Beyond Reason: The Top Ten

[linebaugh]

Iconoclastic poster formerly known as suspended reason has raised eyebrows in part because his personal cannon is seemingly so different from the average dissensus user. Here @sus will give us ten select cuts from the personal catalog so we may broaden our horizons

 

[Clinamenic]

I'm ready for some bootlickin'!

 

[sus]

This time, the only boots getting licked will be mine

 

[sus]

I assume I'm getting asked for reading recs and not music. Just this little thing called context clues I've picked up on

 

[linebaugh]

I assume I'm getting asked for reading recs and not music. Just this little thing called context clues I've picked up on

Ya, should have made that more clear

 

[linebaugh]

Nothing modernist, nothing sci fi, nothing mystic/mythic/magic, nothing french.

 

[linebaugh]

Nothing oneotrix point never might mention to the new yorker. Nothing from the version core cannon. This is the suspened syllabus

 

[sus]

I'll toss out a preliminary list here and then I'll explain some of my choices later tonight/tomorrow, when I'm back from apple-picking

You've set up too high of expectations here, I'm not sure I can deliver an adequately idiosyncratic and quality list, but I'll try

- Andre Dubus, "On Charon's Wharf"
- Random Cloud, “Fiat Flux”
- Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction
- Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos
- Peli Grietzer, Amerikkkka
- Sarah Perry's Ribbonfarm essays
- Ben Lerner, "The Media"
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame
- Annie Baker, The Flick + Antipodes
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
- Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (opening chapter)
- Eliot, "East Coker" (closing stanzas)
- Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens + Forests
- Franzen, Freedom
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Michael Shaara, Killer Angels
- Don DeLillo, Underworld (prologue)
- Austen, Emma
- Schelling, Strategy of Conflict
- Paglia, Sexual Personae (intro)
- Keith Thomas, Man & the Natural World

And I'll add some movies/TV series, since they're texts too

- Mamet, House of Games
- Herzog, Wrath of God
- PTA, Punch-Drunk Love + Phantom Thread
- Malick, New World
- Altman, Short Cuts + Nashville
- Kubrick, Barry Lyndon
- Dunham, Girls (S5)
- Gavin, Lodge 49
- Wyler, Ben Hur

 

[sus]

I can trim down to 10, make this more reasonable. But lots of short passages flagged in case people want to look them up—"On Charon's Wharf" is maybe 15 pages, Lerner's "The Media" is maybe two thousand words tops, the "East Coker" stanzas are flagged (probably the last couple pages TBH). Some opening chapters and prologues. Very rarely does an entire book feel perfect; Grietzer's Amerikkkka is one of the few honors there; but more often I'm really strongly drawn to openings, prologues, introductions

 

[sus]

OK I'm off apple-picking but when I'm back I'll try to post excerpts. Some will need scanning-in since they're not available online. (Do I win points for this?)

 

[linebaugh]

I'll toss out a preliminary list here and then I'll explain some of my choices later tonight/tomorrow, when I'm back from apple-picking

You've set up too high of expectations here, I'm not sure I can deliver an adequately idiosyncratic and quality list, but I'll try

- Andre Dubus, "On Charon's Wharf"
- Random Cloud, “Fiat Flux”
- Erving Goffman, Strategic Interaction
- Lynn Margulis, Microcosmos
- Peli Grietzer, Amerikkkka
- Sarah Perry's Ribbonfarm essays
- Ben Lerner, "The Media"
- Samuel Beckett, Endgame
- Annie Baker, The Flick + Antipodes
- Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
- Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (opening chapter)
- Eliot, "East Coker" (closing stanzas)
- Robert Pogue Harrison, Gardens + Forests
- Franzen, Freedom
- Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
- Michael Shaara, Killer Angels
- Don DeLillo, Underworld (prologue)
- Austen, Emma
- Paglia, Sexual Personae (intro)
- Keith Thomas, Man & the Natural World
And I'll add some movies/TV series, since they're texts too

- Mamet, House of Games
- Herzog, Wrath of God
- PTA, Punch-Drunk Love + Phantom Thread
- Malick, New World
- Altman, Short Cuts + Nashville
- Kubrick, Barry Lyndon
- Dunham, Girls (S5)
- Gavin, Lodge 49
- Wyler, Ben Hur

Was expecting something dorkier, more mathy, but still very good

 

[linebaugh]

Im actually reading sexual personae now and cant decide my feelings on it. I think the chapter after the intro is better because theres fun comparative anthropology going on where as the intro is just making intuitive extensions of her single metaphor which, while probably correct, she sometimes really stretches past the point of serious consideration. Also think she paints herself into a corner a bit by her effort to be so unshakeabley anti- the thing she is writing against. The writing is fueled by pure butt-hurt but I suppose thats part of the charm.

Theres also an unsavory element which isnt her fault in that its pure internet culture war material. She pretty much covers all the discourse despite starting this in the 70's

 

[Mr. Naga Pickle]

they only had one tape and one seven inch fuck u mean top ten smdh

 

[version]

- Gavin, Lodge 49

I've finally gotten round to watching season 2 and just have the finale left. It's great when Giamatti appears and they all end up in Mexico. He materialised in the Pynchon sub to promote the show at one point.

 

[sus]

Going to post "The Media" in its entirety, because it's very short + paywalled + brilliant

Walking at dusk through the long meadow, recording this prose poem on my phone, that’s my job, as old as soldiery, the hills, the soldered hills where current flows, green current. When you are finished recording, your lips are dried flowers. The trees are full of black plastic bags and hornets’ nests but not significance; the task of imbuing them falls to me. And it’s me, Ben, just calling to check in. I’m on the way to pick Marcela up from day care and just wanted to hear about your trip. I’m sure it must have been hard seeing him like that. Anyway, I love you and I’m here. Give me a call when you can. I’ll be around until the late nineteenth century, when carved wood gives way to polished steel, especially in lake surfaces. You know how you sometimes realize it has been raining only when it stops, silence falling on the roof, forming rivulets on the glass? This is the religious equivalent of that, especially in music and applied fields, long meadows. Overwintering queens make wonderful pets, just don’t expect them to understand your writing, how you’ve rearranged the stresses to sponsor feelings in advance of the collective subject who might feel them, good work if you can get it, and you can’t, nobody can, that’s why the discipline is in crisis, this cut-flower business, applied folds, false equivalence. I remember when I interviewed for this position. I was wearing a Regency trimmed velvet tailcoat with a small hole over the left breast where the lead ball had entered one of my great-grandfather’s five heartlike structures. I met the committee at a Hyatt. The room had migraine carpet; a conventional river scene hung above the bed. After the usual pleasantries, the chairperson requested that I sing, and soon the painted water began to flow. It’s hard to believe that was more than two hundred years ago, when people still got dressed up for air travel and children were expected to absorb light in their super-black feathers, making contour disappear. They probably evolved to startle predators, make us seem deep, so that, when they least expected it, we could cast their underground nests with molten aluminum, sell them online as sculpture. But if you’ve ever seen a dendritic pattern in a frozen pond, lightning captured in hard plastic, or the delicate venation of an insect’s wing (the fourth vein of the wing is called the media), then you’ve probably felt that a spirit is at work in the world, or was, and that making it visible is the artist’s task, or was. I am resolved to admire all elaborate silvery pathways, no matter where I find them, that’s why I’m calling. I’m sitting in Grand Army Plaza by the fountain, which they’ve shut off until the spring, when it will again give sensuous expression to our freedom. In other words, I’m at work, realigning and interlocking barbules, lubricating what are essentially dead structures with a fatty oil I’ve developed for that purpose, thinking of you, holding you in my thoughts like fireflies in glass, cold to the touch, green current. You just can’t blame yourself. The last time I saw him we had dinner in Fort Greene and he was cracking me up with his impressions, especially of John. He was drinking, but not too much: one cocktail, white wine. The only weird moment was when I had to look at my phone because I was getting a lot of texts and wanted to make sure everything was O.K. with the girls. He kind of freaked out about it: Am I boring you? Do you need to make a call? But I apologized and we moved on. What reassured me most was how excited he was about the new job, even if it didn’t pay much. They were going to let him use the 3-D printers for some of his own stuff and he was really psyched about that. Anyway, I love you and I’m here. I’ve got to get Marcela now but tonight I’m around, promoting syllables, trying to avoid the twin traps of mere procedure and sentimentalism, ingesting around seventeen milligrams, blunt-toothed leaves in motion lights, signifying nothing but holding a place. Lately my daughters have been asking what I do when they’re at school; I want to say that I enchant the ferryman with my playing so that lost pets may return, that the magnet tiles arrange themselves into complex hexagonal structures at my song, but they know I’m not the musical one, that I describe the music of others, capture it in hard plastic. With the profits, I purchase an entrapping foam that coats the nest for a complete kill and a pendant that resembles a tiny abacus of pearls, responsibly sourced. What does a normal day look like for you? For me, the fruit is undefined around the edges and the faces of some friends are mere suggestions while others observe the standard codes of verisimilitude in a way that feels increasingly affected; why appear vividly when it’s dusk, has been dusk for ages? I don’t know if oysters can feel pain, can’t even know if other humans do, although I recognize what philosophers call “pain behavior” among my loved ones as the seasons change. Tie their stems together with unflavored dental floss and hang them upside down, but display them away from windows or they’ll fade, polished steel gives way to painted water, a turn of phase, a change of phrase, the slippages release small energy and the harvest falls to me. Someday I’d like to bring my daughters to work, but not today. Today is cut-glass flowers reinforced internally with wire, a vibration-control system, the religious equivalent of that, lampwork they’re too young to understand, the effects too mild. Their nests are paper, they can discriminate between fragments of foreign and natal comb, the interests between workers and their queen diverge, those are the three prerequisites for song, for the formation of singers who will eat both meat and nectar, which they feed to larvae on the bus ride home. Marcela pulls the yellow stop-request cord, but never hard enough, so you have to help without her knowing, say “Great job.” Say “Great job” to the sensible world if you want to encourage reënchantment, keep the trees in touch with their strengths, the magnolia’s increasing northern range, for instance, soon to be cold-hardy beyond zone four. The way we say of our children “they went down” to mean they fell asleep, that makes me glass, soft glass bending in long meadows, a fallacy each generation reinvents and disavows, reinvents and disavows, a rocking motion. Otherwise you’re mixing pills and gin and your friends are debating whether it constitutes a true attempt, recklessness, a cry for help, before deciding it makes no difference, it’s pain behavior, he has to be checked in, monitored, sponsored, set to music. Anyway, the girls are down and I can talk. I’m just clicking on things in bed, a review by a man named Baskin, who says I have no feelings and hate art. Through the blinds I can see the blue tip of the neighbor’s vape pen signalling in the dark, cold firefly. The raccoons are descending from their nests in foreclosed attics to roam the streets of Kensington; we moved last summer, have a guest room now, come visit. I can’t believe I haven’t seen you since his wedding. ♦

 

[sus]

@luka what do you make of it?

 

[sus]

Here's Random Cloud's "Fiat Flux," which I scanned in so y'all fools can read it

Cloud is a pseudonym for a Canadian close-reading textual scholar who specialized in Renaissance poetry.

He also invented whacky devices for comparing manuscript editions by layering the images atop each other in your vision

This piece is a crazy inventive piece of scholarship that examines many different printings of George Herbert's 1633 poem "Easter-wings," and shows how impossible it is to pick an "authoritative" version, and how seemingly minute editorial decisions lead to dramatic interpretive swings.

It's a gorgeous introduction to Renaissance poetry, textual scholarship, and the world of Renaissance bookprinting. You end up having to learn how quartos are stitched together, and what sorts of common binding mistakes were made, in service of comprehending Herbert's poem.

 

[sus]

some bits from "On Charon's Wharf," don't think there's a full-text online, but the collection Broken Vessels is well worth reading

Dubus was a Hemingway type of author: barrel chest, military background, a serious drinker, barbells in his writing room. Then he was hit by a car and paralyzed from the waist down. Broken Vessels is a collection of essays about living with it, centering around a scene from Bergman's Seventh Seal where a woman offers the protagonist a bowl of berries

Since we are all terminally ill, each breath and step and day one closer to the last, I must consider those sacraments which soothe our passage. I write on a Wednesday morning in December when snow covers the earth, the sky is grey, and only the evergreens seem alive. This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal.

As lovers we must have these sacraments, these actions which restore our focus, and therefore ourselves. For our lives are hurried and much too distracted, and one of the strangest and most dangerous of all distractions is this lethargy of self we suffer from, this part of ourselves that does not want to get out of bed and once out of bed does not want to dress and once dressed does not want to prepare breakfast and once fed does not want to work. And what does it want? Perhaps it wants nothing at all. It is a mystery, a lovely one because it is human, but it is also dangerous. Some days it does not want to love, and we yield to it, we drop into an abyss whose walls echo with strange dialogues. These dialogues are with the beloved, and at their center is a repetition of the word I and sometimes you, but neither word now is uttered with a nimbus of blessing. These are the nights when we sit in that kitchen and talk too long and too much, so that the words multiply each other, and what they express — pain, doubt, anxiousness, dread — become emotions which are not rooted in our true (or better) selves, which exist apart from those two gentle people who shared eggs at this same table which now is soiled with ashes and glass-rings.


These nights can destroy us. With words we create genies which rise on the table between us, and fearfully we watch them hurt each other; they look like us, they sound like us, but they are not us, and we want to call them back, see them disappear like shriveling clouds back into our throats, down into our hearts where they can join our other selves and be forced again into their true size: a small I among many other I‘s. We try this with more words and too often the words are the wrong ones, the genies grow, and we are approaching those hours after midnight when lovers should never quarrel, for the night has its mystery too and will not be denied, it loves to distort the way we feel and if we let it, it will. We say: But wait a minute … But you said … But I always thought that …Well how do you think I feel, who do you think you are anyway? Just who in the hell do you think you are?


I need and want to give the intimacy we achieve with words. But words are complex: at times too powerful or fragile or simply wrong; and they are affected by a tone of voice, a gesture of a hand, a light in the eyes. And words are sometimes autonomous little demons who like to form their own parade and march away, leaving us behind. Once in a good counselor’s office I realized I was not telling the truth. She was asking me questions and I was trying to answer them, and I was indeed answering them. But I left out maybe, perhaps, I wonder. … Within minutes I was telling her about emotions I had not felt. But by then I was feeling what I was telling her, and that is the explosive nitroglycerin seeping through the hearts of lovers.

 

[sus]

@linebaugh I think you'd maybe dig the opening chapter of Labatut, it feels Wes-core to me for whatever reason

 

[IdleRich]

Im actually reading sexual personae now and cant decide my feelings on it. I think the chapter after the intro is better because theres fun comparative anthropology going on where as the intro is just making intuitive extensions of her single metaphor which, while probably correct, she sometimes really stretches past the point of serious consideration. Also think she paints herself into a corner a bit by her effort to be so unshakeabley anti- the thing she is writing against. The writing is fueled by pure butt-hurt but I suppose thats part of the charm.

Theres also an unsavory element which isnt her fault in that its pure internet culture war material. She pretty much covers all the discourse despite starting this in the 70's

It might be hard to believe, but, even though it's unlikely, you will probably concede that it's at least conceivable that there could be someone on here so unfeasibly ignorant that they have never read this book, in fact there might be someone - definitely not me but someone - so ill-educated that they - again, to be clear, not me - have never even heard of it and don't know what it's about. And I wonder if, for the benefit of those fools, perhaps it would be better to begin the discussion at a lower stage, maybe saying what it is and what it's about etc rather than wading in with a discussion of a particular specific point which, yes, is fine for those of us who've read it but for people such as, I dunno, probably @DannyL for instance who haven't - well for us er them it's kinda meaningless and hard to follow.

Alright I haven't read the fucking book, what is it, why is it good? Please tell me.