Almost a Novel: The Broom of the System

Abstract

The Broom of the System is apprentice work, a young man’s novel about his generation, in much the same way that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (1920) is about the fabled jazz age generation and the amorous adventures of the homophonically named Amory Blaine. Both wise and wise-ass, Broom is clearly the product of the smartest kid in the class (and he really was). It could only have been written—this first novel, initiated as a senior thesis—by someone who has read everything he could get his hands on from the age of five, and absorbed it all not semiotically or hermeneutically, but in the manner of granular synthesis, a method of assimilating sound and information, according to the The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Music, comprised of sound “grains” assembled into

short snippet[s] of about ten to a hundred milliseconds, an elementary particle as opposed to a complex soundscape. By combining different grains over time, and by overlapping several grains at the same instant of time, interesting sonic effects can be produced. The synthesis techniques in which different sound grains are combined is known as granular synthesis.… Since its inception, many composers have utilized granular synthesis as a musically powerful technique to create and manipulate complex sonic universes using basic particles” (Sarafin 207).

A new broom sweeps clean, but the old broom knows the corners.

—Irish Proverb

When I say: “My broom is in the corner,”—is this really a statement about the broomstick and the brush?

—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (29)