The Musical Illusionist , by Alex Rose (Hotel St. George, October 2007)
Leave it to fiction writers to joyously excavate the paradoxes of science, religion and philosophy. Alex Rose's tales of scientific discoveries and failures, lost manuscripts and languages, bizarre neurological disorders and other ephemera suggest an infinitude of histories that shape our unceasing and ever-unfulfilled reach for truth.
A lost manuscript from Japan's 9th century--said to contain a string of tales from an escaped concubine--sounds much like One Thousand and One Nights . The ancient Chinese, while experimenting with devices to dispatch secret messages, discover a process called cynaotography, which had the capability to make photographs but held no use as such and was forgotten. These exhibitions preclude the flounderings of Rose's modern researchers who attempt to make sense of the brain or out-do Pythagoras via musical experiments.
The short, Ficciones-style summaries are interspersed with scene-setting curatorial notes from The Library of Tangents (the fictional institution that archives the manuscript), which, rich in imagery, recall the author's career as a filmmaker. Rose is well-versed in science, math, music, philosophy, religion, etc., and, while as plastic with his erudition as, let's say, David Foster Wallace in Everything and More , he distinguishes himself with his modesty and brevity. It's a good book.
Hotel St. George, the press that brought it out , is a new imprint of Akashic, and as everybody says they have a really nice website. So nice it's hard to find stuff. It's a little like a computer quest game. But they publish interesting work online, along with two books so far. They held a launch party for Rose's book at Cornelia, and here is what happened:
A small orchestra was brought in to perform an original composition by David Little, also present, to go along with the reading. Rose sat with the string players behind him and read from an oversized computer moniter, plugged into a laptop used by a musician next to him to manipulate the overall sound. The experience was meant to allude to, if not simulate, the experience detailed in the book's title story, and I think this is the point to think about.
With authors and publishing houses producing trailers for books and maintaining interactive blogs, it certainly seems like a logical step to add music to live readings. In fact the press has planned a series of them locally that will include both of their authors. But the music, as I understand it---at least in the case of the performance I witnessed at the Cornelia St. Cafe this past October---is not meant to dramatize the work or enhance the experience of listening to it read, but to reference it in a way that demonstrates a new level of self-awareness, and also, in this age of short attention spans, allows us to keep from losing our place.
