how to mention John Crowley and Douglas Coupland in the same sentence (no, really)

Blogs by content creators (they used to be called “artists and writers”) are too often entry points into mental universes that some would just as soon not have entered. Even when interesting in and of themselves, they contain the quirks, side trips and obsessions that get filtered out in a finished work of art, and the results, while fascinating, frequently have little to do with the main work with which the blogger is associated. I expect my blog to be no different in that regard.

People following the preceding art history thread on this blog can stop reading here.

I am, at this moment in world history, possibly the only person contrasting the contents of Douglas Coupland’s new novel JPod with the contents of John Crowley’s Lord Byron’s Novel: The Evening Land, the paperback of which was released yesterday. At the time of the latter’s hardcover release, I was impressed that a novelist whose sympathies clearly lay with the (imaginary) gothic novel by Lord Byron that is discovered by the characters in the frame tale...that this novelist, to begin this long sentence again, was so capable of capturing the tone of the frame tale's young lesbian intellectuals who decipher the document left by Lord Byron’s daughter. Critics at the time remarked that the Byronic novel failed to be convincingly byronic. None observed that the e-mail messages of the code-breaking characters are on target (even if Crowley has to throw in some banter about “lol” to clue in unwired readers to the most elementary of common abbreviations).

Coupland is more or less the opposite sensibility, an enormously literate intellect immersed in the daily minutiae of a wired or wi-fi world that, on one level, clearly appalls him. Or at least the fun he has with the stuff of bright young people trapped in designing video games is so congruent with the great works of modernism that he plainly remembers a world he doesn’t expect his characters to have the slightest inkling of. In a move with considerable antecedents, he inserts a character called Douglas Coupland into his novel who creates a devil’s bargain for the contents of his protagonist’s laptop so it can be used as the material of his next novel, already under contract.

Even so does a character who is clearly the equivalent of John Crowley appear in the waning pages of the third novel of Crowley's “Aegypt” quartet. This not-quite-Crowley bewails the ramification of a project that is recognizably not unlike the quartet, which seems to have gone off in impossibly complex directions, as could have been predicted in a project that begins with the chapters of an immense, unfinished and perhaps unfinishable novel by Fellowes Kraft, one of “Aegypt”’s characters.

Coupland, by contrast, delights in his anomalous position as omniscient creator not quite in charge of his material. We realize at a certain point that he is comparable to the perverse game-spoiler the content creators of the jPod cubicles gleefully implant in the heart of the games that they create and that management alters for marketing purposes. The Donald-Barthelme-like blocks of enlarged type, pointless asides that somehow advance the plot, and embedded digressions worthy of Gravity’s Rainbow are Coupland messing with our head as the fictional character who bears his name messes with the heads of his fictional characters. As with John Crowley, there is a distinguished lineage of precursors stretching back from Coupland's book, which critics have nonetheless largely found problematic.

Coupland, incidentally, also synthesizes the world we live in for those of us New York Times readers who would really rather be living someplace else but have not much choice in the matter.

Does this meditation lead anywhere? I think not.

Atlanta and the death of God (as a historical event, Tom Altizer said once)

I have now spent more than half my life in a Southern city more associated with Newt Gingrich than with the death of God theology (or, these days, even with the civil rights movement except as ancient history, as the sale of the Martin Luther King Jr. papers has just reminded us). But there was a time when Atlanta was a hip and happening place for radical theology. In those years, Christianity still had an active left wing that shaded off at one end into visionary projects more redolent of William Blake than of William Sloane Coffin. So here is a modest meditation I wrote the other day; I originally titled it with the name of the world's favorite soft drink in place of "Atlanta," but the disclaimer I wrote in this introductory paragraph turned so long I decided to retitle the essay. The new title makes a passing allusion to Harvey Cox's The Secular City, the other book everyone was talking about in 1965, along with Marshall McLuhan and...well, you know. It was the sixties, but nobody remembers that Cox and Altizer were part of the decade.

Again, people who signed on for the art can stop reading here. We shall return to art-type topics soon enough.


Atlanta and the Death of God: Notes on Half a Lifetime in the (Not So) Secular City

Atlanta is a paradoxical place, not least because it never finds time to realize what a paradoxical place it is. This was brought home to me most recently by the publication of Thomas Altizer’s autobiography Living the Death of God, in which he remarks that in many ways Emory University’s four-decade-long rise to global recognition, if not exactly prominence, began with its president’s courageous defense of its maverick death-of-God theologian in the 1966 national controversy.

It would be an interesting side trip to ponder how much subsequent events have borne out Altizer’s controversial hypotheses of the day, insofar as one can understand what his hypotheses actually were. In a time of ongoing fundamentalist retrenchment, one of Atlanta’s best-known institutions for many years was the Reverend Charles Stanley’s nationally televised worship services from the First Baptist Church; far more than the increasingly moribund liberal denominations, the increasingly distorted faces of fundamentalism have been projected globally by those who understood the uses of communications technology. The most reactionary spiritual projects have been the most adroitly disseminated through the techniques that are thought of as intrinsically tending towards atheism. What remains in the realm of near-secrecy are precisely the most humane aspects of the religious imagination, which seem mired in outdated modes of getting the word out. Meanwhile, long-atheistic or indifferent European societies are being as stunned as American secularists by the explosion of techno-savvy purveyors of unrelenting literalism. It is possible to understand algorithms without comprehending hermeneutics. In fact, the legendary emotional maladroitness of geekdom may play into the rise of the new fundamentalism; the versions now being peddled offer mathematical exactitude instead of the imprecisions and intrinsic paradoxes beloved of English majors. That they have hijacked Christian theology and turned it into a parody of itself is beside the point. Neo-fundamentalism, like neo-conservatism, is a quite contemporary expression of consciousness, and as such is as much a part of what Altizer named as the death of God as the secularity that everyone in 1965 thought would be the ultimate victor.

But that would, indeed, be a side trip. The changing modes of communication and consciousness have always been fully embodied in Atlanta society; UPS and CARE move their headquarters here, with attendant arrivals of interesting individuals who remain quite invisible to Atlanta at large. Emory University, long since over the death of God, institutes a Tibetan Studies program in collaboration with the Dalai Lama and Drepung Loseling Monastery. It becomes respectable to ponder the epistemological implications of modes of inner investigation that were once reserved in American society for retirees looking for late-life answers. Most Atlantans couldn’t care less, and in fact are too ill-informed even to express puzzlement. The city’s global reputation as a center of particular music styles is far more visible, but respected chiefly because it provides a source of so much concentration of capital. It would require a psychoanalyst trained by Tibetan monks to keep these multiple strands in mind; they resemble, structurally, those impossible mandalas that novices are told to re-create in the mind’s eye and follow round in all their inter-relations.

The World of Coca-Cola abandons its 1990 building (opened, with unintentional symbolism, on the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, setting the United States on a course no one could have predicted) for a new one in 2007, redesigned because the old one was constructed for an attention span and a linearity that are both completely outdated. The short attention span has become productively rechanneled into multitasking and attention to several topics at once. The new building allows visitors to move in any direction for as long as they like before heading off to some other interactive encounter.

Once again the city becomes a splendid metaphor for shifting possibilities within consciousness and capital flows, but nobody notices.