Every time God closes a parenthesis he opens an ellipsis

I’ve been working on a new novel for a while now. I just broke 40,000 words on its first draft. It is messy, really honestly basically unbearably messy.

The problem, one of the problems, has to do with the proliferation of possible novels in my head—how I am never content for a novel to be one thing, but I always want it to be all things. (Another term for this is "commitment issues.") I want any novel I am working on to be the book from Borges that contains all books—the book with an infinite number of pages that could replace the library of Babel (in which all books, all language, become by necessity meaningless). But in that meaninglessness (which is the necessary result of such an infinite proliferation) arises the possibility of something else, a devastating beauty. I don't think it would be possible to look at the book of Babel directly, it would be like looking at an elder god, anyone who did would go mad or blind. Borges notes, in parenthesis, that such a book logically could not contain a middle page.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n15/adam-shatz/at-the-crime-scene

In the future the internet will be full of nothing but the dead

A list of readings, journals, and presses that I once deeply loved that are now gone:

Land Grant College Review

Quick Fiction

Quickies

>kill author

abjective

Poetry Made of Diamonds

The Sunday Night Sex Show

Mud Luscious Press

Metazen

Also, when I was searching for "Abjective," this was the first hit that came up: http://www.abjective.net/109.html

For a while, my tumblr was linked to jamestaddadcox.com. I let it slide after I decided that I didn't really want my name as a domain (I pictured sending out emails from jamestaddadcox@jamestaddadcox.com, for example). Now jamestaddadcox.com has been taken over by a Japanese company advertising "The Bridal Hair Removal Salon in Shizuoka for Marriage." You can go there right now. It's here: http://jamestaddadcox.com/

First as tragedy, then as kitsch

Things I'm currently reading:

The Whiskey Baron, Jon Sealy (picked up from a bookstore in Charleston SC, which seems appropriate)

The Concise Book of Lying, Evelin Sullivan

Sky Rat, Rauan Klassnik

At Swim-Two-Birds, Flann O'Brien

Thirteenz, Daniela Olszewska (free echap from Nap Press)

At this moment I am eating a cheese that has walnuts in it and my advice to you, if you find a cheese with walnuts in it, my advice is to eat it, especially if you cut up an apple and eat it on the apple. What will my life be when this cheese is gone.

Wolf Doctors

Russ Woods wrote this book and I am excited to help put it out into the world. Coming 2014 from Artifice.

To what degree are we arguing about feelings and to what degree are we fighting for careers?

1. Feelings are important, and generally shouldn't be hurt, all other things being equal.

2. Many things outweigh feelings being hurt, such as, being able to continue in one’s chosen career, such as justice, such as

3. What is it about the internet that makes us worse people?

4. The lack of a face?

5. None of us are responsible for patriarchy. All of us are responsible for injustice.

6. It is okay to say that you are “tired of being nice.” It is okay to say that it “isn't your responsibility to educate others.” It’s okay to be a human being. It’s okay to do exactly what is expected of a human being in your position.

6.b. Note that this makes you neither better nor worse than other human beings in other positions, doing exactly what is expected of them.

6.c. To categorically claim that people from an oppressed group are better than people from an oppressing group is to claim that there is something essential about the oppression. That the particular oppression is anything more than a historical contingency.

6.d. Is to claim, in fact, that there is something that “makes sense” about the oppressed group being oppressed, or the oppressing group oppressing.

6.e. Who happened to cross an ocean first. Who happened to have gunpowder.

7. The contingent fact of one’s being in a position of oppression does not apriori make one a better person than the people who contingently are in a position of oppressing.

7.b. Being a better person than them does.

8. Bullying someone who is ostensibly a member of the oppressor group, when it is safe to do so, is a perfectly understandable reaction to oppression.

8.b. The fact of its being so understandable is the issue, ethically speaking.

9. To suspend the human, to act outside of what is understandable—to refuse to hurt others when one has every reason to—

10. is what?

(cf http://htmlgiant.com/behind-the-scenes/resignation/, cf http://lunalunamag.com/2013/12/15/leigh-stein-vs-htmlgiant-why-we-have-to-be-our-own-vida/, cf http://htmlgiant.com/word-spaces/open-letter-to-htmlgiant-the-sexism-stops-here/, cf http://htmlgiant.com/massive-people/the-zambreno-doll/, cf http://web.archive.org/web/20100124211426/http://htmlgiant.com/author-spotlight/the-legend-of-zelda/)

http://lesswrong.com/r/discussion/lw/8w1/transcript_tyler_cowen_on_stories/

At first glance this seems like a regular shipping harbor from the year 1937, but upon closer inspection, the time traveller is Visible

I haven't really been able to get into Dhalgren yet, which is a weird thing to say considering I just spent two hours reading it without necessarily intending to. But I think that if this book hadn't come so highly recommended—if it weren't for the blurb by Lethem, the forward by Gibson, and especially if I hadn't been told that, at some point, something happens that makes it an entirely different book—I'd probably have stopped reading by now. This book is pulling me along on pure mystery: This can't possibly be the book, I think—so what is it?

A book that becomes an entirely different book: This is an idea that I've always been attracted to. But what can it actually mean? Is there going to be something that changes my experience of reading the first four hundred pages? Certainly, the possibility of "an entirely different book" has already colored that experience—I don't think that my reading of these first 400 pages would be the same if I weren't expecting something to happen to put those pages in a new light. But it seems nonsensical to say that something could happen that would actually change my experience of those 400 pages. I have had my experience of them, it was what it was, nothing is going to change it. At the same time, of course, I can't in any way undo it, nor do I have to or do I get to repeat it. What I am relying on, I suppose, is not an actual change in that experience, but a future experience that incorporates my memory of that experience, in some way that I will find remarkable or surprising.

Meaning is nontemporal, or rather, runs backwards in time; meaning can only attach itself to the past. Justice is what the present owes the past. Is it, then, that in the book that becomes an entirely different book, there is more meaning, precisely because there is more to be redeemed?

(Is all justice a form of meaning? Vice versa? What exactly is the connection between these terms? Each of them, it seems, involves an operation of the present on the past; or rather, an operation of the present on itself, for the sake of the past.)

I think he was just in a room with a podium and a camera

When works of theory or philosophy read as novels, what exactly about them functions novelistically? Such works typically have a character, or characters. In Repetition, there is the narrator, the young man, and (unseen) the woman the young man loves, or who loves him. In Camera Lucida, there is again a narrator, and also, ultimately, his mother. But I think more than just saying that there are identifiable characters, we also mean that there is some sort of a plot, or something that functions in its place. Which means that there are lines of tension to be followed. Mystery appears, promises are made. I almost want to say that the author puts himself into debt to the reader (how else can we explain the feeling of being “cheated” that occurs if this debt is not repaid?).

Spoiler Alert 1962

On Pale Fire: there is a certain closure that the book refuses to give you. The most obvious example of this is the crown jewels, which are referenced, but always kept just out of reach—until, in the index, it becomes a kind of game, in which the entry for “crown jewels” refers you to “hiding place” which refers you to the Zemblan word for “hiding place,” which refers you to “potaynik” (which I need to look up), and from there to “taynik,” Russian for “secret place”; which refers you back to “crown jewels.” All the while, two Russian experts or “experts” are searching for the jewels, even here, in the index (which seems to comment on the reader’s own desire for closure). Meanwhile, in the main text of the novel (that is, the commentary), we are given the events we’re promised—Shade shot dead by Gradus—but not the epistemological closure we wanted and perhaps expected: Is Kinbote actually a deposed king (probably not)? If not, who is he? How did he come to occupy the position he’s in now? In what way is he like Hazel? Does Zembla even exist, in the world of the novel? (It seems to—we are given scenes in which “outside” characters refer to it—but we are given those scenes through Kinbote’s commentary, which is of course suspect. The only truly “outside” reference to Zembla is a single mention in Shade’s poem, which raises some interesting possibilities—for example, that Zembla is an invention of Shade’s, a throwaway line, that Kinbote has fastened on to. Or, to bring things to a complete epistemological crisis, that Kinbote, and not Shade, wrote the poem [as we know, or most likely know, or suspect, that he has written some if not all of the “variants”].)

​Interesting how the use of these sorts of narrative mirrors allows Nabokov to present a fairy tale or fantasy within this literary novel—the footnote as “distance.”

Gale Marie Thompson