Philip Sugg | Blog

In American media, a lot has been written in the last year about the Australian novelist Gerald Murnane. He just published what he claims is his final book, Last Letter to a Reader, which has set off many new attempts to introduce and assess his work.

I wanted to see what he was about, so I found a copy of his A Million Windows (2014).

Some underrecognized writers attract the interest of writers, and others the critics. I haven’t seen as much about what, say, novelists think about Murnane, but he has definitely attracted the interest of critics. Here is Merve Emre’s description of him in The New Yorker:

The act of contemplation is rendered in a compact and highly finished style that distinguishes Murnane both from his predecessor Proust and from his contemporaries W. G. Sebald, J. M. Coetzee, Jon Fosse, and Rachel Cusk. Murnane has described himself as a technical writer, and his outspoken and fastidious devotion to grammar steers a great deal of the thinking his narrators perform. This thinking is usually about the nature or the essence of fiction’s relation to life, and it often begins with verbs of supposition. “I, who dislike the word imagine, would prefer to use such an expression as speculate about,” reports the narrator of “A Million Windows.” “Speculate,” “suppose,” “presume,” and “seem”—as in “I seem to recall”—all shift narrative into the subjunctive mood, in which ambitions, conjectures, and longings reign.

The mood is enhanced by the sudden appearance of the perfect continuous conditional tense, which considers not what was, or what had been, but what would have been, or might have been, in certain secluded corners of the narrator’s mind. And, in these corners, one also finds a series of smaller, but no less essential, repetitions that hint at how far fiction may range from fact: the avoidance of proper names when referring to historical figures or locations, or the application of adjectives like “certain” or “so-called,” or adverbs like “probably” or “surely.” The effect is a paradoxical sense of both particularity and indeterminacy, exposure and concealment.

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Continuing from “The condition of being blocked”

A creative block does not have to end a work before it begins, but it can mean that something is wrong. The most disappointing response to a block is to take it literally, to believe that there is really nothing there worth pursuing. Where would this “there” be? The more reasonable response is to understand the block as a signal, a pause imposed from elsewhere for undetermined reasons–a signal which has to be taken seriously, but interpreted. Something about the specific makeup of this work, at this time, under these conditions–something about it is not right, and so it can’t continue.

If one interprets the block provisionally, as a sign to reassess and work in a new way, then it is possible to work while blocked. The decision to change one’s working pattern, however slight, is already a temporary release from the block. The act of assessing the new situation is itself a novel, creative act.

One of the most extraordinary recent examples I have seen of what can come from working while blocked, to working with a block rather than against it, is Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle series. An article in the New Republic describes the origin of the six-part, 3,600-page autobiographical books. It began with a writer’s block that intensified when he became a parent:

Between child-rearing duties, Knausgård was trying to reckon with his relationship with his father in a new novel, but it was falling flat on the page. He saw an evasiveness in his work that gnawed at him. He didn’t believe in it. Maybe he didn’t believe in fiction at all. “He was so desperate and full of pain,” [Knausgård’s friend Geir Angell Øygarden] says.

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From David Ludlum’s Vermont Weather Book (1985)

The atmosphere is still undergoing change. Alternate warm and cool periods lasting several centuries, as well as long spells of wetness and dryness, have resulted in stress to humans and their agricultural activities. During the past century, the petrochemical age, we have altered the constituents of the very air we breathe, and only in the past three decades have we come to realize the damage we have done. Now we are trying to restore the atmosphere to its former purity. We should not have left to unregulated industrial freedom the composition of our most valuable possession. (4)

This version of environmentalism is almost 40 years old. In some respects, the sentiment sounds dated. Ludlum writes in the wake of the U.S. “Clean Air” acts of the 1960s and 1970s, which were concerned with specific sources of pollution like coal plants or combustion engines. From the current era’s perspective, the notion that we need to clean up the air sounds quite optimistic and doable. Today air is still a problem, but it’s a symptom. Mainstream attention has moved to the potential collapse of the entire planetary atmosphere that makes Earth conducive to life. “Dirty” is defined differently: not particular sites of pollution like factories, but a circulating background of particles, atmospheric CO₂. Global CO₂ is far harder to address, because it is a dispersed marker of the entire planet’s polluting activities. The shift in the understanding of atmospheric pollution is a great example of how systems-level thinking can define a problem more completely, at the same time as it makes it more daunting to address.

I would love to read an account of creative blocks, of “being blocked” when you want to do something original, or engage in some sort of unstructured free inquiry. How have cultures and individuals understood that, what did they did do about it, why did it matter to them? “Writer’s block” is the most recognizable term in this area, although I wonder if it may be on the way to obscurity. I’ve never heard of anyone speak of writer’s block with respect to the ephemeral text-based communication that makes up the bulk of writing today.

Then again, writer’s block (or any other condition of being blocked) never pointed to a stoppage of ordinary communication. No one, for example, gets blocked when talking to a friend, or ordering dinner at a restaurant. This is because an essential part of being blocked is failing to make the leap from spontaneous and unremarkable speaking to an original expression. When a person is un-blocked, he or she still communicates when the cues from the environment and social world fall to a minimum.

But if someone simply can’t, for whatever reason, continue to speak from the other side of that transition, if he comes back with nothing to show for it, or if the attempt is so painful, interrupted, and shaming that it creates a negative feedback loop–producing ever-more dirt, gravel and sand when only the hint of something precious would make the effort continue–then I would call that person blocked.

I think a wider, cross-cultural account of this phenomenon would be worth studying, because I have the sense that it describes something much broader than a condition of artists and self-described “creative” types. The “many people are too distracted” argument gets a lot of attention; the condition of being blocked is really just a description of distraction from the other side.

“Watching the clouds” is an everyday shorthand for daydreaming, aimlessness and boredom. It’s as if the professionals who classify clouds have this prejudice in mind as they go about their work, and they defend themselves by building a maze of systematic classification on top of the clouds. Just look at the remarkably thorough, carefully designed website of the International Cloud Atlas. It has to be one of the best online references I’ve ever seen, on any subject–as intellectually satisfying as the casual viewing of clouds is for the senses and the imagination.

We’ve had a lot of storms and weather in the last few weeks here in Chicago, and I’ve had more reason than normal to look at the sky. For ordinary observers, it seems to me that there is really just one fundamental division in cloud typologies: between clouds that create depth in the sky, and clouds that obscure. The atmosphere is an amazing medium. At its clearest one can see indefinitely far: to the stars, into thousands of light years, distances so large they have no referent on earth. It can also close off vision, down to the few feet reachable with one’s hands, or less.

Even in a busy city sky, when I look up, I rarely see anything. But an open sky is not empty space. A view into the sky can be much more than a line of sight between “here,” the standpoint of the observer, and “there,” the furthest visible point. An opening in the sky is an invitation to see strata: layers, a space with undefined depth, like how any unit of time can become long or short according to events.

The last few years have produced many histories of the internet. This includes the topic of the internet as a technology, as a product of social groups, as a medium, and as a cultural force.

Here’s one history that I have seen less of, and that I would love to see researched within a more conceptually unified scheme: all of the technologies, societies, media and cultures that lost their viability after the internet gained a mass foothold.

For example, the retreat from the ambition to be comprehensive, or a certain ideal of comprehensiveness. Three examples:

1. A Metaphors Dictionary, a project that is pretty much what it sounds like. It was published by Elyse Sommer and Dorrie Weiss with Visible Ink Press. The final, reissued edition was published in 2001. Curiously, there was a companion guide to similes, which managed a second edition more than a decade later in 2013.

2. The American Library Association Guide to Reference Books, a reference guide to all the other reference guides. Its purpose was to help librarians select from tens of thousands of specialized references for addition to their library collections. According to Wikipedia the first one came out in 1902. The last one, the 11th edition, came out in 1996, after which the guide went online in 2009 before completely shutting down in 2016.

3. The long-running, celebrated, sometimes-contested Penguin Guide to Jazz Recordings, a massive compendium of jazz album reviews reaching back to genre’s beginning. It was first published by Richard Cook and Brian Morton in 1992, and kept up through nine editions until 2008. Cook died that year, and while Morton put out another, smaller guide to the “1000 Best Albums” of Jazz in 2010, the project has seen no more updates since.

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The last few days have seen a string of mostly clear weather in the evening, just as the moon begins a new monthly cycle. One of the nice things about looking at a very young moon (~2-5 days) is that it appears low in the western sky around sunset (which occurs after 8pm right now), timed as the day is slowing down and it’s convenient to look outside for a while. I started studying this cycle’s crescent moon with binoculars when it was just over two days old.

A moon of that age is a beautiful sight: large enough to be easily seen, but still very delicate, so thin at its sharp points (lunar observers call them “horns”) that it is possible to imagine that the moon is made up of a bunch of stars clustered near each other.

A feature on the horns caught my attention through the binoculars. At the leading edge of the sunlight cast onto the moon, where the thinnest possible segment of lighted lunar surface faces the earth, the moon’s light becomes discontinuous. Through the binoculars it looks like four or five bright lines or smudged dots, with short breaks, as black as the rest of space, in between. Here is a rough diagram of the crescent moon and where the effect appears—although it’s not visible to the eye alone:

Through the binoculars, it’s not obvious what’s causing this. A little digging gets an answer. The moon’s surface near its visible southern pole is cratered and bumpy. The sun’s light, which hits the surfaces near the horn at a nearly 90-degree angle, doesn’t reach the bottom of every crater, canyon floor and plain. At the most extreme angles of illumination, the sunlight only reflects off the highest points on the lunar surface, and the shadows are so deep that huge patches of dark occur right alongside the high points that are lit. This is what creates the broken appearance at the southern horn.

In places where spring seems to be a long time coming, there is a particular melancholy that sets in when one realizes that the season is, at least for aesthetic purposes, over. After the first round of new growth–the plants that cheer everyone up with their hardy blooms when it feels too cold for vegetative life–when the weeds and the trees look leafed-out enough to pass for mid-summer, when there are a few hot days that make one lose–even for a minute–one’s reflexive gratitude for the warm weather–that’s the end of psychological spring.

There’s another part to that feeling for me. I have a few small garden plots, and I also mark the moment when the seedlings I’ve started lose their compact, orderly form–beginning to stretch this way and that out of their own principles.

What is it that’s charming about seedlings? When they first emerge, they are pretty much all well-behaved. Next they show one, two, three of their true leaves, and I imagine that they will look straight and compact like this forever, only bigger. Of course this is not right. Soon, they will become unruly, stretch out of their pots, enter into tangled warfare with their neighbors, and nag at me that if I don’t do something with them soon, they will die or be stunted and I will have wasted the season.

In the spring, gardening is a rational task. Plans, maps, calendars-plants are at least potentially faithful to the winter vision.

But at some point by around this time, in the transition to summer, I get a premonition of the chaos that is coming, that it is more powerful than me. There ought to be a word for this phenomenon, the moment when a rational order gives way to organic spontaneity. There are probably gardeners for whom the early period is the best part of the season, when they feel most confident and fulfilled by their avocation. Once the plants are in control, it’s all downhill.

From Louis Menand’s The Free World: Art and Thought in the Cold War, on the educational program of the Black Mountain College:

Black Mountain College is famous for the number of artists and poets, later prominent, who studied or taught there, but it was not an art school. It was a college. It was launched during the Depression by a renegade Classics professor named John Andrew Rice, who had been fired from Rollins College in Florida, and for twenty-four years, it led a hand-to-mouth existence in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains outside Asheville. In a good year, enrollment was sixty. The college opened in the fall of 1933 with twenty-two students, fourteen of whom, along with four of the faculty, had followed Rice from Rollins. To the extent that finances permitted, and depending on who was available to teach, it offered a full liberal education. Students could take courses in science, mathematics, history, economics, psychology, languages, and literature.

What made Black Mountain different from other colleges was that the center of the curriculum was art-making. Students studied, and faculty taught, whatever they liked, but every student was expected to take a class in some kind of arts practice—painting, sculpture, pottery, weaving, poetry, architecture, design, dance, music, photography. The goal was not to produce painters, poets, and architects. It was to produce citizens. “The democratic man,” as Rice explained his philosophy, “… must be an artist.” Rice thought that people learn best by doing, rather than by reading books or listening to lectures, and he regarded art-making as a form of mental discipline. It instills a habit of making independent choices, which is important in a democracy. This was the pedagogy of progressivism, derived from the educational theories of John Dewey, who visited the college frequently and served on its advisory board.

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