Friday, July 10, 2020

LITERATURE AND "TRUTHINESS" and some various notes on two many subjects


The generation of  New Journalist  who emerged during the 60s and 70s were indeed post modern in their coverage of events-- whether the writers themselves were modernists in sensibility is irrelevant to work they did. Post modernism is defined, in the usual quarters, as the eclectic jumbling of categories and styles, the blurring of distinctions of generic distinctions, and transgressive of boundaries that were formerly considered sacrosanct, immutable, unyielding.  Now that post modernism is as old hat and near useless as anything other than an historical place holder for a series of shallow ideas, we find that the what was called the postmodern gesture in the work of the hungry journalists, that of treating their subjects and their contexts as though they were part of an explicitly literary, i.e., fictional framework, is important chiefly because it availed the writers a means to write a compelling prose. Less important than compelling readers to few the world differently—Ezra Pound’s assignment for all the Modernists—the importance of the books the style produced lies in their adherence to some rather conventional ideas of what constituted a higher quality of writing.
The work evident in Armies of the Night, The White Album, In Cold Blood, The Electric Cool Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Los Vegas, and other sublime and less-sublime examples of the approach fulfill what's come to be the givens, and even clichés of post-modern writing. It's not unreasonable to think that writers normally considered Modernists would take what's thought to be a post modern strategy in order to achieve perspective that normally form would make more difficult. Carrying about the matters involved in a story hardly disqualifies a work, or a writer, from being post modernists. The cool, ironic stance that is supposed to problematize and “make strange” the conditions of narrative formation seems more as a pose critics who have a curious aversion for writing that is meant to illicit a galvanizing reader response: it sounds more like a good rap than good reasoning.
I do not have a problem of with the conflation of the emotional with the rational, since that is the point of writing and making an argument in the first place. One may use whatever the current wisdom insists are formal means, or one may engage the current species of avant-garde slash and burn in order to make their case, but the point is coming to an end that somehow makes a point, or has created an enlarged and vivid sense of the studied particulars.
In any event, New Journalists never as a group never referred to themselves as "post modernists", and the style, now faded somewhat, has been absorbed by the culture as an accepted style for very mainstream consumption. The news story-literary-narrative scarcely raises an eyebrow today. But the judgment of history has these writers, nominal modernists perhaps, performing the post modern gesture, interrogating the margins of genre definitions, and making impossible to regard news reporting quite the same again. The conflation of reason and reason is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in, whatever slippery pronoun you desire to append it with. Being neither philosophy, nor science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think needs to be accomplished.
The attack on modernisms' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had.
Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before.
I agree with Fred Jamieson on the point that Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project. Writing is an argument so far that the central impulse to write at all is to make a series of statements about oneself and one's experiences in the world , and reach a satisfying conclusion, some "meaning" at the end of the discourse.  Barthes notes that  the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not an static event, but a fluid movement through time that a writer's perception of changes moment to moment, text to text. The argument is thus not one sided, but multi-vocal, complex, interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves within in the writer and onto their pages, in the extension of characters, plot, instances, local, active bits of imagining where the goal, is finally to attempt to resolve contradiction, arrive at something absolute in a universe that seems to permanently with hold its Absolute Meanings during this lifetime, and to achieve, somehow, some peace, some satisfaction. But no: the argument persists, the imagination soars, the old certainties cannot contain either the unset of new perceptions, nor can sooth a writer's restlessness. In literature, the conflation continues, reason and emotion color each other, the eyes shut, hoping for vision, a clear path, but the writing continues, the sorting through of experience continues, the unease continues, the world changes radically and not at all. That post modernism's over all mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.
Lew Welch said that you don’t write unless you can’t do anything else; writers are powerless to write in ways other than the urge dictates, regardless of what crit


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More than ever, I believe The Fountainhead, to be a dangerous book. This may worry a point already mulled over here, but one cannot just pass-off this book's implicit assertion that mass destruction is justified in the name of "higher values" whose substance supposedly overrides the need to respect and protect human life. It is only irrational romanticism and literary convenience that Rand softens Roark's destruction with an empty structure.  Roark is the hero of all those ruggedly individualist libertarians whose opinions sound as oddly uniform as Communist Party USA position paper, but shed of the that odious veil, he's pretty much the prototype of the perplexed goons and gangsters whose lives are committed to making the world notice them by the most miserable means available. 

I've little problem with "enlightened self interest", a general concept where one pursues their own agenda with it in mind that their goal is not just to fulfil their own wants and needs but also benefit others in doing so. One "does well by doing good" when they realize that their rights are coherent and effectively applicable in larger social and cultural contexts. 

Rand lops off the "enlightened" part and effectively tries to make an intellectual defense for adults, males for the most part, to act like three years olds and essentially demand that the world bow to their self-defined genius and all the pulverizing engineering it takes for said genius to be foisted on the community. It's a childish view, the mewling of King Baby, and it is, frankly, solipsistic to a degree that approaches a species of mental illness. 
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The existence of God can neither be proven nor proven in absolute terms, and is that belief in either proposition requires an act of faith, faith being a firm belief in something for which there is no proof . The acts of faith, in William James' estimation in his writing in Varieties of Religious Experience, is the relevant quality to watch; if the belief and the dictates the faith espouse result in helping its membership adjust, adapt and find purpose in a world that subjects them to all sorts of catastrophes and seeming cruelties, then that is reason enough . The existence or non-existence of God comes out of the equation: we look at the results of the faith, and see how it's contributed to the General Good; the description and standard can apply to believer and atheist alike.
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Noted pop musicians in twelve step meetings often seem bursting at the seams to tell other members what it is they do and what their latest projects are. It's a testimony to most of them that they contain the impulse to brag and speak in a general way. Bill Wilson had the same dilemma, in terms of keeping his vanity in check, and wrote about in in both the book Alcoholics Anonymous and The Twelve Steps and the Twelve Traditions. It was a fitting thing for me to read that the man who warned against being the AA big shot had to live up to his own advice.

Eric Clapton's celebrity doubtlessly shields him from any blow back concerning his well publicized battles with booze and the needle , mostly because the public is quick to forgive those who've gone astray but who have gone to well-publicized lengths to clean up their side of the street. We see the same thing happening with Robert Downey, a repeat screw up and jailbird who a few years ago just made it a point to work as much as he could, prove himself reliable, bondable, professional. It paid off, as he more or less owned last summer's box office. In their cases, celebrity might work as a sufficient substitute for the lack of anonymity, but it comes down, again, to whether the famed addict or alkie has willingness to change their lives. Talent figures into it as well; fans just want Clapton to play blues guitar and prefer to see Downey peform well in good roles, and are willing to suspend their misgivings over their bad habits provided the entertainers do just that, entertain.

Wednesday, July 1, 2020

YES, JACK WEBB WAS A FILM DIRECTOR. A GOOD ONE

RIP Los Angles: Celebrity Grave: "Dragnet" Actor & Producer Jack ...
For Jack Webb, the man was a right-wing law and order, probable homophobic, anti-commie, racist scum-slinger, but he had chops as a filmmaker, as someone capable of telling a compelling, compulsively watchable bit of propaganda. I wrote a paper on him in college which compared him to classic auteur hero Sam Fuller, mainly for the purpose that Webb, in his movies, met and exceeded the qualification required to be a film “AUTHOR” and hence the single creator of a movie.

He had a world view that was clear and consistent across his films. He had an identifiable visual style that he applied to specific genre conventions, such as crime drama, war comedy and musical noir. His characters were variations on a number of types that served to make the plot move along, such as the tough but fair cop, the loyal but naive sidekick, the cynical but honest reporter and the glamorous but troubled singer. The narratives contained a set of values that were threatened and needed to be protected, such as patriotism, justice, family and tradition. And there was an obvious morality that was never far under the surface in his story-lines, where good always triumphed over evil and order always prevailed over chaos.I chose Webb because I always found Fuller a bit arch and melodramatic, while Webb had a certain charm and flair that made his films more appealing to me. So why compare him to someone who is bit cornball and stiff but with such a righteous sense of self-confident style that you cannot help but watch his films over and over? Because I wanted to challenge the conventional wisdom that Fuller was the essential American auteur and Webb was just a hack who made propaganda for the establishment. I wanted to show that Webb had his own artistic vision and expression that deserved recognition and respect.

I’ve said more than once that Webb is the auteur critics never seemed to talk about. I wonder if anyone’s done a study of his film work, such as 30 (1959), The D.I. (1957), Pete Kelly’s Blues (1955), The Last Time I Saw Archie (1961), Dragnet (1954), Dragnet 1966 (1969) and The LSD Story (1967). Not a lot of feature films, but more than Norman Mailer, who got a hefty study from a film scholar a few years ago. And though one is never going to get past what is unintentionally comic in the films, such as the wooden acting, the cheesy dialogue and the dated effects, there are times when I just shook my head after watching The D.I. or 30 realizing that I just watched a movie made by a man in full expressive control of his talent."


POUTY BOY, EMPTY PACKAGE

Andy Summers Dishes About Being an 'Asshole,' Sting and the ...
Despise Sting the solo artist; art-poseur whose only gravitas is his sense of self importance. The Police were a superb hit singles band buoyed by two other excellent musicians, Miles Copeland and Andy Summers , who were more to shape the band's sound than Sting, consigned, wisely, to lead vocals, which he did rather well, and lyrics, which were poetic without being arch. 

There is always something to take these guys to task but their records from the time are on a very short list of those releases that don't embarrass the fuck out of me. And they had a short life, leaving a mere 5 studio albums for fans and new fans to glory in.  

Their oeuvre is a nice, tight package of high quality rock and roll for middlebrows such as myself. Unconstrained by the other two in the band, Sting nee Gordon Sumner might have royally made their work of big ideas crushing cute by fragile pop concepts. 

They died young before they could turn into grotesque, U2-esque parodies of themselves, full of themselves and corn syrup in equal amounts. And with out the frameworks provided by Copeland and Summers, which is to say the limits his ego needed, Sting has the most flush-able body of work by a solo artist who was formerly in a great band, surpassing even Phil Collins. Collins, at least, was a good drummer and could play some intricate stuff. As a bassist, Sting played his parts like they  it was an interferring with his best moves with the microphone.


Wednesday, June 17, 2020

O'Connor

File:Robie with Flannery 1947.jpg
photo: Charles Cameron Macauley
Paul Elie has an essay on Flannery O'Connor in The New Yorker that asks the pertinent question as to how racist the late writer happened to be. It's a matter worth investigating and doing quality speculation about, since O'Connor, a certified icon of 20th Century American literature, died young, at ate 39, and had published only three books in her lifetime, Wise Blood ,A Good Man is Hard to Find, and Everything That Rises Must Converge.  An interesting and illuminating read on a brilliant writer who died much, much too young.  As it turns out, scholars have uncovered , is that Flannery O'Connor is a problematic writer for her fans due to racist attitudes that appeared in her juvenilia , and for detectable traces of bigotry through out her life as novelist, short story writer and essayist. There's a limit to the amount of shock one ought to have because of these unpleasant facts about her, and anyone recoiling with disgust because O'Connor proves to be very human despite very great talent , with very human prejudices are, I think, not lovers of literature at all. 

I resist and oppose on principle the idea of regarding poets, novelists, playwrights or any artist at all as saints, philosophers or messengers of moral instruction; beyond the work itself, I regard their lives as subject to the same slings and arrows we all face and have to surmount, and regard their creation of art as having the sole duty of expressing their experience in the world with metaphors, symbols, whatever means and style it requires to make that expression memorable. It's a good idea to judge artists on what they share with the rest of the world, that they are part of the vaguely defined mass of "suffering humanity", but it's unwise, stupid even, to use what offends one's sense of moral order , the sins of the bohemian , as grounds to condemn and dismiss. Doing just that makes me ponder why many would bother reading literature at all.

What is the writer, the poet, the painter, the musician has to express is always imperfect and contains things and issues that reveal the creator's skull contains ideas, whims and notions that are , in fact , ugly. O'Connor, a Southerner, a spiritually restless fallen Catholic who doubted the perfected the redemption of humanity through any measure of grace, and more than likely politically conservative, is , as the saying goes, a product of her time and the surrounding cultural and regional connections around her as she developed as a person and as a writer. 

To refer back to Flaubert, we need to trust the tale, not the teller, more or less because the facts of a writer's life prevents too many readers, struggling with their own issues, from reading the work and getting the benefit literature provides. I bear in mind is that O'Connor died when she was 39, had published only three books before her death; we were robbed of the chance to read a longer lifetime of books that would have revealed, more than likely, an increasingly broadened and nuanced way of investigating fictional territories. By all means examine the life and investigate the real energies in a person's life that a scribe brings to their narratives, but we ought to examine to understand the problems of genius, not to condemn it.