ravel

Southern California: I thought I'd lost you there for a moment!

~~~

The weird and yet fascinating story of the Ovitz family. Mengele was in his thirties. The randomness of it all. The damned and the saved.

~~~

'a sheltered, privileged, mysteriously stalled life'

---JCO.

Fuchs found Southern California, 1937, "still undeveloped, fresh and brimming and unawakened, at the beginning everything in this new land wonderfully solitary, burning, and kind."

"what is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life...It's the melodic line-when it all comes together, it sings."

The incredible, the superhuman ability to accept the cards that have been dealt to you. With the blessings of the sun. Not to ask: what might have been but, instead, to inhabit the parcel of history that's yours.

~~~

The piling up of books, the sheer, dizzying fertility of the culture-churning industry. The rapid, burgeoning, growth of academic papers, newspaper reports, tweets, blogs, 24-hour news, cheap pop music, the derivative market: criticism, analyses, commentaries, biographies of biographers, films, clips, documentaries, all available at the click of a button; the mind not knowing what the hand does. This frantic, frenetic gathering and accumulation of details, information, its exponential growth; the hyper-inflation of words, the silence of the commons destroyed.

The libraries, the museums, vast cathedrals of the human mind, vast storehouses categorizing everything that's ever been done or thought. What a tangle we've got ourselves into. Another fine mess. Long ago it's outstripped the human capacity to name, let alone understand what it all means.

At a stroke this might seem oppressively burdensome, the great weight of the past, unplumbed, sunken, as dark as whale, so vast that it defies structure; on the other hand, the sheer accessibility to this bloated, overblown mass of details, profundity mixed up with trivia (the need for search engines to shuffle it all about) may, in fact, have the opposite effect: a delightful giddiness, light-headedness: pick out whatever you can for yourself, like a great jumble sale. You stumble across something, a story, a reference (good ol' wiki), a writer or a musician who was once considered great but that now everyone's forgotten or will forget in 30 years. All but a few amateur experts and dusty-haired academics, holed up in the tower have even heard of them. Everything is rediscovered. Like the Eloi, you start from scratch, not remembering what happened before. You find a few leaves away from the whirlwind.

Multiplication. Think about it: Prafit with his two volumes and thousands of pages. Do you really think anyone's going to read that, give you the privilege? Or Burton, six volumes on melancholy with the fashionable blurb: this books is about two things: melancholy and everything else.

The sustained brainwork, monkish devotion to the Cause, the blind, fanatical collecting, storing up for the winter of the mind, this colossal, mammoth effort comprising small, marginal advances added to one another. A few samples for you, from one page: The Last Imaginary Place: a human history of the Arctic; The Future of the Brain (dim, let me tell you); Choral Masterworks; Kansas city Jazz. The examined life...This morbid inability to forget. Major and minor works. Black studies, gender studies, development studies. Post-colonial, post-industrial, post-everything..the colossal leviathan ploughs on, devouring..heaving with a monstrous incomprehension, like a silent movie...Great Authors Series; Great Books. There's something neurotic, hurried, unnatural about it all, this tumble of imagery and dialogue. Bring back the Taleban. The 'world of celebrity, fast movement and shiny living'.

Art staves off death. Old hat. The art of storing up art. Now, that's a story!

Steiner: Errata.