There's the idea that God is the universe—or that the universe is his word, that everything you see everywhere is God's message to mankind, to you—an idea I find appealing in much the same way that I'm tickled by the recognition that the natural–manmade distinction is false (in that, for example, Homo sapiens and all that it does on earth are part of nature, such that skyscrapers are every bit as much a part of capital-N Nature as anthills) or the notion that if E = mc2 and, more to the point, energy and matter can be turned into each other (just as—or, I don't know, I'm not a scientist, maybe not just as—water and ice and steam can be turned into each other), then in a way not only every piece of matter in the universe but essentially everything that every piece of matter in the universe does and has done to it is all basically just this one kind of meta-substance with variations in its shape or warp or...
Sometimes the stuff I find the very most interesting is the stuff that isn't quite what it's meant to be. People go different ways on the question of whether an artist's personal life is relevant to your judgement of his art—e.g., is our experience of Manhattan affected by the tabloid spectacle of Woody Allen's life c.1993; can we still enjoy Hunger even though Knut Hamsun called Hitler "a warrior for mankind." I tend to think that Hamlet would still be a good play even if it came out that Shakespeare used to molest children, and that Michael Chabon is a bad writer no matter how nice a guy he might be. I suppose I wouldn't go so far as to say that context is irrelevant...more that its relevance will be indirect, circuitous—that there will be no 1:1 correspondence between the facts and their importance. Think of sound traveling through water, or (in the same vein) the experience a fœtus must have of a dinner party its mother attends.
And but so Vegas, as in the city of Las Vegas, Nev., is a curious case because I basically love it while at the same time hating all that it stands for. The place is capitalism on performance-enhancing drugs, everything designed specifically to leach out your money while making you think you're getting something for it. And are you getting something for it? The reason I say it's a kind of super-capitalism is that capitalism is all about profit, right?—the idea that if you act in your own self-interest, ultimately all society benefits: I'm going to turn out the best product possible, or the best entertainment, specifically so that you'll buy mine and not someone else's, and the net result is that products and entertainment just get better and better because of the magic of competition. Is the idea. Capitalism: not so well suited for art. But in this hypercapitalism, all is exaggerated. Gambling, in particular, inspires you to spend money by offering you little more than the spending of money itself—and as Donald Barthelme's brothers suggest in their book Double Down, the big thrill that never gets mentioned by anybody is that even losing is exciting. It's like in those horrible Matrix sequels when Neo gets to, like, the very heart or nerve center of the machines, and instead of a big fight, he basically—what, gets absorbed into it or something? Unclear. Fuck those movies.
What I'm getting at is that Vegas is amazing, and it's amazing not simply because the hideous ugliness of what's actually going on there requires an incredibly flashy and overwhelming and even kind of beautiful disguise to make it bearable (which is 100% true), but because of the tension between the mask and the hideous ugliness, or even the fact of those things: what you wind up with in Vegas (if you are of a certain sensibility) is this wild narrative or—I even want to say self-satire, but not in the disparaging way that's usually meant—kind of like a poem...
I think I mentioned a while back the idea that what makes poetry poetry, or literature literature, is a tension between the explicit, surface-level sense of things and some kind of meaning beneath or beyond it, the idea being that anything you can "reduce" like a mathematical equation to a simple statement (x = 3; war is bad) is bad poetry if it's poetry at all. "Real" literature must include some degree of tension, even if it's beautiful and highly bearable tension.* Hence the one very positive thing I can say about Finnegans Wake (which I decided I wasn't actually going to try reading, or "reading"): Joyce seems to achieve that kind of poetic tension in some cases in a single word, as with the sort of incredible phoenish. This effect is also what makes Pale Fire more than just a clever literary magic trick (it does not come down merely to a question of whether Kinbote's crazy**), and I would argue what makes Hamlet (and Hamlet) great.
As for Vegas, when you look at these incredible, crazy structures—which (again) are basically there to direct your eye away from the gruesomely awful shit that's really going on and (a little less paranoiacally) to put you in a spending mood, but which also are in some cases practically candidates for the n Wonders of the World—you're looking not just at incredible feats of human ingenuity and creativity, but at the motivation behind them, and the relationship between all these things, and it's sort of less like looking at a piece of art than it is like being inside a novel, somehow, a novel in the bold and totally insane classical tradition (revived in the 1960s) of like Satyricon and The Golden Ass...
Anyway, these are some pictures I took of the inside of this fucking pyramid that they built (it's a hotel and casino, of course). It's one of the most amazing things I've ever seen. (At the risk of undermining my own point, I'm going to go ahead and stick it to The Man a little by not giving the name of the hotel. The least I can do.)
* Maybe tension is the wrong word.
** Nor does it come down to whether ghosts were running all over the place, was my big problem with Brian Boyd's book.
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