{"id":461,"date":"2007-02-08T14:08:15","date_gmt":"2007-02-08T14:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=461"},"modified":"2014-03-07T17:25:55","modified_gmt":"2014-03-07T22:25:55","slug":"obsession","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/?p=461","title":{"rendered":"Obsession"},"content":{"rendered":"

I had to order the CD update for The Complete New Yorker<\/b> in order to reread Jonathan Lethem’s Personal History essay “The Beards: An adolescence in disguise” (from the 28 Feb 2005 issue, pp 62-69), and found that I remembered bits of it clearly but that I’d missed a lot too. It’s a fine piece, especially if you’re trying to sort through your own history of interests and ummmm obsessions. A couple of especially juicy bits, in which I don’t exactly recognize myself but can see how one might extrapolate:<\/p>\n

Attempting to burrow and disappear into the admiration of certain works of art, I tried to make such deep and pure identification that my integrity as a human self would become optional, a vestige of my relationship to the art. I wanted to submit and submerge, even to die a little. I developed a preference, among others, for art that required endurance, that mimicked a galactic endlessness and wore out the nonbelievers… By trying to export myself into a place that didn’t fully exist, I was asking works of art to bear my expectation that they could be better than life, that they could redeem life. I asked too much of them: I asked them to be both safer than life and fuller, a better family. That, they couldn’t be. At the depths I’d plumb them, so many perfectly sufficient works of art became thin, anemic. I sucked the juice out of what I loved until I found myself in a desert, sucking rocks for water. (pg. 67)<\/p>\n

The work I’ve chosen bears a suspicious resemblance to the rooms themselves [ref: Every room I’ve lived in since I was given my own room at eleven, has been lined with books]. My prose is a magpie’s. Perhaps anyone’s writing is ultimately bricolage, a welter of borrowings. But, of the writers I know, I’ve been the most eager to point out my influences, to spoil the illusion of originality by elucidating my fiction’s resemblance to my book collection… My rooms might have been armor, a disguise or beard, but I wanted millions of admirers to peek inside and see me there, and when they did I wished for them to revere and pity me at once. The contradiction in this wish tormented me, so I ignored it. Then I became a writer and it began to sustain me. (pg. 69)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…this in the context of last night’s Radio Open Source program The Ecstasy of Influence<\/a> and the Harper’s<\/b> piece of the same name<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had to order the CD update for The Complete New Yorker in order to reread Jonathan Lethem’s Personal History essay “The Beards: An adolescence in disguise” (from the 28 Feb 2005 issue, pp 62-69), and found that I remembered bits of it clearly but that I’d missed a lot too. It’s a fine piece, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=461"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2756,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/461\/revisions\/2756"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/oook.info\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}