Re: <nettime> a reading list for 'what comes after tactical media'

On Thu, Oct 29, 2020 at 4:37 PM Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com> wrote:

Hi Rachel,

I would actually recommend a novel: Less, by Andrew Sean Greer. (It won the Pulitzer in 2018, but reading it now will get the jump on his new novel due out in a year or so.)

It's not too theory-based, in the overt sense, but it is very steeped in the art and publishing worlds and, in my reading of it, quite ambitious in its claims for and exploration of "chiastic structure." I recommend it with mixed emotions as he treats Calvino and Leonardo, my own recent research interests, in greater and more skillful depth than I've been able to muster (Greer lives half time in Calvino's home turf Tuscany), at least so far.

Here is a word salad of notes and links I wrote up for my book club (we read it last week). TL;DR totally understandable and OK. 🙂

All very best wishes and regards,

Max

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From: Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Thursday, October 29, 2020 10:38 AM
Subject: Re: Book Club invite

Correction: the sentence about the wrong car is called antimetabole, a sub-type of chiasmus in which the words are same but repeated in reverse (like "all for one and one for all").

This from Finley Dwyer is a true chiasmus, ABC-CBA:

"I saw you stand there, and I had to take this opportunity to let you know, because no one else has been kind enough." He smiles and repeats: "Kind enough to say something to you, as I have now."

I finally finished the book last night and saw a lot of puns and puzzles that fit the definition of chiastic structure, (sometimes called as in Herodotus "epic regression"). With a tinge of sadness I realized that Greer based his novel on many of the same ideas in Calvino that I have been working on, and has maybe even "cracked the code" of the Mona Lisa (two years before me no less) though thankfully after sleeping on it I don't think he has completely stolen my thunder. Perhaps in the true twist of comedy from tragedy, this could be a happy similitude? One can never be totally certain, at least in advance.

Here is my latest blog, which I finished before finishing the book last night. This caused about a thousand double-takes, which may be part of the purpose of the chiastic mode, a kind of deja vu by design.

A couple of sources of very extreme deja vu for me resulted from A) reading Calvino for the first time in January 2018 (Thank you Jenn!) and B) traveling to Paris and Italy in summer of 2019 while working on a book idea for Calvino which then morphed into a blog series about the Mona Lisa because the Louvre was closed the day we went to see it, due to a one day strike by museum staff to protest an excess number of visitors. Greer has also used a few images and phrases I have used in my own writing and always felt were unique and inimitable, such as "asymptotically zero," various ideas about XXXXX, and so forth.

I am not saying this is a great novel though! At least not necessarily. The method being used is not necessarily effective or admirable; I am mostly just trying to parse it out as a method. Personally I find it to be a mixed experience aesthetically and intellectually but I appreciate some elements of it.

The other "mixed" experience is that Greer finding chiastic structure "before me" (though I pretty much spelled it out in this blog XXXXX) is a strange lesson in "winning" and "losing." Somewhat reminiscent in ways of Normal People come to think of it. Perhaps this is part of the "lesson" of the "ingenious" Odysseus: he loses everything but achieves victory in finding himself (so to speak).

Other potentially chiastic features in Less:

Less thinking of using his tongue to remove Javier's lens, as Humbert did for Lolita;

cutting up passages from books and rearranging them;

"Carlos the Great" = Charlemagne, referencing the story from Calvino about Charlemagne's ring

Laughing backward

Aging backward

Mixing up word order in German

Japanese dishes served in reverse order from more to less cooked

Many Hamlet references (ear poisoning, "crown prince of innocence," indecision, etc.)

Many mentions of scorpions

Uses of spiral imagery -- the nautilus-room, the pants, sun dying in a spiral, "spiral nature of being," Nietzsche

Seeing the boy at the airport then again leaving the retreat (boy starts and ends the chapter)

Extra "a" in quaalude, mentioned twice

Possible reference to Borges' "Garden of Forking Paths" (Garden of Bad Gays)

Possible reference to the Mona Lisa: "with his sad _expression_, three-quarters turned to Javier"

"Ask me and I will stay" thought but not said by both Freddy and Arthur

Arthur as Arthurian hero

Tahiti/Tahiti passage pp. 166-167

Gauguin's carvings in Paris and Tahiti

Ait/8 in Morocco

Repeated Twain references (Huck as Odysseus?)

Chaplin appearing in two locations

Repeated visits to Art Bar by Lewis and Clark

Multiple appearances of the Last Supper (which has an X composition, the perspective lines converging on the location of Christ's optic chiasm, which Leonardo considered the site of the "sensus communis" or "common sense," center of the human spirit

Swift as book name may relate to Calvino's "Quickness," the section in Six Memos in which the story of Charlemagne's ring appears

Swift as comic? A Modest Proposal?

Repeated reference to chow-chow/cha-cha

Medusa reference to Swift, from the first section "Lightness" of Calvino (who lived and worked in Tuscany)

Swift/Less as fool rather than hero (Yorick/Hamlet)

"Epiphany" about laughter on p. 195 (may relate to the ML, la gioconde, the jocund one)

Relevance of banana references to Cattelan's 2019 work "Comedian"?

Labyrinth references

Frankenstein references as "backward," dead to living

Glowworms in Berlin and India

Dante references echo Six Memos

Leonardo's drawing of Matilda from Dante (one of his last) see blog at XXXXX

Less's recurring dream, avoids Love to find answer, and the answer is Love

Four-eyed fish, sees above and below the water

Process of reversing scenes in Swift from tragic to comic

Damaged foot a reference to Oedipus?

Marco and "invisible cities" possible reference to Calvino's novel

Carlos' theory of life as half comedy, half tragedy

"We have to take care of our Robert" said twice

Teiresias = Robert, both "genders," reference possible to Eliot's "Waste Land"

"just reverse your mind" p. 248

Seeing mother again, scarf again

Poplar/unpoplar

Humility = a good "less," the piece of luggage not lost

Something about key to exit garden?

From: Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2020 7:52 PM
Subject: Re: Book Club invite

This is exactly a chiasmus:

"He did not take the wrong car; the wrong car took him."

The two trips to Mexico are also a chiastic pattern. Also perhaps, Robert and Greer both winning the Pulitzer (which I've lately been thinking I pronounce wrong, because I so often hear Pewlitzer).

From: Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, October 25, 2020 5:25 PM
Subject: Re: Book Club invite

Hi all,

I'm catching up on the parts of Less I had to skip over, and I do think there is a structure being used. The host in Mexico City for example being named Arturo, Freddy's remark "all you ever write is the gay Ulysses," the Art Bar....

The most full of structural clues I think are Less at First and Less at Last, departure and homecoming, with a cavalcade of stars between, but it was reading about the mushroom market that something strange and unexpected happened.

When Arthur lost his ring, I was reminded of the story in Herodotus about the too-lucky king who had to throw his favorite possession (a ring) into the sea, and a story from Calvino about a ring, trying to think of literary uses of the lost ring image. Of course I thought of Lord of the Rings, and the Ring of the Nibelungen. But none of these really fit.

So, I typed into internet search "the lost ring in literature," which returned virtually nothing useful, but it did return the below link about something I had never heard of before, and am now so very happy to have heard of -- another book club marvel!

+++

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiastic_structure

'Chiastic structure, or chiastic pattern, is a literary technique in narrative motifs and other textual passages. An example of chiastic structure would be two ideas, A and B, together with variants A' and B', being presented as A,B,B',A'. Chiastic structures that involve more components are sometimes called "ring structures", "ring compositions", or, in cases of very ambitious chiasmus, [don't laugh] "onion-ring compositions".   These may be regarded as chiasmus scaled up from words and clauses to larger segments of text.

These often symmetrical patterns are commonly found in ancient literature such as the epic poetry of the Iliad and the Odyssey. Classicist Bruno Gentili describes this technique as "the cyclical, circular, or 'ring' pattern (ring composition). Here the idea that introduced a compositional section is repeated at its conclusion, so that the whole passage is framed by material of identical content".[1] Meanwhile, in classical prose, scholars often find chiastic narrative techniques in the Histories of Herodotus:

"Herodotus frequently uses ring composition or 'epic regression' as a way of supplying background information for something discussed in the narrative. First an event is mentioned briefly, then its precedents are reviewed in reverse chronological order as far back as necessary; at that point the narrative reverses itself and moves forward in chronological order until the event in the main narrative line is reached again."[2]

Various chiastic structures are also seen in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Book of Mormon,[3] and the Quran.

+++

One example being "young (Less), old (Brownburn), old (Less), young (Freddy)."

I don't know if Joyce used chiastic structure in his Ulysses but I'm wondering if he might have. And Catcher in the Rye as a Ulysses story, walking around, going on a circuit, etc. Or other images even: the two lobsters uncovered in clouds of steam, Dr. Van Dervander, "I alone have lived to tell the tale" (p. 47), the suit in blue and gray, most of the images are pairs.

As punishment for my presumptions here, I will get my copy of Ulysses out of basement storage and read it!

Thanks again for fun book and talk,

Max

From: Max Herman <maxnmherman@hotmail.com>
Sent: Saturday, October 24, 2020 5:29 PM
Subject: Re: Book Club invite

Hi all,

Fun conversation and thanks for a cool choice XXXXX!

I would be up for trying outdoor meeting on Pearl Harbor Day if everyone else is. We'll just have to talk fast. I would love nonfiction too but if the group wishes to make the genre more randomized I can survive.

This rather sums up my case for the literary allusion at the heart of the book:  "It is long past time to answer the question -- and I see you, old Arthur, old love, looking up to that silhouette on your porch -- what do I want?"  Joyce had the answer: "Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."  🙂

All best and don't forget to vote!

Max

+++++

From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> on behalf of Carolyn Guertin <carolyn.guertin@gmail.com>
Sent: Wednesday, October 28, 2020 1:58 PM
To: Rachel O' Dwyer <rachel.odwyer@gmail.com>
Cc: Nettime <nettime-l@mail.kein.org>; nettime-l <nettime-l@kein.org>
Subject: Re: <nettime> a reading list for 'what comes after tactical media'

This sounds like a fascinating line of inquiry.

Perhaps Finn Brunton and Hellen Nissenbaum's Obfuscation: A User's Guide for Privacy and Protest might fit your criteria?

Carolyn Guertin

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020 at 11:58 AM Rachel O' Dwyer <rachel.odwyer@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi everyone,

I'm starting to think about an elective for postgraduates of studio art and art theory next semester that looks at network art, and hacktivism after 2015. I think this ties in somewhat with the 'after networks' theme of last year's Transmediale and also to this year's theme of refusal. I'm provisionally titling it 'what comes after tactical media?'

This is not well formed at all yet but I'm considering looking at topics like 'doing nothing' and refusal, care and care ethics, hope and capitalist realism, post-truth, facism, the local and the hyperlocal, critiques of entanglement and decentralisation...

My first thought was to start putting together a reading list to map this space.

I recognise that this is still very broad but wondered has anyone got any suggestions?

For example I had the pleasure of chairing a panel with Eva Giarud at last year's Transmediale that focused in part on her book 'what comes after entanglement' and this is definitely on my list.

also this Basics series book from MIT edited by Maria Hlavajova and Wietske Maas Propositions for non-fascist living: tentative and urgent and work from Brian Holmes' Unleashing the Collective Phantoms.

I'm open to any and all suggestions.

Best and Thanks in advance,

Rachel

--

http://www.rachelodwyer.com/

+353 (85) 7023779

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