marginal gloss

‘For some little while now I have been chasing a hare — buck or doe, I do not know; never yet have I managed to come close enough to check. It is lanky, manky, and quite as rapid as its name. This past month I have pursued the hare through a gallery, my memory, some postcards, and a half-dozen books. In recent days, the hare has gone to earth in the British Library; and it is here — seated on this chair, at this desk — that I would like to re-commence the chase. (Please excuse the Victorianism of my voice, but I can at present see no way other to make the approach — this task being so obviously illegitimate. I intend, for once, as an improvised Victorian, to ignore the wraiths of contemporary thought; unobjectifiers, soul-suckers.) I will, in this great library — cavernous yet luminous — on this wooden chair, at this wooden desk, attempt to hunt the hare haphazard; to examine the quotidian grasses, to sniff the wind of correspondence, to trace the found tracks of the intentional, to crumble or squidge the meant droppings, and to come — eventually — into the real presence of a real living literary animal-idea, and not kill it.’

Toby Litt is one of those quietly innovative authors who I’ve always admired very much, even while having mixed feelings about much of his fiction. When he’s good he’s very very good, and when he’s bad he’s — well, I’ll come to that. I very much enjoyed his riffing on reality TV, chick-lit and To The Lighthouse in Finding Myself, but though I liked parts of Hospital I just couldn’t bring myself to finish it. One of these days I’ll give it another go. Also it’s pretty cool that he wants to write a novel for each letter of the alphabet. I loved his take on J.G. Ballard. I very much admired his involvement with Penguin’s We Tell Stories project, which sort of crosses over with the above: the preface to Ghost Story. This in turn appears to have had its origins as a short story — you can read more on his website (though finding it in full is a pretty little puzzle). He does seem to have a thing about hares.

So. The preface to Ghost Story is narrated by a man who calls himself ‘Toby Litt’ and it describes a situation reminiscent of the one which will be further fictionalised in the novel proper: his life with his partner during and after a series of miscarriages. This is described as ‘non-fiction’ in the blurb, which is sort of odd because it is more surreal, more literary, and far more interesting than anything else in the novel proper. A couple, Agatha and Paddy (oho nice name that) move into a new house. The reader is particularly close, though not wholly inside, the mind of her; left alone all day, with her child Max living elsewhere, Agatha begins to stray towards agoraphobia, starts fantasising about the death of her husband, and almost stops eating.

It’s a credit to Litt’s style that he can write lucidly about these things without seeming sentimental or hysterical, but then this is a book about various kinds of restraint: class, language, writing, thought. There’s much to admire in the deliberately careful, cerebral style that the novel easily slips into — an extension of the offbeat ‘Victorianism’ of the preface — but so often Litt seems content to rumble along in this style while running low on substance. The book aspires to the chilling tones of The Turn of the Screw or M.R. James, but it just isn’t very frightening. It’s too long. By the end, I found myself skipping large chunks of text; I know, I know, I’m sorry, but I tried so hard, I did, I’m so sorry. I will still read your other books, Toby. And we’ll always have this:

‘I was able to stare in through the the window without attracting the attention of the corpse upon the kitchen table, feasted upon by three now full-grown foxes. It was not my wife, I would have recognised her; and besides, my wife wasn’t a man. This was a man-corpse, cooked…The foxes were talking as they ate, and this is what they said: ‘One, two, three.’ ‘One.’ ‘One two three.’ ‘One-two.’ ‘Three. One.’ ‘One.’ ‘One!’ ‘One.’ ‘Two.’ ‘One.’ ‘One two three one two three one two three.’ ‘Two.’ ‘Three.’’

‘There is something deeply seductive about the image of a pristine surface that frames unspeakable possibilities, so it is not surprising that a small literary canon has grown around the motif of the black mirror. In the extremely eccentric 15th-century Italian dream narrative Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the protagonist finds himself in an avenue whose marble walls have been inlaid with two perfect circles of jet, so that he is mirrored to infinity. Five centuries later, Truman Capote’s short story ‘Music for Chameleons’ seems to unfold in the depths of a black mirror, the ‘senseless flickerings’ of which recall an untuned television. And in his fatally recursive tale ‘The Mirror of Ink’, Jorge Luis Borges makes a black mirror — or rather its common variant, a small pool of ink poured into the hand — the instrument of a terrible revenge.’

From a review of ‘The Dark Monarch: Magic and Modernity in British Art’ at Tate St Ives, an exhibition to which I already wish I could go.

The above image is from the British Museum.

‘The scene itself is bizarrely calm, given the challenging reality at the other end of the satellite connection. It’s not a particularly Space Age-looking configuration—just a rack of equipment in the corner of a small classroom, acoustic tiles in the ceiling. A traditional Air Force officer (the drone pilot) is paired with a young, enlisted “sensor operator” (the videogame player, running the cameras and deploying the weapons) at a two-man console, complete with joysticks and controllers indistinguishable from the ones that ship with the latest PlayStation. (Why improve on the best a multibillion-dollar industry already has on offer? And why retrain your troops when Sony has spent so many years doing that for you?) Between the two operators, they have the necessary skills to navigate the aircraft, which can stay aloft up to 40 hours at a time and fly as high as 25,000 feet, responding to troops’ verbal cues (just like in World of Warcraft) and, most importantly, shooing very real ordnance, from Hellfire missiles to 500-pound bombs.’

Douglas Rushkoff visits the site in Nevada where soldiers fly UAVs over Afghanistan. See also for the source of this image.

The equation between remote warfare and video gaming seems simple enough, but since nobody seems quite sure how gaming works us over to begin with, it often makes me wonder whether the end result will be rather more complicated than a simple desensitised/sensitive dichotomy.

Also, I still can’t decide whether this RAF advert is unintentionally hilarious or genuinely terrifying.

Visitors to the Ed Ruscha retrospective at the Hayward Gallery are greeted by an enormous blown-up reproduction of one of his works blazing out from the Brutalist walkways and flyovers of London’s South Bank. In this context it takes on the significance of an accidental manifesto: indeed, it’s as good a definition of art as any I’ve heard. And it is a fine exhibition, taking in everything from his brightly-coloured beginnings in Pop Art to the intimations of gothic horror in his later works. Though his stock has surely never been higher, I knew relatively little about him beforehand, and came away feeling refreshed, enlightened and oddly touched — though J.G. Ballard described him as having ‘the coolest gaze in American art,’ there is something deeply and obliquely personal about his best work. Which isn’t to say that he can’t be darkly funny too.

Often the dominant tone is one of a wide-eyed wonder at the world, childlike if not necessarily innocent, expressing a sense of the insignificance of the individual in a vast and mysterious universe. He paints the lines of his utopian gas stations and factories without judgement, but look closely at his beautiful still-life rendition of a Ball Bearing Breaking a Glass of Milk, and you’ll see another blue world beyond the painting’s red background reflected in the metallic surface of the sphere. Ruscha seems to promise that even in the heart of violence, there may be found a terrible but transcendent stillness.

Los Angeles County Museum On Fire imitates the form of the widescreen Hollywood disaster movie as much as it does architectural draughtsmanship. For some reason I found it deeply affecting, almost mesmeric. He has a fascination — some might say a fetish — for the symmetrical forms of modernism, and how such buildings so often depart from their intentions. I can’t think of a better example of this than the Hayward Gallery itself and its own peculiar ambience of dilapidated post-war optimism. It’s as though Ruscha sees these buildings as having a secret message, as words written across the landscape in a language that can be read but never shared. The flames that inevitably follow bring to mind the dream-conflagration in which realism is consumed in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust; fire as an ugly, childlike smear of colour across the edge of the painting, almost as though it were an afterthought, or an instinctive reflex of revulsion. Oblivion often seems preferable to the data-overload of our information age.

small worlds →

Small Worlds by David Shute is a short but very beautiful flash game based around exploration. Reminiscent of Solaris, it’s one of the most unlikely, thought-provoking online experiences I’ve had in some time.

tails of the unexpected →

‘“What a lot of hairy-faced men there are about nowadays. When a man grows hair all over his face it is impossible to tell what he really looks like. Perhaps that’s why he does it. He’d rather you didn’t know.” To my mind Dahl’s flatly authoritative statements have a universal sweep and psychological penetration to rival the first line of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, with the added bonus of actually being true; I mean, there are undoubtedly many happy families that are altogether unalike, while — speaking with all the authority of the recently barbellate — I can assure you that when a man grows hair on his face, he definitely has something to hide.’

A very entertaining article on Roald Dahl by Will Self, who seems to be bravely striding towards ever more Pninish combinations of almost self-parodic wordiness and slightly unhinged psychomarxist insight by the day.

dave and david

Rereading Dave Eggers’ beautiful, brilliant short story Up The Mountain Coming Down Slowly, I spotted something I’d completely missed the first time round: that the character of Grant appears to have been based in part on David Foster Wallace. With his dip tobacco and his cut-off jeans, his sincere and apologetic manner, a ‘not the most normal guy’ somehow both vulnerable and self-sufficient, a product of a different age venturing off alone into the wilderness…could it be anyone else?

‘The mist soon lifts and Rita sees Grant, who has already assembled his tent, surrounded by porters. He and a very young man, the youngest and thinnest she’s seen, are playing a tennislike game, using thin wooden paddles to keep a small blue ball in the air. Grant is barefoot and he is grinning.’

Maybe. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

The complete text of There Are Some Things He Should Keep To Himself by Dave Eggers.

I picked up The Broken World by Tim Etchells from my local library partly because the cover looked intriguing (if a little YA-ish), partly because I saw the word ‘Borgesian’ on the second line of the blurb on the back, and partly because it promised a neat conceit: a novel written in the form of an online walkthrough to a fictional PC game from which the book takes its title. Of course, it doesn’t depart entirely from the standard novelistic form because the narrator’s life keeps intruding on his guide, Pale Fire-like, and so his oblique reminders to ‘keep searching the bodies’ and to ‘stretch and kick repeatedly to loosen bindings’ are juxtaposed with accounts of his uncommunicative life with his girlfriend, Tory, and his day job at a ‘cooked circular food’ outlet named ‘Domenico’s’ (no prizes for guessing that one). But unlike Pale Fire we have no access to the source material of the narrator’s commentary — stylistically and thematically, Etchells might be said to owe more to Douglas Coupland or perhaps Brett Easton-Ellis in its depictions of geeky twentysomething Americana-slackerdom. But I won’t hold that against him.

The game is an action/adventure/RPG set in a huge, complex and impossibly detailed virtual world. The best comparison I can think of is the Fallout series, except that ‘The Broken World’ is so huge that it becomes inconceivable as a real game. It’s a mess of sf/fantasy/horror styles and plots, a Frankenstein’s monster of reconstituted bits and pieces from gaming history, a kind of collage of various archetypal game-experiences. There are one or two references to real games (I think Beyond Good and Evil is mentioned at one point) but, like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ, that it is implausible and incoherent as a real game ends up being besides the point when it captures certain intensely ‘gamelike’ situations so well.

There’s a sequence in that film where Jude Law’s character realises that although he can say whatever he wants in the game, the AI can’t converse with him unless he puts his words in a certain way. It can’t transcend the level of its pre-written responses. Similarly, the narrator of The Broken World explains that the way in which the game only generates objectives within its world once certain pre-conditions have been fulfilled is perhaps more lifelike that we might think. We believe we have perfect freedom, but so many of our actions are unthinking, only another product of lifelong conditioning; we all have our own pre-written responses. And so life comes to imitate the game: from our point of view, certain people stand only for their significance as parts of broader quests, condemned to repeat the same small pattern of actions for all time.

‘The Broken World’ quite often seems literally broken; yet throughout the narrator suggests that the game’s bugs are not just annoying problems, but errors part of some wider significance:

‘But if you take a close look you will see a pixelated shimmering by the left-hand side of the porthole. Bro—it is a tiny gap (maybe one pixel) between the texture mapping of the window and the green stuff below. OK. I am not an expert but when I showed this glitch to CW he told me that cool green line you can see is part of the wireframe, i.e. the skeleton that they build the whole world onto. Texture mapping is how they make the porthole look like it does (with colours, paint, and textures, etc). Anyway. Look hard between the two and into that gap of darkness, and you will see it is somehow different from the night. My friend, when you look in to that gap you are seeing right through to the nothing that the world is drawn onto. HINT: Do not spend too long looking in there coz you soon start thinking too much about that nothing.’

This is partly reminiscent of Jim Rossignol’s excellent writing on the intentional-or-otherwise profound surrealism of the bugged-out game. I read Rock Paper Shotgun compulsively, even though I hardly get around to playing many of the games featured on it, and you should too. There are also some great, pure ideas in Etchells’ novel: there’s one memorable sequence in which the player finds themselves in a place which the narrator calls ‘The Crowded Earth’, a fully-functioning and beautifully detailed city, with no immediate task other than to survive as a homeless person. To move on, the player must find a sequence of numbers which is hidden somewhere chosen at random by the game. This makes the narrator’s task somewhat more difficult:

‘When the key code/number finally comes to you (Ray) it can be in many different ways altho the skywriting as mentioned before must be the most spectacular that I’ve ever heard of. Be ready at all times. The number could get passed to you on a scrap of paper by some person you just met, or whispered in your ear during a taxi ride, or told to you in a phone call from some near-total stranger that you just happened to encounter. Or it could come ringed by a stranger in the numbers of your bank statements or written in the sand by a girl that Ray (you) is slowly falling in love with against his better judgement, or chalked by some dumbass kids on the wall at the end of a long long garden in a house that Ray just happens to be staying in when all hope is almost gone etc. There is more or less no actual limit to just how the code can come through, but one thing is for sure and certain: you will only get one chance—so plz PLEASE write it down when you see it and keep it safe.’

As it turns out, this is a sort of microcosm for the whole guide, since it becomes apparent that there are countless other ways through the game. The walkthrough is thus made redundant as anything other than a guide to the narrator’s own mind; that of a man unable to express love or anything else except through his way of playing the game, which is to turn it into a love story between the two central characters who must be reconciled at all costs. Perhaps there’s an argument about the side-effects of game addiction to be dug out of this, yet it’s also clear that the walkthrough is only one manifestation of an impulse that might equally find its release in a different and more respectable art form.

Am I arguing that the contents of GameFAQs are art, then? Perhaps not always. But it’s often rather humbling to think of the sheer weight of the millions of words of invisible literature produced constantly online by people who are just writing for the sake of writing, perhaps spurred on by a small readership, but free from the expectations of any editor or publisher, with little hope of lasting fame and nothing to guide them except their own instincts. Some of it might be awful, but happily no-one is obligated to read it. Whether it’s fanfic, game guides or just blogging, I suspect many people who strive towards objectivity are writing from the heart without knowing it.

The Pixies — Into the White