none of us has ever read Fredric Jamerson (the thread about annoying embedded works of art)

theory: writing about fictional fiction/authors >>>> writing about fictional music/musicians

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan), Thursday, January 15, 2009 5:58 PM (5 hours ago) Bookmark

how about:

writing about fictional works of visual art / artists
writing about fictional works of visual art / artists (non-representational, 'modern' category)
writing about fictional 'happenings'
writing about fictional television shows, movies, etc.
writing about fictional video games
writing about fictional message boards

WE ARE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS AND THE LOOKING GLASS IS ACTUALLY AN ELK

Language has more descriptive power to convey visual imagery than it has to describe musical tones and melodies. It isn't impossible to describe music, but it isn't easy to do well. Written descriptions of music tend to become overly technical and jargon-filled, or else they fall back on metaphor, simile and vaguely suggestive slush.

Otoh, musicians are probably not harder to describe than anyone else.

J. R0bert L3nnon had a short story where an artist makes a work consisting of 100 "cubbies" representing the years of the 20th century -- in each cubby is a miniature replica of a great, representative work of one year. In the last cubby is a miniature of the cubbies.

What ever happened to him anyway? Another unassuming tombstone in the short-story-writer graveyard, I guess.

What Aimless said. Also, writer writing about another, fictional writer has one obvious tried and true strategy, to write about his 'bad' or 'other' self - sufferer of writer's block, unsucessful hack, sucessful hack, however he wants to play it.

One of the best things I ever read about a fictional musician was a Julio Cortázar story called "The Pursuer" about a Charlie Parker-type character living in Paris, in which the author uses the trick of undermining his unreliable narrator, a patronizing journalist. In this way the writer avoids any platitudes, mushy writing, woolly thinking or bad faith by deliberately giving them to the character who is telling the story.

success

J Robert Lennon now seems to be writing HUUUUGE books rather than short stories, unfortunately.

oh bugger, i misspelled his name. also i can't spell mis-spelled. mispelt? mispelled?

> Language has more descriptive power to convey visual imagery than it has to describe musical tones and melodies.

i) Not sure I want to concede this, but I had in my mind more their position as subject matter: the incredible frequency with which books 'about' the creation, dissemination, or reception of some sort of art are dreadful; and the tendency for even small scenes which take same as their subject on a micro- rather than macro- level to also be, near-inevitably, dreadful; and the ensuing status quo by which characters in novels, stories tend to only open a book or listen to a record at incredibly significant moments where the writer wishes to attempt a sort of evil k-neev-ul (can't spell that either) leap over a bit shitpile of bad taste. it seems to be a subject that comes up here quite frequently.

ii) Personally, I can't think of much/any fiction about visual art at all, altho i fear there must be some terrible novels about 'the' 'modern' 'art' 'world'; otoh there is that bit in breakfast of champions.

also dorian gray, who doesn't count.

> 'J. Robert Lennon'

this is a great name.

I really like max beerbohm's essay on his favourite fictional novels, plays, etc? It's really funny!

The Horse's Mouth by Joyce Cary, was a well-known example in bygone days of a novel about a visual artist.

And then there's The Burnt Orange Heresy by Charles Willeford.

> I really like max beerbohm's essay on his favourite fictional novels, plays, etc? It's really funny!

I like how, in this sentence, 'fictional' appears to be redundant, but isn't. // got a title? i'm having trouble googling it. for related reasons.

Beerbohm's 'Seven Men and Two Others' also has lots of made-up artists/writers and their works in it.

"i fear there must be some terrible novels about 'the' 'modern' 'art' 'world';"

slaves of new york was great!

Music is built on associations, by the composer, perfomer, marketer, reviewer, reader, and listener. Some degree of technical detail is noteworthy (pun) somewhere along the way, ditto metaphor and simile, though no slush please (unless it's in the description--but will "slush" become an amiable and even attractive tag, like "sludge"?)(I swear, on more and more sites, sludge is the thing, if not yet king). The Unreliable Narrator is one of those hoary devices L. Rust Hills made fun of, as far back as the 70s (claimed he always thought the barber in Lardner's"Haircut" was as funny as the barber meant to be). But I guess it might still work sometimes.

Unreliable narrator way of distancing, but sometimes the longest way round is the shortest way home. See also Pale Fire

the thread concept, which I didn't really understand, put me in mind of something like Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew. I've held on to that for 15 or more years on the idea that I will "get it" when I next attempt.

As far as music goes, I wonder what it would be like if something like Chuck Eddy's Stairway to Hell had been fiction, and would it have been so entertaining. I guess taking the Lester Bangs Carburetor Dung concept to it's extremes.

I can't really think of a novel about a musician or author that means anything to me, except to the extent that it creates an interesting backdrop for horror or crime.

the thread concept, which I didn't really understand, put me in mind of something like Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew.
Ha, I was just about to post Imaginative Qualities Of Actual Things to thread.

Actually, in Mulligan Stew I dont' know if he embeds works of art so much as borrows and reanimates characters from other works of fiction, based on some idea he got from Flann O'Brien.

But don't worry about it, apparently nobody on ILX "gets" Sorrentino, nobody except me and one other guy. I think it's even in the FAQ.

'imaginative qualities...' actually pretty much succeeds, as i remember, but it's been a while. probably because it's a 'portrait' of a 'scene'.

the 'thread concept' is just that we seem to have come round to "book x about a musician is really quite shit" a fair few times now, and i wonder what the reasons are. at university i once had a tutorial where the professor claimed that jameson had comprehensively refuted the notion that 'embedded' works of art could work, meaning, you know, novels about brilliant paintings or whatever. he couldn't remember the citation, though, and i've never found it. also i find jameson wilfully pedantic and obscurantheist, so i'm kind of tempted to just assume he was wrong.

actually, now i think about it i'm not sure it wasn't raymond williams.

this may be straying from the 'thread concept' but i am thinking about steven milhauser and his stories of incredible works, including buildings, automatons (perhaps most relevant to thread; the villagers who make these automatons consider them art and debate about craft vs. art), what else, amusement parks/penny arcades, tunnels, ancient civilizations/royalty. all grounded in the physical (as opposed to, say, a fictional messageboard) and appealing to the senses, most often visual, but also some aural, olfactory, perhaps even touch and taste to a lesser extent.

On a purely childish level, describing a non-existant work of art invites the equivalent of the "if you're so smart why aren't you rich" retort, only rephrased as "if your idea for this piece of art is so great, why don't you just go ahead and make it for real instead of just talking about it?"

Parenthetically, I am reading Infinite Jest, the plot of which pivots on a piece of fictional cinematography, and while the concept of the film is absolutely crucial to the book's plot, the description of the film's contents is weak and strained.

the film's more of a macguffin than anything, no? i don't recall it ever being described beyond hints that the pgoat, joelle van-something iirc, stars as some kind of maternal parody. but it's been years.

i've never been sure whether one is meant to be able to actually determine anything reliable about the content of the film in infinite jest

steven millhauser sounds fantastic, where do i start

i think infinite jest is part of a subset of the trope, the 'x exists in this fictional world in a way in which no version of x could ever exist in the real world' version

then there's 'x is immeasurably great/awful in a way akin to which x would be in the real world' (this, i think, is where the awful is)

'x exists in the fictional world along with a y, z, a, b, and c, as would a real x in the real world'

'imaginative qualities' and 'the savage detectives' are both exemplars of the third option above, but the savage detectives also contains elements of the first (cesarea tinajero's poem)

maybe start with the knife thrower and other stories? i believe the automaton story's in that one (along with the excellent, though not this-thread-related, "a visit"). any of his collections will contain one or more of these fantastical system-building first-person-plural stories; they're his specialty.

do not start with edwin mullhouse.

It can work: I'm thinking of DeLillo's 'Running Dog' which features a lost film of Hitler imitating Chaplin (in revenge for 'The Great Dictator')--couldn't have been done in real life, is described really well, and is integral to the plot

"do not start with edwin mullhouse."

i agree. not a good place to start. novel-wise, *Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American Dreamer* is all about the main character's dream of creating a mythical city within a city (a dream he achieves). it's very cool and on-topic. (and the way he mimics the horatio alger/sinclair lewis/dreiser young striver plotlines is funny too.)

his stuff always reminds me of Bruce McCall illustrations:

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/09/19/dining/20diningcover.650.jpg