Tuesday, March 07, 2006

is about, madness, or; in defense of auto-critique

This thread could use a soundtrack. Now it has one. Question: would counting the logical fallacies, or attempting to quantify the auto-choreographical leaps in the following amount in the end to much the same? Or would it amount to something less? Both, perhaps?
...that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer, everybody his own artist where the whole thing came from, the binary system and the computer where technology came from in the first place, you see? I can't even go into it, you see that's what I have to go into before all my work is misunderstood and distorted and, and turned into a cartoon because it is a cartoon, whole stupified mob out there waiting to be entertained, turning the creative artist into a performer, into a celebrity like Byron, the man in the place of his work when probability cam in and threw that whole safe predictable Newtonian world into chaos, into disorder wherever you turn, discontinuity, disparity, difference, discord, contradiction, what they're calling aporia they took from the Greeks, the academics took the word from the Greeks for this swamp of ambiguity, paradox, perversity, opacity, obscurity, anarchy the clock without the clockmaker and the desperate comedy of Kierkegaard's insane Knight of Belief and even Pascal's famous wager in a world where everyone is "so necessarily mad that not to be mad would amount to another form of madness" where the artist is today, the artist and real artist, Plato warned us about...

[...for the full and copy-edited version of this scrivener's post see LS...]

...For me an image slumbers in the stone, who's that, Nietzsche? Probability, chance, disorder and breakdown here's that punched paper roll holding the the, damn! Getting blood all over these pages of ads for what I just said didn't I? Whole thing turns into a cartoon? an animated cartoon? Chance and disorder sweeping in and this binary system digital machine with its all-or-none paper roll holding the fort yes it was the fort, whole point of it to order and organize to eliminate chance, to eliminate failure because we've always hated failure in America like some great character flaw what technology's all about, music entertainment counting, counting, seventy years ago one great pianist cutting a roll coordinating his hands and pedaling within a fiftieth of a second 1926 one company cut and sold ten million rolls whole thing turns into a cartoon, mob out there crash bang storming the gates seeking pleasure democracy scaling the walls terrifying the elite who've had a corner on high class entertainment back to Marie Antoinette storming the Bastille with here yes, here's one yes, here's a German ad 1926 holding the line for the class act against here they come, here they come, "a still alrger class of people whoe cannot successfully operate the usual type of player, because they lack a true sense of musical values. They have no 'ear for music,' and for that reason they play atrociously upon pianos equipped even with high grade player actions" talking about the class act? about defending these elitist music lovers? Not here no, taking about what we're always talking about. Sales!

-Willaim Gaddis, Agape Agape, 4-14

Further reading.

2 comments:

Roger Gathmann said...

Is that really ten pages? Wow, I thought I loved Gaddis, but typing ten of his pages out, that is true love.

The only novel I haven't read is Agape. I guess it is an extension of the piano roll sections in J.R. I'd read bad reviews of it, but looking at that excerpt, I have a feeling that once again, the reviewers are wrong.

Anonymous said...

The scrivener hired did leave some bits out.