bad.  Here are some nuts I have not yet cracked, or that I do not realize were cracked long ago, by a squirrel, perhaps, with the nut extracted and eaten, while I keep gnawing on the empty shell.

1.  Complexity.  Why do some good books keep their readers for hundreds of years, and other similarly good books do not?  I have this idea that the complexity of the book is crucial.  Not difficulty, which may well be a form of complexity.  The less complex books are replaced by new versions of the same idea.  The more complex books are irreplaceable.

I want to push past the idea that innovation is important.  We’re living in a period when the taste or preference for innovation is extraordinarily high.  I’m looking for something more universal.  The more universal the idea, the more reductive, simple, and banal.  The more boring.

2.  So another idea, a self-serving one, is to defend boring writing.  My recent reading of the Javier Marías novel Your Face Tomorrow: Fever and Spear has inspired some (bad) thought on the subject, although I have written about it before.  Nothing special about Marías here – he is borrowing from the maniacally precise descriptive writing of Alain Robbe-Grillet and the maddeningly spiralling monologues of Thomas Bernhard.  The boredom is conceptually purposeful, a perverse form of tension-building.

The challenge here would be to define and defend artful boredom.  A recent sparkling and witty Joseph Epstein piece on boredom suggests some helpful books and directions.  Epstein notes that Isaac Bashevis Singer argued that boredom is “the natural human condition of men and women,” and that “the purpose of art was to eliminate boredom.”  My goal would be to defend art whose purpose is to induce boredom.

The problem, obviously, is that my week-long defense of boring literature would almost certainly be crushingly boring.

3.  Canon-formation.  Another topic I have perhaps thought about too much, but because I mostly read canonical books, books from lists, books written about in other books, it may be worth some time thinking about how they got there.

I have a social scientist’s view of the canon.  It is an existing thing, or maybe many things, that is or are the outcome of a social process, analogous to how policies are the outcome of a political process or prices of a market economy.  Millions of individuals influence the process, some with more heft than others, but no individual or committee or council of clerics determines the outcome.  My idea is actually very similar to the argument by D. G. Myers that there is no such thing as the canon (this post is not the one I am thinking of).

I assume that this is obvious, but then I see bloggers get tripped up by the word "canon."  Blogging is a canon-forming activity.

4.  I have a million ideas about how other people are reading and writing incorrectly, and how they should fix their errors and infelicities by doing whatever it is that I do.  Somehow, I have been able to keep most of this to myself.  Let me continue to do so.

If any of these ideas are not as bad as I fear, or if they somehow inspire good thinking, please steal them.  I would love to find out why I am wrong.  Or right, sure, but I’m not counting on that.

Back on June 26^th or so.  Ubu, etc.  Ubu.  Ubu.