Thursday, January 15, 2009
Slippery Literature
Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Permanent Nobel Prize Committee member Horace Engdahl must have been having a bad time of it on particular morning as he finished reading yet another Danielle Steele novel, choking down a bit of soggy toast with concentrated orange juice, and commenced to crack open a Dan Brown book."American literature is too awful, too insular, to fixed with American concerns to be really play in The Big Leagues" he must have gasped, his quaking hand spilling still-frozen ice crystles from his glass of would be orange juice onto his crisply pressed pajama bottoms, "Europe, oh our writers are so superior, so much more worldly,yes, we are the world, after all, ohhhh, ahhh..."
Has anyone who's read this man's remarks on American Literature not been struck how closely akin elitism is to provincialism; not to slight anyone , but there is a small town boosterism that resonates like small, thin bell that cannot produce anything more than a flat, metallic clanking. He doesn't have the arms, one guesses, to beat the big bass drum for his beloved European superiority. I'm reminded of the old Roger Corman movie Bucket of Blood where a preening , brain dead blonde ingenue berates a bus boy in a bohemian coffee house , telling him, in effect, " who are you but a mere bus boy? We're all sophisticated beatniks..."
How on earth can the slandering of an entire country, its people and the complex and diverse culture it contains be considered "enlightened"? It cannot, even if this sort of hubris-choked braying comes from the mouth of a permanent member of the Nobel Committee. It’d be one thing if this were something said in a bar or at a sufficiently boozed-up party where baseless claims are the norm and the revealed ignorance radiates no further than the next morning when hangovers and amnesia take priority over one’s global pronouncements to the insularity of American literature. Horace Engdahl’s remarks belie his own insularity; one has a hard time imagining someone so unaware that they’re fulfilling the rank stereotype of the half-cocked dilettante who cannot support his view with anything other than a snotty tone. I’ve my doubts that he’s read Roth, DF Wallace, Oates, August Wilson, Don DeLillo, John Ashbery, Kate Braverman; one may furnish their own examples of worthy Americans not given the and consider the Nobel Prize itself irrelevant.
Tuesday, September 23, 2008
notes on "The White Negro"
Moreover, any kid, black, white, Hispanic or Asian ambling down school halls emulating 50 Cent is regression of an odious sort, a realization of Norman Mailer's romantic ideal of “The White Negro”. It's doubtful even Mailer would find this trend enviable, a generation of young people placing a value on the ill formed locutions of millionaire goons and wallowing in a subculture that prizes accumulation of material and money at any costs, including the sacrificing of one's humanity and the community one lives in.
Being from Detroit in the 8-Mile Road area, I know full well what “Wiggers” are, and I'm old enough to realize that the phenomenon is not a new wrinkle in the scheme of things. Times and styles change, but a constant in my life and in my parents' life was white kids affecting the style and musical habits of the current edge of black culture. My reference was to Norman Mailer's famous essay “The White Negro”, written in 1957, where he argues that whites who want to free themselves of crushing and killing conformity must emulate the style and language of blacks because blacks, he opined, are closer to violence and thus privy to kinds of rapidly deployed existential knowledge that a bookish and emotionally neutered dominant culture could never know.
Mailer had a continuing theory that living close to violence, the kind of violence that is an intractable quality of your race's metaphysical being, was an entry to spectacular influxes of new perception and awareness that dismantles the many veils of false consciousness. It's all beautifully if boggling argued in the essay, and there is an insightful discussion here of Mailer's work, ideas and this particular essay here [www.english.upenn.edu]; the short of it is that Mailer thought whites blessed to be attracted to black style and culture and sought to emulate it with "spontaneous bop prosody” (Jack Kerouac's phrase) were the hope of the white race. Mailer was speculating that the kind of knowledge of violence that blacks had would do well to help the questing Hipster gain new perception and new experience and allow him to create a truthful world where real choices are possible and individual responsibility for them is a matter of what private, divinely derived ethics one has made with the God of their understanding.
Among the problems with all this righteous forecasting and waxing poetic is that the Revolution as described never starts, and Heaven does not arrive at the planet, conditions that are easily explained away by revisions to theory where it practice is at fault, not the catechism. The romanticization of major criminal acts as a people's spiritual rebellion against crushing falseness and capitalist hegemony is one of the trends and marketing clichés. Above all this is Marcuse’s fleeting notion of “repressive tolerance”, often mocked and maligned but prophetic, timeless and tersely wise when one witness their idealistic style turn into advertising slogans and their manifestos become the humorless rationale for being a monster, a thug. Everything is allowed, everyone has their say, each word of dissent and radical exception is allowed, nothing is forbidden, and everything is the same. Nothing happens.
Simply put, the Man, as he was affectionately called in the Sixties, makes your protest and revolutionary style ineffectual by allowing you the means to express yourself and your peculiar take on the erring course the culture has taken. Your protests become part of the news cycle, more factoids to fill the spaces between advertisements. Nearly fifty years later one wonders if Mailer would approve of the bragging self-regard that black style has turned into, and if he would admit that "wiggers", albeit emulators of black style, are merely followers of fashion and consumers after all is said and done with.
It would seem that an especially troublesome tract from the recently belated Norman Mailer's writings will be his essay The White Negro, published in Dissent in 1957 and later included in his landmark 1959 collection Advertisements for Myself. In a rough paraphrase, Mailer argues that whites need to emulate some of the jazz-inflected style of black Americans, whom, he said, had developed an attitude, a lived philosophy in the face of the violence they face daily solely because they are black. Mailer placed a good amount of hope that the Beats might be such an evolution in the Caucasian mind. Authenticity,a self, rooted in primal reality and not lodged in a language-locked template, was the goal. Mailer's assertions, to be sure, came under attack, not the least of the asides being that he was taking something of an exotic and racist view of the lives of black people. The misgivings are understandable.
It is true that Mailer added violence to the equation for its potential to transform the individual, but he was worried about the constant and pointless violence for its own sake. What he saw in the urban black culture of the time was a particularly acute style and manner that could accommodate and hone the violent impulse and use the energy to a more creative purpose. This presents all sorts of problems for intellectuals, and gullible whites (and blacks) attracted by the flashy density of Mailer's writing, but it should be noted as well that Mailer modified his pronouncements. Mailer, believe it or not, matured. Which is not to say there wouldn't be sufficient grounds to argue with his later writing. I agree, Mailer’s tough guy stances were a species of posing, and it seems to me that he had a rude and crucial awakening after he nearly killed his wife Adele by stabbing her when he was crazed on Benzedrine.
It is interesting that two of his best novels are An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? are two lyric flights that are fueled by the sort of rage he gloried in a decade earlier, the first book being something of a Blakean purge where his hero, Stephen Rozack, attempts to berserk himself into transcendence through violence against targets that he felt undermined his tenuous grasp on self. Transform he does, but he is an unenviable mess for the carnage, someone stuck on some psychotic edge with virtually nothing to build a new life on. Mailer seemed content to let the violence, the raging burn itself out in the novel, with there being the tacit moral that “encouraging the psychotic within” is a dead end, a nihilist fantasy. The second novel is poised to investigate, through metaphor, the source of this insanity, an obscene cruise through American repression, obsession with masculinity, racism, and an insane obsession with individualism, guns, and God. So many polarities battle each other in the book that the question posed in the title is thus: we were in Vietnam because, as a nation crazed on many ill and contaminated streams, we had to be.
William Carlos Williams is said to have remarked that the “pure products of America go insane”, an idea that Mailer accepts in the form of the book’s crazed, multi-voiced narrator DJ who, representative of a complex cultural stew that will not blend but rather form a thickening cluster of unpalatable projections on the face of the planet, is compelled to expand upon, disrupt, dominate, and decimate the people and resources outside its actual borders. Mailer here echoed Susan Sontag (in attitude at least) that the white race was the cancer on the face of humanity. In any event, we’ve been lucky enough that Mailer had the sense to forgo his armchair philosophizing for long enough intervals, so he could do some real work; I am a fan of his novels, but along with most Mailer partisans, I think it will be his non-fiction that will secure his reputation, Executioner’s Song and Armies of the Night, certainly, but also Of a Fire on the Moon and Oswald’s Tale.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Writing and Aging
Poet Paul Breslin, writing about writers obsessed with their place in history in Slate’s on line forum The Fray, made an observation about the poet confronting his old age and having to wrestle with either settling into a known, familiar style , or to push one’s boundries further still, risking a loss of readers and critical ridicule. Was one going to be Dizzy Gillespie, resting on his inventions of bebop velocity, or to be Miles Davis, looking back at his past with a scowl, aggravating the notes and the harmonies for a new sound, a new thing? Breslin said this:
“... the poet who gets obsessed with reputation and turns into a self-caricature is a disturbingly frequent spectacle in American letters--must have something to do with our culture's eagerness to commodify everything and everyone. It becomes hard for a poet to focus on images, not image.”
Yes, and the sad fact that's dawning on us is that writers really do tend to run of things to say as they get older; consolidating their marketable identities into a framed and footnoted package historians can refer to after their passing is an activity that makes me sadder the older I get. There is a mania you see amongst some poets as they plunge into furious productivity, trying to tip the scales as to how the western canon will treat them in time. Allen Ginsberg was long past his best and most brilliant work; he had 'become" the professional Ginsberg, the product Ginsberg, the sage and philosopher and the seer and the divinely inspired rebel. I do not question Ginsberg's beliefs in the slightest; I've met him on a couple of instances, and a no-nothing phony he wasn't.
He was actually engaging and subtly intelligent. He has one of the best reading voices I've ever heard. That said, one confronted his recent words on the page and became aware that they were formless, random scribings, notes to one that never became the lines of finished literature. For all the good things he wrote about and embodied about the open and tolerant society, there was an awareness of audience expectation that was obvious in the slovenliness of the verse. It was as if there was a feedback loop going on that compelled him to perform for the duration of his life those same notes over and over again, and to attempt to preserve what he regarded as a massive and lasting contribution to American Literature.
That was the fatal flaw regarding his work, as it isn't the artist's job to attempt to control the posthumous judgment of their work, or to design, arrange, and seek funding for the altar at which new and older readers alike may gather and murmur their respective renditions of shock and awe. Norman Mailer, was similarly obsessed with his place in history, and even went so far as to name one of his early books Advertisements for Myself, but the difference is that Mailer had a sense of irony about the nature of his quest to forge a revolution in the consciousness of his time. Ever the clever boy, Mailer turned his self-aggrandizing proclivities and turned it into a literary persona that allowed him to produce a series of nonfiction masterpieces, such as Armies of the Night, Miami and the Siege of Chicago, Of a Fire on the Moon. Yes, it was Mailer the character at war with the world, and the character protested that the inhabitants of the world weren't doing as they should, but there was always an outward push to Mailer's egocentric excess a legitimate and mostly successful attempt to engage the world around him and understand it; Mailer's particular obsession with his place in history, with his influence on the powers of his time was successfully turned into a stylistic trope that could be used as metaphorical springboard to address the unseen details of human activity in unexpected ways. A brilliant writing style helps immensely, which Mailer has always had. And here comes another point; Mailer, unlike Ginsberg, could change his style as he got older, wiser (perhaps). By the time he won his second Pulitzer Prize for The Executioner's Song, Mailer-as-character was all but gone, the sentences were short, clipped, and the complex story of Gary Gilmore and the America he lived and murdered in was made real with the artfully artless; you couldn't "see" him writing.
John Ashbery, of course, is another who hasn't diluted his art for fame and glory;it is one of the supreme ironies in contemporary that perhaps our most unrelentingly obscure "name" poet has ascended to greater media saturation by sticking to his guns. Voices from the margin usually stay there, and die there. But not Ashbery. My take is that if one thinks there is nothing to John Ashbery's poems, they are bringing nothing to their readings, Willingness is the key; something of oneself needs to be invested in reading the poems in order to find pursuable verse. But nothing ventured, nothing gained.He was more the walker than Ashbery, I suppose, or at least he wrote more about the going to and coming from of his strolls. unlike Ashbery, O'Hara loved being an obvious tourist in his own environment, and didn't want for a minute for his poetry to leave the streets, cafes and galleries where he treaded. Ashbery is more the stroller who gets lost in his associations triggered by what he beheld. Ever more the aesthete than his fellow New York Poets, he was interested in things a little more metaphysical, that being that the reality that exists in the inter-relations being the act of perception and the thoughts that are linked to it, which branch off from the perception and link again with another set of ideas, themselves connected to material things observed and remembered. O'Hara was immediate, like the city he loved, while Ashbery allowed his senses the authority to enlarge his perception, to explore the simultaneity of sight and introspection. In a strange way, Ashbery is the more sensual of the two, willing to examine that even the sacrifice of immediate coherence.
I'm not a fan of difficulty for the sake of being difficult, but I do think it unreasonable to expect poets to be always unambiguous or easily grasped. Not every dense piece of writing is worthy by default, of course, and the burden falls on the individual talent. Ashbery's writing, for me, has sufficient allure, resonance and tangible bits of the recognizable world he sees to make the effort to maneuver through his diffuse stanzas worth the work. Poetry is the written form where ambiguity of meaning and multiplicity of possible readings thrives more than others, and it's tradition is not a parsimonious use of language, but rather a deliberate expansion of what words pieced can do, what meanings they can evoke, and what sensations they can create. Prose is the form that is, by default, is required to have the discourse it carries be clear and has precise as possible. Poetry and poets are interesting because they are not addressing their experiences or their ideas as linear matters subject to the usual linguistic cause and effect; poetry is interesting because it's a form that gives the inclined writer to interrogate their perceptions in unexpected ways. The poetic styles and approaches and aesthetics one may use vary widely in relative degrees of clarity, difficulty, and tone, but the unifying element is that poetry isn't prose, and serves a purpose other than the mere message delivering that is, at heart, the basic function of competent prose composition
Monday, March 10, 2008
Notes
Rollo May asserts somewhere that pure, sheer, absolute innocence is inviolable, and that until the one that's blessed to be in it's wrap willfully samples knowledge of a grittier world, they will be protected from harm and the ill activities of others. This sounds idealistic, even optimistic to me, and is an aspect of a larger argument -- exactly when did we fall from grace? -- That drips with nostalgia for a more interesting era, before we invented the club and the gun.
The difference between being honest and being naive, maybe. Honesty seems a state of complete awareness about the world, a state where one can peer into the eyes of others and discern real motivations behind the eyes, and in turn trust an instinct that steers them from misadventure and victimization. Honesty is a quality that is earned, a purposeful armor. Being naive, then, would be a choice for being stupid, a refusal to realize materialistic agendas of others who view others not as citizens but as resources to be harvested, stripped, denuded. Is cynicism is but naivety in another guise?
Too encompassing, I think, though it is an easy matter for someone to feign worldliness with sham cynicism: abrupt dismissals of topics with impatience and pat-rants are a handy method of avoiding conversation about things. Call someone naive is a statement about their lack of real-world experience, however it gets defined. It means, though, that some conceptions about the way life works hasn't been tested against actual events and that a learning curve has yet to commence about our subject. The cynic believes the world goes only in one direction, is motivated by the worst instincts, but more times , if we have our archetypes clear, it's a world view that's formed after a run of misfortune. At this point one may call the cynic short sighted, as in not taking other things in consideration, but not naïve. ‘‘Ignorant is a better word, as it becomes a willful act after one has tasted the imprecision of real events. It's a refusal to know more, as opposed to a state of not knowing at all.
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Fiction does not need theory in order to be written. First the fiction is written, the artistic moments, and then theory arises as a consequence of critical reading. Theory is a coherent statement of known and verified material facts, in this case works of fiction, and the formation of theory, if it's to be interesting , comes after the appearance of a the primary source. Postmodern critics and erstwhile deconstructionists seek to have theory on the same level as fiction, literature, but in terms of actual practice, theory is a secondary activity, a delayed reaction to fiction, not a simultaneous occurrence. Changing tastes and fashions have more to do with novels falling off the radar, not an absence of theory. And a philosophy without a theory to begin with is not a philosophy at all, only the same said fashionable chatter. For real philosophies that get dropped into our dirty bin, it's most likely that their systems and suppositions have been supplanted, discredited and sufficiently critiqued into submission, which is just the happenstance of intellectual shelf life.
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All bad writing comes from writers who are writing badly, even normally good writers who've undertaken bad projects. There are many tangible reasons for bad writing, not the least of which is the plain truth that the world is full of bad writers who manage to get their scams published. Poe wanted desperately to be thought of as an intellectual, and tried to limn the metaphysical structure of the cosmos in such horse-shit Meta essays/stories like "Eureka" and “The Philosophy of Furniture". These are turgid meanderings in an involuted prose style that would have been consigned to the dust bin had not Poe more than once hunkered down and committed himself to unblemished storytelling, the work that is the basis of his deserved reputation as an original. I think his reputation would have been made even without his dabbling in theory. He was bad at it.
Individual talent is the issue, not generic determinism. Alan Lightman does quite a good job with his novel The Diagnosis, and the charge of it being "over rated" is a remark worth noting when one has read the book and is ready to give a critique on matters relevant to its execution and substance. Modernism cannot get "less modern", I think, because the modernism seems, in itself, only a tidying up of Romantic impulses before it, as post modernism seems only a refinement, an updating of some essentially modernist tropes and stylistics. Each age takes the conventional set of dreads and sagas and makes their contours conform to the constructed world of the current moment. What counts is the individual talent that becomes the substance worth talking about. Even in a post-modernist arena, subject to slippery laws of equivocation and deferral, the talents that transcend the limits that constrict the names assigned art-making processes and histories are what matter for us.
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David Foster Wallace, a civil and occasionally enthralling wunderkind whose is the leading light in the latest generation of post modernists: certainly, the man can write, though his ability to discern between gleaning the telling detail from a life of observation and mere accumulation weighs his prose into a sagging, soggy bag of entrails, dripping a tasteless juice. Infinite Jest is not the masterpiece his admirers want it to be, but it has moments, pleasures, though it drags around the references as if the author were selling the Britannica door to door. His brief works are much, much better, his best form. Underworld is well worth finishing, Scott, though it does get a little clogged in the middle section --middle - aged spread, I suppose -- but the work does sustain itself in total. There is simply too much brilliant writing in the coming pages to pass up, and one does achieve a sense of the largeness DeLillo imagined with his interlinked stories arranged haphazardly in the second half of the American Century. The bomb, the baseball, the mad artist in the desert painting the old , rusted bombers, the nun scouring for humanity in the South Bronx, the use of the language of professional waste disposal, all become part of a metaphor that makes sense in an associative sense that left me particularly breathless by the last page. I think it's a great post-modern novel, but beyond that, it is a great novel, period. One wishes for the careful trimming and tucking a good editor might have had in making Underworld an even stronger masterpiece, but please, do read ahead.
Saturday, March 1, 2008
more on the God of Mailer's understanding
Since God is creation, and creation includes the constancy of change, it is plausible, feasible, very attractive to regard the notion of God sticking to a Master Plan, and that He micromanages the affairs of each soul that entreats Him in crisis as wishful thinking; the desire to have phenomena explained as being meaningful in a Grand Scheme has us undermining the idea that we are God's servants who, subtly, want to control the definition of a Higher Power as being rigid, fixed, useful for a population's sense of linked continuity , and useful as well for political purposes for those who use the few words of The Bible and have them mean their opposite.
This Static God is at odds with the world He created, which by its nature is sustained by dynamic change. God is subtler, I think, than the cloud-bound bully that millions have been forced to endure from childhood until an accumulation of experience forces one to change, lest one become rigid and fixed as the God they grew up with, without joy and without value to one's fellows.
Friday, February 1, 2008
Memoirs of an Amnesiac
by Clive James
(Picador)
The estimable James, novelist, poet, and critic, has an opinion on everything having to do with culture and the arts, and with Cultural Amnesia , an alphabetized collection of essays on the artists, poets, musicians, writers and film makers he feels we should be conversant in, lest we forget, get lazy, or simply stop giving a good goddamn of what brilliant men and women are trying to do. James does give a damn, fortunate for us, and sallies forth with learned and nuanced barbs, jibes, praise, and digressions that evince a mind that will not stay in one place long. His range is impressive, though some of his views are questionable, given to subjectively defined absolutes, such as his long essay on jazz composer and band leader Duke Ellington; James does an insightful reading of the master's body of work, but goes beyond his kiln expressing his dislike of the modernism that caught up with jazz improvisation, claiming, in effect, that the faster, more bracing innovations of Charlie Parker, Coltrane and Miles Davis destroyed the form. Rather than admit that any vibrant art changes with the younger stalwarts who take up it's practice, James would rather that his beloved idea of jazz, rhythmic, melodic, and danceable, was "dead". This is rather typical of the book, where one enters what they think is a discussion of an intriguing personality only to find that James has a grievance he wants to address, a score to settle. He goes off topic with the topic he selects.
A mind as expansive as James' seems to be wouldn't make such closed-source claim, and one gets the feeling as they progress through his pieces on painting, film, literature and the like that rather than attempt synthesis with his tastes, he's formed a template on each of his subjects, a prepared statement that he can repeat time and again, on command. Elsewhere, he shows a knack for leaving his ostensible subject altogether to consider a tangent that makes for a mystifying transition; his essay on film director Michael Mann turns into a muddied meditation on terrorism and relative morality of fighting the scourge with clandestine means. It's something worth discussing, I suppose, but one feels cheated at these times in not getting what James promised he'd discuss. There are other subjects one puzzles over, such as his inclusion and other wise bright essay on talk show host Dick Cavett; the issues he takes up in Cultural Amnesia’s alphabetized format is to have readers be confronted with cultural figure who are truly crucial in the advancing (or retardation) in the 20th century, but one wonders whether Cavett, despite his wit and skill as an interviewer, is among those who contributions mattered to the degree that James immortalizes him further. Cavett himself might well be embarrassed by the critic’s lavishing.
A particular annoyance is his habit of showing his rather narrow take on some of the arts he covers, especially in his remarks concerning the respective bodies of work from jazz composer and band leader Duke Ellington and saxophonist John Coltrane.
Typically British and marvelously intelligent, James' goal is not just to inform the uninitiated to new persons and their ideas, but also to provoke a conversation, perhaps controversy among the cognoscenti. He does this effectively on a recent excerpt on Duke Ellington; the essay reads well and describes the composer's particular genius for writing three minute swing masterpieces, not a point of contention. He then takes the dimmer view of Ellington's later work, when he was composing and performing longer concert pieces, a denser, less swinging arrangements of colors and moods. James is not happy with The Duke's efforts:
The art form he had done so much to enrich depended, in his view, on its entertainment value. But for the next generation of musicians, the art form depended on sounding like art, with entertainment a secondary consideration at best, and at worst a cowardly concession to be avoided. In a few short years, the most talented of the new jazz musicians succeeded in proving that they were deadly serious. Where there had been ease and joy, now there was difficulty and desperation. Scholars of jazz who take a developmental view would like to call the hiatus a transition, but the word the bebop literati used at the time was all too accurate: It was a revolution.
This isn't an unusual position, since critic Gary Giddins has written at length about why he considers Ellington's legacy resting not on denser, mature work in later years, but instead on the sheer wealth of shorter dance tunes he brought to light; all the invention one might wish in notation and sound are found in the work Ellington performed to keep America dancing. Yet Giddins admits the originality and greatness of much of the larger work, while James is harbors a resentment against the post-swing developments of Bebop complexity and post-Bop envelope-tearing improvisation of John Coltrane. Pretty much implying that one of the greatest betrayals against art was that of a younger generation of improvisers seeking ot expand jazz's lexicon, James cites with endearing relish the great Ben Webster's magical tenor work for Ellington against the wild man arrogance of a younger John Coltrane:
There is nothing to be gained by trying to evoke the full, face-freezing, gut-churning hideosity of all the things Coltrane does that Webster doesn't. But there might be some value in pointing out what Coltrane doesn't do that Webster does. Coltrane's instrument is likewise a tenor sax, but there the resemblance ends. In fact, it is only recognizable as a tenor because it can't be a bass or a soprano: It has a tenor's range but nothing of the voice that Hawkins discovered for it and Webster focused and deepened. There is not a phrase that asks to be remembered except as a lesion to the inner ear, and the only purpose of the repetitions is to prove that what might have been charitably dismissed as an accident was actually meant. Shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals. Above all, and beyond all, there is no end to it. There is no reason except imminent death for the cacophonous parade to stop. The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: Supreme mastery of technique has led him to this charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can. The likelihood that nobody else would want to is not considered.
Jazz ought to have stood still.
The most noticeable element of this essay is Clive James' resentment that people and things change over time. Eloquent as he is about Ellington's great early period, there is less a convincing argument for the superiority of swing over more experimental strains of jazz than it is a barely contained lament for lost, youthful elan. As has been said already, the rhythms of the world changed after WW2, and the kids were taken with rock and roll's back beat rather than what was going on with jazz. Being able to swing was besides the point; the children of the Ellington era audience wanted to rock. The jubilation at the Ellington "comeback" concert was a good and great thing--good art should always cause excitement--but it didn't translate into the fabled return of the Big Band/Swing era. It's doubtful Ellington himself would have desired a return to the Golden Days, as he was far too interested in the new music he was composing and performing with his Orchestra. For such a bright fellow, Clive James has the queer notion that art, jazz in this instance, must not progress some vague peak of expression; band leaders should keep their writing chops focused on producing limitless three minute dance tunes, and soloists have to remain sweet, lyrical, and brief.
Art is only interesting in that it evolves with successive generations of players, and it would be a strange and stale reading world if novelists adhered to perceived rules from the eighteenth and nineteenth century, or if film makers eschewed sound and color. Jazz would be a predictable shtick rather than a creative act.The truth of this is that audiences were turning away from jazz in general.Dispite whatever historicist arguements advanced pitting traditionalists against experimenters in order to explain jazz's declining audience,both Ellington and Coltrane were both playing to diminished fan bases;the record buying public had gotten younger and leaned towards a simpler rhythm and blues style. This was true among black audiences, whose generational switch to Ray Charles, and Rufus Thomas influenced white audiences, resulting in the eventual rise of rock and roll. Everything gets displaced from the center. Clive James objects to both Ellington's widening ambition with his composing, recording and performance of longer concert pieces and to Coltrane's redefining what jazz improvisation could sound like. He seeks to locate the cause and the instance when jazz ceased being the world's all purpose sound track, and for as sweetly as he writes, seeks to attach blame. He forgets a crucial fact of being alive; things change
James is at his best when he finds the clay feet of cultural icon and then wields a sure hammer to smash some other wise sensitive toes, especially in the case of German Communist playwright Bertolt Brecht. Supported by the government to write his plays and poetry in furtherance of the revolution, James takes delight in detailing the jarring contrast between the man’s image, that as an artist who was “of the people”, and his lifestyle” which, as he describes it, was as bourgeois as any cigar chomping capitalist he might excoriate in his art. Brecht, though, was mindful to keep up appearances; he apparently had the tailor who made his silk shirts manufacture them so that they looked like the rough textured denim that was the requisite dress of proletariat intellectuals. As for Brecht’s art, which was considerable and deserving of analysis on it’s own terms, James skirts the issue altogether with summary dismissals worthy of Paul Johnson (Intellectuals) and dwells on the gossip, the dirt. In that regard, Cultural Amnesia is deep dish indeed.
Saturday, January 26, 2008
Why stop at three?
Faulkner, Hemingway and Fitzgerald are considered in many an old-school clique to be the triumvirate of American Writers, to which I ask, reeling against the noxious habit of limiting “best of” lists to no more than three, why stop with three? The thinking is that writing in this country soured and became an insufferable murk of confessionalism and tone deaf experimentation in the last half of the twentieth century. Think what you may, but the second half of this century produced a lot of major talent who have produced or are producing respective bodies of work that require the passionate reading and argument our already named personal bests have received. Harold Bloom not withstanding, our canon is expanding with new and achingly good writers, and one would think that the male majority so far discussed will have relinquish room on their uppermost tier.
On the point, Fitzgerald will make the cut because so few writers, then or to the current time, have managed the breathless lyricism contained in the "The Great Gatsby" or "Tender Is the Night". Some have come close, and I'm thinking of the resonating sentences from Scott Spencer's "Endless Love" or some keenly rendered pages in Updike's "Rabbit" quartet, but Fitzgerald at best gave us small masterpieces that gave an sharp view of the time.
Hemingway, I thinks, merits a permanent place on any greatest list because his style, at best, was lean, and his sentences , constructed the way they are, convey pages of buried turmoil, lost hope, small idealism, bravery to pursue another day , to shoulder one's burden honorably. "In Our Time" and "The Sun Also Rises" accomplish this. At his worse, though, Hemingway was a boozing sentimentalist whose writing lapsed into repetitious self-parody, as we have in "Island in the Stream" or "A Movable Feast". But I am grateful for the good work he did.
London, I'm afraid, pales for me personally. He was a lot of fun for me when I was growing up, yearning for adventure in Catholic School. But later, in college, closer and more seasoned readings had him sounding rushed, awkward. The admixture of Marx and Darwin that seasoned his writings seem showed a straining idealism that was not redeemed by a modifying style. I’ve just re-read "John Barleycorn” and the book is ridiculous. It seemed like so much bluster and blarney toward the end , after vividly recalls his disastrous drinking career, that armed with this new self awareness, he would drink responsibly, that he was in fact only temporarily an alcoholic.
I doubt the record shows that London cured himself.
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Trickle Down Post Modernism
One confronts the average man's working definition of modern art as being the sort of difficult object, whether visual art or literary text, as being something that's open ended into which the viewer can infer any significance . This works fairly well as a definition in a nut shell, accurate in the intentions of what the host of self-referential aesthetics enable us (or forces us, rather) to do if we the audience are to make the effort to bear witness worth the sustained use of our senses. This wreaks havoc with conservative aesthetes who think art should be a giver of laws instead of platforms from which one constructs their multi-faceted paradigms and (in a phrase) deconstructions. One might sympathize with the law givers for reasons having not a bit to do with maintaining and orderly and chaste life, but with the particular tedium of modernist (nee post modernist) strategies. The self-referencing of the medium, the placing of format as the subject of the work ceases to be an interrogation of played out narrative explanations as to what experience leads to and becomes a cloying club of knowing gestures, a wink, a nod, an elbow in the ribs, the patois of yet another privileged group suffocating in their theoretical enclosures.
A key reason for postmodern writing was because reality itself had gotten too strange, obtuse, inflated with its own self-justification for writers to try and be more fantastic than. Cited before, especially from the writings of Brit critic Tony Tanner in his book City of Words, the only way for literature to thrive and reasonably to a fantastic reality is to attempt and be even more fantastic, to shed itself of the need to be faithful to reality and to become even more aware of how fantastic language and technology have caught up with and surpassed conventional fiction's ability to penetrate it's center.
Did Derrida and Barthes actually "define", or address at all the rather slippery notion of "post modernism"? Seems more appropriate to say that they, in their respective inquiries, high lighted some real conceptual issues in Continental philosophy, and created another layer of jargon that made an industry out of what, in retrospect, seems a small addition to our ways of thinking about writing.
Both were inspirations to a generation of literary critics who wanted some Gallic gravitas in their corner so they may speak philosophically with out actually philosophers--or so they may extend their embedded existentialism with into the world with a bright and shiny new paint job--but my reading of them didn't come across the word "post modern". I may be wrong.
Siding with Jacob for a moment, the act of preferring one writer over another with regard to value , style and impact constitutes a choice, choice being a decision. This personal canon-formation, a nascent writers' set of examples of what writing can be, ought to be, and where writing ought to grow from, is obviously a set of choices, albeit convoluted.
Likewise, I doubt that there's a moment in a writer's activity when they are not aware of the shadow of past genius that is cast over them, the Greats--however defined--that they aim their work away from, toward an originality, and maybe genius,that is their own. The anxiety of influence, courtesy of Harold Bloom, is almost an observable dynamic in sensible study. The scholar, in turn, only uncovers who the influences are in the course of credible research, but does not choose them. The temptation may be great, but the theorist/scholar/critic can speculate only so much in their interpretation of real data.
Writers begin with private views and prejudices about the given world, perceived through their eyes, their sets of experience, but an aim of writing to begin with is too seek consensus: it's the shock of recognition, among other things, that gives the aesthetic satisfaction with a narrative that's rendered well. Private projects don't stay private: they enter into the reading world in an attempt to give us more ideas, fixtures, metaphors to help us think about ourselves . That is all, I think, that literature can ever promise, the work itself. Criticism, like literature proper, is hardly a fixed set of standards, a Biblical claim of absolute, final totality. It's an activity that's adjacent, secondary to, literature, and at best can act as an aid to the reader seeking to underline salient elements that dovetail, enlarge, or illuminate the problematic nature of experience that won't, and cannot, tell you what it means.
The artist DOESN'T choose his influences, rather, he finds himself chosen by them.
Too flat an absolute a statement to be useful here: Bloom's refinement of a dialectical model to describe, in sweeping, how influence forms new writing is spectacular, but he over reaches, and over states his case with an insistence that influences choose the writer rather than the other way around. This is a deconstructive reversal that's cuter than it is precise. It's half the tale. Better to have it half and half: the writer certainly exercises choice so far as who they opt to read through their lifetime, and makes judgments based on their reading as to who matters more than others in the forming of a idiosyncratic aesthetic. The writer, as reader, is not a passive agent here.
A writer "being chosen" by their influences makes more sense, I think, when he place the statement at the moment when the writer is actually writing, when inspiration, imagination, and whatever other resources a writer has at their behest combine, churn, swirl, and combine in ways during the drafting that could result in interesting, original work. Process is a word that's horribly abused and bled of meaning these days, but here it's appropriate. Creative process is a strange ritual unique to each writer, an idiosyncratic set of habits that are the basis of the discipline needed for a writer to actually stay seated long enough to produce and bring the work through all it's stages. It's the mysterious clutch of protocols that unleash the influences into the creative roil , and it's here, during these churning, erupting , fever pitched sessions where a writer looses the ability to control the influences about them, large and small, whether from their personal reading, or from the larger culture: it's here where the writer is literally "chosen" by the influences and styles about them and literally have their style defined and guided. So it seems to me, anyway. For the force of the unconscious in the work, of course: memories emerge, scenarios spontaneously form, and arcs are drafted and written out to link disparate sketches on a narrative spine that rapidly becomes a fleshed-out work.
But the steps to get to the point where writing actually commences, I believe, begins with some conscious choices the writer makes in the world that's given to them: deciding what has value among the given--whatever we mean by that-- constitutes choice. What happens beyond that is what becomes problematic, and subject to niggling disagreement. But conscious human agency is not
The self is earned, not invented, some might say, but I might say that the thing which is earned is now less constructed. Well and good, but someone had to invent the criteria of a "self" that's awarded to someone who's "earned" the appellation. A gift wrapped box of "self" does not pop into being at some ceremony one attends on graduation day. Something that is earned needs to have a definition, however slippery or subjective, and that entails construction, more choices to be made in the inventing of a generalized "self".Anything that can be "earned", abstract or material, first needs to be invented.
Anything that is "constructed" is thereby real, whether abstract or material. A constructed entity is operative and has an effect on one's conduct through a problematic sphere. If a self is "constructed", it has dimensions, it has definable limits, it has conditions that are a premise a personality is initially based and layered upon with experience. If it can do that, it's as real as anything as anything you might throw a tin can at. A thing's existence, then, is understood as the actuality of its essence. Allen Ginsberg, speaking of a conversations he had with his mentor William Carlos Williams, gave a definition of Modernist perception as being that "...the thing itself is it's own adequate symbol..." Further, there is the strong suggestion that there is no God in this scheme, that the "thing" being perceived did not require an ideal type, or any other kind of Ideal superstructure in order to exist, to be. Ginsberg, and later poet/critic Jerome Rothenberg, gave a suggestion that this was Western writing's back-door approach toward more open structures, to decidedly un-systematized philosophies, witnessed in the Beat flirtations with Zen. This brings us knocking at the door of an extended Modernist approach--a style in which avant-garde procedure became an ironic protocol to literary writing--that became, in some critical finessing, post modernism.
How could the beliefs be useful if they weren't true? I could have many false beliefs that are coherent, but of what use would they be? The test of any theory is in how it works, and the gauge for how it works is in whether it's employment is of observable benefit to others, i.e., does it give some one and their community a coherent and workable structure to live life, to promote what would locally be defined as the Greater Good, and likewise provide a means for helping a community absorb change, how however and why ever it happens. The test of whether a theory is useful, if I remember my William James, is whether such a methodology leads one to a truth that's germane in situ. The usefulness of a theory is judged by how it side steps the confounding and conflating "proofs" of what constitutes Truth, with the big "t", and instead enables one to find something that works in mending the immediate situation.
Speaking for myself, Lost in the Funhouse is nicely written gripe in which author John Barth, flowing of pen, voices a buried resentment against his own reading habits, a collection that's kind of dull: he voices the complaint against the dreary optimism of modernism, the same dull complaints, in fact, and yet wishes that had been him, rather than Joyce or Faulkner at the key moments of break-through novel writing: a Bloomian moment with his career, with his writing desperately bloated books, his "literature of exhaustion" to demonstrate how much more radical he would have been had he the power to intervene in recent literary history, and also a classic example of the School of Resentment. Barth, I think, resents his teachers, or at least writes like he does.. His work, though important in the postmodern genre, is among it's dullest. The Floating Opera, though, is a masterpiece: brief, funny, unusual, unselfconscious in it's re-formation of the novel. Many readers would find Infinite Jest too hard to follow because they are reared on typical mainstream fiction that sticks to strict, world -shrinking genres. The Modernists we've mentioned here, if in passing, are Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Faulkner, and Beckett, among others. Faulkner was the only one who produced works resembling mainstream entertainments, with As I Lay Dying and Intruder in the Dust, yet even these less consequential efforts in his body of work are daunting for the vaguely referenced "general reader".
It's a tenet of Modernism that in order for writing to be truly contemporary, it must achieve a level of difficulty that allegedly force the reader to reassess their take on experience. Impenetrability was encouraged, so far as the Modernist project encouraged any specific tendency among its early practitioners. "Make it new" was a chief slogan at the height of the Modernist literary movement, courtesy of Karl Shapiro, and the works, assimilated into academic study, don't comprise the sort of literature that makes for lazy readers. Rather, it's techniques set up the ideal reader, say, "reared in the Modernist style", to grasp the manner and aim of a Postmodern writing, which again, I believe, in it's best expression, is an extension of the Modernist agenda, albeit tweaked about the edges with a bankrupt critical apparatus. The theory cannot keep apace with the actual imaginative writing: sorry, but many theorists seem like bright children adept at taking things apart who cannot quite put them back together in anyway that's useful, meaningful.
The accurate statement about Modernists, in general, is that theirs wasn't a search for the single, unifying meaning, the single, capital "Truth", but rather that human beings have a capacity of breaking old habits and developing new ways of seeing the world outside their skins. There is a notion that that writing, art, architecture, film, et al, can be used in unique ways to bring about new perceptions of the addressed world, new ideas about human experience, rather than finding the one unchanging Truth, the single metaphysical road sign. Modernism operates, in a real and traceable sense, within the the concept of the Pluralistic Universe, addressed by William James.
There is truth out there, goes the assumption, but it's less about an absolute dogma about an underlining definition than it is about how the human personality comes to perceive and form a sense of place and belonging within it. The search for singular Truth was a vain task, noted by Eliot, Pound and others: at it's best expression, Modernism remains an invigorating vehicle , a keen investigative sense. Postmodernism searches for fallacies, so called, but we're stuck with the old binary oppositions that deconstructionists find offensive: we cannot have a definable sense of what is false unless we give ourselves over to an idea of what it opposes, the truth, or truths, plural. By default, postmodernism continues the Modernist project for what is useful in our descriptions. An extension of Modernism, in other words.
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Norman Mailer's Presentation of Self
Saturday, November 10, 2007
NORMAN MAILER IS DEAD
--Norman Mailer, Advertisements for Myself
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Ray Bradbury
Others have been less believable, as in the case of Jim Thompson, who is genuinely creepy and entertaining, but lacks music and wit, or James Ellroy, who mistakes intensity and encroaching unreadability as requirements of writerly worth. Elmore Leonard resists the temptation to let critics and upper echelon authors seduce him with praise and a general invitation to take his work more seriously;
he is the kind of professional you most admire, someone who continues the work, writing one brilliantly middlebrow entertainment after another.
Would that a few of our "serious" authors adopted the work ethic and wasted fewer pages and less of our time with their reputations.Some writers literally beg to be taken seriously; they implore us to read their novels deeply and let the philosophical conflicts resonate long and loudly. Has there been a John Le Carre novel that hasn't been compared to the world weary speculations of Graham Green's ambivalent attaches and minor couriers wrestling with the issue of Good versus Evil under a shadow of a silent Catholic God? Has there been a discussion among fans of James Lee Burke that didn't slip into a tangent about the the American Southern tradition , with Faulkner's and Flannery O'Conner's names repeatedly dropped like greasy coins? It's not such a bad thing, though. Le Carre and Burke are fine writers and do manage to provide a complex settings where the moral battles take place in their work. Their presence in the high rankings needn't make anyone squeamish.
Stephen King, try as he might, will not remain on the top shelf no matter who places him there. He is the master of premise , one great and magnificent idea after another, but then he goes soft in the head and rushes through his novels with flights of illogic that even excusing them as part of a horror novel's delirious nature cannot excuse the slip shod execution.
Bradbury? He is very good, sometimes even brilliant in all his amazing convolutions, and I think it would do everyone a great favor to not burden him with the weight of "literary importance". There are issues and morals and philosophies galore slithering through the paragraphs of his stories and novels, but Bradbury above all else is fun to read. I think it's enough that he be admired as craftsman with a slight touch of the poet. Bradbury , however sage we might wish him to be, never shed the basic rule of all professional writers go by; you need to be read by an audience that wants to be entertained.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Some short essays
A sampling of some of the smarter things I've written in various internet forums. As with this blog, it's a vanity excercise. At least it isn't a felony.-tb
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Money’s Worth from The Movies
I generally don't walk out of films, not so much hoping that they'll get better and more with the stubbornness of someone who is going to get their ten dollars worth of movie not matter how badly it blows.
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Naïveté and Cynicism
Rollo May asserts somewhere that pure, sheer, absolute innocence is inviolable, and that until the one that's blessed to be in it's wrap willfully samples knowledge of a grittier world, they will be protected from harm and the ill activities of others. This sounds idealistic, even optimistic to me, and is an aspect of a larger argument -- exactly when did we fall from grace? -- that drips with a nostalgia for better days, before we invented the club and the gun.
The difference between being honest and being naive, maybe. Honesty seems a state of complete awareness about the world, a state where one can peer into the eyes of others and discern real motivations behind the eyes, and in turn trust an instinct that steers them from misadventure and victimization. Honesty is a quality that is earned, a purposeful armor. Being naive, then, would be a choice for being stupid, a refusal to realize materialistic agendas of others who view others not as citizens but as resources to be harvested, stripped, denuded.
Is cynicism is but naivite in another guise? Too encompassing, I think, though it is an easy matter for someone to feign worldliness with sham cynicism: abrupt dismissals of topics with impatience and pat-rants are a handy method of avoiding conversation about things. I don't think they are the same thing, though a cynical person can be naive as well. But same said person may also have a wealth of real world experiences. Saying that someone naive is a statement about their lack of real-world experience, however it gets defined. It means, though, that some conceptions about the way life works hasn't been tested against actual events and that a learning curve has yet to commence about our subject. The cynic believes the world goes only in one direction, is motivated by the worst instincts, but more times , if we have our archetypes clear, it's a world view that's formed after a run of misfortune. At this point one may call the cynic short sighted, as in not taking other things in consideration, but not naive. Ignorant is a better word, as it becomes a willful act after one has tasted the imprecision of real events. It's a refusal to know more, as opposed to a state of not knowing at all.
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Getting It, Telling it Like It Ought to Be
Pointing to the phrase or in others words directing ones attention to it is all that is necessary to ascertain its meaning. This is called "reading", a word that is still useful, and the act of reading is itself an act of interpretation. All reading is an interpretive act. The point, though, is when interpretation ceases to be useful to any advance degree and instead exists as an activity meant to amuse the Idle Clever.
In common parlance such special phrases are termed "literal". They have the meaning that is contained in them. One does not need to go outside of them to construct meaning.
Literal or not, one needs to gauge the words in a sentence against the world the words are assigned to describe. Language, being a living activity that functions with a mind and consciousness that must adapt cautiously, in some fashion, to the constantly changing state of Nature, cannot contain meaning that is self-disclosing, absent at least a superficial gauging against the world. Even at the "simplest" levels, a reader constantly goes outside the words themselves to judge their veracity, their usefulness, and hence, interprets the words to come to what sentences mean, in their contexts and their subtler permutations. Interpretation isn't always the circuitous method of the academic, or the specialist: the activity is instinctual, I think, as we use language and change language to accommodate changing requirements and conditions.
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Style, Writing Devices, and the Will to Write Badly
Fiction does not need theory in order to be written. First the fiction is written, the artistic moments, and then theory, or theories, arises as a consequence of critical reading. Theory is a coherent statement of known and verified material facts, in this case works of fiction, and the formation of theory, if it's to be interesting , comes after the appearance of a the primary source. Many pomo critics and erstwhile deconstructionists seek to have theory on the same level as fiction, literature, but in terms of actual practice, theory is a secondary activity, a delayed reaction to fiction, not a simultaneous occurrence.
Changing tastes and fashions have more to do with novels falling off the radar, not an absence of theory. And a philosophy without a theory to begin with is not a philosophy at all, only the same said fashionable chatter. For real philosophies that get dropped into our dirty bin, it's most likely that their systems and suppositions have been supplanted, discredited and sufficiently critiqued into submission, which is just the happenstance of intellectual shelf life.
All bad writing comes from writers who are writing badly, even normally good writers who've undertaken bad projects. There are many tangible reasons for bad writing, not the least of which is the plain truth that the world is full of bad writers who manage to get their scams published. Modernism cannot get "less modern", I think, because the modernism seems, in itself, only a tidying up of Romantic impulses before it, as post modernism seems only a refinement, an updating of some essentially modernist tropes and stylistics. Each age takes the conventional set of dreads and sagas and makes their contours conform to the constructed world of the current moment. What counts is the individual talent that becomes the substance worth talking about.
Even in a post-modernist arena, subject to its slippery laws of equivocation and deferral, the talents that transcend the limits that constrict the names assigned art-making processes and histories are what matter for us. The inclination to have a sharp dividing line between modern / post-modern is arbitrary to the degree that it illustrates the alleged arbitrariness that POMO theorists routinely decry. The distinctions have their merit, and it's important that they are made, but it is in fact a dead end to harp on matters that are distractions and amount to filibustering. The book in question needs to be read before a nominal reader can make a judgment that's useful for discussion. There is nothing wrong with deciding to write in an older mode... so that its tensions may be reinvaded.... Unfortunately this novel fails to do this. In fact it does accomplish this fete cogently, and seamlessly traces the similarities in the matter of Bill Chalmers' nameless malaise in Alan Lightman’s deadpan comedy The Diagnosis and the churning tragedy of Socrates and the assassin Anytus, and it provides that sense of loss that is still a real and inconsolable ache in the heart across the centuries, the tropes, and the communicating technologies. At heart, this is the endeavor of either an avowedly modernist or post modernist: what lies beyond our names for things and their constructions are only the truth of our own instinctual humanity, stripped of language that makes the everyday endurable as a grand narrative we're part of.
Lightman fixes technology as part of the narrative devices that lend the hush of meaning to the daily traffic, and here, beyond high lighting the events of a day life going wrong for routine comedy, links it with habits of a supposedly usable past whose reputed 'purity' of process and perception were no less fallible than the lens of the current period.
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The Atlantic a month ago ran a pig-headed bit of snark-slamming prog rock as "The Whitest Music Ever, "a catchy bit of clickbait...