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The Density of a 100-Page Suicide Note Opinion - The Telegraph 27 Feb 2017 10:15am Comment: Tony Blair is back on the pitch but he and his fellow centrists are still playing last season's game Which Define Which at Dictionary.com The book which I read last night was exciting. The socialism which Owen preached was unpalatable to many. The lawyer represented five families of which the ... U.S. News Latest National News Videos Photos - ABC ... Get the latest breaking news across the U.S. on ABCNews.com Rank: #4163426 in BooksPublished on: 2015-07-08Original language: EnglishNumber of items: 1Dimensions: 8.50" h x .28" w x 5.50" l, .33 pounds Binding: Paperback122 pages 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.A Great Piece of LiteratureBy David Farr“I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather plain suicide.”-Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus, “Philosophical Suicide”First, I’ll make some general remarks, then get a little more specific.I decided to read this memoir/novel because I read the following excerpt of it on the author’s blog:"I can still see a little bit, one word at a time, 48-point type on the computer screen and of course I can touch-type, and if my fingers are positioned properly I can blaze across the screen like "the milltails of hell" as my grandfather used to say. A logging term. Arthur participated in the stripping of the world. The ends of the boards, the "milltails" flying as logs are processed at breakneck speed into lumber. Whoosh, I type fast. I used to do physical labor, like the rest of the menfolk in my family, construction workers, timber men, mechanics and truck drivers all of them. Then I did intellectual labor, staring into the digital sun. Now I'm going blind.But I can still write. Unless my fingers are improperly positioned on the keyboard. Then I get: S ejp;r nimvj pg honnrtodj yjsy hprd pm smf pm smf ejp vsm frvo[rt oyz A cryptographer could decipher it, a cryptogram where all the e's are r's, etc. Nobody wants to work that hard for somebody else's writing, though, not even my editor, though she does go the extra mile. The extra kilometer. She is German. I can see well enough to send it to her and she will edit it after a fashion and publish it on one of the many self-publishing platforms that cater to the failed writers of the world and give us all hope. A place for our maunderings and our trunk stories, our ersatz memoirs and our sexual fantasies. Kindle, Barnes Noble Nook, Smashwords and Kobo. Others, too inconsequential to mention. We are all writers now. It's the easiest art form. With music you have to practice for a while and it's immediately obvious if you're not yet competent. Painting costs money, lots of money for tubes and brushes, and it takes space and solvents to clean the brushes, and, like music, it's pretty obvious if you're terrible. But every person who is literate is a writer. Everybody who has commented on a Yahoo news story feels they have been published. Everybody who's gotten a thumbs up on a Facebook posting feels like Beckett. Everybody can publish, and does. Everybody transmitting all the time."Above all the remarkable characteristics of this quote, what I want you to notice most about it is that while the narrator contends that the writers/transmitters the literacy/silicon chip technology/internet nexus has made of us all, he stops short of explicitly stating that it has made us all good writers. Corollary to this is the fact that he’s also silent about this nexus’ ability to make us all good storytellers. This implies, I think, that while writing is now mostly the common place, dumbed down, rabble of the masses*, writing well, especially telling timeless stories well through writing, is still an accomplishment of rare distinction. Of course, there are technologies that facilitate writing well, but they are not found in microchips and/or world wide web technologies (per se), and they can never replace the necessity of discipline, hard work, vision, development of aesthetic sense and persistence. Perhaps the narrator left these facts unsaid because he didn’t want to appear like he was engaging in shameless self promotion, which is admirable to me, as I consider authentic humility a virtue. So, where the author of The Density of a 100-Page Suicide Note (D1SN) stops short of bragging, I’ll take the liberty to do it on his behalf, and I’ll start by saying that not only is this memoir/novel well written, but it is also a story told well: it is Art-with-a-capital-”A,” a literary tale of the highest caliber, a work of aesthetic genius.The copy I read didn’t have page numbers, and I didn’t count them, but it seemed, as its title suggests, to be about a hundred pages. Such concision brilliantly lends itself to its beauty, especially in the way it employs its density to not only impute its messages with deep significances but also to transmit them in profoundly touching and humane ways. Not only is the print large but some chapters are just a single sentence or one word. This skilled brevity makes it once intellectual and accessible. And this is just one of the ways it addresses the ironies of “post-modernity.” In that regard, I couldn’t help thinking of David Foster Wallace: in terms of his infamous suicide, in terms of his treatment of hyper-irony in his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” and more importantly in how his suicide and that essay provide a rich commentary on the relation of the artist to his culture--the latter as a prophetic foreshadow of where computer technology has taken us and the former as the punctuating emphasis of his critiques. Wallace, however, was rarely if ever concise. But the creatively crafted briefness of D1SN amplifies Clunie’s application of irony to our contemporary situation: us individuals who currently comprise our computer technology saturated societies, us beings conditioned by the multimedia, meme based mayhem of modernity to have ever shortening attention spans. One way the impact of cultural hyper-irony on individual consciousness is delivered in D1SN is in how its weight and length are playfully self-referenced to the page numbers. This makes it fun to read, especially as one engages the ironies within ironies it invokes. Yes! Fun!! Not what you’d expect from the title, eh But once you read it, you’ll see what I mean. Of course, it’s heavy, too, but as its owner is a master aesthetician, he blends the tragic with the comic adroitly. For example, another enjoyment can be found in his remark, “I hate happy endings.” I’ll neither tell you if this is itself ironic in the context of the novel/memori nor if the ending is happy, not only because I want you to find out for yourself, but also because a culminating suicide would not necessarily mean the ending is unhappy. But I will tell you that when you’re done, you’ll have learned something not only about the error of assuming that standards for happiness are absolute across all individual experiences, but also on mistakenly relying on oversimplified platitudes like, “Suicide is a cry for help.”Indeed, Clunie’s treatment of suicide is my favorite aspect of D1SN. The “ethics” of suicide are handled neither in the dry, detached ways typical intellectuals and philosophers have traditionally dealt with it, nor in the clinical and academic ways psychologists have historically done. I can’t get too much more specific without being in danger of being a spoiler, but suffice it to say that the narrator lives in a state where it is taken for granted that suicide is a right and where assisted suicide is legal. I interpret this to mean that the narrator also takes these things for granted, and I further infer from this that he feels that suicide is nobody’s decision but one’s own. Perhaps I’m projecting, but that’s okay. We’re talking about literature here, not logic; good literature, in my opinion, lends itself to multiple interpretations of meaning, and as a piece of great literature, D1SN does not disappoint. .Now, to get a little more specific (but not spoiler specific--I mean, I do want you to read the book, and only use this review as motivation to actually do so). There are several themes coherently held together in D1SN, but four had especially personal appeal for me: (1) it’s set in Portland, Oregon, where I live; (2) it poignantly depicts the frustrations of being an obscure artist/writer, which I am, while (3) having a disabling illness, which I do, and (4) it realistically explores the relationship between (3) and (4).Regarding (1): In this increasingly popular, incessantly blowing up, exponentially gentrified, hipster overan city, D1SN gives you a sense of what living here is like for most people, instead of what it’s like for the “Spirit of the nineties” fantasy world created by shows like Portlandia.Regarding (2): While great achievers like Descartes, Nietzsche, Proust, etc... attributed some of their productivity to the contemplation afforded by their time with long bouts of illness, they’re all also on record admitting that they’d have achieved even more and better things without their illnesses.Regarding (3): Another beautiful element of D1SN is how the well written and well told story is done by an ill man, and this aspect makes in not only moving for and compassionate to readers in general, but especially relevant for sufferers of disabling conditions. Yes, it is by now--with existentialism approaching the hundred and fifty year mark (assuming you start with Kierkegaard)--an old existentialist philosophical and literary motif, but it is not one that ever gets old, for we all must die, and most of us will die from illness.Regarding (4): Illness sucks, period. Chronic illness really sucks. Period, exclamation point. But as almost anyone struggling with chronic illness will tell you, whatever ways you learn to cope with it that help you see the proverbial silver lining, these do not change the fact the you’d prefer the challenges of being well and self-sufficient to the all too contrived “benefits” of being ill. It’s nice to sip homemade lemonade after life has given you lemons, but ultimately it’s sweetness proves an ineffective antidote to the sourness of being persistently infirm. When one aspires to not only grow lemon trees but also to own the whole orchard, platitudes about gracefully coping with perpetual pain and/or disease and/or disability are small comforts. While suffering is probably a necessary condition for making Art, too much suffering is counterproductive to that pursuit.Still, D1SN is a testament to making art despite our ailments. While the narrator’s gratitude for his ability to still be able write despite his disabling blindness is, in my estimation, at war with his desire to die, it is through working through this conflict that his talent shines through: in his ability to make that the story. And he accomplishes this astonishing feat without giving you a clear idea where the memoir ends and the fiction begins. And to the extent that this challenges the very validity of the distinctions between novel and memoir, fiction and nonfiction, the overall aesthetic effect is only enhanced.So challenge your short attention span! Defy your culture! Mr. Clunie makes it easy on you, giving you a compelling story coming in at about one-hundred pages.And what’s a hundred pages when it’s Art*This is a complaint, AFAIK, at least as old as Nietzsche, and the seeds of which can be identified in Plato’s criticisms of the written word as opposed to oral traditions; see also the book by Nicholas Carr called The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, a finalist for the General Nonfiction 2011 Pulitzer Prize.1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.READ THISBy Sara ScottI love hated it page after page. I couldn't put it down. Best read in a long time and you MUST purchase the paperback version--the layout is everything. Excuse me while I cry now.0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.Love love loved itBy Michelle ClunieWhat a page turner!!! Love love loved it!!!See all 4 customer reviews... U.S. News Latest National News Videos & Photos - ABC ... Get the latest breaking news across the U.S. on ABCNews.com Which Define Which at Dictionary.com The book which I read last night was exciting. The socialism which Owen preached was unpalatable to many. The lawyer represented five families of which the ... Opinion - The Telegraph 27 Feb 2017 10:15am Comment: Tony Blair is back on the pitch but he and his fellow centrists are still playing last season's game
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