Genealogy of manuscripts

I am reading Robert Irwin's "The Arabian Nights" A companion. It was recommended to me as 'the best commentary ever.' I dont really agree. I think the best work of commentary is Herbert Dreyfus's commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time", "Being-in-the-world." The best work of literary criticism or commentary is Mimesis by Auerbach. I keep a copy of this above my desk - 'being-in-the-world' is relegated to my stacks.

What is interesting about the Arabian nights commentary is its discussion of literary scholarship. This all but disappeared with the advent of ideologies and literary criticism. Rather than the try piecing together of texts from various sources, trying to find the 'true text' in some sort of pseudo-scientific exploration, people now just interpret a text in light of some agenda - in some meta-pseudo-scientific pontification. We are really moving beyond the scientific method - it seems - as a mode of exploration and investigation of the world. String theory is not a result of empirical evidence and nor is the Lacanian interpretation of Pär Lagerkvist.

But back to the Arabian nights commentary. So one of the ideas that caught my eye was that scholars where attempting to create a sort of evolutionary tree of different editions of the Arabian nights. This is sort of an interesting thought to me that works of literature can have a history. Further along, we see that many of the stories in the Nights, have parallels in Chaucer, Boccaccio, various sanskrit works, and other. Here is yet another genealogy - the genealogy of an idea rather than the genealogy of a work. I feel like these sorts of ideas are used in the generation of books themselves, the questionable source of a work is used as a device in Don Quixote and in the "Dictionary of the Khazars" - and probably in 59% of Bevery Borges novels.

The sort of scholarship that went into this sort of detective work seems more apt for the computer age (or the Big Data Age) than the experimental age, however I dont think literature scholars are doing this sort of work anymore -

I leave you with some of my favorite lines from Tao Lin's "Shoplifting from American Apparel"
"On Christmas Eve Sam work around 7 p.m. in his brother's studio apartment in Manhattan. Sam had moved in November into a four-person apartment in Brooklyn but was staying at his brother's studio while his brother was on vacation with his girlfriend. Sam put on music very loud and showered in the dark with the bathroom door open. He put in earphones and walked ten blocks to an organic raw vegan restaurant. He ate a seaweed salad. He drank a smoothie. He walked back to the apartment. He drank an energy drink. He worked on writing for two and a half hours. He lay on his brother's queen-size bed and listened to music. He read most of the newest Stephen Dixon novel and fell asleep around 3 a.m.

the scrivener

I use scrivener to write. Paul and I use it to write our screen plays. I use it to write my stories, plays, and currently I'm using it to write a graphic novel. I was once in an airport bookstore and spied Bartleby the Scrivener, and read it on the flight back to NY. How is scrivener the software like Bartleby the scrivener? Perhaps some industrious 11th grade English student somewhere can deconstruct this. Really I like the scrivener software because I have different outline modes, I can write in a corkboard mode, and it is easy to keep track of research and themes related to a particular topic.

So, can I write a game using Scrivener? Good question. I don't know, maybe I should try that.
I'll post here the first paragraph of my latest short story - it is the documentation for a cellular automata program.

"Documentation for a Computer Program"

Out of the IOStream comes theWorld. The stream is blue, not a microsoft blue, but deep sky blue, #00BFFF, and it is not web safe. theWorld is created from a pseudo random number generator. The first iteration of theWorld was created with a Perlin noise filter. But that produced too much geographic diversity. The purpose of this experiment is to see how cells interact, so we need to strip out all extraneous variables - geographic diversity was the first to go. The pseudo random number generator, and that provides much less variation in worlds from one Universe to the next.

The Great American Novel

My husband always says that I should write a novel. I have no idea where he gets the idea that I am capable of such a feat - but it is an interesting idea to entertain. I have about 20 half finished novels and some new novel ideas, but so does everyone.

A novel is more than an idea. It is not a knock knock joke, a one liner. A novel is not just a good idea - it is the unfolding and refolding and crumpling up and tossing on the floor of everything that surrounds that idea. What novel should I write? I ask my husband. Write that novel about Detroit. I had a idea about a novel that follows generations of a detroit family through immigration, the automotive revolution, and finally to current decay. "How should I start?" I ask. "Dont try to write War and Peace." My husband replies. That is actually very good advice. But the Detroit novel really does seem to have a War and Peace scale, so I try and pick up another idea. Ok - I was thinking about something golem related. For some reason I have been thinking about Golem stories. I have a nascent screenplay on a Golem and World War 2. I also love Jewish esoteric stories (the hasidic tales, tales of nachman) - I like weird esoteric stories in general. So I was thinking about combining the two. A group of jews hiding one night from the pogroms in early 19c russia stay up all night telling stories. Shamelessly stealing from the Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and other stories in a story. I love framing devices almost as much as the stories they frame. I started writing this but all I got was a frame. A fictional story of my grandmother writing down her recollections from this night 50 years later. And my possession of this manuscript after her death, via my aunt. I actually had a beginning and an ending and all i need to do was fill it with stories. This has proven more difficult that I first thought. (I was also inspired by The Manuscript of Saragasso)

I was going to do 10 stories based on the 10 Sephirot (levels of creation) based on Kabalistic ideas. The first story I was writing was based on Daat (knowledge) and was a fictional account of Spinoza - really a glass grinder in Amsterdam. I was playing with ideas of rationality, speculation. But that is all I got - no plot ! I am thinking that there should be a video game based on the 10 sephirot. Maybe I should do that instead.

Being stymied, I decided to get into shape by writing short stories. Short stories are a different beast than novels - and I think most novelist dont get this. At the moment I am enjoying the short stories of George Saunders - he writes some dystopic fiction about amusement parks or modes of entertainment. Really great stuff. Since I was reading about vagueness in philosophy - I thought it would be interesting to write a story that explores vagueness. I sketched out a story about a bunch of adolescent girls who go to an amusement park and the different rides they can take based on the 'You are this high' mark - a sort of exploration of living in vague territory. I was going to end it with a death - but that was really a bummer. I really could not get behind it. It did not seem like a story I would write. And it really did not have a 'turn', a strong idea. A short story is sort of like a knock knock joke. Maybe I should write some science fiction.

This post was written while listening to passion pit.