ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Terms coined in his new book: “Peer progressives” (members of decentralized cooperative movements, whether cultural like Wikipedia, economic like Kickstarter, or political like Occupy Wall Street), “pothole paradox” (that a pothole outside your house is about to be fixed by the city is the single most important news item in your life and yet the least likely to be reported upon by traditional media, which paradox is used by Johnson to advocate for greater online customization of journalism).

  # of times “hive mind” is defined as “a dense network of human intelligence”: 1.

  # of times Renaissance Venice and Genoa, and Ottoman Istanbul, are described as “peer networks”: 1.

  This reviewer’s incredulity that people can get paid to come up with this crap: Total.

  This reviewer’s naïveté: Boundless.

  Requisite Marshall McLuhan concept that Johnson “appropriates”: “Affordances,” or the tendency of each new medium to shape the message it communicates (e.g., movies and TV prioritizing the auditory and visual over the textual).

  Application of McLuhan’s “affordances” to all the books under review: The new type of tech-themed text property, whether book or ebook, is intended to appear quickly and disappear quickly and probably even in the best of cases should not be reviewed; the obvious speed of its composition, and the brief sales window in which it is expected to perform, all form the velocity of its “sending,” and too its method of “reception”: rush through; do not pay attention; things are changing fast.

  Malcolm Gladwell: Blurber of the Johnson book, thanked in the Acknowledgments section of the Schmidt and Cohen.

  Also thanked in the Acknowledgments section of the Schmidt and Cohen: WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani, former secretary of state Henry Kissinger, Evgeny Morozov.

  Requisite takeaway scores on scale of 10: Morozov 6, Schmidt and Cohen 4, Lanier 2, Johnson 1.

  Other new books this reviewer considered reading: Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Kenneth Cukier; Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World, Christopher Steiner; a stack of Mexican novels; friends’ poetry.

  # of hours spent on this review, including reading: 80.

  Monies earned: $800.

  Hourly rate: $10/hour.

  Word count: 2,382.

  Rate per word: $0.33585222502/word.

  What $800 can buy at Ibrahim’s cart just outside the building this reviewer was writing in on Van Brunt Street in “hipster” Brooklyn: 400 hotdogs, 266.666 hamburgers, 800 sodas.

  # of times Google was consulted for this review: 82.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  NAVAJO RESERVATION

  A portrait of a horse painted on horsehide with a horsehair brush. I’d like to write a book like that, but where—or what—or who—is my horse?

  MEDIUM THOREAU

  “One generation abandons the enterprises of another like stranded vessels,” Thoreau, Walden.

  “There is an incessant influx of novelty in the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness,” Thoreau, Walden.

  Medium: One generation abandons novelty, another enterprises the dullness of vessels. Tolerate the incessant yet stranded world.

  WRITING ABOUT THE PRESENT: MIRROR, BODY, SHADOW

  MIRROR

  IT WAS STENDHAL WRITING UNDER the protective guise of a bogus epigraph (attributed to historian “Saint-Réal”) who decided it was the novelist’s job to hold up a mirror at the side of the road to catch everything that passed. This would remain the prescription for description in what would later be called the realist novel for the next century and a half. Today, however, everyone is followed down every road by mirrors: We’re tracked by these mirrors to the office and to lunch and through all the rooms of our homes, and though surely we’ve sped up our pace of life in order to evade them, they’re becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce and install, and even lighter and less conspicuous for our family and friends and stalky strangers to carry with them, in the forms of computers in their bags and phones in their pockets. And beyond even that—these mirrors don’t merely reflect momentarily anymore, no—now they also record, and so make all our moments eternal. The final change will come when these mirrors stop following us, and we start following them—seeking out their surveillance, and so seeking out their immortality, becoming so involved in our pursuit of them that we’ll forget what type of machines they truly are, and all we’ll be able to sense are these strange people coming at us at top speed—just “people,” because we won’t be able to recognize our own shrieking selves, and so we’ll inevitably either crash into our own representations, or just swerve at the ultimate moment toward the precipice instead, from which we’ll fall—we’ll fall—which is the sole process by which realism becomes reality.

  BODY

  Stendhal proposed the novel as a mirror held up to the side of the road for a single purpose: to make the political/aesthetic argument that if a novel was concerned with the immoral or ugly it wasn’t the fault of the novel or author but of the thing/situation it was reflecting. Don’t blame the mirror for the puddles in the road, Stendhal was saying, blame the road-surveyor or -inspector. In the nearly two centuries since Le Rouge et le Noir, however, Stendhal’s intent has been distorted or downplayed, and what literature has been left with is the image of the novel as image, a reproduction not of a consensus or objective “reality,” but of one author’s subjective experience.

  Zola, born in 1840, two years before Stendhal died, and one year after the appearance of the daguerreotype—the first commercially practical photographic process—referred to this impossible reproduction of a consensus reality as “idealism,” and opposed it with “naturalism,” which characterized novels that sought to expose the forces that produced that consensus. The naturalist novel, from its birth in the late nineteenth century through its disguised heyday in the twentieth, has been precisely about how reality is “made,” as distinct from what reality “is.”

  Zola defined this naturalistic approach in an essay that responded to a medical text by a contemporary, the physiologist Claude Bernard, which attempted to transfer the scientific method governing experimentation in chemistry to the precincts of biology—the treatment of disease. It was Zola’s goal to diagnose French society as a doctor would a patient’s body: by analyzing its comorbid maladies one at a time, with a nib as sharp as a scalpel. Only after this diagnosis would treatment—extraliterary, political treatment—be possible.

  Zola titled his essay “The Experimental Novel,” and inasmuch as that epithet “experimental” has plagued the careers of countless modern writers, its original context must be recalled: “The experimental novelist,” Zola writes, “is therefore the one who accepts proven facts, who points out in man and in society the mechanism of the phenomena over which science is mistress, and who does not interpose his personal sentiments, except in the phenomena whose determinism is not yet settled, and who tries to test, as much as he can, this personal sentiment, this idea a priori, by observation and experiment.” After a paragraph break, though, Zola hazards a “personal sentiment,” but only in terms of his own incomprehension: “I cannot understand how our naturalistic literature can mean anything else. I have only spoken of the experimental novel, but I am fairly convinced that the same method, after having triumphed in history and in criticism, will triumph everywhere, on the stage and in poetry even. It is an inevitable evolution.” Zola’s hope, which he outlines in this essay and realizes in his series Les Rougon-Macquart, was to show how characters, and how the characters of nations and classes, etc., could all be taxonomized in a vast social hierarchy, and so how their development could be portrayed as methodical as well, through the inheritance and acquisition of physical, mental, emotional, and psychological traits, in a process whose guiding intelligence wasn’t Darwin or Lamarck or eve
n God, but the Novelist-Scientist, who was bound to natural law as strictly as any of his fictional animals.

  SHADOWS

  Zola, early in his essay-experiment, invokes the authority of Balzac (born 1799, and so a generation younger than Stendhal and perhaps two or three generations older than Zola) as a herald of this new literature of process:

  The novelist starts out in search of a truth. I will take as an example the character of the Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette, by Balzac. The general fact observed by Balzac is the ravages that the amorous temperament of a man makes in his home, in his family, and in society. As soon as he has chosen his subject he starts from known facts; then he makes his experiment, and exposes Hulot to a series of trials, placing him amid certain surroundings in order to exhibit how the complicated machinery of his passions works. It is then evident that there is not only observation there, but that there is also experiment; as Balzac does not remain satisfied with photographing the facts collected by him, but interferes in a direct way to place his character in certain conditions, and of these he remains the master.

  A dozen pages later Zola quotes Claude Bernard’s medical-metaphoric conception of the “vital ‘circulus’ ”: “The muscular and nervous organs preserve the activity of the organs which make the blood; but the blood, in its turn, nourishes the organs which produce it.” Then, Zola writes:

  Go back once more to the example of Baron Hulot in Cousine Bette. See the final result, the denouement of the novel: an entire family is destroyed, all sorts of secondary dramas are produced, under the action of Hulot’s amorous temperament. It is there, in this temperament, that the initial cause is found. One member, Hulot, becomes rotten, and immediately all around him are tainted, the social circulus is interrupted, the health of that society is compromised. […] Suppose that Hulot is cured, or at least restrained and rendered inoffensive, immediately the drama ceases to have any longer any raison d’être; the equilibrium, or more truly the health, of the social body is again established. Thus the naturalistic novelists are really experimental moralists.

  Engels once said that he learned more about France from Balzac than from “all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together.” Paul Lafargue, in his Reminiscences of Marx, writes that Marx—who was born in 1818, the year Balzac decided to dedicate his life to writing—so deeply loved La Comédie humaine that if he ever finished with economics he intended to write a study of it. Though not even a sentence of that study ever appeared (rather, Marx borrowed a few of Balzac’s sentences for The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte), it seems that what Marx most appreciated in Balzac’s sequence was the way in which it illustrated the processes by which an individual, while operating under the delusion that he or she was forming society, was instead being formed by it. Marx transferred the personalities and struggles of Balzac’s characters—their struggles with spouses, lovers, employers, employees, clergy, and the chaos of the Restoration and July Monarchy—to entire social classes: the newly individuated bloc of the working proletariat, which (I nearly wrote “who”) fomented a failed revolution and was left to suffer under the repressions of Napoleon III.

  It doesn’t take a Žižek to point out that identifying a social problem in fiction doesn’t solve that problem in life, and that while a book can describe the processes that create a problem, that description itself becomes an integral component of the problem’s irresolution. The writer is never exempt from, or outside of, the writing, then, but remains as much a product of ideology as any of his or her characters.

  The selves that all true writers must recognize and acknowledge in the ideological mirror—the selves that are most fully created by the writer becoming aware of his or her emplacement in multiple simultaneous identity-continua (economic, gender, sexual, racial, etc.)—feel so supernatural that, paradoxically, they seem to render even the most fantastical fictions “naturalistic.” Marx referred to these selves, these negative images of the faces that a writer presents to the world, as “shadows.”

  For many of my peers, to write about the present is to search for a mirror that will show only shadows.

  FROM THE DIARIES

  BROWS

  “Why is the brow so devilishly vital to the fin de siècle novel?” Sven asked in iffy translation while furrowing his brow.

  FRECKLES

  The maid’s freckles were like the use of French in a Russian novel: distracting, excessive—imbécile.

  ZIBALDONE DIARY

  8/20/2013

  SO HERE IT IS, THE ZIBALDONE, one of the greatest blogs of the nineteenth century, of any century, for that matter—and what matter it is! 2,584 pages! Translated, edited, printed, bound, shipped, and received from the tattooed hands of my Monday/Wednesday/Friday UPS guy, Phil—a process that required seven years and the efforts of seven translators, two editors, more than two dozen “specialist consultants,” in German, French, Hebrew, Mongolian/Tibetan, philosophy, the history of science, etc., a partridge, a pear tree, and Phil, not to mention Il Cavaliere himself, Silvio Berlusconi, who took a break from his women and media companies and the media company that is Italy to arrange partial funding and take a tax break on art. Then there were also the daily emails and phone calls from Important Editors to get Farrar, Straus and Giroux to send the galleys to me. Unpacking the paperback stack, I understood FSG’s hesitation. Sending out copies, even review copies, of Leopardi’s masterwork must get expensive—sort of like sending out review models of the Roman Coliseum—but still, why invest what must’ve been hundreds of thousands of strong euros or weak dollars to prepare a book for publication only to stint on crucial freebies? Why work so intensely to put together a diary so intensely of and about the page, and then try to placate a critic—who, in order to read the entirety and write anything even remotely coherent by deadline, will have to put off all other paying assignments, sex assignations, sleep, and laundry—with an ebook version? These, rather similar concerns about human folly, are Leopardi’s subjects.

  8/21

  Online time is comprised of all the times of all the texts we click. Each session, then, is a history of sessions, a temporality salad, a chronological Zibaldone, which is apparently a slang term for a meal or dish slapped together out of available ingredients. I’m downtown, at a café featuring B&W photos of Naples on the walls and accordion renditions of “ ’O Sole Mio” on the stereo and a menu that insists on the proper adjective, “Italian,” before every section heading—Italian Appetizers, Italian Sandwiches, Italian Coffee—the list of Italian Desserts lacking for nothing but zabaglione, that concoction of egg yolks, sugar, and sweet wine, intended to be scooped or sipped, or both.

  The time of print is different—if I have to continue the metaphor, print is best read like a recipe: one line, then another, unidirectionally, in order. Reading backward is like using flour as garnish.

  Online reading becomes writing with interactivity: Social media feeds compel constant update and continuous response. Leopardi was faithful to his journals, but he was never their slave. He wrote only when he had something to write about (no deadlines!), and only for himself (no editors!). As for me, I’m trying to remember—since I don’t have a smartphone, just a stupidphone, I still have to remember—which author it was who once claimed that, regardless of how blasphemous a book might appear, all books were essentially moral, because while reading and writing you’re not doing anything active, like looting, or bombmaking. When I first read that sentiment I was impressed, but now—in this break from a dead poet’s prose in the middle of a Wednesday—I’m not. Passivity has its morality too: While reading and writing I’m not, for example, calling my uncle in the hospital, or my sister in L.A., both of which I have to do before the weekend. Leopardi, who was an ugly hunchback, lived at his family’s estate in Recanati for much of his life, and hardly ever left its library, which was stocked with anthologies, dictionaries, encyclopedias, and manuscripts i
n every major and a few minor and even defunct languages, many of which he mastered. The first page of the Zibaldone bears the nondate “July or August 1817,” which captures his spirit exactly, especially because, according to the editors’ introduction, it was appended to the work in 1820. The last entries arrive in 1832, written in Rome, and Florence, to which Leopardi, age thirty-four, had fled to experience the world unprinted. He died at thirty-eight, of cholera, in Naples.

  The tables all around me are full of laptops, which should be called “I’m a freelancer with a studio apartment and don’t have anywhere else to work but heretops.” The marble is fake, but in the context of that fakeness the veins might be “real.” I should’ve gone to the library. The line to order ends where the line for the bathroom begins.

  8/23

  Zibaldone #3: “A plant or animal seen in real life should give us more delight than when it is painted or imitated in some other way, because it is impossible for an imitation not to leave something to be desired. But the contrary is clearly true: from which it appears that the source of delight in the arts is not beauty but imitation.”

  I’m not sure—though maybe this only applies to plants and animals. What about literature—the differences between an original and a translation? What about experience? Because if I had the choice between another day in this café or going on an all-expenses trip to Italy, I’d take the ticket, no question.

  #29: “Everything is or can be happy, except man, which goes to show that his existence is not limited to this world, as is that of other things.”