étrangers/amis
Long before Substack was invented, I had a fondness for communicating with people I didn’t really know.
In the sixties, hitchhiking across the country, I met people I would never meet again. We often shared thoughts we would probably never share with friends or (god help us) relatives. Some of it was true, some not so much. These were opportunities to bare one’s soul and, at the same time, pretend to be the persons we wished to be.
Anonymous conversations are an exquisite blend of intimacy and judicious circumspection.
Later, I became part of a worldwide network of artists—strangers who communicated, visually, through the mail. Many of these postal artists hid their true identities behind aliases (e.g., Crackerjack Kid, Robot Vegetable, Anna Banana, DooDa Post, etc.). I began using Roy G. Biv, G. Alien, and Troublesome Little Dexter, among other noms du poste.
We got to be whoever we wanted to be while sharing some of our best work with an appreciative audience—one that was completely outside of the art-for-business world of galleries and critics. It was art, but also anti-art. Dada was frequently invoked.
A colleague (someone I actually knew) nicknamed me Professor Longbeard, then switched to Dr Sanscravat. I have adopted the latter as my nom de plume. It allows me to take stands on subjects on which I don’t necessarily believe, some utterly absurd. It also gives me the freedom to reveal truths that might otherwise prove awkward in civil discourse.
Intimacy and judicious circumspection.
Later still, e-mail replaced mail art in my life. I have corresponded with friends-of-friends, complete strangers, and even a few famous people who were—surprisingly enough—actually willing to respond to messages from strangers like me. One of them was Ray Johnson—the man who invented mail art through his New York Correspondence School.
Social media—such as Facebook and Twitter—have since allowed these almost anonymous dialogues to flourish.
Substack is merely the latest incarnation of this fascination with the literary equivalent of a masked ball. The process is absurdly easy, and that ease encourages the writing of tiny essays, essays that explore whatever nonsense is in my head at any given moment. What I didn’t realize, when I began Substacking, was that—when examined, en masse—the posts would coalesce into a kind of journal, or scrapbook memoir, of transient thoughts.
Most memoirs are written by people who have done things (great or otherwise) in their lives. I have not.
At least not outside of my own head.
Memoir is the medium-of-choice for egotists and/or monomaniacs—and Substack has allowed me to indulge in it freely. But it has also encouraged me to dig around in my past for material. The samples, below, come from an archive of ancient e-mail messages. They reflect what I was thinking about, at the time (which, as noted above, was all that I ever did).
Imagine that you have just picked me up as a hitchhiker…
Navel-gazing in Gaza
(excerpts from old correspondence)
A friend once described me as:
...someone who’s waded through the deep end and emerged unscathed.
It’s not clear what was intended there—was this “deep end” business some kind of post-sixties left-handed compliment?
Did I wade—or plunge into the depths, recklessly skinny-dipping, close to the drain?
Did that friend ever actually SEE the pool, except as something next to which one could get a really bitchin’ tan?
Who among us can say that they visited the pool and came away totally unscathed?
Sanscravat
(who’s waded through the deep end and is still all wet)
Another friend jumped in with,
I like to blame my memory loss and related quirks (“I just had that eggbeater in my hand— where the hell did I put it? Oh, there it is on top of the TV”) on “all those drugs I did in the sixties”—‘though if the truth be known, I didn’t do that many drugs, and it’s probably incipient Alzheimer’s.
I was thinking of the pool as a metaphor for all the chances and experiences of the sixties. Certainly, drugs were part of the mix, but just having done the time provides more than enough explanation for our current state.
We all like to blame our memory loss on “the sixties” or “incipient Alzheimer’s.” It’s much cooler than just being old. It lends panache to Prufrock. Who wouldn’t prefer to chalk up our gimpiness to an old war wound, or “that time I was gored by a bull in Pamplona,” over the confession that we’re just old farts?
It is one of the distinguishing characteristics of our generation that we always think of ourselves as being something other than what we are: if we are doctors, we’re really poets waiting to be discovered. If we are waiters, we are really actors. If we are actors, we are nascent directors. We have been children so long that playing dress-up has become a lifestyle—indeed, the concept of “lifestyle” did not really exist before our generation. We literally try on other lives as easily as changing a costume.
Here ends the lecture for today...
Sanscravat
(this is only my day job, I’m really a... oh, yeah, we never figured out what that was, did we?)
I’m all too aware that my cognitive powers are rapidly fading (due, no doubt, to a misspent youth—but we’ve covered all that, haven’t we?). But I gotta’ confess: I have no bleeping idea what it means. I do sense that I’m missing something, though.
Who would have thought that the chemical experiments of the sixties were unnecessary—that all we had to do was wait a few decades and our brains would turn to mush on their own?
The Dim Dr.
Umberto Eco wrote, “Intellectual passion is just as real as any other kind.” And a friend added:
Just a bit more constipated.
Doesn’t intellectual diarrhea constitute a greater threat to the public weal? Besides, what is the intellectual’s equivalent of clap, crabs, herpes, chlamydia, syphilis, venereal warts, and HIV? Who ever heard of the ad campaign “Get high, get stupid, get ideas?” (oh, wait a minute... this is getting perilously close to a reintroduction of the sixties theme)
Sanscravat
(Conceiver of the Conceptual Condom, the Captain of Contraconception, the Valedictorian of Virtual Veracity)
Another friend, possibly puzzled by my seemingly random insertion of the words of Eco, begged,
Tell me everything you can about Foucault’s Pendulum. Spare no details, I’m prepared.
Needless to say, I spared no details:
Dear “Desperate,”
You have to understand that Eco was, first and foremost, a leading practitioner of semiotics. He was profoundly interested in the printed word and its symbolic, contextual, and implicit functions. For Eco, nothing was as fascinating as the way the reader is affected by, and affects, the flow and structure of language. To ask for an encapsulated digest of the book bypasses and negates the very heart of the material. It does for literature what a Playboy centerfold’s list of measurements does for romance.
There is no person there.
To provide some kind of guide to the use of the book, think of this: The reader finds the surfeit of historical and allusional detail to be overwhelming, is puzzled by the implications of each new data-filled tidbit, questions not only the “plot” or directionality of the book but whether there is any purpose to the rambling. The reader is lost and clutches frantically for any tiny shred of advice that might help. Some readers ask other readers. Some go to reference books, carefully following every allusion, in the hope that some key fact will emerge, flooding a simple logical light over all the dark crevices and tangled snares the author has left lying about. It doesn’t seem to help.
Of course not.
The reader is a character in any Eco piece. Perhaps the most important character. The reader does not merely observe the befuddled state of the characters—he or she is an active participant in their struggle. This is the essential truth of all great literature. Eco believes that this can be seen by closely examining the very structure of the books. Eco’s Six Walks in a Fictional Wood is primarily about this. It is no accident that the protagonist in The Name of the Rose is named Baskerville, after a key figure, a typographer/printer, in the history of publishing. Eco is writing about writing. In philosophical terms, Eco’s work is self-referentially consistent.
It assumes that the reader can follow the words. It expects that the reader will look to see if there are any important subtexts or allegorical events taking place. It hopes that the reader will be watching to see how the author uses the flow of text to control the reader’s sense of the flow of time and fact.
When we read, we do not look at words on a page. We look through them as through a window. We can choose to look only at the metaphorical windowsill, the yard, the street, or out to the farthest visible or even imagined galaxy. Eco wants the reader to do all this—and, at the same time, stand aside and watch the process.
Why would you want to deprive yourself of all this? Just telling you this much is tantamount to shouting out the name of the culprit when someone picks up a detective novel. Do Eco and yourself a big favor. Read. Read as openly and consciously as you can. If Foucault’s Pendulum doesn’t reveal its truths directly, read Six Walks. It may give you an idea of Eco’s purpose.
Sansito
That response only provoked more Eco-babble:
Dear Soul in Search of the Good,
Only someone pumped full of dark-roasted caffeine @ 2:22 AM would be willing to go to such lengths just to tell me to “avoid run-on sentences.” Something tells me that you are not anxious to dive into the verbal vortex that is Proust—‘though I suspect that his work is a major influence on Eco (it’s hard to be certain—Eco’s major influences seem to consist of everything ever written, sung, filmed, danced, built, or otherwise conceived by humankind. His minor influences include—but are not limited to—the rest of the universe). You might consider reading the first couple of lectures in Six Walks. They’re all about the manipulation of time in the writing of certain 19th cent. French authors. Eco mentions Proust briefly but spends a lot more time on lesser-known writers (much more cool than exhuming the famous yet again).
Sanscravat (what, exactly, is The Good—and will we recognize it if we slip on some on the sidewalk?)
Literati,
I sense that the entire assembly has become enervated, that e-life has become flat and listless—and there seems to be an inverse relationship between e-pistolary exuberance and a diminuendo in the discussion of Italian intellectualism, generally, and semiotics, specifically.
Fortunately, today’s New York Times Book Review contains a long (needless to say) selection from the diaries of William Weaver (the premier translator of Eco and Calvino), entitled “A Translator’s Journal.” Just in case any of you might have been suffering under the delusion that you were “out of the loop” or otherwise unhip, note the following:
The other day at La Foce, the guests included some writers (Luigi Malerba, Sergio Romano). It seems to be chic not to have read Eco, rather like not having a TV. Monte San Savino, 10 January ‘95, 6 P.M.
Do you feel better now?
Sanscravat
PS: Nonsequitur of the day: Every proverbial schoolboy knows that the ancient Romans used a kind of sea snail, called Murex, to obtain the dye for the famous Royal Purple. I just discovered that the robes of the high and mighty retained the stench of decaying shellfish. So the Roman Senate literally stank! Do you think that we could persuade our leaders to wear the purple—effectively belling the cat?
At this point, someone jumped in with a question:
Who is Sanscravat?
I suspect she meant to ask, “Who the bloody hell is this Sanscravat—and why does he go on at such length on things about which no one cares?”
Dear Rare and Delicate Flower of the Amazon,
I’d give anything to know.
Is this not the central question of our lives? Well, to be honest. I must admit that my identity is of less interest to all of you than it is to me. Right now it seems to be a dilemma, wrapped in an enigma, rolled in a burrito-sized tortilla—with too much cheese and not enough pico de gallo.
Sanscravat (“Cogito ergo possum—I think, therefore I play dead.”
swiped from an old New York Magazine contest)
PS: E-mail is perfectly suited for my plodding style. I can untangle the various strands, and respond as I would like (rather than having to blurt out any drivel, just to keep up my end of the conversation). Contrary to the complaint of many—that e-mail fosters surreptitious anonymity and evasiveness (read: lack of personal responsibility)—I think it allows the expression of one’s true nature. When I speak, I appear a fool. When I write, I may prove it—but I will at least reveal the true nature of my foolishness, not just its superficial appearance.
At some (other) point, one member of the vast assembly of my e-mail correspondents suggested I might have been changing the subject:
in an attempt to murder the nerd thread
Hardly, I was merely guessing about the likelihood of diminishing interest among the larger group. All, not some, of my best friends are nerds. Those friends who take offense at this need to either: try another brand of over-the-counter introspection-inducing medication, or realize that for me, at least, nerdiness implies an enhanced consciousness that often manifests itself as obliviousness.
Jeeeeeez, consider our medium of choice!
BTW, Einstein was my first hero. I remember my parents talking about him when I was, maybe, seven. They, knowing practically nothing of his work, described him as “the smartest man in the world.” The very concept so amazed me that it started a lifelong interest in him and his work. The bulletin board in my office has pictures of five people, in order: Einstein, Dorothy Sayers, Bertrand Russell, Douglas Adams, and Ray Johnson—oh yeah, there’s another picture of Einstein on my computer. I downloaded it from the mathematician’s page at St. Andrew’s.
Does that sound like nerdiness is in any danger of extinction in my neighborhood?
Sans
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