10 THE INVENTORY AND THE AMBIENT
The impulse to obsessively catalog the minutiae of “real life” spans from Boswell’s descriptions of Johnson’s breakfasts to tweeting what you ate for breakfast. And with increased storage capacity and more powerful databases emerging all the time, technology seems to be arousing the dormant archivist in all of us. The “data cloud”—those unlimited capacity servers out there in the ether, accessible to us from anywhere on the globe—and its interfaces encourage an “archive” function over a “delete” function.1 While much of this material is being archived for marketing purposes, writers as already discussed, are also plundering these vast warehouses of text to create works of literature—not so much using it as raw material from which to craft their next novels, but rather to manage and reshape them. Still other writers are not so much mining these gobs of texts as they are exploring the function of the archive as it applies to the construction of literary works. These sorts of works are closer to the ambient music of Brian Eno than they are to conventional writing, encouraging a textual immersion rather than a linear reading of them. Uncreative writing allows for a new type of writing about ourselves: call it oblique autobiography. By inventorying the mundane—what we eat and what we read—we leave a trail that can say as much about ourselves as a more traditional diaristic approach, leaving room enough for the reader to connect the dots and construct narratives in a plethora of ways.
Some stories are so profoundly moving as they are that any sort of creative gloss or enhancement serves to lessen their impact. Take the best-selling novel Angel at the Fence written by Herman Rosenblat. In this work Rosenblat tells of meeting his future wife Roma when he was imprisoned as a child in a concentration camp and she tossed him apples over the fence, helping him to survive. According to Rosen-blat, they met by happenstance years later in Coney Island, realized their history, got married, and lived happily ever after. Rosenblat appeared twice on Oprah, who called the book “the single greatest love story” she had encountered in her twenty-two years on the show. After much fanfare, his publisher canceled the memoir when he learned it was false. In the aftermath, Rosenblat wrote, “In my dreams, Roma will always throw me an apple, but I now know it is only a dream.”2
Deborah E. Lipstadt, a professor of Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University, upon hearing that yet another Holocaust memoir was falsified, said, “There’s no need to embellish, no need to aggrandize. The facts are horrible, and when you’re teaching about horrible stuff you just have to lay out the facts.”3
Lipstadt’s sentiments echo—in a very different way and context—something many writers have proposed over the past century: that the unembellished life is more profoundly moving and complex than most fiction can conjure. Popular culture gives us a similar message from a different angle: over the past decade, witness the rise and relentless domination of reality television over the constructed sitcom. And, from the looks of it, our online lives are headed in the same direction through obsessive documentation of our lives. From the early days of webcams to today’s rapid-fire Twitter blasts, we’ve constructed and projected certain notions of who we are through a process of accumulating seemingly insignificant and ephemeral gestures, fashioning identities that might or might not have something to do with who we actually are. We’ve become autobiographers of an obsessive nature, but, just as much, we’ve also become biographers of others, collecting scores of minute facts and impressions on whomever we choose to focus our lens. Tribute pages, fan sites, and Wikipedia entries on even the most marginal persons or endeavors continually accumulate, line by line, all adding up to an obsession with detail and biography that rivals Boswell’s Life of Johnson.4
Boswell in many ways both mirrors and predicts our contemporary linguistic condition. His massive tome is an accumulation of bits and pieces of the quotidian ephemera: letters, observations, patches of dialogue, and descriptions of daily life. The text is an unstable one because of Boswell’s excessive footnoting and Mrs. Thrale’s marginalia rebutting and correcting Boswell’s subjectively flawed observations. And Thrale’s comments are not just appended to the main body of the text; she also annotates Boswell’s minutiae-laden footnotes, some of which take up three-quarters of the page. The book feels Talmudic in its multithreaded conversations and glosses. It’s a dynamic textual space reminiscent of today’s Web, with built-in feedback and response systems. It also has some of the same cacophonous dilemmas of online space. The spectator sport of Johnson’s life in some ways trumps the subject.
Boswell’s Johnson can be read cover to cover, but it’s just as good taken in small chunks, by bouncing around skimming, grazing, or parsing. I recall, in the early days of the Web, a friend lamenting that he reads so “carelessly” online, that he’s more curious to get to the next click than he is in engaging in a deeper way with the text. It’s a common cry: we do tend to read more horizontally online. But The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. is a reminder from more than two centuries ago that not all texts demand a strictly linear reading. Once Boswell actually meets up with his subject, there’s no real narrative thrust other than chronological, ending with Johnson’s death. You can dip in and out without worrying about losing the thread the way you might in a more conventionally written biography. Running your eyes across the pages—skimming—you haul in gems of knowledge while experiencing fleeting ephemeral moments that have been rendered timeless. Yet there’s a lot of chaff, such as this frivolous instance Boswell pens, deep into Johnson’s seventy-fourth year: “I never shall forget the indulgence with which he treated Hodge, his cat; for whom he himself used to go out and buy oysters,(a) lest the servants, having that trouble, should take a dislike to the poor creature.(b)”5 Like a commenter on a blog, Hester Thrale in the margins, chimes in: “(a) I used to joke him for getting Valerian to amuse Hodge in his last Hours. (b) no, it was lest they should consider him as degrading Humanity by setting a Man to wait upon a beast.”6
In another example, this not particularly profound conversation about wine feels like the meandering improvised dialogue from an Andy Warhol film:
SPOTTISWOODE. So, Sir, wine is a key which opens a box; but this box may be either full or empty? JOHNSON. Nay, Sir, conversation is the key: wine is a pick-lock, which forces open the box and inures it. A man should cultivate his mind so as to have that confidence and readiness without wine, which wine gives. BOSWELL. The great difficulty of resisting wine is from benevolence. For instance, a good worthy man asks you to taste his wine, which he has had twenty years in his cellar. JOHNSON. Sir, all this notion about benevolence arises from a man’s imagining himself to be of more importance to others, than he really is. They don’t care a farthing whether he drinks wine or not. SIR JOSHUA REYNOLDS. Yes, they do for the time. JOHNSON. For the time!—If they care this minute, they forget it the next.7
It’s through these small and seemingly insignificant details that Boswell is able to build a convincing portrait of Johnson’s life and genius. Boswell’s strength is information management. He’s got a great sense balance, mixing throwaways with keepers. The text has a leveling quality—profound with insignificant, eternal with quotidian—that is very much the way our attention (and lives) tend to be: divided and multithreaded. In 1938 The Monthly Letter of the Limited Editions Club asked of Boswell, “What, however, has the Life to offer a twentieth century reader?” And in the parlance of the day, it goes on to ascribe conventional value to the presumed profundity of the book, saying that “the Life has an apt word or phrase for everything” and that it is “at once intimately personal and classically universal.”8 More than seventy years later, I think we can ask the same question: “What has the Life to offer a twenty-first century reader?” and get a completely different answer, one intimately connected to the way we live today.9
There’s something about inventory that feels contemporary. When the graphic user interface emerged, there was a sense among many that “now everybody is a graphic designer.” With the ever-increasing push of information and material flowing through our networks, we’ve become like kids in a candy store: we want it all. And, since it’s mostly free, we grab it. As a result, we’ve had to learn how to store things, organize them, and tag them for quick recall. And we’ve become very good at it. This ethos has seeped into every aspect of our lives; offline, too, we find ourselves meticulously gathering and organizing information as a way of being in the world. Caroline Bergvall, a trilingual poet living in London, recently decided to inventory the opening lines of all the British Library’s translations of Dante’s Inferno. She claims that the act of translating Dante has become “something of a cultural industry.” In fact, by the time she finished collecting her versions—there were forty-eight in all—two new translations had reached the library’s shelves. Bergvall explains her process: “My task was mostly and rather simply, or so it seemed at first, to copy each first tercet as it appeared in each published version of the Inferno. To copy it accurately. Surprisingly, more than once, I had to go back to the books to double-check and amend an entry, publication data, a spelling. Checking each line, each variation, once, twice. Increasingly, the project was about keeping count and making sure. That what I was copying was what was there. Not to inadvertently change what had been printed. To reproduce each translative gesture. To add my voice to this chorus, to this recitation, only by way of this task. Making copy explicit as an act of copy.”10
Here’s an excerpt from Bergvall’s “Via: 48 Dante Variations”:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
che la diritta via era smarrita
The Divine Comedy-Pt. 1 Inferno—Canto I -
1.
Along the journey of our life halfway
I found myself again in a dark wood
wherein the straight road no longer lay
(Dale, 1996)
2.
At the midpoint in the journey of our life
I found myself astray in a dark wood
For the straight path had vanished.
(Creagh and Hollander, 1989)
3.
HALF over the wayfaring of our life,
Since missed the right way, through a night-dark-wood
Struggling, I found myself.
(Musgrave, 1893)
4.
Halfway along the road we have to go,
I found myself obscured in a great forest,
Bewildered, and I knew I had lost the way.
(Sisson, 1980)
5.
Halfway along the journey of our life
I woke in wonder in a sunless wood
For I had wandered from the narrow way
(Zappulla, 1998)11
A simple act of inventory belies the subjectivity of translation as the immortal words of Dante are up for grabs. Through re-presentation, Bergvall transforms the tercets into a permutational poem or an Oulipian N+7 style exercise, which replaces each noun in a text with the seventh one following it in a dictionary). We move from a “dark wood” to a “night-dark-wood” to a “great forest” to a “sunless wood”; or “journey of our life halfway” to “midpoint in the journey of our life” to “ HALF over the wayfaring of our life” to “Halfway along the road we have to go” and “Halfway along the journey of our life.” Each phrase uses metaphor, allusion, sentence structure, and wordiness in entirely different ways. By doing very little, Bergvall reveals so very much. In any other context, such a list would be used to demonstrate the intricacies, vagaries, and subjectivity involved in the act of translation. And, although all those concerns are part and parcel of this work, to stop there would be to miss the greater point that Bergvall herself is acting as a sort of translator by simply recasting preexisting texts into a new poem that is entirely her own.
The poet Tan Lin complies information into what he calls “ambient stylistics,” which can be likened to the “nonlistening” of Erik Satie’s “Furniture Music.” In the midst of an art opening at a Paris gallery in 1902, Erik Satie and his cronies, after begging everyone in the gallery to ignore them, broke out into what they called “Furniture Music”—that is, background music—music as wallpaper, music to be purposely not listened to. The patrons of the gallery, thrilled to see musicians performing in their midst, ceased talking and politely watched, despite Satie’s frantic efforts to get them to pay no attention. For Satie it was the first of several gestures paving the way toward “listening” by “not listening,” culminating in his “Vexations,” a strange little 3-minute piano piece. It’s only a single page of music but it has the instructions “to be repeated 840 times” scrawled on it. For years it had been written off as a musical joke—a performance of the piece would take approximately 20 hours—an impossible, not to mention tediously boring, task. John Cage, however, took it seriously and gave “Vexations” its first performance in New York in 1963. Ten pianists working in 2-hour shifts conquered the piece, which lasted 18 hours and 40 minutes. Cage later explained how performing “Vexations” affected him: “In other words, I had changed, and the world had changed.… It wasn’t an experience I alone had, but other people who had been in it wrote to me or called me up and said that they had had the same experience.”12 What they experienced was a new idea of time and narrative in music, one predicated upon extreme duration and stasis instead of the traditional movements of a symphony, which were aimed for great formal and emotional impact and variety. Instead, “Vexations” took on a more Eastern quality, belatedly joining ragas and other extended forms that were being embraced by Western composers in the early sixties and would go on to form minimalism, the dominant compositional mode for the next two decades.
Satie and Cage’s gestures were picked up by Brian Eno some seventy-five years later when he described his concept of ambient music: “An ambience is defined as an atmosphere, or a surrounding influence: a tint. My intention is to produce original pieces ostensibly (but not exclusively) for particular times and situations with a view to building up a small but versatile catalogue of environmental music suited to a wide variety of moods and atmospheres.”13
Lin wants to create a space for innovative writing that is relaxing, not demanding, to the point where he envisions a writing environment where literature exists without having to be read at all: “A good poem is very boring.… In a perfect world all sentences, even the ones we write to our loved ones, the mailman or our interoffice memos, would have that overall sameness, that sense of an average background, a fluid structure in spite of the surface disturbances and the immediate incomprehension. The best sentences should lose information at a relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition.”14
The idea of making a text intentionally flat and boring flies in the face of everything we’ve come to expect from “good” literature. His project Ambient Fiction Reading System 01: A List of Things I Read Didn’t Read and Hardly Read for Exactly One Year15 took the form of a blog documenting each day’s intake or textual grazing. Here’s an excerpt from Tuesday, August 22, 2006, which begins:
10:08–15 HOME OFFICE NYT From Their Own Online World, Pedophiles Extend Their Reach
10:15–23 Pakistanis Find US an Easier Fit than Britain
10:24–26 nytimes.com Editorial Observer; The Television Has Disintegrated. All that’s Left is the Viewer
10:28–31 A Police Car with Plenty of Muscle
10:31–4 Now the Music Industry wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing
10:50–6 Code Promotions, A Madison Ave Staple, are Going Online
10:57–07 The Tragic Drama of a Broken City, Complete with Heroes and Villains When the Levees Broke
11:09–15 Helping Fledgling Poets Soar with Confidence
11:15–12:16 AOL Acts on Release of Data
11:59 wikipedia “abdur chowdhury”
12:16–23 Rohaytn Will Take Lehman Post “I remember the first time I cam into contact with them. I was carrying Adren Meyer’s briefcase into a meeting with Bobby Lehman in the mid-1950’s. They had six desks. I’ve always had a yen for them.”
12:23–5 wikipedia “rohatyn” “greenberg”
12:25 style.com “greenberg”
12:25–33 What Organizations Don’t Want to Know Can Hurt
12:34 Tower Records will Auction its Assets
12:34–57 Web Surfing in Public Places is a Way to Court Trouble
What appears to be a banal list of things he read—or didn’t read—with some investigation reveals a wealth of autobiographical narrative and sheds light on the act of consuming, archiving, and moving information. Lin begins his day at 10:08 in his home office where he skims the day’s news. The first thing he reads is a story about how pedophiles are colonizing the online space. The story says that “they swap stories about day-to-day encounters with minors. And they make use of technology to help take their arguments to others.”16 We have no way of knowing if Lin is reading this in the paper version or online, but since he’s blogging about it or entering his meanderings into a word processing document, we can pretty much assume that he is on the computer. In a sense—without the pedophilia, of course—this article describes Lin’s situation. Sitting at his computer, he is simultaneously reading and writing, consuming and redistributing, creating and disseminating information, “mak[ing] use of technology to help take [his] arguments to others.” Minus the lurid connotations, we could easily reimagine the title of this excerpt to be “From His Online World, Tan Lin Extends His Reach.”
By 10:24, he is definitely online: “The Television Has Disintegrated. All That’s Left Is the Viewer” is a folksy mediation on how our digital technology has supplanted the functional simplicity of the old analog television set. With one window cracked to nytimes.com and another open for blog entries, Lin is enacting the dilemma put forth in the article, which was published in the shrinking paper version of the New York Times but read online by Lin at nytimes.com.
Immersed in the screen, Lin continues to read about the erosion of old media distribution from 10:31–10:34 in “Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing.” The article, which is still online at the New York Times site, is 1,500 words long. Quickly reading or skimming, it’s entirely plausible that Lin read this article during the time he said he did. Yet a much shorter article of only 920 words, which takes six minutes to read, “Helping Fledgling Poets Soar with Confidence,” is a book review where the author claims “poetry is a primal impulse within us all,” which, again, Lin is also enacting by churning the day’s news into literature.
Much of Lin’s work is about the complexities of identity, and he naturally is drawn toward the article “AOL Acts on Release of Data” which is about a data scandal at AOL where the identities of many users were exposed. Coincidentally, that same AOL leak forms the basis of Thomas Claburn’s book-length piece, i feel better after i type to you, where he republished all the data of one user. As Claburn explains:
Within the third of the ten files of user search queries AOL mistakenly released (user-ct-test-collection-03), there’s a poem of sorts. Between May 7 and May 31 of this year, AOL user 23187425 submitted a series of more than 8,200 queries with no evident intention of finding anything—only a handful of the entries are paired with a search results URL. Rather, the author’s series of queries forms a stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.
Whether it’s fact or fiction, confession or invention, the search monologue is strangely compelling. It’s a uniquely temporal literary form in that the server time stamps make the passage of time integral to the storytelling. It could be the beginning of a new genre of writing, or simply an aberration. But it does beg further explanation. What circumstances prompted the author to converse thus with AOL’s search engine?17
Claburn’s poem looks eerily like Lin’s:
Tuesday 1:25 am
2006–05–09 01:25:15 break in
2006–05–09 01:26:00 joseph i have a question
2006–05–09 01:27:27 all the years why did you work out of delphi
2006–05–09 01:28:36 could have gone to detriot
2006–05–09 01:29:40 why you make delphi kettering your base
2006–05–09 01:30:09 your base
2006–05–09 01:31:13 joe why
2006–05–09 01:31:56 you choose kettering
2006–05–09 01:33:01 had opportunity
2006–05–09 01:33:26 to leave
2006–05–09 01:34:19 start there but could have left
2006–05–09 01:34:54 know you started there but could have left
2006–05–09 01:35:28 why did you stay
2006–05–09 01:36:14 but why
2006–05–09 01:37:46 cause of me
2006–05–09 01:38:48 last saw you bicycle
2006–05–09 01:39:31 why didn’t you tell me who you were
2006–05–09 01:41:07 was not to tell me
2006–05–09 01:41:47 orders
2006–05–09 01:42:38 jt order
2006–05–09 01:43:59 was thinking
2006–05–09 01:44:38 on line to ask
2006–05–09 01:45:17 no one would tell me
2006–05–09 01:46:11 mean no
2006–05–09 01:47:45 told of everyone else
2006–05–09 01:48:20 keller like you
2006–05–09 01:48:44 all thrash
2006–05–09 01:49:24 told of them
2006–05–09 01:50:27 wasn’t my type
2006–05–09 01:50:49 was not my type
2006–05–09 01:51:32 my type is rare18
In the same way that Lin tracks his reading habits and, by association, his mental patterns, Clauburn tracks “AOL User 23187425.” Our digital footprint, when rendered visible by data trails, makes for compelling narrative, psychological and autobiographical literature, proving once again that, incisively framed, “mere data” is anything but banal.
When Tan Lin reads about the AOL leak, he came across the name Abdur Chowdhury, a professor who was the source of the leak. At 11:59, he most likely opens another browser window and looks up the Wikipedia entry for “Abdur Chowdhury,” for which no page is found. The Times article claims that “nearly 20 million discrete search queries, representing the personal Internet hunting habits of more than 650,000 AOL customers gathered over a three-month period last spring, were posted by a company researcher, Abdur Chowdhury, on a publicly accessible Web site late last month.”19 One presumes that such a figure would be of interest to Lin, who claims, “Reading, in a web-based environment, crosses into writing, publication, distribution, and marketing. Is a Twitter feed a form of publication? or is it writing? or is it distribution that is ‘pulled’ by readers who ‘subscribe’? It would seem to be a combination and the lines between these practices is less rigid than with a book where writing and publication are distinct temporally and as entities. Even tags used by Twitterers don’t necessarily identify the author by name.”20
So what does this all add up to? What looks at first glance to be a mass of random information is, in fact, multidimensional and autobiographical. And it’s also mostly verifiable. Those articles do exist, and the correspondent times generally make sense. In short, we must conclude that this is not a work of fiction and that Lin really did read what he did and when he did over the course of a year. Taken cumulatively, this is a fairly accurate portrait of Tan Lin, a different type of autobiography, accurately describing himself and his circumstances, without once ever having used the pronoun I.
In 1974, Georges Perec, the Oulipian writer, wrote a work that asked similar questions. He compiled a massive Rabelaisian piece, “Attempt at an Inventory of the Liquid and Solid Foodstuffs Ingurgitated by Me in the Course of the Year Nineteen Hundred and Seventy-Four,” which begins
Nine beef consommé, one iced cucumber soup, one mussel soup.
Two Guéndouilles, one jellied andouillette, one Italian charcuterie, one cervelas sausage, four assorted charcuteries, one coppa, three pork platters, one figatelli, one foie gras, one fromage de têe, one boar’s head, five Parma hams, eight pâté, one duck pâté one pâtée foie with truffles, one pâté croûe, one pâtérand-mèe, one thrush pâté six pâté des Landes, four brawns, one foie gras mousse, one pig’s trotters, seven rillettes, one salami, two saucissons, one hot saucisson, one duck terrine, one chicken liver terrine.
and ends five pages later:
Fifty-six Armagnacs, one Bourbon, eight Calvadoses, one cherries in brandy, six Green Chartreuses, one Chivas, four cognacs, one Delamain cognac, two Grand Marniers, one pink-gin, one Irish coffee, one Jack Daniel’s, four marcs, three Bugey marcs, one marc de Provence, one plum liqueur, nine Souillac plums, one plums in brandy, two Williams pears, one port, one slivovitz, one Suz, thirty-six vodkas, four whiskies.
N coffees
one tisane
three Vichy waters21
Perec’s inventory is a massive indulgence in the pleasure principle, creating a portrait based on the cliché you are what you eat. Or perhaps not. Taken as autobiography, if food and drink can be signifiers of class and economic status, then we can glean a lot from this list about the author. But the problem is that, even though the work recounts what Perec himself ate, we have no verification of it. And, if you think about it, quantifying exactly what you ate over the course of a year is almost impossible. In the text he claims to have consumed “one milk-fed lamb.” How much of that lamb did he actually eat? Class status might become more traceable when wines are mentioned, for instance, “one Saint-Emilion ’61.” There’s no vintner mentioned, and, if we look up the price of that wine today, it goes anywhere from $220 to $10,000. While it would have been considerably less in 1974, how are we to know that this isn’t just fantasy, an impoverished writer dreaming of great luxuries? It’s entirely conceivable that Perec sat down and invented this inventory in one drunken evening at his desk in his modest flat. We’ll never know. And yet, in the end, what does it matter if Perec is telling the truth or not? While it’s fun to try to sleuth out Perec’s claims, I’m more intrigued by the idea that someone would try to quantify everything they ate for a year and present it as a nearly fourteen-hundred-word list of food as a work of literature, rich with sociological, gastronomical, and economic implications. Like Bergvall or Lin, Perec pays close attention to and isolates small details, creating a massive inventory of ephemeral experience whereby the sum is clearly greater than the parts.