The gallery recently posted an awesome time-lapse video of the artists at work and a free PDF version of the haunting little book that goes along with the show, which features Ian Campbell and David Muenzer’s “improved” vintage oil paintings and found Polaroids.

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The full list of characters is here. I happen to be tweeting as Eleazar Albin, the 18th-century natural history illustrator we recently contemplated graphically here at The Rumpus. There’s nothing uncouth about following dead people. Really.

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Made by young Brooklyn filmmaking couple Lawrence Michael Levine (director, character of “Sam,”) and Sophia Takal (producer, editor, character of “Gabi”), Gabi is a pastiche of wonder and honesty. Levine didn’t originally intend to be in the film at all, but shooting took so long on their limited budget that he eventually stepped in, playing the role of Sam, who’s naive little sister, Gabi, full of harmfully cute ideas about anarchy and art, comes to visit him in Brooklyn, on vacation from Oberlin. It’s a good thing he stepped in; their playful, whip-smart dynamic drives the film toward something awesome.

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To construct Lovely Faces, the third column in their phenomenal Hacking Monopolism Trilogy, which began with Google Will Eat Itself and Amazon Noir, Paolo Cirio and Alessandro Ludovico borrowed info from one million Facebook profiles, then ran the pics through face-recognition software. Despite the Face to Facebook art project’s snobbishness about social realities, we must admit that Lovely Faces is endlessly amusing. Click around. Judge people’s characters. Maybe you’ll find yourself.

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For years, you haven’t been able to stop asking this question. Reading Patrick deWitt’s Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, you are asking it again, vocally (a real dinner-party silencer), by mistake or with motivations hidden from even yourself.

Around the time that the younger Bush is elected for a second term, across the Atlantic or across the Pacific, over the river and against the woods, Serpent’s Tail, one of the great, fierce and independent British publishing houses, has issued a new edition of Ron Butlin’s The Sound of My Voice, which first met readers in 1987. You are asked to review it for the Scottish magazine Chapman.

You have never enjoyed books about drinking, but this changes everything. You read it in one evening, sipping cheap but nonetheless single-malt scotch in your apartment near the Pubic Triangle, a convergence of roads more like a death star than a triangle, populated by a salsa club, strip joints, a chippie run by Italians, and a few dusty used book stores, where Arthur Conan Doyle could have researched his somewhat real cases, who knows, below the shadowed side of the Edinburgh Castle.

Then you read it again. Sharp, condensed, unrelenting, only occasionally overindulgent (Butlin wrote the novella about a friend, not about himself, which helps), it tells of Morris Magellan, a biscuit company executive in the new 1980s UK suburbia, drinking himself to the edge of death at a remarkable level of consumption on par with the death-drinking in Leaving Las Vegas, though Butlin’s style is consistently active, unlike John O’Brien’s passive and elegiac “There were tears,” “Three times they were lovers,” etc. “Everything that has ever happened to you is still happening,” writes Butlin. The “my voice” of the title addresses Magellan in the second person throughout. Oddly, it is its consistent harshness that renders it angelic.

You begin Ablutions, which came out last year, with a distracted heart, a The Sound of My Voice-hangover. Friends might recommend Bright Lights, Big City, but that particular second-person literary drug romp is too rushed, a Bloody Mary from a nitrate-heavy mix. Ablutions chooses simplicity. It sits in the bar and listens:

Discuss the regulars. They sit in a line like ugly, huddled birds, eyes wet with alcohol. They whisper into their cups and seem to be gloating about something–you will never know what.

Soon “you,” the protagonist–a budding alcoholic, a grandly unambitious bartender in a seedy Hollywood bar–and you, the reader, are stuck in this ugly-bird sanctuary. Eventually you together discover what the locals have been gloating about: “If I can fool this bartender, I’ll know that I’ve finally made it.” Soon it’s clear that the narrative voice is more death than novelist, and death appears to have a fantastic sense of humor but a rather prosaic imagination. “You try to cry all the way home but can manage only a coughing fit and a few moans…”

Gary Shteyngart likes deWitt’s “dirty realism.” About.com warns: “If you cannot handle crass stories of sex, drugs and violence, this is not the book for you.” Actually, if you cannot handle these things, you would be better advised to let deWitt fondle them for you. His wry tenderness, his ability to climb a ladder and look down on our little world without taking off his shoes of broken glass, this is Ablutions‘ unique delight. There is tenderness, but nothing particularly tender. Two acts through the four act novel, the lead character–”you,” always “you!”–finally leaves the fucking bar. Ablutions could have ended here, in desperation without redemption, though then it would have been good and not great. You imagine deWitt climbing above the bar into a soft fog. Suddenly the bar is empty. Time to put Warren Zevon on the jukebox, even if you are the only person singing along: “You know I hate it when you put your hand inside my head/ and switch all my priorities around.”

Kai Maristed‘s exquisite 1996 essay on quitting smoking, “Nicotine: An Autobiography,” refuses to choose between the first and second person, with the “you” statements referring to a harshness of mind and the “I” statements, more or less, taking hold of the body. “Hard-core porn is much easier to lay hands on than serious information on nicotine….You hate propaganda. You despise the self-appointed smoke militia,” she writes. “Would you suffer for any principle….Do you love those whom you say you love….Is there anyone who could know you?” These statements give way to admissions that “As a girl, I used to see myself mirrored in the magazine ads for Parliaments and Winstons–prophetically prettier, adept at tennis or sailing,” and (after quitting), “At home sometimes, in an apprehensive reflex, I still hold my breath and listen. But the frightening sounds are gone. My little boy’s chest is clear…” So the second person is a type of investigation that leaves something out, maybe the body, maybe listening. Yet in Maristed’s essay, even talk of choosing madness over suicide is couched in the empty comfort of “you.”

The Sound of My Voice presents alcoholism as breathing underwater, suburbia as a dried up ocean bed. The human body is strangely absent. There is no “fun” drinking in the book, but there are great expanses of imagination. Butlin narrates a world that is falling apart but never shatters completely. Magellan drinks like a fish but never sets foot in a bar. His seemingly ideal suburban life of middle class Thatcherite values and possessions (mirrored, in Ablutions, not in Reagan’s America but in post-Reagan America) is falling apart but will not go away.

This is the alcoholic strain. Magellan’s life is there all around him in a rising sea raised by relics of his eroding career and relationships, including memories of strained and abusive relationship with his father (“Had he glanced at you, smiled and replied to your greeting; had that commonplace event ever happened, even once, it would have been the miracle to change your life”), and a “functional” alcoholic’s heavy half-dreams. The use of the second person becomes a way to keep reality and dream life separate but equal. Speaking to this disorienting democracy is again the voice of death, a constant reminder that even before blood and alcohol were drawn together in religious rites, imbibing was a way to push consciousness toward its own disappearance, or at least a chance to pretend, for an evening, for an hour, that you are doing the pushing.

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One thing that was edited out of my piece was this sentence: “Howl: A Graphic Novel reads like a panoramic urban altar, demanding something deeper than just the reader’s attention.” Maybe readers are afraid of sacrifice?

One thing that the critics keep forgetting to mention about the movie is that it offers a chance to experience the poem in more than full form, with certain sections repeated. The film would have been stronger clocking in at 60 instead of 90 minutes, and The New Yorker is right that the issues in the obscenity trial feel “woefully dated,” but James Franco gives a vibrant performance and the overall experience of the film is a heightened experience of the poem. In my book, that’s something to celebrate.

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At Brooklyn’s Issue Project Room on Sunday, Chord brings their singular sound to a phenomenal Important Records showcase, which includes everybody from folky Arborea to the microtonal Duane Pitre. Chord’s new album, Progression, comes out in November, and sees the stellar cast reaching an even deeper and darker sonic drama. It’s sure to turn heads.

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Until recently, every form of textual communication has had a double, a good twin to keep it alive if not in check. “It would be impossible to say that we are not haunted,” writes Paul Auster in the tremendous final pages of The Invention of Solitude. “It is to say that each thing leads a double life, at once in the world and in our minds, and that to deny either one of these lives is to kill the thing in both its lives at once.”

I cut up some rice paper, folded it, taped the spine, and tried to use pens that didn’t bleed too much. The relationship had ended, was in certain ways continuing to end, with a palpable silence. R___ wanted to keep it that way. I wanted to take notes.

I chose what to include, what only to write down half of. As friends started to learn that I was keeping such a “pointless” journal, they sent things like this is for your text msg journal and haha write dis, but the more surprising thing was how quickly they forgot about the journal altogether and continued writing things that one would not necessarily want recorded, buzzy candidates for textsfromlastnight.com (which didn’t exist yet, and now has advertising from American Apparel).

I only transcribed texts with emotional zing–just say my name!, from a musician friend, for example, and messages from R___ that, in context, made me shiver like Shakespeare, and still make me shiver in exactly the same way, even though the context has long since vaporized. It was a controlled affair, but every pen bleeds a little. Especially when you don’t expect the ink to be so thick.

It turns out that in the 18th century there was a verb for this process–journalizing–and that this obsessive but seldom distorting activity birthed what we would come to know as textual intimacy. Adam Sisman’s Boswell’s Presumptuous Task: The Making of the Life of Dr. Johnson is an intricate and often startling biography of the world’s first intimate biographer.

The first thing that startles is James Boswell’s unbridled passion for Samuel Johnson, most stunning because it wasn’t sexual. Many years Boswell’s elder, Johnson quickly became the wayward thinker’s mentor and, in many ways, savior. Not long after the reluctant Scottish lawyer met the established intellectual in London, Boswell wrote to Johnson from Edinburgh, where he had returned to live with his wife for three years. It is clear that Johnson had already replaced the heart of the wife:

I fairly own that after an absence from you for any length of time I feel that I require a renewal of that spirit which your presence always gives me, and which makes me a better and a happier man than I imagined I could be before I was introduced to your acquaintance.

Their relationship was of course delusional, full of projection like all relationships. But it was not entirely delusional, was in some ways remarkably clear from the outset. Where others saw simply a social climber, Johnson somehow glimpsed in Boswell his ideal biographer. In this slight shift from something more like celebrity to something more like friendship, we see the birth of showing people how they really are.

Sisman notes that the bookish guru provided Boswell with unparalleled “access to the heart of literary London,” through Johnson’s daily life as well as membership in the infamous Literary Club, to which Boswell would likely not have been admitted without Johnson’s authority being thrown around. Boswell was a playboy of large, if clumsy, proportions–he would eventually die from a combination of multiple venereal diseases (which were treated with mercury pills and other questionable items) and alcohol-related issues, he might have even slept with Rousseau‘s mistress, Thérèse Le Vasseur, who once accompanied him back to London (he wrote that she seduced him thirteen times)–Johnson, whose self-awareness was rare for the period, kept him in check. Peter Martin’s biography of Johnson reminds us that Johnson tried to cut off trouble before it began: “The breasts and silk stockings of your actresses excite my genitals,” he once said in defense of his refusal to go backstage at one of his own plays. In the early 1980s, R. Crumb would pick up on Boswell’s philandering. Crumb captures the sense that the two men were acting out their own lives, playing off each other, the playboy and the philosopher.

It wasn’t long before Boswell was writing down absolutely everything that Johnson said, sometimes with actual paper and pen, sometimes by recall, and this journalizing began to spark public outcry, cartoons of Boswell as a sycophant hungry for quotes at dinner parties, “anonymous” letters of moral outrage. Boswell was quick to respond with uncharacteristic sass in the Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, his early, raw account of a trip to Scotland with Johnson:

It may be objected by some persons…that he who has the power of thus exhibiting an exact transcript of conversations is not a desirable member of society. I repeat the answer which I made to [a friend who asked:] “Few, very few, need be afraid that their sayings will be recorded. Can it be imagined that I would take the trouble to gather what grows on every hedge…”

It was clear that he was onto something–something dangerously close to reality–but no one yet knew what it was. Soon Johnson was even altering his own speech, live-editing his own phrases to make them sound more “Johnsonian.” Commenting on a play, Johnson once said, “It has not wit enough to keep it sweet,” then gave a cancel-that expression and changed this saying to, “It has not vitality enough to preserve it from putrification.” Johnson greatly distrusted fame and public opinion, and would make such re-statements with a certain humor, but Boswell ate them up. His great talent seems to have been an ability to simultaneously miss the joke and write it down.

This process of Johnsonification would be repeated often during the over seven years Boswell took to write the Life of Johnson, eventually forging a type of editing that we now all do with text messages, what we show each other and what we learn to say, whether we’re trying to be ourselves or to be someone else. The Enlightenment was remarkably unsubtle, full of garish pseudonyms and “anonymous” letters and advertisements where everyone knew who the author was. It is in the annals of intentional miscommunication that Boswell’s Presumptuous Task reaches out to our current age.

Boswell learned a little too late in his writing career that miscommunication in mailed letters could sometimes be cleared up by a little in-person contact. Ironically, actual conversation was his journalizing’s good twin. Soon, when the letters were confusing, he was traveling laboriously around the country, asking for an audience at the person’s estate, rather than simply writing back and making things worse. What a remarkable premonition of our current troubles with emails, whose capacity to inspire misreadings Daniel Goleman, in the New York Times, has blamed in part on the fact that “there are no online channels for the multiple signals the brain uses to calibrate emotions.” A journey by carriage was Boswell’s good ghost’s host; telephone conversations have been ours.

Now some musicians–Nick Cave (just history repeating itself babe u turn me on), Beth Orton (ha wishbone where his backbone shouldve been)–write lyrics that could easily form texts, or come from them, but only if the recipient were deeply engaged with the texter. And on the right is one of the greatest messages I’ve encountered in recent years: Im on vacation with my Boyfriend but Im going to break up with him when we get home. I found it at sitting-eye level in a Brooklyn restroom. This wouldn’t have been possible even ten years ago. It contains an entire story.

Text messages have as their guardian angel, their happy opposite, time itself. They are the first form of communication that works against time and against context. So where do we go next? Where is the carriage house, where is the literary brothel? I was gchatting with R___ around the time that I started that stupid text message journal when she suddenly typed, “stop thinking and just write something!!” or a similar line to that effect. The chat was “off the record.” I don’t know exactly what she asked, but I know that she was right, and that she must have been waiting a long time to say it.

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