Conversational Reading

More Trouble for Free

2009-07-16T16:44:00-07:00

In addition to plagiarism, we can also add tampering with evidence to the charges against Free:

In a pull-out box in the book, Mr. Anderson tells the story of how Berkeley put lectures on YouTube from Mr. Muller’s course “Physics for Future Presidents” that drew more than 200,000 views and turned the professor into “a Web celeb of sorts.” That part is undisputed. But Mr. Anderson then suggests that the celebrity status from the videos led Mr. Muller to secure a book deal, and led to greater interest in the resulting book. As Mr. Anderson concludes, “it’s easy to see just how good Free has been to Professor Muller.”

But in an e-mail interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Muller said the YouTube videos of his lectures did nothing to help him get a contract for Physics for Future Presidents (W.W. Norton).

“That is wishful thinking from someone who is trying to conclude that Webcasts lead to money,” said Mr. Muller. “But correlation is not causation. What Anderson says may be ‘easy to see,’ but it just ain’t so. He is letting his hoped-for conclusion drive his analysis of events.”

Free, by the way, is now available for free. Although you still have to pay what economists refer to as an opportunity cost: the more time you spend with it, the less you have for useful activities.

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The Right Price for Information

Total (Translation) Information Awareness

2009-07-16T09:54:00-07:00

Over at Three Percent, Chad has just posted a list of recommended lit-in-translation that have thus far come out of the evaluation process for this year's Best Translated Book Award. It's a rather robust list, and looking of it I'm struck by the amount of books we've managed to cover so far.

Basically, between the great enthusiasm of the judges and the low number of translations published each year in the U.S., I think by the time we're done with this year's award we'll have accounted for virtually every work of literature in translation published this year. I remark on this mostly because in spite of the shaft put on lit-in-translation by most old-media publications, this year's panel (and their respective institutions) will have just about covered the entire literature-in-translation scene.

It's a nice example of how media on the Internet have sprung up to fill a gap in our nation's literary coverage. Of course, it's far from the only gap, and we're far from the only people working to address this gap and others.

Anyway, have a look at the full list at Three Percent. Here are the titles form it that we've covered:

Ghosts by Cesar Aira. Translated from the Spanish by Chris Andrews. (New Directions). TQC Review.
Op Oloop by Juan Filloy. Translated from the Spanish by Lisa Dillman. (Dalkey Archive). My own mini review.
Vilnius Poker by Ricardas Gavelis. Translated from the Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas. (Open Letter). TQC Review
She-Devil in the Mirror by Horacio Castellanos Moya. Translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver. (New Directions). (Review forthcoming).
News from the Empire by Fernando del Paso. Translated from the Spanish by Alfonso Gonzalez. (Dalkey Archive). (Review forthcoming)
The Mighty Angel by Jerzy Pilch. Translated from the Polish by Bill Johnston. (Open Letter). (Review forthcoming)
The Halfway House by Guillermo Rosales. Translated from the Spanish by Anna Kushner. (New Directions). My discussion of it on this blog.
Five Spice Street by Can Xue. Translated from the Chinese by Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping. (Yale University Press). TQC Review.

Sooner Than I Expected

2009-07-16T08:15:00-07:00

Somehow I'd assumed The Original of Laura wasn't getting published for some time. But there it is, up on Amazon, with a November pub date. Kind of creepy, for some reason.

Gert Jonke Essay And Stories

2009-07-16T05:18:00-07:00

Last year I read Homage to Czerny (Google Book text here) by Austrian writer Gert Jonke for the Best Translated Book Award. It wasn't quite my thing, but it was interesting enough to make me want to see more from this writer (who also died last year).

Calque has provided just that, with an introductory essay and translations of five pieces of Jonke's writing. Here's a little bit from the essay, describing "The Projector," one of the pieces available at the link:

Preserving or fortifying memory is also a theme of “The Projector,” a piece holding more than its brevity would seem to make possible. It was most recently published as the preface to Jonke’s last play, Freier Fall (Free Fall). The sci-fi, fantasy premise of erasing memory of a film by showing it backwards seems a comical variation on popular stories and films about “brainwashing,”so we have here a kind of domestic, trivial Manchurian Candidate in clowning mode, except that the migraine-inducing hollows where the memories were call to mind all too effectively the paralysis, grief, and bewilderment recorded by children of Holocaust victims who are partly or fully deprived by traumatized relatives of memory or even basic information. “The Projector” is thus a shorter, funnier, but not less powerful version of stories like George Perec’s W or The Memory of Childhood, Doron Rabinovici’s The Search for M., or W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, right down to the realization that restoring memory, or being provided one in the first place, starts the process of resolution almost regardless of how dreadful the events were.

On Paying For The Times

2009-07-15T09:26:00-07:00

Levi makes some excellent arguments:

I understand the appeal of a payment system to support the Times' massive journalistic infrastructure, and if Times management does actually go forward with this ambitious plan they will be applauded by many within the newspaper and publishing communities who yearn to see an online payment model succeed.
The New York Times has a history of seeking out innovative revenue models for its website. Under the leadership of Martin Nisenholtz, who has remained at the helm of Times digital operations for a remarkable 14 years, NYTimes.com pioneered the "demographics first" approach in the mid-1990s, putting up content for free but requiring registration information designed to attract advertisers. This kind of experimentation should be encouraged, but after careful thought I am sticking with the conclusion I expressed in my tweet above. If the New York Times puts its web content behind a payment wall, that will be the end of my lifelong relationship with the New York Times.
The reason is simple: excluding the mass online audience, the idle surfers and linkers who won't be bothered to pay for access, would irreparably change the nature of the New York Times.

And then, in closing:

The New York Times was absolutely instrumental in the early popular discoveries of Jack Kerouac and Bob Dylan. Can a newspaper with a cultural legacy like this continue to thrive behind a payment wall? I don't think so.

Levi's absolutely right. Newspapers are made for mass audiences. At one point in the past, that was in print. Now it's electronic.

Archipelago Books Could Use Your Help

2009-07-15T08:39:00-07:00

I usually don't post this sort of thing, but Archipelago Books has been doing amazing work, and it's hard to contemplate a literature-in-translation scene without their publications. Simply put: they're one of a handful of lit-in-translation publishers that I consider essential.

So if Bush's Recession has left you in a position with enough disposable income to donate a little something, please, please send it their way. (I just made a small donation of my own.)

Here's the text of the email I received today:

As a not-for-profit publisher, each year our budget is pieced together from book sales, foundation support, government grants, and from individual contributions — donors both large and small. We don’t need to tell you that the recession has had severe effects on each of these sources of revenue. These reductions in funding have had very real consequences for our publishing program.

We have had to reduce our staff.
We have been forced to delay publication of books.
We have been forced to reduce print runs of some of our books.
The marketing and promotion budgets for our books have been reduced.

During this challenging moment, your contributions are more important than ever. Please consider making a donation.

We do firmly believe that with your generous support, Archipelago will survive this difficult moment and thrive for many, many years. We urgently ask for your participation to allow us to move forward without compromising the quality of our works. Every cent of your donation will go toward making certain that Archipelago can continue to produce the books that you have come to expect: vital and innovative works of classic and contemporary international literature that foster cross-cultural dialogue and bring voices to our shores that might otherwise remain silent here.

If you're prefer, you can also subscribe for a season of books. Six new books for $90 is great deal, and especially when you get to pick from these.

I find it hard to believe that a reader of this blog wouldn't know about Archipelago, but if you are wondering just what they do, have a look at some of Archipelago's books that we've recently reviewed at The Quarterly Conversation:

Attending the Russian Prize

2009-07-15T03:17:00-07:00

“If you don’t have a visa, send us a copy of your American passport and the name of the city where your consulate is located, and we’ll take care of everything,”—stated the email.
An “organizing committee” powerful enough to arrange a visa to Russia was to be taken seriously . . .

So begins Margarita Meklina's account of abusive customs agents, sex-crazed Georgian war-writers, and heading back to her native Russia to attend The Russian Prize ceremony, for which she was a finalist. Full article at The Quarterly Conversation.

And remember, we'll be posting new reports, reviews, and interviews all summer. So check TQC's site regularly, or better yet, subscribe to our feed.

We'll of course also have our fall issue coming in September. I think one sets a new record for amount of material I'm incredibly excited to be publishing.

Review of Little Fingers by Filip Florian

2009-07-14T11:34:00-07:00

I haven't seen Little Fingers getting too much attention, although it sounds like one of the better translations to be published this year. I'm definitely eager to read. The Seminary Co-Op reviews:

In a small, post-Communist Romanian mountain town, schoolchildren discover a mass grave near an archeological dig. It hides, everyone assumes, the work of party chiefs and their firing squads. Military prosecutors “refuse to accept the evidence,” according to a daily newspaper—unlike Major Maxim, the local police chief, who is more than willing to accept the fame associated with such a morbid investigation.
Military prosecutors, archeologists, and townspeople converge on the site of an ancient Roman fort, once interesting in itself but now taking a backseat to the bones being unearthed . . .

The review, by the way, is strongly negative, but my interest remains undiminished.

Cesar Aira At Feria Internacional del Libro de Guayaquil

2009-07-14T09:09:00-07:00

Nice write-up on Cesar Aira, who was speaking at the Book Fair in Guayaquil, Peru.

The piece opens with a typically modest statement from the Argentine author:

“Mientras más grueso es un libro, menos literatura tiene”. La frase fue una de las sentencias del escritor argentino César Aira (1949), durante un conversatorio desarrollado el pasado sábado en el marco de la Feria Internacional del Libro, en Guayaquil. Y el dictamen fue duro, cuestionable para muchos, pero ceñido a las convicciones del narrador no tan popular como otros de su nacionalidad, pero que en una de sus obras, Carlos Fuentes lo imagina como el primer premio Nobel de Literatura Argentina.

That is, the bigger the book, the less literature it contains (Aira's works being uniformly short). And as to the odd Fuentes reference at the bottom of that paragraph:

Sobre la referencia que Fuentes hizo en su novela, Aira comentó que se trataba de una réplica a un texto de su autoría titulado El congreso de su literatura, donde un científico decide hacer clones del autor mexicano a fin de dominar el mundo usando a un poderoso ejército de intelectuales, pero todo sale mal.

And I wonder yet again why Aira isn't bigger in the States.

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What Do Barack Obama And Roberto Bolano Have In Common?

2009-07-14T04:26:00-07:00

Both authors of books banned from our nation's swelling prisons.

The federal government's most secure prison has determined that two books written by President Barack Obama contain material "potentially detrimental to national security" and rejected an inmate's request to read them.
Ahmed Omar Abu Ali is serving a 30-year sentence at the federal supermax prison in Florence, Colorado, for joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate then-President George W. Bush. Last year, Abu Ali requested two books written by Obama: "Dreams from My Father" and "The Audacity of Hope."
But prison officials, citing guidance from the FBI, determined that passages in both books contain information that could damage national security.

Brilliant.

Interestingly, whereas the president's inspiring tales of achieving as a black American were deemed dangerous to national security, Bolano's tales of penniless poets eking out a tortured existence were found to encourage homosexuality:

Inmate No. 1385412, in Huntsville, Texas (below), ordered a copy of the book, but on its arrival, the prison mailroom intercepted it and sent it, at the inmate's expense, to a relative of the inmate's in Austin. The prison determined that the material could "encourage homosexual or deviant criminal sexual behavior" and was "detrimental to the offender's rehabilitation." (For what it's worth, the sexual and violent acts described in the offending passage are in fact between a man and a woman.)

It feels appropriate that I'm reading Solzhenitsyn now.

Everything Matters! Review At The Quarterly Conversation

2009-07-13T12:05:00-07:00

Our newest review at TQC is Everything Matters! by Ron Currie, Jr. It's a pre-post-apocalypse novel:

Ron Currie, Jr.’s second book, Everything Matters!, is an appropriate follow-up to his award-winning story collection God Is Dead. While the latter collects nine stories about a world fallen into chaos in the wake of God’s sudden death, the former is essentially pre-apocalyptic in nature. Rather than expanding from some disastrous origin point, the world of Everything Matters! contracts into a fiery and inevitable end, a conclusion punctuated by the Destroyer of Worlds, a giant comet that appears in the book’s final pages, obliterating the Earth and all of humankind. Far from spoiling the plot, foreknowledge of this ending operates within the novel as a kind of literary mechanism; it is not only readers of the novel who know that the end of the world is near but also the main character, and this awareness affects his every action.

This is Currie's second book, and he seems to be creating a sort of "apocalypse-literature" niche for himself, as this follow his lauded short story collection God Is Dead.

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The Life of Print

2009-07-13T09:11:00-07:00

There's a lot to agree with in Eric Obenauf's "print is alive" article in The Brooklyn Rail, even if none of his arguments strike me as novel. Nonetheless, this is a pretty good summation of why corporate publishing is in disarray:

Such efforts expose a key fundamental flaw within the mindset of modern corporate publishing: the perceived role of the book in today’s society. In the past, because of the necessary evolution required to actually create one, coupled with an ambition to deliver a valuable artifact to the world, a book was imagined by publishers as a means to both inspire and inform culture. Now the opposite is occurring. In a flagrant attempt to compete with Internet culture, to crash books into the marketplace on hot button topics from steroids to celebrities, from political scandal to political ascension, corporate publishers aim now to meet immediate demand. If a book about teenage vampires becomes a bestseller, then the hustle is on to find and market a series about pre-teen vampires. And because of this constant rush to the market with books that have the shelf-life of a bruised tomato—in hardcover, with supplemental cardboard cut-outs that stand in chain store windows and usher customers down narrow sales aisles—this ideology has influenced the ebb and flow of the industry. A worthy book that has been crafted over several steps and patiently delivered with care is outshined by a gossip memoir by a B-list celebrity’s cat-sitter.

So yeah, print shouldn't try to be an ebook. And really, the electronic market is probably the proper home for all that gimmicky garbage: that'll save a lot of time and expense on getting rid of these books when their fad ends, and the fact that none of them will actually be actually printed will lead to less material waste.

But what of the future of printed books that really do deserve to be printed?

If there is any lesson to be learned from the work of Jacek Utko and his newspapers, it is that we live in an age where a newspaper in Estonia can be better designed and more successful than a newspaper in the United States. This is a time where independently published books—such as works by Europa Editions, Seven Stories, or tiny Bellevue Literary Press—can edge their way onto bestseller lists in major U.S. cities. Today, books released by Akashic, Soft Skull, Melville House, and City Lights are selected regularly as Editor’s Choice picks by the New York Times. These publishers are taking some creepy, run-down entertainment and putting it to the highest possible level of art. Without gimmicks. These are outfits run by a handful of dedicated individuals, without advertising budgets, a personalized sales force, or the vast web of contacts that larger houses depend on in getting word out about a book.

I agree, although I don't think this is really that novel. Small to mid-size publishers have always been the ones with enough interest in literature as art to stick behind an author like Beckett, even if his masterpieces took years to sell 1,000 copies. The difference now would be that the industry is far more corporatized and vertically integrated than ever before. That, and the traditional media's penchant for acting as though only a handful of the largest publishers matter, gives off the misimpression that all the important authors are handled by the biggest houses. That isn't the case, though. Small and mid-sized publishers are still the ones by and large discovering the talent; yes, every now and then a major house will do the same, but far more common is for them to buy off talent once a smaller press has done the legwork of bringing an author along.

I do have to take issue with this, though:

With the economy in the crapper, the American people are becoming more thrifty consumers, better able to discern what we want from what we need. Chain stores such as Barnes and Noble are realizing that books aren’t necessarily as profitable as home furnishings and are already redirecting themselves along that path. Meanwhile, the healthiest bookstores are the independents which have earned a reputation over the years based upon their own quality of taste and concern.

Sadly, no. After watching indie after indie close up in the SF Bay Area (which I am often told is one of the best markets for literature in the entire nation) I cannot endorse the idea that indies are the healthiest bookstores. Just a couple weeks ago I watched Black Oak Books die, and if quality of taste and love of literature was at all correlated with bookstore success, then that would not have been possible. Yes, some indies are surviving, but that has more to do with innovative business models than with some special indie juju. At any rate, the healthiest bookstore today isn't any indie, it's Amazon.

SF Indie Bookstore Tour Update

2009-07-13T07:56:00-07:00

For the walking tour of SF Indie Bookstores happening on Saturday, July 25, we've confirmed a reception to conclude the tour at our final stop, The Booksmith. It'll be a nice gathering of tour attendees with food, beverages, and some nice conversation over what was bought, what wasn't, what's still longed after . . . all that good bibliophile stuff.

Here's the lowdown:

Starts @ 12:00 pm. Get Lost Travel Books, @ 1825 Market St. Travel extravaganza, with special curated selection of lit-in-translation.

12:30. The Green Arcade @ 1680 Market St. Lots of green and sustainable living titles, plus an interesting selection of nonfiction and fiction. Lots of each I haven't seen anywhere else.

1:00. Great Books Symposium, @ 325 Hayes St. The best selection of classics I've seen in any one place, hands down. Plus, info on their series of "symposium" book discussion groups.

1:30. Books, Inc in the Castro, @ 2275 Market St. More hand-picked fiction and non, great coverage of LGBT titles, and awesome staff picks.

2:00. The Booksmith, @ 1644 Haight St. An SF institution, and Vollmann's home-away-from-home when he's in SF. There'll be a special visual presentation here and a reception after we've shopped.

Remember, first 30 attendees get the NCIBA canvass bags w/goodies.

If you're planning on attending, RSVP to editor@quarterlyconversation.com.

For more tour info, see this post.

Robert McCrumb In Denial

2009-07-13T04:46:00-07:00

This is how Robert McCrumb sounds when he's in a tizzy:

Which brings us to the larger question: whatever happened to that "Anglo-American dialogue" that Granta "in good conscience" no longer has time for?
The short answer is that it actually went global about 20 years ago. Under the new management, readers of Granta will be missing this bigger picture, but here it is, anyway. Like it or loathe it, the engine of the contemporary global literary dialogue is Anglo-American. At the risk of stating the obvious, the intermarriage of English and American culture in its broadest expression sponsors the really dominant cultural fusions. Four out of the last 10 Nobel laureates write in English. Barack Obama reads Joseph O'Neill's Netherland and Derek Walcott's poems, and quotes from the King James Bible. The multi-Oscar winner Slumdog Millionaire was based on Vikas Swarup's Q & A. Bestseller culture, you sneer, unworthy of a literary magazine?
There's more: the recent Orange prize shortlisted three Americans, and then awarded the big one to Marilynne Robinson, who teaches at the Iowa writing school. Jacob Weisberg, Chicago-born editor of Slate, chaired the Samuel Johnson prize, won by Philip Hoare's Leviathan, a brilliant book inspired by Herman Melville. Michael Chabon's essay on childhood in the current New York Review of Books, a journal that understands the "Anglo-American dialogue", makes eloquent reference to CS Lewis, Philip Pullman, Matt Groening and Lawrence of Arabia. If this isn't "dialogue", I'm a Trappist.

Incoherence like this is difficult to argue against, since I've read this a number of times and still can't quite say what McCrumb is trying to prove here. It's supposed to be a surprise that prizes chaired and sponsored by British and Americans are awarded to . . . British and Americans? Or that Hollywood's biggest movie was based on a book written in English?

If anything, that's proving John Freeman's point that there's a lot of room for Granta to expand into fiction being written elsewhere. Whether it's being written in English or another language, there's a significant body of work not being served by a dialog that holds Marilynne Robinson, Jacob Weisberg, and Michael Chabon as its standard bearers. McCrumb can stick to his narrow view of literature. I'll gladly take the new Granta and leave him to thrill to authors that were doing interesting work 20 years ago.

My Infinite Summer: "Good Old Neon," from Oblivion

2009-07-10T04:55:00-07:00

I'm fairly sure that David Foster Wallace's short story "Good Old Neon," published in the collection Oblivion, is the most celebrated piece of writing in the author's post-Infinite Jest career. It is certainly the most lauded story to appear in Oblivion: it received an O. Henry Award, was the most consistently praised piece in the mixed reviews that greeted Oblivion upon publication, and was mentioned again and again (for reasons both literary and autobiographical) after the suicide.

The piece, which I read this week for the first time, strikes me as in many ways Wallace at his best. It's provocative and thought-provoking, and it leaves the reader to wrestle with a series of inter-related paradoxes concerning the nature of language and identity, and how we use language to share our identity with others. It's an extremely complex work--I'd even say intricate--and it brings together an impressive range of thematic material. But for everything in "Good Old Neon" that impresses me, the story lacks a certain vitality; it feels to me more like an interestingly stated puzzle than an actual human voice. Admittedly, though, given the nature of the narrator, this might have been just what Wallace wanted.

The story consists of the thoughts of someone: the narrator's ghost? David Wallace? It's unclear, and I'll explain what I mean at the end of this post. For the sake of simplicity, though, let's just assume for now that "Good Old Neon's" narrator is the ghost of the character that kills himself at the end of the story.

So then. The narrator is recounting what led him to kill himself; the malady that led to suicide is difficult to define exactly, but revolves around the idea that since he was 4 years old the narrator has felt himself a fraud in that he is always managing, every single moment, the impressions that others receive of him. For almost all of his 29 years he's managed these impressions in order to achieve--to do well in school, to get into various women's pants, to succeed as a corporate marketer--and this wracks the narrator with a great existential emptiness. In the end, the narrator can't get past this emptiness, and the angst leads to suicide.

The narrator's deep conviction that he is a fraud is declared in the story's very first paragraph, and that should immediately make any reader suspect every single word that follows. Further clouding the narrator's reliability is that he soon reveals how he takes pleasure in leading his psychiatrist around by the nose and outwitting him with conundrums of life. And, indeed, "Good Old Neon" exposes us to so many paradoxes, contradictions, and dilemmas that we can at times feel like the narrator's batted-around interlocutor. Wallace was very much a writer who reveled in infinite recursions, in thought patterns that snaked around like a Moibus strip or that ate their own tail like a an Ouroboros, and in this story he heaps them on the reader here in characteristic style. To wit:

There was a basic logical paradox that I called the "fraudulence paradox" that I had discovered more or less on my own while taking a mathematical logic course in school. . . . The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside--you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn't find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year old became aware of this paradox, he'd stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he'd figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn't eve have a form or name--I didn't, I couldn't. Discovering that first paradox at age nineteen just brought home to me in spades what an empty, fraudulent person I'd basically been ever since at least the time I was four and lied to my stepdad . . .

The movement in this passage is similar to the feeling brought on by a lot of "Good Old Neon." It starts with a fairly easy-to-conceive paradox--the fraudulence paradox. But then it adds an element to make the whole system far more complex: the idea that the narrator, completely understanding the fraudulence paradox, still couldn't overcome it. But then, before we've had a chance to so much as begin to digest that new complication, Wallace adds yet another element to the mix: the whole story of how the narrator imagines he first became a fraudulent person.

If you can imagine this accumulation of paradox being built up again and again, and then meta-paradoxes being built on top of these smaller paradoxes, and then doubling back to inject thought into paradoxes discussed pages ago, and plus a little bit of character-defining anecdote and some progression forward in time toward a climactic ending; if you can imagine all that, then you've got a pretty good idea what it feels like to read "Good Old Neon."

The narrator's life ends with a vehicular suicide that instantly kills him, but this is not the end of the story. We continue to hear from the narrator after death, and, ironically and sadly, it seems that the narrator has realized in death what he couldn't see in life: a resolution to his feelings of fraudulence. Death, the narrator's ghost tells us, is a timeless realm where all points in time are laid out before you. (To my ear, it sounds awfully similar to Vonnegut's Tralfamadorians' experience of time.) From this vantage, the narrator finally understands that

inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the now in older doors.

The keyhole would be one's mouth, or rather, the words that come out of it.

Words are a key thing here, because fundamentally "Good Old Neon" is about one of Wallace's most cherished themes: the insufficiency of language--both its insufficiency to fully communicate our authentic selves to another human being and its insufficiency to embody thoughts with enough clarity to allow us to escape logical paradoxes. About midway through the story, Wallace discusses the Berry paradox, which in Wallace's characteristic description states that

higher up there in these huge, cosmic-scale numbers, imagine now the very smallest number that can't be described in under twenty-two syllables. The paradox is that the very smallest number that cant be described in under twenty-two syllables, which of course is itself a description of this number, only had twenty-one syllables in it, which of course is under twenty-two syllables. So now what are you supposed to do?

According to Wikipedia, the solution to the Berry paradox has to do with ambiguity in the word definable. In other words, the paradox can be solved with better language, which would also seem to be the case with the narrator's problem: English is insufficient to wrangle with his thoughts on a precise enough level to satisfy his need to wrestle out the paradox that wracks his existence. Death, presumably a realm fundamentally different from life, lets the narrator see things anew.

After the narrator's death, there is a two-page coda. In these final two pages the narrator repeatedly refers to "David Wallace," and oddly, in these last two pages the narrator shows no sign of the problems that he agonizes over throughout the story. Right after the car crash is narrated the narrator declares:

And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you're a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, ad of course you try to manage what part they see if you now its only a part. Who wouldn't? It's called free will, Sherlock.

Further complicating things is the fact that this coda also makes it clear that David Wallace is the author of this story: within the coda we learn that the story we have just read was inspired in David Wallace's mind after he found that someone he used to attend high school with committed suicide. It is a small but important twist on the typical metafictional ending: typically in the metafictional ending the vantage pulls back into the author's subjectivity; instead, in this case the vantage pulls back past the author's subjectivity and comes to encompass the author himself as just another character.

This is odd enough, as it implies that David Wallace both is and isn't the author of this story (yet another paradox), but, even more oddly, the story then goes on to imply that this is all "true," in a certain sense of the word, since it gives us reason to believe that these are the genuine thoughts of David Wallace after hearing that the narrator, someone he knew in high school, had died in a suicide.

It is the final paradox in a story that accumulates them like cat hair on a rug. So many paradoxes for just one story. Certainly, to a certain extent, the point of "Good Old Neon" is to let the reader know how the narrator (and, per the coda, David Wallace) feels as he fails to live his life with sufficient authenticity to match his standards. But at the same time, the presence of so many paradoxes--really, so many instances of language breaking down--reveals "Good Old Neon" as an exercise in deconstruction, an effort to reveal the contradictions and insufficiencies inherent in such words as authentic, fraud, performance, and even identity.

Toward the end of the story the narrator reflects that just before his suicide he was "in that state in which a man realizes that everything he sees will outlast him." The narrator readily admits that "as a verbal construction I know that's a cliche," but nonetheless, "as a state in which to actually be, though, it's something else, believe me." This, I think, is the final point of "Good Old Neon." When put into words--that is, the tiny bit that makes it out the keyhole--a person's feelings generally become cliches. But when these feelings are experienced, the totality of the moment--that incommunicable whole that resides within a person's body and soul--is what makes like worth living. The gulf between what is felt and what is communicated is often demoralizing and isolating, and when we lose faith that the gulf can ever be crossed we feel deeply alone. For some kinds of communication, language isn't enough. That is evident in "Good Old Neon," which presents us with many paradoxes of language but offers us no help in solving them.