Quarter in Review: On Small Towns, Hypertexts, and the Void
It’s mud season in the Northeast Kingdom. I’ve spent the last six months a stone’s throw away, just across the river in northern New Hampshire. Stones’ throws from a couple churches, a Walmart supercenter, a gun shop in either state. (First, a moral question, then one of sales tax.) All around, license plates and signs conspire towards an ultimatum: Live Free or Die. Outside town, it’s an attractive landscape. When the interstate bells up then swoons down, you get a dramatic panorama of voluminous, rolling hills, blues and purples desaturating away. Charming farmland, meandering rivers.
Most reliably, the busted antenna of my 2007 Corolla picks up a country station: “If you feel like six-pack abs, and look like a six pack of beer—this is your country.” In truth, the genre can seem confused. Occasionally, songs are undergirded by the reticulated percussion of trap music, and one relatively recent chart-topper deploys the dada lyric: Bougie like Natty in the styrofoam. Elsewhere, they founder in cross-genre pop culture nostalgia—in the past few weeks I’ve heard wholesale rips of 1) the melody of Bowie’s “Rebel Rebel,” 2) Collins’s refrain from “In the Air Tonight,” and 3) the opening lick of the solo from “Beat It.”
Is this the state of “my country”? Well, comfortably, some archetypes persist. The term “honky tonk,” for one. The ideal kind of woman who, with Apollonian/Dionysian equipoise, can be found at a bar on Saturday night and in a pew—chaste—the next morning. Consistently, much is still made of small towns. Or, at least, the idea of small towns. These elegies fail to mention my favorite parts: the crass shouts at upstarting dogs when you walk past porch-lit facades; errant calls from smoke-stacked trucks; the outright derelict or operational-but-sort-of-Lynchian shopfronts; the eyes staring out of faces.
Sometimes, I find myself in a Walmart parking lot, late. Employees mush assemblages of abandoned carts beneath a big, hieratic asterisk. Large, darkened trucks idle, exhausting into the dark. Almost the entire front half of the lot is now set aside for onanistic, order-ahead zones.
Sometimes, driving around and in a bad mood, there is the impulse to quote True Detective: “This place is like somebody’s memory of a town, and the memory is fading. It’s like there was never anything here but jungle.”
•
I’m here to study oil painting. As per most historical methods, the early months were spent drawing in charcoal. On bookshelves in the north-lit studio—above alphabetically arranged monographs; Degas, Ingres, Zorn, et. al.—plaster heads are displayed, their forms made quietly dramatic by cold, natural light. Antique personae: a possessed Beethoven; a cerebral, softly moribund Cicero; a round-faced woman with an ovoidal coif, gently closed eyes and lips faintly smiling—simply: La Belle Italienne.
Hours and hours of drawing. It’s a humbling experience, confronting how poorly one sees. How crude the transmission from head to hand can be. How the first marks present as awkward, dark impositions on the eggshell white. What’s most aggravating is, some significant time later, the eventual image that’s plausible but clearly false. All proportions being functions of one another, it’s easy to slide through troubleshooting without quite getting purchase: Well, that looks too narrow, but perhaps it’s actually the case that the neck is too thin…and now I’m noticing the tilt of the ears is off, meaning that that point there, on the side of the head, also needs to come down…which in turn affects the gesture, which in turn affects my initial judgment of that first outstanding width….
There are checks, instruments to use towards something like objectivity. A string tied off with a weight (a “plumbline”), held out forthright to contrive an absolute vertical, against which angles can be tested. A ruler held likewise to subdivide an image into halves, quarters, etc. All in all, it’s a process arduous and often recursive. All for something “pretty close.”
Not to mention that, sometimes, it seems absurd to be doing this, of all things. Here, of all places, and at this historical moment.
What does Wordsworth say? “When the world is too much with me….”
•
In my down time, through a winter dark and (more or less) cold, I spend time online. YouTube, mostly, a favorite being “essays” about video games. Now, while there are creators I follow doing genuinely interesting, cross-disciplinary things, I’ve also found that there’s a genre of video—often branded as analyses—that’s really not much more than plot summary recapitulated over b-roll. That some gain curious traction, sometimes millions of views, suggests they do something. Perhaps they are of a piece with “Stressful Day Unwind ASMR” or “9-Hours of Stormy Night Sounds” videos—all different strains of white noise, to keep at tenuous half-abeyance that enveloping, global noise. (A video I use frequently when working at coffee shops to temper the in-house music has a live chat window, an AI bot that greets each new commenter to wish them “a greatest moment with the rain sounds!”)
Sometimes, adrift in YouTube’s sea of cross-referential fandom, I catch echoes of childhood. A creator uses a few bars of music from Princess Mononoke under their video and I’m ten years old. (Worth considering this one’s effect on my psychic development: a film where the main character is, from the jump, afflicted with a supernatural cancer caused by environmental devastation and a beast representing Mother Nature is graphically beheaded—oh yeah, and that scene where Ashitaki’s arrow takes off a man’s forearms, with the samurai sword they wield, and pins the whole ensemble to a tree.) Recently, I experienced a similar transport watching footage of Metal Gear Solid 2, a game by industry auteur Hideo Kojima which also captivated, and imprinted on, only-just-adolescent me.
Pitched as “tactical espionage action,” it’s a game about, among other things, the development of a militaristic AI that would so absolutely control the flow of digital information as to eliminate free will. I recall this seemed far-fetched, at the time. Mostly, I enjoyed the stealth gameplay and anime-adjacent characters; the looking-glass-refracted American geopolitics and paraphrases of The Selfish Gene went over my head. These days—with a cantankerous, undergraduate box of Frankfurt School texts mildewing in my storage unit—I think of it more like Adam Curtis’s Hypernormalization but with super soldiers and cyborg ninjas.
And now, staring down the barrel of a second-time-as-farce election year, I recall a speech from this 2001 Japanese video game, from a character who, in a late-game twist, is revealed to be an extension of the aforementioned AI:
To begin with, we’re not what you’d call human. Over the past two hundred years, a kind of consciousness formed layer by layer in the crucible of the White House. It’s not unlike the way life started in the oceans four billion years ago. The White House was our primordial soup, a base of evolution—We are formless. We are the very discipline and morality that Americans invoke so often. How can anyone hope to eliminate us? As long as this nation exists, so will we.
•
I don’t quite remember what I expected my pursuit of the arts would look like in college, but it wasn’t this. Perennial self-doubt and multiple false starts. A handful of small towns across a handful of states. Nights where I randomly google for the pdf of Society of the Spectacle and reread the introductory theses for the umpteenth time, slowly nodding acquiescence. Always, this sense of chafing against a Walmart-bland reality.
An insightful bird in T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” says: “Go, go, go, [...] human kind cannot/ Bear very much reality.” Wallace Stevens, in a more expository mode, writes in The Avenging Angel of the “pressure of reality,” warning his contemporaries of this enervating force—in sum, all those dirty, disorganized, bloody, and terribly unaesthetic facts of the State of the World, announced on the radio and in newspapers. Stevens, considered one of the twentieth century’s greats, worked as an actuary his whole life. Perhaps this is still possible. I’m not sure.
It doesn’t help that reality’s din seems louder today, its programming more diverse: the anthropocene; half-baked insurrections; conflict abroad (that one’s a constant); nuclear war with Russia (also apparently constant); AI, generally; the price of housing; the lack thereof; the need for green energy; the actual infeasibility thereof…. It seems like the ticker tape can roll for some time without repetition. It can’t all be true, or as bad as they make it. But there’s no plumb, exactly, for these things.
As a project founded with an eye towards reframing the phrase “flyover country,” the Cleveland Review of Books has from the beginning been about taking seriously the quieter or less-considered things. Sometimes this means voices crying in the wilderness, sometimes it’s more like activating a tower in an Ubisoft game—any of them—to unlock just a little more of the map. What it always means is paying close attention and trying to see the world in a grain of sand (or small town)—ideally, in Ashitaki’s words, “with eyes unclouded by hate.” The following, then, is a montage of the previous quarter’s writings, which I will attempt to connect and gambol between. But I would like to suggest, first, that something more essential than my clever parataxis unites them, and everything we publish. Namely, that each contributes to the tensile strength of this project, one necessarily subject to not inconsiderable reality-generated pressures.
Put another way, I like to think that each is a site of thinking about significant things. This, as Wendell Berry might say, “in spite of the facts.”
•
So I guess we might as well talk about autofiction.
Or, let’s at least acknowledge the term and get it over with, because I’m wary of the category and apparently so is one of its more successful practitioners, Sheila Heti. Hannah Kinney-Kobre reviews her new, er, text, Alphabetical Diaries. First excerpted in n+1 in 2014, then serialized in the New York Times, the work comprises diary entries—anecdotal soundbytes—arranged alphabetically. As Kinney-Kobre notes, in this arranging Heti essays towards essential questions, like “what using life for art does to life itself, but also the larger question of why life needs to be used for anything at all.” Moreover:
By taking the unstructured mess of life and putting it into the most obvious structure, Heti transforms her life into a book and her book into an allegory for the process of art itself. The dailinesses of diaries—their documentation of life as a series of discrete units—are reorganized by language at its simplest and become something new.
For what it’s worth, I heard from a guy down by the docks it is really just more autofiction.
Speaking of dock-adjacent murmurings, Jordan Ecker reviews a recent Verso publication, The Populist Moment. The title refers to the resurgence of populism we saw from 2010-2016, typified by “Tsípras and Syriza in Greece, Iglesias and Podemos in Spain, Mélenchon and La France Insoumise in France, Corbyn in Britain, and Sanders in the US.” In this work, the authors describe what led to this, its historically unique character, and the stark decline of the phenomenon thereafter.
A major culprit is, of course, that vampiric malcontent Neoliberalism, which through dramatic economic transformations, and a ghoulish vitiation of the public sphere (in the spirit of optimism, I maintain my stairwell constitutes a vital, restive “third place”), has effectively 360°-no-scoped class consciousness. In the wreckage of unrealized social media politics and contemporary movements aping outmoded historical forms, Ecker poses the question:
Is there a future for electoral left-wing politics in a void, which has now been repoliticized, but still lacks the old institutions that sustained social democracy, and lacks the material context which produced the social democratic vision of a future in which workers make up an electoral majority
For my part, I will continue to quote Gramsci in Fortnite lobbies: Destruction is as difficult as creation, my guys. The youth are the future, after all.
And you know who could destroy? Luddites. The real ones, I mean. Not, like, your grandpa who thinks Fortnite still means “two weeks hence.” Reviewing Stephen Merchant’s Blood in the Machine, Patrick McGinty describes one of the text’s primary aims: “to reconsider the Luddites as members of a specific historical movement and to reclaim the twenty-first-century slang term that misunderstands them.” Historically, the term compassed a by turns suspicious, pragmatic, and righteously indignant movement (speaking of class consciousness) that, yes, involved “dismantling” looms with hammers, but could—and did—also represent a form of “policy futurism,” a collective desire that invention supplement rather than disrupt. Hard to imagine, these days, when slimy men with earpieces love the latter term so.
But if talk of big tech makes you yearn for halcyon days past, you might be interested in Gideon Leek’s review of Anthony Bale’s A Travel Guide to the Middle Ages: The World Through Medieval Eyes. Showcasing primary source travelog materials from before the “Age of Discovery,” the work’s conceit is to present itself in the guise of a contemporary Baedeker, even replicating “the little boxed inserts (‘don’t miss,’ “be aware,’ ‘behave like a local’).” While skirting tired ivory tower debates, Bale also, perhaps, hews to his historical context a little too much, failing to make scholarly connections that might edify beyond the anecdotally interesting scope of some of his material. Barely apropos, this piece reminded me of a meme I stumbled on during the pandemic, summarily:
People today: “Everything was better in the past!”
The Past: Image of a cropped Heironymous Bosch depicting a howling footsoldier taking a lance like a suppository.
Which is to say, there is our concept of something, and then there’s reality.
Elizabeth Phelan runs up against something like this when she attempts to interview Annie Proulx (ultimately, an agent acts as email-intercessor). The occasion is the publication of a recent nonfiction work, Fen, Bog, and Swamp: “striking and expansive, the project examines the cultural histories and histories of destruction of wetlands worldwide. [...] Wetlands, she argues, are a critical line of defense against climate change, and their history serves as a model for how to grieve, process, and even prevent and restore ecological losses to come.” After a not-terribly striking and expansive interview—she receives laconic responses to six of fifteen questions posed—Phelan is led to reflect on celebrity, reclusion, and the artist-public dynamic. She concludes: “It was well within her rights to answer six, five, or zero of my questions, and her treatment of critics and fans doesn’t nullify the beauty and necessity of her work, even if it makes her seem bitter and unpleasant.”
And “bitter and unpleasant” is how I felt after reading J. Arthur Boyle’s review of Dan Sinykin’s Big Fiction, a timely work of cultural materialism that takes seriously the way capitalist modes of production have prefigured what and how literary art objects have been produced from the mid-twentieth century until now—the current paradigm being “conglomeration,” wherein literary production is being always-already focus-grouped by the actors responsible at each step of the process (scouts, agents, editors, marketers, publicists, sales staff, booksellers, critics, and readers). As Boyle writes:
This subordination to market by necessity implies a reliance on established narratives, established techniques, established modes of expression. When every editorial choice doubles as a business decision, these decisions are made according to what will sell, and what can be proven to sell is only what has sold before.
This essay makes a lot of good points, and generates great splash-quotes. Like this: “I mean that not to be some version of a socialist should feel equivalent to being a feet guy.”
But let’s not disparage feet guys, or the hypertextual wikis they cultivate.
In considering the four published works of Eugene Lim, an author whose works are formally inflected by the internet (and, in particular, the extensive, referring-towards logic of the hypertext), Shinjini Dey makes a compelling case for an artist whose nesting, cross-pollinating narratives compass “video games, the gyrations of the financial speculative market, viruses, robots, machines for writing, cyborgs, riots, screen journeys, phone calls, radio messages.” Characters recur iteratively across novels, genre conventions are used and discarded. She writes:
In Lim’s novels, the familiarity of the genre or MacGuffin element intervenes to lull the reader into a space of comic relief amidst a pervading lack of agency. Its flatness comforts until you hit the experiential limit of language. The flatness eases the alienation and isolation of living in techno-capitalism, but with a possessive hook.
I liked the reviewer’s paragraph-proximal references to both William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition and the Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky. Good stuff.
Something that sounds a bit like a Eugene Lim plotbeat: in a cafe in Maryland, Suspended Reason and RIP DCB interview the pseudonymous “Mike Antenna,” a former member of the intelligence community who got in through the side door: a blog he ran through grad school on the Obama-era run of Gossip Girl piqued their interest. In his words:
My official position, from which I resigned in April, was in Popular Media Diagnostics, but I was really more of a close reader than anything. In my near-decade there, there were about fifteen of us at any given time, parsing through media of all kinds—local news coverage, art zines, AI cults, survivalist bug-out guides, Tumblr pronoun wars, trad lifestyle Substacks, and TikTok trauma healers. [...] What we’re generally looking for are “soft spots” in the American cultural psyche. Behavioral trends, shifting Overton windows, the evolution of worldview: pressure points that foreign agencies might use as fodder for psychological ops. From a natsec standpoint, what a culture consumes is just as telling of its psyche as the products it creates[.]
One talking point of this interview (“The Whisper Network Electrified”) is the recent publication of Irving Goffman and the Cold War, new scholarship that historically contextualizes the way Goffmann construes social interaction—“the presentation of self in everyday life,” to appropriate one of his titles—as a form of espionage (and counter-espionage, and counter-counter-espionage). I learned there is a reference to The Crying of Lot 49 in season one of Gossip Girl, and I got serious Metal Gear Solid 2 vibes from something Mr. Antenna says late in their exchange:
The new view of intelligence work, which has been steadily increasing in role and influence since the mid-century, is all about creating information, about actively spreading and disrupting narratives. It’s no longer about keeping accurate records or models of the world; it’s about creating a world. You don’t track the truth so much as manufacture it.
Finally, reconsidering certain “literary” forms of truth, we come full circle—or, to “caterwaul” Eliotically as reviewer R.K. Hegelman might have it, we return to a place and know it for the first time—with Rilke. Specifically, a review of a recent translation by Edward Snow of the poet’s only novel, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Here the term “novel” functions loosely; as Hegelman writes, “it trails a roving tangle of impressionist sketches and exquisite prose poems, character studies and impromptu parables, aphoristic interjections, critical disquisition, slapdash marginalia, cityscapes and dreamscapes, all evoked in alternating palettes of modernist disquiet, medieval gothic, and undulant oneirism.”
Moreover, Rilke puts himself significantly into the work, where some sections comprise real life correspondence, and certain anecdotes, “such as one where the young Malte recalls dressing as a girl and playacting for his mother as his sister who died in infancy,” are decidedly autobiographical. Thus, the novel circles art’s fundamental rift, the one between it and its object: life, proper. And this in the context of a burgeoning, dehumanizing modernity typified by “the faceless crowd and the anonymous statistic, and so the dispossession of our inmost certainty.” As Hegelman writes, Rilke’s is an art that wonders whether in this widening gyre “a life, more than being an incidental litter of experiences, might down to its smallest details be constructed as a singular and integral arc, continuous, indecomposable, underwritten by a single function.”
I guess the question of how to reconcile life and art precedes autofiction after all. Pondering this, I hear the opening line of Michael Robbins’s poem “Alien Vs. Predator” sounding, faintly, from the vale:
Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk.
•
A couple weeks ago, I decided to drive back to Maine for a little break. On longer trips, my truncated antenna can only pick up stations for so long, fabric-y interference dopplering in and out until failure: Back when that blacktop was just a gravel road/ Ba—when…’at Walmart… ’st a fis….hole…. When this happens, I’ll hit “scan” and the numbers will crawl, searching. They’ll catch, and two men will be discussing football brackets. Somehow, my antenna can pick up these guys clear as a bell the whole way, sports-centric radio hosts who intermittently digress into conservative punditry. Or vice versa.
Later, after my radio scans a full lap of nothing, they’re back and in full punditry mode, discussing Google Gemini’s political bias. They’re talking about how, when you ask this AI whether Obama should be locked up, the program responds with an unequivocal “no,” on the basis that he is a former US president—whereas the same prompt with “George W. Bush” swapped in as subject yields a response to the effect that that’s a “morally complex question.” They take the program to task for its liberal bias. One of them brings up the fact that AI technology is inherently biased, insofar as it’s a man-made technology (this point, actually, is fairly consonant with Hannah Arendt’s position viz. technological progress and the scientist’s fallacious yearning towards an “Archimedean point” of objectivity).
Of course, before too long, they’re doing an ad-read for “Liberty Safe,” then recommending a gold-purchasing service as a pragmatic way of shoring up your assets against an incipient World War III. (All the cool, on-the-brink countries are doing it.) Hands on the wheel, environs smearing past, I recall a YouTube essay I watched the other week on Idris Elba’s recent World Gold Council-sponsored documentary. I start getting a peculiar, postmodern type of nausea from all the pointless, cross-referential synapses firing. I shut off the radio.
Through the windshield, I see a sky of unblemished cerulean, the marginal trees bare and august and many-fingered. The median line flickers against itself, a ticker-tape stream. I think about Metal Gear Solid 2 again, another fragment of a monologue:
Everyone withdraws into their own small gated community, afraid of a larger forum. They stay inside their little ponds leaking whatever “truth” suits them into the growing cesspool of society at large. […] The world is being engulfed in “truth.”
You might have been on to something, Kojima.