If you've landed on this page, chances are a search engine or an internal link has delivered you. I forgot to post a notice here that I've upgraded to Movable type, but left the previous Greymatter version intact for historical reference. Until now, that is.
I've moved, and changed. For the latest entries, try this Public Address 2.0
Once in a while, a sentence so startling in its clarity just stops me in my tracks. I can’t stop thinking about it. It usually needn’t have anything to do with its context, or the subject of the writing that contains it. The reference is often outside, anagogical, and to a certain extent what holds me is nothing less than pure linguistic clarity. Today, it was this sentence from an article in the Spectator:
It is easy to move, hard to change.
The alpine plants of Scotland will not evolve to cope with our warming weather: they will simply migrate up the mountains until they become extinct.
Moving wasn’t easy. Succumbing to divorce complicated it significantly. Giving up is hard. Humans are more complex than alpine plants. We draw upon our surroundings to constitute our identities, and for this reason, I suspect we formulate that age-old equivalence of movement with change. Perhaps it's not just an American thing after all— quest-romance is built upon the myths of spiritual rebirth. Perhaps change is slow, while movement is fast.
Of course this is all counter to Gould’s view on evolution, the article that started this train of thought. Evolutionary change strikes like a lightning-bolt, rendering mating between the new species and the old impossible. When perpetual movement (and change) is part of the cultural aesthetic, estrangement seems inevitable. O well. That’s a lot of mileage out of eight words in a sentence.
Yesterday’s favorite sentence was substantially more complex, from Nabokov’s Pnin:
As a teacher, Pnin was far from being able to compete with those stupendous Russian ladies scattered all over academic America, who, without having had any formal training at all, manage something by dint of intuition, loquacity, and a kind of maternal bounce, to infuse a magic knowledge of their difficult and beautiful tongue into a group of innocent-eyed students in an atmosphere of Mother Volga songs, red caviar, and tea; nor did Pnin, as a teacher, ever presume to approach the lofty halls of modern scientific linguistics, that ascetic fraternity of phonemes, that temple wherein earnest young people are taught not the language itself, but the method of teaching others to teach that method; which method, like a waterfall splashing from rock to rock, ceases to be a medium of rational navigation but perhaps in some fabulous future may become instrumental in evolving esoteric dialects— Basic Basque and so forth— spoken only by certain elaborate machines.
Now that’s a sentence!
This is the truck I learned to drive in. I felt like I had to preserve it somehow. Although it obviously was in a little better shape when I drove it. It made the trek from California to Oklahoma many times, before finally being laid to rest in the field across the street from my brother's house.
No need for flowers on this grave, it grows its own. There are more than a few memories for me on this bench seat. I can't see this lawn ornament without thinking of the relationship I began— and ended— in a blue Chevy truck.
I've still got the letters, somewhere. They were filled with honorable intentions.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Eeksy-Peeksy EMAIL: eeksypeeksy@yahoo.com URL: http://eeksypeeksy.blogspot.com/ DATE: 07/01/2002 12:21:00 PM > This is the truck I learned to drive in.Now wait a minute (methinks TV doth protest too much— I suspect he enjoys the discussion as much as the rest).
(Stop)
Oh yes, wait a minute Mister Postman
(Wait)
Wait Mister Postman
Please Mister Postman, look and see
(Oh yeah)
If there's a letter in your bag for me
(Please, Please Mister Postman)
Why's it takin' such a long time
(Oh yeah)
For me to hear from that boy of mine
There must be some word today
From my boyfriend so far away
Please Mister Postman, look and see
If there's a letter, a letter for me
The lowly epistle is indeed a uniquely important variant form of the ever-metamorphosing grapholect. Examination of the syntagmatic features of letter-writing need not fall into the great divide that many misread into Ong’s orality theories, where phonocentrism is poised to pounce upon graphocentrism. I’m actually quite curious what we can learn from both. Kathleen Welch strongly describes the phonocentric primacy of television, and spends little time on the more graphocentric nature of web discourse. So, recalling the evolution of the letter is not at all spurious, though it requires careful qualification, as Turbulent Velvet assuredly has attempted.
Conversation can be simultaneously one-to-one and one-to-many. As TV pointed out, the early history of the letter showed a similar character. Trust is perhaps the largest problem involved in any form of discourse that attempts to stand in for face-to-face interaction. For the Greeks in 400BC, the letter was suspect. Euripides’ Phaedra is a powerful example of what happens when you believe what you read, instead of what you hear. In many reviewer's eyes, any attempt to discern the difference between aural truth, and written truth must privilege one over the other. Ong is usually read as privileging the “noble savageness” of oral constructions; when I read him, my impression was quite the opposite. It seemed to me that he privileged the rising levels of abstraction made possible by grapholects. Go figure. Welch blasts Havelock for being insensitive to women’s issues, and raises Ong to a new level of phonolatry. All of this actually matters very little to me. What matters most is how well the distinctions highlighted by each signifying practice mesh with blog discourse. One thing seems certain though: logocentrism cannot stand. The construction of reality through language is colored by nuances far outside the reach of words alone; it’s a matter of context.
The letter metaphor shines in that respect. Without external knowledge, most people get very little out of reading other people’s letters. The emergence of somewhat self-referential “blogging circles” points out the value-added nature of reading not only one, but many people who may respond to the common topoi. Letters score big regarding periodic, turn-taking behaviors where questions are raised and answered (still conversational, and yet not a conversation). One of the most common usages of letters was to pass along the juicy bits of gossip (also not unlike web behaviors) but where did this exchange of gossip take us? Into the novel. That’s where, I think, the usage of epistolary metaphors breaks down. Is blogging going to evolve into a huge group novel? I don’t see many signs of that. I suspect there is a limit to the complexity of blogging, largely due to its context-dependence. The focus on strictly graphic behaviors denies larger issues of syntagmatic construction which orality theories more directly address— these theories present, not an ephemeral packet, but instead direct insight into some rather counter-intuitive things about oral storytelling practice.
To justify my oral fixation, I thought I’d take a moment to summarize Ong’s defining tropes of orality, so that those who have been confused by the proximity of the term orality with notions of conversation might better understand what features I’m talking about. Oral discourse is (not the google-game):
Additive rather than subordinate (discussed by me on numerous occasions)
Aggregative rather than analytic (or, phrased another way, associative rather than dialectic)
Redundant or copious (Bloggers copious or redundant? Most of the ones I read are)
Conservative or traditionalist (resistant to change)
Close to the human lifeworld (Lanham thinks electronic writing is, and I agree)
Agonistically toned (Warblogging anyone?)
Emphatic and participatory rather than objectively distanced (Blog as performance!)
Homeostatic (self-organizing communities anyone?)
Situational rather than abstract (take a look at a typical day on blogdex or daypop)
Welch addresses the “Great Divide” reading of orality theory quite nicely in her book. Nowhere do any of the primary researchers say that it’s an either/or proposition. There is, as Lanham would put it, an oscillation involved between all these signifying practices. "The Great Divide" is a creation of the critics of orality theory, not the theorists themselves— but then that is just my opinion, due to my preference for descriptive rather than prescriptive theory. Does orality theory describe the phenomenona reasonably well? I think it does.
Kathleen Welch’s tirades in Electric Rhetoric made me curious about the women missing from the “rhetorical canon.” So I’ve been on a bit of a mission. Aspasia of Miletus was next on my list. As usual, Aristophanes is one of the best (at least in the comic sense) resources regarding the ancient Greeks. She’s there, in Acharnians:
But then some young crapshooters got to drinking
and went to Megara and stole the whore Simaétha.
And then the Megarians, garlic-stung with passion,
got even by stealing two whores from Aspasia.
From this the origin of the war broke forth
on all the Greeks: from three girls good at blow-jobs.
phusingoomai phu_singoomai, [phusinx] Pass. to be excited by eating garlic, properly of fighting cocks: hence the Megarians (who were large growers of garlic) are said to be odunais pephusingômenoi infuriated by vexations, Ar.
And then in wrath Olympian Pericles did lighten and thunder and turn Greece upside-down, establishing laws that read like drinking-songs:
“Megarians shall be banned from land and markets and banned from sea and also banned from shore.”
Whereupon the Megarians, starving inch by inch, appealed to Sparta to help make us repeal the decree we passed in the matter of the whores.
What is also far too familiar is the reduction of Aspasia to a simple whore. Her oral powers seemed to extend quite a bit further than the bedroom. Socrates was impressed by her too. Obviously, she held Pericles in her sway, as Aristophanes so pointedly implies by blaming a war on her. The politics behind her situation seems quite interesting. What’s an educated girl from out of town to do? Socrates claims that she was an impressive rhetorician. One of most useful moves I made, in teaching research papers, was comparing them with a sales pitch. Obviously, “working girls” need strong sales skills, and Socrates (though it may have been tongue-in cheek) did seem more interested in other oral skills Aspasia possessed than the ones highlighted by Aristophanes.
Socrates’ interest, is noted as the only thing interesting about his dialogue Menexenus in the introduction of the Princeton edition. I’ve become acutely sensitive to the sort of minimalizing strategies employed by scholarly editors since my friend Dr. Levernier used a conservative American Lit anthology to display how women and writers of color were admitted grudgingly, and always with the damnation of faint praise. That drive to marginalize feminine voices is downright blatant in this edition:
The beginning is entertaining where Socrates talks about Aspasia who, he declared, has been teaching him a speech, a funeral oration, but all the rest is dullness unrelieved, not a characteristic of Plato.
For government is the nurture of man, and the government of good men is good, and of bad men bad. And I must show that our ancestors were trained under a good government and for this reason, they were good, and our contemporaries are also good, among whom our departed friends are to be reckoned.
Then as now, and indeed always, from that time to this, speaking generally, our government was an aristocracy— a form of government which receives various names, according to the fancies of men, and is sometimes called democracy, but is really an aristocracy or government of the best which has the approval of the many.
For kings we have always had, first hereditary and then elected, and authority is mostly in the hands of people, who dispense offices and power to those who appear to be deserving of them. Neither is a man rejected from weakness or poverty or obscurity of origin, nor honored by reason of the opposite, as in other states, but there is one principle— he who appears to be wise and good is a governor and ruler.
The biting mistrust of women shines in the opening and closing of this dialogue— the only parts deemed worthy of Plato by the editors— particularly in Menexenus’ closing comment about Aspasia’s speech:
Yes, Socrates, I am very grateful to her or to him who told you, and still more to you who have told me.
Personally, I think Aspasia describes the nature of government far better than Pericles in his Funeral Oration.
I’ve been thinking a lot about desire and intentionality. I like Dennett and Haugeland’s reduction of the term intentionality to “aboutness.” So, what’s it all about? The narratives that surround us generally point to one easy resolution of the problem, as this bit of dialogue from Finding Forester declares:
“You mean women will want to sleep with me if I write a book?”
“Women will want to sleep with you if you write a bad book.”
“I’m just searching for that perfect tone— the sound that will cause all the panties in the room to drop at once.”
Larry was unusual in his honesty. He knew why he started playing the bass— to get laid. I think that’s why I really enjoyed hanging out with the funk crowd for a while. They had few illusions. While funk can be ridiculed as being simplistic and lacking conceptual depth, I much prefer funk to rap. Rap seems to be more about power, whereas funk is purely about sex; the power relations are submerged beneath a much sexier exterior. It’s not as much a strutting, justifying “I’m the man,” as it is “I’m the man who wants.” Few professional people are as honest as Larry V. about the overwhelming desire to get laid that drives most people to pursue certain skills.
For some, it might be just making money because they believe that money will get you laid. For others, it might be something more artistic because I (and I suspect a lot of people) believe that art is a way of touching people. And what is the desire to touch people if not a sexual desire? It might seem horribly reductive, but ultimately, I think most of human intentionality can be reduced to a desire for sex.
Reading “The Critic as Host” by J. Hillis Miller helped me put a new perspective on this whole language intentionality enterprise. Miller argues that the relationship between critic and text is much like a parasite / host relationship, where the symbiosis depends on the presence of both. Texts are, in a sense, irreducible in that they cannot be fully explained by any means. There is always a residue. Miller sets into opposition the forces of metaphysics and nihilism as a more complex, sexual, parasite / host dynamic. Reduction of metaphysics always moves toward nihilism, which in turn can never completely consume the desire for transcendence. There is always a residue which remains, which seeks to reconstitute itself.
I have reflected in the past about the transience of sexual memory, how it fades so quickly that we have no choice but to repeat the experience as often as possible— there is no such thing as a perfect and transcendent union, only the search for its possibility. This search is perhaps the defining aboutness of the human condition. In Miller’s perception, there is always a residue after the act that drives us to repeat it. Part of that imperfection may lie in language itself.
The play of substitutions in language can never be a purely ideal interchange. This interchange is always contaminated by its necessary incarnation, the most dramatic form of which is the bodies of lovers. On the other hand, lovemaking is never a purely wordless communion or intercourse. It is in its turn contaminated by language. Lovemaking is a way of living, in the flesh, the aporias of figure. It is also a way of experiencing the way language functions to forbid the perfect union of lovers. Language always remains, after they have exhausted or even annihilated themselves in an attempt to get it right, as the genetic trace starting the cycle all over again.
The persistence of desire assures the continuance of the species. and desire fills our intentionality. But it seems locked in a paradox of non-disclosure. We mustn’t talk about the real intention behind our words. To attempt to teach language skills is in effect to teach the survival skills of humanity. How is this possible without dealing with the language of desire? No matter how often we wash the sheets, that curious stain begs to reappear.
Why isn’t sex an “honorable” intention?
Jeff wrote:
It might seem horribly reductive, but ultimately, I think most of human intentionality can be reduced to a desire for sex.
But I think you could argue that the desire to connect is prior to the desire for sex. As infants, without connection we suffer from failure to thrive, and we die. Literally.
And in our humanity, our desire for meaning is often prior even to our basic biological desires. How else to explain that people quite often die for ideas (which is positively amazing if you stop to think about it)? How else to explain the despair of the depressed person, for whom life has become meaningless to the point where death is preferable?
Why isn’t sex an “honorable” intention?
I think many modern people would say that it is, particularly if the desire is grounded in those drives for connection and meaning that I think are even more basic.
----- --------TITLE: Walker Evans, Pt. 10 DATE: 06/28/2002 6:15:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: When Walker Evans entered the circle of Muriel Draper in 1931, a new set of problems arose.
Walker Evans entree into the sophisticated world of the Draper salon brought with it certain hazards. He seems to have made a hit with a number of homosexual and bisexual men who regularly frequented Muriel’s evenings. Kirsten, in his diaries, routinely recorded the episodes he witnessed and those in which Muriel reported on the general assault against Evans’s masculine virtue.
There was a case of an aspiring young member of the American diplomatic corps, an intimate of Jean Cocteau’s, who, high on drugs, took Walker out for dinner “and horrified him by acting camp and taking dope which he got in Harlem and which he decided was half talcum-powder after all. He would scream at the rails of the elevated and tell them to stop. He made a pass at Walker and was generally difficult.”On a different occasion another of Muriel’s young blades had been so attracted to Evans that when he finally took the plunge of asking him for lunch, he did it such a “transparently flirtatious and ass-humping” manner that he was no longer attracted. Muriel, bemused, commented on “the subtle and powerful influence that Walker Evans exerted on all of us, mainly the mysterious quality that he projected— did he know his power or not?”
Beyond the hints provided by James Mellow’s biographical retelling, it seems that there was a certain power that Evans gained through mystery— through careful control of context and presentation.
More of my Walker Evans wandering, in case you’ve missed it, includes: An introduction, Evans’ Placard for a Museum Wall, Evan’s photographs for Hart Crane’s The Bridge, his early European snapshots, photographs of Coney Island, his affinity with Atget, cityscapes, a short story he wrote called Brooms, his habit of making lists, cityscapes and lists revisited, Walker Evans at De Luze Cottage, and just today, another short love story.
----- --------TITLE: A Love Story DATE: 06/28/2002 5:07:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Walker Evans had women troubles too.I once took my meals at a boarding-house in a foreign country. That was one of the ways to learn the language. In this case it was a mistake, because everyone else came there for that purpose.
Besides a Scotch girl there were at table: a Pole who was all right, and his wife; a Dane who had no flavor at all; an English boy for when I was embarrassed; three English girls with perfect table manners; the fat and vulgar lady of the place; her daughter-in-law. There was also an unborn child, carried by the daughter-in-law, and getting along swimmingly, I thought.
All of these people were unimportant to me and to themselves.
Often I sat next to the Scotch girl. It was clear from the start that she was courageous and big and “genuine” and a communist. Her English was very Scotch and not always correct. But for this misfortune she might have been perfectly charming. I pretended she was. This fraudulent wish-fulfillment damaged my summer.
Every noon and evening we ate that terrible food. I thought about fried pork and the unborn child.
The Scotch girl came to my place and I showed her my mysterious wall. It was at the end of the garden, and in all that stone expanse there was only one small iron-barred window, high up. Some nights there was a light. At various times there were different noises, usually bells. It was a fine wall. On Sunday mornings a violin and a voice played and sang behind it. The girl said something about smashing through to get at the human suffering. That was the first I had heard of it. But she had to say that. I attempted to smile inwardly and say to myself that we were different: I liked the mystery and she liked the human suffering; and that de gustibus, and so forth.
It was a madhouse, I think.
I got to the fishing village late at night. The next day the famous mayor was out. The place was very good, with no tourists nor resorters. I walked around and came upon the market place. There was the Scotch girl with a basket. She was buying staple commodities. I leaned against a post and she saw me. She said she hadn’t thought I’d come.
A few miles above the village there was a good beach. We went there with the food for the day. On the way we separated and then made no effort to come together again. I went on along the sand about a mile, without looking back. The situation was serious. I asked God some sharp questions. Nothing happened.
I sat down and thought that something ought to happen. I deserved a vision or a revelation because if I had seen something dubious in nature at that moment I should not have been at all surprised. An apparition would have appreciated me, too, because I should have treated it as an equal. I had sardine sandwiches and should have offered one; I should have sat there calmly eating had the earth opened before me. I might have had a foresight of a thing that happened a little while after this so that when it did happen I could pretend to be surprised. But instead of seeing something peculiar or foreseeing that thing that happened later, I just lay there and imagined things of different shapes and colors and thought about what they would do and what I would do.
When I got back to the city I found the boarding-house deflated and subdued. Everybody looked thinner. The unborn child had miscarried.
I haven’t done any traveling since.
And of course, my favorite:
I talked to him briefly. He was a real gentleman, drawing spider doodles for all the kids who showed up for the afternoon soundcheck and hardly announced show. I'll miss him.
Reading Paul Ricoeur’s “The Metaphoric Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling” triggered more weird thoughts. A return to STC “to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith” is in order. Imagination was, in Coleridge’s view an incredible power which combines things to constitute our world. Life itself was a force, pressing outward towards God with a power that creates a tenuous stasis, where the primary imagination synthesizes the world we cognize. His world view was built on faith, and it seems natural that he would also summon faith as a metaphor for poetic creation. Today, though, I started thinking about the suspension.
Suspension can be read as a cessation of activity. Or, more scientifically, it can be the implication of great motion, as particles are swirled about, suspended in solution. Without motion, the particles settle out in stratified layers underneath. Hence, the act of poetic faith, may also be read not as total belief but as a Brownian motion of particles, set into play through the disruption of disbelief. It remains to determine how to best read “shadows”— there is the Platonic bias, of course, against (re)presentation— but there is also the possibility of reading in these shadows, relations with the objects that cast them.
Ricoeur argues for a constitutive function in metaphor. Teasing out Richard’s tenor and vehicle, Ricoeur pushes these characteristics into the labels of quasi-verbal and quasi-imagistic function. Shadows, viewed as quasi-imagistic quantity are flat, two-dimensional, and opaque. Viewed quasi-verbally, shadows are, as in Hume’s conception of imagination, faint impressions of reality. However, thinking of Coleridge’s synthetic world view, shadows are indeed constitutive as they preserve the contour, although distorted, of a real and palpable world. Relations remain intact.
The quasi-verbal character of metaphors is described by Ricoeur as predicative assimilation. This is the function of proportional metaphors, metaphors by analogy which have little in the way of quasi-imagistic content. Humans communicate by comparison with other known relations (predicates), and these comparisons become assimilated in the synthetic powers of the imagination. We constitute new relations from preexisting ones, at the cerebral level.
The quasi-imagistic character of metaphors is instead a more sensual relation. We feel physically, a connection with the image that has been planted in our consciousness. Ricoeur feels that there is not a direct connection between these conflicting levels of metaphor, but instead a structural analogy between them. Though metaphor is indeed a split reference, the component parts are not extrinsic to the semantic function of metaphor, but intrinsic.
The deep feeling lost in the Platonic shadow is a fundamental part of the construction and identification that all humans feel through metaphor. Desire cannot be removed from meaning, in order to explain it. Shadows both are and are not. Reproduction and repetition changes things, but perhaps some structural analogies remain intact.
The great and continuing nuisance perpetuated by the term “point of view” is that it does nothing to discourage the conflation and confusion of two distinct aspects of narrative practice. Those two separate aspects are:
Now of course in many narratives, orientation and discourse-authorship are sourced in a single individual. But speaking / thinking and seeing need not come from the same agent. We need to allow for cases where another person sees or has seen.
Michael J. Toolan Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction
Toolan uses orientation, rather than Genette's focalization to describe the same distinction in narrative practice. His reasoning is close to I.A. Richards de-visualizing of metaphor. Focalization is a nearly photographic term, just like “point of view,” and carries with it visual metaphors. Toolan violates his own disclaimer that orientation need not be visual, when he summarizes the aspects. “Who sees?” could also be paraphrased as “Who hears?” or “Who feels?”
I think the core confusion rests in the repetitive who? Is orientation a function of identity? If it is, then the collapse of these distinctions by those dreadful Anglo-Americans is entirely justified. However, it occurs to me that the conflation rests on a perception of unary identity. The collapse of these terms might be more of a quasi-romantic world view, rather than an Anglo-American one. Explosion of the quasi-romantic self into a multicultural social-self, motivated by a land of whats as much as a land of whos, better supports the distinction. The question of what, rather than who forces a particular orientation might be more fruitful. We need not infer an identity for a potential agent, as much as an expected response to the whatness of the orientation based on cultural more than individual proclivities.
When I quote people, or images, I do so not with the expectation that they reveal much about who sees or hears the kernal of truth I do, but rather that they reveal a certain position, or orientation if the meaning of the citation is coincident with something, not in an individual, but in a life-experience or cultural background. Is this the same as identity or personality? I don't think so.
There is, in most of what I write, a sort of expectation of limited overlap in orientation with those who would choose to read me. However, there is no expectation of overlaps in identity. Separating orientation from identity seems crucial, and the locus of activity need not be visually metaphoric. In a certain sense, orientation is often conveyed by repetitive tropes of citation and response, where the currency is a shifting cultural mythology, based on stories told and retold— each time with a subtle shift in orientation. What motivates the shift in orientation seems to be more deeply of concern than the who, which separately gives the narrative its authority, that is, if Genette's distinction is to be worthwhile.
Rather than just a simple distinction in character function, I think this separation might also be made in supposedly monologic discourse. The schizophrenic nature of deep monologues, betrays a separate universe of programmed cultural responses— orientations — which should be considered as covalent, and yet not equivalent, to identity. Zooming in on them presents a certain seductive beauty, which exists within each identity, and yet is not identity.
Repetition changes things. Not so much because the repetition is filtered through identity, but because it is filtered through context and orientation. These aspects of narrative behavior seem very important. Social deixis seems to be more easily determined by focalization, rather than identity. I think conflating them is a mistake.
Through veiled in spires of myrtle-wreath,
Love is a sword which cuts its sheath,
And through the clefts itself has made
We spy the flashes of the blade!
But through the clefts itself has made
We likewise see Love’s flashing blade,
By rust consumed, or snapped in twain;
Only hilt and stump remain.
Something tells me that besides being so opium addled he was repeating himself, Samuel Taylor Coleridge was slightly bitter regarding marriage. The myrtle-wreath wasn’t kind to him. I prefer the epigram he used as preface for love poems in his collected works: “Love, always a talkative companion.”
In many ways does the full heart reveal
The presence of the love it would conceal;
But in far more th’ estranged heart lets know
The absence of love, which yet it fain would shew.
The ironic tension between the title and the epigram speaks volumes regarding the problem of conjugal desire. Silence (as anyone who has ever been married can tell you) does speak with intense volume. It occurs to me that I was living on Myrtle Street in Bakersfield, California, when it blew my mind.
With Lois Lane on his back, far away at the North Pole, Superman renounces his power. The fog lifted from my eyes to reveal some basic tropes of American culture. Power demands secrecy. Love prefers disclosure. Love is incompatible with power. Exposure = weakness. And the grand moral of them all, ‘tis better to be powerful in pseudonymity, than a groveling weakling— even if it means giving up on love.
A divisive economics, to be sure: not unlike the modernist division between form and content, or better still, the division between explanation and understanding. The distanciation between text and author fits in the same sort of binary logic. Texts have power— authors have only love. I write that, reflecting on Diotima’s thoughts on love in Plato’s Symposium. Love is the desire for immortality; in a real sense, literature stems from this same fountain. Beginning students of literature resist explanation of the text, favoring instead understanding of the author. They resist because they seem to believe that understanding (love) is incompatible with explanation (power). They resist mapping the lines of power behind a text, as instructors flex their muscles, proclaiming that power is the best.
The problematic part is desire. I’ve heard it a thousand times: “I really enjoyed the book until the teacher explained it.” In “Explanation and Understanding,” Paul Ricoeur has brought me closer to what’s going on. It’s the difference between cause and motive. Explanation is a fairly scientific pursuit, which reveals the causes behind actions. There doesn’t have to be a motive behind a causally related sequence. A text can be explained in terms of effects and their causes, which may or may not be motivated by the nebulous construction of an author behind that text. Indeed, in New Critical thinking, questioning intentionality is strictly verboten. Explaining things concentrates solely on causes, not motives. Desire is something that exists completely outside the text, and lust is pushed into a Victorian closet.
Understanding, on the other hand, requires that questions of motive be addressed. Communication is an intentional act. We bring the sex-toys out of the closet and dress them up. Understanding is built upon a flirtation with belief, a surrender to the world constructed by the text, a slow seduction by the author which pulls you into his world as you imperfectly reconstruct it. It’s no wonder why students resist explanation when it is reduces that carefully constructed world to a web of causality. Causality is not nearly as sexy as motive.
Motive is force, but motive is not synonymous with power— motive springs from desire, and desire, often from powerlessness. There are two contentious desires: the desire for power, and the desire for love. Are they as incompatible as our myths proclaim? Must the empathy which love brings be buried in order to make the story acceptable?
The reader’s interest is addressed, not to so-called underlying laws, but to the turn taken by this singular story. Following a story is an activity that is entirely specific, by which we unceasingly anticipate a subsequent course of events and an outcome and adjust our anticipations as the story progresses, until they coincide with the actual outcome. Then we say we have understood.
This starting point of understanding differs from that proposed by the theory of empathy, which completely overlooks the specificity of the narrative element in the story recounted as well as the story followed. This is why a theory that bases understanding on the narrative element better enables us to account for the passage from understanding to explanation. Whereas explanation appeared to do violence to understanding taken as the immediate grasp of the intentions of others, it naturally serves to extend understanding taken as the competence to follow a narrative.
For a narrative is seldom self-explanatory. The contingency that combines acceptability summons questions, interrogation. Thus, our interest in what follows— “and then?” asks the child— carries over to our interest in reasons, motives, causes— “why?” asks the adult. The narrative therefore has a lacunary structure, such that the why proceeds spontaneously from the what. But in return the explanation has no autonomy. Its advantage and its effect are to allow us to follow the story better and further when the first-order spontaneous understanding fails.
Ricoeur, “Explanation and Understanding”
As I see it now, it seems that Psychology is the land of “who,” Philosophy is the land of “what,” Science is the land of “where,” Literature is the land of “when,” Theology is the land of “why,” and Rhetoric is the land of “how.” Explanation and understanding both seem contingent on how narratives work. Maybe it’s just my dirty-mind at play, but I feel certain that desire has a lot to do with it. This question seems inadequately addressed by all three of these disciplines, due to a residual Puritan ethic which forces sex out of schools, and into the closets where some think it belongs. But I think there can be no real explanation or understanding without addressing just what makes some texts, and authors, sexier than others.
Now, where did I put that kryptonite? That chaste myth of the American Superman has got to go!
Yeah, yeah, I know.
The problem stems from discovering de Man and Burke at the same time; de Man won (at that time). Burke has been gaining ground, mostly through reading other people make use of his ideas in a far more productive ways than symbolic masturbation. I think the problem was reading his later work first.
I've got high hopes for the early stuff, which I have yet to read. You may well see a "Burke is not such a putz" retraction from me yet.
----- --------TITLE: Just a thought DATE: 06/25/2002 10:12:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Guilt by association.I pulled out a tape I hadn't listened to in a long time on this last trip— Brighten the Corners by Pavement. Something alarming struck me. I don't really care that much for “stream of consciousness” writing. I think that it’s a misnomer for the way that consciousness works. It’s more like a lake that pebbles skip across, leaving elliptical ripples with each idea that crosses it. The idea that consciousness might stream also implies that it is coming from somewhere, and going somewhere. In my case, I know that is seldom true. Usually, ideas usually skip across, with the force of a slap or a kiss, depending on the angle of attack and force behind them.
An idea, just like lunch, is never free— so I resist “free association” as well. There can only be association, which is directly plonked in your path, or the glancing dance of sidearm throws. It scared me to think that somehow, lately, I’m starting to write rambles down a shandy lane like songs I’ve heard. I suppose it’s a glancing thing, depending on how you inflect.
A welcome to my friends:
This house is a home and a home's where I belong
Where the feelings are warm and the foundations are strong
If my soul has a shape, well, then it is an ellipse
And this slap is a gift
'Cause your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre
You know, your cheeks have lost their lustre, lustre, lustre, lustre
Take it back -- send return out of time
Tape machine needs to be aligned
Aloha means goodbye, and also hello -- it's in how you inflect
Put the bark in the dog, and you've got a guardian
When the capital's S, it is followed by a T -- and it's probably me
And the tones are grouped in clusters
You know, the tones are grouped in clusters
Well the tones are grouped in clusters
You know the tones are grouped in clusters, clusters, clusters, clusters
Take it back -- kiss me into the past
Lately never gonna last
“Blue Hawaiian”
Thank you, Stephen Malkmus.
----- --------TITLE: Hardcore Theoria DATE: 06/25/2002 7:10:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Hardcore Theoria
What wounds me are the forms of the relation, its images; or rather, what others call form I experience as force. The image— as the example of the obsessive— is the thing itself. The lover is thus an artist; and his world is in fact a world reversed, since in it each image is its own end (nothing beyond the image).
(A Lover's Discourse, 133)
For me, things always seem to reduce themselves to position and desire. Tom's recent question, drawn from an insightful reading of the article Kierkegaard’s “Mystery Of Unrighteousness” In The Information Age, resonates:
Weinberger offers the vision of a more intimate communion, via the Net, liberated from the tiresome vapidity of the public as media-construct. But if Kierkegaard were to charge that such intimacy is still an evasion of the concrete responsibilities of the face-to-face encounter?
Exploring some finely tuned linguistic assumptions points out one potential reason for demoting Kierkegaard. From the perspective of semantic or pragmatic analysis of discourse, deictic expressions are anchored to specific points in a communicative event. According to Lyons:
The grammaticalization and lexicalization of deixis is best understood in relation to what may be termed the canonical situation of utterance: this involves one-one or one-many, signaling in the phonic medium along with the vocal-auditory channel, with all the participants present in the same actual situation able to see one another and to perceive the associated non-vocal paralinguistic features of their utterances, and each assuming the role of sender and receiver in turn . . .There is much in the structure of languages that can only be explained on the assumption that they have developed for communication in face-to-face interaction.
There is another way of looking at this positioning problem: through the lens of desire. Few people have looked as closely at that problem as Roland Barthes:
I am caught in a double discourse, from which I cannot escape. On the one hand, I tell myself: suppose the other, by some arrangement of his own structure, needed my questioning? Then wouldn’t I be justified in abandoning myself to the literal expression, the lyrical utterance of my “passion”? Are not excess and madness my truth, my strength? And if this truth, this strength ultimately prevailed?
But, on the other hand, I tell myself: the signs of this passion run the risk of smothering the other. Then should I not, precisely because of my love, hide from the other how much I love him? I see the other with a double vision, sometimes as object, sometimes as subject; I hesitate between tyranny and oblation.
Thus I doom myself to blackmail: if I love the other, I am forced to seek his happiness; but then I can only do myself harm: a trap; I am condemned to be a saint or a monster: unable to be the one, unwilling to be the other: hence I tergiversate: I show my passion a little.
(A Lover’s Discourse, 41-2)
I suspect that Kierkegaard’s worry that fear is a flaw is largely unfounded. Without the dangerous exhilaration provided by fear, love would not be as strong. And the distanciation brought out by anonymity and pseudonymity could be just another part of the lovers dance, as it flirts with the possibility of new social situations. Sometimes the road is dark, and people hesitate to show the full force of their desire.
How glorious a Privilege has Man beyond all other sublunary Beings! who, tho’ indigent, unpitied, forsaken by the World, and even chain’d in a Dungeon, can, by the Aid of Divine Contemplation, enjoy all the Charms of Pomp, Respect, and Liberty! — Transport himself in Idea to whatever Place he wishes, and grasp in Theory imagin’d Empires!
Unaccountable it is, therefore, that so many People find an Irksomeness in being alone, tho’ for never so small a Space of Time! — Guilt indeed creates Perturbations, which may well make Retirement horrible, and drive the self-tormented Wretch into any Company to avoid the Agonies of Remorse; but I speak not of those who are afraid to reflect, but of those who seem to me not to have the Power to do it.
. . .
Conversation, in effect, but furnishes Matter for Contemplation;— it exhilerates the Mind, and fits it for Reflection Afterward:— Every new thing we hear in Company raises in us new Ideas in the Closet or on the Pillow; and as there are few People but one may gather something from, either to divert or improve, a good Understanding will, like the industrious Bee, suck out the various Sweets, and digest them in Retirement.
. . .
To know ourselves, is agreed by all to be the most useful Learning: the first Lessons, therefore, given us ought to be on that Subject.
The Female Spectator, Book IV (1745)
I do dearly love to suck out sweets, though I sometimes tire of studying alone. I'm too young for retirement.
Walker Evans visited Truro, Massachusetts, in 1930 and stayed in the home of a family named De Luze, rented by his friend Ben Shahn. In the cottage of this Portuguese fishing family, his mature vision really began to take shape.
Had a wonderful dream last night. Where in hell do all those details come from. Really, literature, all the greatest descriptions I know are so much watery smudge to the least of my dreams. I suppose the best about dreams is the abolition of time. After one like last night's I spend the day tasting the tail ends of lovely unearthly moods without a headache. I think my powers lie mostly there, in dreams.
Walker Evans, Letter to Hanns Skolle, May 13, 1930
Evans' photographs of the De Luze cottage mark a profound turning point in his career, not because they were particularly successful, but because they show Evans' deepening dream detail. Though interest in the mundane is common among modernists, it's the complexity of detail that sets Evans apart. These photographs are a bridge between densely formalist experiments, and later photographs which show both this richness of detail, and the compositional complexity of Evans' early work. Life is found in details.
More of my Walker Evans wandering, in case you’ve missed it, includes: An introduction, Evans’ Placard for a Museum Wall, Evan’s photographs for Hart Crane’s The Bridge, his early European snapshots, photographs of Coney Island, his affinity with Atget, cityscapes, a short story he wrote called Brooms, his habit of making lists, and the most recent addition, cityscapes and lists revisited.
Pocola, Oklahoma, where my parents live, is just another one of those highway towns. It's sort of a suburb of Ft. Smith, Arkansas, but not really. It has more in common with the little country towns I've been posting pictures of than the “big city” of Ft. Smith.
Fishing is big there. My father was a fisherman. I never got interested in it, and neither did my brothers. None of us could stomach cleaning them. Fish has lots of associations for me. As I lay down reading my book my first night in Pocola, I noticed a tiny toy kerosene lamp on the bedside table. I recognized it. The little yellow and red streaked lamp was distinctive; I’ve never seen another one like it past childhood. It came from a little curio shop in Bridgeport, California, high in the Sierras where dad used to fish.
Mom remembered trying to make me into a fisherman. They bought me a nice new reel using S&H green stamps. I walked off and left it on the bank of a stream somewhere near Bridgeport. Dad wandered the mountainsides up there, until they fenced the meadows and prohibited fishing. I never did much fishing; I just wandered.
All my wandering lately has given me some bald tires. Waiting around the Walmart in Ft. Smith while getting some fresh tires installed, I was confronted with another connotation of fish on a T-shirt I hadn't seen before:
If it smells like fish— eat it!
Changes in how we interpret the Greek word logos seem to be in order, both in the rhetorical sense (as one of the primary appeals listed by Aristotle), and in the biblical sense. Welch has some powerful arguments on the rhetorical side, which dovetail in a strange way with AKMA’s argument. These things are important to me, as a teacher of writing, because last semester I used the appeals (ethos, logos, pathos) as the framework for my classes. I didn’t dig into the problematic nature of logos for these classes, but for my next ones I think I will.
Ethos has become increasingly problematic; I did explore that in class. While I skipped the Bourdieu, social-constructivist underpinnings of how we now approach this concept, I did point out quite carefully that the word contains multitudes. Ethos is not just who you are, as a Ciceronian good man, but also the style and conventions of the ethical community in which you are trying to have your words heard in. You’ve got to learn to talk the talk before you can walk the walk. In Electric Rhetoric, Welch argues that a lot of other terms have been simplified, much in the way that ethos has been simplified, causing a misreading of most of the extant pre-Aristotelian texts. Philosophia is one of them. In the sophistic sense used by Isocrates, philosophy is not figuring out the nature of reality, but instead a cultural term for developing a way of life. Much like the notion of a frozen, individualistic ethos, philosophy became atrophied when it became the study of “whatness” that Plato and Aristotle pushed it toward.
Philosophy, in the sophistic perspective, is an immanently useful art. The sophistic view of philosophia is much more concerned with “howness,” distinctly paralleling their dynamic conception of ethos.
Complicating logos seems to be a necessary step in order to keep things like rhetoric and theology relevant to life itself. Words are not transparent carriers of meaning. Instead of distanciation strategies, life-relevant disciplines need strategies of engagement. We must return to more pre-literate stance, an acceptance of the dynamic and associative nature of logos, rather than the fixed immutable texts of print culture.
The direction I see myself driving slowly toward is finding ways of dealing with more multivalent levels of pathos as well. It’s been building in the back of my head like a thunderstorm. I’m sure there will be many more thoughts about this to come; I’m still working my way through it. But for now, I wanted to finish one associative thought-train.
When I visited my brother the day after getting the tires changed, we were talking about fishing, and he asked me if I’d seen the sign-board at one of the churches in Pocola. I drove down the street next to the Tote-A-Poke, and it seemed fairly normal on the front:
But the back side of the sign shows an Eastern Oklahoma take on theology:
And the entrance to this church shows that yes, indeed, this is America.
Straining my way through Electric Rhetoric by Kathleen Welch, still. There is some great stuff in the book, but it is positively buried by lame academic schema writing. Attack! Attack! Attack!
But there is a bright side. I’ve now found confirmation that I indeed grew up in a cardboard hut. For some reason, it reminded my of Frank Zappa’s Thingfish and those strange mutations known as the “Mammy-Nuns.”
Looks like y’ done putty good heahh, HARRY-AS-A-BOY! I sees ya’ growin’ up like a weed, axmodently reproducin’ YOUSEFF ‘n evvythang.
Done found some low-rent housin’ in a one-dimensional cardbode nativity box on some Italian’s funt lawn . . . bunch o’ crab-grass underneath de off-spring fo quick and easy sanitatium . . .shit! Y’all provvly be savin’ up for yo first LAVA LAMP putty soon!
Welch has some nice twists in her writing though. I particularly liked her definition of a HUT: “Household Using Television”
For some reason, I was talking to my mother about language acquisition; she told me some stuff about myself that I had forgotten. I did spend a lot of time in front of the T.V. But, somewhere in the mid-seventies, my focus shifted to 12-inch cardboard sleeves stuffed with petroleum buy-products. I was seduced by sound-patterns. I started collecting piles of record albums.
But the deepest kernel of my language skills came from television, at least according to my mother. We were talking about Kaylan, a five-year old that my older brother is raising (a grandchild by marriage, long story). Mom was upset that they hadn’t put him in pre-school, and it reminded me of something I read in John Pfeiffer’s article “Girl Talk — Boy Talk.” Research has shown that boys pick up most of their language patterns from other boys on the playground. Girls, in contrast tend to pick up more from their teachers and older influences. This is perhaps one major reason why boys are five times more likely to have reading difficulties. The most counter-intuitive conclusion of these studies is that outsiders have a greater influence on the language of children than their parents do. Mom told me that she thought most of my language patterns were developed, not from my friends, but from television commercials.
Evidently, I loved commercials as an infant. I would repeat them endlessly, and generally be a pain in the ass (some things never change). One of the striking features about television is that it is primarily aurally focused, rather than visually focused, according to Welch. She makes a strong case. The sound in a HUT is the most defining feature, not the picture. A person can tell what is happening on TV without looking at it; a viewer’s visual attention can wander while the viewer still understands what is going on in the program. It is the sound, not the picture, that has precedence.
Welch notes that the visual aspect of television is generally less appreciated. Watching television with the sound turned off is an interesting creative activity practiced by few people, she says. Somehow, when I discovered Jimi Hendrix in my early teens, I didn’t stop watching television. I did, however, turn the sound off. In retrospect, that may have been one of the things that lead me, eventually, into photography. I photographed TV and movie screens early on, never obsessively, but when an image caught my eye. And the biggest difference, to me, between the current distribution of music on CDs and electronically, is the complete divorce it represents between the intrinsically visual experience tied to the consumption of a new piece of music. I would always prop-up the album cover in my line of sight, as I was listening to the record. That is a big advantage of cardboard. It will stand up nicely, and with the larger size it has much more presence in a room.
Though audio cues do exist, and serve a purpose in electronic discourse through computers, this aural aspect is usually background in most Internet interactions, compared to its foregrounded nature in the rhetoric of television. This is another one of those aspects that isn’t mentioned much. Web discourse puts the visual back in the front of our consciousness. Just another one of those skewed thoughts, as I reflect back on my cardboard hut.
Another thought-provoking contention by Welch is that instead of focusing on the Humanities, education should focus on the Literacies, which includes the textual, aural, and visual aspects of communication. She recommends that we teach TV. I’m not so sure about that. I think I managed to master that on my own, reaching a point in my early twenties when I didn’t even own one. Large parts of my life didn’t include any television at all. But it was a big part of my learning experience, as a child. I find it hard to figure out how someone might teach television literacy, but at the same time I see great utility in using examples from television as source material for rhetorical analysis. It fits nicely with the ideas I’ve been having about ways to connect the function of rhetoric with all aspects of human experience.
What I have most difficulty with in Welch’s book though, is the insistence on gendering everything. I suppose it’s just me getting lost in da white boy troubles. Appreciating difference is good, however should difference always be the focus? I suspect that it’s the agonistic Attack! Attack! Attack! of gender theory, overlaid on top of the scholarly attack which just gives me indigestion. It makes me think of Zappa’s Thingfish, because those strange mammy-nun creatures were created by a particularly powerful form of prison food, “the San Quentin mashed-potatoes,” which rendered those who ate them incontinent, and indestructible.
Someone asked me a few months back, after I posted the pictures of a bridge across the Arkansas River, if there were any lakes nearby. As I was driving home late this afternoon, I thought I’d snap a view from the side of my car about fifteen minutes from my apartment. This is Lake Maumelle, the reservoir for Little Rock, Arkansas. Water quality here is near the highest in the US, especially compared to other metropolitan areas. We don’t drink from the river.
This lake (one of many nearby) is actually larger than it appears from here.
Another trip back to the sticks for me. Now, I get to play garage-door opener repairman. I'm wiser now though, I'm taking the back-roads.
Since I'll no doubt accumulate more snaps along the way, I thought I'd leave some shots of the big-city metropolis Poteau, Oklahoma, that I took on the last trip. No appreciable immigration problems here, this burgeoning little spot is perhaps one of the nerve-centers of Eastern Oklahoma.
The presence of the Walmart Supercenter there pretty much guarantees it. Not to mention Carl Albert University, and the Pansy Kid Middle School. I've often wondered about that one. Named after one of those famous pioneer ladies, I wonder what it must be like to say— “Oh, I went to Pansy Kid school.” But then, I'm easily amused.
They just completed construction of a huge freeway interchange just on the outskirts. It's a four-lane cloverleaf that any big city would be proud of. Of course, the roads that feed into this couple of miles of concrete glory are all two-lane potholed back-roads. You're driving along, and all of a sudden— Freeway! But, it only lasts for about three miles in the shadow of the “World's Highest Hill.”
The downtown is what obsesses me though.
I'll be back there, and here, soon.
In order to be deceived as little as possible, I, for my own part, love to get as well acquainted as I can with an Author, before I run the risque of losing my Time in perusing his Work; and as I doubt not but most People are of this way of thinking, I shall, in imitation of my learned Brother of ever precious Memory, give some account of what I am, and those concerned with me in this Undertaking; and likewise of the chief Intent of the Lucubrations hereafter communicated that the Reader, on casting his eye over the first four or five Pages, may judge how far the Book may, or not be qualified to entertain him; and either accept, or throw it aside as he thinks proper: And here I promise, that in the Pictures I shall give of myself and Associates, I will draw no flattering Lines, assume no Perfection that we are not in reality possessed of, nor attempt to shadow over any Defect with an artificial Gloss.
As Proof of my Sincerity, I shall, in the first place, assure him that for my own Part I never was a Beauty, and am now very far from being young: (a Confession he will find few of my Sex ready to make:) I shall also acknowledge, that I have run through as many Scenes of Vanity and Folly as the greatest Coquet of them all— Dress, Equipage, and Flattery, were the Idols of my Heart.— I should have thought that Day lost which did not present me with some new Opportunity of shewing myself. —My Life, for some Years, was a continuous Round of what was then called Pleasure, and my whole Time engrossed by a hurry of promiscuous Diversions.
—The Female Spectator (from Book One)
Not much is known about Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator. She told so many conflicting lies about her life, and exists in so few records that it becomes impossible to sort it all out. She published her paper from 1744-46, and was as big of a liar as Swift, while covering her tracks even better. But, dear readers, you may recall my citation of Lanham’s concept that Western civilization is built on one golden rule: “Be sincere, whether you mean it or not!”
Jill has pointed out a nuance that I left quite cloudy. I was using “and then . . .” in a sense identical with the drive-through scene in Dude Where’s My Car, not as an implicit causality. The transformation in that scene does move toward causality, and that’s when the anger really heats up, ending in the destruction of the drive-through speaker. Something like this:
I’ll have a coke.
And then . . .
Oh, and a burger, some fries . . .
And then . . .
a frostie
And then . . .
That’s it.
And then . . .
That’s all.
And then . . .
You give me my food and I drive away
And then . . .
NO MORE AND THEN!!!!!
Adjacency with equal syntactic relevance, with or without a causal relation, which may or may not include a coordinating conjunction.
(loosely paraphrased from Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Introduction by Michael J. Toolan)
Clear as mud? The key part is equal syntactic relevance— in other words, a burger and fries do not have any real precedence or direct relationship. They do not, in and of themselves, constitute a narrative or subordinate structure, though they are presented in a temporal sequence.
Expectation of a causal relation in a temporal sequence is what causes the annoyance. That was the cloudy thought driving that blog entry and the reason why I got obsessed with using that conjunctive sequence (and then . . .) for a group of entries following it until I was clear enough on the concept to write about it.
Violation of a paratactic, expected, temporal sequence was one of the primary tools of early oral storytellers like Homer. Events were not related in strictly chronological order, or even in reverse chronological order. Jill is far more deeply read in narrative theory than I am. Genette’s Narrative Discourse rests at my elbow, along with a whole other stack of books on the subject that I want to read. I was shaving on a different splinter that is deeply related. Though largely paratactic, early oral compositions were indeed narrative, but what is unique about them is periodic structure that is not necessarily presented in a temporal, causal relation. That is why I feel they are an important analogue for blog entries. My usage of the term oral is not in any way synonymous with the general banter about conversations. I mean it in a very specific, nuanced way which can only be read in context with a great many entries that I’ve been writing in my blog.
Not all blog constructions result in easily identifiable, or definable, narratives. That, I think, is the beauty of it. Though built on a narrative, temporal, foundation— they don’t really comply with expectation.
Annoying, isn’t it? That is, of course, the literate reaction.
In Electric Rhetoric Kathleen Welch argues that the oral nature of Isocrates writing style (yes, he wrote all of his speeches, rather than just performing them as other sophisitic orators did) accounts in part for his misreading and lack of acceptance in modern praxis. They turn him into yet another golden boy Greek by neatly sanitizing what made him unique among his milieu— his literacy, and his orality. What seems fascinating to me is the way she describes the modern reaction:
Today’s readers frequently find texts such as this long-winded, repetitious, digressive, and finally, annoying.
The prose is associative, as of course much important prose has been, so for him the kind of logic invited by linearity is not privileged. Isocrates introduces issues, leaves them, returns to them, leaves them again, and cumulatively builds on them, in a manner not unlike the speech genres of a lecture or a sermon. . . .
The reader both ancient and modern will find as well an absorption with the lines that Isocrates writes, lines that are worked over, woven, in ways that are beautiful to decode when one stands away from print-dominant formalism that necessarily mocks this writing.
I wonder why I assume that smart people tell the whole story. I linked to Diotima: Materials for Study of Women and Gender in the Ancient World on my sidebar a few days ago. I was trying to dig up some information, after Kathleen Welch’s wonderful tirade, and stumbled on that site which said that the reference comes from “a tantalizing passage in Plato's Symposium”. Coincidentally, I had started to read Symposium a month or so ago, but stopped short of finishing it. I didn’t recall any reference.
When I returned to Symposium yesterday, I found that I was on the very page. And that “tantalizing passage” is actually a long speech, which goes on for at least five or six pages.
Welch argued that Symposium should be added to the rhetorical canon. Diotima, besides being the only classical female rhetorician I've read, has some great things to say about ethics. In one of my commonplace reversals of judgment, I agree. People who are unfamiliar with Plato will not find it an unusual case, but it is. He never mentions women, let alone makes them seem smart. Fictional Socrates relates the story from memory though, she doesn’t “rate” being a direct character in a dialogue, something that has caused generations of scholars to call her “fictional” while accepting that fictional Socrates indeed exists. A curious anomaly.
All that is far less interesting than what she has to say; I had run across this passage before, because Milton alludes to it in one of his tracts. I didn’t notice at the time that it was not Socrates’ voice but Diotima who said that Love was the son of Resource and Need, arguing that love does not seek to be wise. Socrates asks (in conspicuous third-person):
Then tell me, Diotima, I said, who are these seekers after truth, if they are neither wise nor ignorant?
Why, a schoolboy, she replied, could have told you that, after what I’ve just been saying. They are those that come between the two, and one of them is Love. For wisdom is concerned with the loveliest of things, and Love is the love of what is lovely. And so it follows that Love is the lover of wisdom, and being such, he is placed between wisdom and ignorance— for his parentage also is responsible, in that his father is full of wisdom and resource, while is mother is devoid of either.
Such, my dear Socrates, is the spirit of Love.
. . .
[later, Diotima continues]
Then we may state categorically that men are lovers of the good?
Yes, I said, we may.
And we shouldn’t we add that they long for the good to be their own?
We should.
And not merely to be their own, but to be their own forever?
Yes, that must follow.
. . .
Very well then, And that being so, what course will Love’s follower’s pursue, and in what particular field will eagerness and exertion be known as Love? In fact, what is this activity? Can you tell me that, Socrates?
If I could, my dear Diotima, I retorted, I shouldn’t be so amazed at your grasp of the subject and I shouldn’t be coming to you to learn the answer to that very question.
Well, I’ll tell you, then, she said. To love is to bring forth upon the beautiful, both in body and in mind.
I’m afraid that’s too deep for my poor wits to fathom.
Eventually, she gets it through Socrates’ thick skull that Love is the longing for immortality. Great stuff. That’ll teach me to assume that there isn’t much more I can find out about something!
Now this is a lesson in ethics I can embrace.
I find myself completely degenerating into silliness. First, I open up my mail to find a forwarded joke: “What do you get when you cross a feminist and a lawyer? A lawyer who won’t fuck you.”
This of course, in an obtuse way reminded me of the illustration at the right forwarded during my first (to my knowledge), and hopefully last entrance on the Daypop top 40 (at number 27). Today, I found this there:
“Spontaneous interruption of a public sex act to engage in an aggravated assault should be considered as a strong indication of a seriously unaddressed anger management problem,” the complaint states.
Which, circuitously, led me to discover that Gene Simmons plans to be Rock’s Martha Stewart. Which reminded me of a potential future feminist lawyer’s musings: Duo Ranti: Marta Esteeuar e Cultura Corporati Putanissima.
The web is surely a wondrous place. Vowel movements galore. Shite, too much time in the Latinate does drive me back to the Saxon.
—And then . . . Australians have teleportation breakthrough! Wow, now maybe I will be able to visit Luke and Shauny someday soon! And perhaps Delacour too. Now that would be some spooky interaction. I'd much rather have a transporter than an XP-38 landspeeder. You can beam me over anytime.
Punch the keys for god's sake! You're the man now dog!
Wood s lot ferreted out The Thomas Gray Archive. Gray is a favorite of mine. The most "major" of the "minor" poets, as one of my professors described him. His complete works can be read in an afternoon.
This reminded me of one of those fun little bits of Blake scholarship. The two small figures in the corner of Blake's illustration for Night The Second of Edward Young's Night Thoughts are the grandfather of Gothic, Horace Walpole, and Thomas Gray.
The subtitle, "Time, Death, Friendship" is applicable to those two in an interesting way. Walpole was rumored to be gay, and rumor also has it that he made a pass at Gray during their continental tour. They were great friends before that, but Gray quickly and inexplicably returned to England. They were not that close afterward. Blake seems to have agreed with this assessment of Walpole's character, as evidenced by his playful modifications of the plate.
It was really hard for me to track down a copy of the Oxford two-volume edition of Blake's complete designs for Night Thoughts. All the copies available in the US were over $1,000— I finally found one in England for $200, but it cost nearly a hundred to ship because it is so massive.
The final version, shown here in its watercolor form, is fairly respectful. Walpole, in the red toga, takes Gray's hand. But in the earlier stages, there are definite bits of satire.
Notice that in the first stage drawing, Walpole's lips are rather pouty, and the positioning of the hands is, um, rather suggestive.
And in the second, Walpole has a bit of a leer and seems to have grown breasts.
This rather different approach to friendship remains in the third stage drawing, with slightly diminished breasts. It also retains Gray's rather phallic pointing finger.
Of course, Blake discretely censored himself for public consumption eventually, removing the pointer, and the bulbous protuberances.
For more of Blake’s take on Gray matters, as I recall I posted his watercolor illustrations for one of Gray’ s poems as a tribute to one of my favorites, Shauny many months ago.
Only rarely do I get aggregated. Sometimes I get the point, but I fear it’s at the top of my head.
One of these days I’ll work on my Movable Type templates. I’d like to switch for several reasons. Most of them have to do with accessibility. But then it means that I’ll have to be more careful with my code and such. I never really thought I’d have much of an audience for playing in my sandbox. Writing is how I stretch; being able to use pictures and hyperlinks is just plain fun— I find that I can compose in a form that really suits my peculiar frames of mind. But I’m not sure it’s worth the aggregation.
I don’t know much about RSS, but I fear it. Part of what really makes blogging special for me is it’s sexual appeal. I suppose that makes me like Golby. Having long experience with the listserv world, I prefer playing with myself (and occasionally with others) to my hearts content here, compared to diving into a textual orgy. It’s my body of work, and I’m not selling it to anyone. Uh, that just seems dirty. Writing snappy pick-up lines for the club, hoping that someone might follow me home. Nope, I just don’t feel the need for the aggregation.
There are all sorts of rules. Content management software is a labor saving device which imposes a structure on things. Distribution software offers more labor saving, but the attendant structures seem more limiting than liberating. Like a referee at an orgy, it seems a wholly superfluous invention. Accessibility is a different issue though; I tried to keep up with it for a while because it seemed, well, democratic.
Oh, that’s right. I had a point. I think self-imposed rules are good. I remember one of the most liberating things in photography I tried was to imposing a structure of randomness. A structure of randomness? Yes, there is such a thing. One of my primary uses for my toy-computer in the dark-ages was generating random map coordinates which I forced myself to photograph. Forcing myself to use the same structure for two posts in a row was also fun. Though I don’t think I’ll ever go so far as scheduling posts, I can get behind the idea. Some structures help. Others don't.
In the Cocteau movie, Orpheus crosses into the abyss. My favorite scenes are the ones in the Princesses’ black Rolls Royce, where Orpheus listens to radio static and hears a series of words and numbers “ . . . nine . . . twelve . . .”
To everyone else it’s just static, but to Orpheus, it’s poetry— I suspect that is the dominant attitude of the majority of those who were drafted into the faculty of U Blog.
Professor Delacour was right to ask: “which hegemony is that?” I meant the faculty of U Blog. Unmotivated to read the fifty-plus reactions to the article due to my biased assumption that most were brief contextual pointers, I relied upon my peers.
Thankfully, the Abraham J. Simpson Chair of Desultory Conjecture presents a masterful function-follows-form supporting argument. His reasoning is stellar; sometimes "rules" are a good thing which force us to reach further creatively than merely replicating structure. Using the antiquated technology of e-mail, I quickly confirmed my suspicion that Meg’s argument was entirely intuitive (no doubt fueled by her undergraduate education in English), and she did not, in fact, know that a substantial body of theory supports her strategy.
My affinity for intuition need not be restated. However, Professor Delacour’s assertion that Meg’s argument lacked nuance needs must be addressed. My training by those tightly suited and bow-tied “New Critical” folks suggests to me that a great point of departure would be simply to return to the text. Let’s have a look at the proposito and diviso of the article:
If we look beneath the content of weblogs, we can observe the common ground all bloggers share -- the format. The weblog format provides a framework for our universal blog experiences, enabling the social interactions we associate with blogging. Without it, there is no differentiation between the myriad content produced for the Web
This celebration of the “At” level of the phenomenon warms the visual-learner side of me. However, she uses the word beneath misleadingly, as if she were plumbing the depths. No, what she's looking at is the surface, as Stavros and Jonathon quickly surmised. It seems timely to point out that the explosion of postmodern thought stands on a foundation of structuralism and, in lit-crit, the New Critics— we got to this postmodern condition by exploring the difficulties with surface. The key nuances in Meg's argument are found in enabling and differentiating.
Rather than straining to interpret the phenomenon of hypertext and social networks, as most of the big J's before her, she declares a narrow field. Changes in tools have enabled new subset of literacy growth which is best addressed from its surface. Because what is literacy if not a universal set of expectations within a community, forged through interaction? What differentiates a blog from a static web-page is structure. This indeed, I feel, is a finely nuanced assertion. It has limits, much like Chomsky's work on transformational grammar, but it might explain some things as well as Chomsky explained syntactical ambiguity. What seems most important in this case though, is that the tools create the grammar. We create the tools. We can —perhaps— speed or slow the transformation by better understanding the tools. The tools are the deep structure, which does perhaps support her usage of beneath after all.
The “Through” level of blogging is a controversy already in process. That’s where these questions of identity and sincerity are going. Just how reliable are the impressions we receive from our blog reading? This level is important as well, but can possibly be illuminated by examining the difficulties of maintaining serial consistency in identity, a conflict forced by the nature of the tools themselves. The addition of an examination of the “At” level was welcomed by me, as indeed a leading gesture, not a following gesture. I’m happy that Meg has not elected to just get out of the way.
Orpheus was a powerful rhetorician. He could convince the trees and rocks to conform to his will. But Cocteau's Orpheus became mad due to voices only he could hear. The degeneration into schizophrenia is one of those side effects of hearing the poetry among the noise. However, there is the possibility of a bright side at the end of all this. In Cocteau’s movie, after first meeting the Princess Orpheus wakes in a field and the narrator observes:
And a silver shape like his early love doth pass
Upborne by her wild and glittering hair
And when he wakes on the fragrant grass
He finds night day
Hmm, this sounds a lot like the conversations I’ve overheard around the water-cooler at U Blog. Upon reflection, perhaps hegemony was a rather noisy word to use. U Bloggers might better be labeled hegemony crickets. I'm just squeaking along with the rest, and of course their frequency makes a great thermometer. Seems to me that writing involves both form and content. Separating them seems dangerous indeed. Of course, the Princess in Orpheus was death. Death is the ultimate expression of temporality. Temporality seduced Orpheus, which seems completely in line with Meg's exploration.
[listening deeply, and being seduced by the siren sound of secondary orality]
I knew it was bound to happen. I was quoted while I was still tweaking along. I have a tendency to write live. Perhaps I need to start using a blog in prog sticker like AKMA so that people won't miss the jokes which always occur to me after I've completed writing something, and won't quote bloated sentences which I've changed after reflection.
I rather liked "hegemony crickets" (you have to know how to pronounce it to get it).
Lest anyone should wonder, the structural similarity between this entry and the previous one was purely intentional. Imitation is a big part of learning to write. However, I know I've crossed into dangerous territory when I start imitating myself. Even worse, I suppose, is starting to comment on yourself.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Raymon EMAIL: rmontalbetti@hotmail.com URL: DATE: 06/17/2002 9:50:00 PM wishing upon a star . . . when i call up your links now . . . the page appears without any url . . . i miss the url for documentation . . . oh well . . . just different searching with the invisible flashlight in the night or day . . .There's an easy fix for that. Under View (on IE anyway) select the toolbars submenu. Enable the address toolbar. I disabled most of the buttons on the pop-ups, but left the menu intact for that reason. You can make it into a regular browser window using the toolbar options.
I originally set things that way because I liked the cleaner look. If I ever get around to switching to MT, I'm going to do away with the centered javascript pop-up function entirely, but for now, that's the workaround. The address also appears in the status window before you click it, as long as you have that enabled in your browser.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Raymon EMAIL: rmontalbetti@hotmail.com URL: DATE: 06/18/2002 9:41:00 AM thanks for the guiding toolbar . . . ----- --------TITLE: Dude! DATE: 06/16/2002 7:18:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
In the abysmal farce Dude Where's My Car, two guys are in search of a continuum transfunctioner. My favorite moment was when they became trapped at a drive-through where a disembodied voice insistently repeats “and then? . . .”
That's an easy way of describing parataxis. Parataxis is a quality of primary orality —to keep Alex happy, I'll further specify that it is a quality of ancient Greek primary orality— DUDE! That’s what the embryonic structure of blogging is.
When I first read Meg Hourihan’s piece on blogging, I said to myself— SWEET! Of course, this wasn't the hegemonic response. Stavros was the first to blast it, followed closely by Jonathon.
You see, in my opinion, what she was writing about is really the continuum transfunctioner of blogging. To be tiresomely McLuhanesqe, the medium is the message. I'm not saying that Jonathon and Stavros didn’t raise valid points, but as Meg replied in a comment to Jonathon’s post:
What I was trying to do in my article was simply point out that we can’t define this thing based on the content we're outputting, just like you can’t define photography based on the photos of one brilliant photographer. I tried to look beneath the content to the tools and format that enable us to make connections. I wasn’t saying that's all there is to blogging, I was just saying that’s one piece of it.
I’d like to take that a step further. What she's looking at is the grammar of blogging. There is a reason for the explosion of diverse content, post-blogging. I think it has a lot to do with the changes to the grammar involved. Blogging is a fat sandwich. I’m looking at it through the lens of orality, literacy, and secondary orality theory— what Kathleen Welch calls good bread for arguments about literacy in the electronic age. I think the content produced through blogging represents an entirely new kind of meat. And to invert Welch, we need the bread too.
Simply put, the structure imposed by the grammatical rules of timestamps, permalinks, etc., results in paratactic information exchange. Each day adds another level of and then. . . which had been largely lost in conventional hypertext documents. In hypertext, there doesn't have to be a then, only rhizomatic patterns of connection. Blogging imposes a structure which makes hypertext more functional as a medium. The first generation “link blogs” are entirely paratactic, compared to the hypotactic, subordinating [dare I say tree-like] nature of first generation personal home pages. Hypotaxis was derived from print literacy. Link blogs are in essence far more oral and conversational.
Blogs move things back toward the pole of orality because of their grammar. The world returns to its long-lost and then . . . roots. However, as the divergence of conversation suggests, it’s not a simple change. As long form blogging has stretched out, it still maintains its periodic oral structure while each post within a blog maintains a largely literate subordinate hypotactic structure. We are going into the future by rediscovering the temporal, ever-shifting nature of the oral past. As Jeremy Bushnell reflected a few days ago, there are precedents to this return to temporal writing, but the sheer scale of the thing begs that we examine not just how these tools affect “writers,” but how they affect everyone. Blogs are one of the best arguments for the emergence of what Father Ong calls secondary orality.
Why is this important? Because it represents an entirely new kind of consciousness, not a “paradigm shift” (yech!) but a syntagmatic shift. The grammar of blogging is perhaps instrumental for the practical development of a completely new grammar of thought. I don't think what Meg was talking about was trivial at all. Of course, I seem to be in the minority here, but I thought I'd speak up. Isocrates was present at a very similar interface point, and Welch has some really interesting observations that I’ll talk about later. For now, I just wanted to repeat a blogger's chorus:
Dude! What does mine say?
Sweet! What does mine say?
Dude! What does mine say?
Sweet! What does mine say?
The technology of photography is indeed of great importance, for example, in examining how the small hand-held camera and high speed films fundamentally changed the content of photography. In a mature medium, these questions are less important. But still, Walker Evans’s nearly recursive move back into heavy view cameras deeply effected the character of the images he produced, when contrasted to his street photography with roll-film cameras. The grammar of the machine affects the content. I gave up infrared photography largely for the reasons Jonathon suggested; people didn’t care about the photographs, only the technology. But, how old is blogging? Shouldn’t we be asking precisely these sort of questions?
[ducking before the ostrich pokes my eye out]
-----
COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Pascale Soleil
EMAIL: both2and@yahoo.com
URL: http://radio.weblogs.com/0100595/
DATE: 06/17/2002 12:19:00 AM
I'd just like to put in an utterly facetious, but sincere!, vote for secondary orality. I just like the sound of it. (Pun intended.)
Forgive me, I'm a little drunk on kisses.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jonathon Delacour EMAIL: sasame@yuki.net URL: http://weblog.delacour.net/ DATE: 06/17/2002 2:38:00 AMWhich hegemony is that? Three dissenting voices amongst the avalanche of enthusiastic endorsement?
I agree wholeheartedly that "Walker Evans’s nearly recursive move back into heavy view cameras deeply effected the character of the images he produced, when contrasted to his street photography with roll-film cameras."
But that's an infinitely more nuanced argument than defining the difference in terms of the dimensions of the respective negatives and the presence or lack of perforations.
Anyway, the weather here in Sydney is cold and overcast, rain on the way. How about Little Rock?
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: stavrosthewonderchicken EMAIL: stavrosthewonderchicken@hotmail.com URL: http://emptybottle.org DATE: 06/17/2002 4:37:00 AM Jeff, I like this, I like this a lot. Thank you for making me revisit what Meg was saying and look at it in a new light. Whether or not she was thinking in terms of the 'grammar of blogging' when she wrote the piece isn't important... you've given me a way to approach that article in a way that makes it more meaningful. For me, anyway.
Those misguided few who persist in believing that there's some point to the humanities as well as to science, and even (to a much lesser extent) to computer technology, will also find some point to explicitly bringing one realm to bear on another. I wouldn't call that "translation." I'd call it noticing evidence and dealing with it. Or, more briefly, "insight."
-----COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Bill Humphries
EMAIL:
URL: http://www.whump.com/moreLikeThis/
DATE: 06/17/2002 7:06:00 PM
Point well taken Ray, in my excitement to see that once Meg's thesis was recast in another domain, that stavros had his 'aha!' moment, I was dismissive of the effort to illuminate him.
Mea culpa.
-----COMMENT:
AUTHOR: Ray
EMAIL: raydavis@kokonino.com
URL: http://www.bellonatimes.com/
DATE: 06/17/2002 7:25:00 PM
Thanks, Bill.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit that -- even though I had no real problem with Meg's description, and even though I'm skeptical about the extent to which the weblog format is revolutionary or lends itself to revolution -- I also got a lot of "aha!" out of VD's post. To recast in another domain is often to say something new.
-----
--------TITLE: Walker Evans, Pt. 8
DATE: 06/16/2002 1:27:00 PM
AUTHOR: General
-----
BODY:
Reaching Toward Critical Mass
Jonathon’s gesture towards an Walker Evans photograph reminded me about something I should have been doing. Last month, I started a sort of survey of the work of Walker Evans, but I stopped around 1930— the point where most critics begin.
I was leading toward something. But once again, before I get there, I've got to pause for a moment to share a few more of those 1929-30 gems, which most people probably have not seen.
Early focus on the nature of hypertext pointed at the “death of the author” somewhat tediously. I think that TV’s latest motion toward the role of pseudonyms in the 18th century is a more fruitful (and perhaps not as cliché as he thinks) way to think about what is going on regarding the web. Where Evans was going involved marching in lockstep with the early modernists into anonymity. But prior to 1930, he was still working in a rather assertive and playful mode, dancing on the edge of sentimental celebration before falling off the other side into something bright, shiny, and hard.
So, I suppose I’ll dive back in again with a bit of a recap, and some new images. What keeps drawing me back to these photographs is their humor. I never seem to tire of looking at them. Though sometimes Evans is easily placed into his milieu, often, he dances precariously just beyond the edge of the “high seriousness” of modernity.
Eventually, Evans left the bright lights and big city.
More of my Walker Evans wandering, in case you’ve missed it, includes: An introduction, Evans’ Placard for a Museum Wall, Evan’s photographs for Hart Crane’s The Bridge, his early European snapshots, photographs of Coney Island, his affinity with Atget, more cityscapes, a short story he wrote called Brooms, and where I left off, Evan’s lists.
It seems fitting to include another list, just for Bloomsday.
Like
fucking (including + chiefly composed of all leadup and parody)
drinking
working when I do not hate it and every sensation following work
movies
music
city streets
auto driving
the cleaner degrees of weltsmerz and God
hatred
exhaustion
Buster Keaton
S.J. Perleman
beautiful bellies
Melanctha
Lenin
the life and conduct of Joyce
New Orleans
8 extensions of Swift, Grosz and Celine
the earth from the air
James Harold Flye
(what James Agee likes, in Evans’ hand, NY 12-26-37)
In a short time, the sleepy little Oklahoma town has been overrun by scores of Mexicans who have come to town to work in the huge chicken plant there.
I liked my mom's reaction to the whole controversy. She said:
“If they don't like it, well, it's their own fault for not wanting to work in the chicken plant.”
Working in chicken processing plants is hard, disgusting work. The area is filled with poverty. Since the rise of Walmart and other discount chains, the downtown areas have been reduced to rows of secondhand shops. It's a far cry from when I visited as a boy. Heavener was never really “Main-Street America,” of the form that exists in a lot of Midwestern towns; it's always been a sort of frontier outpost, where the seedy side of America pokes its stubble through.
I first saw The Wild One in a theater in downtown Heavener in the 70s. It was still popular then. One of my uncles lived there, alongside some railroad tracks. Bill Thompson would disappear into the surrounding hills for days on end; Bill ran a still, chewed tobacco, and drank from mason jars. Heavener was a hillbilly wonderland.
I'd always meant to go there someday and photograph it, but the Heavener I knew no longer exists.
This building is a center of controversy. The owner, to please potential Mexican tenants, painted it bright purple on one side, and blue on the other. I thought it looked gorgeous. The long-time residents however, think it’s an outrage.
There was a bright florescent green building next door, but they didn’t seem to complain about that. They are trying to have the building declared a national landmark, so that the owner will be forced to restore it to it’s prior, dilapidated, condition.
You can’t please all the people all the time.
All the taquerias were closed when I was there. It made me sad. I really wanted a real taco. Most of the rednecks really don’t know what they are missing. When cultures come together, usually, the food gets better.
That’s the main problem I have with living in such a “black and white” part of the country. Even the ethnic restaurants tone down their cuisine to please the customers whose palates have two settings: barbequed or fried. Those options bored me really quickly; brown people have some of the best food, at least in my opinion.
I did take some snapshots that hold on to a bit of the old flavor though, just for the heck of it. Old Heavener has much more of a brick-red and piss-yellow sort of thing going on.
Actually, the Walmart Supercenter is in nearby Poteau. I've got more photos of that to come.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: sharon EMAIL: sha_19682000@yahoo.com URL: DATE: 03/20/2004 7:12:00 PM hello. i am a resident of heavener oklahoma, lived here all my life. i was born in poteau oklahoma. i was born into a poor family and was preety much treated as such by a lot of people around here. i rember my attitude was one of discrimination when the hispinacs first started comming in. then i started working at the chicken plant. i got to know a few and eventually learned a little of the language. the mexicans, as they call themselves, are very friendly. always willing to share a meal and lend a hand to a friend in need.they give as good as they get. i have yet to meet one that judges me the way most white people do. this includes men and women. we take alot of our lifestyle for granted. were they view it as a great gift. yes they come here to make money but the money they spend here helps line the pockets of the heavener commerce. however they are often taken advantage of by the people wishing to fill their pockets. housing cost have skyrocketed. even for a bateman mansion the cost is not less than 300.00-*400.00. most of thes homes were declared unlivable by the department of health but are now rentable, to a mexican used to living in a home with nothing but a dirt floor.call me crazy but there is good and bad in every race. but a person usually finds what hes wanting to see. sharon s. sanchez, -----COMMENT: AUTHOR: mary EMAIL: rob_drummer_chic@yahoo.com URL: DATE: 04/17/2004 8:40:00 PM I have lived outside of heavener in hodgen all my life and i have notice the rise in the mexican population in heavene. i am currently attending heavener high shcool and there is alot more mexican students thean there was 3 years ago. im not really racist but i don't really like the mexican in town but i try tolerate them as the best i can but i do have to admit there would be no heavener without them but as long as they stay in heavener and not in hodgen everything well be allright but if they start moving into hodgen there will be some ticked off rednecks (like me)... -----COMMENT: AUTHOR: francesca EMAIL: chester_sully_mike_13@yahoo.com URL: DATE: 04/17/2004 8:55:00 PM Hello, I'm a resident of Hodgen Ok. I'm a working mother I have 3 kids ages 5, 3 1/2, 2. And I have notice the rise in hispanics in Heavener over the past 5 years. Hodgen is a small rural town about 4 or 5 miles south of heavener and if u think heavener is FULL of rednecks... you should come visit Hodgen. But the rise in mexicans has GREATLY increased like almost 3/4 of heavener is now mexican "turf" personally I have no problams w/ them but I think the major reason that the people of heavenr are so racy is because of how fast they came, I mean a@ first maybe a few lived here and then it what seems like days there swamping heavener! But they really help w/ the chicken plant and all that stuff, trust me i have worked @ the chicken plant and its not the best job in the world!!! Also why people are so racy is because most of them are old farts who are racy against any body who has any dif. skin tone and dont belive in what they do!! thats all i have to say! by the way u need to update ur pics they are so old those buliding have changed b-sides the purple one! ----- --------TITLE: The E question DATE: 06/15/2002 7:24:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: The “E” question.I have consciously avoided, in all my pursuits, questions of ethics. There just doesn’t seem to be a convincing argument, to me at least, that ethics exist as a “discrete” quantity to be conferred or instilled in an individual, or a society for that matter. Senstitivity to ethical issues can be conferred through both rhetorical and philosophical education, but ethics as a subject field is both a mystery, and a misery to me. I noticed as I logged on to the OED today that they updated the entry for misery with some nuanced terms:
misery index Econ. (orig. and chiefly U.S.), an informal measure of the state of an economy obtained from the sum of the rate of inflation and the unemployment statistics, devised by American economist Arthur Okun (1928-80).
1973 D. POTTER Hide & Seek iv. 99 ‘What's the matter with you, misery guts?’ asked the other woman, obscurely offended. ‘Piss off, Marlene,’ the girl replied.
As Turbulent Velvet commented, the subject of emotions and ethics are seldom mentioned in the same breath. However, rhetoric and emotions often are. Rhetorical education has long been scarred by its association with ethics. This goes back to the “Q” question explored by Lanham. Just what is good in regard to Quintilian’s definition of the ideal orator as “a good man speaking well?” Is good an ethical term, or an evaluation of value? The Platonic and Aristotelian view is that good is an ethical term, and this makes rhetoric supremely problematic. The Sophistic view is that good is a pragmatic question of value. But good is never ignored in questions of rhetoric. Cicero, one of the great taxonomizers, listed the attributes of “personhood” as multiple facets that must be dealt with in order to promote the judgment desired by an orator, stealing some concepts from Isocrates regarding the public notion of good.
All propositions are supported in argument by attributes of persons or of actions.
We hold the following to be the attributes of persons: name, nature, manner of life, fortune, habit, feeling, interests, purposes, achievements, accidents, speeches made.
Name is that which is given to each person, whereby he is addressed by his own proper and definite appellation. It is hard to give a simple definition of nature. (De Inv. I:24:34)
Habit is a poor translation. Cicero uses habitus demonstrating his sensitivity to the cultural part of identity. Notice also that he also includes both feeling and chance. Nature, as Cicero notes, is the most problematic term to define. He goes on to describe biological attributes, and qualities which differentiate men from beasts. Nature is the problematic descriptor at the root of the conflict between transcendental expressivism and socially constructed neo-Marxist praxis. Is nature merely habitus? I resist that conclusion. Expressivism deals with the “E” question in a Kantian manner, assuming that people in touch with their true selves are impelled toward moral behavior. Social Constructivism is built on the premise that education instills moral values. Sophistic praxis ridicules the problematic nature of ethics, and thumbs its nose at ethical conventions.
I don’t think that rhetoric should teach ethics, only ethical sensitivity. It’s “good” to recognize the values game, and the qualities of emotion and chance that influence it. Dwelling on ethics makes me a misery guts, causing a huge increase in my misery index.
PHILOSOPHY
And suppose your pupil, by taking your advice, is promptly convicted of adultery and sentenced to be publicly reamed with a radish?
How, Sir, would you save him from that?
SOPHISTRY
Why, what’s the disgrace in being reamed with a radish?
PHILOSOPHY
Sir, I can conceive of nothing fouler than being buggered by a radish.
SOPHISTRY
And what would you have to say, my friend, if I defeat you on this point too?
PHILOSOPHY
What could I say? I would never speak again for shame.
SOPHISTRY
Very well then. What sort of men are our lawyers?
PHILOSOPHY
Why, they’re all Buggers.
SOPHISTRY
Right! What are our tragic poets then?
PHILOSOPHY
Why, they’re Buggers too.
SOPHISTRY
Right! And what of our politicians, Sir?
PHILOSOPHY
Why, Buggers to a man.
SOPHISTRY
Right! You see how stupidly you spoke? And now look at the audience. What about them?
PHILOSOPHY
I’m looking hard.
SOPHISTRY
And what do you see?
PHILOSOPHY
By heaven, I see an enormous crowd of people, and almost all of them Buggers.
Pointing to individuals in the audience
See there? That man’s a Bugger. And that long-haired fop’s a Bugger too.
SOPHISTRY
Then, how do we stand, my friend?
PHILOSOPHY
I’ve been beaten by Buggers.
Flinging his cloak to the audience
O Buggers, catch my cloak and welcome me among the Buggers!
I’ve been trying to read Kathleen Welch’s Electric Rhetoric for a little over a year now. The whole thing is so agonistic that it’s hard to separate the venom from the serum. Most reviewers don’t agree with me. Noemi Marin applauds it. Raymie McKerrow calls it a richly textured, broadly supported argument. I’m on page seventy-five, and I really haven’t found an original argument yet. It’s mostly been a polemic against other rhetoricians that have used dead white guys as a means to develop their arguments for rhetorical pedagogies which really don’t differ that radically from what she proposes. That is, unless you count studying texts that don’t exist.
Checking in the index, she lambasts Lanham for not citing enough women writers, calling it an evidence of his bias. Of course, she admits her own bias (as no-doubt Lanham would as well). Welch constantly announces what she’s going to do, but as a poor magician’s stall, it’s just taking too damn long. But I’m trying, again, to persevere. Diotima is her Joan of Arc. A brief reference, in one line of Plato’s Symposium, representing a female rhetorician with no extant writings. I’m all for studying female rhetoric; but how do you study what isn’t there? Well, you study contemporary theory on rhetoric that isn’t there. Sorry, I’d rather read Jane Austen. Now there is some powerful female rhetorical theory that does exist. I’ve got high hopes for Aphra Behn as well.
I just had to rant. I like Isocrates (her pet Sophist), but I prefer Protagoras. What really nailed me was her wonderful flourishes regarding Henry Sussman’s deployment of Ong’s orality theories in High Resolution:
This book is a sandwich in which the meat is a well done formulation applied to Male Master texts and the bread is some orality, literacy, secondary orality theory. We need the bread.
The confusion over Virgil’s bank-robbing note in Take the Money and Run points at the necessity of interpretation as a pragmatic part of communication. He failed to rob the bank, because nobody could understand his handwriting. The primary flaw I see in Lanham’s reduction of things to levels of transmission (At / Through) is that it doesn't begin to touch the problem of interpretation. This is a mistake that Ricoeur addresses. I’ll wander my way back there sometime soon. I’ve been dancing toward this stuff for a while. Turbulent Velvet posed a question in a comment:
When someone insists on "sincerity," is this always a formal-stylistic-epistemological demand?
I will be back in an hour.
An hour from when? Without face-to-face interaction, we must speculate on the “now” that the writer is referring to. The “now” must have some relative referent to be meaningful. In the case of a blog entry, if the post has a time-stamp, it is indeed meaningful in the time context. But what about space? When I say “back” it implies a “here” which the return will be consummated in. Does the writer mean he will write more in his blog, or merely be connected to the web, waiting for replies? What if a writer says:
I will be back soon.
Soon, for a rock, might be a thousand years. For a human, well, the entire concept is socially constructed and conditioned by appropriateness behaviors. The problematic nature of identity in writing often amplified by the web exists because the presence of an I implied in all statements constitutes a deictic expression. When someone links something, even with only an implied intention, an I is present as the epistemic, indexical context for the utterance:
[I think this is] Hilarious
It seems easy to index some qualities of intention behind my act of pointing— I must be interested in writing, or at least be in possession of a dirty mind, to find it funny. There is an inferred I at the core of all statements. Thus, the insistence on “sincerity” is an epistemic demand for clarification of the position of the speaker in relation to the utterance. Links are always deictic. They come from somewhere and they go somewhere, which can only be defined relatively. As Jill has noted, they are signs of value. Links are currently being “mined” in a relatively simplistic way creating a power dynamic that, though tangential to what I’ve been on about, is relevant. Identity, at least in most Western cultures, has its own sort of value, its own currency. And the "mining methods" surrounding identity are similarly flawed.
Questioning online identity is similar to questioning link economics because identity also involves a complex exchange between differing consensual levels of access. I blame Alex for getting me started on this. Questions of linking and questions of identity are not usually connected because the convergence of the deictic functions in electronic discourse is seldom noticed: what we point at and who we are have received attention separately, but not together. Expressions of identity, whether in the form of abstract links or expressive revelations, index the relative position of the speaker to the hearer, and are largely inferred rather than overtly stated. To request clarification of either (context around a pointer, sincerity from a writer) is indeed a formal-stylistic-epistemological demand. Indexical expressions are evaluated for “truth value” on the basis of both ends of the relation. However, conversational deixis is not conveniently reducible to pure semantic, truth-conditional analysis. This, perhaps, —as Frank Zappa would say— is the crux of the biscuit ['].
There’s a lot more to think about in that fat comment. I don’t see the problem of emotion or “emotional scripts” as an “orthogonal vector” to conventional rhetorical theory, but instead a central cause for the vibrations. The oscillation between expressivist and social-constructivist praxis is a large case in point. I’ve got a paper on that subject I’m still working on. But I’ve already babbled on too long. Perhaps later.
Jeff,
The emotional vector is a problem because there's no theory for it. That is, classical rhetoric has enormous, elaborate taxonomies for all the stylistic doodads. But there's no correspondingly elaborate taxonomy of these emotions which you say are the causes of rhetoric, nor is there a lot of thought about the complex-deceptive way that the emotional causes might relate to the styles. As a result, the stylistic forms and the emotions which precede them tend to become theoretically conflated. People begin to think that in describing the formal, stylistic maneuvers they're also describing or taxonomizing the emotions which are related to the forms (and this is problematic because it oversimplifies and ignores the zones where there is slippage or complexity between the two fields, or where emotion has some kind of "autonomous" effect which can't be reduced to or identified with a stylistic maneuver). Then, once this conflation occurs, theory begins to let language take over the slots of both cause and effect. People begin to say that language "constructs" emotion.
A narrative of error: First the integrity of the stylistic taxonomy was preserved by saying that emotions-- standing outside of the stylistic maneuvers--were their cause. Emotion does its thing, rhetoric does its thing, and there's a lovely dance between. But because no way has been developed to talk about the emotions apart from the rhetorical taxonomy, rhetorical form is allowed to stand in for the missing theory of emotion--and then in the end emotion is triumphantly conceived as the result of language, "constructed" by it. Poststructuralism and cognitive theory tend to eliminate emotion as anything but an epiphenomenon of language in just this way.
The only theory we've really had that attempts richly to put linguistic form and emotional dynamics together is psychoanalysis. So if you don't believe in psychoanalysis, where do you go theoretically to think about emotion and rhetoric in a really rich and complex way? I think most critics and rhetoricians, faced with this problem, have retreated to stylistic form and hoped that it can somehow redouble itself and stand in for the emotion question. And I see this as a source of many theoretical dead ends.
At the same time, I have a hard time getting people to see the problem I see here, so I tend to stop them on the road like the Ancient Mariner and harp on this point over and over.
Please accept this albatross.
Also, my comments are not "fat." I prefer to think of them as portly in a dignified sort of way, like Mr. French in A Family Affair.
Yours as ever,
T.V.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeff EMAIL: URL: DATE: 06/14/2002 9:53:00 PMT.V., that is a horribly skewed version of classical rhetoric. Aristotle, in Book 1 of Rhetoric says (before he says much of anything else):
The modes of persuasion are the only true constituents of the art: everything else is merely accessory.
With the fading importance of epidictic in the Roman World (coincident with the rise of the lawyer), the taxonomies began. However, Augustine effectively revived the epidictic (praise or blame) genre as a mode of preaching, thus placing importance back into the emotional field of play. The “wound” in rhetorical theory you’re speaking of happened in the 16th and 17th century, with Erasmus and Ramus. Erasmus's Copia is the taxonomy to end all taxonomies (stylistically). These things really took hold not in classical rhetoric, but modern rhetoric. It’s just that the popular perception of classical rhetoric is filtered through these guys, thus privileging the logical pole of the appeals. That pretty much ends with Burke and McKeon in the 20th century, as rhetoric reverts back to its emotional roots. Surely Burke’s consubstantiality and Jim Corder’s Rhetoric is Love are attempts to put the importance of a theory of emotion in Rhetoric back in play? I suspect that there is more of a surfeit of emotional theories in both classical and postmodern rhetoric, rather than a lack. It’s just the dark ages (the age of reason) which minimized emotion in any way.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeff EMAIL: URL: DATE: 06/15/2002 3:06:00 AMOh, and one more thing— a deep engagement of emotional issues is incorporated in a sort of marginalized sub-field in rhetoric, Writing and Healing, wrapped tightly around the “vector” you propose. Check out “Teaching Emotional Literacy” by Jerome Bump from UT Austin, anthologized in Writing and Healing: Towards an Informed Practice.
“Expressivism” (popularized by Peter Elbow and others in the 70s) became a straw dog to flog upon for social-constructivists, due to its engagement with emotional rhetoric (constituting a supposed power-imbalance, where disclosure became a prerequisite for successful writing), and now the flight into psychoanalytic support for the inclusion of emotion in rhetorical theory is raging full steam (again) as we speak(write).
Lack of fallacious “taxonomies” does not constitute an avoidance of theorizing the emotions in rhetoric, it merely confirms that emotion was ignored during the “age of reason” when most of the “logical” taxonomies were constructed!
----- --------TITLE: Toasted DATE: 06/13/2002 8:21:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Getting Smashed
Turbulent Velvet emailed me about a problem with my commenting feature. Because of my preference for composing directly in HTML (without an editor) I must disable the automatic insertion of line-breaks. I knew about the problem, but it didn't really seem to be that important until people started leaving longer comments.
The side-effect of not having breaks is that the comments get smashed. The only solution I've found is to enable HTML completely in the comments. This means that you can <p> and <br> to your heart's content now. Just don't expect anything to happen by just hitting return, and kindly close your tags! Violators will be edited.
A nearby coffeehouse with its own roaster has a great warning in the parking lot: “Violators will be roasted and ground.” It's almost as good as the warning sign in the parking lot of the UALR Methodist student union: “Dire consequences for transgressors.”
I was hoodwinked at the local wine store into buying a chardonnay. I prefer red wine; maybe it’s the blood thing. They told me that Toasted Head was owned by Robin Williams. A simple mistake really. Robin Williams owns Toad Hollow, which isn’t nearly as flashy.
You’d think they’d get it straight though, since the epicenter of Toad Suck Daze is a half-hour away. Odd that a festival named for drinking would be in a dry county. You’ve got to love the South. Yes, selling (not drinking) booze is illegal in some places around here.
But I digress (as usual). There was something seductive about a wine whose logo is a fire-breathing bear. Hey, I resemble that remark! And besides, everybody loves Toasted Head!
In one of those weird little epiphanies last semester, it dawned on me that the only difference between dialogic and dialectic was the presence of an implied hierarchy, and an implied resolution in dialectic. Dialogism is messy, and refuses to be any other way.
Dialectic is one means of damping the oscillation (or osculation) of dialogue. Who’s your daddy? Dialectic is coercive, and more often than not presents a false security of pretended resolution. Reading deeply in Plato these last few years, I’m struck with how unresolved and unsynthesized things really are. Centuries have declared Plato and his apologist Aristotle the victor, effectively squelching the other voices in the dialogic oscillation. Aristotle became the “Daddy.” Rewriting (his)tory with the silenced voices back in becomes a sort of fetish game of dominance and submission.
I’m not sure this is all that productive. However, recognizing the swinging pendulum itself surely is. With each stroke, the opposing voices are driven to clarify their positions, and recognize the value-laden nature of the discourse. Each time that I write something here, since I seem to have attracted a crowd of astute readers, I anticipate a certain amount of pressure on problematic assumptions. This is a good thing. I try to return the favor from time to time. This blog has transformed lately into a reading journal which compares concepts in books I’m reading with conversations already in progress, with an occasional expressive flourish. It helps me, a lot.
I am glad that Tom spoke up about my problematic lines regarding skepticism. I wrote and erased them a dozen times. Eventually, I settled on leaving them in as a sort of aporia. Statements of that type beg for a defense, which then (or now) I lack the energy to pursue. It was the one part of the essay that I was least happy with; but rather than expend a great deal of time with that (relatively minor) conceptual part of the equation, I simply let it stand and moved on. I’m happy that someone noticed; it’s the sort of thing that could easily be expanded into an essay all its own. Reduction always invites challenge, as AKMA parenthetically noted in his wrap-up of some of the conversation going on.
Thankfully, his clarification need not be answered in a response of my own. When I expressed a sympathy for his questioning of the flight from accountability that pseudonymous writing can represent, it was for all the reasons that Ed noted in response to another conversational thread:
But failing to convey feelings or at least the inability to properly resolve them, whether in person, privately or through the act of writing, has got to be the ultimate stab against self-respect. And anyone who stops at midpoint because of this, anyone who fails to put their name upon a piece, is ultimately disrespecting the full nature of their talent, or owning up to their own inadequacies or, for that matter, who they really are.The problems involved are complex. As I said, this is my “first response,” but not my only response. Learning to construct multiple identities through writing is a key skill. People try on different voices, though I think it is necessary in the end to be accountable for those voices. But even in sum, all these voices do not entirely construct a person. There are always silences, gaps, and ums and uhs. Life itself is often seems a “dark, deep Ravine— / Thou many-colour'd, many-voiced vale” where things are only discovered through the relationships implied between them.
There are large areas at play in writing instruction regarding which voice should be emphasized in teaching. The oscillation swings between privileging disclosure (expressivism) and privileging silence (neo-traditional and some aspects of social-constructivist praxis). Power always enters into the problem. There are no easy answers, as Rory’s reply to that splinter thread implies. It is indeed about the definitions of public and private, and it is also about the economics of the exchange. And economics are only possible when one thing is valued more highly than another.
Jill unveiled an interesting paper on the economics of links. This approach certainly has merit, regarding one important aspect of link behaviors. People are the currency of the web that interests me, and it seems pertinent to note one more definition of rhetoric from Richard A. Lanham:
Rhetoric is the economics of attention.Disclosure and non-disclosure are in some ways the personal currency of the web. While it is tempting to view them as positive and negative values, which is which depends entirely on your perspective. Perhaps the fun is in the friction, which dialogic rather than dialectic exchange implies. ----- --------TITLE: Good vibrations? DATE: 06/12/2002 9:45:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
The freaky thing about the snapshots I discovered last week is that they confirm moments I've written about.
In the story Wound, written just after my brother David's death, I talked about building some magnetic project kits.
Well, here is some supporting evidence. The kit is strewn all over the dining-room table, and my trusty glass of iced tea is close by. It's weird to see what I actually looked like during those early years.
Geek boy in his element.
I did have an odd thing for magnets at first. I'd break magnets off of old speakers once I destroyed them by turning them into vibrators.
It was a cool trick my brother Stephen taught me. Just hook up a speaker to a 12-volt train transformer, and it vibrates like hell at 60hz. That is, until the speaker bursts into flame, shooting sparks and the flaming cone across the room. I have a long history of being easily amused.
Good vibrations? I suppose so, in a childish way. There is something compelling about oscillation.
He did, however, know about magnetism:
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say.
—Walden, “Economy”
The vacuum tube hadn't been invented yet. Fleming created the diode in 1904, but it wasn’t until Lee De Forest invented the audion tube (triode) in 1906 that tubes became an active device. An extra part, known as a grid, could modulate the current traveling across and inject feedback to create either amplification or oscillation. Though tubes have been largely replaced by solid-state devices, the basic principles remain. The difference between an amplifier and an oscillator is slight: changing a few component values can affect the transformation. The hard-wired circuits can be identical. Keeping amplifiers stable is tricky— they always want to oscillate.
Metaphorically speaking, I think this is the sort of crossroads that the spread of personal communication on the Internet represents. The challenge, of course, is stabilizing the oscillation to productive ends: much like the oscillation at the core of radio, TV, and above all, computers. Too much feedback, and it becomes nothing more than a high-pitched whine that doesn't do much but run away. Oscillation begs for control, something to stabilize it so it doesn't run away and overheat all the component parts. It needs a resonant frequency, or alternately, a clock. Ever hear the term clock speed? It’s the oscillator at the heart of your computer. Without this synchronization, you couldn't compute at all.
Electronic communication is constantly stepping up in clock speed, but oscillation is still apparent in a world before active devices. Diane was astute to point out the oscillation operative in Thoreau between withdrawl and emergence. It’s just that his “operating system” was geared toward privileging one pole of that oscillation. I suspect that is what the Internet is deeply changing; knowledge is coming from both centers of activity. Lanham argues that the operating system of humanity must be changed in order to keep pace with the active, electronic world. The rigid “print” operating system can't be sustained much longer. Like the 640k ceiling of MS DOS, it has got to go. However, that doesn't mean that some programs will continue to run because they are useful in the new environment. Some degree of compatability is possible. Books can live on, but the thinking that generates inflexiblity in texts as if they are opaquely telegraphing messages, must change. The new world is see-through. The emperor has no clothes.
Part of the shifting perception in rhetoric is the return of the sophistic world-view embracing rhetoric's epistemic (knowledge producing) function. The oscillation of conversations does not just (re)present knowledge already present inside people. It creates new knowledge, which only grows with each sharing. Electronic communication can be not just an oscillator, but an amplifier. That’s the point that the big “J” folks miss entirely. It seems like they only pay attention when the high pitched whine of war or tech blogging hits their ears.
Makes me glad I read all those biographies as a child (Edison, De Forest, Robert Goddard, etc.), and took apart lots of old electronic devices. Maybe I wasn’t wasting my time building a theremin in my reading class in Junior High. My teacher, realizing that I was already reading at college level, gave me an electronic project kit to play with. Electronic metaphors are good for electronic communication.
A social grid, evolving through blogging, can act as a means of controlling resonance. It can contain, at least briefly, those moments of resonance which allow for amplification. We all both impose on (constrain) each other in productive amplification as well as trigger (excite) runaway points of oscillation. But it always starts with modulation and feedback, things which are far outside the magnetic realm of the telegraph.
Odd things always converge in the world conversation of blogging. It seems that Shauna and Daniel are trading places. What makes this game even more interesting is that Daniel has left Shauna with some canned posts to use as she is currently struggling with a writer’s block. So, who is who? Stepping into someone else’s personality template is an interesting idea indeed.
Part of “Elegies for the Book,” one of Lanham’s essays in The Electronic Word, relates directly to the “self” question in electronic communication. I really like his point of view:
Something in this repeated discussion about self and society in the electronic classroom and, by extension, in electronic society needs to be set straight. The central self is threatened not by a lively social self but by a lack of one. Electronic networks permit a genuinely stylized public life, one with formal roles that we can play that are not isomorphic with our “real selves.” They allow us to create that genuine social self which America has discouraged from the beginning. Our Clarity-Brevity-Sincerity theory of style has been a theory of identity too. We have in America always resisted a formal public self and society: that represented the kind of European insincerity America meant to escape. For this reason, American academic utopias have always tried to do away with the false authoritarian relationships between student and teacher and to speak without the “rhetoric” of polite public conversation.
But this rhetoric allows us to have a genuine private self. The one extreme creates the other; the oscillation between the two creates the complex Western self. If computer networks allow us to play roles with no fear, so much the better. We should push them in that direction. We needn’t worried that the private, central self will be impoverished. Private selves are created by public ones.
Oh, and it does bear mentioning that the CBS style is actually descended from the Scots— Alexander Bain in particular— who was also one of the first rhetorical theorists who focused on writing rather than oration. He's the guy responsible for such things as "thesis statements" and the five paragraph model of the essay, rapidly embraced by America in the twentieth century.
I've been enjoying your discussion a lot. I've learned a lot arguing in my head with Lanham for awhile now.
But I think the point about "politeness" above indicates a blind spot in rhetorical theory generally, and that's emotion. The ethical question--the way we treat each other rhetorically--doesn't really map onto formal questions very well, does it? I can imagine someone being fair in all three ways: the clarity-brevity-sincerity way and the sophist-constructionist way and the oscillating way between. I can also imagine someone being an asshole in all three ways. (In fact, as appealing as Lanham's "oscillation" solution seems to be at first, it's nonetheless true that the tactic of switching off between two definitional systems is the quickest and easiest way to be an asshole: heads I win, tails you lose.)
When we start getting at the ethical issue, I think there's a reason why we start reaching for words that have a vaguely emotional referent (like "politeness")--even though we convince ourselves that we're talking about a purely cognitive or formal quality (like "boundaries" or "appropriateness conventions"). The reason is that ethics is largely grounded in what kind of emotions we privilege, what kind of emotions we wish upon others, what kind of emotions we wish to promote in culture as the basic processing template for dealing with intellectual issues or with each other.
Lanham's critique of the CBS philosophy is good up to a point. But sometimes I think he is conflating two issues with the CBS construct and perhaps being unfair to the people he criticizes. When someone insists on "sincerity," is this always a formal-stylistic-epistemological demand? Could it sometimes mean something like: "In your performance, promote social affects X and Y and beware promoting social affect Z."
I'm not sure yet what affects I would plug into this formulation. But I wonder if the imperative of "sincerity" is not really a demand for transparency but rather--for some people--something like a requirement of reciprocal decencies: "do not exploit another's rhetorical weakness without just cause" or "do not encourage the viral spread of petty malice" or "do not encourage people to experience each other as exploitable objects." Or even "first, do no harm."
Could you see a different issue lurking beneath the rhetorical taxonomies here? The emotional vector seems to me orthogonal to the rhetorical distinctions that Lanham wants to draw like "look at/look through" "philosophical/ethical" and so on.
Ethics seems to me primarily a matter of emotion scripts. Some people think that promoting hostile emotions is--in general and as a calculated gamble--more likely to promote the social good (these emotions humiliate those with evil views before they have a chance to do harm, they create strong individuals, they prevent decadence). Some think that promoting the emotions of irony promotes the good (irony creates reflexive distance and undermines the grip of violence) while some think that promoting the feeling of compassion will promote the good (compassion reduces distance and promotes interidentification, and therefore clarification of grievances.)
In brief: "ethicists" on all sides want specific feelings in place as much as they want specific rules or beliefs or procedures. They want to promote certain feelings in advance of context. (And they all deny this: each will be the first to condemn the other side for wanting "mere" feelings rather than rules or beliefs or procedures.)
Emotion scripts may be formed early in life, and all the more indelible for that reason. But even if they're not fixed during childhood, they're built up out of idiosyncratic life events which have a tremendous, sometimes traumatic, psychological grip. In cases where people's emotion scripts diverge strongly, you're not likely to see any agreement, ever--and rhetoric can't build much of a bridge because part of the friction has little to with the specific topics under discussion. It has to do with the emotional "rules" that the other person will project onto any question.
With regard to the discussion above: what I see is that the rhetorical promotion of one's preferred emotional "ethic" could be achieved through the rhetoric of "sincerity," or "performance," or "oscillation." And if that's true, then one can't identify "rhetorical ethics" with one of these rhetorical procedures as opposed to the others.
-----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Ray EMAIL: raydavis@kokonino.com URL: http://www.bellonatimes.com/ DATE: 06/15/2002 1:27:00 PM I'm pig-ignant about the history of rhetoric, but T.V.'s stately plump comments certainly bring needed clarity to the lay use of "rhetoric."
I would merely add that the emotional dimension is not always as stable as T.V. for the purposes of argument makes it out to be. There are one-trick ponies and steady draft horses when it comes to rhetorical scripts (the canonical academic paper-writer, for example), and there are similarly single-minded folk as regards emotion scripts (the Troll and the Attack Dog, to name a popular comedy team). But many of us switch our emotional goals about as often as we switch our discursive tactics, and usually without really noticing either. (After all, it's all "me" talking, and I'm not lying, and so unity is guaranteed. Hilarity ensues.) And some of us (fiction writers, priests, and politicians among them) consciously -- for structural or other reasons -- switch which feelings are being sincerely promoted ("K-Mart shoppers: Special on Compassion in Aisle 9").
Ethics must be able take such switching into account.
-----
--------TITLE: Mom
DATE: 06/11/2002 3:04:00 PM
AUTHOR: General
-----
BODY:
Last night I dreamt my mother was dead.
I didn't really feel anything. I was at her funeral, doing what I always do under stress: dealing with it. I was completing the arrangements, getting the tiny room together and waiting for everyone to show up. I looked back from the pulpit, next to a casket, and was transfixed by the rows of folding chairs. There were less than a dozen of them.
I walked outside the empty room, and signed some papers in the lobby. No one I knew was there yet. I just waited, and thought about how small the whole affair was. Most of the people she knew were already dead.
I woke up feeling fragile.
Together, my parents can drive a car fairly well. My mom is a bit uncoordinated and timid; my father is bold and well skilled— but he can't hear, and has a short attention span. His mind wanders sometimes, and he doesn't pay attention to what's going on. Mom keeps him out of trouble. I don't know what he'd do without her. They do everything together.
I should have been a mess in the dream. But I wasn't. I was just thinking about what I had to do. Taking care of things, making sure things worked out right.
Sometimes I just can't allow myself to hurt.
----- --------TITLE: Selves DATE: 06/10/2002 10:55:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Stepping across the lineOne of the powerful things about diagramming things like I did a few hours ago, is realizing what a short trip across the line it is to consolidate both “philosophical” (ethical) notions of a central self and “rhetorical” (role-playing) selves. One of the points that Lanham makes is that electronic communication makes it possible for both central and social self to coexist more easily. I suspect the same is true of the philosophical and rhetorical selves. This thought bubble was the result of AKMA’s blog on identity and Stavros’ reply.
I empathize deeply with both positions. I don’t use a pseudonym, but I often write in different “personalities.” They are all merely aspects of the total me. My first reaction always is to consider hiding a mistake, for much the same reasons as AKMA does. I think it erodes the perception of sincerity (I’m still deeply engrained with CBS). However, I’m not so attached to the idea that real world presence is uniquely tied to body in the usual sense. Body is also the root of concepts of privacy, and as such is deeply a part of the more abstract, etherial concept of rhetorical self. Philosophical self stands naked and public, while rhetorical self maintains privacy behind devices like pseudonym and anonymity. Both coexist in every person. In the "onion" conception of self (from the Speech-Communications field), philosophical self is the last part we chose to reveal socially— we save it for those we love.
What seems unique about blogging to me is that it is simultaneously public and private. I control what my page says; it is outside of public or social control and hence private. I say this mostly because I do not blog for validation (though it is nice sometimes) but instead to clarify my own thoughts on whatever topic strikes me at the moment through writing. I can’t be private to the degree that other people are about my thoughts; it’s just an aspect of my personality (in virtually all my multivalent selves) to say what I’m thinking. Conceptually, I try to live in a constant state of love. I can respect those who feel safer by concealing identity, but I don’t really feel the need for the safety that they do. However, in a concrete sense, the mass-confusion of the social rhetorical self is a truer picture of who a person really is than the naked philosophical self— there is more information to process in order to construct an interpretive identity.
In one of those little epiphanies Tom was talking about, it dawned on me that the earliest formulated sets of rules for blogging were nothing but the age-old Newtonian rules of rhetoric: Clarity, Brevity, and Sincerity (CBS).
One of the unstated rules of Western culture brought out by Lanham in The Electronic Word is that one must "be sincere, whether you mean it or not." Rhetoric by its oppositional nature is the antithesis to "rules." It seems little wonder that it wasn't long before those rules were violated. CBS was quickly sent to hell. Of course sincerity was replaced by timeliness in the "blogging rules," but with the distortions involved with "web time," a page that is years old becomes new when cast into a new context through blogging. Rules don't work for rhetoric; rhetoric only allows for models. And models have an incredible tendency to shift.
On an unrelated note, I was pleased to find out that Marshall McLuhan began as a scholar of Classical Rhetoric: his dissertation was on the rhetoric of Thomas Nashe. While the shifting face of technology is "new" it is also incredibly old. Technology has been shifting for a long time. Viewed philisophically, postmodernism appears to be a radical disruption; viewed rhetorically, it is just an ongoing movement back to humanity's rhetorical roots.
----- --------TITLE: The Q question DATE: 06/10/2002 5:38:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Does Teaching the Humanities Humanize?One of the most interesting essays in Lanham’s Electronic Word is “The ‘Q’ Question.” The “Q” in question is Quintilian, and Lanham traces the rise of English departments and decline of Rhetoric as a central educational force back to Ramus— not an original conception of the problem. What is fairly original, however, is recasting the struggle back to the original Greek debate between Plato and the Sophists as to whether areté (the qualities of a good citizen) can be taught.
The question asked by Quintilian in book twelve of Instutitio Oratoria is a continuing reflection on the idea that the ideal orator is “a good man speaking well.” By teaching a student the techné of rhetoric, do they somehow become good? Quintilian, with eleven long books invested in the subject, of course answers “yes” but with no real defense for his answer. He merely “begs the question,” repeating his answer so many times that a reader must automatically agree.
One possible defense, which comes up a lot in politically trying times, is that there is “good rhetoric” and “bad rhetoric.” Lanham calls this the “weak defense” of rhetoric. This defense stems almost entirely from Ramus, who assaulted this definition of an orator point blank:
What then can be said against this definition of an orator? I assert indeed that this definition of an orator seems to me to be useless and stupid . . .
For although I admit rhetoric is a virtue, it is a virtue of the mind and intelligence, as in all the true liberal arts, whose followers can be men of the utmost moral depravity.
It seems inevitable that if virtue was not to be found in virtuosity, it must be found somewhere else. Answering the “Q question” with a resolute NO! inevitably forced a shift into canonical texts, where “good books read well” could educate students to be virtuous. The problem is, just what is a good book and what is reading well?
It was Quintilian’s project to unify philosophy and rhetoric into two sides of the same coin, not to separate them as praxis after Ramus has. To answer the “Q question” with a resounding YES! requires a profound examination of just what being human is; it requires the acceptance of both virtue and vice as necessary parts of the decision making process. You cannot separate them. Inevitably, Lanham sees the “strong defense” of rhetoric in the dramatistic nature of decision making; the courtroom model of prosecution and defense performing in front of an audience (jury). Humanity is by its nature rhetorical, and acceptance of that fact is what makes rhetorical education in the humanities an integral part of the humanizing process.
What makes “great books” great is their intractable refusal to be models of strictly virtue or vice, and their engagement with the dramatistic conflict between the two.
From Institutio Oratoria Book I
Without natural gifts technical rules are useless. Consequently the student who is devoid of talent will derive no more profit from this work than barren soil from a treatise on agriculture. (pr 26)
I would, therefore, have a father conceive the highest hopes of his son from the moment of birth. If he does so, he will be more careful about the groundwork of his education. For there is absolutely no foundation for the complaint that but a few men have the power to take in knowledge that is imparted to them, and that the majority are so slow of understanding that education is a waste of time and labour. On the contrary you will find that most are quick of reason and ready to learn. Reasoning comes as naturally to man as flying to birds, speed to horses and ferocity to beasts of prey: our minds are endowed by nature with such activity and sagacity of the soul is believed to proceed from heaven.
Those who are dull and unteachable are as abnormal as prodigious births and monstrosities, and are but few in number. (I:1)
The American education system is modeled on Roman example. What I can’t figure out is why some teachers choose to embrace the first thought, and ignore the second. The system is filled with gatekeepers who selectively pick who is talented and who is not, as if the failure to excel rests entirely on the student and not the teacher.
----- --------TITLE: At / Through DATE: 06/09/2002 1:00:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: At / Through
Subject: MUSIC INDUSTRY UNVEILS NEW PIRACY-PROOF FORMAT
Music bosses have unveiled a revolutionary new recording format that they hope will help win the war on illegal file sharing which is thought to be costing the industry millions of dollars in lost revenue.
Nicknamed the 'Record', the new format takes the form of a black vinyl disc measuring 12 inches in diameter, which must be played on a specially designed 'turntable'.
"We can state with absolute certainty that no computer in the world can access the data on this disc," said spokesman Brett Campbell. "We are also confident that no one is going to be able to produce pirate copies in this format without going to a heck of a lot of trouble. This is without doubt the best anti-piracy invention the music industry has ever seen."
As part of the invention's rigorous testing process, the designers gave some discs to a group of teenage computer experts who regularly use file swapping software such as Limewire and Gnutella and who admit to pirating music CDs. Despite several days of trying, none of them were able to hack into the disc's code or access any of the music files contained within it.
"It's like, really big and stuff," said Doug Flamboise, one of the testers. "I couldn't get it into any of my drives. I mean what format is it? Is it, like, from France or something?"
In the new format, raw audio data in the form of music is encoded by physically etching grooves onto the vinyl disc. The sound is thus translated into variations on the disc's surface in a process that industry insiders are describing as 'completely revolutionary' and 'stunningly clever.'
To decode the data stored on the disc, the listener must use a special player which contains a 'needle' that runs along the grooves on the record surface, reading the indentations and transforming the movements back into audio that can be fed through loudspeakers.
Even Shawn Fanning, who invented Napster, admits the new format will make file swapping much more difficult. "I've never seen anything like this," he told reporters. "How does it work?"
As rumors that a Taiwanese company has been secretly developing a 12 inch wide, turntable-driven, needle-based, firewire drive remain unconfirmed, it would appear that the music industry may have, at last, found the pirate-proof format it has long been searching for.
Processing Lanham’s Electronic Word a little further brings me back to links. Raymon pointed me at a student’s hypertext reading of the book (thanks!) that expressed some discomfort at the repetition of some concepts, such as the “At / Through” reading of texts, suggesting that Lanham “put his HTML where his mouth is.” Reading a good book on discourse analysis or linguistics is like that too. Sometimes, the concepts are so important that transposition into a linear textual exposition requires this sort of emphasis to convey the weight behind the words.
Lanham proposes that electronic communication is the ultimate convergence of text, image, and music. While the paradigmatic (in a linguistic sense) set of meanings available for expression in these earlier technologies is the same, the syntagmatic rules which govern their behavior are not. The grammar is different (my conjecture, not Lanham’s). Projecting my intuition onto Lanham, you could say that the paradigmatic level (the Through level) is confronted with new syntax of expression on the At level.
Lanham uses Eric Havelock’s work to suggest that this is natural with any new technology: with the development of alphabetic technologies, letters were at first decorative rather than transparent carriers of meaning. Letters lost their surface character after a time, becoming a transparent meaning carrier enabling us to look through them; however, this is an illusory phenomenon which ignores the value laden nature of discourse. In times of interface between the two levels (image / text), simultaneous functioning on both levels (At / Through) historically has occurred. Illuminated manuscripts are a strong case in point. Perhaps the arguments regarding the syntactic functioning of links in hypertext are evidence of a similar mode of interface.
Adrian Miles site shows the same sort of convergence that Lanham was talking about. What is most striking to me is that, unlike the statement I quoted regarding the lawlessness of links, Miles actually argues for the development of a syntax for using hypertext for scholarly documents. Entering the same document from Miles’ akademic werds page, I discovered that the article was much deeper and broader than I originally thought. I misread it. Why? Because the “rules” were unknown to me, and I hadn’t clicked any of the links. There was no clear marker (just a visual map on the side that I missed) as to where or how the essay was structured. Nothing differentiated the use of links as “works cited” and links as a narrative structure. That’s the problem with hypertext: grammar must be inferred, and links haven't been around long enough to develop any sort of syntax allowing a reader to follow link structures transparently, that is, to read through the text without the disruption of confronting the presence of a link. For now, links are indeed ruptures; but it may not always be that way.
Thinking about this in broader terms, applying the convergence that Lanham proposes, it seems as if we must confront the presence of syntactic rules in all forms of communication. Syntax, in a linguistic sense, is well formed and only partly understood. In a musical sense, syntax is present in terms of codified scales and genre expectations developed after years of tradition. Pictorially, syntax is mysterious and only relatively recently has developed some expected parameters for communication beyond genre (extra-linguistic universal signage). Perhaps this collision of pictorial communication (the At level) and linguistic communication accounts for the difficulty involved.
Links of the meaning-nn type (non-natural intentional communication) require syntax in order to be interpreted. The primary recourse is to linguistic syntax, but this isn’t the only possibility. A deeper development of visual syntax is perhaps the key to preserving the synergistic At / Through oscillation without losing the capacity to transmit meaning. This seems much like the secondary orality that Father Ong proposes, and Lanham’s throwing musical communication into the mix complicates syntactic conjecture even further.
The easiest road of exploration seems to be the visual / verbal confrontation. Photographs or images in general force a confrontation with the At level; linguistic components imply the presence of a Through level. Although links need not be pictures, the way we deal with them often seems to be analogous to the difficult syntax presented by a photograph. Surface is always the quality that is dealt with first in a photograph, before we can move through into the conceptual communication beyond it. There’s a lot to think about!
Christ! A blasphemous expletive, and a typically ironic one as well. Part of what makes an utterance profane is violation of societal norms, and taking the Christian name for human embodiment of God in vain is a perfectly symmetrical case. Christ, in the normal context, is a physical manifestation of belief, belief embodied in flesh. Christ, as an expletive, is a mental conception of disbelief, disbelief with no embodied referent. Belief and disbelief are frequently the axis around which humanity turns.
Coleridge is often quoted on the subject of belief in an abbreviated manner, transposed wherever a “suspension of disbelief” might be required. The full context of this now cliché phrase is worth revisiting. Wordsworth and Coleridge sought to excite the sympathy of readers, using ordinary life modified by the “colours of imagination”:
In this idea originated the plan of the “Lyrical Ballads,” in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic; yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.
No sane human would attempt to model themselves after an omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent God. However, Christ as “God made flesh” is a more accessible paradigm. Paradoxical qualities attributed to Christ provide a good frame to evaluate the products of would be creators on earth. Art began in ritual practice, and the theological descriptors kenosis and plerosis describe attributes not just of the qualities of art, but the attitude an artist takes regarding self in relationship to “human interest and semblance of truth” that an artist seeks to convey.
Kenotic theology focuses on Christ’s renunciation of his supernatural qualities; he emptied himself of omniscience and omnipresence while incarnate; he became flesh to instill belief in man through becoming man. This is a relatively new outlook on Christ, as is the view that an artist's work is not about who they are, but should instead deal with larger concerns alone. Modern poets who have renounced the importance of their personality or individual selves are in a sense emulating the behavior of Christ by giving up the very qualities that make them human.
In an abstract sense, artists of this type want to be Christ through an artistic ritual of emptying themselves to make room for a conception of the totality of the human condition through kenosis. TS Eliot seems to be the prime example in this case, but it does not take much of a stretch to see the utility of this viewpoint in other art forms, particularly the idea of disinterested documentary non-fiction and photography.
The opposite ritual form, plerosis, emulates more closely the effect of a second coming. It is a ritual of filling, of completing the world in its totality. In a traditional Christian view, man was incomplete and without the gifts of love, compassion, and forgiveness of sin which Christ delivered to us. In a sense, some artists celebrate the gift of Christ by emulating it— filling the world with the greatest gifts of God, which include our capacity for self-consciousness. Shelley's extravagance comes to mind, as does the rhetorical florish of William Blake.
Ultimately, those who try to create do so by engaging in a practice which either models itself on a behavioral perception of an authentic messiah, or simulates the effects of one by aiming at completion and totality. A theological model need not be far fetched, even for artists who do not adhere to the Christian faith. These attributes are a deep structure in the fabric of Western society.
Though these attitudes toward artistic creation are opposite, they are both viable positions for a creator operating in the shadow of a Western Christian paradigm. Perhaps because they are both unattainable absolutes, any effort at maintaining strict boundaries of production is doomed. Any model of intention is always flawed, because the motives for creation are as bountiful as the cultures which form them.
However, studying the oscillation between kenotic and plerotic modes of artistic creation— modes of generating a suspension of disbelief, at least for a moment— can provide a way of reconciling how artists “transfer an inner nature” into an outward practice of production by such contradictory means. Art attempts to save what is best in us; the methods of art can tell us much about the motives and the mechanics of constituting belief. Art is messianic when pushed to the extremes, at least in the moment that we have faith.
So, there you have it. A blog entry and an example of Roman rhetoric rolled into one. I don’t teach the Latin names to my students; instead, I call the divisions Introduction, Background, Claim [I don’t believe in thesis statements; it’s a horrible misnomer for the work that this section is supposed to do —partition, division, or claim are better terms], Argument, Refutation, and Conclusion.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: George W. Bush EMAIL: rasbliutto@hotmail.com URL: http://meltingobject.blogspot.com DATE: 06/13/2002 6:23:00 PM Uh...
I'm perhaps a bit overly sensitive to class issues in education. I spent some time talking to my father about class and was really surprised that now, he claims he never felt any pressure from it. He didn't say that when I was growing up. He came to California in the second wave of "okie migration" in the forties. He told me that okies were horribly discriminated against and looked down upon.
His mother, Goldie, was a cook for a sorority at Oklahoma University in the 30s. Though my dad was a blue-collar eighth-grade dropout, I found out on this trip that a few of my cousins were not quite so poor. One of them was the director of the women's studies program at Baylor University in the 40s or 50s. At the time, that would have meant "home economics" classes of course.
Dad always looked good in a suit, but that's not the way I think of him. He was always in khakis with chambray work-shirts. He worked in the oilfields as a welder first, and later as a pumper, and as a maintenance person in charge of steam-injection wells. He took some correspondence school classes in math, and got his literature education from the public library. Mom said that when they first got married, she was scared to death because my dad would sometimes stay up all night reading. She thought she was doing something wrong.
Dad had great taste in literature.
Most of what he recommended to me growing up were canonical texts. Shakespeare, and all the major Russians were his favorites. But he didn't learn any of this in class; he learned it by being a good reader.
He hated his own father, and refused to go to his funeral. Jess Ward was an alcoholic, a gambler, and a total mess. He would threaten his family with a gun, and my father was always put in the position of defending his mother and siblings against the onslaught. His little brother Wendell was more of a free-spirit, played 12-string guitar, and married a woman who was a spiritualist and medium. When I found this picture of Wendell, my father, and Jess in 1944, I was reminded of all those snapshots of Kerouac and Cassidy. The distance between these sons and their father seems almost palpable in this photograph, and the man standing in the middle is much closer to the father I know.
I took The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts by Richard Lanham with me on my little “vacation.” The issues discussed in this group of essays pivot around the role of “great men” in the future of education. Synchronously, these are the same issues which Loren and Diane have been confronting in Emerson’s American Scholar.
Lanham’s perspective is a positive one. I had been thinking quite a bit during the long drive about the kenosis / plerosis opposition, and have a huge thought bubble about it that I need to write out. Far from the rather ethereal questions of artistic intentionality, these problems are also wrapped up in what “education” really is and does. There will be much more to come on that, but what Lanham’s argument centers upon is the changing ways that the humanist center of “core courses” in university education must shift in order to accommodate the changing demands of technology. There’s a lot to work out, but in the end, the role of so called classics should be strengthened and not eroded by technology.
In brief, Lanham proposes that the center of the university should not be upper level “disciplined” study, but should rather give greater emphasis to an integrative approach which blurs the boundaries of what we normally think of as “education.” He makes two suggestions as to how this might be done: one would be to make first year composition the gateway to upper level study through “writing across the curriculum” efforts (already being done at many major universities) or, by renewing the relevance of library and information science (LIS) and making it a similarly cross-disciplinary emphatic introduction to the world of education. I think these are worthy aims, myself. Though the shift in emphasis in LIS seems to be primarily manifest at the graduate level, Lanham's proposals seem to anticipate a lot of what has happened in the time since the book was written.
One of the most striking images to me was Lanham’s perception of students at a university as “visiting anthropologists” who must negotiate moving from tribe to tribe (academic departments) who are all convinced that they have the answer to the world’s problems, and that their field of study is the only one worthy place to be, that is, if you are a smart person. However, they all speak different languages and have different customs. In Lanham’s model, it is the students that are the “smart ones” because they must learn to cope in ways that the ossified departments themselves are incapable of.
I like that. I notice that Lanham's 1994 book is not listed in the Bedford Bibliography, but his 1983 book, Literacy and the Survival of Humanism, is. The abstract sounds promising:
Nine essays on the place of the humanities in the university curriculum. Unless literature and composition are reconciled, not only will the study of literature perish but our nation will descend into illiteracy and political conflicts among our disparate languages and cultures. Humanities teachers must abandon the notion that language is a neutral medium for exchanging information or expressing oneself. If language were employed only for such rational purposes, humanistic study would be superfluous. A more accurate notion of human motivation is now emerging from interdisciplinary work in the biological and social sciences. This “post-Darwinian synthesis” depicts human beings as motivated by the desire to play games as well as to satisfy appetites. Humanism can offer crucial insight into game- playing motives, particularly as expressed in styles of language use, and into the ways human beings collaboratively construct self and reality. In the final essay, Lanham outlines the UCLA composition program designed to inculcate “post-Darwinian humanism.”
In The Electronic Word Lanham has clearly extended his thesis quite a bit, and sets up what he calls a sort of bistable oscillation between clarity and obscurity which is and should be the core of western thought. This oscillation may be at a higher frequency during the shift to non-codex based texts, but the core vibrations are the same. In the end, it’s been coming to this for a long time. Technology isn’t the death of our old text-based culture so much as it is the flowering of it. I like that idea too. This is big stuff and it will take a while to make sense of it all.
A word of advice to travellers who might want to cross Arkansas on Interstate 40: don't.
It took 4 1/2 hours to get halfway across (Little Rock to Ft. Smith) where it usually takes two, due to all the construction.
On the way back, I took the scenic route on old highway 10. It was more fun anyway. Sometimes it's good to know the back-roads.
I didn't need to go too far into Oklahoma. I turned off about thirty miles before the big bridge disaster, but it was still a mess.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Jeff EMAIL: URL: DATE: 06/13/2002 6:43:00 PM Just a fetish testGetting formatting issues sorted out in the commenting apparatus.
----- --------TITLE: Rhetoric DATE: 06/04/2002 1:21:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Wood s lot gestured at a listing of Rhetoric resources.
This business of line breaks causes much frustration.
As is typical of me, I can't keep my mouth shut. The web links listed (with one exception) have been on my sidebar for many months. The one that isn't, Rhetorica is focused on political rhetoric (which doesn't interest me much, except as a teaching device).
A point of pedantry though: his glossary of rhetorical tropes contains one boner— anastrophe is defined reasonably correctly, but the example is not an anastrophe. It is a chiasmus (inversion of structure, bookended symmetrically for emphasis). A much better example of anastrophe would be Yoda-speak: "Jedi I am." However, rhetoric is much more than remembering all the Greek and Latin words for things. The slant of the references on Blood's list are primarily classical, with only one exception: Kenneth Burke.
I'm the odd-man out in thinking that Kenneth Burke is a putz. His dramatistic pentad is just journalism restated, and his view of language use as "symbolic" puts me off. Sad that he's the only thing past Rome and Greece represented on the bibliographic list. I can't resist a few comments.
Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student is an expensive textbook that no one I know uses. Meant for first year writing classes, it's really more of a graduate student's tool. However, it is absolutely excellent. It presents clearly all the tropes, styles, etc., while also providing overviews of both writing pedagogy and the history of Rhetoric. As dense as it is, it's perhaps easier to read than the primary texts involved (of which it provides great excerpts) and contains a number of great samples for rhetorical analysis. Great choice, but not really for beginners. The Art of Rhetoric is a cheap Penguin copy of Aristotle's Rhetoric, available online. It's more of a theory piece, really, not a practical guide— it is fragmentary, more like lecture notes than a full treatise. Aristotle's perspective on Rhetoric really needs to be read across several of his works, a job that Classical Rhetoric does quite well. Cicero and Quintillian are great, but a bit distant from modern rhetorical praxis. Many efforts have been made to update them through the ages, and one of the worst is listed in the ensuing list. Hugh Blair is for aesthetes, and this treatise has more to do with speech than writing. Starting with Ramus, Rhetoric was eviscerated. Blair, Campbell and Whately in the Romantic period completed the job of ripping out its epistemic heart: invention (inventio for those who prefer Latin). Blech! It wasn't until I.A. Richards in the early twentieth century that Rhetoric began to get back on track.
Asking about Rhetoric is like asking about "science." Uh, which version (or subgenre) do you want? There is no real need for me to compile an alternative bibliography, because one already exists, and as for great examples, many of the best speeches by women are available online at Gifts of Speech.
The entire text of The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing is available online. The introductory section covers the development of the "new" discipline of Rhetoric, and its conflict with Blair's belles-lettres. Matthew Arnold, taking Blair up a notch, is largely responsible for the attitude I was railing against yesterday. The bibliography is neatly sectioned by topic, with classical and contemporary perspectives on Rhetoric. If you're interested in Rhetoric (not just teaching writing), this is perhaps the single best place to start. It has abstracts of every book and article listed, and provides a great shopping list for those who want to know more about Rhetoric.
On another topic— Tom, if you're reading this, an attempt has been made to index bloggers geographically. It's called The Pepys Project.
Now, I'm off to Ft. Smith for a few days. Thanks for commenting, folks!
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Mike EMAIL: mike@akacooties.com URL: http://blog.akacooties.com DATE: 06/05/2002 6:12:00 PM And it's a good attempt, too, Tom. Wait for a few days, and you might be the 1000th blog added. ----- --------TITLE: Making Meaning DATE: 06/03/2002 8:50:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Making meaningIn one of the oddest search queries I've ever seen in my referer logs, I show up as number 7 for Tolstoy, art is a form of communication, a vehicle which the artist can use to communicate his feelings and emotion; it is a "means of intercourse between man and man".
Now this certainly beats being number 218 for mom bent over tits, though it does make me wonder. Who would go through 217 results for that query before landing on my site? I feel certain they were disappointed. You can't please all possible audiences.
But I don't want to be a snob. I was cleaning out a bunch of old academic mail today (obviously), and ran across some stuff that made smoke roll out my ears. I won't name this guy (an English professor), but people like him contribute to the reasons why I think I prefer to continue in writing instruction rather than try to scale the battlements of the literature guardians:
My problem with encouraging "writing" is that for the most part it's based on what I consider false premises:
- Everyone not only can but should be a "writer."
- "Writing" is a priori either therapeutic or consciousness-raising.
But that's not the worst thing I've heard come out of a teacher's mouth. I remember sitting in a classroom where a writing "teacher" said: "Not everyone belongs in college, the world needs auto-mechanics too." I suppose that's why I almost feel insulted when people call this an "academic blog."
I will never be like these people. If being an elitist snob is a prerequisite for admission, you can count me out now. I like to think that I can help people more effectively "make meaning" in their writing. Everyone should be a writer. That doesn't mean that they will ever find an audience outside a small circle of friends, but it does mean that their lives would be better if they picked up the craft of writing to help them make sense in the world.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rex EMAIL: URL: http://a-golub.uchicago.edu DATE: 06/03/2002 10:06:00 PM Here here! Good on you, mate. -----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Norm Jenson EMAIL: normjenson@yahoo.com URL: http://www.onegoodmove.org/1gm DATE: 06/04/2002 12:27:00 AM Damn that was good. Your prize whether you value it or not is a link on my list of notable blogs.I picked up a couple of new vocabulary words, kenosis and plerosis. Being a lifelong agnostic has left me a little out of the loop regarding a lot of theological lingo. These terms were appropriated by Richard Nanian in his doctoral thesis regarding poetic function. I thought it was an interesting idea. Language meaning moves between two limits: perfect emptiness and perfect everythingness. Midway between, I suppose, would be Lockean language (one word = one meaning). Movement toward nothingness is kenosis, movement toward totality is plerosis. Nanian is drawing on these concepts from Sewell, who called Mallarmé the poet of nothingness and Rimbaud the poet of everythingness. Nanian's thesis is that the Romantics were mostly plerotic poets. This mode of explanation is much in keeping with Yeats's gyres and system (on a two-dimensional level) in A Vision.
I get really involved with language, and as others have noted, and always like to look at specific words. My post this morning made me wonder about the history of clitoris. The first citation in the OED is from 1615; writers waited until the Renaissance to label it? I suppose that makes a certain amount of sense. What is fun is the description of labia, though:
1615 CROOKE Body of Man 226 These Ligaments..do degenerate into a broad and sinewy slendernes..vppon which the Clitoris cleaueth and is tyed.
Starting with Sewell . . .
Progressing to a rather innovative folding of the spectrum. . .
Logic and nightmares are closely related? I can buy that!
Resulting in the boundary conditions for language.
It seems that (his)tories of the novel I've read completely ignore her. She wrote an epistolary novel fifty years before Richardson. She wrote in a first person narrative voice long before Defoe, and may deserve a great deal of attention in the development of the novel. Learn something new every day (if you pay attention).
Oh, and one more thing— calling women "broads" may come from a game? From Rictor Norton:
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Pascale Soleil EMAIL: URL: http://weblogs.radio.com/0100595 DATE: 06/03/2002 1:39:00 PM "Supposedly" is right. The sources of all these terms tend to be porn written by and for men -- so it would be interesting to know where documentation for 19th century "lesbian slang" is coming from. I think descriptions of the "flat-fuck" can generally be traced to performances by women intended for the titillation of male clients in bordellos.In a supposedly predominant form of lesbian intercourse, one woman lies at full stretch on top of another, and they mutually rub their 'flat' pudenda together for stimulation. In 19th-century lesbian slang this was called a 'flat-fuck'. All of this is supposedly analogous to card games involving
the taking of tricks, in which one playing card (or 'flat') is laid on top of another. The reference is to horizontal planes that don't require vertical instruments.The playing-card derivation, however, does depend on how early playing cards were called 'flats'. I see that the earliest citation in the OED is dated 1812, when 'flats' is called a cant term for cards. No doubt the term arose earlier (e.g. 'broads' is cited for 1789), but how much earlier? John O'Neil's 1698/1699 citation for "a New Game Call'd Flats with a Swinging Clitoris" is a great deal earlier than any citation describing playing cards as 'flats'. But it clearly draws upon some sort of game, perhaps a betting game using flat games counters or broad-pieces.
Watching the third season finale of the Sopranos, I was amused by the conversation about sending Anthony Jr. to military school. The US Army’s slogan is “an army of one.”
“What if this ‘army of one’ decides it doesn’t want to go over the top of the foxhole?” Tony asked.
“What if he doesn’t want to be an army and would rather be a veterinarian?” Carmella wondered.
The classical notion of life as a battle just doesn't mesh well with getting by in the real world; self-reliance doesn't have to be militaristic. Often, the transcendentalist notion of “self-reliance” is bashed and smashed in the modern world of social modeling. More often than that, the conception of “the romantic self” is demonized in scholarly circles as a myth to be overthrown by “socially situated” postmodern praxis.
But this romantic myth never existed. It comes from a misreading of the Romantics, and I suspect the Transcendentalists too. I blame TS Eliot (I always do), and to a lesser extent, Jerome McGann. There are lots of names for it: “the egotistical sublime” (a label more properly applied to Milton, I think, than Wordsworth) or, “the romantic genius.” There are six major canonical figures in British Romanticism. It is odd to me that this misconception should be applied wholesale, when it really only applies to two writers of this revolutionary period. The period was one of intense social activism, and deep exploration of notions of self which fueled the American Transcendentalists.
McGann attempted to shape all of Romanticism in the image of Byron (last of the big six), though he later retracted much of his thesis regarding The Romantic Ideology. Eliot shaped it into the image of Wordsworth (second in line, but in Eliot's time it was the big five rather than the big six and Wordsworth was number one— Blake was added later). Most of the popular misconception is based in a misreading of the word genius. Genius, in the eighteenth century sense, was not so much an individual attribute, but a quality of connection with a larger spiritual (and social) wholeness. Genius, derived from
genie, was really another word for spirit.
One of Blake’s (first of the big six) primary concepts was “the poetic genius” which might best be translated as the spirit of god, in men. His conception of the “self” was not unary, but rather fragmented and split into four “Zoas” which were constantly at enmity with each other. Wordsworth chose himself as a topic, but was far more concerned with the spirit of god reflected in nature rather than man, and unlike Blake— Wordsworth's concept of self was unary. Coleridge (third of the big six) differs from Wordsworth in that his later concepts of self were trinitarian: reason, religion, and will. Reason was “a science of cosmopolitanism without country” (sounds pretty social to me). Keats, fourth of the big six, was big on the dissolution of identity in great authors (negative capability), and Shelley (the fifth) was nearly Buddhist in proclaiming that he didn’t exist as an individual, but as only as a momentary manifestation of the “one mind”. That leaves Byron, as the sole purveyor of the Faustian individual who controlled the world through his will. Only two, of all these writers, were champions of romantic individualism!
These guys all had very little in common, really. So why does “romantic” have such a negative connotation? It pisses me off. All were socially conscious (except perhaps Keats), so why does romantic mean an anti-social, egotistical, individual in the context of contemporary social criticism? Coleridge put it succinctly: they “would sacrifice the each to the shadowy idol of all.” Rereading The American Scholar by Emerson shows that these people were hardly simplistic when it comes to sorting out just what is important. We are both individuals, and social creatures. One cannot be sacrificed at the expense of the other. All of these people were hardly naive, and never believed half of what they are accused of today.
Like I said, it just pisses me off. Fragments, removed from context, paint an ugly picture of “solitary geniuses” who slaved and suffered; it’s utter bullshit. None of the British Romantics were foolish enough to believe that there is “one true self” except maybe Byron and Wordsworth. While I enjoy Byron a lot, I've got to side with I.A. Richards' contention that "Wordsworth was the greatest poem that Coleridge ever wrote."
Just one last iteration, with a twist. The misreadings of some of these posts has been as informative as the original dispute. I think I figured something out (famous last words). Where this all started was a disagreement with Alex regarding link-heavy blogs as an act of self expression. My problem with his proposal (which I don’t think I misread) was in one sentence: “I think that link-heavy blogs are as much about who the blogger is as a content-heavy blog.”
My initial answer was: in an anthropological sense, yes, in a rhetorical sense, no. I offered the thesis that the implied “method” behind the linkage can lend a hazy impression of “self” but that links, in and of themselves, fail the criteria of interiority which “expression” implies. I was wrong. I wasn't wrong about linking's metaphoric nature, and still believe they have characteristics of tenor and vehicle. In order to communicate, metaphors and links require both. I thought at the time that without surrounding text (tenor— as in quotes, reaction, etc.) links weren’t communicative acts. I forgot about implicature. As pragmatic units (in the linguistic sense of accomplishing work), links can be expressive under certain conditions, and are always communicative. I disagree with Adrian Miles contention that:
The link does not require, need, or even recognize a codified set of rules for what may or may not be linked, either in terms of origins or destinations. To this extent the link always presents itself as a virtual outside to the codified norms of language, that is to grammar, syntactic organization, and rhetoric.
S meant-nn z by uttering U if and only if:
(i) S intended U to cause some effect z in recipient H
(ii) S intended (i) to be achieved simply by H recognizing the intention (i)
These textual utterances qualify as expressives. Do these utterances reveal much about my “self”? No more than any other utterance, really. Links have no special status beyond being complex placeholders for meaning (like metaphors, symbols, words) and are just building blocks through which we express intention within a context. Even in experimental hypertext documents there is an implied intention to the linkages which is linguistic. The absence of context on some link-driven blogs drives me to say that I find them less interesting. I think it’s a case of preferring type (i) meaning-nn utterances to type (ii), where I am supposed to be amused by discerning an implied intention solely by a “linking=cool” context. That is a distinction that I did not make before. I think these types of utterances are hardly novel or revolutionary when compared to other behaviors in the global discursive community.
In the end it's really a matter of degree. My preference (obviously) is toward greater density. The density of utterances is generally less on a link-driven blog, not more (links are selectively metaphoric, not additive to the author's text). I still do not think they are as revealing of personality. However, I can now more comfortably concede that they can be expressive.
See, I’m not afraid to point out when I’m wrong!
For a slightly different look at the relationship of health and rhetoric, this exhibition was just what I needed. I don't mean to imply, in a lot of my ramblings, that there is nothing new that has occurred as the result of the impact of technology on expression and representation. Where I differ from most of the other online theorists (both scholarly and non-scholarly) is my perception of how these changes are unique.
One of the threads I find most interesting is the increasing importance of testimony, and how that testimony is validated and authorized. This isn't new; it is descended from the earliest novels from the eighteenth century. The rallying cry of much postmodern thinking (particularly about the web) is that it does away with conventional concepts of authority. I don't agree. I think it represents a shift in authority, almost regressively, into the importance of establishing first person narratives.
Another interesting thread is the shift back almost to a renaissance level of punning behaviors. Jokes become an important driving force in our linguistic interaction, as does labeling, listing, quantifying these forces of change. How we represent ourselves, and our world, is increasingly distanced by irony thus undermining the counterforces of authority that constantly try to reestablish themselves.
It's an interesting playground, indeed.
A playground of signs. Not all signs function in the same manner; that's my problem with the extensions of metaphor (the fundamental linguistic building block) into hardcore modernist symbolism or hypertextual rhizomatic networks of linkage. Metaphor enables all communication, but metaphor does not require the deep conceptual complexity sometimes attributed to it as it moves to greater distances from actuality. Sometimes, it's just play.
As if said (before the dreadful loss), sometimes links are just gifts.
----- --------TITLE: The Pledge DATE: 05/31/2002 10:36:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: The PledgeBalanced precipitously on the edge of my mind I was composing something to try to explain why these seemingly multitudinous issues regarding blogging, documentary photography, linking, symbols, identity, narrative, and representation are in essence one problem. But then I watched a movie. The Pledge just blew me away.
It is a trauma narrative. I analyzed a ton of them in a class last semester. The seminar I took on "writing and healing" was far from a "fru-fru" new agey thing. This field of study is small, and the principles behind it brought together years of research I'd been doing on symbol and narrative, as well as decades of real world experience with the problem of representation. To try to express it in few words is impossible; but it is deeply involved in the problem of distance and the nature of the self.
Nicholson, in The Pledge, besides reminding me a great deal (physically) of my oldest brother who died recently, precisely acts out the collapse and compression of self involved with traumatic events when they are denied resolution. The traumatic event becomes a symbol, usually wrapped around an image, which the mind just can't let go of. The funny thing is, literature is often taught the same way, traumatizing students with the endless deferral to symbols. Somewhere about half-way through my deep involvement with William Blake I began to see symbols as the enemy; they compress meaning into hard quantities which obscure more than they reveal. There are books (that I don't recommend) which compress Blake into a veritable dictionary of symbols, completely missing what he was really on about. Blake has far more in common with the eighteenth century writers than he does with the advocates of symbol who followed, "interpreting" him. They imposed a distance to his words that really isn't there. Distance is a complex thing. In order to “heal” a certain distance must be created from the traumatic event; in some ways, symbols are the limit of distanciation, in others, they are the limit of compression.
That's why Weinberger's idea that links (in a symbolic sense) are the ultimate in “otherness” (distance), and Jill's idea that they are the ultimate in barbarity (collapse) can coexist. This is the paradox of the symbol. What comes out in the study of healing narratives is that the degree of distanciation is a key consideration: too much, and it's a strategy of hiding behind mythic enabling, too little, and it doesn't expand the collapsed, traumatized self back into a whole person. The middle ground (and the way I believe Blake is best read) is in the realm of allegory, or narrative.
Allegory was thought to be an inferior form by the Modernists, and was met with conflicted responses by the Romantics (including Blake). When I read “The Rhetoric of Temporality” by Paul De Man, I began to appreciate the difference in distanciation involved. For over three years now, that light bulb has been burning. I've had this intuitive concept in my head that I can't seem to get out that I keep struggling to rationalize. It's sort of like wanting to build a bridge back to the Middle Ages, because it seems like something really important and vital has been lost. The control of displacement. What is unique about Walker Evans, and the reason why I sort of elected to spend my summer trying to understand what he was up to better, is that he faced the same problem of distance without resorting to symbol. He did not resort to narrative either, and so is completely anomalous; there is no literary model which describes Evans' approach to representation.
So, there is a handful of words that attempt to impress a logic on what I have been writing about. I think it is incredibly important to tease out the fine distinctions in approach. But ultimately, it's just a gut feeling that I've been operating on for several years; being an ENFP, I'm trying to backwards engineer a rationale behind this overwhelming feeling that symbols are not the answer to the problem of representation. Symbols increase complexity without a commensurate gain in expressiveness: symbols don't heal, they wound— all the while seducing us with their power.
Loren, I have taken the Meyers-Briggs before, and I am actually an ENFP. I consistently score low on thinking tests. I'm more of an intuitive/feeling kind of guy. As the site (under career options) suggests, I can work rationally but only by a sort of "reverse engineering" approach from my basic intuition. Because my blog only presents one side of my personality, I may appear more inwardly directed than I really am and more logically structured. I agree that the test is amazing indicator of personality. I have been known to make serious errors in judgement by trusting my intuition, and am ill-suited to being a pedant. However, they tell me that it's a great personality type for teachers.
Oh, and Jonathon, you aren't "the only one to miss the shot of Journalism is the Holiest Profession serum." I'll have a lot more to say about that when I return to the Evans/Agee discussion later. For a brief span of time, journalists were actually able to dig deeper into things (the photo-essayists like Gene Smith come to mind), but even then journalism was hopelessly shallow. I know lots of them; I've been interviewed by a few; but journalism seems to me to be slightly below the ethical level of advertising. At least pitch-men have no illusions about what they do.
I don't usually read Salon, but edrants has pointed at a really good article about failing to appreciate some writers. I could write a great deal about that too; I may return to it later.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Reggie Jackson EMAIL: rasbliutto@hotmail.com URL: http://freakydeaky.blogspot.com DATE: 05/31/2002 3:47:00 PM hey advertisers are worse than journalists. even if I agree with you that "At least pitch-men have no illusions about what they do" (which I don't) there's still one little problem: advertising is all about big claims - none of us believe it to be true when the voice-over actor says "this is the best ___ ever!" because we're jaded and suspicious (and well-trained to be). Unfortunately it's been PROVEN that children are incapable of making that distinction. Much of our social training is at the hands of shills.I’ve been doing this a long time. By this I mean attempting to communicate outside the “meatspace” world. Sometime around 1980 I bought my first “computer” in a toy store. A few years later, I was running a BBS [bulletin board system] which received visitors from several countries; this was all pre-internet. It was a frustrating headache mostly; I gave it up and went back to photography. What irritated me most was the resistance to disclosure. It’s hard to have a conversation with people when you have no idea who they are. Then, and now, I have little use for games. I taught myself how to program a little, but it was just too much work for the desired ends.
Around 1990 I bought a little subnotebook, mostly to track exhibition submissions and create slide labels. I got sucked in again, to the artists community on CompuServe (still pre-internet). I got involved in some e-mail groups, exchanging prints and such with other photographers. Somewhere around 1993 I fell in love with someone in a forum. During the years that the “Internet boom” happened, I was largely homeless, and seldom online.
The explosion of my life through non-“meatspace” interaction left me with choices to make. I could have withdrawn from contact with people around the world (obviously, a longstanding interest) or I could brace myself within a constructed identity to avoid further mishap, or I could do what I have always done, the one thing that I seem to be good at: be myself. The danger I feel in doing this is quite real; it’s not that I’m afraid of being fired, afraid of being misconstrued or misinterpreted: I am afraid that I will care too much for the people on the other end of the line. In fact, that is also one of the reasons that I ended up ceasing to pursue documentary photography: the problem of excessive empathy.
At first, I tentatively started to write to some listserve groups in 1997. I met some great people, and made a few “friends” of a sort. I created my first homepage in 1998. As time wore on, writing to the listserves seemed to be an imposition on people. I, obviously, have problems with brevity. While the feedback from a few people showed that they appreciated the writing I was doing, increasingly I found myself wanting to write about things that were hardly relevant in the context of a topical listserv. I wrote about literature on a music listserv, because the literary listserves were just too damn stuffy.
One of my favorite conversants on my favorite e-mail list, Luke Martin, started a blog. I followed it for a while with intrigue. In a “writing for the web” class where I learned HTML, I took the plunge and bought this domain. I started in February 2001 to hand code my own “blog.” About six months later, I started using Greymatter. I stopped writing to e-mail lists, though I do subscribe to a few. The reason why is that I felt, when writing for an audience of thousands (in some cases) that I was needlessly filling up their mailboxes with things that they had no care about. In blogging, users must make a choice to visit and read. If I get too boring, the readership may chose not to return, and unlike an e-mail list, most likely won't flame me for being "off-topic".
Why have I got the biographical introduction bug again? Because Luke has been dooced. He lost his job in London, and may be forced to move back to Australia. His blog may have been the excuse and not the primary cause, but the recent group of comments I have received reminds me that people are still bracing themselves against the repercussions of public writing. The danger is real.
So is the odd sense of trepidation I felt when people much smarter than me started reading my blog. I have soldiered on, hoping (perhaps vainly) that if I commit an outright error or fallacy in my writing someone might correct me. It is disconcerting when the “popular kids” start noticing you. But the utility of this thing far outweighs the downside, at least to me.
Blogging has brought me a great wealth of information. It has introduced me to some fine writers and people. Yes, I confess that I care about a few of them far too much, given the inaccuracy possible in reconstructing bracketed selves. But all the same, I do genuinely care about many of my longstanding “friends” which were discovered on the same mailing list, Badger, Johanna, Russ, and Kafkaesque, not to mention those like Shauny who I’ve been reading so long that I feel like I know them.
Blogarati? It took a long time for me to take the chip off my shoulder that made me refuse to link to the “popular kids” like Weinberger. Now, I don’t care. If I consistently read someone, I link to them. I don’t have to prove myself to be an outsider or brace myself against attack. Claiming "outsider" status is as much of a cliqueish behavior as joining a group. The only thing I'm consistently good at is being myself, inside or outside a group. There are several interlinked groups on my blogroll now, and I'm not as afraid of membership as I once was, largely due to my experience with the listserve group that brought me out of my shell and back to the worldwide conversation.
Mostly, I just want to hope that things will be well with Luke, and that whatever change happens will eventually be good. It takes a while for the ripples to settle. And I also wanted to give credit to the person most responsible for getting me started on this thing, with his link-oriented blog. I wish you nothing but the best.
Turbulent Velvet has argued emphatically regarding one of my favorite issues in the blogging debate: audience. He revised out some of the great bits about the loss of control one feels writing for an indeterminate, generalized audience, i.e., how can you selectively invite in those we feel most comfortable talking to, allowing a higher amount of disclosure and less back story, but left in the core conflict: writing for an audience that could be anyone.
I got caught in this sort of weird writer's thing a while back, where it seemed like I was continually writing an introduction over and over and over ad nauseum. Finally, I stopped. Well, sort of. Just a few days ago I attempted to explain my philosophical position (a sophistic world view) in order to provide some sort of underpinning to my rejection of certain aspects of postmodern, structure-free, conceptions of self. Reading several essays by Ricoeur today, the distance between text and conversation, between blog and real world persona, became clearer to me. I have not constructed a utilitarian persona to combat the problem of writing for any random surfer that might happen by, nor attempted to develop a focused “blogging identity” so that consistent readers might get an intended impression of me. I have chosen instead to just write.
And writing is what it is. It occasionally resembles conversation, because I react and respond to things I read in blogs that I follow, but ultimately, it’s still writing. I think about writing a lot, not just because I am a writing teacher, but because writing has gotten me into a lot of trouble in the past. I made the mistake of thinking that I knew someone, because of what they wrote, and believing that they knew me, because of what I wrote. It’s a dangerous error. Perhaps that’s ultimately why I became so interested in rhetoric. I paid a big price for believing in writing as a reliable vehicle for the expression of inner states.
My favorite two sentences in I.A. Richards' Philosophy of Rhetoric are these:
Words are not a medium in which to copy life.
Their true work is to restore life itself to order.
Previously, the choice seemed fairly simple. A text can be read as an artifact, self-contained and separate from its author (the “New Critical” approach) or it can be read as a socially and historically constructed artifact which is inseparable from the context of the author both in terms of power relations (Marxist approaches), psychological state, and demands arising from genre considerations. I had always opted for the latter group of plural responses, seeing works as a conversation between the author and his time. Ricoeur offers a third choice. The choice is somewhat similar to “reader-response” criticism, but not exactly the same. The tenets of reader-response suggest that what is important in a text is what a reader’s reaction is. This is problematic, because no two people read a text the same way, so it lacks the capacity to promote a generalized reading. However, Ricoeur places the choices on a continuum that is very interesting. We can look at the surface of a text, try to look behind the text, or, focus on where real interpretation happens: in the “possible world” created outside the text, as it is placed in new contexts.
This is where the postmodern view of texts really shines, I think. Attempting to communicate through texts effectively eclipses not only the author, but the reader as well. What is formed when we read is a possible world where we impose an order, based on words, to our conception of the ideas behind those words. It’s an imperfect thing to be sure. That’s why I really love Richard’s conception of rhetoric: “the art of avoiding misunderstanding.” Ricoeur makes another distinction which just rang with me, regarding the difference between speech and writing:
Conversational speech presents; writing represents.
I am my primary audience. Period. To share with others is a great thing though, and I confess that I often strive to be entertaining and engaging. But this is secondary, and must remain so if this blog is to be useful to me. Otherwise, it’s just another trip back to high school, without the drugs and sex. I don’t think that would be nearly as much fun.
But the “I” of which I speak will always remain a sort of bracketed self, the self who writes. It is not identical with the self that sits alone, and lives with the choices it has made. It is only this bracketed self that is in play in the panopticon of web discourse. Those who have access to my physical self, have displayed absolutely no interest in my bracketed, blog self. My situation is a bit different than some; in my local, physical world, as BB King says “nobody loves me but my mother, and she could be jiving too.” So I write freely, and at ease with this scattered mess, because I know that there is a big difference between the real world, and the world that lives in texts. With work, texts can help make the real world make sense; but they constitute possibilities, not actualities. I quit selling myself a long time ago; now I concentrate more on avoiding misunderstanding.
As I spend another sleepless night (because I slept all day) I started thinking about something (imagine that!). One of my favorite bits in Small Pieces Loosely Joined is this:
Perhaps the Web isn’t shortening our attention span. Perhaps the world is just getting more interesting.
I’ve always been rather “hypertextual” and I suspect I’m not the only one. Hart Crane seems to display a lot of those properties, as do most great writers (not that I’m classifying myself with them). My evil female twin, who I moved to Arkansas to be with (big pieces, too tightly wrapped into my personal mythology) was an artist with a taste for philosophy who usually had seven or eight books open around the house to different sections to clarify her primary reading at the time. I have worked the same way most of my life, reading at first a few things (and now dozens of things) at a time. I told myself I wasn’t going to do that this summer. I was going to read some novels, damn it. But I digress. When Weinberger did the “imagine having x books at your immediate disposal” I looked around the room and said, “but I already have that without my computer!”
Anyone who has read me for any length of time may have noticed my wandering ways; I started to read I.A. Richards. He mentioned some Coleridge I wasn’t familiar with, but since it was on my bookshelf I opted to pause and read it before finishing the book. His book reminded me of Ricoeur, which I had read, but I revisited the dozen or so pages that discuss Richards. I do that sort of reading all the time; it comes up a lot with classical references. When someone mentions a situation in a play or novel as context for a critical argument, I’ll often stop and read the work mentioned for the first time, or refresh my memory of it. I found myself strangely drawn to The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology and the Arts by Richard Lanham tonight, which I’ve been meaning to read for some time (the theoretical books I want to read usually outnumber the novels at any given time).
In the preface, Lanham claims (regarding the personal computer) that “a new expressive medium had emerged— but the demand for the medium had preceded the medium itself.” I do believe this is the case with hypertext. The demand for it is something that has been building up in literature for years (particularly Modernist literature) because it becomes impossible to always know what an author is alluding to without a lot of secondary research. As history grows longer, keeping up on all the “commonplaces” of the day, words that have shifted in meaning or have fallen out of use, requires a battery of dictionaries and other aids to keep these works fresh and relevant. With greater access to tools, the world becomes a more interesting place because nothing is out of our grasp when it comes to providing deeper contexts to the topic you wish to explore. What makes hypertext interesting to me is not its rupture with narrative form, but its sheer utility when it comes to matching how people actually read (here, there and everywhere).
I’ve heard it said somewhere before that the primary job of scholars is research. With tools like hypertext at the fingertips of anyone who cares to use it, I can only hope that “scholar” stops being an esoteric or derogatory term. Research isn’t sitting in an ivory tower away from the world, it’s living in it and trying to make the most of it. I seem to recall Emerson saying something to that effect in a commencement address somewhere. He encouraged everyone to get out of the library and head for the forest after graduation. I suspect he’d probably not mind having a terminal around, so that the research time could be shortened, and he’d have more time to watch the sunset.
It had been a long time since I read The Rule of Metaphor by Paul Ricoeur. As I picked up my copy last night, I noticed that it was still interspersed with at least twenty bookmarks; it is, in my opinion, one of the most important critical works of the twentieth century. Going through the last group of lectures in I.A. Richards’ The Philosophy of Rhetoric, I noticed that the ideas were oddly familiar. No wonder; Richards’ ideas were part of the foundation of Ricoeur’s work.
When I wrote about denotative and connotative properties of links, I was falling back on the terms most popular in tech-writing theory. Richards doesn’t use those words, but instead, tenor and vehicle. Richards’ Philosophy of Rhetoric is more about understanding how metaphor works (to prevent misunderstanding) than any sort of tropological (style and figures) study. The distinctions Richards makes about metaphor were a bit confusing at first, but last night I began to see the power of it, driving me to pick up Ricoeur again.
Using George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” in class last semester, it seemed easy to nod in agreement with the idea that the most powerful metaphors are visual; if you can’t picture it, it’s not a good metaphor. Richards attacks the simplistic view of metaphors as “mental pictures” instead suggesting that words are metaphorical when they operate simultaneously at two levels, i.e., “literal” (denotative) and “figurative” (connotative). However, those words do not adequately describe what’s going on either. Think of the word “strong.” You could picture a guy with big arms crushing something, I suppose, but what of “strong light”? You don’t picture sunbeams with muscles on them, whereas used in the form “strong man” you do. When you say someone is “brainy” do you picture a brain? When you say someone is “geeky” do you picture a circus freak that bites the heads off chickens?
Richards’ points about metaphors are multiple: they cannot be removed from context to be evaluated in isolation; they are not always visual; their meaning is constructed by applying selective parts of the other contexts to which they might also be applied. Thus, when we say something is geeky, we are usually applying the marginalized status of the geek, without taking wholesale the entire literal context the word implies. I would suggest, as Weinberger does in Small Pieces Loosely Joined, that link behavior is similar. Weinberger says that collections of links often have only one thing in common: whoever collected them found something of interest on that particular site. What that something is, is certainly a matter for conjecture — not as “expression” but as part of a larger meaning constituted by the site which chose to link them. Taken in isolation, they are not meaningless, but rather are filled with so many different meanings as to make them an unreliable and imperfect indicator of personal expression. But these qualities do make them effective metaphors.
To channel Weinberger again, being “unreliable and imperfect” is part of what the web is all about. It can be embraced as a strength, rather than a weakness. The more I think about it, linking behavior was one of the first things that obsessed me when I first started reading weblogs. I picked the people I wanted to link to carefully; I did my best to avoid any of the “popular” circles. Sort of like going back to high school, it seemed to me. I tried to choose diverse weblogs with little in common with each other, to avoid reading stale repeats of the most popular buzz. I got sucked in by individual writers, not communities.
So what study might be made of my choices? Of the sites I find interesting enough to point to? The bottom line is that outside of the context of my own particular cave, very little. Linking choices are based in complex interactions, shifted by context. What puzzles me about link blogs with no commentary is why, given the absence of a context would I chose to click the link? Many blogs provide snips of the target document, which is quite helpful in determining why I would be interested, in lieu of commentary. Making a choice to follow a writer is an investment, and I find those with no commentary or quotes a total waste of time; hardly a revelation or new form of expression. I might as well read a dictionary arbitrarily. I suspect that there is much to be said for approaching links through Richards' labeling of the effective parts of metaphor.
Rather than denotative or connotative, rather than original idea and borrowed idea, rather than idea and image, Richards labels the parts of metaphor as tenor and vehicle. Ricoeur applauds this choice, because it makes it impossible to confuse the two parts with anything else, or give priority to one over the other. In a certain sense, you might call the target of a link its tenor, filled with overtones and information. The inducement to click it is the vehicle, be it quote, commentary, or context. The two parts work together. Sometimes they work through resemblance, sometimes through dissimilarity. However, what constitutes their effectiveness is that both parts must be present in order for it to qualify as a metaphor.
What is constantly true of links (or metaphors) is that they are externally referent, not internally referent, as building blocks for discourse— except in the case of incredibly skilled writers who build their own metaphorical universes through years of practice at their craft. Gesturing at other sources to clarify a position, make a point, or fuel an expression is a time honored tradition within a text, as are tactics of self-mythologizing word-play in writers like William Blake, who use the entire force of their oeuvre to pack each word with multiple meanings. I suppose that some bloggers are self-referential in this way, pointing to previous posts to clarify the compact concepts they use; but this is the exception, again, rather than the rule. Metaphors only work when within a context, a connection can be made with subtle possibilities of meaning. Otherwise, they might as well be a bag of words. Pick a handful— they’re cheap.
I couldn’t sleep last night. There are paradoxes in any position I try to take. Sometimes, my position seems to sink deep, complex, just out of reach. Other times, my position seems open, obvious, and irreconcilable. When I stand in a crowd, I realize I do not see the same world that other people do, or notice the same problems, or feel the same gravity. The only truth I know is individual, and locked in the paradox of my own perception.
My perception of the world is not an acentered system, proposed as some sort of postmodern ideal by Deluze and Guattari, “finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to any other, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment — such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency” (TP 17). The number of obstacles to truth in this position is just staggering to me. Stems and channels do preexist. We all want. We all need. We all die. Eat, sleep, drink, dream. Individuals are not interchangeable; they are not defined by momentary states. To call this utopian is to deny everyone possession of their own world, their own perceptions. To say that the resulting system without hierarchy can somehow be synchronized into a unified result celebrates the end of individuality by substituting an amorphous blob of sociality. Some future. You can keep it.
My perception of the world is not a centered system either. A single center, at best, implies hierarchy, and at worst, implies predestination. I suppose my perception has evolved in my head into multiple centers, drifting together and breaking apart. Crowds are collections of universes, each one unto itself; unique, irreplaceable, and awash in the river of other people. It doesn’t matter so much where the river began, or where it is going, so much as it matters that we develop strong oars if we are to hold our place in the current. It's a sophistic view, of course, and while I like Deluze and Guattari's thoughts on nomadism, I suspect that rivers provide faster transport than wandering overland.
I suppose I like the river metaphor best of all. I’ve always been drawn to them, physically and mentally. With a strange flash of insight last night, I realized that the sole thing that bothered me about the “links as expression” question is not the linking, but the expression part. I realized that I had created great possibilities for misreading, because of my criteria for what constitutes “expression.”
It’s a nagging thought, and a problem which is deeply connected with all branches of what I’ve been writing about for the past month or so. In speech-act theory, expressives are utterances that are contingent solely on the knowledge of the speaker; they cannot be evaluated for “truth value” because they are the direct reflection of inner states, and are thus unverifiable. If a person says “I am happy” you can’t say “No, you’re not” because you aren’t them, and do not have access to their mind. Expressives cannot be weighed, measured, or evaluated except by the speaker. This is of course the spiritual high ground of expressivist art, and the reason for the multiple reactions against it in the modern period. Its aesthetic resists any larger utility, it is truly “art for arts sake,” unless the goal is shifted to that of persuasion. By this, I mean, crossing the border into the speech-act theory of commissive. Commissives are acts which invite sympathy, participation, a melding of that internal state into another to promote implied action, as in “I promise,” or “I empathize.” It’s a thin line, but a firm one.
Exposition is a different act. Exposition is not explained well by speech-act theory. There are categories which are close, such as “representatives,” or “declaratives,” but it gets murky quickly. A representative utterance is one which declares that some condition in the external world is true, and a declarative is one which acts to move the hearer to action in reaction to an external state. I think that link behaviors are probably best traced to this side of the speech-act taxonomy. They do not “express” so much as they represent or declare. The knowledge conveyed is not inside the speaker, but outside, therefore they may be more easily categorized as expository acts.
Representation is the toughest of the speech-acts to pin down. If something is true in the world, and verifiable by anyone (being outside the speaker), why say it? There is always the suspicion that the information should be taken as directive, or that the information has been pointed to as a reflection of an internal state and thus commissive. Representative acts are always problematic. But representative acts are the core of disinterested documentary work, a genre perhaps born from Walker Evans.
There’s much more I want to say here. But I want to make it clear that I was not in any way stating that link oriented blogs were not participating in communicative acts, just that it was problematic to read them as expressive. It’s a simple matter of internally revelatory (expressive) modes of communication vs. externally revelatory (directive, commissive, representative) modes of communication. The gap seems to be quite broad to me, and a river runs through it.
If you accept the Deluze and Guattari way of thinking, that individuals are not defined by their totality, but only in their states, then I suppose that all communicative acts are revelatory. But I don’t believe that people are interchangeable sets of states. I think there are universes in there, universes that are only revealed in glimpses, through expressive discourse.
But I could be wrong. All I know is what I see through my eyelid movies.
Occasionally, I find the footnotes and bibliography of a scholarly paper more interesting than the paper itself. It’s rare, but it happens. When I surf into a link blog, I always get the feeling I’ve entered into something by turning to the back pages. Only a few of them interest me much; wood s lot is certainly one of those. There is a coherence to his method that is the exception rather than the rule.
Returning to an earlier theme, I wanted to respond a little more completely to Alex Golub’s Filtering as Personhood and Tom Matrullo’s Two or three views of links.
Tom summed up my position fairly well, though I must state up front that it’s an evolving position which seems to shift with everything I read. That’s why off and on, I write about it. Bourdieu was fresh in my head, and I was thinking about how little, effectively, these taxonomies of social predilection really say about people. As an artist moving into higher education with feet dragging (I align myself closely with Joseph Duemer’s observation “this is the only way we have been able to figure out to earn our dinner & indulge our passions”) I like an occasional drink of red wine and listen bit of accordion music (norteño, not polka), effectively thwarting Bourdieu’s neat diagram. Of course, this makes it entirely possible to say that evaluating linking choices outside the normal habitus is a means to chart the “expressive” nature of linking.
However, Tom really hit a nerve regarding the real question at stake: logos vs. techne. Linking is a techne: a method of accomplishing either authority (in the case of scholarly discourse) or metaphorical connection in the case of web discourse. I say metaphorical, because linking behaviors operate on many levels simultaneously. A link can be a direct access to information for justification or a gesture of approval, or an indirect, ironic glancing blow at an object of ridicule, or oftentimes both. Links are stand-ins, symbols that revel in their multiplicity and playfulness. Reading authorial intent into these behaviors is complex; it pushes homo symbolicus to the extreme.
Links are connotative and only rarely denotative. When denotative, they usually express primarily habitus. So, in this sense I can agree with Alex that the connotative power of link behaviors might be worth consideration, however, lacking any real commentary or feedback (which is usually the case with link-driven blogs) determining authorial intent (as expression) is a potential mine field of misinterpretation. The only certainty regarding the connection of a personality construct regarding these connotative link behaviors, is that the personality has chosen to be silent. Silence is a difficult field to glean personality from.
What assumptions can we make regarding the personalities of authors who write dictionaries? Not many. A new mode of expression? I doubt it; we’ve been hunting and gathering for a long time, and while an anthropologist may be interested in reconstructing portraits of a people by what they choose to hunt and gather, it hardly seems necessary when so many people are willing to speak, and tell their stories in first-person narratives.
As Tom says, this is really not an either/or ground. Just a choice of what, within a given subject field, is the most interesting. Method has a powerful attraction. Coleridge takes an interesting stance in his essays “On Method.” He starts with the question of what makes a person seem to be “of superior mind,” when we meet them in passing:
Not the weight or the novelty of his remarks; not any unusual interest of facts communicated by him; for we may suppose both and the one and the other precluded by the shortness of intercourse, and the triviality of the subjects. The difference will be impressed and felt, though the conversation should be confined to the state of the weather, or of the pavement. Still less will it arise from any peculiarity of his words or phrases. . . . However irregular and desultory his talk, there is method in the fragments.
Method, accustomed to contemplate not things only, or for their own sake alone, but likewise and chiefly the relations of things, either their relations to each other, or to the observer, or to the state and apprehension of the hearers. To enumerate and analyze these relations, with the conditions under which they alone are discoverable, is to teach the science of method.
The purpose of the writer is not so much to establish a particular truth, as to remove the obstacles, the continuance of which is preclusive to all truth, the whole scheme assumes a different aspect, and justifies itself to all dimensions.
. . .
— not to assist in the storing of the passive mind with the various sorts of knowledge most in request, as if the human soul were a mere repository or banqueting-room, but to place it in such relations of circumstances as should gradually excite the germinal power that craves no knowledge but what it can take up into itself, what it can appropriate and reproduce in fruits of its own.
There's a lot more I'd like to say about Weinberger's book; I'm not really avoiding the question, I'm just easily distracted. But, regarding the "self-sacrificing artifacts" that links constitute, I would argue that most language behaves that way. Each word is a gesture that flouts, or aligns itself with the social meanings which preceeded it. Language has been reaching out to "the other" long before the web was formed to carry it. Language is constantly reaching beyond itself. Links can be taken to be polyvalent signifiers, but then, so are words.
On Saturday, I drove in early enough to snag a parking spot a few hundred feet from the key entrance (now that I knew where it was!). No bridge crossing. Trout Fishing in America was playing on one stage, while the other was silent. I hadn’t seen them before, but they were just a little on the happy side for me. As I walked around to the other side, I saw a big man laying on top of a stack of equipment cases, twenty feet up backstage. It turned out to be Chris Chew of The North Mississippi Allstars.
I’d wanted to see them since an acquaintance, Daniel Gold of An Honest Tune magazine, had raved. Daniel rescued a guitar of theirs, when someone attempted to steal it in Fayetteville after a gig. Even though I’m not into the jam thing, Daniel has pointed me at some interesting bands as they’ve passed through town. I was near the front of the stage when they came out, and after a few songs I was glad I was. They had great energy, as they melted a bunch of classic blues tunes together. I looked around and saw some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time, Stephen Koch of the Arkansas Democrat Gazette and my old friend Dan Limke who works for some newspaper consortium a bit further north. Then, a skinhead near the center just started pointing and madly gesturing at me like he knew me. Everyone thinks they know me. The band was playing great, until halfway through the set when the jamming became intolerable. I left to get a beer.
When I returned, the band had returned to playing songs. Overall, they were good. I just feel so damn cheated when people start noodling about on the stage. I think it was the drum solo that did it. Didn’t these people learn anything from the sixties? Drum solos don’t work. I left before the encore, to try to get a good position for the man I really went to see.
Steve Earle was a total pro. It was an acoustic show, and the monitor set-up was so bad I could hear the onstage feedback at the front row. He stopped once, to see if they could fix it. They didn’t. He played a few Bob Dylan tunes, and eventually commented “I’d be happy if they could just get the feedback in tune.” Earle explained that he started out as a folk singer, but he had to give it up because there were too many rules. He told stories about hopping trains as a kid, with a funny twist. He said he accidentally jumped on one that took him out of town and he had to call his dad to come and get him.
Later in the set, he played a Lightnin’ Hopkins tune, and told a story that Townes Van Zant had told him. It seems that Hopkins used his mouth like a bank. Any time he had extra money, he would put more gold in his mouth. He decided he wanted to get a diamond inset, but was so nervous that someone would steal it while he was sleeping that he had it placed on the inside. He carried a little dental mirror, so he could inspect it from time to time.
You could tell that Earle couldn’t hear a thing on stage. But he played amazingly well, for having no monitors. He just soldiered on, through a masterful set of tunes. As Tom Waits has said, “Steve Earle writes about American regret as clearly as anybody going.” I haven’t been moved to tears at a concert in a very long time, but this time I was. There’s just something about “Transcendental Blues”:
In the darkest hour of the longest night
If it was in my power I'd step into the light
Candles on the altar, penny in your shoe
Walk upon the water — transcendental blues
Happy ever after 'til the day you die
Careful what you ask for, you don't know 'til you try
Hands are in your pockets, starin' at your shoes
Wishin' you could stop it — transcendental blues
If I had it my way, everything would change
Out here on this highway the rules are still the same
Back roads never carry you where you want 'em to
They leave you standin' there with them ol' transcendental blues
In the encore, Earle played a brand new song written for an album coming out in the fall. It’s called “Jerusalem” and he joked that it might get him deported. It’s obviously political, and unabashed in its claim that “the sons of Abraham must lay down their sword.” Just another one of those folk-singer peace anthems, but gorgeous nonetheless. I wonder when calling for peace became anti-Semitic?
I wondered for a moment at the end of the first encore if there would be a second. I suspected not, so I headed for my car. I feel reasonably confident there wasn’t because Earle was about two steps ahead of me, headed for his bus. I didn’t bother him. As I walked out to the parking lot, I could hear a girl talking:
“I just don’t get this bit about never being satisfied,” she said. “Is it just an artist thing or what?”
I paused for a second, unable to keep my mouth closed. I said:
“If you’re ever satisfied, it usually means that your standards are too low.”
The guy she was with laughed. She looked at him and said:
“He might be right about that.”
From the Shawnee Oklahoma News Star:
"He said he was driving along, and the next thing he knows, there was no pavement under him, and that he was headed for a concrete pillar of some sort and hit the water," Wetz said. Horn said it's possible that seven tractor-trailers and nine vehicles went into the water during the heavy downpour.
"This barge came loose. It was an accident. It hit the bridge and the bridge collapsed and that was it," Horn said.
I noticed as I was walking across the Broadway Street bridge (same river, different state) that one of the sections was steel, while the others were concrete. I suspect a similar mishap occured here sometime ago. Barges get away from time to time.
----- --------TITLE: Riverfest DATE: 05/25/2002 4:40:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Crossing BridgesParking about three blocks from the base of the Broadway bridge, I thought I’d made a good tactical choice. I trudged past the green brass-eyed stare of the statue of Count Pulaski in front of the treasurer’s office, and stepped carefully across the steel-margined expansion joints in the concrete, past the Robinson Center and onto the bridge. Halfway across the mile-long span, I wasn’t so sure. I was alone, a few hundred feet above the river, looking down at the massive crowds below. Somehow, when you’ve made a choice that is different from a few hundred thousand people, you question it.
On the other side, I walked through twenty or more acres of neatly mowed green vacant lots. At this entrance, there weren’t many people. Just ticket-takers with stares fixed neatly a dozen feet behind you. Have a nice day. Such an odd layout. Two stages, back to back with each other. The entrance neatly faced the backstage area for both. I walked the length of the North Little Rock side toward the Main Street bridge, and noticed that the lines for the ticket booths were at least a hundred feet long. I walked back down to the far end, and stood in line at another booth. When I got to the head of the line, the beverage tickets were sold out. A fine start.
There seemed to be little choice other than to cross back to the Little Rock side. Another two miles, across the Main Street bridge. There was a horrible jam-up at the pedestrian ramps due to their great logistics. The entirety of the crowd was funneled down into a three-foot wide staircase. But I crossed over, bought tickets, and walked back. I avoided the jam-up by walking the extra half-mile back to the entrance where I first came in. I bought my first beer at least four miles later.
As I walked around, the music coming from every direction was clearly “jamming.” I found my self thinking, “please phone me when a song starts.” I got back to the stage complex to see a few minutes of Anders Osborne. It was a little unusual to see a “rock” band with a tuba onstage, but what the hell. Mildly amusing. The real fun started when Dr. John and Blues Traveler were playing back to back (literally) in this weird venue. I’m not really a fan of either, but given the choice I’ll run miles to avoid melismatic harmonica playing. I did walk to the other side, noticing that a lot of people had stationed themselves midway, getting assaulted by an odd cacophony of two bands playing fairly loud. The age split between the two crowds was predictable.
More than that, I was struck by the impression that people usually prefer the copy to the original these days. I don’t know why that is. I walked easily up to a space about fifteen feet in front of Dr. John, during “I Walk on Gilded Splinters.” Blues Traveller were unapproachable, as the dervish dead dancers were going wild. A side effect of the stage layout was that the crowds at the front of both stages effectively blocked the exits, so that the policemen carrying the day’s take had to climb the barriers in front of the stage, and cross in front of the performers with the money. The whole thing was a logistical nightmare, and it was surreal watching the six-foot-six four-hundred pound black bouncer at the front of the stage grooving as the money passed by while Dr. John was beating on a piece of bone with a drumstick.
It doesn’t get more Southern than this. A guy standing next to me kept staring at me. He eventually started shouting: “Hey, I know you!” I think I might have seen him in passing before, at the Whitewater tavern. I found myself wanting to say, “No, you don’t.”
I walked back over the Broadway Bridge as the encores were playing. The boats on the river, and the receding line of bridges off in the distance had a sort of Apocalypse now feel. But the real show will be tonight, or perhaps tomorrow night. They will block the Main Street Bridge for fireworks, as Rick James takes the stage (on the white side of the river) while a jam-band, Moe, and Steve Earle stand with their backs to each other on the blacker, North Little Rock side. I suspect the Broadway bridge will be more crowded; there isn’t any other way across, and miles separate the two events. There’s something positively metaphoric about the whole enterprise.
Things will come together on Sunday, as Styx and Run DMC will play simultaneously, back to back. It seems like some demented Middle America cartoon. During my way back over the bridge, I was passed by some gang-looking folks and a guy with Downs’ syndrome. After watching Forrest Gump last week, I sometimes do think that the history of this country is best told by an idiot, like Benjy in the first chapter of Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury. An idiot surely could have designed a more effective festival.
My ex stopped by today with her new baby, now two months old. So, this is the obligatory personal post for those friends back in California who are curious about them.
I took a couple of quick snaps, and in keeping with the "blogging outside the taxonomies" theme that I like to pursue, here you have it. No cat pictures for you, but here are some equally boring (to those who have no social connection with her) family snaps.
The Evans/Crane project may be paused for just a bit, as it is the Riverfest weekend. I feel a little shaky about all the walking involved, but since I missed it last year due to the broken ankle, I've got to give it a try tonight.
I'm also waiting with great anticipation for Loren's look at the Transcendentalists. I'm quite happy with the content out there I have to choose from. I like it when people talk about stuff that is outside my experience, regardless of what it might be.
So, this is but a momentary indulgence, a few snaps for some friends. I might take a few at the festival, but who knows. All I know is that I do need to get out more.
There are some who say that content-heavy blogs are more 'personal' or more 'expressive' of the blogger's personality than link-heavy blogs. This seems to make a certain sort of sense: link-heavy bloggers don't talk about themselves and their emotions and stuff.
I disagree. I think that link-heavy blogs are as much about who the blogger is as a content-heavy blog. The web and linking reveals with a startling clarity the way we connect ourselves to others.
This is the perspective of an anthropologist, to be sure. As is also quite predicable, I disagree. What linking behavior reveals is the habitus of the blogger, in Bourdieu’s terminology, not the personality. How we connect ourselves to each other does not constitute what I consider ‘personality’; in Bourdieu’s schema, these things are largely involuntary, entirely socially constructed, and not in the least a gesture of expression or personality. It’s a strategy of indirection, hiding personality beneath the waves of cultural doxa. It substitutes pointing to capital for possessing it.
It is refreshing to me that most of the online writers I read do not merely shout and point. I have no interest in studying positions within the fabric of society, because this activity reduces everything to a set of well traveled maps. Old news, I say. The congruence of this method of analysis is easily demonstrated, as in the wonderful map near the opening of Practical Reason:
This is a useful way of looking at things. Chances are, most people’s social opinions, preferences, political views, etc., can be determined by this sort of mapping. But does it really tell us who they are? Not in my opinion; it merely relays social predilections that have nothing to do with any real constitution of ‘self’. But then if you adopt the position of social constructivism, there are no relevant parts to the ‘self’ other than these involuntary choices; we literally do not exist outside of our conditioned responses. This is something that I refuse to believe.
Leuschke is not here for a while. But I love the away screen. It says some interesting stuff about pointing. “Pointing at information has become a standin for its possession.” Some views on blogging see the entirety of the phenomenon in its embrace of shouting (punditry) and pointing (linking). I don’t see it that way at all. Like Weinberger, I think it's far more complex than that. What interests me is the ability to see, albeit through a limited window, into a diverse group of consciousnesses as they grapple and form ideas around information.
There are, in Foucault’s terms, new discursive formations being constructed. These contain elements of the old formations (narrative and cataloguing taxonomies) and entirely new social formations, where power lies in different sorts of capital. I don’t see it as a “new consciousness” so much as an ever-accelerating group of tools that force a confrontation with basic issues of social consciousness, i.e., public vs. private, individual vs. collective, etc..
It seems to me that the core is conversational, as many of the blog writers I read have proposed. The ideas I take away reading these texts, like normal conversation, often have little to do with the intention of the writer that has composed the text. I suspect the same is true of my texts, for the handful of people who seem to read them regularly. I’m a textual wanderer. I started reading I.A. Richards The Philosophy of Rhetoric, but stopped after the second lecture. There’s some dense stuff, connected with my other wanderings. I like dense stuff:
A perception is never of an it; perception takes whatever it perceives as a thing of a certain sort. All thinking from the lowest to the highest, whatever else it may be — is sorting.
If we sum up thus far by saying that meaning is delegated efficacy, that description applies above all to the meaning of words, whose virtue is to be substitutes exerting the power of what is not there.
In these contexts one item — typically a word — takes over the duties of the parts that can then be omitted from the recurrence.
We can be fairly ingenious with these metaphors, invent neural archives storing up impressions, or neural telephone exchanges with fantastic properties. But how the archives get consulted or how in the telephone system A gets on to the B it needs, instead of the whole alphabet at once in a jumble, remains utterly mysterious matters.
Shouting and pointing is also an advertising strategy, a persuasive perception of rhetoric. It's a simplistic view of rhetoric on the web; though the structure of the network is rhizomatic, the connections of the people within it are not. And not everyone is selling something. Where Richards really shines is at suggesting that all rhetoric is not persuasion, as was thought in the embattled realm of classical rhetoric. There is also the matter of exposition, which is ultimately where Walker Evans set up camp in the visual realm, as a radical reaction to persuasion.
Richards points at Coleridge’s essays “On Method,” so I had to stop and read them. I'm easily distracted. There, I found the best perspective on Wolfram’s discoveries:
It is with sciences as with trees. If it be your purpose to make some particular use of a tree, you need not concern yourself with the roots. But if you wish to transfer it into another soil, it is then safer to employ roots rather than scions.
Something stuck in my head from a post from net.narrative.environments. I was reminded that, as an adolecent I was deeply influenced by two things: Playboy Magazine and The Last Whole Earth Catalogue. While I won’t explain Hefner’s influence right now, I will say that the subtitle of the catalogue, “access to tools” was a libratory influence. There is an optimism in thinking that access to informational tools can shape the world, an optimism that interests me more than the functioning of machine intelligence. I’m far more interested in the trunks of discursive formations than the roots; they make better planks with which to construct a world worth living in.
And I am far more interested in expository prose than persuasion.
I feel a lot better about dawdling regarding Walker Evans after receiving James R. Mellow's biography. It's over five hundred pages, and only goes to 1957. Mellow died before it was completed. There's a lot of material out there on Evans. The sources for all my ruminations fill a good-sized banker's box. I've been collecting them for years, because while I know a lot about Evans' approach, I'm still grappling with him as a man. Conflicting things are written all the time, and Evans encouraged that. He wanted to be a mystery.
I remain stuck in the 1928-31 phase because there is relatively little there, image-wise, though there is a lot of textual stuff. In 1929 Evans changed roommates, from Hans Skolle to Paul Grotz. Skolle was a painter, and Grotz an architect and amateur photographer. Skolle moved out, and Hart Crane left town. Though Evans enjoyed Crane when he was sober, like most people, he couldn't deal with him drunk.
Part of the reason for the limited number of photographs available, I suspect, is because Evans wanted to destroy any evidence that he was aligned with the “high aesthetic tradition” that he dabbled in, via his cityscapes. In the years from 1929-34, Evans forged a new aesthetic. The romantic or at the very least, dramatic, approach to photography was quickly moved to the itemized list of things he loathed.
| Thanks for: | No thanks for: | |
| ruler | LePage's Big Boy Paste | |
| Rosmersholm [by Ibsen] | The Miraculous Revenge | |
| Superior clips | by Bernard Shaw | |
| Vick’s Vaporub | Rock Island time table | |
| twine | garbage | |
| India ink | Burton’s trade purity strength | |
| Asia [a magazine] | delicacy of flavor mark | |
| Monocle | extract of vanilla | |
| The Missing Link | souvenirs of amorous adventures | |
| hatchet | whiskey | |
| Dos En Uno Pasta Superior | oil can | |
One of the interesting things about the change from Skolle to Grotz as companions, was the fulfillment of some of Evan’s wanderlust. The pair made extensive trips, including one to Canada which has some surviving photographic evidence.
Rosenheim and Eklund paired the grain elevator photograph with a set of prose poems composed around the same time, thinking that the poems might be written in reflection of the Canadian trip; however, they could just as easily be a reflection on New York. Influence is a curious thing.
An interesting attribute also noted by these editors is that the manuscript containing the poems is set apart by short lines, like the lines of a contact sheet of photographs. I think that’s a bit of a reach. That’s also a contextual apparatus also used in books of poetry.
The great thing about Mellow’s biography is that it’s written by a man used to writing biographies of modern writers; he examines the lies, and the reaching involved of trying to make sense of history.
In the introduction, Hilton Kramer notes Walker Evan’s reaction to biography: “They’re all lies! They’re nothing but lies!” Reacting to the suggestion that he write his own memoir, Evans said: “No, no, you don’t understand. I would write lies too. You can’t write anything but lies about the past.”
One thing is certain about this group of poems by Evans: they are hardly the celebration of modernist vision of the city
cross
check
cube yourselves
black and white in the sun
it is nothing to me that you are a grain elevator
your words carry another word to my eyeshadow
shade of a city
falling across the face of a one eyed monsterbuilt by
hidingforawaiting
waiting
standing day after day
none sees this
threat
cascades
dry
your water is the caress of my eye
one part of a city
impaled
punctured cubes
full of stenographers desires banalities
not good enough for their shell
Text on verso:
To hell with the filthy punctured cubes of the city — architecturally speaking. Fourteen thousand two hundred and seventy three tragedies, 67284 mysteries, several obscure dramas with or without poetry there in the night.
Besides the trip to Canada, there were also several subsequent trips to Truro in Cape Cod. Grotz had a place there, and when I get to that section, where this is all going will be much clearer. In his words, Evans reacts against the aestheticism of his day. However, the visual solution to the problem is just around the bend.
W.B. Yeats gathered together some fragmentary poems from Blake’s notebooks for the Modern Library edition of William Blake’s poetry, the same edition that I feel relatively sure is the primary source for most of the early Modern poets’ reading of Blake. It’s a cheap little book, quite gorgeous and pocket sized. I have no doubt that it was found in the pockets of many poets for years to come, including the Beats. What seems really odd to me, is that Yeats felt that these poems were best classified in a section he titled “Ideas of Good and Evil.” It sets the stage for a sort of cascade of misreading, because close reading of most of Blake’s catalogue shows that he felt these binaries were dangerous and non-productive.
To a large extent, that’s what Blake’s work The Marriage of Heaven and Hell is all about. The perception of what constitutes a heaven, or a hell, is dependent largely on a person’s point of view. But it seems to be a fundamental human characteristic to itemize these things and set them apart in lists, particularly the bad things. It’s an attempt to create a balance sheet for spiritual economics. Blake’s point was that the world is made up of both, and perception depends on who is making the list. The same thing applies to cultural economics.
Well she likes Dinosaur Jr. but she can't tell you why
She says if you like country music, man, you deserve to die
She's got that whacked-out hair, got them second-hand clothes
She's got an itemized list of everything she loathes.
Well she’s so political, so sophisticated
She will swear in court that everything is overrated“Idiot’s Delight” — Bottle Rockets, Brooklyn Side
Crusoe also made lists. The popularity since then hasn't abated. List generated about 117 million hits when I last checked. I remember last semester being quite frustrated when asked to make up a list of pros and cons as a decision making strategy. My brain isn’t really wired that way. I make lists quite often, but never as an oppositional strategy. I suspect though, this method of weighing oppositions is the dominant mode. In making sense of his presence on the island, Crusoe made this list:
Evil | Good | |
| I am cast upon a horrible desolate Island, void of all hope of recovery. | But I am alive, and not drown'd as all my Ship's Company was. | |
| I am singl'd out and separated, as it were, from all the World to be miserable. | But I am singl'd out too from all the Ships Crew to be spar'd from Death; and he that miraculously sav'd me from Death, can deliver me from this condition. | |
| I am divided from Mankind, a Solitare, one banish'd from humane Society. | But I am not starv'd and perishing on a barren Place, affording no Sustenance. | |
| I have not Clothes to cover me. | But I am in a hot Climate, where if I had Clothes I could hardly wear them. | |
| I am without any Defence or Means to resist any Violence of Man or Beast. | But I am cast on an Island, where I see no wild Beasts to hurt me, as I saw on the Coast of Africa. And what if I had been Shipwreck'd there? | |
| I have no Soul to speak to, or relieve me. | But God wonderfully sent the ship in near enough to the Shore, that I have gotten out so many necessary things as will supply my Wants, or enable me to Supply my Self even as long as I live. | |
Upon the whole, here was an undoubted Testimony, that there was scarce any Condition in the World so miserable, but there was something Negativ or something Positiv to be thankful for in it; and let stand this Direction from the Experience of the most miserable of all Conditions in this World, that we may always find in it something to comfort our selves from, and set in the Description of Good and Evil, on the Credit side of the Accompt.
Evans lacks all of Crusoe’s optimism. He exchanged “itemized lists of everything he loathes” with James Agee in the mid-thirties. But before that, he was making up lists of things, and photographing lists as well. Was it a decision making strategy? I don’t think so. I think it was a means of testimony, as Crusoe put it, to his position in time. The lists were not made public. Evans made good on his promise to keep his “inner thoughts” private, though it seems that contempt was one of his guiding voices.
However, underneath Evans' lists also seem like Crusoe’s ledger, though purely an inventory of external, rather than internal states. I feel myself a bit torn, perhaps a bit closer to Crusoe than Evans in this respect. I think that there has been an often unspoken optimism which holds society together, an optimism that is ignored by choice by many Modernist voices.
When shaped into quasi-narratives, list poems are an interesting thing. That’s on tap for later on today.
A person I knew casually died recently. He was the husband of the 16th-17th century English professor at my school, and a philosophy professor. I was just at a party with him about a week ago. I don’t remember what day he died on; I just got the basic facts from another student who called me because they thought I would care. I do. He was a quiet man; I ran into him at a Kant lecture a while back, and we didn’t even speak.
But he seemed to be animated and in good spirits at the party. He wasn’t ill, and he was laughing quite a bit. I spoke to his wife briefly, but not to him. The story I got of his passing was totally mundane. He was found dead sitting on a toilet.
“How Elvis!” my friend said.
The cause of death was blunt head trauma. Evidently, he fell and hit his head somehow. He walked with a cane, so I suppose his legs were not the best. After breaking my ankle by stepping out of my car last year, this news hits me fairly hard. I don’t feel nearly so invincible as I once did. The idea that one day you’re here, and the next, you’re gone is of far greater interest to me than models of cellular automatons, and the possibility that the end of life is following some sort of cosmic computer program.
I really couldn’t care less about “A New Kind of Science.” I cracked up when I read that title, and a few reviews. Principles of New Science of Giambattista Vico concerning the Common Nature of the Nations, by which are found the Principles of Another System of the Natural Law of the Gentes was first published in 1725 by a rhetoric professor. It’s a more interesting document to me, because it draws upon the metaphoric, poetic nature of man’s consciousness as a formative basis for social cultures (gentile cultures, anyhow). It's usually called Vico's New Science. Much like the realm of advertising (New! Improved!), if you wanted to sell a book in the early eighteenth century you did need to gesture at its novelty. What makes me wonder about the latest "new science" is the dependence on digital modeling; life's alway's been analog to me. I suspect that's the primary novelty.
Unfortunately, death has no novelty. Realizing that if a similar thing happened to me, it might be as much as a month before anyone found out. But then again, I suppose it wouldn’t matter much to me. I’d be dead.
Rip dusts his broomThere is an interesting confluence of imagery between Evans' short story, “Brooms” and “Van Winkle”, the second poem in the “Powhatan's Daughter” section of Hart Crane's The Bridge.
It seems likely that Evans had read it before he wrote his story; it shows the larger issues behind the choice of sweeping utensils.
There is something Oedipal about the questions invoked. Evans buys a vacuum cleaner, where Crane places the same instrument in different hands, in a different place and time, wondering about the amnesia involved. For some reason, my brain wants to connect this all with Henry Miller's Remember to Remember.
But there are eddies and currents beneath the surface that I can't help but swim in. Photography is a relatively new technology, but the ocean is quite old.
The question is one of method, against a backdrop of change. Crane reaches out to embrace the inner thoughts, whereas Evans deigns to repudiate them. In both cases, it seems to be a response to tradition. The tradition of photography was shallow at this time, but the tradition of literature was deep. Although, it must be remembered that Hart Crane was a self-educated high school dropout who perhaps wasn't all that attached to what we now call "canonical literature."
The heart of the beats pounds in the bookended lines of “Van Winkle”. The choice of words is perhaps a bit obtuse to a modern reader: “Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, / Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate.”
Macadam is a paving material composed of broken stones, bound together by asphalt. Tunny is just a synonym for tuna. I suppose it might be an echo of the Christian ethos, being a fish and all.
Of great interest to me were the literary references in the third stanza, because upon close examination they all pertain to “woman troubles”.
| Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, | ||
| Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate: | Streets spread | |
| Listen! the miles a hurdy-gurdy grinds— | past store and | |
| Down gold arpeggios mile on mile unwinds. | factory — sped | |
| by sunlight | ||
| and her | ||
| Times earlier, when you hurried off to school, | smile . . . | |
| — It is the same hour through a later day — | ||
| You walked with Pizzaro in a copybook, | ||
| And Cortes rode up, reining tautly in — | ||
| Firmly as coffee grips the taste,— and away! | ||
| There was Priscilla's cheek close in the wind, | ||
| And Captain Smith, all beard and certainty, | ||
| And Rip Van Winkle bowing by the way,— | ||
| "Is this Sleepy Hollow, friend — ?" And he — | Like Memory, | |
| she is time's | ||
| And Rip forgot the office hours, | truant, shall | |
| and he forgot the pay; | take you by | |
| Van Winkle sweeps a tenement | the hand . . . | |
| way down on Avenue A,— | ||
| The grind-organ says . . .Remember, remember | ||
| The cinder pile at the end of the backyard | ||
| Where we stoned the family of young | ||
| Garter snakes under . . .And the monoplanes | ||
| We launched — with paper wings and twisted | ||
| Rubber bands . . .Recall — recall | ||
| the rapid tongues | ||
| That flittered from under the ash heap day | ||
| After day whenever your stick discovered | ||
| Some sunning inch of unsuspecting fibre — | ||
| It flashed back at your thrust, as clean as fire. | ||
| And Rip was slowly made aware | ||
| that he, Van Winkle, was not here | ||
| nor there. He woke and swore he'd seen Broadway | ||
| a Catskill daisy chain in May — | ||
| So memory, that strikes a rhyme out of a box, | ||
| Or splits a random smell of flowers through glass — | ||
| Is it a whip stripped from the lilac tree | ||
| One day in spring my father took to me, | ||
| Or is it the Sabbatical, unconscious smile | ||
| My mother almost brought me once from church | ||
| And once only, as I recall — ? | ||
| It flickered through the snow screen, blindly | ||
| It forsook her at the doorway, it was gone | ||
| Before I had left the doorway, it was gone | ||
| Before I had left the window. It | ||
| Did not return with a kiss in the hall. | ||
| Macadam, gun-grey as the tunny's belt, | ||
| Leaps from Far Rockaway to Golden Gate . . . | ||
| Keep hold of that nickel for car-change, Rip— | ||
| Have you got your “Times” —? | ||
| And hurry along, Van Winkle — it's getting late! | ||
The hazy nature of memory, of childhood and education, flits past as the traveler gets on his way. The mysterious “she” is “times truant,” and these fragments of information may mean very little, or they could mean a lot. Cortes and Pizzaro require little explanation, as explorers of the new world. But what of Pricilla's cheek?
I believe it must be Pricilla Mullens, as glorified by Longfellow in The Courtship of Miles Standish. As her suitor John Alden described her in Longfellow's poem: “There is no land so sacred, no air so pure and so wholesome, / As is the air she breathes, and the soil that is pressed by her footsteps.” Interestingly enough, all the references in this stanza are slanted toward tales of courtships won or lost, including Rip Van Winkle. Rip's story is more of courtship come to a bad end, for numerous reasons. First of all, Rip had no care for himself but only of other people's needs (instead of his family's). And he was hen-pecked; upon waking up his first thought is “what excuse shall I make to Dame Van Winkle!” Van Winkle finds a victory through his sleep though, because that wife is long gone when he wakes up. The John Smith reference should be apparent to those familiar with Pocahontas, because in his telling of the tale the young girl was smitten by him.
The reference to The Legend of Sleepy Hollow drives deeper, because more than a ghost story, it is the story of a courtship thwarted. What I found most interesting in Sleepy Hollow was the description of two types of women:
I profess not to know how women’s hearts are wooed and won. To me they have always been matters of riddle and admiration. Some seem to have but one vulnerable point, or door of access; while others have a thousand avenues, and may be captured in a thousand different ways. It is a great triumph of skill to gain the former, but a still greater proof of generalship to maintain possession of the latter, for the man must battle for his fortress at every door and window.
If the “she” here is taken as the literary tradition, then the poet positions himself as a somewhat henpecked suitor who has slept through too much and is in pursuit of a difficult and elusive target. When Van Winkle awakes though, he is free. Though as the gloss suggests, she is there to take you by the hand, somewhat echoing the role of Dante's Virgil. Great literature deepens when you read it carefully. I love this stuff!
I got a couple more sources to draw from, regarding Walker Evans today. There is some great information, which scares me somewhat. It's one of those deep personal things.
Though Evans claims that he wasn't really all that influenced by Baudelaire, Unclassified: A Walker Evans Anthology presents some of Evan's translations of Baudelaire's prose poems, as well as several Evans short stories. What's weirding me out is that Baudelaire is the person who drove me back to school after a twenty year absence. It's a long story that I think I've told before.
I am really quite taken by Evan's short story "Brooms." It really says quite eloquently some of the stuff that I've been skirting about, as I approach the really formative years in his art. It was written in 1929, and I have typed it in from the facsimile manuscript in the book, complete with the spelling idiosyncrasies. Don't bother commenting about corrections. It's the lit-scholar habit. What you see is what was there.
It's short and sweet. It also connects oddly with the post I wrote earlier in the evening as well. Notice that one of speakers "imperative needs" was a novel. I don't find this coincidental at all. Some people consume such things, myself included.
----- EXTENDED BODY:A change in policy. Journal won't do. Have decided to continue but to omit dramas, crises, eruptions, explosions, simmerings, boilings, and all manifestations of the chaos of my inner life. Review before leavetaking: I am full of hate; have wanderlust not only in Spring; am firmly intrenched in physical life, and love it; am alone; have soul, to which I hereby bid farewell.
When I took this place I simply couldn't buy a broom. couldn't buy anything. Sold, in fact, books, cameras; pawned watch. There was no broom until I found one in the alley back of the abandoned factory. It had a triangular shape. (I didn't know anything about brooms.) I carried it home and swept bitterly.
I forgot to say that I shall eliminate dates. But I shall go on writing. Every night I shall sit down and write something that hasn't anything to do with my inner life.
Haaga the grocer has a sale of brooms, 39c.
I don't mind the cold. I don't mind anything. I am detached. I walk along the street in the sunlight, with something to do; something connected with my inner life, and therefore unmentionable. Divine power of thought. I forget what it is I have to do. Left stranded on upper Bway in this condition.
I know I ought to buy a broom. There are times when I actually could buy a broom, financially. But nothing has ever come of it morally.
Ena Douglass was born in Singapore. She now pays $12 a month for a room on 14th ST. Has a long green dress and a long cigarette holder which I sat on and broke in three (REPLACE), and long vocabulary. All this means nothing to me.
Upon one of the main thoroughfares of the city, in a commercial district, I found a cluster of super-booms. Examined them carefully. The handle of each was of ash, machine-turned ash, I should say. This part of the implements had been dipped in robin's egg blue for youth and happiness. The sweeping part was long and green, like Ena's vocabulary. The sweetsmelling reeds were bound together with ochre twine. Groups of these brooms stood swaying in the breeze, gladdening the hearts of the passers-by. But I was sick of an old passion.
I am going to change my nourishment. I am weary of staple commodities. I think I am in the frame of mind a man gets into when he eats caviare for breakfast, as in Strindberg.
IMPERITIVE NEEDS:
Words: the bottom of my life is a shadowy pattern of unreality, imposing in its own private way. I look into it coming out of deleria or even out of sleep on summer mornings before dawn, having set my will to go off at 4:30. Moi intime. My happy hunting-ground. My little core of humanity. Later it is shot through with cold sparks of intellect, or words to that effect.
Soon after I left the house, before I even turned the corner, I saw a worn-out broom lying in the gutter. It is nothing I said; it will pass. But I saw another, and yet another. All had that horrible, suggestive triangular shape. It was too much. Today, this dateless day, I walked into Macy's and bought a vacuum cleaner.
Now I shall suck the dust out of chaos.
—Walker Evans, 1929
It almost has a certain "blog" attitude. Just the facts, maam. But then, so does Defoe.
----- --------TITLE: My ball DATE: 05/20/2002 8:02:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Cross purposesUsing their typical approach of pointing out contentious articles on the web, Arts and Letters Daily has gestured at another piece of academy bashing, You Read Your Book, and I’ll Read Mine.
Despite what your high school English teacher may have told you, literature does not make us or our society better. To be seduced by fiction is to live at cross-purposes with most of the really important things in life.
What they have in mind is what economists call social capital, which is the trust between people that lets them get along well enough to build businesses and other useful institutions.
I’m not a conventional “student” or a conventional “teacher” per se. I was shut out of education in the years that Reagan held sway as governor of California. I spent a long time in the business of selling things to people, burning out and ending up in more clerk-type employments. The reason for this being that as Coleridge observed, few things are more important in life than providing “bread and cheese.” But they aren’t the only important things, and I have long felt the compulsion to explore the fields of artistic expression. Maybe I’m just a victim of my “habitus” as Bourdieu would have it, but my own “spiritual economics” has long been at cross-purposes with monetary economics. The value which drew me, like Walker Evans and other artists I admire, was disinterestedness. The importance of this freedom from economic slavery (in my mind, though not in actuality) was what drove me to be almost totally unconcerned with normal notions of suck-cess.
The antithesis of governing principles between “cultural economics” and conventional economics is well explored by Bourdieu, and it explains a lot about my own particular doxa. One of the governing institutions of “cultural capital” is the academy, and the rules and principles are closer, though not identical, with my own. I also have that streak of American transcendentalist in me too, which rebels against homo academicus. So, when all is said and done I must continually assert that though I am now moving from the workaday world of saying “may I help you” (which really means “may I sell you”) to dispensing another form of capital. It’s closer to me, but it’s not me. I don’t know what the hell I am really, but I know that I am neither an uneducated laborer (though I spent most of my life laboring) nor an ivory tower intellectual. I’m just continually searching to find out what works for me, and “cultural capital” has always been more important to me than economic capital. Of course, there is a nice refutatio near the close of the article:
None of this matters if core curriculum classes teach students to question the falsely coherent narrative of intellectual progress that canonical books are said to exemplify, which is what happens in the best of such classes.
I get so sick of the bashing of universities, and of the so-called “great books.” It is only in the secondary literature that any sort of “coherence” occurs, and then only for brief historic windows in time. The stocks of writers, and artists, rise and fall based on their coherence to institutional politics, but also cultural capital. The first cultural capital of any importance to me was music; and I don’t buy the now institutional Rolling Stone or Rock and Roll Hall of Fame points of view. Yet I still love music. And I’ll continue to love the books, and works of art, that have use to me, canonical or not. Just because it’s canonical doesn’t mean it’s automatically the enemy. Sometimes they call them great books, because they are great books. But that’s up to each individual reader to decide.
That’s one reason why I find rhetoric as a subject field so attractive. There is no real canon. It’s at once the oldest, and the newest of subjects. What matters most is what works. In my opinion, Cicero, Quintillian, Aristotle, and Plato work as long as they are offered in the correct context. In some ways, these books, as well as other great works of literature have made the world richer and better; their utility is dependent on how they are presented. I think it best to present them as possibilities, not as totems enshrined in wood. Each time I read one of these articles I can only marvel at how crappy the writer’s teachers must have been, to make them hate the forces that formed them so much. The closing sentiment of the article regarding the goal of reading is good, but diffuse:
This process, however, has nothing to do with coming together and everything to do with breaking apart, with figuring out how to live as an independent intellect and a soul loyal to its own needs. Literature takes root in a rich and stubborn particularity, not in some powdery notion of communal uplift.
I give you the end of a golden string
Only wind it into a ball:
It will lead you to Heavens gate.
Built in Jerusalems wall.Jerusalem, Plate 77
That’s what reading is for me. It’s not an academic thing, really, it’s just the search for that golden string. And this is just my ball. Sorry, but I do think it is about coming together. It's about joining yourself into history to better see where you are now. Literature works for me, perhaps because I'm working under a screwed sense of economics.
----- --------TITLE: Harbor Dawn DATE: 05/19/2002 8:36:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: “When the band plays hail to the chief / they point the cannon at you”
I'm mostly unfamiliar with the American canon. I could blame it on my education. The Americanists at my university are incredibly progressive, and tend to focus on more marginalized works. I only had time to take one of the survey courses in American Lit, seventeenth century mostly, and the canonical works read like dry lumps of wood compared to the other stuff presented (captivity narratives, diaries, etc.).
So, encountering a poem that takes in the sweep of the American canon like Hart Crane's The Bridge requires a lot of work for me. But it's welcome, because now I get the chance to fill in some gaps in my reading.
While it was accused by its critics as being an attempt at an American epic, The Bridge is really more of a lyric vision. It has an interesting affinity with Joyce, because it traces the events of a single day against a deep backdrop of allusions. But in Crane's case, the allusions are slanted and obtuse, inviting a great deal of speculation about the real nature of the intention involved. This isn't a cold intellectual game, but a warm-hearted reflection on the story of America thus far.
The fun really begins in the second section of the book, “Powhatan's Daughter.” I related the opening epigram near the end of my last entry on Hart Crane, and now I'm just about ready to start talking about its poems.
The first poem is "Harbor Dawn" which begins on the borderline between waking and sleep, and needs to be presented with its glosses intact. One of the interesting bits of textual history is that Crane went to great lengths to assure that the glosses would not override the main text, even if that meant the were lost in the bleed into the books spine. The glosses are almost a "machine for thinking" about the text though, rather than an explication. They ask the key questions.
| Insistently through sleep—a tide of voices— | ||
| They meet you listening midway in your dream, | 400 years and | |
| The long, tired sounds, fog-insulated noises: | more . . . or is | |
| Gongs in white surplices, beshrouded wails, | it from the | |
| Far strum of fog horns . . .signals dispersed in veils | soundless shore | |
| of sleep that | ||
| And then a truck will lumber past the wharves | time | |
| As winch engines begin throbbing on some deck; | ||
| Or a drunken stevedore's howl and thud below | ||
| Comes echoing alley-upward through dim snow. | ||
| And if they take your sleep away sometimes | ||
| They give it back again. Soft sleeves of sound | ||
| Attend the darkling harbor, the pillowed bay; | ||
| Somewhere out there in blankness steam | ||
| Spills into steam, and wanders, washed away | ||
| — Flurried by keen fifings, eddied | ||
| Among distant chiming buoys — adrift. The sky, | ||
| Cool feathery fold, suspends, distills | ||
| This wavering slumber. . . . Slowly — | ||
| Immemorially the window, half-covered chair | ||
| Asks nothing but this sheath of pallid air. | ||
| And you beside me, blessèd now while sirens | recalls you to | |
| Sing to us, stealthily weave us into day — | your love, | |
| Serenely now, before day claims our eyes | there in a | |
| Your cool arms murmurously about me lay. | waking dream | |
| to merge | ||
| While myriad snowy hands are clustering at the | your seed | |
| panes — | ||
| your hands within my hands are deeds; | ||
| my tongue upon your throat — singing | ||
| arms close; eyes wide, undoubtful | ||
| dark | ||
| drink the dawn — | ||
| a forest shudders in your hair! | ||
| The window goes blonde slowly. Frostily clears. | — with whom? | |
| From Cyclopean towers across Manhattan waters | ||
| — Two — three bright window-eyes aglitter, disk | ||
| The sun, released — aloft with cold gulls hither. | ||
| The fog leans one last moment on the sill. | Who is the | |
| Under the mistletoe of dreams, a star — | woman with | |
| As though to join us at some distant hill — | us in the | |
| Turns in the waking west and goes to sleep. | dawn? . . . | |
| whose is the | ||
| flesh our feet | ||
| have moved | ||
| upon? |
It took longer to set this poem correctly than I expected, so I’ll have to refrain from diving into the next poem, “Van Winkle” which does begin to answer indirectly the questions raised in the glosses of “Harbor Dawn”. I have become overwhelmed even more by the poem by transferring it here. The echoes of the proem should be apparent to any reader, for it begins with a gull soaring over the Brooklyn Bridge. And remember that the entire poem is prefaced by an epigram from the Book of Job, where Satan tells God that he came to stand before him by “walking up and down the earth.” The question raised is not just the result of a one-night stand with a woman whose name he can’t remember the next day, but a question of whose flesh the poet has trod upon to get here. What might not be so apparent is the gesture at Mathew Arnold’s Dover Beach.
Rather than the sound of stones clattering against the beach, Crane hears the sounds of New York harbor. Arnold’s poem echoes the pessimism of Eliot’s Wasteland, and if anything, it seems to me that Crane is attempting to answer the despair and defeat of both poems. Unlike Arnold’s retreat to reflection and human love, the object of Crane’s affection exists in a twilight realm between waking and sleep. This scene appears to be one of shimmering illusion to me, rather than the concrete darkness of Arnold’s closing lines:
Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
I spent the day reading Longfellow, and both Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. They are important to the next poem in this section, which alas, will have to wait another day.
I was tracking down some of the allusions in the “Powhatan’s Daughter” section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge when I found another rock rip-off. When I was growing up, it would have been a great help if rock and roll albums came with bibliographies. I discovered on my own that Jim Morrison ripped off whole songs from William Blake, but now I find another one of the ghosts from my past is also appropriated poetry.
It seems normal that American bands would rip-off English poets, but English bands ripping off American poets? Buried in Hawkwind’s spaced out album Warrior on the Edge of Time is a stanza of Longfellow’s A Psalm of Life. Now that’s just plain weird.
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime
And, departing leave behind us
Footprints in the sands of time
Finishing up Practical Reason by Bourdieu this morning and perusing the excellent comments of people who have stumbled onto my meanderings, I feel like I need to clarify something regarding my usage of “epic” and “lyric.” These terms are appropriated from their poetic syntax, and pressed into the service of larger questions I’ve been thinking of.
As I noted yesterday, as I try to make sense of modernism (not my main focus of study), I have this sense that there is a fracture between the “epic” mode of totalizing narrative and the “lyric” mode of particularizing narrative. Labeling these “fields” of interference seems useful to me. It’s not meant as an oppositional binary, merely as a locus of artistic intentionality.
The aim of epic is to contain (traditionally in poetic form) the codex of a culture. The aim of lyric is to contain the specificity of a moment, a relation of distinctiveness, of individuality. Few artists have asserted as boldly as Milton did the aim to “justify” the ways of god to men. That is what I mean by epic, in the deepest sense. Lyric, on the other hand, seems to lean toward justifying the ways of men to god. Several people have suggested Moby Dick as the epic vision of America. I’m not so sure. It lacks the pervasiveness of a Paradise Lost; I would almost nominate The Scarlet Letter in its place, if I were really searching for an American epic. The guilt, shame, and price of conformity seem as much a part of the American codex as the futile quest. But I digress.
I’m not really searching for an American epic, just wondering at the tension between the fields of lyric expression and epic expression, between universality and particularity, and of the parameters that define both. Moby Dick is on my list. I started to read it last December, but I got derailed by school. A Thousand Plateaus has received a cursory glance, but I wandered away when I finished reading about rhizomes. I’m not a rhizomatic kind of person. I’m a tree kind of person. I’m not promiscuous.
I’m trying to stay on track. Next up on my list was The Waves by Virginia Wolfe, though I may do Moby Dick instead. And though it may seem as if I’ve forgotten to keep writing about The Bridge, I haven’t. It’s just a matter of swimming in an ever-deepening context. Also on deck is Pnin by Nabokov, Gulliver’s Travels, Gilgamesh, and The Road to Wiggan Pier by Orwell, not to mention another biography of Walker Evans now on its way. Sometimes I feel like Burgess Meredith in that Twilight Zone episode. Unlike Henry Bemis, I don’t need glasses, just time.
Of course littered through this there will be a few critical texts I want to pick up along the way. So, how were you going to spend your summer? I realize that most people don’t get so deeply involved in things as I do. But these things all feed into questions I have, and since I have no life, I might as well read about them. It can easily be assumed that I have too much spare time. This will change, since I’ve signed up to start writing a book in the fall, as well as teaching and other theoretical diversions. I should be working on some articles I need to write, but instead, left to my own devices, like Henry Bemis I’ll chose to read.
At the turn of the twentieth century, the city was the place to be. Most currents in the art of the time owe a big debt not just to machine culture, but to the imposing presence of the modern city. With the benefit of the time that separates us, somehow the responses seem almost preprogrammed.
The city almost seems to dictate its own aesthetic. The reactions which Walker Evans had to draw from with were largely European, and it almost might be painted as a battle between the French and the Germans. The breeding ground of the German Expressionists was the sense of disillusionment of the city, with its anxiety and psychic distress. The disenchantment can be read in the poetry of the time, and it can also be seen in the visual evidence of early modernism.
One reaction to discontent is a pure aesthetic formalism, as exemplified by the Bauhaus. But there remains the echo of a transcendent, idealistic, form. Evans' formative years are found in this milieu, using the city as a metaphoric and symbolic object. There is a comfort in such reductionism. But peeking out from the corners there is a sort of human cry of distress, as all things become reduced in the scale of the city.
At the same time there is an exuberance that almost becomes lost, in an objective search for aesthetic perfection. It seems almost inevitable that all the Americans that became caught up in these German trends would later recant them, including Evans' contemporaries Charles Sheeler and Paul Strand. And the romanticism of the French was similarly dismissed, to forge an American vision.
In some ways, these early modern works are the visual equivalents to Marx's theory of the alienation of the worker. From the aerial perspective, most things are diminished, reduced, and darkened.
Reflecting on Paul Strands relationship with Modernism, Milton W. Brown proposed that there were three roads taken. The first was that of "urban realism" where the forms of the city were dealt with in an intuitive, non-academic fashion. This was the tradition of Louis Hine, which was also deeply tied to photography as a means of social change.
The second road leads to abstraction, and to an almost expressivist reaction to the forces which seemed to loom large over the face of humanity in these periods of change. The third road, was into portraiture, an attempt at universalizing the experience of change.
Though these photographs flirt with these perspectives, ultimately I think that Evans reinvented realism beyond the boundaries of mythic expressivism, with a strong sense of form without the slavery to it.
There was a quest for the new that made these efforts a bubble, a sort of experimentalism that he would later reject. But viewed in the correct context, you can see him learning his trade. Against the aesthetic of texture, formulated by West Coast practioners like Weston and Adams, as well as Strand later in his career, the attention to form was never far from Evans' consciousness. He just found entirely new ways to implement it, outside the strictures of formalism.
I think that photographs of this type, formal exercises, are a phase that all photographers must pass through. It's largely the place and time that give them value, rather than the high-flown aesthetic presumptions. They are studies in how to deal with the city, not the pronouncements of a new art. That part comes later.
This seems counterintuitive, but it has fairly compelling evidence. Why would some people be amused at being the number one search result for motherfucker, where others might find it a rather regrettable consequence of excessive resort to profanity? Why am I so amused at being the number one search result in the rather narrow field of antimony fuzzle? I suppose it’s a matter of asserting distinctiveness.
Reading Practical Reason by Pierre Bourdieu, I was struck by the assertion that opinion is not a cognitive activity, but a bodily one. Opinion is the internalization of indoctrination by the state?
The state does not necessarily have to give orders to exercise physical coercion in order to produce an ordered social world, as long as it is capable of producing embodied cognitive structures that accord with objective structures and thus ensuring the belief of which Hume spoke — namely doxic submission to the established order.
While I resist social constructivism, I cannot deny the attractiveness of its argument. It plays directly into the formulation of national enabling myths, such as the American myth of rebellion and nonconformity. Such things present an interesting merger of historic, and mythic, truths. The project which unfolded at the beginning of the twentieth century is my ongoing fascination here, and its immanence. The divisions, which Bourdieu always links with visions, resolve themselves into the parts which construct a national identity.
The construction of a state is accompanied by the construction of a sort of common historical transcendental, immanent to all its “subjects.” Through framing it imposes upon practices, the state establishes and inculcates common forms and categories of perception and appreciation, social frameworks of perceptions, of understanding or of memory, in short state forms of classification. It thereby creates the conditions for a kind of habitus which is itself the foundation of a consensus over this set of shared evidences constitutive of (national) common sense.
It has become a deep cognitive structure. One of the interesting obsessions of the Romantic period in England is the questioning of what remains to be done, once a national epic is written (in the case of England, that would be Milton's Paradise Lost). The prevalent theory is that the muse was on an endless westward flight, and a hundred years on there were several attempts at a national epic in America, all pronounced failures. The easy answer, and the answer embraced by most, is that the epic as a form was dead. The more difficult possibility which enters my mind now, is that our national character merely prohibits it.
Bourdieu’s point really is that if we can identify these structures, we can circumvent them. Why do we constantly agree to disagree? It seems like a strange foundation for a society, but it seems to be there. Reflecting on Robinson Crusoe you can see the elements of those “cognitive structures” (as contrasted with actual cognition) in Crusoe’s movement from a hapless tormented wretch, to a spiritual man, to a king, to a general, and eventually, at the time of his rescue his assumption of the rights and responsibilities as a governor. Why would a man alone give himself titles? Perhaps because to crown oneself as the top of any particular category is to assert distinctiveness from within those inherited structures, all the while conforming to them.
It was just a thought.
Maybe that’s why I’m so drawn to Defoe. Compared with Swift or Pope, he’s surely bush-league, but all the same I find him compelling. I’ve taken the last couple of days to read The Life and Strange Suprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe.
It’s so great to read books with big reputations, and come away thinking that the reputation is deserved. Sometimes it astounds me how many things I’ve read in the last five years, but what always astounds me more is how many more books I have to go. That’s one thing that has bugged me about the way literature is taught; you get a whirlwind of excerpts, mostly filtered through secondhand opinions, after which supposedly you are “well read.” It was utterly refreshing to read a classic book without having to think about a niche to carve out to write a paper in. Of course the critical faculties are never completely “off” but all the same, I read this book largely for pleasure. And it was a pleasure.
But there were echoes of other things I’d been thinking about, particularly in some of the commentary from other writers present in the Modern Library edition. James Joyce said:
Defoe was the first English author to write without imitating or adapting foreign works, to create without literary models and to infuse into the creatures of his pen a truly national spirit, to devise for himself an artistic form which is perhaps without precedent.
The novel was born from biography, and autobiography, or to a large extent, just plain gossip. I really like Virginia Wolfe’s introductory essay to Crusoe. It her typical well crafted sentences, she expresses the explosion of eighteenth century prose:
A middle class had come into existence, able to read and anxious to read not only about princes and princesses, but about themselves and the details of their humdrum lives. Stretched upon a thousand pens, prose had accommodated itself to the demand; it had fitted itself to express the facts of life rather than the poetry.
For the book itself remains. However we may wind and wriggle, loiter and dally in our approach to books, a lonely battle waits in the end. There is a piece of business to be transacted between writer and reader before any further dealings are possible, and to be reminded in the middle of this private interview that Defoe sold stockings, had brown hair, and was stood in the pillory is a distraction and a worry. Our first task is to master his perspective.
That is, it’s instructive to me. Defoe beleaguers the reader with endless lists, much like James Agee, and I suspect that these catalogues and inventories are essential to plotting any escape. He skips the florid prose, and cuts right to the utility of every choice. And that is where he’s useful to me, as I sit in my castle, on this green land-locked island.
FragmentsI stumbled on an odd little book a while back, Introducing Romanticism.
While I've been courting Romanticism for quite some time, I'm always happy to get a formal introduction. This one's a bit different. It uses comics to convey the key concepts. I like the idea; if I were teaching a course in Romanticism, I'd consider using this book.
Though I'm resistant to clubs that would have me as a member, I must admit a certain blush of excitement of being named as a faculty member at U Blog. I like this part of the mission statement:
The heart of U Blog lies in receiving patiently and giving freely.
Whatever it takes to move the project forward, I say. Delacour suggested that I might be moved to the Szarkowski photographic chair, and I don't find anything wrong with that either.
However, Rhetoric, being the no-discipline discipline, suits me fine. Rhetoric butts into everything.
Alex is on a roll, both with his posts on filtering and his reaction to Weinberger's book. I think it an opportune time to point out that rhetoric has only shifted to an emphasis on the written word in the late nineteenth century; prior to that, it was both written and spoken discourse. But when Speech Communications started serving up the milk and cookies, Rhetoric ran to the literature departments. It's only started to break free again recently.
Ultimately though, they're all fragments in the same puzzle.
----- --------TITLE: Walker Evans, Pt. 4 DATE: 05/14/2002 6:43:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Bernice Abbott was a lesbian.
I didn't know that until a few days ago. Seems like I've got lots of people to rethink, perhaps a bit, as I enter that course in queer theory in the fall. We shall see. I don't like dividing people by their sexual preference.
As with Hart Crane, I don't think her sexuality really factors much into her art. Her project of documenting New York in the 30s, Changing New York, owes much more to her deep friendship with Eugene Atget than it does to her apprenticeship under Man Ray. And there is little doubt that she is the one who introduced Walker Evans to this anomalous figure in the history of photography.
Atget is from a different age, an age where photographers coated their own plates, and were part magician and part showman. He began life as an actor, but when he entered the profession of photography he presented it as an entirely practical form. He hung a sign on his studio which said, “Documents for Artists.” His project was to document a changing Paris, around the turn of the century, before those last vestiges of the nineteenth century faded away. But his photographs are nothing if not artistic. Atget's art comes not from the evocation of a singular vision, but a multiple one. I think that Walker Evans said it best.
He knew where to stand.
John Szarkowski notes the affinity between Atget and Walker Evans well, in his introduction to the MOMA monograph on Atget:
Atget's greatest student—and the photographer who came closest to becoming his artistic successor— was surely Walker Evans.
It seems now that Evans worked his way through Atget's whole iconographical catalogue, save only the parks. Evans did the bedrooms and kitchens, the boutiques, the signs, the wheeled vehicles, the street trades, and the ruins of high ambition. He did not have Versailles, of course, only ruined antebellum plantations, failed banks in the classical idiom, and fragments of stamped tin ornament.
To rework Atget in America required that Evans recognize that he was dealing with a different order of tradition and quality, and this recognition inevitably inflected his work with irony— a condition that seems foreign to Atget's view of the world.
The quality that seems to ring from Atget's work is an impression of stillness, a stillness that was a world apart from the machine frenzy of America. Perhaps we make too much of the irony, and miss the monumental nature common to both their work. It is an epic vision, far more than it is a lyric vision.
Though Evans often claimed in later years that he thought photographs should reach for a lyrical quality, he was uneasy with anything that might be considered romantic. It seems that Szarkowski's words regarding this photograph by Atget might also be applied to Evans.
Atget apparently worked with perfect calm and equanimity on the roughest waterfronts, and in the neighborhoods of the slaughterhouses and tanneries of Paris, but he often seems to be nervous in the zone; in any case his framing and focus seem uncertain, especially when he confronts the people who lived there, who stare at him with an incomprehension that seems to echo his own.
This plate is perhaps atypical of the series; it seems to suggest a degree of empathy between the subject and the photographer that probably distorts the position of both.
This sort of discomfort is easily seen in Evan's early photographs on the New York streets; it seems that people were more like props rather than objects of sympathy. As Szarkowski suggests, I think that the “sympathetic” nature of his later work in the deep south is a distortion, though perhaps a welcome one.
However, what Evans did capture was that same sense of stillness, and history, in his photographs of New York people and shop fronts. Like the people in Atget's photographs, when people appear they seem to be more like props, stylistic devices used to complete the composition rather than objects of vital importance within the photograph.
There is a distance, an aloofness, in Atget which was no doubt formative. While empathy may be involved in Evans' later work, it seems purely secondary to the project of constructing iconic images, images that convey a sense of "great time" in the smaller contexts of day-to-day life. While some of the street photographs convey easily the sense of rushing modernity, this aspect is but a splinter on a route toward a sort of aesthetic purity. It is this sense of purity that Evans seems to have adopted from Eliot, and then fed it through the vision of an itinerant Paris street photographer named Eugene Atget. The resulting synthesis is pure Walker Evans; a visual poet of a uniquely modern sort.
Though Evans was the architect of many fine portraits, they might have easily been road signs. In their weathered faces, a skilled viewer can trace the steps of time. Atget produced an incredible catalogue of artifacts, and perhaps only Walker Evans ever exceeded him in range, because of his deeply architonic portraits. To provide evidence, documents in a shifting world, was the project of both men. Capturing the personalities of people, or even empathizing with them wasn't the point. It was the contour, the shape, and the position against the backdrop of deep time that mattered, not the personal response to a moment, either inside or outside the frame.
I wanted to acknowledge some fine posts, just in case someone hadn't caught them. Luke collected quite a variety of Coney Island links, to complement my posting of Evan's photographs there. Shauny has written about triangles (one of my past and current obsessions) in her own distinctive way. Loren has gone off on a rather uncharacteristic rant, using such technical jargon as "it pissed me off." I was reminded of a paper that I had to read from a student that "pissed me off."
The first draft was an exploration of means used to put people to death for capital crimes. After each section, the conclusion was drawn that "this is a good method" or "isn't a good method" based on the amount of suffering. The more suffering involved, the more the student thought it was a "proper" execution method. It really turned my stomach. Worse still, the student hadn't even come right out and said that; she just assumed that everyone would agree with her that criminals should suffer for their crimes. Suffering is good? She also suggested the repeal of the amendment prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment. I told her that she had to have some sort of "warrant" to back up her assertions, even if it was a religious one. She was Assyrian, so she did a re-write cutting back on the emphasis on suffering and cited the code of Hamurabi as her reason for believing that capital punishment is just. It made me think of the quote "an eye for an eye and soon the world will be blind." But it was near the deadline, and the end of the semester so I just didn't have the energy to try to reason with her about it. She withdrew most of the outlandish stuff, and grounded part of her argument. I settled for at least some justification of her view, even if in my opinion it was ludicrous. Her answer was: "It's my heritage." Some traditions do need to be changed, no matter how old they are!
Thankfully, the next day I heard a paper by a young English major about to enter law school regarding the portrayal of capital punishment in African-American literature. It's her crusade to become a lawyer and do what she can to help abolish the death penalty, or at least stop innocent people from being put to death. I felt better. She was a very smart girl, not just because I agree with her, but because she had the sense to dig for things to help prove her case that capital punishment is racist, classist, and generally a screwed-up mess in the practical reality of the world. She wasn't just presenting an uninformed opinion based on quasi-religious thought. I didn't say that English majors were smarter, one of my professors did, but when it comes to digging deep into things they generally are a bit ahead.
Actually, my initial thought is to say that artists are smarter. That's because they know (if they really deserve the title) that what they do has the power to change the world. That means poets, writers, and landscape gardeners too. Pundits, well, they just punt-it into someone else's court. Oh, and so as to not close on a sour note, if you missed If's pointer for the Artists of Brücke (Bridge) you should visit it. There are some interesting topics to be discussed regarding expressionism and photography just around the bend.
It was such a beautiful day that I took it down to the bridge(s).
I haven't really ever taken snapshots before, so I thought it might be about time I started. It's impossible for me to really take digital cameras seriously.
But since I do my own labwork, and don't really have the time anymore, I thought it might be nice to at least collect some snapshots of landmarks.
But after one short little drive, I can tell that it will be really hard not to want to start making real photographs again. This place is just too bizarre.
----- EXTENDED BODY:
This is too much fun. I knew there was a reason why I put the camera down; it's too tempting to just take pictures all the time. I can't start getting lazy now. Well, maybe just a little bit. It is summertime after all.
Hart Crane's The Bridge has eight parts following the introductory proem "To Brooklyn Bridge." Most of these component parts are broken up into groups of smaller poems, and each one is dense. That's why I keep lingering.
Some scholarship (which I haven't read, thankfully) paints a picture of Hart Crane as a self-loathing homosexual, who was a failure in poetry and in life. I resist strictly biographical readings of most poets, and personally I see little evidence that the facts of his life (other than some fairly basic stuff) have much bearing on reading the poems. The poems aim high, much higher than the scope of a tragic life.
I listened to a paper a couple of days ago on Gerard Manley Hopkins which assaulted the same "easy answers" to Hopkins' poetry. The presenter noted that Hopkins, as evidenced in his letters, was thrilled by Dr. Jekyl and Mr. Hyde and claimed that he could present a persona even more terrifying in his poetry. Scholars, on the other hand, claim that his later poetry is best read through the lens of deep, dark, depression which plagued him in his last years. His letters really don't support this reading; according to the woman who wrote the paper, he actually seems quite normal other than a few dark moments transmitted in his letters, latched on to as incontrovertible evidence for reading the poems as autobiographical.
The Bridge has nothing to do with self-loathing, as far as I can tell. It seems to me to speak to the difficulty of maintaining a romantic spirit in a modern age.
I’ve posted the full text of the proem before. It begins with a seagull’s eye view of the bridge, and then descends, mutable “As apparitional as sails that cross / Some page of figures to be filed away.” The proem is a consideration of history “how many dawns . . .” considered in entirely modern terms: “I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights / with multitudes bent toward some flashing scene.” The bridge becomes, near the end, both the source of music and an altar, a threshold which contains “prophets pledge / Prayer of pariah, and the lovers cry / Against the traffic lights.”
The invocation closes with “And of the curveship lend a myth to God.” The curves in the introductory proem are twofold, the curves of a gull’s wing, and the curves of the bridge. Hard cold mechanistic world, and organic sweeping flight of life. But the portrait of the bridge is that of an object of beauty, not unlike Wordsworth’s “Westminster Bridge.”
Much is made of the opening epigram from the Book of Job, which is voiced by Satan, inviting speculation that Crane saw himself as an evil figure. But it is also an image of movement, just as the bird soars through the opening proem; it seems to me to be a gesture of balance through movement. The first words you read are from the mouth of Satan, the last in the proem are a dedication to God. There is a sense of symmetry here, fearful though it may be. The epigrams seem to have a solid place in these poems, not just as an opening sentiment, but as a contextualizing apparatus which sets up the work to be done in each section. I suppose their might be something to thinking that the overarching reason behind the epigram (rather than being an identification with Satan) would be that the book is a story of faith being tested, as is the Book of Job.
I’ve discussed the epigram for the first section of the poem, Ave Maria before. But I became so lost in that little discovery of the Columbus connection that I neglected to think about what was really going on, as the poem shifts near the end. The first part is a mystic dream of Columbus, with the sea as the prime player as a world unto itself. Columbus sets words adrift in a cask, and not long afterward, the church bells ring: “Some Angelus environs the cordage tree; / Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.”
Duh! He’s waking up! The first part of the poem is told from Columbus’ point of view, but there is a shift at the end. Sometimes I can be so thick. I didn’t think about it before; the words that follow are in a strange indeterminate voice, with indeterminate pronouns:
O Thou who sleepest on Thyself, apart
Like ocean athwart lanes of death and birth,
And all the eddying breath between dost search
Cruelly with love thy parable of man,—
Inquisitor! incognizable Word
Of Eden and the enchained Sepulchre,
Into thy steep savannahs, burning blue,
Utter to loneliness the sail is true.
I spent a lot of time theorizing about it, enumerating possibilities and discarding them. The easy answer is the poet; but that seems rather self important and a bit outside the tone of the rest of the poem. Too simple. It certainly isn't Columbus, who would naturally follow if it weren't for the clearly demarcated stanza breaks. Maybe it’s the bridge. But then, that doesn’t make sense because bridges don’t think, or search. I don’t believe that it could be God, because why would God contemplate himself? Another option is that the “thou” and “thy” are separate references, and thus it would be the poet contemplating God. I think that perhaps that’s what it is. For a while, I had myself convinced that it wasn't the poet per se, but a sort of embodiment of man's will. That's still a possibility, but I suspect I was just overcomplicating it. My puzzling might seem odd to those who find the answer obvious, but you must remember I’m used to the romantic poets where the answers aren’t usually the obvious ones.
The poet considers God, separate and apart, and searches “all the eddying breath between . . . Cruelly with love”— as man the inquisitor. The duality of the “parable of man” seems to be something that recurs in echoes of the fruits of Columbus. Man yields mostly by “inference and discard,” and faith though distant, seems close to the poet as he searches for that “incognizable word” and that “one shore beyond desire.”
Journeys begin with the first step, and the hallucinatory intensity of this first section of the poem ends in praise of God, “O Thou Hand of Fire.” And in continuing with the mythic theme invoked in the proem, “Powahatan’s Daughter,” the second section of The Bridge is composed of five poems which each address aspects of the American myth. The epigram sets a festive, playful tone:
“— Pocahuntus, a well featured but wanton yong girle . . . of the age of eleven or twelve years, get the boyes forth with her into the market place, and make them wheele, falling on their hands, turning their heels upwards, whom she would followe, and wheele to herself, naked as she was, all the fort over.”
Now, I feel I understand it better. I’ll enter the “Harbor Dawn” when I have more time. But for now, I’ll just leave with the thought that if the “incognizable word” was a fools project (as many think it is), Crane stands in good company with poets like Goethe and Byron. Though it’s cliché to some, I really do admire the quest:
Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,— could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Hear, know, feel, and yet breathe— into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it like a sword.Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III 97
It seems to me that Hart Crane, rather than expressing self-loathing, was expressing his continuance of that quest for one word.
I know I’m difficult to follow sometimes. So many things converge in my head at the same time, and I have an affinity for a period in prose that most people have problems with. When you read so much eighteenth and nineteenth century stuff, it seems natural to write in long and flowing sentences joined by the most tenuous and subtle of twists; this is to me an elegant thing, not a gesture at impenetrability. Another nagging problem, no doubt stemming from my love of poetry, is my frequent use of rather ambiguous pronouns. I just picked up a paper yesterday, containing notice of that flaw. Duly noted. I suspect it’s because the essay in question was a critical survey which I just didn’t want to write, and didn’t proofread adequately.
There has been a subtle change in my thinking in the last few months, as I have entered the reality of teaching. This manifests itself in my imposition of what I consider to be large philosophical issues in the practical realities of conveying things to other people, and seeing the struggle of writers in literature who have attempted the same thing. Writing doesn’t just elevate, it also instructs. That is, if you’re motivated and diligent enough to really lose yourself to it. How do you convince people that writing is a valuable thing, not just an exercise in academic masturbation?
In “Diving in: An Introduction to Basic Writing” Mina Shaughnessy offers the hypothesis that there are four stages that teachers go through when they enter the craft of teaching writing:
The shift into Converting the Natives comes when you start to see that students don’t accept, as you have come to accept, the utility of what you know. The task then becomes to act as emissary between the camps of academia and the general populace, sending messages back and forth to try to convert your students to your faith. Shaughnessy places this in more negative terms, saying that it comes when you think that there are a few people in class, that though substandard, might be brought up to the level of worthy pupils. That is where most teachers stall, and stop, according to Shaughnessy.
The third stage comes after a teacher begins to notice and pay attention to the pattern in the errors of students, and tries to develop strategies to address the reasons why these errors are occurring. Sounding the Depths is the process of trying to not just act as a mediator, but to begin to effect change, not just in terms of correcting the perception of the tower of learning, but also by sounding out just what is impeding their process of climbing its heights. A teacher needs to be not only well skilled in what the university seeks to teach, but in what the students accept as a workable practice in their version of the “real” world, in an attempt to bring these two together.
The final stage, Diving In, comes with the acceptance that somewhere in that classroom is a person who knows, or will know, more than you ever will. It’s letting go of that ego, instilled by years of schooling, that you are somehow better than the other people on the other side of the room. That’s hard for many teachers, but for idiots like me, that part actually comes pretty easy. I was incredibly flattered when one of my old teachers from the English department, after I summarized this article to him, said “I’m not sure I buy that; we don’t often get students like you.”
But they do. I was reminded of that, as I listened to the final projects of some of the students yesterday. That person is always out there, somewhere in the classroom, that is going to make a real difference in the world. That’s why I take that third stage, the stage of merging the real world with the world of academia, so damn seriously.
What does this have to do with what I’ve been writing the past few weeks? Eliot, in Tradition and the Individual Talent surely felt himself in the position of Guarding the Tower, whereas Hart Crane in The Bridge is closer to Converting the Natives. To use the Bakhtinian terms, Crane seeks to join “great time” with the “small time” of regular existence. That’s why, though tangential to my exploration of Walker Evans, this part of my project has really come together. In a real sense, this bridge between “great time” and “small time” was also Evan’s project, though he addressed it in a much different way. It is, in my mind, one of the strongest functions of art: to instruct. And I’m learning a lot from my exploration. The final two stages in Shaughnessy's scheme can only be implemented in the classroom, and since I'm not really trying to educate the blogging public, just myself, they can't really be applied here. But for those who are struggling to follow this, I thought I might try to offer up a map.
The first part of Crane’s poem, “Ave Maria” is really starting to come together for me. Though I tentatively posted both the text of the poem and some thoughts, I’ve come a long way in my understanding since then. So though it might seem a bit inconsistent to pause in exploring Walker Evans, it’s really not. “Two paths diverged” and all that. But the project was still the same.
Since as usual, in my meandering fashion with twisted syntax, I may have obscured the truth, I felt like I owed some explanation. Entries scroll off as my slow mind turns, so I wanted to try to bring things together a bit, for those who can’t see inside my head (which means everyone). I hope this helps, and doesn’t just add to the confusion.
It would have been two, but I got into an engaging discussion about Milton, Wordsworth, and Keats on the break. The band I went to see was The Schwag, a band that a few people I know had recommended as being great. I suppose they are, if you’re into the Grateful Dead. I’m not. I’ve been trying to “get” this whole thing for nearly twenty years. I had a roommate way back when who was a deadhead. My Blake prof was a deadhead. I’m not a deadhead. I suppose, if anything, I’m a livehead. So, I had to give it another try, same songs, live, another time around. I think I’ve developed a theory, though.
The Grateful Dead must be postmodern, because there is absolutely no center to their music; if one develops, it rapidly shifts to another place and the listener is forced to follow. Or do they? I’m the veteran of at least 10,000 or more live music events. In the ones I remember best, the crowd responds to the music. Often, you can trace the ripples that rip through the crowd with each chord, each sound, each feeling. It’s magic. Sometimes, the music hovers in mid-air, and a crowd just wanders, waiting for it to land, hopeful that the music will last. There is a noticeable change when the music stops. Sometimes, jaws drop, and people stand transfixed at a particularly magical moment. Tonight I noticed that it didn’t seem to matter how good or bad the band was playing (there were moments of both). People just were locked into their own little universe, some of them following the music, some of them just wagging their heads so that other people would think they were “getting it.” I can’t lie. I don’t get it.
Maybe it requires a higher tolerance for boredom. Maybe it requires better drugs. I had a good buzz going on, so I thought it might help. It didn’t. The music killed my buzz right away, actually. It just became a social project. Lots of tie-die. Lots of good looking girls, all smiling friendly. I can see why people might want to lie and say that the music was great, just to hang out with the girls. But really, I just can’t hack it. I noticed that there was no center to the experience, just lots of circles of people too young to really have much of a clue about who the Grateful Dead were, gyrating in imitations of things they’ve probably seen. A few old folks wandering around, with obviously better drugs than I had. But it just seemed to be a social thing that had very little to do with what was being played on stage.
I remember seeing Rat Dog a year or so ago, thinking that there weren’t enough drugs on the planet to make the music seem interesting to me. But the crowd, well, that’s another story. That’s why I went to this thing tonight. Fortunately, there was a distraction: thinking about what being an English major means.
I remember well a teacher telling me that English majors were smarter than other people. I resisted the idea at first, but after a long time on this road I think he’s right. If you really begin to understand what some of these folks in literature were on about, it can literally change your mind in a way that no other subject does. It pulls everything together, and explodes it at the same time.
The guys I was talking to were about to enter a seminar on Lyrical Ballads and Songs of Innocence and Experience. I remember what those books meant to me when I first really got them. It was a rush; I feel so envious that they are about to cross into the same territory. I realize that's why I stick with this literature nonsense. No matter how many things I've read, I find something new to explode my head with every other day. It feels good when you "get it." What I can’t get is why so many people who seem to have otherwise good taste see in the music of the Grateful Dead. It just wanders around, occasionally lies down, and seldom seems like more than an extended out of tune nap. I jut don’t get it at all. But I keep trying. I mean, these people aren’t stupid. Maybe I am.
[Quick aside— I love St. Augustine. Particularly, On Christian Doctrine. My previous post wasn’t meant as a slam, but a compliment to his perception of rhetoric. He argues that Christians should use whatever means necessary to make the truth convincing, and I agree. Sorry if it didn’t seem that way, AKMA.]
I went to an English department party. I skipped the Rhetoric department party, because the list of “nos” was longer than the bulk of the invitation: “no cats, no smoking, bring your own... etc.” It just didn’t sound like fun. The English department party was fun. But I suspect that I fatigue people, because I’m always thinking. Especially when I’m drinking.
I talked to the renaissance specialist about Marlowe texts, and asked for pointers regarding 17th century spiritual autobiographies. I talked to the romanticist about Blake, and his aversion to Hart Crane. I talked to the 18th century person about Defoe, and the paper I’m working on there. I just can’t stop working. I listened to a paper about Joyce’s Dubliners and thought about how it connected with healing rhetoric, and fractured selves. And I thanked Ralph Burns, (who loves Hart Crane) for the poem he wrote that helped me make sense of a bad situation a while ago.
In other words, I was myself. Blathering nonsense about teaching, and how it feels to step to the other side of the room. About the strange sense of guilt, of working out your ideas with an audience, and being paid to do it. And thinking, always thinking. The beer just makes it go faster and stronger. That’s why I don’t drink too much these days, it makes me think too much. About why people die, and why people walk away before you can develop your thought into something. Something you’re thinking about, that just won’t let go, even after they walk away. But at least these people know what I’m talking about, even if they don’t really care.
I drove home and felt connected with the car, making all the right choices and moving smoothly across the hillside. I thought about my compulsion to walk away from the crowd, and just gaze at the river sometimes. It’s a beautiful thing, all that mud flowing swiftly past. And the hillsides were so green, so beautiful. I can see why Hart Crane leapt into the sea. The end. No worries, anymore. But that wont’ be my end, I’m just to stubborn to give up. I swooped past the gallery that was the first to show Warren Criswell. I thought about his daughter, who never seems to leave me, in my head, as I rewrite history.
That’s what Brady’s paper on Joyce was all about. Joyce rewriting conceptions of himself in Dubliners. We all do that. We construct these mythic selves, which we either keep or discard as time goes by. Life sometimes seems like one long myth. I blurted out my site address, and offered to help him out if he needed it with photography, as he's recently taken it up and has a few pieces in a show at the University gallery. Nothing too striking just yet, but he has some potential. Coming from literature, I think he has an advantage. Especially since he's cracked the nut that the construction of self is largely mythic. Joyce's narrators were constantly at odds with their previous selves, interrogating them and revising their own past. I think we all do that.
But this is just a drunken ramble, a bit of an effort to sober up before I go out again. Drinking is all too easy. Been there, done that. No amount of drinking will kill her, and seemingly, no amount of drinking will kill me either. That’s why I mostly quit drinking. It doesn’t work; as a suicide method it’s sloppy and takes too long. When I drink it’s just fuel, and I already have too much. I don’t need much more. Nobody understands much of what I say as it is; it gets worse if I slur my words. So, for penance I think I’ll go see a Grateful Dead cover band, to remind me to slow down and not be so serious. I really don’t like them, but friends may be there. If you can call people who are puzzled by me friends. At least because I keep them guessing, and they aren’t afraid to stand next to me on the dark.
But the sun always comes up, and they always fade away. And I go back to what I was doing before: thinking too much. Drinking? Oh yeah, I remember. The flames go higher, but they are so damn ineffectual they cannot burn anything.
Someone commented on the Neil Young list regarding his carrying along a wooden Indian as a stage prop for his performance on the Leno show last night on the rustlist:
What's up with Neil hauling around that noble wooden Indian to all of his gigs??? It must be some sort of security blanket or something...it couldn't be that his Neilness is trying to establish a trademark or
image because...after all... the folks most likely to take notice of such minutia are us Rusties/Zumans/NYAS members...and we now know from that Shakey tome that Neil could give a flying f*ck about what we think...
Inside jokes are always a big part of any artists work, I think. Sometimes they're embarassing, as Walker Evans so rightly pointed out.
Performing, particularly on the scale of artists of Young's stature is nothing if not mythic. Identifying and controlling those myths is a project that every artist strives for; I suppose you could say that it is a security blanket. It’s the how of mythmaking that dominates much of my thinking lately, rather than the why.
Are you negative?
In a world that never stops
Turning on you
Turning on me
Turning on youNeil Young, "Are You Passionate?"
I ran across this sentence in On Christian Doctrine that is just so freakin’ amazing I had to type it in:
For since through the art of rhetoric both truth and falsehood are pleaded, who would be so bold as to say that against falsehood, truth as regards its own defenders ought to stand unarmed, so that, forsooth, those who attempt to plead false causes know from the beginning how to make their arguments well disposed, attentive, and docile, while others remain ignorant of it; so that the former utter their lies concisely, clearly, with the appearance of truth, and the latter state the truth in a way that is wearisome to listen to, not clear to understand, and finally, not pleasant to believe; so that one side, by fallacious arguments, attacks truth and propounds falsehood, the other has no skill either in defending the true, or refuting the false; so that the one, moving and impelling the minds of the audience to error by the force of its oratory, now strikes them, with terror, now saddens them, now enlivens them, now ardently arouses them, but the other in the cause of truth is sluggish and cold and falls asleep!
But it also reminds me of the whole warblogging thing. There is nothing on the web that interests me less. I like to concentrate on the things I can change, like myself and my students, rather than pursuing the trail of truth to the point of becoming sluggish and cold, neatly causing everyone to fall asleep, or worse yet, polarizing complex ideas into simple us or them decisions. I read and write to expand, not to contract.
I’ve just spent the day poring over portfolios, and being far too generous. But that’s okay. Some of the reflective essays really got to me; not that flattery had anything to do with my generosity. It was the issues that they brought up regarding my teaching style: “You talked to us on our individual levels” and things like “I’ve always hated writing personal essays, but you showed me that there were other kinds of writing beyond creative writing” and best of all, “these were tools I can use.” Most of the portfolios could have used stronger proofreading, but because I was not such a big “language cop” as other teachers, people seemed more willing to take chances with their final efforts. Almost universally, they showed strong thinking and improving critical skills. That to me is far more important than correct use of the semi-colon.
The biggest shock was the paper on medical marijuana. It was actually proofread carefully this time, and completely reformed and reshaped. Or better still, rethought. That’s what my class (in my mind at least) was all about. Learning how to think more effectively. That’s what writing does best: it teaches you how to think clearly.
As I went to school to pick up some straggling portfolios today, I ran into Dr. Kleine. He seemed to think that the paper I’m working on regarding triadic models really should find a slot for publication somewhere. I was sort of ashamed of what I gave him; I have a ways to go with it, but the basic ideas were there. I think that the focus on social practice in writing ignores the fundamental problem of “mental space” where writing is refined into a social instrument. All the “group work” in the world won’t put a person in touch with themselves, and into what really generates thought. It’s inside, as well as outside, so it’s dangerous to go too far in either direction. So many things these days seem to me to be just pendulum swings: “oh, individuality is everything... no, sociality is everything.” Writing is composed of both things. You can’t ignore one at the expense of the other. Many of my students remarked that I was the first teacher to really work with them individually on their writing. That saddens me no end. People are unique, and deserve to be treated as such.
I’ve been rethinking “Ave Maria,” the first section of Hart Crane’s The Bridge. There is a lot more that I want to try to write about that poem, before I move on with Walker Evans. There’s a paper in there too. I’ve got too many damn papers I want to write. But there is something about just spilling out these thoughts as they come to me. They are not rhizomatic, but treelike in every way. When I get a little further down the road, I’ll have to try to connect these posts in some way so that someone outside my head might stand a chance at figuring them out.
Sometimes, I go way out on a limb before I figure out where the trunk is. It’s gradually coming together as I read and write. That’s what this stuff is really good for. It is indeed, a “machine for thinking.”
I had a thought, but then stavrosthewonderchicken beat me to it. Con-tent? Not me, I’m neither trying to con, or living in a tent. Con-duit might be a better word. Stuff flows through. Sometimes I get conned into doing it. But it is at least processed, excreted if you will, into the heteroglossic cesspool.
I’ll return to craning after a bit. I just had to get that out of my system.
What is a What Not
if what is not negates
what is not what
you thought it was ?
. . .
so clams open not
to the naughty What Not !Hart Crane, from “What Nots?”
Every night she comes
To take me out to dreamland
When I'm with her, I'm the richest
Man in town
She's a rose, she's the pearl
She's the spin on my world
All the stars make their wishes on her eyes
She's my Coney Island Baby
She's my Coney Island Girl
She's a princess, in a red dress
She's the moon in the mist to me
She's my Coney Island Baby
She's my Coney Island GirlTom Waits “Coney Island Baby” from Blood Money
The currents of both the Bauhaus and European romanticism are firmly evidenced by these photographs; it's the romantic aspect that draws me nearly as much as Evans was later repulsed by it. I suspect that the conflicting modes involved can be described by a lot of binaries. It's not unlike the tension between the lyric and the epic. Evans sublimated most of his lyricism, whereas I tend to treasure it. I suspect that he was seduced by epic, and felt he had to leave these “smaller moments” behind.
Hanging onto the brass rail is recommended, but which one?
The early photographs of Walker EvansWalker Evans started taking photographs in a now standard way: making snapshots. Unlike most photographers that preceded him in history, the form was now established and not at all arcane. Roll film cameras were easily available to anyone who had the means.
He would have been around 21 at the time, and it appears that he started right before his first trip to Paris.
I had a vest-pocket camera [in Paris] and I still have about three snapshots I made, and they're quite characteristic. They're documentary scenes.Taped interview, 2/1/73
Some of the photographs were observations of street life, and several critics have latched onto these as early examples of American street photography. In retrospect, I don't see them as all that innovative. They fit more into the experimental category, similar to Alexander Rodechenko's work, with distinct tinges of the early photojournalists like Kertez and Bresson. You can see the cross-currents of the time, evidenced from the beginning represented by these shots and the work he did upon returning to New York.
After photographing in New York from 1928-9, Evans was finally convinced by a neighbor to take his portfolio to show to Alfred Steiglitz, the originator of the seminal photo publication Camera Work, in his declining years. Stieglitz gave patronizingly gratuitous comments regarding Evans
photographs, and I agree with Belinda Rathbone's observation that "Steiglitz probably thought of them as tentative imitations of the European avante-garde or, worse the technically uneven attempts of an amateur.
Steiglitz, as Rathbone comments, probably was important as a defining figure in determining just who Walker Evans wasn't. Evans though Steiglitz was "egotistical and cultish." He provided the perfect example of an establishment to rebel against.
Steiglitz produced very few photographs with the hard modernist edge. Steerage, displayed on the right, is probably the only thing even close to the core of Modernist aesthetics. Steiglitz was really more a product of the Victorian age, and though he was instrumental in bringing Modern painting to America, he was not a great example of modernist thinking.
However, there were several people in his circle that no doubt were an influence on Evans. Paul Strand was a person that he looked up to, and I suspect that Strand's friend Charles Sheeler also influenced the early work by Evans.
I came across the picture of Strand's blind woman and that really bowled me over. But I'd already been in that, and wanted to do that. That's a very powerful picture. I saw it in the New York Public Library files of Camera Work. That's the stuff, that's the thing to do. Now it seems automatic even, but it was quite a powerful picture. It charged me up.Katz/Evans interview, 6/28/29
Most of Evans early work was later rejected, as he took the directness of Strand's early photographs to new extremes
Some of them are romantic in a way that I would repudiate now. Even some of the Brooklyn Bridge things — I wouldn't photograph them that way now. I developed a much straighter technique later on. But in 1928,'29, and '30 I was apt to do something I now consider romantic and reject. I hadn't learned to be more straight about things . . .Katz/Evans interview
But there are some really shining moments from that early period, particularly those that seem to be "under the influence of Strand." This photograph, in particular, has had a deep influence on me, in a way probably not unlike the influence of Strand on Evans.
Sheeler's influence was perhaps a bit more apparent in Evan's architectural photographs, and comparing his factory photographs with Evan's work of the same time shows that Evans' big breakthrough was yet to come. Ultimately, he rejected this too. As Gilles Mora relates:
This generation's desire for change, expressed in their experimental use of photography, was derived from Europe. Evans quickly learned, for example, about German New Objectivity from mixing with German artists such as his friends Hans Skolle and Paul Grotz. He hailed the effective destruction of romantic art in the work of German photographers. But he also suspected that behind the attempt at a plastic interpretation of reality that Laszlo Moholy-Nagy was working on at the Bauhaus lay a method that was rapidly hardening into a fixed formalism, which, he wrote, "has already run out of steam."
I went to the bookstore, because I wanted to see if there was a better monograph of Edward Weston’s work available than the scraps I have here to draw from. Though he’s definitely out of fashion these days, I have a soft spot for the sort of transcendentalist splinter of modern photography. I remember the first time I read Sontag’s trashing of him in On Photography, it blinded me to the good parts of her book. I notice there are some new things out, a collection of work from Weston’s last days in Carmel, and a really cool book which juxtaposes Weston’s photographs with some I hadn’t seen by Margrethe Mather. But there wasn’t a comprehensive monograph to be seen. No Paul Strand either. Their stock must be down, again.
They are sinking in the Modernist ghetto. Evans, on the other hand, seems to have triumphed as a poster-boy for the postmodern rewrite of modernism. Reflecting on things, it seems to me now as a case of, as Lefebvre put it, the “illusion of transparency” vs. “the illusion of realism.” Realism won. But is this manifest? It dawned on me that the word, so associated with modern aesthetics (via the manifesto), might actually provide some useful clues.
The OED notes its entrance into the language as a verb, in one of Chaucer’s translations of Boethius, in 1374: “Thinken ye to manyfesten yowre renoun and don yowre name to ben born forth?”
1. To make evident to the eye or to the understanding; to show plainly, disclose, reveal.
b. Of things: To be evidence of, prove, attest.
2. To expound, unfold, clear up (a matter).
3. a. To display (a quality, condition, feeling, etc.) by one's action or behaviour; to give evidence of possessing, reveal the presence of, evince.
b. Of a thing: To reveal itself as existing or operative.
4. To record or enumerate in a ship's manifest.
It’s important to know the milieu that these voices came out of, and grew in different directions. But looking at most of the photographic work available in the 10s and 20s, it’s hard to see them as so far apart. That all happened later, but not much later.
In the fall of 1928, Hart Crane moved into a building across the street and a few doors down from Walker Evans in New York. It was close to the waterfront, and Crane hoped to finish his poem there.
Though Frank Stella was originally set to illustrate the poem, the new friendship with Walker Evans