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You bet. That's exactly what I am doing today (written yesterday). I got up late, nine-thirty, scanned LBO and Pen-L, and got an e-mail from a friend who is beginning to write a fictional account of his years in Berkeley when he was married and worked at UCB---living off a post-doc and later various grants. His marriage ended his life in Berkeley, because his ex-wife took the kids and moved down to the San Luis Obispo area. This in effect ruined his career, since he had to move down there to be see his kids, and start over. He had to take poor paying adjunct positions.
His writing is good and has a naturally `abstract' or `modernist' quality, something like James Joyce, because he is blind and describes the world without visual terms or images.
Reading D's work makes me aware of how little information we really get from visual perception. Conincidently, Joanna gave me an article in recent New Yorker titled `Itch' by Atul Gawande (June 30, 2008) that makes the same point from a neuro-science point of view. The amount of concrete information gained through vision is very much less than we suppose.
I discovered the above through my friendship with D. and the years we spent climbing, hiking, and of course while I was working for him on various bio-science projects. One startling fact that everybody forgets is that much of bio-sphere, plants of course, but also some animals do not have eyes, and manage quite successfully without them.
Since D. can't see, he has no idea what Cubism means. I spent most of the day describing what Cubism was, by using special relativity, multiple positions, and no privilaged reference frame (no fixed metric, either) as the way to describe what Cubist painting was trying to do. This in turn relates to Joyce and Ulysses, since Joyce was attempting to achieve similar effects (multiple and theoretically simultaneous points of view) in writing. I just re-started Ulysses to see if this theory of the novel holds up, and what I think about it, after trying to get through it in my early twenties.
This idea of relating Cubism, Joyce, and Relativity together is straight out of Edmond Carpender's lectures in Cultural Anthro. Carpenter (heavily influenced by McLuhan) picked up the trace of the ideas from Cassirer, Whorf of course, and other sources in the period.
We are so familiar with these ideas and their effects on our concept of the world, that we hardly notice them anymore. You can see these effects and their influence on our arts when you go rent older movies (say the straight story line sort) and then contrast them to much newer movies where more recent directors have mastered some of these collage and simultaneity effects well enough to construct a formal composition out of very heavily cut and pasted scenes that build a story line through what is in linear terms, essentially irrational nonsense.
Momento, for example does a really good job of this sort of abstract composition by telling the story backward in color and foreward in black and white---or was it the other way? (Can't remember, and it doesn't really matter.) The plot synopsis is in the link below. Don't read it if you haven't seen the movie, but plan to. That's because the synopsis will spoil the effect this discovery of composition makes on you---which is a very nice surprize.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0209144/synopsis
This movie is highly reminiscent of Alain Robbe-Grillet. For any one interested try R-G's Snap Shots, a collection of very short stories. The compositional forms stand out easily and don't become tedious. For example, The Replacement, uses something like Joyce's parallax (two points of view of the same object), hence the title. The object is a tree seen by a school teacher, teaching French history, and a student in the classroom, bored, looking out the window at the same tree. Both are completely disengaged from their own physical position, while their minds wonder in other directions. The apparent positions, when you work them out, turn out to be physically impossible. The narrative makes them appear coherent.
CG