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I forgot to post a notice here that I've upgraded to Movable type, but left the previous Greymatter version intact for historical reference.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 made him change his mind, and use three of Evans’ photographs instead. It was the beginning of Walker Evan’s career, and near the peak of Crane’s.
The two men had a lot in common. According to biographer Belinda Rathbone:
Crane was a fascinating companion. His talk was vivid with puns and crazy metaphors, and his laughter could fill a room. He could talk poetry for hours, reciting passages from memory or discussing endlessly how poetry related to the other arts — “how a Bach fugue, a Chinese painting, a Donne Sonnet, all irrationally illuminated each other,” as one friend recalled, and ultimately, how his words could find their spiritual equivalent in pictures.
But they do fit together. The poem was first released in a fine limited edition, printed in France, and later in the United States. The quality of the finished product was to influence Walker Evans aspirations for the rest of his life, as well as setting a certain tone of sympathy, in detachment.
The introductory section to The Bridge is this proem, prefaced by a quote from Job (where Satan described how he came before the Lord)
From going to and fro in the earth,
and from walking up and down on it.
To Brooklyn Bridge
How many dawns, chill from his rippling rest
The seagull's wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of tumult, building high
Over the chained bay waters Liberty--
Then, with inviolate curve, forsake our eyes
As apparitional as sails that cross
Some page of figures to be filed away;
--Till elevators drop us from our day . . .
I think of cinemas, panoramic sleights
With multitudes bent toward some flashing scene
Never disclosed, but hastened to again,
Foretold to other eyes on the same screen;
And Thee, across the harbor, silver-paced
As though the sun took step of thee, yet left
Some motion ever unspent in thy stride,--
Implicitly thy freedom staying thee!
Out of some subway scuttle, cell or loft
A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets,
Tilting there momently, shrill shirt ballooning,
A jest falls from the speechless caravan.
Down Wall, from girder into street noon leaks,
A rip-tooth of the sky's acetylene;
All afternoon the cloud-flown derricks turn . . .
Thy cables breathe the North Atlantic still.
And obscure as that heaven of the Jews,
Thy guerdon . . . Accolade thou dost bestow
Of anonymity time cannot raise:
Vibrant reprieve and pardon thou dost show.
O harp and altar, of the fury fused,
(How could mere toil align thy choiring strings!)
Terrific threshold of the prophet's pledge,
Prayer of pariah, and the lover's cry,--
Again the traffic lights that skim thy swift
Unfractioned idiom, immaculate sigh of stars,
Beading thy path--condense eternity:
And we have seen night lifted in thine arms.
Under thy shadow by the piers I waited;
Only in darkness is thy shadow clear.
The City's fiery parcels all undone,
Already snow submerges an iron year . . .
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies' dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
A rip tooth of the sky's acetylene. Images just don't get much more vivid than that. Hart Crane was near the top of his form. But Walker Evans was still pretty much derivative of the New York School; the best from him is yet to come.
These images were mainly a letter of introduction to the world; Walker Evans grew a lot from here.
The first part of Hart Crane’s The Bridge begins with an inscription from Seneca:
Venient annis, saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet et ingens pateat tellus
Tethysque novos degat orbes
Nec sit terris ultima Thule
The quotation is incorrect, and was corrected in all editions except the first. However, the Collected Works reverts to the original:
“Tethyesque” is used to emend “Tiphysque” or its variant in all other versions because of the following: Below the epigraph in the first edition proofs “look up in Medea?” is inscribed and circled in pencil, but not in HC’s hand. The form “Tiphysque” became “Tethyesque” in the first edition, but HC had not changed or commented on the quotation, which he had taken from an inaccurate source.
The debate is interesting because Tethys was the sister of Oceanus, while Tiphyn was the helmsman of the Argonauts. The latter name seems reasonable, considering the focus of this section is Columbus and his voyage to America. It’s also the name that actually appears in Seneca’s Medea. So, why does this matter? Because if my hunch is correct, HC’s unwitting use of the wrong name points at a text that may have had some influence on this section of the poem.
A reference to a letter from June 20, 1926, to Waldo Frank footnoted in the Norton Anthology of Modern Poets (which thankfully includes Hart Crane) interests me a great deal (now I’ve got to buy a volume of his letters...).
He speaks of having what he had thought were authentic materials. These materials were valid to me to the extent that I presumed them to be (articulate or not) at least organic and active factors in the experience and perceptions of our common race, time, and belief.
“Venient annis, saecula seris,
Quibus Oceanus vincula rerum
Laxet, et ingens pateat tellus,
Tethysque novos detegat orbes;
Nec sit terris ultima Thule." (Medea, ii, 375.)
"There will come a time," he says, "in later years, when Oceans shall loosen the bonds of things, and a huge land shall lie revealed, and Tethys shall disclose new worlds, and Thule shall no longer be at the end of the earth." This is one of the most notable un-"inspired" prophecies on record. In a copy of the Tragedies of Seneca, belonging to Ferdinand Columbus, now in the Biblioteca Colombina, there is attached to these prophetic verses this marginal note: "Haec prophetia expleta et per patrem meum
Cristoforo Colon, Almirante, anno 1492."
There were immortal heroes of science who dared defy such inspired ignorance. Copernicus, truer prophet of God than Moses or pope, wrote his inspired revelation of God in the heavens, "The evolutions of the Heavenly Bodies," which in terror of Yahveh's Holy-Ghost-inspired Church he withheld from publication till the day of his death, May 24, 1543. Then with his dying breath he gave to the world the revelation that the sun is the center of the solar system, and that the earth and other planets revolve around it; and from the security of the border of the grave he defiantly dedicated
his immortal work to His Holiness the Pope.
I could be wrong. The dates are rather close; I suppose it depends on what month Wheless’ book came out. But the parallels with the poem are striking. The first page contains the gloss “Columbus, alone, gazing toward Spain, invokes the presence of two faithful partisans of his quest . . .” I suppose I had better get to it:
Ave Maria
BE with me, Luis de San Angel, now—
Witness before the tides can wrest away
The word I bring, O you who reined my suit
Into the Queen's great heart that doubtful day;
For I have seen now what no perjured breath
Of clown nor sage can riddle or gainsay;—
To you, too, Juan Perez, whose counsel fear
And greed adjourned,— I bring you back Cathay!
Here waves climb into dusk on gleaming mail;
Invisible valves of the sea,— locks, tendons
Crested and creeping, troughing corridors
That fall back yawning to another plunge.
Slowly the sun's red caravel drops light
Once more behind us. . . . It is morning there—
O where our Indian emperies lie revealed,
Yet lost, all, let this keel one instant yield!
I thought of Genoa; and this truth, now proved,
That made me exile on her streets, stood me
More absolute than ever — biding the moon
Till dawn should clear that dim frontier, first seen
—The Chan's great continent . . . . Then faith, not fear
Nigh surged me witless . . . . Hearing the surf near—
I, wonder-breathing, kept the watch,— saw
The first palm chevron the first lighted hill.
The resonance of these lines is just astounding. Luis de San Angel was the man who successfully pleaded Columbus’s case, and Juan Perez was the queens confessor. Genoa was where Columbus was from. I can’t help but notice the tenuous nature of these lines. The fragility of the ship who would founder like his other ships if the keel should yield. It also seems striking that it was “faith, not fear” that made him witless. It seems an interesting choice to place Columbus after the Brooklyn Bridge, echoing it perhaps in the metallic imagery of “waves climbing into dusk on gleaming mail.” But the mood shifts into descent, as the cask holding Columbus’ logs is set adrift, and the next stanza begins with a rather odd fragment, though I suppose it implies that he was standing watch up on a mast, and climbed down:
And lowered. And they came out to us crying,
"The Great White Birds!" (O Madre Maria, still
One ship of these thou grantest safe returning;
Assure us through thy mantle's ageless blue! )
And record of more, floating in a casque,
Was tumbled from us under bare poles scudding;
And later hurricanes may claim more pawn. . . .
For here between two worlds, another, harsh,
This third, of water, tests the word; lo, here
Bewilderment and mutiny heap whelming
Laughter, and shadow cuts sleep from the heart
Almost as though the Moor's flung scimitar
Found more than flesh to fathom in its fall.
Yet under tempest-lash and surfeitings
Some inmost sob, half-heard, dissuades the abyss,
Merges the wind in measure to the waves,
Series on series, infinite, — till eyes
Starved wide on blackened tides, accrete — enclose
This turning rondure whole, this crescent ring
Sun-cusped and zoned with modulated fire
Like pearls that whisper through the Doge's hands
—Yet no delirium of jewels! O Fernando,
Take of that eastern shore, this western sea,
Yet yield thy God's, thy Virgin's charity!
—Rush down the plenitude, and you shall see
Isaiah counting famine on this lee!
Columbus’ crew did threaten mutiny, but it was averted. The Doge is the chief magistrate of Genoa. The key points here seem to me to be the third world as a sea, which separates the old and new world, “starved wide on blackened tides.” The reference to Isaiah is incredibly haunting too. The part which Crane refers to is no doubt Isaiah 14, where a tyrant is deposed and the survivors are admonished “Let them never rise to possess the earth / or cover the face of the world with cities” [14: 21] (clearly similar to the fate of Spain) but more specifically, “The firstborn of the poor will graze, and the needy lie down in safety; but I will make your root die of famine” [14:30]. There is not much joy in this part of history, no jewels. Just a long trip back.
An herb, a stray branch among salty teeth,
The jellied weeds that drag the shore, — perhaps
Tomorrow's moon will grant us Saltes Bar—
Palos again,— a land cleared of long war.
Some Angelus environs the cordage tree;
Dark waters onward shake the dark prow free.
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.
Who grindest oar, and arguing the mast
Subscribest holocaust of ships, O Thou
Within whose primal scan consummately
The glistening seignories of Ganges swim; —
Who sendest greeting by the corposant,
And Teneriffe's garnet — flamed it in a cloud,
Urging through night our passage to the Chan;—
Te Deum laudamus, for thy teeming span!
Of all that amplitude that time explores,
A needle in the sight, suspended north,—
Yielding by inference and discard, faith
And true appointment from the hidden shoal:
This disposition that thy night relates
From Moon to Saturn in one sapphire wheel:
The orbic wake of thy once whirling feet,
Elohim, still I hear thy sounding heel!
White toil of heaven's cordons, mustering
In holy rings all sails charged to the far
Hushed gleaming fields and pendant seething wheat
Of knowledge,— round thy brows unhooded now
—The kindled Crown! acceded of the poles
And biassed by full sails, meridians reel
Thy purpose — still one shore beyond desire!
The sea's green crying towers a-sway, Beyond
And kingdoms
naked in the
trembling heart—
Te Deum laudamus
O Thou Hand of Fire
It seems interesting that Crane makes reference to discarding faith in favor of inference, and then addresses the rotation of the globe as the work of God, in light of Wheless’ text. But it could just be an odd coincidence.
I went to class this morning to return portfolios, and two students showed up. I’m glad I didn’t write extensive comments, I just reviewed things to make sure that people were actually able to write in the form convincingly. Only a few took the opportunity to revise things, to take another look at what was really possible in their papers. It is sort of pointless to maintain my questioning presence. After all is said and done, I suppose more than anything I thought of myself as a tough audience who is not easily impressed. The effort put out by some of the people in the class did impress me; they might not be naturally “gifted” but their perseverance did pay off in the end. I feel comfortable with passing them on.
Then I went to Barnes and Noble. I wanted to see if they had the new biography of Hart Crane released last month. They didn’t. I bought another copy of The Bridge, primarily for the introductory essays. I’d been reading it again, sitting in an empty classroom, and thinking about the effort that Crane so obviously put into his work. He was a high school dropout, but his self-education was quite full. The flaws highlighted by others in his poems seem to me to be part of the overflow of Eliot’s tremendous influence, and his simplistic reading of the Romantics. I’m tremendously weak on American writers, so once again I perused the anthologies and noticed something: Hart Crane isn’t even represented in the Norton Anthology of American Literature. Eliot and Pound are there, with massive selections, and they don’t include a single work by Crane. I suppose I’d better get my Eliot rant out of the way.
Lest I be accused of being ill-informed regarding Eliot and Pound, I will admit that I haven’t been forced to read much Pound, who excites me with all the enthusiasm of a root-canal, but I have read Eliot extensively. He seems to me to be a talented, but altogether misdirected man. I am not intimidated by difficult poetry, quite the contrary, but I am totally bored with the pronouncements of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and though I enjoyed “The Wasteland,” I couldn’t help but feel sorry for its pessimism. I can forgive pessimism much more than the myopia of “Tradition”:
No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone. His significance, his appreciation is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.
. . .
I mean this as a principle of aesthetic, not merely historical criticism. The necessity is that he shall conform, that he shall cohere, is not one sided; what happens when a new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously to all the works of art that preceded it. The existing monuments find an ideal order within themselves, which is modified by the introduction of the new (the really new) work of art among them.
. . .
. . .
The point of view which I am struggling to attack is perhaps related to the metaphysical theory of the substantial unity of the soul: for my meaning is, that the poet has, not a “personality” to express, but a particular medium, which is only a medium and not a personality, in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways. Impressions and experiences which are important for the man may take no place in poetry, and those which become important in the poetry may play a very negligible part in the man, the personality.
. . .
Poetry is not the turning lose of emotion; it is not the expression of a personality, but an escape from personality. But of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.
The futility of this model of art is easily apparent in the words I noted from Walker Evans below. We cannot separate ourselves from the things we make. We’re in there, like it or not. Maybe if I had T.S. Eliot’s personality, I’d want to escape from it too. There are traditions that I feel a part of, but Eliot’s isn’t one of them. I use the plural intentionally; the “high church” of modernism has fallen, and rightly so. It’s been replaced by a more plural view. I was reading Alan Williamson’s swansong column in The American Poetry Review from 1995. I liked his assessment of types of difficulty in reading poetry:
Some poems are difficult because the presume, or recommend, a different level of “cultural literacy” than is now standard — Pound’s Cantos, for example. Others are difficult because they are attempting to capture a process, a series of stabs in the dark, thoughts struggling toward completion . . .
But there is a third category: poems that are difficult because they are written from a place in the mind where “real” experiences meld and overlap, where texture, heft, rhythm, slant of light are better keys to “meaning” than anything that could be expressed discursively. Such poems do not aim at putting the reader through an intellectual puzzle, but at giving the reader a richer sensuous and pre-rational experience, both of and through language.
Hart Crane, one of our greatest poets of this third kind, said that he wanted to give the reader “a single new word, never spoken and impossible to actually enunciate,” out of the interrelations of all its terms beyond sequential logic, “using our ‘real’ world somewhat as a springboard.” . . .
Crane was intensely concerned with all communication, but what he wanted to communicate was “a state of consciousness,” not stories or assertions: “This competence — to travel in a tear/ Sparkling alone, within another’s will.”
Blake was onto the difference between “self” and “self-hood” which he saw as an encrustation on the immortal soul. He sought to cast off the “rotten rags of selfhood.” But he would never make the mistake Eliot did, of throwing out personal distinctiveness as an important part of communication.
I became interested in the poet Hart Crane for an odd reason. I suppose it’s not that odd, if you know me, that is. I was listening to a bootleg of Neil Young at the London Festival Hall from February 12, 1971, and he introduced a song like this:
This is a song I wrote about uh. . .
I don’t know how many of you have heard of a poet called Hart Crane, he wrote a poem called The Bridge among other things. . .
and uh, I’d just been reading it . . .and I wrote this song.
I started out feeling like I was Hart Crane so I wrote this song called “The Bridge”
Shortly after that, I bought Hart Crane’s Collected Poems, though I didn’t have the time to give it that it deserved, because I was knee-deep in W.B. Yeats. I finally got around to giving it a close read, as I reflected on the fact that the first edition of this poem was also Walker Evan’s first big break. I recall being rather confused by most of Crane’s poems, and the book had been sitting on my shelf for at least two years. Sometimes, poems don’t find you until you need them.
Because it was neatly nestled in the middle of the Collected Works, I didn’t realize that the poem To Brooklyn Bridge was just an introduction to a sort of American epic, which dances on the line of social engagement and detached aesthetic sense. And I didn’t know that Hart Crane committed suicide at the age of 32, and was a tortured homosexual. Crane worked on The Bridge for almost ten years, and felt that it was incomplete, a fragment that he just couldn’t bring together. Finding that out, brought Neil Young’s song into sharp focus:
The bridge, we'll build it now
It may take a lot of time
And it maybe lonely but
Ooh baby, ooh baby.
The bridge was falling down
And that took a lot of lies
And it made me lonely
Ooh baby, ooh baby.
The bridge was falling.
The bridge was falling.
The bridge was falling.
The enterprise of trying to write about deep topics on my blog forces me to let go of chronology and focus, while at the same time they assert themselves. I wanted to write about Walker Evans. But my Tristram Shandy mind has me writing about Neil Young, and thinking of the second part of Crane’s poem, “Powahatan’s Daughter,” and wondering about the entire process of myth construction, as it says on the Smithsonian web site:
Historians have pieced together her life from the accounts of others, most notably her friend, Capt. John Smith, whose veracity of detail and recollection is, to put it mildly, questionable. During the intervening four centuries others have showered her with virtues. Poets and writers from Thackeray to Hart Crane celebrated her charm. More lately rocker Neil Young sang, "I would give a thousand pelts / To...find out how she felt." And now we have the animated eco-warrior princess from Disney.
I wish a was a trapper
I would give thousand pelts
To sleep with Pocahontas
And find out how she felt
In the mornin'
on the fields of green
In the homeland
we've never seen.
And maybe Marlon Brando
Will be there by the fire
We'll sit and talk of Hollywood
And the good things there for hire
And the Astrodome
and the first tepee
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
Marlon Brando, Pocahontas and me
And that’s all there, with much more, in Hart Crane’s Bridge.
O Sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies dreaming sod,
Unto the lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the Curveship lend a myth to God. (41-44)
I think the sad song of America took a big twist through Hart Crane on its way to the Beats and Neil Young. I think that all of them fail in one way or another, but it’s America’s nature to try and fail. I'll get back to Walker Evans, when I get back to that confounded bridge.
A good art exhibition is a lesson in seeing to those who need or want one, and a session of visual pleasure and excitement for those who don’t need anything — I mean, to the rich in spirit — that’s you.
Grunts, sighs, shouts, laughter, and implications ought to be heard in a museum room, precisely the place where they are usually suppressed. So, some of the values of pictures may be suppressed too — or plain lost in formal exhibitions.
I’d like to address the eyes of people who know how to take the values straight through and beyond the inhibitions of public decorum. I suggest that religious feeling is sometimes to be had even at church, and, perhaps, with luck, art can be seen and felt on a museum wall.
Those of us who are living by our eyes — painters, designers, photographers, girl-watchers — are both amused and appalled by the following half-truth: “What we see, we are;” and by its corollary: “Our collected work is, in part, shameless, joyous autobiography, cum confession, wrapped up in the embarrassment of the unspeakable.”
For those of us who can read the language, that is —I mean, I never know just who is in the audience— when the seeing eye man does turn up to survey our work and does percieve our metaphors, we are just caught in the act, that’s all. Should we apologize?Walker Evans, from: A Transcript of his Discussion with the Students of the University of Michigan, 1971
His photographs scream “truth” with a capital T.
They’re not. Evans manipulated, arranged, and painstakingly controlled every aspect of his photographs. They were aesthetic objects, and yet he claimed they weren’t art.
He moved in the midst of high modernism, but it’s hard to call him a modernist. Genre labels are at best a ruse to hide complexity. I suspect that the tensions involved can be best explored by analogy. In Evan’s case, the poles operating in his work share much in common with the tension between T.S. Eliot and Hart Crane to a much greater degree than the poles he would probably choose himself, the difference between Flaubert and Baudelaire.
Evans also has a certain similarity with Percy Shelley. He was born into money, but not the “old money” of an aristocracy. Walker Evans I, his grandfather, worked his way up from a cashier to being a secretary at the Mound City Paint and Color Company in St. Louis Missouri. Walker Evans II, his father, was not a college graduate but had a native talent for writing which lead him into advertising. He was a very successful man, and following family tradition, when his son was born on November 2, 1903, he named him Walker as well.
But Walker Evans III, the photographer which I am occupied with here, changed the facts to suit himself. He claimed to be born on November 3, 1903, to match the numeral on the end of his name. Though his biographer Belinda Rathbone claims that it is unclear whether this was his idea or his family's, it is certainly in keeping with his well wrought personal mythology. There is a certain forced symmetry to his work, and the loftiness of being part of a tradition. The opening of her biography states his case quite well:
“Privilege,” said Walker Evans late in his life, addressing a group of well-heeled college students, “is an immoral and unjust thing to have. But if you’ve got it, you didn’t choose to get it and you might as well use it.”
. . . He believed that artists like himself made up their own class and were due their own set of privileges. His demeanor, both superior and comfortably informal, and his cultured accent, punctuated here or there by a mumble or stutter, suggested to many that he was an aristocrat, though perhaps not a born one. “He liked to imply that he was very well bred,” explained a close friend. “I think he was rather a self-made well-bred man.”
Like Shelley, Evans was a college drop-out. Like Shelley, Evans was often connected with movements for social change. But the comparison ends there. While Shelley was comfortable with his position, Evans was embarrassed to a certain extent by his. He recalled with disdain the way his father earned a living, working on such things as the Aunt Jemima flour campaign with its smiling mammy. Where Shelley was engaged, Evans was detached. But it’s a peculiar sense of detachment, because his sense of passion rivaled Shelley’s. It was developed through a stint working at the New York Public Library in 1924, pouring through literature and the now classic modernist texts from Joyce and Eliot as quickly as they came off the press.
He traveled to Paris, and began his involvement with photography in 1926. I note these facts as a prequel to exploring his photography in depth, because the contexts of his development— from literature to photography, rather than the other way around, is important to situating him in his milieu. He claimed Flaubert as his primary influence, as a realist, though he had great affection for Baudelaire as well. However, his disassociation, both from the rhetoric of advertising and the density of symbolism are key. Though his renunciation of the heroic “self” of romanticism may have come by way of Eliot, he does not share Eliot’s pessimism. Evans shares the passion for effect of Hart Crane, and his lust for an American epic vision, but not his tragedy. Researching Crane the last few days, I suspect that the key to unlocking the careful tension of Evans’ photographs may indeed be linked in no small way to Crane, who had a profound effect on Walker Evans’ career.
This of course will require digression at a later time. But I had to get started somewhere. Evans has been staring at me from the couch. And this of course, will be continued in the upcoming week.
Raymon posted a comment a few days ago that I never properly thanked him for. I’m such a “bad blogger” because I’m often trying to turn this into some sort of narrative, with connections between the constituent parts. Shelley wrote some embarrassing lines in the midst of great poems, and it takes a certain forgiveness to negotiate the full catalogue of most great artists. I find myself returning to Shelley’s Defence of Poetry often, and enjoyed the article about it he suggested, Shelley’s Defence Today. When I read it, I was greeted with an argument I’d made myself before:
A negentropic practice of literature could be encouraged by a literary scholarship aware of "the roads that go from poem to poem" and at work on the "map of understanding." "Intertextual" criticism, certainly, makes a beginning; with less jargon, more adding up of results, it could become a genuine science. I believe that here something like objectivity, or at any rate intersubjective reliability, is possible - that there is a sort of order in our literary experiences which subsequent observations will go on verifying.
But like some people’s revulsion regarding Shelley, I feel the same way about Eliot. I really hate him, with a passion that is unfounded but profound. I blame him for too much, in the same way some people (like Eliot) vilify Shelley. But that’s not why I started writing this. . .
It was this fragment in a great post by Ray Davis:
Cognition doesn't exist without effort, and so emotional affect is essential to getting cognition done. Just listen to their raised or swallowed, cracked or purring voices: you'll seldom find anyone more patently overwhelmed by pleasure or anger or resentment than a "rationalist," which is one reason we so often lose debates with comfortably dogmatic morons.
The great secret of morals is Love; or going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person not our own. A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own. The great instrument of moral good is the imagination; and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause.
Ultimately, any discourse seeks to move. The question is, move what? In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe lays out an incredible description of his composing process:
I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view — for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest— I say to myself, in the first place, “Of the innumerable effects or impressions, of which the heart, the intellect, or (more generally) the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion select?”
Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem. A few words, however, in elucidation of my real meaning, which some of my friends have evinced a disposition to misrepresent. The pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful. When indeed, men speak of Beauty, they mean, precisely, not a quality, as is supposed, but an effect— they refer, in short, just to that intense and pure elevation of the soul— not of intellect, or of heart — upon which I have commented, and which is experienced in consequence of contemplating “the beautiful.”
It is this sort of elevation, which for Shelley was love, and for Poe was the effect of elevation that comes from the cognition of the beautiful, which impels humanity forward. Ray is right. It doesn’t occur without effort, which is why Shelley made his impassioned plea for poetry as the means by which humanity is enlarged and improved. That’s why I always end up back there somehow, even if he did write some very sappy love poems.
Rational arguments are indeed, just gravy. As Ernesto Grassi says in “Rhetoric and Philosophy”:
The indicative or allusive speech provides the framework within which proof can come into existence. Furthermore if rationality is identified with the process of clarification, we are forced to admit that the primal clarity of principles is not rational and recognize that the corresponding language in its indicative structure has an “evangelic” character, in the original Greek sense of this word, i.e., “noticing.”
I’m always asking them. On the last day of my latest rhetorical theory class, we were given an open forum to ask any nagging questions we might have, so that the class could offer up perspectives on them. I asked one that has been bothering me for the last few years:
“What is the difference between Rhetoric and Fine Art?”
The groans from the class were pernicious. “Oh no! We’d have to get into the whole ‘what is art’ thing . . .” That wasn’t my intention, so I clarified myself: “Reflecting on all these articles which proclaim that rhetoric is an art, just what differentiates it from fine art?” I asked. No one answered. So I continued: “It seems as if the fundamental distinction is one of utility; is rhetoric defined in any way by utility?” Stone silence.
Granted, I’m probably the only one in the room that thinks of things in these terms, coming from the documentary tradition in photography. After thinking about it the last two days, I suppose I’ll jot down my thoughts. I haven’t been able to locate the Walker Evans quote I was thinking of. He said something to the effect of “my photographs are documents, because documents have a use, compared to art, which by definition is useless.” One of the students in the class brought up that the “uselessness” of art was purely a Western fabrication, and things stalled again. Okay, so I’m a Western guy. I haven’t been through the twelve-step program, but I’ll cop to it just the same.
That’s what makes the issue problematic for me. If I accept Evans' definition, it might seem that what I’ve been practicing all these years is rhetoric rather than art. But this has a negative spin, amply expounded upon by synthesis.
On one side, you have the words that "narrate" -- on the other side, the words that "affect." It's a very, very vicious war and it may never end. Like most such wars it's extremely difficult to even tell the two sides apart. Then consider that the words themselves are forever switching sides, promoting and demoting themselves and trying on new disguises.
That’s the myth of realism, and the myth of an “impartial” narrator. If art moves us, it moves us somewhere. That’s the goal of rhetoric, and the primary reason why it has grown up alongside the notion of self. If an audience listens, it requires knowing who the speaker is in order to grant authenticity. A speakers authenticity is established outside the realm of realism— a fabricated construct of identity— a self that is made visible and conveyed to others. The notion that a rhetorical “self” is somehow false whereas an artistic “self’ is true is part of the legacy of Aristotle.
It began with Plato, who cast the “narrators,” the poets, out of his ideal republic. They practiced arts of imitation. Rhetoric was devalued as well, and only dialectic remained as a means of divining the “truth”. Aristotle invited the poets back in, granting that poien was generative. Poets and artists created things, so they should be valued as creators. However, rhetoric ends up in the doghouse, as mere craft, which rearranges things to serve a purpose. Modern “new rhetoric” attempts to restore rhetoric to the company of poetry, as a generative and epistemic art. Ultimately, this does beg the question I asked. Just what is the difference anyway? If rhetoric is generative, then why is it different from poetry (and or art)? I think it’s just that nagging connotation of falsehood, which has persisted through the ages. Rhetoric can be, but isn’t always, a deception.
Alex suggested that the idea of presenting your self to others began with Aristotle. That’s close, but not strictly true. Concern with the false presentation of self to others began with Plato and continued through Aristotle’s severance of rhetoric from poetry. The importance of presenting your self to others, in the Western sense, was born in Sicily with Corax in the fifth century BC. It was a matter of property. A despot, Thrasybulus of Syracuse, had seized the personal property of the residents. Litigation resulted after the fall of the despot, in order to restore the property of the residents. Those who excelled at helping these citizens pleading their claims set up schools to educate others in the art of persuasion. This was the beginning of the Sophists (Sophist actually means teacher, or wise man). It was their questionable methods which caused the reactions of Plato and others a century later. The importance of presenting a “true self” is perhaps best illustrated by the Roman Quintillian though, who defined rhetoric as “a good man speaking well.”
From the beginning, rhetoric was generative. The only differences between rhetoric and art appear to be in questions of motive: A bad man, speaking (or painting , or sculpting, or whatever) well is accepted with open arms in the world of art. Art appears to live in a world outside good an evil, or at least it pretends it does. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is measured by its attention to virtue. A double standard, to say the least.
Both2andbeyond mused about St. Augustine. I like him a lot too. Somehow, it didn’t surprise me to find him in a paper that I stumbled on in circuitous surfing route from consumptive to daily operations to The Self as Narrator by J. David Velleman. Backing out from there onto his home page, I found a rather interesting paper called The Genesis of Shame, which uses Augustine’s questioning of the genesis of lust to propose that shame, in the correct context, is a good thing:
In short, Adam and Eve were right to avail themselves of fig leaves. Although the term "fig leaf" is now a term of derision, I think that fig leaves are nothing to be ashamed of. They manifest our sense of privacy, which is an expression of our personhood.
What I really enjoy about these strange surfing expeditions is that they often make me reach for books off my shelf, to contextualize the incidents used as examples by others. Reading Augustine is always such a pleasure. Velleman summarizes his argument well in the article, in short:
Augustine says that the genitals became pudenda when they produced the "shameless novelty" of moving against their owners' will--in other words, when Adam lost the ability to control his erections, and Eve her secretions. The idea of their ever having possessed these abilities may seem odd, but it has a certain logic from Augustine's point-of-view. Augustine thinks that Adam and Eve did not experience lust before the Fall.
Yet there is less shame when the soul is resisted by its own vicious parts than when its will and order are resisted by the body which is distinct from and inferior to it, and dependent on it for life itself.
But so long as the will retains under its authority the other members, without which the members excited by lust to resist the will cannot accomplish what they seek, chastity is preserved, and the delight of sin forgone. And certainly, had not culpable disobedience been visit with penal disobedience, the marriage of heaven would have been ignorant of this struggle and rebellion, this quarrel between will and lust, that the will may be satisfied and lust restrained but those members, like all the rest, should have obeyed the will.
. . . And whereas now, as we essay to investigate this subject more exactly, modesty hinders us and compels us to ask pardon of chaste ears, there would have been no cause to do so, but we could have discoursed freely and without fear of seeming obscene, upon all those points which occur to one who meditates on the subject.Augustine, City of God Book XIV
This all seems so familiar. The little head has a mind of its own, dangerously overriding the will of the soul — gonads and strife, if you will. It’s the shame of admitting that we do not have authority over all of our body parts which creates the strife, and makes discussing it difficult. Augustine goes on to propose that if it wasn’t for this independent lustful will, there would be no such thing as dirty words. However, it is very hard for me to agree with Velleman about any positive nature to shame. Ultimately though, it comes around to the argument that human society is based almost entirely in prohibition, of controlling the animal will, and defining the "proper" method of letting your gonads out to play. Vicious parts? They seem relatively harmless to me.
Penal disobedience. You’ve got to love the polysemous nature of the phrase.
I could never be my father. Sometimes, I think about how much he taught me by saying so little. He kept it inside. You could see it, turning behind his eyes. The pain of having your brother who you defended in fights for years because he was outspoken and small, always getting into trouble and needing to be bailed out, wreck your car in Chicago, Illinois, in 1944 while you are trying to find work and living in a basement apartment feeling the cold lake wind in the dead of winter. You could see the resentment, lodged there from being felt-up by a gay doctor as you took a physical to work in Gary, Indiana, to earn enough money to get to your younger brother who lived in California who promised that work could be found there. He never said much at all. He wasn’t mad about this at all, he was just processing it, dealing with each day as he could, and trying to do the best thing for himself and his family.
You didn’t need to tell him that there was evil in the world, for he stared it down when he was twelve looking down the barrel of a gun pointed by his alcoholic father, trying to defend his mother and his siblings from the assault of madness. He didn’t carry a grudge, he just dealt with it. Quietly. Inside himself, and seldom did it ever move out into the light. It was private.
My father gave me one piece of advice that I’ll always remember: “Son, you can only do what you think the best thing to do is at the time.” He didn’t know that he was training me to be a Sophist. It was only obvious that my father’s idea of truth was relative. He saw decision making as complex, and the more you knew about something the better off you were. He didn’t know, as he brushed me aside and told me to “go to the library and look it up” that he was training me to be a scholar.
And I didn’t know at the time that his reasons for doing this were twofold: he didn’t trust himself as an authority, and it would get a pesky kid out of his hair. Most things were understandable if you dug into it, he thought. Dad made the same argument about Shakespeare that Huxley did, phrased in a Will Rodgers cliché: “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Human nature doesn’t change. Things happen, and you deal with it. “You need to read some of those Russians, son, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky— they knew a thing or two.” Dad never graduated the eighth grade, but he knew that if you went to the library you could find what you needed to help you out. He didn’t know of Tom Huxley, but if it would have been useful to him, he would have found out.
I’m nothing like him. Or am I? All I know is that where he was quiet, I can get loud. Where he stayed away from people, I gravitate toward them. Where he was private, I am public. Where his life was filled with obligation, ultimately I have none. Now, that is. I tried to live life that way, it just didn’t work out. I’ve been thinking a bit about the Oedipal thing.
I’ve had it in my mind for a while to write some stuff about Walker Evans. Jonathon Delacour and I talked about it a long time ago, and he brought him up again recently. I’ve been revisiting a bunch of stuff, realizing that in order to say what I want to say that it will take many days and many posts. Perhaps I’ll tackle it next week, after I finish up the semester's business. I was looking at Belinda Rathbone’s biography and was reminded that his father was in advertising. You couldn’t pick a more opposite pole for his career path. Or could you? Like my relationship with my father’s ways, I think that Evan’s father perhaps was part of the reason why he was so resistant to being involved in any propaganda enterprise. And yet he was, in a strange way.
Much more on this later. I just had to write to clear off the buzz and settle my dinner. And perhaps recommit myself to the enterprise. What Walker Evans was up to is vastly oversimplified in most of the material I visited on the web. Perhaps in the next few days I’ll offer up some links, but I hesitate to do that before I clarify my own position on the subject. There’s always more to know. But there also needs to be a time to write.
I like Arts and Letters Daily. Or at least, I used to. Until I clicked through to the most poorly put-together article I’ve ever read linked from there.
Degrading Darwin seemed interesting enough on the surface, as an indictment of the right-wing application of Social Darwinism. I agree, Darwinism has no place in social policy. But the article was just plain wrong in one of its primary targets. I don’t mean “wrong” in the sense that I didn’t buy it, but “wrong” in the sense of being factually incorrect. Truth bears no delay? Evidently falsehood doesn’t either. For example:
Everything about Huxley's ideology was mankind as a pinnacle within progressive nature - and Victorian Britain lapped it up. This was the very peak of Britain's journey towards industrialised wealth and colonisation. It was clear to the restless Victorian go-getters that the engine room of their superiority lay in science, engineering and technological breakthroughs. Darwin's idea of evolution was the perfect embodiment of Victorian progress - as both evidence and proof of mankind progressing in the guise of rationality and reason.
For a better look at what Huxley was on about regarding Social Darwinism, have a look at Jungle vs. Garden, a section of the online Huxley archive which details his battle with Spencer and those who would apply natural selection to politics. In a nutshell, Huxley thought that humanity had moved past the forces of Darwinism, and now had to look at the hard choices of “tending our garden,” to use Voltaire’s phrase. This exerpt from his 1894 Prolegomena pretty much sums things up:
That progressive modification of civilization which passes by the name of the "evolution of society," is, in fact, a process of an essentially different character, both from that which brings about the evolution of species, in the state of nature, and from that which gives rise to the evolution of varieties, in the state of art.
There can be no doubt that vast changes have taken place in English civilization since the reign of the Tudors. But I am not aware of a particle of evidence in favour of the conclusion that this evolutionary process has been accompanied by any modification of the physical, or the mental, characters of the men who have been the subjects of it. I have not met with any grounds for suspecting that the average Englishmen of to-day are sensibly different from those that Shakspere knew and drew. We look into his magic mirror of the Elizabethan age, and behold, nowise darkly, the presentment of ourselves.
I was suprised for a moment, because the original article was in Spiked Magazine; I confused it with Spike Magazine for a second. That's the problem with sharp objects on the web. I wrote a rebuttal letter to the editor, as well as a chastising comment to A&L Daily. When I surfed into the Spike magazine web log, I found that he had just ranted about A&L Daily’s tendency to link to shrill attacks. Shrill attacks don’t bother me, except when they are just plain wrong.
Evidently, falsehood knows no delay either.
----- --------TITLE: Z-Bird DATE: 05/01/2002 9:48:00 AM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Zounds!I was driving home from school this morning and got behind a truck with the strangest slogan on the back: "Meats That Makes Men s." Underneath a huge Z logo was the inscription: "Z-Bird." The truck had Georgia plates.
Huh? I thought. I pulled up closer and realized that there was a letter obscured by the latch on the back of the truck, but still, it seemed strange for this vehicle to be driving down the street giving everyone Z-Bird. Shipping chickens to Arkansas is a bit like carrying coals to Newcastle and all that. There's a chicken farm on every corner. I had to research this when I got home.
It seems that the parent company is Zartic. They have an interesting list of trademarked labels, judging from the fine print on their web site:
Bakeables, Bar-Z-Que, Chicken Fryz, Chic-N-Vittles, Circle Z, Crispy Steak, Entrée Legends, Heavenly Wings, Hi-Brand, Honey Hugged, Jim's Country Mill Sausage, Meats That Make Menus, PiggleStix, Rockin' Roasted, Wing Demons, Z-Best Bird You Can Serve, Z-Bird, Zartic, and Zartran are trademarks of Zartic, Inc.
I'm sure Chicken Fryz are big with the Hi-Brand crowd, and that most folks would like to be Honey Hugged after they are Rockin' Roasted. I'll go for the Heavenly wings, but keep those Wing Demons away from me, and please refrain from giving me Z-bird. I felt worse after pondering what might be included in PiggleStix, though I suppose puttting pigs on a stick has a long heritage.
It seems noteworthy that the company recalled 18,600 pounds of chicken in 2000 because it contained an "undeclared egg product." Now there's another point to ponder: just what is an undeclared egg product and why would it get mixed up with a chicken in the first place? But before I digress into the chicken and egg debate, I suppose I had better shut up.
Sometimes, I'm just too easily amused.
----- --------TITLE: Hey Bud! DATE: 04/29/2002 10:26:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
An eventful day, in a wax head sort of way. I presented my paper on A Journal of the Plague Year tonight. It still feels like a draft, but I received a good bit of encouragement. It seems that according to Dr. Anderson there may be a niche for getting it published; he didn’t say where, but I suspect it’s Literature and Medicine (he is the editor). Now I can sit on pins and needles until he reads the massive tome. I know it needs to be both narrowed, and expanded at the same time. But I just had to stop somewhere and get it out of my system. I’ve only been researching it for the last four months. If he thinks it’s publishable, I have the summer to work on refining it. I’ve still got a paper on Yeats that another editor said he would publish, if I can only get the time to work on it some more... I’m headed into strange terrain, and rather rapidly at that.
I also found out tonight what one of my fall classes is all about. It’s one that I signed up for, for lack of anything better to choose from. It is a special topics course on expository writing, which I chose largely because Dr. Anderson is teaching it. He’s “theory friendly,” which isn’t always the case with writing professors. I’m more interested in figuring out how things work than writing a novel or anything like it. Uh oh. I may have signed up for more than I bargained for. The course is on extended non-fiction. The product of the class will be a text which will be at minimum, fifty pages, and will involve reading a pile of non-fiction book length works. Little did I know that I was signing up for, in effect, “how to write a book.” I suppose it’s about time. I’ve stayed away from that, largely because I don’t feel prepared enough just yet, but with a thesis impending in the spring I suppose I might as well go through with it.
The department has been moving away from the conventional masters thesis, and into accepting extended non-fiction projects. I don’t want to do that, I’d rather do a conventional thesis because I do want to enter a Ph.D. program, and figure the practice will be good for me. Dr. Anderson suggested that it would be possible to take the product of that class and feed it into a project, but I don’t think I want to do that. Instead, being the horrible wax fountain of ideas that I am, I came up with an long-form idea I’d really like to write.
I’d like to write something about photography, using an approach similar to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida, but about the process of change I went through as I explored the techniques and products of infrared photography. Sort of part theory, part ethnography, and part memoir. It was a big deal for me, and my forays into language philosophy have deepened my understanding of the experience. It may be time to write about it. I’m not sure, but tonight it sounds like a good idea.
I was watching Lost Weekend. Don Birnam drinks the shot that starts his bender, and is transfixed by the wet circle on the bar.
“Don't wipe it away, Nat. Let me have my little vicious circle. You know, the circle is the perfect geometric figure. No end, no beginning.”
I felt that way this weekend. I worked yesterday on one paper, which is now at about six pages. Dense theoretical stuff. I love it, but I hate it. It can take hours to construct a single paragraph; that is, if you care about it being right.
Today was more of a sprint. Up at seven AM, and writing until now. Different paper.
It’s on Defoe’s Journal of a Plague Year. I left out most of the theory I really could have used to attack another scholar. Instead, I just positioned the text within a few other concepts. Twenty-two pages, mostly composed in one day. Over 6,000 words. I already hate it. I feel like I’m just talking in circles. I need a drink.
But I can’t have one. It’s up early tomorrow morning to teach, and then perhaps I’ll take another editing run at this monstrosity. But I suppose I should just let it lie, and concentrate on the other one. I don’t know why I’m so attached to my little vicious circle.
This damn academic bender is going on its sixth year. I wonder if there is a 12 step program for frustrated academics? Yeah, I know, it’s business. The money is better, and the circles are bigger. But damn it, I like my little circle.
Yesterday was a weird day. I painstakingly pored over some essays between classes, hoping to find some way to help my students across the bridge into good academic writing, not the stultifying obscurantism decried by those on the outside, but a subtle blend of the personal and professional that marks truly good research writing. After the morning class, I had a good conversation with Huey Crisp, the director of composition at my school. He has recently started calling the “research papers” written by his students “research articles” instead, to try to distance them from the sort of “reports” written in high school. I like that idea a lot. It makes it sound more like the writing involved is targeted at a larger audience than just a teacher, and allows the student to take the writing they produce more seriously outside the academic enterprise. As I read through the papers, I thought about the difference between obscurity and ambiguity, gestured at by the Lefebvre that I quoted a few days ago.
I was thinking so hard as I drove to the noon class, that I left all the papers I was working on at home. I arrived at school a half an hour early, as I usually do, but without the reason I drove there in the first place. Looking at my watch, I knew it would be close, but I might not be too late if I drove back to get them. I live fifteen minutes away from the school, but it was raining and the roads were all fairly flooded. I decided that being a little late would be better than showing up and making excuses.
I like driving. Little Rock is a fun city to drive in, because most of the roads aren’t straight, but long sweeping curves cut into hillsides. However, in the pouring rain that can work against you. About halfway home, on a four-lane road that is a fairly busy route, the rear end of my car broke traction rounding a blind turn. The car went into a full spin at around 40mph. I have grown use to being out of control back here, with all the ice in the winter and such, so I didn’t panic. In fact, it hardly registered at all. I gradually brought the car back under control after one full loop, using the spin to scrub off the speed and finally coming to a stop halfway through the second trip around, just before crossing the center divider into the oncoming traffic. The people coming around the corner were no doubt quite surprised to see the butt end of my car facing them, but I stopped before I got in their way. I calmly pulled back out, and went on my way. It could have been a real mess, but it wasn’t. I’m not sure if it was luck or skill, but I suspect it was a combination of both. Life has been that way for me. I do tend to put more faith in luck than I should, but it usually works for me when it needs to.
I made it home, and back to school without further incident and was only five minutes late. Class was jovial, and good. Then, when I got home I read another article: 13 teachers, two students, and one policeman were shot dead at a school in Germany. This rips my heart out. How can a place of discovery become a place of murder? Regular everyday life is hazardous enough without the added complications of armed students!
The inhospitable host made my website unavailable for about fourteen hours, so I wasn’t able to write about this then. But so this post won’t be a total downer, I must note one more student blooper from a paper about pre-natal care:
She consumed a baby when she was in the ninth grade.
If I read one more paper on dentistry or dental hygiene I’m going to yank my own teeth out. I didn’t name any “taboo topics,” because I haven’t had my fill of the biggies like cloning, death penalty, abortion and all that yet. But I’m considering putting anything that has to do with mouths on the “don’t you dare” list. At least one person took a somewhat innovative tack: she attacked the problem of bad breath.
Did you know that “in a Jewish liturgical teaching, a man who marries a woman and subsequently discovers she has bad breath, can summarily divorce her”? I didn’t. Unfortunately, I can’t confirm this because there is no reference cited. Of course that’s a big problem with this paper. Inquiring minds want to know where this stuff comes from, particularly in the context of a research paper. Trying to do ten pages on teeth and gums is just too much. No medical school for me, thank you. At least they could have picked more interesting body parts to write about.
While I’m rambling, I thought I’d cast out a favorite bit from Blake’s Milton which could be applied to the negative side of a lot of postmodern rants:
To cast off the idiot Questioner who is always questioning,
But never capable of answering; who sits with a sly grin
Silent plotting when to question, like a thief in a cave;
Who publishes doubt & calls it knowledge; whose Science is Despair
Whose pretence to knowledge is Envy, whose whole Science is
To destroy the wisdom of ages to gratify ravenous Envy;
That rages round him like a Wolf day & night without rest (40:13-18)
But I can offer up something good, which helped take the edge off the multiple papers on mental health. If you haven’t seen flashback, dim the lights, have some mushrooms, and enjoy. I was told you have to wait until it’s completely loaded before it will play. I’ve had friends like that. I’d better shut up now.
1. The illusion of transparency Here space appears as luminous, as intelligible, as giving action free reign. What happens in space lends a miraculous quality to thought, which becomes incarnate by means of design (in both senses of the word). The world serves as mediator — itself of great fidelity — between mental activity (invention) and social activity (realization); and it is deployed in space. The illusion of transparency goes hand in hand with a view of space as innocent, as free of traps or secret places. Anything hidden or dissimulated — and hence is dangerous — is antagonistic to transparency, under whose reign everything can be taken in at a single glance from that mental eye which illuminates whatever it contemplates.
. . .
The act of writing is supposed, beyond its immediate effects, to imply a discipline that facilitates the grasping of the ‘object’ by the writing and speaking ‘subject’. In any event, the spoken and written word are taken for (social) practice; it is assumed that absurdity and obscurity, which are treated as aspects of the same thing, may be dissipated without any corresponding dissipation of the ‘object’. Thus, communication brings the non-communicated into the realm of the communicated — the incommunicable having no existence beyond that ever-pursued residue.
. . .
‘Everything must be said! No time limit on speech! Everything must be written! Writing transforms language, therefore writing transforms society! Writing is signifying practice!’
Such agendas only succeed in conflating revolution with transparency.
The illusion of transparency turns out to be a transcendental illusion: a trap, operating on the basis of its own quasi-magical power, but by the same token referring back immediately to other traps — traps which are its alibis, its masks.Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space 27-29
The funniest thing happened today. I was doing a final sort of review exercise about the steps involved in writing a research paper, when a student decided that they just had to offer up their opinion of my class, and the university in general.
She said it was all too easy, and not challenging at all. Looking around at all the pained faces, struggling to get their papers into shape before next week, it seemed like things might almost erupt into a riot. She asserted that she learned all this stuff in high school, and so far college had taught her nothing new. I asked her where she went to high school. It was a privileged Catholic girls high school. The class nearly erupted into a shouting match, with quite a few students asserting that it wasn’t that easy, I just made it seem that way. As I look at the numbers, and review the progress of the students I feel like most of my decisions were good ones.
At least 70% of the people are “getting it.” A few are going to need a minor miracle to pass. Now, at least, I had some indication that there was someone who felt I wasn’t aiming high enough. That’s the first indication of this from anyone, and it sort of brought a smile to my face. Though I’ve never said that in a class, I have felt that way before.
I reviewed my comment sheets on this particular student when I got home. Her first essay was a B-. Her second, a complete fail. Her third, a B. If she didn’t feel challenged, that’s her problem and not mine, because she obviously hadn’t incorporated much of what I was teaching into her papers. She has not submitted any revisions on any papers, including the F. She's a miss, but it’s a miss on the lower end rather than the upper end. You can’t reach them all. Her indictment was not aimed just at my class, but at all her classes. I’m sure she’ll complain to daddy and try to get into a private college, but as far as I can see the public school students are way ahead of her. I was proud to see the way my students held their own against her accusation, asserting that there was no way that writing was as easy as she claimed. She’ll be in for a nice surprise if she tries to write at the level she wrote in my class at a stricter private college.
The interesting thing to me was that she equated difficulty with “homework.” I was thinking back, and I can’t remember any university level classes that had anything like homework, with the exception of foreign language classes. My first thought was to tell her that she should have said something sooner, because I know I could have provided something more challenging for her. Now that I look at the quality of her work, I see that that isn’t the problem at all. She wants a nun with a ruler to crack her on the knuckles when she doesn’t do her sentence combining and grammar exercises on time, and that’s something that real universities aren’t set up to provide.
The students who are self-motivated and working hard nearly exploded. If I’ve tried to teach them anything, it’s not to accept things at face value and to dig deeper to produce informed opinions. Their revolt against this uninformed opinion made me feel like I had really done my job. What a great way to start closing out the semester!
I was reading Plato’s Cratylus this morning (doesn’t everyone?) and a lightning bolt entered my brain. Cratylus is a sort of dry inquiry into the nature of naming of things, and its foundation is fairly ordinary. As Socrates says, he is speaking only of situations where “an animal produces only after his kind, and not of extraordinary births.” The core idea is that names have a “true” nature and are not relative and arbitrary as asserted by the Sophists. I’m not saying I buy into this, but a weird confluence occured.
I’ve been reading a lot of Bakhtin lately. He has a rather unusual approach to the rhetorical triangle of speaker-language-hearer. Bakhtin substitutes “hero” for language in his formation, suggesting that at the top of the language pyramid there rests a sort of idealized notion of the hero which both the speaker and the hearer interact with, when they form meaning from language. Then, in Craytlus, the derivation of hero was addressed:
Hermogenes: What is the meaning of the word hero?
Socrates: I think there is no difficulty in explaining, for the name is not much altered, and signifies that they were born of love.
Hermogenes: What do you mean?
Socrates: Do you not know that the heroes are demigods?
Hermogenes: What then?
Socrates: All of them sprang either from love of a god for a mortal woman, or of a mortal man for a goddess. Think of the word in the old Attic, and you will see better that the name heroes is only a slight alteration of Eros, from whom the heroes sprang.
That really makes Bakhtin come into focus. Words bring us together, in a natural birth. This also helps me accept the “hero” concept a little better. I’ve always been uncomfortable with them, but as Carlyle argued, it seems as if people need them. The problem is choosing good ones.
Of course I had to do a little more etymological wandering. It seems like the spelling of my name, Jeff, is a mid-nineteenth century formulation. Finding some of the other uses of the name was enlightening. Did you know that as a noun "jeff" is circus slang for a rope? Makes sense, I certainly give myself enough of it at times. It’s also synonymous with “white guy,” in a derogatory sense:
A derogatory term for a man, usu. a ‘hick’ or a bore; esp. used by American Blacks of white men. Also attrib., as jeff artist, hat.
1870 O. LOGAN Before Footlights 202, I thought perhaps they imagined I was a female Jeff Davis, and were going to make a ‘charge a la bayonette’ instanter. 1917 E. E. CUMMINGS Let. 4 June (1969) 26, I escaped repairing with the bums, mutts and Jeffs. 1938 C. CALLOWAY Hi De Ho 16 Jeff, a pest, a bore, an icky. 1946 MEZZROW & WOLFE Really Blues (1957) 375 Jeff Davis, an unenlightened person, a hick from down South; sometimes shortened to jeff. 1952 BERREY & VAN DEN BARK Amer. Thes. Slang (ed. 2) (1954) 391/3 Jeff Davis, jeff, a Southern ‘hick’. 1969 Publ. Amer. Dial. Soc. LI. 29 Names used exclusively by Negroes..jeff, jeffer, jeff davis, jeff artist. 1970 C. MAJOR Dict. Afro-Amer. Slang 70 Jeff,..a white person;..a dull person; a horrible square. 1973 Black World Apr. 57 He wears a jeff hat and a light raincoat.
‘To throw or gamble with quadrats as with dice’ (Jacobi Printers' Vocab. 1888). Hence jeffing vbl. n.
1837 Baltimore Commercial Transcript 7 Nov. 2/1 (Th.), We move that the printers of the U.S. divide off in halves, and ‘jeff’ to see which shall go to digging ditches or picking stone coal for a living. 1841 W. SAVAGE Dict. Art of Printing 428 Jeff. See Throw. 1875 J. SOUTHWARD Dict. Typogr. (ed. 2) 58 Jeffing, throwing with quads... One of..[the party interested] takes up the quads, shakes them..and throws them..after the manner of throwing dice, when the number of quads with the nicks appearing uppermost are counted,..the highest thrower being the winner.
Sometimes I think I enjoy the OED too much. Ah, life's simpler pleasures. Perhaps though, I'm an extraordinary birth and have nothing to do with the history of my name. Though I might wish to be related to Geoffrey Chaucer, I suspect I'm not. I was born a mistake, though my mother never claimed any animosity over it.
2. Resemblance between Man and the Ass. - A round and convex forehead, says Aristotle, is a sign of stupidity.
Long ears are a sign that their possessor is extremely foppish, both in language and action; but indicate, also, good memory. According, to Aristotle, such ears denote a disposition like that of the ass. Polemon and Adamantius say, they denote a dull disposition. Albert assures us that long ears denote stupidity and impudence. Rhases says they are a sign of foolishness and longevity.
According to the opinion of Rhases and Conciliator, he whose face is long, is slow and lazy. Albert says, that such a one is cowardly and sensual, slow in his motions, lazy, and sometimes stubborn.
The under lip, when it advances more than the upper, is a sign that the possessor thinks about a great many vain things, and cherishes vulgar or unpolished ideas.
The union of all these signs in the same head, will be found to correspond exactly with that of the ass, to which it may be compared.
I suppose that saved a lot of time. I remember the frustration. Page after page of marked up nonsense; no, this will never do. Spelling errors in every other word. Fragmented sentences, as I tried to get the stuff I wanted to say out— it never worked. I tried poetry, and failed. I’d get a song stuck in my head, and that would come out instead. But I liked pressing buttons. From the near-silent fftt of a Leica or Rollei to the loud WHAP of a Mamiya RB-67— there it is— it’s done. A moment caught, decisive or not— more often, indecisive.
Grammar made no sense. Are they just making this stuff up? Just what the hell is a dangling participle anyway? A subordinate clause? Why is the future imperfect? These things just didn’t seem nearly as pressing as the problem of air-bells on film. Why did they call them air-bells? Those dark circles on film caused by improper agitation. My perfect pictures, ruined by streaky skies and odd UFO type objects on the negative. They can’t be fixed, go on— try again. It’s science, you can handle this. There must be a reason why some pictures turn out and others don’t. I found out that consistency works; if you find something that works, just do it. Nothing worked when I tried to write but it worked, eventually, when I tried to take pictures. I wanted to be a photographer.
CLUNK— I settled in on the sound of the Nikon. Only the F’s, though. I felt like I needed to see 100% and no one else offered that. The real stuff happens at the edges, and I wanted control. Control, control, control . . . the world must be ordered, there must be some sense behind it all. Standing in the empty concrete and brown spaces of Southern California, I tried to make it work. To find in those rectilinear spaces something that I felt was inside myself. What I found out was— the harder you look, the less likely you are to find it. I suppose what I wanted most of all was mystery, and mystery just won’t come when called. Year after year of trying to make sense, when really all I needed to do was let go and let sense and mystery find me.
After you make the pictures, and look at them, it’s only natural to want to talk about them. I talked a lot. Inevitably, it seemed that other photographers just didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. Somewhere in the gut-shot sore loneliness I began to think different. Maybe it was improper agitation. Too much time by myself, the bubbles settled in and stained me. I started looking for conversation somewhere else, electronic bytes over the phone lines. But that meant I had to learn to write. I had no choice, because there were few people around my town that saw pictures as important in the way that I did. They were my way of thinking about the world.
CLUNK— the words misfired. People got angry with me easily. Didn’t they know I was joking? Wasn’t sarcasm a universal right? I grew into being a writer out of self-defense. I wanted to talk, and writing was the only way I could do it. That’s inevitably what this space is all about: Jeff learning to write. If you think otherwise, I have misfired again. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time. Now Chomsky has made grammar make sense to me, and I’m a million miles away from fumbling poetry, digging deeper into just what I think. In words alone, because at this stage of my life that’s pretty much all that’s left.
I’ve embraced indecision, and let go of consistency. It’s just practice. A writer? Maybe, only in the sense that I’m a guy who writes. Yeah, so I’ve got degrees in it too. But more than that, I’ve majored in frustration— frustration with getting what’s inside into the light so that I can talk about it, and get over it. Words sometimes work, because I now have a sort of control over them that I only dreamed of as a photographer. Who knew? Words are easier!
I started to read Ernesto Grassi’s “Rhetoric and Philosophy” but I had to stop. He started an analysis of Agamemnon by Aeschylus, and I haven’t read that play. Another trip to Barnes and Noble, hoping they have it. I’m terrible that way. If I encounter references to things that I’m not familiar with, I always stop and read the primary text involved. This gets time consuming, and it may explain why I’m usually reading a dozen books at a time. Every time I go into a bookstore, it gets more expensive and my apartment is getting really cramped with books and records and CDs.
I was just at Barnes and Noble yesterday. After successfully resisting it for a couple of weeks, I finally succumbed to the urge to buy the Fantasy Records box set of all the original Creedence Clearwater Revival albums. Ben Fong Torres called them “American Music 101” and I suppose that might be true; they developed both inside and outside of a tradition. They defy placement in an arbitrary label of genre classification. It’s been eerie today, watching Anthony Hopkins play Nixon with the sound turned down on the TV, while listening to this music.
Like Bakhtin’s distinction between speech that reifies and speech which personifies, Creedence does both. It generates an image of the American blues and gospel tradition, a living breathing and shouting music going back for centuries, and a personification of a particular moment of crisis in this country, where people were dying— and dancing and having a good time. Grassi’s essay on rhetoric is a claim that the original structure of language is not rational, but rhetorical. We are inextricably bound to language which moves, which is immediate, not deductive or demonstrative, illuminating and purely indicative. The moods shift from “It ain’t me, It ain’t me / I ain’t no fortunate son” to “Don’t look now someone’s done your starvin’ / Don’t look now, someone’s done your prayin’ too” is sheer genius. The complexity of these simple pop songs is just astonishing. They show, they don’t tell, and like any good history lesson they indicate a slice of where we were without preaching about where we should be.
“Ramble Tamble” is the perfect lesson in the American tone.
Oooh, oooh, down the road I go...
You’ve got to love any theorist that rolls his manuscripts and smokes them when he’s out of rolling papers. I decided I had better try to make some notes on “Toward a Methodology for the Human Sciences.” The essay is as dense and rich as poetry, and full of things I’ve been thinking of. I’m still having trouble with accepting the concept that any mode of thought is monologic, though I would grant that some discourses are more dialogic than others. However, the limits of expression that Bakhtin proposes make sense. It’s amazing how well his description of “understanding” fits with modern brain science. While the acts of understanding are perceived as unitary, each act is independent:
That’s why I distrust monologism. It seems to me that “active dialogic understanding” is in some part, a conversation between that animal level and the more machine/thinking level. I really love Bahktin’s conclusion that “each particular phenomenon is submerged in the primordial elements of the origins of existence,” and that this awareness is not synonymous with individuality. The act of linguistic recreation of the world is an act which means to move to a higher sensual realm, a realm of flight in language. Disquieting is my word, not Bahktin’s, because it seems to me the more the process of thought moves away from concrete reality into symbol, the more alienated we become from our animal selves. It seems so presumptuous to proclaim, as Pasternak’s poem “August” cited by Bakhtin does, that the word gives the world its image:
Farewell, spread of the wings out-straightened
The free stubbornness of pure flight,
The word that gives the world its image,
Creation: miracles and light.
The realization that you cannot construct yourself through writing, that an active renovation of the psyche through the creation of images is a fools project, comes later. Writing ourselves into existence? Sounds great, but a person still must eat and excrete. Is writing a creative process, a recycling process of accumulative images, or an excretory process? I’m leaning toward the latter. Internal conversation creates images, and when they swell up they must be released. They are not images of self, but of a dark aggregate of waste material that must be expunged.
The true author cannot become an image, for he is the creator of every image, of everything imagistic in the work. Therefore, the so called image of the author can only be one of the images of a given work (true, a special kind of image) . . . The author-creator cannot be created in that sphere in which he himself appears as the creator.
Bakhtin raises the possibility of a third consciousness, outside the concepts of I and other, “a ‘neutral’ world where everything is replaceable,” and “question and answer are inevitably depersonified.” Contrary to the conception of Romanticism as being a celebration of the individual, I think the majority of its writers were in tune with this concept. They pushed language to its edge, not to define themselves, but to somehow create such a barrage of images that an outline of that “primordial consciousness” might emerge. I particularly like his delineation of two lines of thinking: reification and personification. Do we write to make our world palpable, in the same way the animal world is, an impossibility given the distance we have between our conscious and animal minds? Or, do we write to reveal a self that inevitably recreates nothing more than endless images?
The real mystery is not in the said, but in the unsaid. That’s where I think the surrealists were onto something. They were attempting to dance upon an edge, and the boundary of that edge is forever shifting:
The “unconscious” can become a creative factor only on the threshold of consciousness and the word (semiverbal/semisignifying consciousness). They are fraught with the word and the potential word. The “unsaid” as a shifting boundary, as a “regulative idea” (in the Kantian sense) of creative consciousness.
Maybe in the end, it’s all shit. The painter Robert Williams once suggested that it was a useful conceptual exercise to stand in front of a supermarket, and picture the state that all the colorful products on the shelves would be in within just a few weeks. They would be processed, and turned into brown. It’s a humbling thought, and a thought that anyone who seeks to write or create images should bear in mind, I think.
In the end, it’s the dialogic nature of the creative self, constantly conversing with a concept of “great time” vs. “small time,” and at once a best friend, and worst enemy, to both of these things
The Soul unto itself
Is an imperial friend -
Or the most agonizing Spy -
An Enemy – could send -
Secure against it’s own -
No treason can it fear -
Itself – it’s Sovereign – Of itself
The Soul should stand in Awe –Emily Dickinson #579
It’s been theories of knowledge week around my house. There is a fracture between language and image; a sort of metaphoric divorce. I’ve been thinking about that gap, because it also represents my “second life” after years of dealing with images. Only lately have those ideas begun to coalesce, because virtually every theorist splits the visual and verbal into independent realms. Indeed, empirical observation tends to support this. As I have recollected before, I find it difficult, if not impossible, to talk and make photographs at the same time.
Reading Roland Barthes' “Photography and the Electoral Appeal” reminds me of the essays on politics and language that I have considered this year, from George Orwell and Toni Morrison. Barthes, as usual is unique in his approach for he deals with photography as “an ellipse of language and an ‘ineffable’ social whole,” proposing that in this sense photography “constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status.”
Barthes goes on to perform a rhetorical analysis of the variety of poses and types of political photographs, suggesting that each one conveys its own sense of ethos which the candidate sells to get himself elected, liberated from the problem of actually dealing with issues. This is distinctly parallel to the point made by Orwell and Morrison, that political language is a tool used to dumb us down and force us to accept violence, unquestioningly.
What is transmitted through the photograph of the candidate are not his plans, but his deep motives, all his family, mental, even erotic circumstances, all this style of life of which he is at once the product, the example, and the bait.
I’ve written a bunch of stuff about emotional memory and trauma in the last few months. The core of it is that emotions are placed into memory without control or processing by higher brain functions. Reading a article about visual research at Vanderbilt suggests that vision works in much the same way. The brain centers that deal with temporality, narrative order, and the like don’t get primary control over what we see. Consequently, it seems unlikely that image is an ellipse, an extension, or modification of language. However, some people like Aristotle offer a fairly compelling argument that language actually springs from images. At first, I pretty much agreed. Now I’m not so sure.
To give one primacy over the other is the problem, particularly when the complex processing required for language seems to occur in many parts of the brain. The level of complexity increases when you examine other research on Braille readers suggesting that there is an abstract level of meta-image that is close to language, and outside the influence of the senses. So, in saying that language springs from images, which images are we speaking of? Sensual images, or abstract mental images unrelated to the senses? Other work on image rotation suggests that “unreal” images are dealt with differently than real ones, consequently finding a connection between image (of the sensual variety) and language seems even more obtuse than at first glance. Like the emotions, confrontation with images of the real may operate at a visceral level where processing is different and not at all language or narrative driven. Can these two systems be reconciled? Are we hopelessly separate and at odds with our animal selves?
Antiphon, the Sophist, seems to have thought so. In the fragments of his lost work On Truth he cuts right to the core problem:
Mind rules the body, but it needs a starting point.
This starting point is the senses. We believe what we see with our eyes more than abstractions
But when we speak, there is no permanent reality behind our words, nothing in fact comparable to the results of seeing and knowing.
Even as a broken mirror, which the glass
In every fragment multiplies; and makes
A thousand images of one that was,
The same, and still the more, the more it breaks;
And thus the heart will do which not forsakes,
Living in shattered guise, and still, and cold,
And bloodless, with its sleepless sorrow aches,
Yet withers on till all without is old,
Showing no visible sign, for such things are untold.Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage Canto III 289-297.
Sounds like living, and thinking, to me.
I really need to keep close track of my students bloopers. They help break the tension of worrying about how they’re doing. From another revision of the paper on medical marijuana:
THC, a chemical erection from marijuana . . .
But when it comes to policing grown-ups at leisure, the war on marijuana is sillier than a weed-fueled giggle. The same government that permits Americans to soften the edges of modern life with Xanax, Tylenol PM, Lotto, and Jagermeister immediately should put a match to the entire anti-pot project. If marijuana amuses the mayor of America's premier city, it should be available to entertain adults in Anytown, USA.
It is commonly assumed that killing to young people about sex will make them do it.
I suppose I've spent so much time dwelling on elegy because it's a form of poetry written to someone who isn't there. That's a situation I'm feeling increasingly comfortable with. I write most of the things I write here to someone who isn't there. I know there are people out there that read this, but they're odd bits of broken image to me, a piece here, a piece there, and only fragments of connection. People are complicated; I suspect it's largely because we ride the same horse that there is a connection at all. Is there something to be said, something that's been learned, something that we all should know? Perhaps in the end it's just to say that we should remember to talk and listen to each other, because the ride doesn't go on for long.
I love the way that Ginsberg turns the corner into the narrative part of his "Kaddish" near the end of the proem:
Now I've got to cut through— to talk to you— as I didn't when you had a mouth.
Forever. And we're bound for that, Forever — like Emily Dickinson's horses
—headed to the End.
They know the way— These Steeds— run faster than we think— it's our own
life they cross— and take with them.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for me;
The carriage held but just ourselves
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
And I had put away
My labor, and my leisure too,
For his civility.
We passed the school where children played,
Their lessons scarcely done;
We passed the fields of gazing grain,
We passed the setting sun.
We paused before a house that seemed
A swelling of the ground;
The roof was scarcely visible,
The cornice but a mound.
Since then 't is centuries; but each
Feels shorter than the day
I first surmised the horses' heads
Were toward eternity.
Death & Horses & Loss— boy, I'm in such a damn cheerful mood today. I hope the coach pulls out of the graveyard soon! Some kinds of death are better than others.
----- --------TITLE: Oh no! DATE: 04/18/2002 4:04:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
In the sheets
there was a man
dancing around
to the simple
Rock & roll
song
After writing the last entry, I stepped over to Luke's place and found out something I didn't want to know: Which John Cusack Are You?
I could have gone a lot longer without this bit of information, though I confess that I do value my record collection perhaps a little too much.
A cluster of articles, poems, and songs get caught in my head. For now, I can’t get past the opening proem of “Kaddish,” because of the way it resonates with other thoughts. How strange a resurrection (needs) must be.
Six years? Maybe it’s seven. It’s been a long time since my divorce. Daphne Merkin’s article in the New Yorker raised some good points. I can’t see myself among the categories mentioned either: the good enoughs, the enhancers, the seekers, the libertines, the competent loners or the defeated. I share her desire to find:
something to help me explain why I am lingering on the stage set of life after the curtain has come down and the others have got married, or died. Marriage and death have always been the two paradigmatic endings in Western culture, which raises the question of how to make sense of the havoc represented by divorce, as either an end or a beginning. Perhaps divorce is a way of living two lives for the price of one. Surely this is what the social historian Lawrence Stone had in mind when he noted that the remarriage rate in the seventeenth century was similar to that of today, with divorce replacing death as its precondition:
Indeed, it looks very much as if modern divorce is little more than a functional substitute for death. The decline of the adult mortality rate after the late eighteenth century, by prolonging the expected duration of marriage to unprecedented lengths, eventually forced Western society to adopt the institutional escape-hatch of divorce.
But let’s have a smile for the old engine driver. While I might be called either a seeker or a competent loner, or on occasion be numbered among the defeated, mostly I strive to be true to my nature. As Blake said in the letter I put up a few days ago, “Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all offences committed against me.” If he learned one lesson during his time as William Haley’s lap-dog, it was this: “that a too passive manner. inconsistent with my active physiognomy had done me much mischief.”
The strange thing about my own particular mourning regarding my divorce is not that I think it was something that shouldn’t have happened, and indeed the end of my marriage seemed perfectly natural and peaceful, slipping away in the night due to natural causes. Instead, it’s the particularly violent loss of the life I thought I was escaping to, and I try to find solace somewhere. It was a loss, a trauma, not a death though I wish that there was some way I could say that she is dead to me now, and mourn it. As Ginsberg observes in the proem to Kaddish, “Death is that remedy that all singers dream of, sing, remember, prophesy.” And I turned back to those majestic stanzas that Ginsberg speaks of, in Shelley’s Adonais.
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven's light forever shines, Earth's shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-colour'd glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die,
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Follow where all is fled!—Rome's azure sky,
Flowers, ruins, statues, music, words, are weak
The glory they transfuse with fitting truth to speak.
Why linger, why turn back, why shrink, my Heart?
Thy hopes are gone before: from all things here
They have departed; thou shouldst now depart!
A light is pass'd from the revolving year,
And man, and woman; and what still is dear
Attracts to crush, repels to make thee wither.
The soft sky smiles, the low wind whispers near:
'Tis Adonais calls! oh, hasten thither,
No more let Life divide what Death can join together.
That Light whose smile kindles the Universe,
That Beauty in which all things work and move,
That Benediction which the eclipsing Curse
Of birth can quench not, that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being blindly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea,
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst; now beams on me,
Consuming the last clouds of cold mortality.
The breath whose might I have invok'd in song
Descends on me; my spirit's bark is driven,
Far from the shore, far from the trembling throng
Whose sails were never to the tempest given;
The massy earth and sphered skies are riven!
I am borne darkly, fearfully, afar;
Whilst, burning through the inmost veil of Heaven,
The soul of Adonais, like a star,
Beacons from the abode where the Eternal are.
My spirit's bark is far from shore. It’s not the death that bothers me, but the loss of a star to steer by. I walk along on that dome of crushed glass, and pick up a few pieces and write about them. These things are but stains to eternity, but they’re my stains. And I hate doing laundry, or looking for a remedy.
It’s that time of year again. Swamp-like humidity in the morning, burning off in just a few hours. Sticky yellow residue of sex everywhere, gumming up wiper-blades and making it hard to see. My car needs a shower, it’s getting really funky.
But then there’s the green. A thousand shades of it, bursting out everywhere. There’s something special about this time of year, because the black trunks are still visible behind the subtle shades now decorating the spidery network of trees. I accept myself as a metaphor-making creature, and I’ve been thinking about how the color of this state is truly green, in every sense of the word. It’s a big change from where I’m from.
The dominant color of the Great Central Valley of California is brown. Green occurs in the patchwork fields, since most of the fruits and vegetables for the country come from there, but it’s mostly monolithic, non-variegated patches of a single cash crop in the fields that can afford to pay for the water it takes to grow them. What sticks out in my mind are those empty fields, the stretches of brown sandy dirt, seldom impeded by a stone put there by nature. Instead, the fixtures are concrete, and often covered with fading graffiti. And the people turn brown too, as they work in those fields. It is truly a land of dirt, dust, and brown. Infinitely variable shades, really. It takes a long time to become acclimated to them, and to develop a language akin to an arctic tribe, that need not really have a thousand words for snow, but instead endless variants of modifiers and types to describe the state of the snow. In California, what matters most is the state of the dirt, not the individual crops placed in it; most of what grows is not wild, but transplanted from somewhere else. When plants are transplanted, there is often a shock, and leaves turn brown.
I now live in a land of somewhere else. It’s green. It’s green with envy, as one of the poorest states in the union. It’s green with naiveté, as they still fight the civil war over race issues oblivious to the fact that one day they, like the rest of the country, are likely to be overcome by brown. But it’s also green with brilliant underbrush, in a million shades, covering the blackened underside of trees that once rooted in the brutal clay soil, refuse to give way. Every spring, the green comes back. It seems so miraculous, so beautiful, and above all, so wet.
Aristotle wanted to blame everything on moisture. Moisture, however, is where life springs from. I like living in a wet world; I don’t mind taking a shower to wash off the residue from time to time. While you’re being born, it’s bound to get messy. It just seems, well, natural. Ah, I get it now, that’s why they call Arkansas the natural state.
Psalm IV
Now I’ll record my secret vision, impossible sight at the face of God.
It was no dream, I lay broad waking on a fabulous couch in Harlem
having masturbated for no love, and read half naked an open book of Blake on my lap
Lo & behold! I was thoughtless and turned a page and gazed on the living Sun-flower
and heard a voice, it was Blake’s, reciting in earthly measure:
the voice rose out of the page to my secret ear never heard before—
I lifted my eyes to the window, red walls of buildings flashed outside, endless sky sad in Eternity
sunlight gazing on the world, apartments of Harlem standing in the universe—
each brick and cornice stained with intelligence like a vast living face—
the great brain unfolding and brooding in the wilderness!—Now speaking aloud with Blake’s voice—
Love! thou patient presence and bone of the body! Father! thy careful watching and waiting over my soul!
My son! My son! the endless ages have remembered me! My son! My son! Time howled anguish in my ear!
My son! My son! my father wept and held me in his dead arms.Alan Ginsberg, 1960.
The essential nature of a sunflower is that it always turns toward the light. I’m not too familiar with Ginsberg, but in an odd coincidence I had just purchased his Collected Poems: 1947-1980 a few days before In a Dark Time started to take him on. I bought it mostly for “Kaddish,” which was recommended to me by someone I trust as a tour de force in elegy, a favorite genre of mine. Blake never wrote any elegies. He was constantly looking toward the sun. Blake’s sunflower is a complex thing, weary and yet patient.
AH! SUN-FLOWER
Ah Sun-flower! weary of time,
Who countest the steps of the sun:
Seeking after that sweet golden clime
Where the travelers journey is done.
Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow:
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.William Blake, Songs of Experience, 1794.
I suppose that like Loren, I find much of Ginsberg’s verse to be simplistic and cartoonish, particularly when compared with his self-proclaimed spiritual father, Blake. To compare them isn’t very fair, but it is inevitable. Ginsberg was certainly a child at Blake’s feet, but he knew that.
For a look at a black and white version of the plate which this poem appears on, click here. If you click the symbol in the upper left, they have a variety of audio versions available, including Ginsberg singing it.
Oh, and for the record: Blake was against masturbation. He thought that religion caused it:
In the secret shadows of her chamber, the youth shut up from
The lustful joy, shall forget to generate. & create an amorous image
In the shadows of his curtains and in the folds of his silent pillow.
Are not these the places of religion? the rewards of continence?
The self enjoyings of self denial? Why dost thou seek religion?
Is it because acts are not lovely, that thou seekest solitude,
Where the horrible darkness is impressed with reflections of desire.Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 7:5-11
Dear Sir This perhaps was sufferd to Clear up some doubts & to give opportunity to those whom I doubted to clear themselves of all imputation. If a Man offends me ignorantly & not designedly surely I ought to consider him with favour & affection. Perhaps the simplicity of myself is the origin of all offences committed against me. If I have found this I shall have learned a most valuable thing well worth three years perseverance. I have found it! It is certain! that a too passive manner. inconsistent with my active physiognomy had done me much mischief I must now express to you my conviction that all is come from the spiritual World for Good & not for Evil. Give me your advice in my perilous adventure. burn what I have peevishly written about any friend. I have been very much degraded & injuriously treated. but if it all arise from my own fault I ought to blame myself
O why was I born with a different face
Why was I not born like the rest of my race
When I look each one starts! when I speak I offend
Then I'm silent & passive & lose every Friend
Then my verse I dishonour. My pictures despise
My person degrade & my temper chastise
And the pen is my terror. the pencil my shame
All my Talents I bury, and Dead is my Fame
I am either too low or too highly prizd
When Elate I am Envy'd, When Meek I'm despisd
This is but too just a Picture of my Present state I pray God to keep you & all men from it & to deliver me in his own good time. Pray write to me & tell me how you & your family Enjoy health. My much terrified Wife joins me in love to you & Mrs Butts & all your family. I again take the liberty to beg of you to cause the Enclosd Letter to be deliverd to my Brother & remain
Sincerely & Affectionately Yours
WILLIAM BLAKE
When he composed this letter to Thomas Butts, Blake was about to go on trial for sedition. It’s a peculiar tale. An unruly soldier came into his back yard while he was composing poetry. Blake asked him to leave. He didn’t. So, Blake pushed him down the street, pinning his arms behind his back, back to the tavern where he came from. The soldier, Scofield, conspired with his friend, Mr. Cock (appropriate, no?) to have Blake arrested for sedition.
It was the end of what Blake considered to be his exile to the coast, and he was returning to London to write Jerusalem. Sometimes, I think of Arkansas as my Felpham. I hope they don’t try me for sedition when I try to get out.
I had to find it, before I could work. I remember reading about an artist, I think it was Jasper Johns, who said regarding his alcoholism "I drink to kill the noise." The rational mind sets up so many obstacles to understanding, making it hard to just be somewhere and experience what is happening there. I've never once tried to make a "statement" through a photograph, I've only wanted to show the things that pricked me, generated an interest in me, or more accurately, made me feel.
Art doesn't say, it shows. That's where the conversational metaphors for communication break down. Conversation, especially in one's head, really makes you miss things. You concentrate to much on what is being said, and neglect what is being experienced. It's distinction that is often taught in writing classrooms: "Show, don't tell." But as soon as an image appears in our heads, the only way to get it out is to tell someone about it. But that must come after the experience itself, otherwise you miss it. The bio piece on Johns I linked covers this well:
That distinction between saying something and being something corresponds precisely to Wittgenstein's distinction between what can be said and what shows itself, and the point about art is that it shows rather than says. Johns's sense of the distinction between saying and showing produced a memorable declaration: 'When you begin to work with the idea of suggesting, say, a particular psychological state of affairs, you have eliminated so much from the process of painting that you make an artificial statement which is, I think, not desirable. I think one has to work with everything and accept the kind of statement which results as unavoidable, or as a helpless situation. I think that most art which begins to make a statement fails to make a statement because the methods used are too schematic or too artificial. I think that one wants from painting a sense of life. The final suggestion, the final statement, has to be not a deliberate statement but a helpless statement.'
Shortly after the recording ended, he added: 'To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.'
Emotional memory is iconic. I suspect that's the land that I dwell in most often. I used to sit on the couch for at least an hour, in something akin to meditation, before I would go out and take photographs. I needed the time to finish those conversations in my head, to clear it out to make room for experience. When I would finally get there, I tried to be open like a raw nerve waiting for the electricity to strike, to pass through from my eyes to my fingers without hesitation or second guess. To really be there, instead of thinking about being there.
When I went back to school, I tried to do what everyone tells you to do. Take notes carefully, follow along in the text, and all that. It just didn't work for me. When I discovered that I am different, that I can take in a complex argument at a glance without painstakingly jotting down all the details and noting and highlighting a text, I finally became comfortable with school. I do the same thing I did as an artist. I just clear my head, show up, and look and listen. That's enough for me. I just make sure I'm there. Unlike most of my fellow students, I seldom write in my books. I write in my head.
When I became a teacher, I was given one piece of advice: "Bring yourself to class." I knew exactly what that meant. You have to be there, and avoid getting lost in your concept of what a class should be, and just concentrate on what it is. You have to embrace that helpless feeling that asks what the hell am I doing here? You make it up as you go along, or at least I do, in response to what is happening at the time. I've got lots of "selves," and I bring them all with me wherever I go. But I've got to shut them up most of the time, so I can hear what other people are saying.
There are different ways of killing the noise. I grew up reading Zen texts, matured using chemical enhancements, and returned eventually to a more idiosyncratic method of clearing my head involving a lot of blank staring, and an occasional cry. The question of meditation always reminds me of a funny story about Warren Criswell, a somewhat eccentric Arkansas painter. A student once asked him at a lecture if he used meditation.
----- --------TITLE: Madonna DATE: 04/14/2002 11:17:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Medication?
Oh, meditation! Well, medication, yes. Meditation, no.
To labours mighty, with vast strength, with his mighty chains.
In pulsations of time, & extensions of space, like Urns of Beulah
With great labour upon his anvils, & ladles the Ore
He lifted, pouring the clay ground prepar’d with art;
Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems;
That whenever any Spectre began to devour the Dead,
He might feel the pain as if a man gnawed at his own tender nerves,
Then Erin came forth from the Furnaces, & all the Daughters of Beulah
Came from the Furnaces, by Los’s mighty power for Jerusalems
Sake: walking up and down among the Spaces of Erin:
And the Sons and Daughters of Los came forth in perfection lovely!
And the Spaces of Erin reached from the starry heights to the starry depth.William Blake, Jerusalem 11:1-12
There is a lot of speculation why Blake drew a swan with a woman’s body on this plate. I don’t buy most of it. The glosses read as if the swan is dying; the text underneath does not reflect a scene of death, but of birth. This scene is early in the massive poem; Los is labouring at his furnace, attempting to shape the world to match his “system,” striving to instill forgiveness through sympathy, as humanity grows and shapes itself. Erin is of course connected with the revolutionary forces in Ireland at the time Blake was writing; he saw some hope in the growth of revolutionary spirit around the world in his time. But pay close attention to the language used here. Erin walked "up and down through the spaces of Erin," much like Satan in the Book of Job. Is revolution a good thing? There seems to be a subtext of mixed feelings throughout the opening of Jerusalem, a subtle shift from Blake's earlier revolutionary politics. I feel sure that Yeats meditated deeply about this plate, as he did about most of Blake’s work, and saw in this a justification for re-writing Blake’s biography to make him an Irishman.
I feel reasonably certain that Yeats connected this plate with Leda, as I do myself. Leda was raped by Zeus. Leda had four children. two human, and two half-god. All twins, sprung from two contrary eggs. The children were born of rape. Some Blake commentators have remarked that the sad image is at odds with the happy scene of the plate, others have insisted that the swan is actually happy. I think Yeats, more than anyone else, has a real sense of what is going on here. Dr. Murphy, in his inimitable way, saw this legend as one of the primary ingredients that Yeats incorporated into his complex system of gyres, contraries and negations spinning against each other creating all of human history. A great and complex history was borne from this point, how could anyone know of the tragedies that would follow?
Leda and the Swan
A sudden blow:the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?WB Yeats
Leda’s children were Clytemnestra, Helen and Castor and Pollux. Obviously, Helen could be considered responsible for the Trojan war, and the root of the problem of war on the planet might be traced to the rape of Leda. I think the question Yeats asks is a good one. Did Leda know what this rape would bring? The image of the swan, through this allegory (not through symbolic interpretation) is rich with its associations to violence, war, and revolution. It’s a bittersweet moment, indeed. Brother against brother, we struggle.
The allegory holds strong to the present day, and even shows up in a song by Dinosaur Jr. The swan, for me, will always be connected with the story of Leda. We can’t seem to get past the rape, and the wars that still follow this loss of innocence.
Forget the swan
It's floating through the abyss
Under the brig my head swings down
Beware her wrath, the image gone
The Shell is crumbling, fix my frown
This spell would be clear in non-tradition
And stepping on these pieces of pain and smirk
And rape goes through to sin my eyes
And shapes know where the heartache will lurk
Forget the swan, a stone swims near
A stone has come, if I could cheer
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
Drifting among this rubble
I guess the waiting, wished I would
I found a box, untethered and true
Possession it understood
Forget the swan, a stone swims near
A stone has come, if I could cheer
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
How I tried to warn my neighbor
But the corn was much too high
In confusion up and threw him, woke up every day
But it's not too late brother, I'll still say you were mine
Forget the swan, a stone swims near
A stone has come, if I could cheer
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
Forget the swan, the dreams are gone
The pain goes on, they fly at dawn
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
Forget the swan
Same scene, three writers. Go figure. Some legends don't want to die. Collapsing the richness of the story into a hard and fast symbol denies its complexity. Is humanity a good thing or a bad thing? Well, it's complicated.
Oh, and on a final note, versions of the legend differ. In some versions, it wasn't a swan and Leda, but instead a goose and Nemesis. Loren's connection has more weight than just idle conjecture about birds. It's not that "swan" means something special, it's the story that lies behind it. It could just as easily be a goose. And as both Blake and Yeats conjecture, it's also possible that after the rape Gods and humans might share each others characteristics, as Blake has so aptly drawn.
After all, as Blake wrote in one of his earliest tractates: "God becomes as we are, / that we may be as he is."
I logged onto the OED online to check something out, and just for the heck of it I checked the entries that were just added last month. Would you believe they have just got around to adding mindfucker?
mindfucker, n.
coarse slang.[< MIND n. + FUCKER n., after MIND-FUCK v.]
1. Something that disturbs, astounds, or amazes.
1969 in J. E. Lighter Hist. Dict. Amer. Slang (1997) II. 559 This thing is a real mindfucker! 1971 Oz 34 42/1 Some gigs Jimi [Hendrix] was terrible, some nights he was good as it ever gets. His records generally contained, an equal mix of absolute killers, real total mindfuckers, and interesting little also-rans, marking-time things, ultimately just fillers. 1980 A. MAUPIN More Tales of City (1989) lvii. 188 Jon shook his head incredulously. ‘That is..a mind-fucker.’ 1993 R. RUCKER et al. Mondo 2000 71/1 It's a real mind-fucker.
2. A person who psychologically manipulates another.
1971 E. E. LANDY Underground Dict. 133 Mind fucker,..[a] person who attempts to manipulate another's thinking without consideration for the other. 1980 National Lampoon Aug. 67 You're some kind of mindfucker. You're a witch. 1992 Harper's Mag. May 36/1 In common usage, the term ‘mindfucker’ refers to someone who manipulates other people, who fucks them over emotionally or financially
Why does it not surprise me that one of the earliest attributions is a reference to Jimi Hendrix?
But this wasn't what I was looking for at all. I actually was looking for a word that I found in the online Malleus Maleficarum that Luke so graciously pointed out. Believe it or not, one of my professors used this historic work in a rhetorical theory class. But then again, he did his dissertation on something regarding the rhetorical structures of Gothic death metal... But I digress, again, as usual. The passage that caught my eye was this:
JUST as the generative faculty can be bewitched, so can inordinate love or hatred be caused in the human mind. First we shall consider the cause of this, and then, as far as possible, the remedies.
Philocaption, or inordinate love of one person for another, can be caused in three ways. Sometimes it is due merely to a lack of control over the eyes; sometimes to the temptation of devils; sometimes to the spells of necromancers and witches, with the help of devils.
Philocaption seems to be an interesting problem. I've suffered from it from time to time. I think my problems largely stem from the first reason, a lack of control over my eyes. But I suppose I'm open to the suggestion that I'm tempted by the devil. Unfortunately, this charming word isn't even in the OED, let alone any other online dictionary. It's a charming thought, but the Malleus Maleficarum (Witches Hammer) insists that strong men can resist:
It is said that when a man does not give way to temptation he does not sin, but it is an exercise for his virtue; but this is to be understood of the temptation of the devil, not of that of the flesh; for this is a venial sin even if a man does not yield to it. Many examples of this are to be read.
. . .There are still some strong men cruelly enticed by witches to this sort of love, so that it would seem that they could never restrain themselves from their inordinate lust for them, yet these often most manfully resist the temptation of lewd and filthy enticements, and by the aforesaid defences overcome all the wiles of the devil.
Sorry, I'm with Tom Waits on that one: "Temptation, temptation / I just can't resist." Then again, it seems like a fun cop-out, oddly connected with the National Lampoon reference in the OED: "You're some kind of mindfucker. You're a witch. " But maybe the real problem is that I like witches. My ex-wife's mother was a bona-fide Wiccan, and she was one of the nicest people I ever met. No mother-in-law jokes from me; she was a fine lady. I don't really suspect the witches; I suspect that my eyes are the source of most of my mindfucks.
----- --------TITLE: Someone to talk to DATE: 04/11/2002 11:58:00 AM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: She needed someone to talk toI listened, but I knew that these were questions with no answers. If it were anything other than the cruelty of life itself that was the problem, if it were drug addiction, or alcoholism, or abuse there are agencies that might help her. But it wasn’t that. It was just life, and sometimes life sucks. More than anything else, she just needed someone to talk to. But there was a rub; part of her problem was caused by the “system,” so it seemed difficult to tell her that she needed to go into the system for help. I’ve never felt so unqualified to deal with things before.
As is my usual response to unfamiliar things, I decided I could research the system to see if there was a way to cut through some of the crap. Every door in my department was closed. Out of town. No one to talk to. I went by several other campus agencies, hoping to find someone who would know where to go. I got some suggestions. I came home and made some calls. It seemed like it was a dead end. All the right people were going on vacation. I went back to campus, and looked up an old acquaintance I hadn’t seen in a year or more. She teaches in the School of Social Work, and trains the people I was trying to reach.
She made some calls, and got some more answers for me. Six weeks, at least, before I could get this girl someone to talk to who was qualified. I took the numbers, and knew that it wasn’t the golden thread, it was only a realization of the truth. If you’re a normal person with a problem instead of a criminal or a drug addict there is no place to turn. You’re on your own. Get used to it. This isn’t what I want to tell my student. This isn’t what I wanted to tell her at all. I began to become even more traumatized myself, knowing that there wasn’t anything I could do.
I felt oddly displaced as I walked away from the social work offices. My old mentor from the English department shouted out into the hallway in a building I usually don’t pass through anymore. I walked over to the doorway. “We’re talking about your book, Jeff: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” I stood there for a little while, silently while Dr. Yoder passionately conveyed the complexity of Blake’s model to a new crop of students. Looking at the lists of attributes on the board, I was reminded that Blake’s project was to reunify reason and the emotions, to allow them to forgive each other. I remember how long it took for me to really “get it” and understand just how important some of those “simple” passages were. I thought about the way thinking hard about complicated ideas made me feel less alone. It’s been a comfort to have conversations in my head, interrogating these ideas and trying to understand where these long dead voices are coming from. But it’s all inside my head.
As I walked away to teach my next class, I felt scared to realize that I didn’t really have anyone, in the physical world, to talk to either. Sure, I can write my whiney blather here, and often receive consoling e-mails. I’ve got skills, of a sort. But one of those skills isn’t being able to solve life problems, particularly those that are insoluble. For my next class, I tried to lighten myself up a bit by doing what I can do: explaining complicated topics as simply as possible. Today, when I got up I just started trying to get past that feeling of ineffecualness. Surfing on a tangent, deluding myself into thinking that things will be okay, I found a poem that hit me square in the forehead:
The Boat is a Lever
--after Simone Weil
After my student went to the doctor to
Check out the rash speckling his
Right hand and found out he had
Leukemia, that the cancer had spread
Into his lungs, then where did he go?
I've called his number several times.
Flat-bottom boats light in water.
Brown brack and mud smell,
Stumps like chewed-off candles,
Cypress knees, knock and small
Talk floating over water, a motor
Chuffing off, a small blue cloud of excess
Gasoline spreads an ugly
Rainbow on tan water. Every
Thing rests on its proposition
Including smooth isobars along the bay.
Since collective thought cannot exist
As thought it passes into things.
Chemo takes a few gray hairs. Mustard
Cruises the bloodstream under a blizzard
Of white cells. Subdued by the arbitrary,
Suspended, the one in the boat still needs
To row it -- to direct the muscles, to
Maintain equilibrium with air
And water. If water is waveless
Then the boat reads by leading marks.
There is nothing more beautiful
Than a boat.Ralph Burns, from Swamp Candles
But the dedication rang a big bell. I knew I’d read something about Simone Weil this week. I searched until I found it in an entry at If. I dug a little further, and found some interesting quotes:
Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.
The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say, "What are you going through?"—Simone Weil
Found at the Vocabula Review:
It seems that it would be wise for the writers of the present to renounce for themselves the hope of creating masterpieces. Their poems, plays, biographies, novels are not books but notebooks, and Time, like a good schoolmaster, will take them in his hands, point to their blots and erasions, and tear them across; but he will not throw them into the waste-paper basket. He will keep them because other students will find them very useful. It is from notebooks of the present that the masterpieces of the future are made. Literature, as the critics were saying just now, has lasted long, has undergone many changes, and it is only a short sight and a parochial mind that will exaggerate the importance of these squalls, however they may agitate the little boats now tossing out at sea. The storm and the drenching are on the surface; and continuity and calm are in the depths.— Virginia Woolf, How It Strikes a Contemporary
While you're there, you might enjoy a nice article about famous last words.
I just love the idea of Time as a good schoolmaster. History is nothing if not pedantic. Look at what fools we once were, as we work harder at being better fools today. Great books as squalls on the oceans of time? You've got to love it. But I also love Karl Marx's last words: "Last words are for fools who haven't said enough."
Few people would accuse me of that. I talk too much.
But I suppose there's a downside to that. It was funny, after writing about Metafilter as an arena of forensic discourse, to read another academic use it to trace reactions to the poor guy who only wanted a handjob. It does pay to be careful what you say.
----- --------TITLE: Rastaman DATE: 04/09/2002 11:30:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I learned something from one of my fellow students tonight. I commented that every “multicultural” event I’ve ever attended in Arkansas is predominantly attended by black folks. She said that when you advertise an event as multicultural back here, that usually means black.
It was a “town hall” meeting about racism put on by two local radio stations (with the same owner, imagine that), one with a mainly black audience, and one with a nearly exclusively white audience. It made me think about a lot of things. It was supposed to be a “rhetorical” observation trip, to see deliberative rhetoric in action, but as far as I’m concerned it was purely epideictic: praise and blame. There was a lot of that going on. I glanced down at the notepad of the black gentleman sitting next to me. He was taking notes, and the header on the page he put a few short comments in was “Notes to Self.” The first item he had written there was “Quit blaming yourself”
Racial issues are a weird thing in Arkansas. I was reminded that there is a lot of history that I wasn’t here for (I’ve only been here six years or so). People have long memories, and institutions are slow to change. I did not know, for example, that the governing board of the University of Arkansas consists of nine white folks, and one black person. It almost became ten white people last year, due to a proposed appointment by the lily-white Baptist minister governor (who looks a lot like Gomer Pyle; talks like him too). As the white senator who was present read the list of committees in state government, noting the racial imbalance in every aspect of state government, it was appalling. Why does this power structure survive? There does seem to be a big problem. The figure that was thrown out regarding the balance of population was 2.5 million whites, and around 500,000 blacks statewide.
Then, I started to think about my day to day experience. The faculty of my state-funded university is primarily white. However, it seems quite likely that this has as much to do with the fact that as universities go, they pay poorly. The population of the school is nearly 30% black. There is one black assistant professor in the rhetoric department, added only a year or so ago, and one who is in the process of becoming tenured faculty. I suppose there are about 15 full-time professors, so that’s a little better than the norm but not much. They actually went after Professor Cox, I think, to come back after going through the undergraduate program here and getting his Ph.D. in Texas. There are no “good-ole boys” in the department though, and the disparity has more to do with the applicants for openings rather than hiring practices, at least in my opinion. The best and brightest black students move out of state.
And in my limited experience, there are a lot of great black students. A lot of black students in my classes are the product of private schools. My classes, just by the luck of the draw I think, are a bit heavier on the black side than the university average. I adjusted my teaching strategy as a result. I decided I needed to use more black authors.
But the problem is, now that I think about it, I’m painting a pretty dismal picture of the white race. Most of the most memorable essays were written by black writers. I need to dig up some better white folks to use, I think. The black writers I used were almost too good. I may be slighting the white students, making them feel a little inferior. I need to work on that. The white writers I used were good too, but a bit more inaccessible than the black writers, even for the white students.
One of my fellow rhetoric students, Jason (the preacher) who also teaches in public school, brought up that he was audited in his class to make sure he displayed enough black faces on the posters on the walls. He asked if “counting” the presence of black faces in the classroom wasn’t just an artificial token system that had a bad effect on the atmosphere of the classroom. No one answered him. Another student in my class observed that there was not a single Mexican face in the meeting. They are the largest growing minority group back here, and it won’t be long before they overtake the black population. There was little going on except blame-casting, mostly at institutional and media practices. I never turn on the media, so I can’t say, and the institutional guidelines toward fair practices seem to be firmly in place. So what’s the problem? I suspect it’s just money, pure and simple. This is a poor state, with the most poorly paid teachers in the US. Of course that makes getting an education cheaper, and that’s why I’m doing it here. Another side of the “low-pay” equation is that there are few real prima-donnas here. There are some brilliant people, working at a second-tier school because they love it, instead of for money alone.
In the town-hall meeting a guy got up and claimed that black people weren’t allowed to rent at any of the better apartment complexes in West Little Rock. I live in West Little Rock, the “rich” side of town. A black family lives next door. Most of the complex are Indian or Pakistani. I just had to shake my head. While I wouldn’t call it upscale, it’s certainly middle class. I just don’t get it. I think the money issues are a much bigger factor than residual racism. Sometimes I think it’s just time to get over it. There are some staggering imbalances that need to be taken care of, this is sure, but I don’t think that they are primarily racist issues. It’s about the money.
One of the members of the panel was a black judge and reverend, and he kept ranting about racism in the system. A fellow from the nation of Islam (who held up one of their newspapers as a political stunt at the end) was quick to point out that the judge attended white schools growing up, and lived in a white neighborhood. I hear a lot of rhetoric about racism, and it’s hard to figure out who to believe. I see a lot of black folks “movin’ on up” and later, movin’ on out. I know that there are a lot of pockets of white whackos out in the sticks, but tonight I also heard from a black man in a wheelchair who was consistently reelected to a seat on the city council of Jonesboro, by margins of up to 70%, in a town that has a black population of 7%. I really can’t figure this place out.
Reading an article about The Color Blind Web this morning worried me too. I wonder if I should put a banner up listing my color? I suppose the majority is rather pinkish, with a big patch of strawberry-blondish-brown with a few streaks of gray hair on top, offset with rapidly graying blue eyes? Why does this still matter? There were police at this town-hall meeting tonight. A patrol-car pulled out of the parking-lot as I left. Was it because it was a “multicultural event”? One great question came up tonight. White teenagers are not chased out of the Kmart parking lot a couple of blocks from me when they gather on a Saturday night. Black teenagers, in a similar spot not far from the university are. Now that’s a thought provoking question. I’ve seen that in action. As much as I wish I could, I can’t turn my back on racism.
I’ve been reading a lot of difficult things this semester. Not difficult in that they are intellectually challenging (though there has been some of that), but difficult in the sense that they are trauma narratives, narratives about the darkest side of human experience.
When I got home tonight, I read another narrative that I have to take notice of. Mike Golby is an astounding writer. I strongly recommend reading this post. It should be read. It’s not something that will cheer you up, but it does express what a sad and beautiful thing life is. Good writing is often hard. So is life.
I read something else today that I must have stitched on a pillow, or perhaps tattooed on a bicep:
Effective writing is affective writing.
The same essay that had this quotable quote told the story of a professor that had been teaching writing for years with his head, and it had consistently failed to improve the performance of his students. When he began to teach with his heart, only then did his students improve.
Guy Allen teaches at the University of Toronto, and has received a 40 million dollar grant to found a writing center. I like his approach, but it feels so weird to read about it. My journey through life was completely the opposite. I’ve run the first forty years with my heart, and only recently discovered that I have a head. But I don’t plan on putting away my heart any time soon.
When I was a kid, it seemed part of the equipment a person needs to hide behind. I wore mirrored biker shades, and it reflected back the people who would look at me. I can take care of myself, thank you. If you want something to concentrate on, concentrate on yourself.
But I had to give them up. Besides the fact that I was constantly losing them, or sitting on them, when I became a photographer they just didn’t work right. If you look through a viewfinder with sunglasses on, you can’t focus. You also can’t see the edges of the frame. All of the interesting stuff usually happens on the edge of the frame. I tried leaving them on, and then taking them off when I wanted to take a picture. This didn’t work. My eyes were constantly adjusting back and forth, and by the time I got it together the picture was gone.
So I gave up on them, but I wanted to pick them up again when I started back to school. I was worried about my eyes. They had always been better than perfect, but all the close reading was making them get blurry. I took a test. Slightly below normal in one eye, perfect in the other. No dice. No glasses for me. I think the second time around, it was more of badge, rather than a barrier, that I was looking for.
Glasses are a sign of imperfection. And I’ve never felt so imperfect as I did when I returned to school. Those who can’t do, teach, and all that. But you’re a natural born teacher, my friends would say. Yes, I suppose so. Naturally born second-rate. Naturally born imperfect. Except for my damn eyes. Why couldn’t they be as imperfect as I felt?
Now there are circles under my eyes. They get a little darker every year. If I only wore glasses, I could hide them. Too many late nights. Too much going on behind my eyes. Just too much. Sometimes I wish I didn’t see so much. It makes me easily distracted. It makes it hard to maintain relationships, when you change at such a rate that from one day to the next you’re a different person. If I had glasses, maybe I would be more comfortable with standing still. Maybe I could be comfortable with being damaged.
Walking back from my car today, I bent over to pick up a pair of glasses. They were tortoise-shell horn-rims for a woman, lying in the middle of a handicapped parking space. Nope, they didn’t suit me either. I dropped them off in the lost and found, but I wished they had been mine. I like glasses, but they just don’t seem to work for me.
If I would have smoked a joint before reading this particular essay about medical marijuana, some of the typos would have been even funnier. I wonder if it would be out of line to advise against smoking a joint before proofreading?
Grading the essays today was a lot more fun. I can’t figure out why the 12pm people are so far ahead of the 8am class. It started out just the opposite. There were some innovative essays from the second class, and it helps me forget about my frustration from yesterday. Yes, at least some of the people are getting it. I graded hard, but there were several A papers in this group. Perhaps more important than that though, was that most of them were interesting to read!
I’m tapped out now. Zoning out and watching Six Feet Under. The show has really increased in depth and complexity in its second season, and it reminds me just how complex relationships are. I almost feel relieved I’m not in one. Just me in my cave with this glowing terminal, trying to come up with something interesting to say. I gave up on “outer badly” experiences years ago, so it’s just the TV and a glass of wine.
And that’s all right. I’m just looking for that Dean Martin glow tonight.
Maybe it’s because I started out the morning by reading Blake and Shelley, but I’m ready to take back everything I said about how great my students were. I tricked myself, I think, by reading the essays I knew would be good as a preview. Now that I’ve worked my way through the stack from my 8am class, I’m ready to take a baseball bat to most of them.
There is little evidence of thought in most of those papers. While they’ve got mechanics down okay, they just seem to be allergic to thought. Just recite the information from the book, that will get you through. . . in a pigs eye. I hate to think of failing over half of them, but if it comes down to it I will. The 12pm papers should be better, I hope, at least from the sample I looked at. Why is it so hard for some people to think? Why do we make life a project of just “getting by”?
Of course I’m just pissed, and overstating the case. I also went through a bunch of revisions that are showing real progress. But they’re not there yet, and I’ve really got to hammer on them in the next few weeks to get them ready. I’m not going to pass anyone who can’t construct a credible argument, no way, no how.
At least 30% of them are making a genuine effort, and making progress. I haven’t quite figured out what to do with the rest. I may have to force them to write an essay about how to write an essay, in class. They seem to be able to tell me when I ask. So why aren’t they doing it? Is it just pure laziness? Next time, the assignment will be due before spring break. I think that’s part of the problem. They just threw it together after they got back. No, this just won’t do.
Mr. Roger’s musings about Wordsworth and the definition of a poet reminded me of an issue I’d been meaning to write something about. It’s something about the “I” (ack!).
When people think of Romanticism, usually it’s Wordsworth who’s trotted out as the poster-boy. It’s a fair enough assumption, but this sort of unary lumping strategy really undercuts the complexity of what was going on at that time. There are some things that have always bugged me about Wordsworth that keep me at arms-length. While his influence can’t be denied, I think he was a big mess. It’s what happens when you set up childhood as the high-point in your life, and figure that everything is downhill from there. I don’t buy it. Shelley liked him though, and it shows. I remember a passage in a diary somewhere (I think it was Trelawny, but I could be wrong) where Byron complained about Shelley always trying to force Wordsworth on him. But Shelley took what Wordsworth was on about, and pushed it to a higher level, complicating it in the process. I like what Shelley wrote in his Defence of Poetry about childhood, which is strangely like Blake’s concept of a prelapsarian innocence.
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves. Many of the circumstances of social life were then important to us which are no longer so. But that is not the point of comparison which I mean to insist. We less habitually distinguished all that we saw and felt from ourselves. They seemed as it were to constitute one mass. There are some persons who in this respect are always children. Those who are subject to the state called reverie feel as if their nature dissolved into the surrounding universe, or as if the surrounding universe were absorbed into their being. They are conscious of no distinction. And these are states which precede or accompany or follow an unusually intense and vivid apprehension of life. As men grow up, this power commonly decays, and they become mechanical and habitual agents. Their feelings and reasons are the combined result of a multitude of entangled thoughts, of a series of what are called impressions, planted by reiteration.
Besides being a great description of the LSD experience, the concept of innocence as a unary thing, is strangely at odds with his language: “a distinct and intense apprehension” of things that “constitute one mass.” No inside, no outside— and yet it is described as being “distinct.” Things can only be distinct when separated from the things that they are not; fallen language just can’t deal with the problem. But whether arrived at through authentic childhood memory, or more recent drug experience, this revelation moves Shelley to denigrate the importance of the individual, distinctly at odds with the conception of the Romantics as champions of the individual, and the poet as the lone suffering figures of the age.
The view of life presented by the most refined deductions of intellectual philosophy, is that of unity. Nothing exists but as it is perceived. The difference is merely nominal between those two classes of thought which are vulgarly distinguished by those the names of ideas and of external objects. Pursuing the same thread of reasoning, the existence of distinct individual minds similar to that which is employed in now questioning its own nature, is likewise found to be a delusion. The words I, you, they, are not signs of any actual difference subsisting between the assemblage of thoughts thus indicated, but are merely marks employed to denote the different modifications of the one mind.
Shelley goes on to disclaim any illusion that he might be thought to be speaking as the “one mind,” but rather as himself, constrained by language:
It is difficult to find terms adequately to express so subtle a conception as that to which the intellectual philosophy has conducted us. We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of— how little we know.
One thing seems certain to me though. Whatever “real” answers their are, they are bound to be complicated. If there is “one mind” as Shelley postulates, it’s certainly got a lot of distinct thoughts going on. Shelley’s notion of the child is infinitely more complex than Wordsworth, with deeper implications. We aren’t children any more. We’re all pretty damn experienced, and we’ve all been experienced as well.
I never get up this early, but I did today. The first thing I read bothered me, and the second even more. Thomas Wright’s What’s for afters? is typical of the sort of ill-informed comments often tossed about regarding Blake:
My personal favourite is the Swedenborg-inspired heaven of William Blake. Only those capable of appreciating beauty are allowed into this dome of pleasure, Puritans and ascetics being unworthy of its splendours and the marvellous conversation of the angels.
The Learned, who strive to ascend into Heaven by means of learning, appear to Children like dead horses, when repelled by the celestial spheres. The works of this visionary are well worthy the attention of Painters and Poets; they are foundations for grand things; the reason they have not been more attended to, is, because corporeal demons have gained a predominance; who the leaders of these are, will be shewn below. Unworthy Men who gain fame among Men, continue to govern mankind after death, and in their spiritual bodies, oppose the spirits of those, who worthily are famous; and as Swedenborg observes, by entering into disease and excrement, drunkenness and concupiscence, they possess themselves of the bodies of mortal men, and shut the doors of mind and of thought, by placing Learning above Inspiration, O Artist! you may disbelieve all this, but it shall be at your own peril.
In Blake’s day, as in our own, “unworthy men” rule by shutting off the minds of humanity through hollow rhetoric; it isn’t learning that is the answer, but belief. Belief that there are great things, visionary spirits who have left a legacy worthy of study, belief in grand things. Heaven exists primarily through the active process of creating it each day. It isn’t a club that only a few can join, and I resent the implication that “only those who appreciate beauty” are allowed. Blake never said anything even remotely resembling that. Even of one of his worst detractors, Dr. Trusler, Blake offered a sarcastic apology: “I am terribly sorry you have fallen out with the spiritual world...”
It’s all about the inspiration, breathing in the world and expelling it tainted with our own feelings and thoughts. It becomes a thick space, when all the complexities of life draw in, as he said in his Public Address
Resentment for Personal Injuries has had some share in this Public Address But Love to My Art & Zeal for my Country a much Greater.
One of my fellow TA’s said that, as she explained how much she was looking forward to teaching remedial writing classes. I wish I was that easily amused. Each day when I go to class I think about how difficult writing is, and how difficult it is to explain it. Sure, there are the basic evaluative criteria, firmly entrenched since 1863, of unity, mass and coherence, but I really want to get more than that from people. I want them to think.
It’s been incredible to watch some of my students grow. At first, most of them didn’t seem to care about the quality of their writing. I think grading the first essay hard was a quick way to fix that. Welcome to college. By the time we got to the second essay, most of the conversational artifacts and persistent mechanical problems were taken care of. While they were largely clueless about citation styles and such, the overall level of mechanics was strong. Now that I’ve started to read the third assignment, I’m proud of most of them. While there are still some issues, harping on the component structure of the classical essay really seemed to work. The essays are really starting to convey unity, mass, and coherence. There should be no problem in evaluations for these kids, they’ve got the basics coming together.
I think an open revision policy is also a big plus. Only a few students are turning in shoddy work at the deadline, knowing that they can redo it. Mostly, it’s the borderline and below folks that this helps the most. Many of them have turned in several revisions, trying to make the best grade possible. What matters is how far they get in the end. I have no intention of grading on a relative scale; I think that this is a cheat which just passes the problem on to the next teacher. Considering my class will be the last writing class most of them take, I think it’s important to have them writing at least at junior or senior level by the time they leave, even if it is a “freshman” class. But that’s where the real work is.
Writing at the upper level is less about mechanics than it is about critical skills. I learned most of those in the study of literature, and sadly many of these students will opt out of World Literature in favor of Anthropology, which fits the same slot in the curriculum. So, besides writing, I think it’s a big part of the job to teach people to read.
I had my students do that today. I’ve figured out the correct factor, I think, for allowing in class time for reading. If I multiply how long it takes me to read something at a median rate by three, then about 75% of the class will finish in that amount of time. Out of about 16 students today, four finished early, and eight were done right about the cut-off time. I could tell by the expressions on their faces where they were, as much as anything else. A few kept nervously checking if I was watching, as if to see if they could just blow it off. No dice. I thought it was an important thing to read.
It was One Step at a Time: Japanese Women Walking from the latest issue of the Journal of Mundane Behavior. I chose it for several reasons. First, it displays a constant questioning of presumption. The author starts with a mundane question about the way that Japanese women walk, and continually evaluates the real worth of the question she’s asking. Along the way, it turns from casual research into deeper statistical research about the level of freedom for women in Japan. It doesn’t bog down in abstract numbers, and much of the data doesn’t really support her conclusion. Her conclusion is a culturally inclusive one, that points at the difficulty of evaluating things based on arbitrary scales. In the end, she decides that her primary question wasn’t the right one at all. It doesn’t matter how people chose to walk. But it makes a great sustained metaphor out of what begins as a mundane investigation. Crafty writing, and tolerant world view. What more could you want?
Guys, as a general observation, don’t care for this one much. I suspect that it has a lot to do with the discussion of platform shoes that opens it. But who cares? It’s the writing style, and the fact that you can construct good writing on any subject that matters. Even something as simple as the way people walk.
The ability to do that can’t be easily tested, but it can be easily proved. I suspect that most of my students will prove themselves to be good writers when this is all over, regardless of what subject they chose.
Writing paragraphs is hard, particularly since there is much controversy about what one even is! How about this definition, for starters:
The paragraph can be described very roughly as an autochthonous pattern in prose discourse, identified originally by application of logical, physical, rhythmical, tonal, formal, and other rhetorical criteria, set off from adjacent patterns by indentations, and commended thereby to the reader as a noteworthy stadium of discourse. Though all good paragraphs are stadia, not all stadia are paragraphs. Many must exist merely as emergent possibilities, potential paragraphs (as well as smaller units) dissolved in the flow of discourse. (Paul C. Rogers, A Discourse-Centered Rhetoric of the Paragraph)
I’d rather teach people to write, rather than how to write paragraphs. Paragraphs are too confusing.
A screaming migraine for two days.
Upon surfacing this evening, I started to read The Production of Space by Henri Lefebvre. I hadn’t thought about just how hazy the concept of space is until I started to read Weinberger’s book, with it’s opposition of “map space” vs. the spatial concepts of the Internet. Then of course, I found a connection when I started to read Michael Herr’s Dispatches.
The book begins with the image of an old map of Vietnam, and observations about how inaccurate it is. I think that’s part of the fundamental character of spatial maps, they are always inaccurate and fail to represent what we really think of when we think of space. Oh, and the time thing is in there too. The entire book takes place in the time it takes to draw a breath and release it, in a fictive space of memory.
Lefebvre sorts out many ways of thinking of space, largely mental abstractions and proposes that one method of approach is dividing it into physical space, mental space, and social space, the divisions that any real “science of space” must deal with. Then he goes on to demonstrate the separation between theories of mental space and social space, and the wide rift that exists between them. I think that’s a big problem with the approach to spatial metaphors for the web: is it in our heads? Or, is it a developing social space?
There’s not an easy answer to that one and the two types of space seem deeply at odds with each other. I do think that there are individuals separate from the social construction of “selves,” which distances me from Weinberger’s view right out of the gate. There’s something about the public/private interface that complicates everything, when you try to reach for any sort of unified theory.
There was a great example of that in my rhetorical theory class on Tuesday. Jason, a student that I’ve spent a lot of time with, asked a question that we ended up spending hours on. He’s a minister, currently enrolled simultaneously in the Rhetoric program and a seminary. While I wouldn't call him "open minded" I certainly find him to be congenial, intelligent, and a fun person to talk to. Encountering Rogerian theories of argument, Jason found this aspect of modern rhetorical theory a problem. Rogerian argument, unlike the attack/defend stance of classical rhetoric works to seek compromises by evaluating the core values between speaker and audience. Both sides are expected to give, in order to reach workable compromise. Jason wondered just where the line is. How much can you compromise your personal values to reach accommodation?
It went something like this. Jason said “I believe in capitol T truth, so how can I compromise on what I feel I know to be true, in talking to others?” This triggered an impassioned plea from another student, a pagan who has felt oppressed by the preaching of all the militant Christians in her life, for Jason to leave his truth at the door when entering into conversations. I found myself taking the middle ground, as an agnostic, telling her that in all my conversations with Jason I know that what he considers to be true will always be his opinion, not a proclamation of fact. Jason isn’t a deity, and doesn’t claim to be one. He just believes, and asking him to leave his belief at the door just isn’t an option. I think it’s up to the hearer to judge for themselves. Living in Arkansas, if I didn't talk to people because they had religious convictions of one sort or another, there wouldn't be many people left!
There are always oppositions to be dealt with. Thinking about it, my concept of my web pages as a mental space will always be separate and at odds with moving through the web as a social space. Theories that approach the web from the social side often leave me cold. When theory becomes too social, I suppose I always want to pull it back into myself. I know my space much better than anyone else's.
That’s what I created a web space for. For me, mostly, and only as a second thought, a place where people might visit and get to know me. I suppose I’ll always be a bit of a cowboy about that.
Sometimes it seems like love and death are the only subjects really worth writing about. This binary quickly becomes unary when you think about it, though. I was walking to class yesterday evening when I approached a girl I know from an intro survey literature course. She was walking down the green path, just scanning the skies with a deep smile. She stopped and said:
You know what I was just thinking?
How could anyone think of suicide on a day like today!
What happens when we die? Are there girls?
How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here’s a traveled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there’s a politician
That has both read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and wars alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms.
We understand so little about love, and why it drives us so. I was teaching a short bit on sexist language today, and while I hate the PC tongue-twisting, the avoidance of generic objectifying is relatively easy. When you speak of everyone, you cannot say man alone. But all the same, if we speak in character, we do objectify those that are different from us. Objectifying, dividing things that are different from us into the “not us” is a fundamental building block of language. I speak of love only with the terms that I know. Being heterosexual I can only speak of women as different from me, and a binary that love seeks to unify.
But what triggered all this, more than anything else, was a song from the Pontiac Brothers called “Almost Human.”
Well she’s almost human when she steps up to you,
And gives you a kiss, from the lips that never miss,
Well she’s almost, she’s almost human.
I came across The Pontiacs in an appropriately unassuming fashion. I dug up Doll Hut out of the incoming bin of a local used record store. I remembered seeing a Frontier Records ad for it calling it "Stones"-like, so I figured it would at least be a style of music I liked. I got Tom Waits' Closing Time the same day. I had just had a death in the family, just split with a girl.
Love and death and the Pontiac Brothers and Tom Waits. Go figure. But then, I started to think about how many rock lyrics get a bad rap for being sexist, among them Neil Young’s A Man Needs a Maid. I just can’t read it that way, no matter how I try. It seems to me that its one of those inner voice things, and his musings about needing “just someone to keep my house clean / fix my meals and go away” is part of that same frustration in the Pontiac Brothers’ song. A frustration that we just don’t know why we need lovers so much, and yet we do. I think Liz Phair’s “Canary” really expresses the other side of being loved as an object through so many layers of sexual metaphor that it makes my head spin. I still haven’t been able to remove that damn CD from my player...
I learn my name
I write with a number two pencil
I work up to my potential
I earn my meat
I come when called
I jump when you circle the cherry
I sing like a good canary
I come when called
I come, that's all
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
I clean the house
I put all your books in an order
I make up a colorful border
I clean my mouth
'Cause froth comes out
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
Send it up on fire
Death before dawn
Love and death, that’s the stuff... Or maybe just love. I’ve been collecting definitions of rhetoric, and I found another one I like from Jim W. Corder:
Rhetoric is love, and it must speak a commodious language, creating a world full of space and time that will hold our diversities. Most failures in communication result from some willful or inadvertent but unloving violation of space and time we and others live in, and most of our speaking is tribal talk. But there is more to us than that. We can speak a commodious language, and we can learn to hear commodious language.
To be told we objectify something is the deepest insult to love. Sexist language does violence, on both sides. But if a room is truly commodious, isn’t there room to say what we really feel?
I was thinking about how much he permeates my consciousness today. The response from Dr. Kleine regarding my hypertext essay included, in part, “If William Blake were alive today, do you think he’d be doing what you’re doing?” I suppose in my imaginary construction of him, I believe he would. This whole space of mine owes a debt to him, the title of this blog, for example, comes from him. I was trying to think what sort of “simple” explanation I might offer, regarding this rather complex man, as to why I think of him as my greatest teacher.
Blake was unashamed. He said what was on his mind, forcefully, and without hesitation even when he was wrong. And he paid the consequences.
I was reading Dispatches by Michael Herr yesterday, and I ran across a slight reference that’s still ringing. It was in the form of an observation about the “spooks” behind the Vietnam War, specifically Robert “Blowtorch” Komer.
If William Blake had “reported” to him that he’d seen angels in the trees, Komer would have tried to talk him out of it. Failing there, he’d have ordered defoliation.
On Peckham Rye (by Dulwich Hill) it is, as he will in after years relate, that while quite a child, of eight or ten perhaps, he has his “first vision.” Sauntering along, the boy looks up and sees a tree filled with angels, bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars. Returned home he relates the incident, and only through his mother’s intercession escapes a thrashing from his honest father, for telling a lie.
That’s where I always reach my impasse. Rhetoric is, by its essential nature, a threefold vision. There’s so much more to say here, and another paper is coming together. I think I’m getting to the core of it, by asking myself what would Blake do?
I don’t want to do what Yeats did. He kept it to himself.
In his Autobiography Yeats constructs an account of hearing spirit voices, much like the story Gilchrist told about Blake. In Yeats’s case, he is afraid to tell people he’s heard them: “I had some wretched days until being alone with one of my aunts I heard a whisper in my ear, ‘What a tease you are!”
Mysteries exist to be told, not to be kept to oneself. That’s what drives me to write I suppose, I listen to those internal voices of thought and spill them out over the side for anyone to hear.
Even if it means that some can’t resist the urge to defoliate my trees.
I found the perfect counterpoint for George Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language." Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel Lecture. It went over well in class, and I would recommend it to anyone interested in a more open, and yet just as powerful essay on language. It's really great stuff. Here are a couple of snips:
The systematic looting of language can be recognized by the tendency of its users to forgo its nuanced, complex, mid-wifery properties for menace and subjugation. Oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence; does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge. Whether it is obscuring state language or the faux-language of mindless media; whether it is the proud but calcified language of the academy or the commodity driven language of science; whether it is the malign language of law-without-ethics, or language designed for the estrangement of minorities, hiding its racist plunder in its literary cheek--it must be rejected, altered and exposed. It is the language that drinks blood, laps vulnerabilities, tucks its fascist boots under crinolines of respectability and patriotism as it moves relentlessly toward the bottom line and the bottomed-out mind. Sexist language, racist language, theistic language--all are typical of the policing languages of mastery, and cannot, do not permit new knowledge or encourage the mutual exchange of ideas.
. . .
Word-work is sublime, she thinks, because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference--the way in which we are like no other life.
We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.
I really enjoyed teaching this one today. I suppose I should add a postscript to my morning entry. I'm okay, folks. Sometimes, I just have to freeze little atomistic moments of terror in my own way. It was a bad way to start the day, but it turned out okay in the end. As Lou Reed wrote once upon a time, "there's always work... the most important thing is work..."
----- --------TITLE: Walk away DATE: 04/01/2002 10:41:00 AM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: It wasn’t her first affair, but it was my last.She passed by me, about three feet away. I think it was her, but I can’t be sure. Her hair was dyed red. She looked so angry. She wouldn’t make eye contact. I had been smiling, happy, coming from class after teaching a brilliant Toni Morrison essay on language. I was happy that they seemed to get it. Language is what we have, what we can control. It creates pictures, but more than that, it reaches to things that can’t be pictured.
One foot in front of the other, one word after the next. It’s what we have in this life. Move on, keep going forward. To stop is to die. I hadn’t seen her in over five years. Everything ended then, and I have to keep placing these words, the only thing I can control, together. Because we won’t be together again. Ever.
But when I got home, there was such a pressure behind my eyes. I don’t know how to describe it. It’s cold, but it’s hot. I wonder how love could cause such anger, such pressure, such hopelessness. Only a moment before I had been happy, but now I’m not. I suppose it’s because she didn’t stop, she just buried her head looking displeased that I’m still on the planet. I’m not sorry she’s here. She reminds me of the essential facts that rule my endless procession of movement.
Feelings, I can’t control. I act on them. They are always there, wild and radical and unconforming to any sense or sensibility. When someone decides they hate you, there just isn’t much to be done, even though you don’t return that hatred.
Words, I can control. There is always a subject, real or implied. There is always a verb, or a gerund, hoping, believing, longing, desiring, feeling... But there isn’t always an object. Place one after the other. Follow the possibility, watch it get narrower and narrower until it becomes a hard and compact point. The limit of opaqueness, according to Blake, is Satan. Writing seems to be a devilish move.
But my feelings are open, translucent, and exposed. The limit of expansion is God, as Blake would say. Feelings can be ineffable, but language can only reach, and with every step contract. What can I say next? What can I do? It is always dependant on choices made, and things done before. Language pushes and pushes, but it can never get there because with each step it always becomes its own oppressor. It’s not a rhizome, free to bond at will, and yet it is infinite, and springs like weeds from every situation, every feeling, growing and branching and weaving, Language tries hard to make it last.
But people usually just walk away.
One of the strange side-effects of my trip, and my uncertainty, was an inability to concentrate on the book I’m supposed to be reading, Dispatches by Michael Herr. Instead, I spent some time on A Thousand Plateaus. As is often my practice with books, I opened it up to a random page and started to read. Sometimes I think like a hypertext, but all the same I’m resistant to it. I have an uncanny knack for opening up any book to whatever page I need, at the time.
It was a section about nomadism and territorialism, and the way that music establishes territory. I thought of Shelley’s skylark right away, and then decided that perhaps I should at least look at the beginning. I found myself hating the book at the start, nearly as much as I loved it in the middle. There is something so counter-intuitive about rhizomes.
You see, they’re promiscuous. They’ll join with anything, anywhere. I don’t think life is like that. I don’t form associations with everything I touch, only some things. There’s a pattern to it, and it’s not rhizomatic. In case you’re not familiar with the concept (I wasn’t until this weekend) here is a nice treatment of what may be a perfect example of a rhizome, the Internet. On a certain level, yes, I’d agree. On another level, the social level, I don’t.
It was incredible to happen on this totally by chance right now. Turbulent Velvet recommended the book to me a while back, and I ordered it, but it had been sitting on the bottom of a pile before this trip. Just before I left, I read a nice essay that abuddahs memes pointed out about the shape of the universe. The article took a somewhat spiritual stance that the most prevalent cultural image is that of the tree. Deluze and Guattari seek to overthrow that dominance, by proposing the rhizome.
I don’t like it much at all as a model. I’d rather be a tree. Without constraint, there is no communication, just a jumbled mess of weeds. I can’t see it as the efficient paradigm for the future at all. As much as I love the concept of nomadism, I hate the concept of rhizomes. We all make choices, we don’t just join arbitrarily. Or maybe it’s just me, who wants to be an irreligious spiritualist, who just can’t buy into the new order.
But other than that, I really like the book so far. I like the approach. I forget who said it, but I do believe that books are machines for thinking, not books that remove the need to think. I don’t think that books are frozen conversations, but instead doors into new worlds where conversation plays a part, but isn’t the central focus.
I had something pressing, beating against my brain. Karen, my ex-wife called the night before. She had gone into the hospital to deliver her baby. She promised to call the next day, but she didn’t. Disorganized me didn’t even ask which hospital she was in.
It’s a weird situation. Because Karen and I still feel close, I knew it would make the child’s father nervous if I tried to keep too close of tabs on her. But I care, and it’s been hard to tolerate not knowing what’s going on even if my mind tells me it’s for the best. Her water broke before she felt any contractions, and when I told my mother this, I could tell that she was concerned too. My mother told me that the same thing happened when I came into the world. There was no real warning before the arduous labor commenced.
So I drove to Oklahoma, not knowing. After I got there, my mother explained a bit more about my birth. As usual, I tried to do things backwards and land on my feet in this world. It was a long and painful process to get me turned around. She didn’t tell me when I left, because she knew I would worry even more. When I got back, I still didn’t know.
I called when I got in last night, to try to talk to the child’s father. No answer. More fear. He finally called today. While the child wasn’t a breech, Karen had to have a c-section. His head was too big, 14 inches around. She’s still in the hospital, in pain. I’m going to go see her tonight, now that I know where she is. Everyone is fine and healthy, he says. But it seems so weird to be distant when your best friend is going through such trauma. But it seemed weirder not to write, to try to get stuff out of my head.
I just found out. Sorry about the surfeit of words today, but writing does help me cope with uncertainty. It’s a narrowing of possibilities, I think. You place one word down, and the list of words that can follow is narrowed. It’s a way of making things go a certain way, of controlling something in the face of uncontrollable uncertainty.
Popeye says, visit Alma. Popeye always scared me just a bit with his overgrown forearms, and I never developed a taste for spinach. That was the province of my older brother Steve, who was always looking for a Bluto to beat up on. As I headed for the Oklahoma border, I slipped the Creedence tape in the stereo and thought to myself: I’m headed into cockroach country.
It’s the gene-pool I came from. Native America they call it now; but really it was a dumping ground of dreams. Poor white trash and native tribes thrown together, with the only unified element being poverty. I have no idea how much “Indian” blood I have, but I know it’s in there. There’s a certain survival instinct, that comes from climbing out of the teeming garbage heap. Of course Oklahoma is a lot different from when my father and mother left in the late 30s, for the sunny climes of California. Fighting back the urge for a White Russian, I entered the part of the state that has changed the least.
That’s where my parents are now, just down the street from the Choctaw casino, in Pocola, Oklahoma. The name of the town is an Indian word which means “ten miles,” because it is ten miles from Ft. Smith, Arkansas. I’d say it’s about thirty miles from the Spinach Capitol of the World, Alma, Arkansas. I got into a lot of trouble when I got here for pronouncing it “all-muh” rather than “AL-MA.” It’s also about thirty miles from the site of the Worlds’ Highest Hill, in Poteau, Oklahoma. My parents sit on the border, but their roots are all on the Oklahoma side.
It’s a land of hardy people, who struggle each day to get by. Deep poverty, generations of it, living side by side. The newspapers each day relate tales that are stranger than any fiction writer could create. It’s hard for me to figure out why my parents choose to live there. Steve I can understand. He’s always been more comfortable near the bottom of the barrel. But my parents are fairly well-off, and could live anywhere they want. They used to live on 200 acres in the middle of a National Forest, but they moved closer in to be nearer to medical care as they got older. Even though they don’t suffer from poverty, I suppose they are still comfortable near it.
Poor people are easier to understand, for my family at least, I guess. They’re actually from around the Norman area originally. My father’s mother was a cook at a sorority at the University of Oklahoma in the 30s. My mother worked at a mental institution in Oklahoma City, before my father decided it was time to look for greener pastures. They were both happy to leave Oklahoma, but as they got older, Dad wanted to go back. I picked up another clue about where my predispositions come from, in a new story I heard from my mother on this trip.
She came from a huge family, about a dozen kids. All the kids had to work in the fields, to support the family. But mom told me that she never did, it just wasn’t her forte. She worked around the house, cleaning, making the meals, and taking care of her baby sister while her mother went with all the other kids out in the fields to work. Her brothers gave her a hard time about it, so they insisted that she had to hoe the corn one day. It was a hot day, and she fainted and had to be carried back to the house. She said that she was too heavy to be lifted over the fence, so she had to be pushed under it. They never asked her to work in the fields again.
She always worked, but she worked inside. She couldn’t take the sun. So that’s where I get it from! I’ve never been the nature type either. My father is a more grizzled outdoorsy type. I always feel like such a wimp next to him. He has deep lines on his face, and looks much the same as the photographs I’ve seen of Native chiefs, with deep weather-beaten features. Not me. I’m a cream-puff by comparison.
Leaving town, I see that another tribal war is in process. The Cherokee Casino has erected a billboard down the street from the Choctaws. Some folks just can’t get along.
Mom’s been reading a bunch of stuff about the civil rights movement. She explained that she missed it, and had no idea what was going on back there in the 50s and 60s. California is like another planet, and that’s the planet I grew up on too. Things are different there, but what has always struck me as odd is that the religious propaganda that I find stuffed under my windshield, in Little Rock, is mostly printed in California.
Driving back, I stopped at a Wendy’s in Clarksville.
I always think of the Monkee’s song when I pass through.
However, there is no train station in Clarksville, Arkansas.
In the bathroom, someone left me a tip.
What is it about advertising practices on urinals that fascinates me so?
The big thing I have to wonder is, what was the ladies auxiliary of Texarkana doing in a urinal in Clarksville? I suppose they must have been headed for the casino. Silly me, I had to pick it up. I'm always looking for a tip.
Then a strange imperative wells up in him: either stop writing, or write like a rat . . . If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomings-writer, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.Deluze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (240)
Desparate for something new, I mined an old tape case, and pulled out some music I hadn’t listened to in years. My listening habits have changed since I became more of a bibliophile. I don’t listen to music while reading like I used to. When I do listen, I tend to listen more deeply, and often repetitively. I suppose I got that habit from Slim.
Before I left on my trip, I had just received a copy of “Exile in Guyville” by Liz Phair, one of those records I didn’t pay any attention to when it first came round. I think I listened to it four times in a row, while getting the stuff together for my trip. I keep wanting to buy something new, but when I cruise the CD listings I balk at paying $18 for a CD. I tend to cruise for gems that I might have missed over the years, and buy the bargain CDs. This was a good choice, a real gem that I hadn’t heard before. Sometimes history seems so deep that it is hard to expend the energy on keeping up with the present.
My old tapes are split into three categories: live tapes of things I don’t want to risk to a car tape deck (probably about 5 or 6 hundred), a core group of around a hundred old beer-soaked and sun-bleached tapes that used to get me down the road in crazier days, and around a hundred tapes I made for archival purposes when I was living in a record store.
It wasn’t really a record store, it just had more records than many small record stores. It was the only time that I had a roommate. In a tiny ghetto apartment, Rick Hodgson paid half my rent, even though he spent most of his time with his girlfriend (now wife). He had a collection of around 2,000 records, and it sat in the same room with my collection of 1,200 or so. So I frantically taped a lot of his stuff. There was only a little overlap, though we did have many points of coincidence in our collections. He was more of a “hippie” type (though he had short hair) and I was more of a punk (though I had long hair). I never sold him on the Minutemen, but he never sold me on the Grateful Dead. It was fun for both of us to try though.
I pulled out a tape of Creedence Clearwater Revival albums, “Cosmos Factory” and “Willie and the Poor Boys” that I made from Rick’s albums, sometime in the early eighties, and a few beer soaked tapes from a little later than that from those old beat up tape cases, and hit the road.
From the moment that “Las Vegas Story” by the Gun Club started playing, I was transported back. Though I favor the Ward Dotson line-up (“Fire of Love” is one of my all-time favorite albums), it was a refreshing blast of tribal power. Music sets up territories, creates communities, and has a social function beyond its entertainment value. There is just something bestial about this music, then and now, and I was reminded just how small that community was. It was all about the tone. I never managed to sell many of my friends on this tone. They missed the point; it wasn’t about songs, lyrics, or chord structures. It was the tone.
I know a lot more about it now. Looking back, I can see that The Cramps had it; The Scientists had it; Neil Young and Crazy Horse had it; The Wipers had it. And the next forgotten gem on that tape, The Toiling Midgets “Deadbeats,” had it. So what was it?
Researching Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year has pointed to the power of historicity over and over. I think that has a lot to do with it. Rex, who turned me on to most of these bands, used to always say in the mid-eighties when we would listen to local schmoes pounding out their cover classics that “They have deep musical roots all the way back to 1977.” I think that’s it. What the tone I became sensitive to was the echo of a chord stretching all the way back to Robert Johnson and beyond; it was muscular, it had a power that refused to let go. Jeffrey Lee Pierce tapped into that tone, and like Johnson, he was walking with the beast. The claim to historicity gives weight and substance to any argument, and seemingly separates it from myth while it creates myths all its own.
When I heard the long versions of “Heard it through the Grapevine” and “Effigy” on that Creedence tape for the first time in 20 years or so, I realized that it was that same tone. A primal tone stretching back to the moment when humanity first began to make sense of pain through music. I resist all tendencies to abolish history, particularly that part that resonates inside me. That’s the problem with most Internet histories; they want to deny those things that ultimately, refuse to die. It’s the animal inside.
But some people just don’t hear it, and can’t hear the difference between the antiseptic studio perfection that some bands strive for, and real human tone. I’m not that interested in perfection. I’m in it for the beast. Sloppiness isn't a guarantee of it though, I still believe that the Grateful Dead definately never had it. I suspect they were just too stoned to let the beast in.
Before taking off for the backwoods of Eastern Oklahoma, I made the mistake of taking a personality test. Not one of those meme-tests, but an Enneagram, which was pointed to by Jim Hart.
It didn't surprise me much, though it might have a surprise or two for the average reader of my blog. The dominant personality type was of course the "Romantic" or "Artist" depending on which page you look at. Uh, maybe that might explain why I spent most of my life making little grey rectangles, and then turned to become a Romanticist of sorts. However, as a thinker, well, I rate a -1. See, told you I was defective! Here's the full line-up, sorted by dominance:
Type 4: The Romantic. The intuitive, reserved type: 7
Type 7: The Generalist. The enthusiastic, productive type: 3
Type 1: The Reformer. The rational, idealistic type: 2
Type 2: The Helper. The caring nurturing type: 1
Type 5: The Thinker. The perceptive, cerebral type: -1
Type 8: The Leader. The powerful, aggressive type: -1
Type 3: The Motivator. The adaptable, success-oriented type: -2
Type 9: The Peacemaker. The easygoing, accommodating type: -4
Type 6: The Skeptic. The committed, security oriented type: -5
According to the page which offers a motivational hypothesis for my "type," fantasy is dangerous for me. I could have told them that. I indulge in it all too often, and it usually turns into a negative thing. But that doesn't deter me much. Though I may appear agonistic from time to time, that agonisim is not based in skepticism. That, I think, would surprise a few folks. I'm about as far from being a skeptic as there is. At school, they tell me I'm a natural scholar. But I have my doubts, I thought scholars were supposed to be thinkers!
----- --------TITLE: Windows on the world DATE: 03/28/2002 9:55:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I’ve been thinking about the “medium” of hypertext, the resistance it causes in me, and the reasons why. I suppose it’s about will. Mine burns pretty brightly, barbequing things up, and serving them up in slices in this liquid space. A crafty person might even be able to construct a partial image of me, based on what I put in my little space.
But this is a bubble at best, a place I do believe I own, contrary to Weinberger’s assertions that “Web space is the opposite of a container,” and that it is “a place we can enter, wander, and get lost in, but cannot own.” I beg to differ. I pay the rent, and I own what I put here, and am free to move at any time. It is a container, a grab-bag of texts and images which I assemble to amuse my overactive will. Presentation concerns me greatly; it’s the “artist” in me, who seeks to control not just the content, but the way that content is presented. He’s right though, Web space makes that sort of thinking nearly untenable.
I’ve had to surrender myself to the fact that people will surf into here with out-of-date browsers and see my neatly aligned content explode into a garble of semantic rubbish. Someone might cage me in a frame, or be unable to view in the relatively nominal screen resolution that I set things up for, and once again I’m baked. For the longest time, I wondered about ways around this. Then I just decided to write instead, and live by the common disclaimer “This site best viewed on my monitor” though I would hope that people might call ahead before they stop by.
Weinberger is right to assert that hypertext, by its nature, is a public phenomenon. It relies on the free access to public linking. Once you put your stuff on the web, you open yourself up to appropriation, and no amount of legislation or clever software tricks will stamp it out entirely. If you can see it, you can steal it. While I’m willing to surrender the content I provide to an audience, I can’t quit believing that I should have some control over its presentation.
However, the most well-done statement in the “Space” chapter of Small Pieces Loosely Joined is its conclusion:
What holds the Web together is not a carpet of rock but the world's collective passion.
Should I surrender my passion for presentation? Reviewing a history of Rhetoric, I was reminded that one of the striking changes which occurred in the 18th century was the complete separation of inventio from the realm of rhetoric, leaving nothing but the hollow shell of arrangement behind. The reason for this was the bifurcation of the emotions and reason, and science from passion. It dawned on me that this is the same thinking that exists behind CSS and the upcoming semantic web.
Don’t get me wrong. I think CSS and the extensions that XML may eventually provide are a good thing. But there is something just so fundamentally, well, logical about it. This isn’t a move engineered by passion, but by logic. That’s the reasoning that fueled the disembowelment of rhetoric in the 18th century. Invention, or creating new ideas, was thought to be the province of logic, not the emotions. Arrangement, on the other hand, needed to deal specifically with the emotional appeals. The passions were neatly systemized by logic, and thought to be their slave.
Content rules, presentation is an afterthought. Not for most artists I’ve known. Artists create spaces as well as scientists; they just want more control.
I could turn each page into a graphic to get around the problem, but I doubt I’ll do that. I could lock them up in a proprietary format like Flash. But instead, I just live with it. If it looks like shit, it’s because of my problems coping with this open environment. It may be shit, but at least it’s mine.
Hypertext does force a huge rethinking of every creative enterprise. I generate it in blocks, with the aid of software. But they’re my blocks, at least the ones that rest in my domain. Using them effectively is a major challenge; I’m not ready to surrender control of how they are put together inside my own place on the web. But it is certain that they are indeed disemboweled, barbequed, and served up on a variety of platforms around the web.
Looking at my artfully constructed diagram a few minutes later, I realize I got it a little wrong. It's easy to locate Bakersfield; the thin ribbon of the grapevine connecting it with LA is easy to spot by satellite. I put my star on Tulsa, Oklahoma by mistake. I'm actually a few dots lower and to the right. The final "e" in "here" must be above Memphis, and Little Rock would be somewhere below the "he". It's perfectly understandable though; consciousness doesn't translate well to map space.
There is a lot to like in Chapter 2, “Space” of Small Pieces Loosely Joined by David Weinberger. However, I find myself locked in refutatio. Traditional space is not a container. Maybe it’s because I’ve moved closer to the middle of the North American Continent, and spent time traveling in the deserts and open spaces of this mass of land, standing in places where optical law takes over before the planet ends. I do not think of space as finite, enclosed, containing much of anything except what my senses can take in at a moment. Space doesn’t end in the “real” world. Our senses mediate space to construct a closure which is largely an illusion.
Ah, but this is the distinction between “measured space” and “lived space” which Weinberger makes in his book. Once again, I don’t see this as a phenomena unique to the Internet. When I think of California, where I spent most of my life, I do not think of the 1678.26 miles which Mapquest tells me separates my current location from my memories. They are right here, right now. The locations in between are “sites” in my memory which vary in detail dependant on the amount of experience collected there. Perhaps “measured space” is not nearly so crucial to our perception of the “real” world as he implies. We always experience space and time through a mediating agent, be it memory or sense. With this distinction in mind, it seems as if the Internet is closer to the space of memory than the space of sense, at least the sense of space that we feel when enclosed. But this is only a subset of the total phenomena of “real” space.
This gets me where I was going. I was amused by another one of those definitional stasis things today. Just a reminder, for those who haven’t followed my train of thought lately, I’m using stasis in the Greek sense [from the OED]:
a. Gr. standing, station, stoppage, f. - to stand.
The argument is:
Let's summarize the Top Three Reasons Why the Web Isn't a Medium.
1. A medium is something we send messages through whereas our talk of the Web indicates that we move through the Web - we go places, we surf, we enter sites.
2. When you call it a medium, the broadcast boys get erections. (And the broadcast girls get more head lumps from jumping up against the glass ceiling.)
3. The Web is "content" - us writing stuff to and for another another - not the transmission medium.
So, discussing media means that we must exclude anything composed primarily of content? Uh, it seems to me that the media, or mediating agents of that content are as important as the content itself. To fall back on McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message” or better still, “The Medium is the Massage.” There is a lot of stroking going on about how different the Internet “non-medium” is. To make this twist in definition means going to the fourth definition of medium in the OED:
4. a. Any intervening substance through which a force acts on objects at a distance or through which impressions are conveyed to the senses: applied, e.g., to the air, the ether, or any substance considered with regard to its properties as a vehicle of light or sound.
I think that the usage of the word medium is too good to lose, particularly in the second subset of this meaning:
b. The application of the word in sense 4 to the air, ether, etc. has given rise to the new sense: Pervading or enveloping substance; the substance or ‘element’ in which an organism lives; hence fig. one's environment, conditions of life.
5. a. An intermediate agency, means, instrument or channel. Also, intermediation, instrumentality: in phrase by or through the medium of. spec. of newspapers, radio, television, etc., as vehicles of mass communication.
The Internet is a vehicle, through which we navigate a space that is much closer to the space of mind than the space of roadmaps. Space is different here, yes. But not unique. I’m not buying that yet.
I’m still working with that rural pen, and staining the water clear.
----- --------TITLE: Randy DATE: 03/27/2002 9:30:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Piping down the valleys wild
Piping songs of pleasant glee
On a cloud I saw a child.
And he laughing said to me.
Pipe a song about a Lamb;
So I piped with merry chear,
Piper pipe that song again--
So I piped, he wept to hear.
Drop thy pipe thy happy pipe
Sing thy songs of happy chear,
So I sung the same again
While he wept with joy to hear
Piper sit thee down and write
In a book that all may read--
So he vanish'd from my sight.
And I pluck'd a hollow reed.
And I made a rural pen,
And I stain'd the water clear,
And I wrote my happy songs
Every child may joy to hearWilliam Blake, Introduction to The Songs of Innocence
Searching the web a while back, I noted a brilliant site containing many poems by John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester.
But one poem was sadly lacking: "A Ramble in St. James Park". So, I decided to add it to the fine works of literature available on the net. It's a bit long for the front page, and a bit saucy. Please refrain from clicking the more link, if strong language and sexual content offends you.
I think if poetry like this was taught in school, there would be greater interest in poetry.
A Ramble in St. James's Park [c. Sept 1680]
Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James's Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th' honor on 't,
'Tis consecrate to prick and cunt.
There, by a most incestuous birth,
Strange woods spring from the teeming earth;
For they relate how heretofore,
When ancient Pict began to whore,
Deluded of his assignation
(Jilting, it seems, was then in fashion),
Poor pensive lover, in this place
Would frig upon his mother's face;
Whence rows of mandrakes tall did rise
Whose lewd tops fucked the very skies.
Each imitative branch does twine
In some loved fold of Aretine,
And nightly now beneath their shade
Are buggeries, rapes, and incests made.
Unto this all-sin-sheltering grove
Whores of the bulk and the alcove,
Great ladies, chambermaids, and drudges,
The ragpicker, and heiress trudges.
Carmen, divines, great lords, and tailors,
Prentices, poets, pimps, and jailers,
Footmen, fine fops do here arrive,
And here promiscuously they swive.
Along these hallowed walks it was
That I beheld Corinna pass.
Whoever had been by to see
The proud disdain she cast on me
Through charming eyes, he would have swore
She dropped from heaven that very hour,
Forsaking the divine abode
In scorn of some despairing god.
But mark what creatures women are:
How infinitely vile, when fair!
Three knights o' th' elbow and the slur
With wriggling tails made up to her.
The first was of your Whitehall blades,
Near kin t' th' Mother of the Maids;
Graced by whose favor he was able
To bring a friend t' th' Waiters' table,
Where he had heard Sir Edward Sutton
Say how the King loved Banstead mutton;
Since when he'd ne'er be brought to eat
By 's good will any other meat.
In this, as well as all the rest,
He ventures to do like the best,
But wanting common sense, th' ingredient
In choosing well not least expedient,
Converts abortive imitation
To universal affectation.
Thus he not only eats and talks
But feels and smells, sits down and walks,
Nay looks, and lives, and loves by rote,
In an old tawdry birthday coat.
The second was a Grays Inn wit,
A great inhabiter of the pit,
Where critic-like he sits and squints,
Steals pocket handkerchiefs, and hints,
From 's neighbor, and the comedy,
To court, and pay, his landlady.
The third, a lady's eldest son
Within few years of twenty-one,
Who hopes from his propitious fate,
Against he comes to his estate,
By these two worthies to be made
A most accomplished tearing blade.
One, in a strain 'twixt tune and nonsense,
Cries, "Madam, I have loved you long since.
Permit me your fair hand to kiss";
When at her mouth her cunt cries, "Yes!"
In short, without much more ado,
Joyful and pleased, away she flew,
And with these three confounded asses
From park to hackney coach she passes.
So a proud bitch does lead about
Of humble curs the amorous rout,
Who most obsequiously do hunt
The savory scent of salt-swoln cunt.
Some power more patient now relate
The sense of this surprising fate.
Gods! that a thing admired by me
Should fall to so much infamy.
Had she picked out, to rub her arse on,
Some stiff-pricked clown or well-hung parson,
Each job of whose spermatic sluice
Had filled her cunt with wholesome juice,
I the proceeding should have praised
In hope sh' had quenched a fire I raised.
Such natural freedoms are but just:
There's something generous in mere lust.
But to turn damned abandoned jade
When neither head nor tail persuade;
To be a whore in understanding,
A passive pot for fools to spend in!
The devil played booty, sure, with thee
To bring a blot on infamy.
But why am I, of all mankind,
To so severe a fate designed?
Ungrateful! Why this treachery
To humble, fond, believing me,
Who gave you privilege above
The nice allowances of love?
Did ever I refuse to bear
The meanest part your lust could spare?
When your lewd cunt came spewing home
Drenched with the seed of half the town,
My dram of sperm was supped up after
For the digestive surfeit water.
Full gorged at another time
With a vast meal of nasty slime
Which your devouring cunt had drawn
From porters' backs and footmen's brawn,
I was content to serve you up
My ballock-full for your grace cup,
Nor ever thought it an abuse
While you had pleasure for excuse-
You that could make my heart away
For noise and color, and betray
The secrets of my tender hours
To such knight-errant paramours,
When, leaning on your faithless breast,
Wrapped in security and rest,
soft kindness all my powers did move,
And reason lay dissolved in love!
May stinking vapors choke your womb
Such as the men you dote upon!
May your depraved appetite,
That could in whiffling fools delight,
Beget such frenzies in your mind
To chew the cud of misery
And know she owes it all to me.
And may no woman better thrive
That dares prophane the cunt I swive!
Caving in under a dreadful headache, I started looking at some old bookmarks:
primitivism.com
How's that for an oxmoronic site name? I suppose they can't all be as accurate as knobsandknockers. Checking out the new additions, I found a rumination by Bob Black about —ism vs. —archy. You've just got to love it.
My considered judgment, after years of scrutiny of, and sometimes harrowing activity in the anarchist milieu, is that anarchists are a main reason - I suspect, a sufficient reason - why anarchy remains an epithet without a prayer of a chance to be realized. Most anarchists are, frankly, incapable of living in an autonomous cooperative manner. A lot of them aren't very bright.
Putting on my forensic rhetorician's hat, I've got to make a call for definitional stasis. The Cambridge Dictionary defines anarchy as "lack of organization and control," so wouldn't his frustration mean that anarchy is what it says it is? Isn't operating in a "cooperative manner" acting with organization and control? At the very least, it implies social control. I do believe that there is such a thing as organized autonomy, weblogs are a great example of that. People develop social networks on there own, choosing how much of there time they wish to dedicate to being "good citizens" within their milieu. It's a sort of self-organizing principle, completely at odds with any notion of anarchy.
I've got to agree with his last statement. Anarchists generally aren't very bright. Declaring an —ism the enemy puts the writer in very good company, though, when it comes to standing in the bushes with the not so bright.
----- --------TITLE: Soldiers DATE: 03/26/2002 9:58:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
One of my much needed papers is done. And it’s here, too, if you’re interested.
Standing on Ceremony is 2,000 words or so on the subject of Aristotle’s “classes of rhetoric” as applied to the Internet environment. Some of it will be a bit basic for the typical web reader, and a bit deep in classical rhetoric, however through the miracles of hypertext all the key rhetorical terms are hyperlinked to explanatory references. The web-conversation specific stuff is also linked for the benefit of my professor, who would not be familiar with ongoing blog conversations. I think it worked out pretty well.
Of course, comments, suggestions, and/or bricks and tomatoes are welcome.
There’s just something, well, seminal about that affix. So much for an open, tolerant society. We’ve declared war on a belief. It wouldn’t bother me as much if it was a war on a behavior; obviously some behaviors damage the fabric of society. To keep it stitched together, society just can’t tolerate certain types of behavior. Is thinking about a sin, a sin? I side with Milton on that one. I don’t think so.
When we make nouns of thoughts, we tread on dangerous ground. Just what is the referent? This rapidly degenerates into surrealism. When these abstractions become as real to us as a chair or a table, we have truly entered the twilite zone.
It’s sticky stuff. Decisions must be made. Stay in or pull out? A thick problem, indeed. I prefer to stay in, as long as the blood flows in a pleasant direction. That’s the problem— it sometimes doesn’t.
Arguments are like that. They don’t always end up in pleasant places. I think it has to do with rigidity. Enough friction, and things liquefy. It’s a dissolution of identity, a scary thing for those who prefer rigidity, comfort, and closure within their own dimensions. But this takes discipline, particularly when it comes to staying within one’s own discipline.
I suppose that’s why I’m currently hanging out in the “no-discipline dicipline.” Rhetoricians are more fun at parties, they can talk to anyone. Except for one fringe group, “the theory thugs,” that is: a group which I find myself hanging out with quite often. It’s a specialized vocabulary, to be sure, but it’s fun once you learn what all the big words mean. I only hate it when people use them gratuitously. Used correctly, they are an excellent shorthand for really big concepts. When pages are filled with these words, you’ve got to study them for a long time. More bang for the buck, so to speak. Make that glorious orgy of the text take a little longer. . .
But sometimes it seems, well, penile. I mean how many variations of “sem” can there be? Semiotics and semiosis, terms beating like semaphore against the brow of those lesser mortals that can’t penetrate the warm cave of scholarly humanity. It seems rather frustrating in the end. But when it works, it results in the glorious birth of an —ism. But some —isms can’t be tolerated. Careful with the verbs you nominalize. You might have war declared on you, if you can’t adequately defend your system.
Then it becomes the province of rhetoric. I like the way that Aristotle explained it:
The duty of rhetoric is to deal with such matters as we deliberate on without arts or systems to guide us, in the hearing of persons who cannot take in at a glance a complicated argument, or follow a long chain of reasoning.
The answers to understanding? Perhaps not. Just a tool to decide what’s probable, and improbable. I’ll leave the hard science to the anthropologists. Though anthropology is soft by definition, with blurry lines between several disciplines including linguistics, psychology, etc., it appeals to the generalist in me. Whatever road takes you there, is what I say. As long as we can make it a pleasant trip.
I am, above all else, easily amused. When I found the definition of nosemosis on a pest-control web site, I just rolled: “infection with micro-sporidia of the genus nosema.” Yes, I suspect that it’s just that damn language virus coming round again.
I don’t know when exactly I picked up the habit of reading over a dozen books at once, but it’s served me well. There’s usually so much floating around my snow-globe of a head that I can’t get it to settle down into a recognizable pattern. I read fast, at least twice the rate of most of my fellow teachers; but I also read slow, often spending hours on a handful of pages that pique my interest.
A few further comments on Weinberger’s book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined. The first chapter, “A New World” bothered me because of the way that it began: the question of people playing “dress-up” on the web. People do that in real life too, probably with the same frequency, but not with the same thoroughness. Ever listen to people talk about fishing? Their latest sexual conquest? People love to lie. This is hardly news. The problem with web “identities” is that they are just like the problems liars face in the real world. It’s nearly impossible to be consistent, so people have to rotate their lies often. I was so relieved when I found that he argued that this sort of behavior was the exception and not the rule. Whew.
The e-bay example was another restatement of a conventional behavior. I sold electronics for a long time in another life. People come into a store, not knowing much about what they’re buying. They read brochures, figure out the buzzwords, ask friends for advice, but most of all— they hop from store to store to examine different pitches about what they should buy. Because it takes so much effort, they usually don’t persist at it for long. I think the “gaming” aspect of auction-bidding is perhaps a bigger attraction than the voluntary learning involved. A person wants to be good at the game, so they are more likely to spend time figuring out the rules. A good salesman will reinforce the insecurity of a customer who is buying outside their realm of expertise by reinforcing what they know, and building on it so that they are confident in their purchase. That’s a bit of a game too. Make the customer feel “in-charge.” Next...
The central content of the chapter— the shifting line between public and private, and the question of the sociability of the web— are better directions to go. Identities are constructed by irony and indirection is not entirely new to the web, but it is certainly an amplified aspect. That the level of social behavior stimulated this way is open to dissention is also a good way of addressing the issues behind it all. In most ways, the issues surrounding this “new world” are central to our perception of democracy, and the place of the individual in the world.
Are we, in Thomas Carlyle’s words, shooting Niagara? Is the avalanche of decentralization brought about by the web the core of the ultimate in democracy? Carlyle would have thought it a bad thing, going over a high precipice in a rather flimsy barrel. But then, as he also quite progressively argued, perhaps it’s time to exchange these rags of mock-democracy, or more accurately, oligarchy, for a truer suit of clothes? The political implications of this “new world” are staggering.
And politics begins with the social impulse. What I think is key is the lack of reliance on hierarchy in the formation of this new socialization, facilitated by the very structure of the Internet itself: a liquid structure. I think that it may be bringing out changes much like those traced by Zigmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity. Internet junkies may be the new nomads.
Throughout the solid stage of the modern era, nomadic habits remained out of favor. Citizenship went hand in hand with settlement, and the absence of a “fixed address” and “statelessness” meant exclusion from the law-abiding and law-protected community and more often than not brought the culprits legal discrimination, if not active prosecution.
Napster, anyone? However, the fluid stage of culture, according to Bauman (page 13, for those who care) brings a return to nomadism.
We are witnessing the revenge of nomadalism over the principle of territoriality and settlement. In the fluid stage of modernity, the settled majority is ruled by the nomadic and extraterritorial elite. Keeping the roads free for nomadic traffic and phasing out the remaining check-points has now become the meta-purpose of politics.
Multi-national corporations anyone? Perhaps the cockroaches of the Internet will overrun them as the borders open, and we can just say no to Starbucks. Or maybe not. Their coffee does taste pretty good.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of problems with it. Sometimes it seems like my education has made everything more complicated and problematic than it was before. On the surface, his summary of thirty years of critical theory (nicely done!) ends in a gross oversimplification:
The most basic form of communication that human beings use is face to face linguistically mediated interaction. It's what we do most of the time. Its what we learn to do first. Its what we do. It should serve as the paradigm for all meaningful activity
Conversations are not moving books, books are frozen conversations. In order to understand blogs, or the internet, or any other cultural phenomenon we need to take as our starting point the way it does or does not resemble face to face conversation. This provides a new viewpoint, one that I think does real work. How exactly? Well, I'll let you know when I figure it out...
This summary sounds good, except...
Analyzing conversations does not explain the process of making meaning, it complicates it. HP Grice’s theories regarding implicature demonstrate that humans literally imply meanings out of thin air— what is being expressed in a conversation is often far outside the words that are spoken, the expressions used, etc. On a very deep level, it’s magic that we can communicate at all this way. But the real danger of his statement is in the second paragraph: “Conversations are not moving books, books are frozen conversations.”
Not even close to the truth. Havelock’s work has demonstrated almost conclusively that societies which use the written word think entirely differently than oral cultures. There is an incredible shift brought about through the development of literate culture. A gross example is this: oral cultures do not use subordination. Every thing related in oral narratives is paratactic in nature, chained together by conjunctions and causal relations. It is a world filled with agents and actions, long on example and short on abstraction. The introduction of written language causes a shift into the hypotactic, subordinate constructions which often convey things which have no clear agents, and less direct action. This influences the structure of conversation, not just the written words themselves. Memory becomes less important, and the ability to deal with complex abstractions more important.
Written works become increasingly distant to conversation, because they can. Philosophy enters the picture, because determining the veracity of written and spoken language becomes important in the realm of abstraction. Words refer not just to agents and actions, but other words. They become a thing in and of themselves, away from the day to day life of face to face interaction. The implicatures become deep and more complex.
Alex is right to suggest that conversation is the right place to start; however, the road from there becomes more complex than he implies. Technology shifts consciousness. The introduction of the printing press caused a crisis of faith unlike anything we have known since. The period I’m looking at now, the 17th century, introduced the battle between the written word and science. This shifted thinking again. I suspect the new technologies such as the Internet represent a shift which is of the same order of magnitude. We’ve come a long way, baby.
Conversation starts it, but conversation also changes itself based on the technology which proliferates it. It’s not just a phenomenon of culture, but also a phenomenon of consciousness. Books are not frozen conversations: they represent an entirely new mode of thinking. It remains to be seen whether the same can be said of the Internet. I'm still quite conservative about that. But there is no arguing that this change is a big one.
Utopian enthusiasm is almost always counterbalanced by the rise of healthy skepticism. Often, things tip over so far that they never spring back. Occasionally, the emergent dialogue acts to refine the utopian ideals into a more workable form.
I’d much rather read well thought out pieces on the web like Katherine Parrish’s not everybody’s autobiography rather than the current number two on blogdex, backwash to the effect of “Starbucks can kiss my ass” (a direct quote from one of the comments). But I digress.
What I really wanted to do was write a little research saga. Readers who have been following me for a while might remember that I’m working on a paper on Defoe’s A Journal of a Plague Year. The genesis of the thing was getting pissed off at an article. That’s where I often start. It really gets to me when supposedly brilliant people get things wrong. The article which got my goat was Anne Hunsaker Hawkins’ “Pathography and Enabling Myths.”
Hawkins defines pathography as “autobiographies and biographies about illness.” She claims:
Perhaps what is most striking about this genre is that it seems a contemporary phenomenon. In previous eras, autobiographical accounts of sickness are woven into a journal or diary; almost never does illness constitute the sole focus of the work.
Hawkins proposes, in what is ultimately a great article (even with the error), that pathography fills the gap between case study and the real human experience of disease. Currently, the term is a popular one. I did a search on WilsonWeb to see just where it started. The earliest reference there was 1988, where the author of an article in Newsweek, “The ‘Pathography’ Perplex,” asserted:
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates recently coined the word “pathography” to describe a subspecies of biography that she believes is overly concerned with “dysfunction and disaster.”
Proquest turned up another article by Hawkins, “Culture and Medicine: Pathography: Patient Narratives of Illness.” It was from 99, and it seems to narrow the definition away from biography and into autobiography. That would rule out Defoe, but the article doesn’t really place that limit on the term, going on to identify “autopathography” as a subgenre. I’m still safe with my assertion that Defoe fits within that genre. On to Lexis-Nexis.
Joyce Carol Oates does not claim to invent the term, only that the term is useful. In a 1988 article in the New York Times, she describes it as a subset of biography, “a new subspecies of the genre which the name “pathography” might be usefully be given: hagiography’s diminished and often prurient twin.” In her usage, it’s a derogatory term, unlike Hawkin’s championing it as a useful genre which fills a real need.
Tons of popular articles with the term follow Oates’ usage in the five years that follow. But was this the real coinage of the term? Once again, I turned to the OED for answers.
The OED lists pathography as:
a. The, or a, description of a disease (Dunglinson Med. Lex. 1853). b. The, or a, study of the life and character of an individual or community as influenced by a disease.
Hence, pathographical a., pertaining to pathography (Mayne Expos. Lex. 1857); pathographer, one who writes a pathography.
There was another article I read recently that asserted that “testimony” was uniquely important in the twentieth century (from an anthology of Holocaust narratives). Uh, what about the Greeks? They wrote volumes on the subject. Determining the veracity of testimony, and it’s assertion of evidence, has been a preoccupation of humanity since the dawn of recorded history. I hate shoddy scholarship. I wish more history was required of scholars before they opened up their mouths!
However, taking McKeon’s approach to the novel as a model, it seems important to figure out why pathography is a useful term for a genre. It fills a need, a need that is literally exploding off the bookshelves right now.
I hadn’t cruised blogdex in a while, so I had a look tonight. The end is near. Michael Moore is a gaseous windbag. Lots of links to the big, reliable [sic] media centers like FoxNews and Wired. No links for me, thank you.
Channeling the ghost of Thomas Carlyle, I have grave doubts about these link-lumping strategies. What does it really say? The mass of the public, bloggers included, are idiots? Now there’s a news-flash. So much for my positive feelings about the Internet tonight. I made it to #128 without finding a single item of interest to me. I suppose I’ll stay in my closed social circle, and read them instead because they say far more interesting stuff. Interesting to me, at any rate. I’d rather read about Shauny’s weekend, or Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea, which coincidentally was one of those books my father forced me to read before he would even talk to me, or the weather in New Jersey than any of the crap people are linking to at this hour.
Content industry taking over the web? Taken from the standpoint of popular trend, I suppose so. However, looked at from the perspective of a surfer who seldom visits the “content industry” unless somebody else I trust links to it, I doubt it. I like people. That’s why I’m here, and vocal. I work out stuff in my head as I go. I forgot there were so many conservative warmongers out there. I hadn’t looked for a long while. I like to hang with the good people.
Somewhere around #78 was a piece on Kuro[something, I can never get these fucked-up web spellings right] about the end of the Internet. Corporations will end the free exchange of information over the Internet. Just like the phone company prevents conspiracies conducted over the phone, and dirty phone calls. Give me a break. There’s something happing here, and what it is... well, I’m with Weinberger, I’d like to figure out what it is.
One thing is certain though. The pattern of rhetoric practiced since the dawn of time is largely agonistic. We provoke confrontations, arguments, and such. We debate our positions, like combatants in an arena. There’s no rosy and free utopia waiting around the corner, though we always want one. In order to institute change, it will mean the discovery of new sorts of rhetoric. One can adopt the utopian vision, and work toward it, tempered with the sort of healthy skepticism that Turbulent Velvet has expressed, or people can surrender their space to the model of the “content industry.”
Not here, not tonight. Perhaps it’s too much wine, but I’m feeling particularly angry at finding so little beyond my circle of “friends” to enjoy. No links to the content industry from me.
I finally got around to going outside and checking my mailbox. Dave Weinberger’s Small Pieces Loosely Joined was there. Another thing to add to my already massive reading list. But I couldn’t help but read the preface right away.
Just some quick notes to self. Though he aligns himself with a mode of thinking I resist (social constructivism), I agree with his hope for the web as infrastructure:
If a new infrastructure comes along that allows us to connect with everyone else on the planet and to invent new types of connections, this is big news indeed.
I am also querulous of the assertion that “the facts of nature drop out of the web.” Weinberger’s further assertion that “we can see reflected in the Web just how much of our sociality is due not to the nature of the real world but to the nature of ourselves” is at odds with his previously declared stance that identity is socially constructed, because it assumes an individual “self” outside the boundaries of normal, real world social conditioning. It’s a thorny line to dance. I’ll be interested in seeing him try to make the connection. He’s right to assert that “every social act implicitly conforms itself to the geographic and material facts of the real world.” However, do we leave these things behind when we enter web world? I don’t think so. I think the web is a great leveler, where some conventions are left behind perhaps, but not all. We’re all looking for affirmation, even in [insert web spatial metaphor here].
As Weinberger says, “we care about ourselves and the world we share with others.” This means that social conventions may shift and change, but they still, to me at least, are grounded in fundamental human behaviors. I agree with him that the web gives us great opportunities to rethink those behaviors and our assumptions about them. I look forward to reading the rest of the book, but I really must get back to Defoe for now. I suspect that I’ll be chewing on Small Pieces in small pieces; every quote in this entry came from pages xi-xii. I think the book deserves to be read carefully; I’m sure it will be one hell of an epistemic dance.
Chris SullivanI think it was 94 or so when I met Chris Sullivan. He was doing a show in Bakersfield that had an odd cross-section of work. Part of it was photographs of mattresses.
He began finding them on the streets of San Francisco, and dragging them back to his studio. He said it was amazing that it took him so long to figure out that he could just cut off the fabric cover, without dragging the whole beast back with him.
Long before William Wegman hit it big with his photographs of his dogs, Chris was doing much the same thing. He stopped, because though he did it first, he didn't want to be thought of as a Wegman imitator. Art is like that. Once somebody else starts doing the same thing as you, what's the point?
Chris told me that when he got to the San Francisco Art Institute, the influence of Ansel Adams was still strong. He knew that he couldn't compete on the "fine print" battleground, so he had to find something else to do. I'm glad. I think Ansel Adams is the most horribly overrated photographer of the twentieth century.
Chris had his staged tableaus, similar to Wegman. He had the mattress photos, photos of tumbleweeds and oil drums in a Duane Michaels sort of style, and he also had some interesting series done with the aid of a photo booth in his basement apartment. He had photo-strips of himself after waking up, after smoking a joint, etc. Just good clean experimental fun. But by far, my favorite was his "Journal of the Public Domain," a series of Xeroxes and artifacts found on the streets. He just displayed the objects, rather than photographs of them.
When Consumptive pointed to Streetmattress.com I got an odd sense of deja-vu. There was no mention of Chris, who in my mind, will always be a pioneer in the realm of mattress photography.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Nancy Dunlap EMAIL: adunlap@verizon.net URL: http://www.delanet.com/~dunlap DATE: 09/08/2003 6:40:00 PM I am an old friend of Chris Sullivan. I've been out of touch for several months and was doing an internet search and found your page. You wouldn't happen to know his e-mail?
What we have called “belonging” is nothing other than the adherence to this historical lived experience, what Hegel calls the “substance” of moral life. The “lived experience” of phenomenology corresponds, on the side of hermeneutics, to the consciousness exposed to historical efficacy. Hence, hermeneutical distanciation is to belonging as, in phenomenology, the epoché is to lived experience. Hermeneutics similarly begins when, not content to belong to transmitted tradition, we interrupt the relation of belonging in order to signify it.
I took a detour. That happens to me a lot. It brought back a memory. I remember when I first started studying literature. My point of entry was William Blake. Growing up, he seemed so dense, so impenetrable, and yet so compelling. I wanted to understand what he was on about. I remember well the feeling of drowning, positioning myself at the genesis of the Romantic period in literature. I commented to the Medievalist on campus, after having read “The Wanderer” just how lost I felt. It seemed like there was an ocean of literature stretching both directions from the period that interested me, and I didn’t know what to do, other than jump in and see if I could swim. She answered that this was all that any of us can do.
I thought about how that relates to where I find myself now. I can’t buy goal oriented models for a very simple reason. Things never start at the beginning, and they only “end” when we insist on a false sense of historical closure. It’s a waste of time, things just don’t work that way. We always are swept up, somewhere in the middle, and in order to find out where we are we have to stop, imply a false closure, and fix our relation to the moment. But then the moment becomes lost, as we find ourselves engulfed in yet another sea of meaning.
I started reading From Text to Action: Essays in Hermeneutics II by Paul Ricoeur. I’m a philosophical neophyte. Sure, I’ve dug into a few— Locke, Kant, Plato, Aristotle, etc., but only as they relate to very specific issues. I’m still struggling with that big picture of philosophical history the same way I struggled with literary history. But I’m starting to swim a little. Tentative strokes, mind you, but strokes nonetheless. I’m drawn to Habermas, Gadamer, Ricoeur, etc., rather than the rest of the crowd. But I’m wandering in the desert, trying to make sense of it.
I’m drawn to this concept of distanciation. It makes me think about the problems that a writer has when they think too much about their audience, and reminds me of what I thought of as my task as a documentary photographer. You can’t make sense of things if you are too close. There has to be some distance involved. Distance seems imperative in this process of making meaning. But distance is the hardest quality to achieve, when you find yourself thrust in the middle of an ocean of possibilities.
I was continuing my journey through McKeon’s Origin of the English Novel when I stumbled on an interesting thing. Defoe evidently in one of his works made the argument that romance was descended from the word Roman, because the Romans were believers in myth and superstition, hence the exaggerations of romance could be traced to them. Of course, McKeon notes that this is a false etymology. It dawned on me that in one of the survey courses I took, a professor (a Modernist) claimed much the same thing.
So, what’s the real story? Where did romance come from? It seems that according to the OED, the answer is precisely the opposite. Romance was a term that was used to separate writing in the vulgate tongue rather than Latin, and languages like French, Spanish, etc. Of course, the exaggerated tales of romance had their origins in those languages, and hence the label for that type of literature. So, romance is not Roman, it's vulgar.
While fishing for this bit, I stumbled on some usages of the term that were new to me.
b. Similative, as romance-like adv.; and instrumental, as romance-empurpled
romancealist, a writer of romances.
romancean a., pertaining to the period of old romances.
romanceful a., full of romance; romantic.
romanceishness, tendency towards what is romantic.
romanceless a., unromantic.
romancelet, a short romance.
The Journal of Mundane Behavior hits another nerve. The current issue is about mundane sex:
Why might "mundane sex" be perceived as funny? If I said, "mundane eating" or "mundane sleeping" no one would chuckle. Eating, sleeping, and sex are routine, ordinary dimensions of our lives. The laughter may betray a certain discomfort that many of us feel about public discussions of sex particularly when one's sex life could be interpreted as ordinary, routine, or worse, boring. Nonetheless, mundane sex speaks to the "truth" of our everyday experiences. Some of us are too tired to have sex or we go through the motions. The novelty and lust have been replaced by: "Can we do it before 10 pm?" Do I have to take my socks off?" "Can I just lay here while you do the work?"
Jane has no problem with explicitness, as such, so long as it is not 'silly, dirty and childish'. Certainly this could be taken as evidence that she invests heavily in the notion of women's sexuality being 'cleaner' and more 'sensitive' than men's, of women's sexuality embodied in a romantic ideal. However, Jane wants more than that:I think what shouldn't be banned is male erections, why can't we see hard ons? I don't think there's any reason why we shouldn't see hard ons - what are we all gonna do? Faint? Oh my god, there's a big dick and it's hard! That's ridiculous, I think that should not be banned.
I tried to set up some categories for my blog, but for the most part I failed. Taxonomy is difficult, when all subjects meld close to my heart. Will Richardson picked up on a thread from the free radical on this very topic.
I struggle with the same issue, because many times there are things of a more personal nature that I would like to get down in my space. Problem is I don’t know if it’s “appropriate” for my “audience”, and I don’t really know how much I want to share publicly. I put in a picture of the kids last week and felt kind of unsure about it. Yet, I do feel motivated by the idea that people are reading what I write. So my “professional” topics elbow out the “personal” ones, since I feel some strange sense of duty to it and to “them”. Weird. But it helps me understand what it might/must be like for my students too.
Of course, some enterprising students have found my blog, and that’s okay too. I am a person first, and a teacher second. When academics stumble on my blog and e-mail me, sometimes it makes me think that I should provide a more in depth documentation for the stuff I write. Like Will says, there’s a sort of sense of duty to the whole enterprise. But I also feel a duty to be entertaining from time to time; I don’t think these desires are necessarily contrary. When I’ve talked about these issues in the past, the small group of readers of this site seems to agree with me. I want to keep all the parts of me together, rather than ripping them apart.
But does the sense of duty to audience cause a frustration regarding emotional outbursts? Damn right it does. However, sometimes frustration can be a powerful tool. I was watching A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy this afternoon and I heard a relevant line:
Because of our problems in the bedroom, I’ve learned to fly.
Sex alleviates tension. Love causes it.
My thoughts about the utility of weblogs in education shifted dramatically the moment I began to incorporate them in the classroom. This displacement was not due to any real modification of my firm belief that writing in the electronic environment is a useful pedagogical tool, but because of the nature of the subject I am trying to teach, and the environment I am teaching it in.
The University of Arkansas at Little Rock is one of a handful of schools in the US which has a completely separate and autonomous Rhetoric department. It is not merely a subdivision of the English Department, but instead a key emphasis in the core curriculum. For mainstream undergraduates, the core course of World Literature is optional; two courses in writing are required. The reasoning behind this began with a crisis in standards around ten years ago, when it was found that people were able to exit the university without adequate writing skills. The department is largely focused on the practical, rather than the creative, side of writing. Creative writing courses still reside in the English department. The schism between the departments was both practical and political, and I straddled this great divide as an undergraduate, majoring in both.
I chose to take this separation seriously. The two required composition courses should, at least in my estimation, have different goals. The first course is focused in expressive writing and mechanical skills. Taking its cues from the Speech Communications department, the pedagogy involved straddles the divide between the expressivist and social constructivist views. However, expressivist pedagogy is generally frowned upon in compositionist circles, so group activity is always emphasized, oxymoronically, to build individual confidence. An underlying goal of the class is to prepare students adequately for a writing proficiency examination, where they must write a timed 500 word essay on cue. I haven’t taught this one yet; my desire was to develop a strategy for the final, more advanced writing class.
When I took it as an undergraduate, it was hardly differentiated from the first class. Students produced one (inadequate) research paper with five sources. The rest of the papers were largely expressive essays in a continuation of the first writing class. To me, this is at odds with the pragmatic nature of the program because it makes writing purely associated with creative writing, which is the province of the English department on our campus. Writing research papers is a skill. I developed that skill to a far greater degree in a core course for English majors called Approaches to Literature, which taught writing along with an introduction to critical theory and canon formation.
I saw a need to put the research and critical thinking portions of that class into the context of a lower level class in writing. I see writing research papers as an essential college survival skill. I chose to believe that one class in writing a coherent personal essay is more than enough to pass the writing proficiency exam, and that to dwell on it was superfluous and a waste of the students time. I think that Composition II should be more of a stretch.
So, what does this have to do with weblogs and electronic teaching tools? A lot. As Scott Rogers recently expressed, just because a technology is there, it doesn’t automatically mean that it must be used, or is immediately useful as a pedagogical tool. I have been involved in several classes where these tools have been useful, and several where they have not. The primary, now almost low-tech tool, is email. Our campus automatically sets up listserv distribution lists for every course in the catalogue. Few teachers use them, however. The majority don’t even know they are there.
In upper level seminars in the English department, one of my instructors used them as a version of the well accepted practice of learning journals. Each student was required to submit a 500 word journal on each weeks reading to the listserv. At least 75% of the time, this practice resulted in the development of social community outside the confines of the classroom, where discussion occurred. However, it wasn’t perfect. I began to postulate at that time that certain “cuing strategies” might be helpful to stimulate discussion in that environment. In this instance, the classroom environment was conventional.
On the negative side, in one Rhetoric course taught in an electronic classroom, I found myself really offended at the suggestion that I email the teacher from my terminal when we were both standing in the same room. There’s a dark side to this technology as well. In this case, the electronic communication was always point to point, person to person, rather than any sort of group activity. It seemed isolationist outside the group context. There was no learning journal requirement here, other than occasional requests for brief emails.
Shortly after this experience, I discovered blogging. I began to wonder about the difference between the forced networking of email lists, and the voluntary networking of web logs. Which might be more useful? I decided to do a little preliminary testing, to see if I might be able to construct a study of learning journal behaviors. I was inspired by a study I read of math-science educators in a graduate program who had asked for listserv sharing, rather than conventional print journal requirements in a particular class. These students felt that the electronic environment was more useful than the conventional personal learning journal.
I find myself resistant to social constructivist theory. It seems to me that the arbitrary construction of online communities is just as oppressive as Friere’s “banking model of education.” I wanted to give students a choice, rather than force them into an experimental model of community building. It seems well accepted that learning journals are an essential part of the assimilation of material, however, is this assimilation improved by group interactions? I suspect it is, and yet, I’m not ready to leap at that conclusion.
I offered three journaling options: a conventional paper journal, submission to the email listserv, or starting a web log. I did offer extra credit for the web log option, because I knew that it might be an intimidating for some. The results, speaking halfway through the term, have surprised me only slightly. While I haven’t tabulated things carefully as of yet, my initial estimate is that 30% of the students have ignored the requirement entirely (including about a 10% drop rate), 20% are submitting sporadic print journals, and at least half took the web log option. No one chose the public submission of journals to the listserv. This was the primary surprise, in stark contrast with the study that I read of the upper level students. I attribute it to an uncertainty about the technology, and greater shyness of first year students.
Of those taking the web log option, about 40% are updating regularly, about 30% do it in fits and jerks, and 30% didn’t make it past the first few weeks. Only two or three students appear to be reading each others logs. These figures might appear to be disappointing, but they aren’t to me. My primary concern is that the students learn the skills taught in the class, and so far they are all progressing nicely. Journaling is a small part of a much larger picture. I wanted to see what would happen with journaling in an atmosphere relatively free of social coercion. Yes, it’s a part of their grade. But it’s not the focus of my praxis.
Outside of the journaling activities, the listserv has been central to social interaction within the classes. I refrained from answering questions posed there immediately, to see if the other students would volunteer to help each other out. They did, in spades. Research tips flew back and forth, questions of requirements, and general business. At least 90% of both classes successfully signed on, and use this resource. Email works. The students that use these electronic tools the most are the best writers in the class, but I feel it is important not to leave anyone behind due to technological anxiety.
At this point, in my view, it is an optional enrichment activity. I’m trying to improve writing, not train people to be geeks. However, there is a central opposition involved in getting people to move from the expressive level of first year writing into the more critical argumentative skills of writing research papers. I think web logs can help. The dismay that people expressed at my assignment of a dispassionate bibliographic essay pretty much says it all:
You mean I can’t express my opinion?
Blogs (or learning journals) are nothing, if they are not a place to freely express opinions. What happens with a paper based journal is that it passes from student to teacher; the student relinquishes ownership of that piece of writing to be judged by a teacher. With a blog, it remains a personal space. It can be edited, updated, revised, and shifted. The student remains in complete control of what they write. As students are forced to give up control over their expression to conform to academic standards, expression must have a place to go. I think a blog represents an important step towards channeling those expressions into a venue which remains completely owned by the writer.
I’m not so interested in the social phenomena involved with networking just yet. I just want to give the students a place they can own, as they move through the classrooms where they must conform to expectation. This is the primary function of web logs in my pedagogy, at this point. I think listserv environments are better suited to the closed sort of networking dictated by specific study environment. They are simple, direct, and a neatly forced version of a network. Some of my students have chosen to join larger networks with their blogs, through linking. But those concerns are outside the classroom that I teach in, a classroom where writing is the subject, not networking.
A blog is simply a space to write in. A space the student owns. I feel like I don’t want to meddle in that, just yet.
As I drove to teach my 12pm class, I turned the corner on University Avenue to huge plumes of flame and smoke. It was far enough away that I couldn’t tell what it was. Then it dawned on me. It looked very close to the abortion clinic. I was sure that had to be it, as I cut across the median like everyone else to try to find an alternate route. I took a quick trip through Boyle Park, and made it to class just on time. I’m glad I’m in the habit of leaving early. Coming home a little over an hour later, I decided I’d risk University again so I could see what it was. As I drew nearer, I just kept thinking— that had to be it. There are protesters out front each day, and I was sure some wacko did the deed.
Imagine my surprise when the flaming wreckage turned out to be “Catfish City.” I suppose I could attribute this act of terrorism to PETA, but somehow I just felt a little silly at my conclusion jumping. However, the locations aren’t that far apart. You could easily stuff yourself with hush-puppies and catfish while a friend was getting an abortion; it’s a short walk. However, I reminded myself as I passed that if they torch the place, the “right to life” center will also burn because it’s next door to the clinic.
Silly me. When I got home I checked my e-mail to find a note from my website host:
We would like to inform you that on the 21st of march from 12:00 GMT you may experience some servcie interuptions. This is due to the instalation of a new connection in to our data centre by Easynet. This new connnection is part of our on going developmet strategy to enhance the qulaity of the service you have come to expect from us. As a result you may find your site will be unavailable in certain parts of the world for period of no greater than 12-24 hours.
We thank you in anticapation of your co-operation.
Yes, I’m definitely anti- capitation. I don’t want to pay any more taxes on my already meager income.
I heard this true fact on the weather channel as a description why things are just soaking wet around here lately. It seems that hot air from the gulf coast has collided with colder northern air, and climbed creating turbulence, thunderstorms, and a generally crappy tone to the weather. I was thinking about that yesterday, as Mike Sanders proposed:
The most accepted definition of professional is getting paid to do something, whether it be writing, journalism or sports. But as with most things the line gets fuzzy at the edges.
So I began to wonder about the genesis of this term, and the negative turbulence that it creates in me. I took a quick glance at my Shorter Oxford this morning and noted that the opposition of professional to amateur is a late 19th century one, so it’s not always been there. Mike asked a very good question:
Is getting paid the most relevant definition of professional? Why is that? Will it change in the age of the Internet?
A. adj. I. 1. Pertaining to or marking entrance into a religious order. Obs. rare.
c1420 St. Etheldred 797 in Horstm. Altengl. Leg. (1881) 300 Hit was hurre professhennalle rynge. [Cf. profession-ring in PROFESSION 9.]
II. 2. Pertaining to, proper to, or connected with a or one's profession or calling.
1747-8 RICHARDSON Clarissa (J.), Professional, as well as national, reflections are to be avoided. 1838 DICKENS Nich. Nick. xiv, I dislike doing anything professional in private parties. 1849 MACAULAY Hist. Eng. iii. I. 332 It was in these rustic priests,..who had not the smallest chance of ever attaining high professional honours, that the professional spirit was strongest. 1870 LOWELL Study Wind. 408 As perfectly professional as the mourning of an undertaker.
3. Engaged in one of the learned or skilled professions, or in a calling considered socially superior to a trade or handicraft. professional (middle) class, members of the learned and skilled professions regarded collectively.
1793 SMEATON Edystone L. 73 Called upon, not only as a professional man, but as a man of veracity. 1871 M. E. BRADDON Zoophyte's Rev. iii, Sometimes there was a party, consisting of professional people..with a sprinkling of the smaller county gentry. 1888 BESANT 50 Years Ago xix. 262 There has been a great upward movement of the professional class. 1979 G. ST. AUBYN Edward VII i. 29 Gibbs had been brought up as a member of the professional Middle Class.
4. a. That follows an occupation as his (or her) profession, life-work, or means of livelihood, as a professional soldier, musician, or lecturer; spec. applied to one who follows, by way of profession or business, an occupation generally engaged in as a pastime; hence used in contrast with amateur, as professional cricketer. Disparagingly applied to one who ‘makes a trade’ of anything that is properly pursued from higher motives, as a professional politician.
5. That is trained and skilled in the theoretic or scientific parts of a trade or occupation, as distinct from its merely mechanical parts; that raises his trade to the dignity of a learned profession.
6. = PROFESSORIAL. Obs. rare.
b. spec. A prostitute. Cf. PROFESSION 6e.
These windy terms like professional get thrown about so much they become meaningless, really. That’s why I had to have a look. Positive uses of the term seem to be relatively rare. Rising hot air creates rain. Rain, as I found out this morning, creates pressure. As I turned the corner to drive on campus, a manhole cover was floating three inches above the pavement, pushed up by the flood of water rushing onto the road from it. A drain must have been clogged somewhere. Sounds like a job for a professional.
About five hours sleep due to a power failure just as I went to bed... tossing and turning in nervousness that I might miss my morning class.
But I’ve moved to a higher caliber. I turned 44 today, and I celebrated by having a typical Monday. I won’t lay claim to being a magnum, just an ordinary average guy.
As the clock passed midnight, the power came back on, and I found myself drawn back to Blake, with his threefold and fourfold visions. Not enough time to sketch it out, but I just felt a big woosh as my head was sucked into Jerusalem once again. Sometimes I think I’ve read plate 98 about a thousand times, but every time it just sweeps me away.
And they conversed together in Visionary forms dramatic which bright
Redounded from their Tongues in thunderous majesty, in Visions
In new Expanses, creating exemplars of Memory and Intellect
Creating Space, Creating Time according to the wonders Divine
Of Human Imagination throughout three regions immense
Of Childhood, Manhood & Old Age & the all tremendous unfathomable Non Ens
Of Death was seen in regenerations terrific or complacent varying
According to the subject of discourse & every Word & Every Character
Was Human according to the Expansion or Contraction, the Translucence or
Opakeness of Nervous Fibres such was the variation of Time & Space
Which vary according as the Organs of Perception vary & they Walked
To & fro in Eternity as One Man reflecting each in each & clearly seen
And seeing: according to fitness & order.
I’m blown away that a few people on the net noticed that it was my birthday; I seldom pay much attention to them, for I am constantly wrapped in these visionary forms dramatic. They insinuate me.
I was thinking of that in a different way as I drove home from my night class. I wanted to spell it in-sinew-ate. Perception becomes a muscle, under the skin, which flexes itself at the oddest times.
To continue my tirade about journalism, while reading McKeon's book on the novel I was struck by an eerie similarity. Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that when journalists write about the "blogging phenomenon" they always bury a provoking insult in there somewhere? That way, their article will be linked by bloggers, promoting their rise to fame on google. Now that's crafty. I never linked or commented on the "cockroach" thing, because unlike most bloggers I was flattered by the comparison. I also enjoyed Oscar Zeta Acosta's Revolt of the Cockroach People, a novel about the rise of Chicano militants. Acosta, by the way, was Hunter S. Thompson's Samoan attorney in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (another of those "rites of passage" novels). Cockroaches are survivors. I think survival is a good thing.
The insults are really getting keen and specific now. In Reading, Writing, and Blogging Jonathan V. Last begins with a positive tag line, spouting the now old party line that blogging makes journalism better. Then he gets in his jab:
But these noble effects of blogging are marginal, and if bloggers were able to be dispassionate about their medium, they would admit that the bad cultural artifacts the blog leaves behind easily balance the scales. For one thing, the blog encourages instantaneous reaction, not serious reflection. And for another, it often degenerates into daisy-chain navel gazing.
Wherin the age may see her owne folly, or hunger and thirst after publish'd pamphlets of Newes, set out euery Saturday, but made all at home, & no syllable of truth in them.
Daisy-chain navel gazing? Sounds great. Where do I sign up?
I can’t help it. My library just keeps growing. It only took partway through the first chapter of McKeon’s book on the novel before I was online ordering it, and the Cicero to boot. You just can’t have enough at your fingertips. These are books I know I will use. Like that book of selections from the Tatler and the Spectator I got eons ago, while researching the “pleasures of the imagination.”
Brief and uncollected thoughts
McKeon cites one John Aubrey who says of the ancient Britons: “They were two or three degrees, I suppose, less savage than the Americans.” It’s the native Americans that he’s speaking of. Somehow, I suspect that the bashed in skulls found in the bogs since then might refute that appraisal.
Debates over truth and authenticity were at the core of the proliferation of the printed word. If it’s in print, in must be true? Not really. It sort of reminded me of the ongoing metablogging discussion. Folks everywhere are revisiting an old debate with increasing fervor. As periods become defined (and histories get written) the process of separating the truth from fiction becomes increasingly important.
I’ve always had an inherent mistrust of journalism, and much of the debate about web behaviors often goes back to the idea that it's a new “replacement” for journalism. However, I never placed it in the context of the battle between mythoi, “just stories” and logoi, or “true stories.” I also never thought of journalism as the creation of the sort of “lust for the new” which the Romantics are so often accused of. I think that criticism is ungrounded, but it’s often voiced anytime those horrible generalities about Romanticism are thrown about. McKeon suggests that “romance” is the category that came to replace, or fulfill the need satisfied by myth. There was from the beginning a tension between the “new” and the “truth.” McKeon cites an instance where in order to assault a reporters case in 1630, the worst insult Richard Braithwaite could hurl at the reporter was to call his article “novel,” thus undermining its historicity. The fundamental opposition involved, which journalism grew up in the middle of, was between history and romance.
It seems to me that journalism is still very much romance in disguise. While fact checking has been improved, its novelty, or newness, is the single most deciding factor in distribution. It’s seldom well grounded, and presents opinion as often as it presents fact. One of McKeon’s citations made me turn back to the Tatler, for Steele’s comment on those who educate themselves through newspapers:
As great and Useful discoveries are sometimes made by accidental and small Beginnings, I came to the Knowledge of the most Epidemick Ill of this Sort, by falling into a Coffee-house where I saw my Friend the Upholsterer, whose Crack towards Politicks I have heretofore mentioned. This Touch in the Brain of the British Subject, is as certainly owing to the reading of News-papers, as that of the Spanish Worthy above mentioned to the reading of Works of Chivalry. My Contemporaries the Novelists have, for the better spinning out of Paragraphs, and working down to the end of Columns, a most happy Art in Saying and Unsaying, giving Hints of Intelligence, and Interpretations of indifferent Actions, to the greater Disturbance of the Brains of ordinary Readers. (#178, 30 May 1710)
We aim to please. But don’t fool yourself. This is romance in disguise, but it isn't journalism.
I had just finished reading the introduction to Michael McKeon’s The Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 when I had a thought (strange how that happens).
Sorting out “modes” or “genres” is a difficult thing. I’ve read lots of stuff about it, including Todorov and David Perkin’s work. I liked the plan of attack that McKeon laid out: rather than starting with an originary hypothesis, he decided it might be better to begin with the time that the idea of the novel was a useful one and work backward from there. Why did the classification of the novel as something worthy of it’s own noun serve a purpose? Good question.
Then I drove to the store. I started thinking about the centrality of the Internet as a label to identify “new” communicative behaviors. Why is this nominalization useful? I don’t recall seeing book length works on how the telephone changed the world. I didn’t hear many debates over the future of the telephone. Or, the distribution of phone books— oh my god, people will be able to randomly pick out strangers and call them! What might this mean for the future of society?
This is why I find it hard to get too excited about all the net discussion. This thing might as well be a microwave oven or a toaster to me. The question that never seems to get asked is: how is it better than the communication technologies we had before? Were there studies on the social behaviors of the party line? Or, why the party line had its boom period, and then faded from use as the costs of single user telephones grew smaller?
A lot of trees are sure being killed over this Internet thing, which is a bit oxymoronic. The real story is much older than that. It reminded me of a song by Roy Harper.
Pinches of Salt
Arthur read stories he got from the shelf
of the gingerbread house of the men in between
making his mind up to keep to himself
and somewhere the future had been.
Pinches of salt
Nobody’s fault
Just the tune of the moon on the ocean.
One year quite suddenly out of the blue
the phone box grew curtains with Sanderson prints
and designers of countryside loaded the view
with “sort of” decisions and hints
And Arthur slept in on the edge of his seat
way back in his mind where the butterflies flew
bred non-committal to live nice and neat
with lots of his dreams coming true
Pinches of salt
Nobody’s fault
Just the tune of the moon on the ocean.
Roy described on his mailing list what “the phone box grew curtains with Sanderson prints” was about. It misses the US audience. In the UK, telephones were slow to come into homes. It was phone boxes first, but then eventually, there was one in every living room. I suspect that the Internet will really be that way for the majority. It’s an appliance, like a telephone. The majority, still wrapped in their dreams and motives will sleep, until it’s just another thing that’s there, suddenly and out of the blue.
After all, we’re just pinches of salt. Nobody’s fault. Just the tune of the moon on the ocean. We give things like the Internet a name, because it’s useful to have something to call it. “Blog” was created to describe a certain type of location on that communication web. In and of itself, the concept is about as interesting as a telephone number, or a party line. The people behind them, and what they say is what I’m in it for.
I do think that there are evolving modes, genres, and types that deserve looking into. However, discussing the machinery behind them bores me to tears. I’m in it for the stories.
I just had to say that. I’ve got my own problems with the Romans— this business of separating law from the people as a whole, for example. But when it comes to getting things done, they had it wired. I decided to take an unusual, perhaps anachronistic, approach to teaching the essay. I wanted to use the Roman model.
Just what is the Roman model? A six-part essay structure which has influenced everything from sermons to speeches to television shows. It’s so firmly planted in the way we take care of business that everyone takes it for granted these days. In the obscure Latin version, it’s this:
- exordium
- narratio
- partitito
- confirmatio
- reprehensio
- conclusio
- Introduction [statement of the problem]
- Background
- Structure [in Cicero’s version— some versions list “claim” or group these things together]
- Argument
- Refutation
- Conclusion [or call to action]
And boy does it. I just finished scanning the first part of Cicero’s treatment of it. He spends almost 2,000 words on the introduction alone. However, going back to the source, I also found that Cicero proposes this structure in the context of forensic oratory. It’s a legal model for pleading a case.
Some might argue that this is what any form of writing does. It represents itself as a method of problem solving, if there were no problems to solve there would be no need to write at all.
Cicero’s attention to the introduction is amazing. In some ways, I think that’s what most blogs always seem to come back to each day. There’s always a feeling that someone out there is reading for the first time, and attention must be paid to the impression that a person receives upon visiting your “space.” I’ll defer to Cicero’s initial appraisal:
An exordium is a passage which brings the mind of the auditor into a proper condition to receive the rest of the speech. This will be accomplished if he becomes well-disposed, attentive, and receptive. Therefore one who wishes his speech to have a good exordium must make a careful study beforehand of the kind of case which he has to present. There are five kinds of cases : honourable, difficult, mean, ambiguous, obscure.
The obscure case is one in which either the auditors are slow of wit, or the case involves matters which are rather difficult to grasp.
In a case of the obscure kind the introduction must be used to make the audience receptive.
Insinuation is an address which by dissimulation and indirection unobtrusively steals into the mind of the auditor.
I’m sure my attempts to introduce myself each day fall into the catagories of faulty exordia listed by Cicero:
The tedious exordium is one which is spun out beyond all need with a superabundance of words or ideas. The unconnected is one which is not derived from the circumstances of the case nor closely knit with the rest of the speech, as a limb to a body. It is out of place if it produces a result different from what the nature of the case requires.
I’ve got e-mails I should answer, papers I need to write, papers I need to grade, and yet every time I look at this box I find something. I do my best to avoid marketing and software people on the web, but every time I turn around and I bump into them.
I just don’t like the mindset. I don’t want to be a product, though I do believe that being consumed is a good thing. I’m not using my web log as a means of increasing productivity, making a sale, or any of the above. I’m writing. Writing changes consciousness in a way that is deeper than any of the subsequent nuances gained through technology. The first web— the web I am most concerned with— is life itself.
I often turn to the Greeks these days. The Fates spin their own sort of web. Clotho, the spinner, produces the thread. Lachesis, weaves it into the events that shapes our lives and Atropos trims it at its conclusion. Is the web a space? I suppose it’s as good a metaphor as anything. To make sense of things, we try to distance ourselves from them. It’s the way the mind works. Having three women governing life is still an attractive, comfortable concept.
To give things power over us, we have to name them. The names of the Fates are not recited much these days, because humanity has moved past them. Instead, we speak of profit and loss, production and consumption, and a hundred other binaries. Yet we fall back easily to the sort of oral aphorisms that fueled the birth of society. Two steps forward, one step back. “In the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes” becomes:
“On the Web everyone will be famous to 15 people”
I’d never pick up the book under normal circumstances, because of my own mental filtering out of things related to consumer modeling. However, given Tom’s excellent review of it, I may have to rethink that. I don’t think I’ll gain any deep insight, but at the very least it seems as if it's grounded in an appreciation of the larger web.
I have yet to see a convincing argument about what makes the Internet different from the larger web though. Take this fragment of Tom’s review regarding defining the character of this new discourse environment for example:
It's as if our bodies and their nuisance appurtenances of time, space and matter were to be drained off, leaving a sort of puree of human intentionality.
Driving back from school yesterday, it seemed like language is a giant fog bank that we all reach into, trying to touch the people on the other side. That started long before the Internet, and continues with all it’s problems regardless of the technology involved.
I do think of my web presence as a “space” and using it provides a place to stretch out, and sometimes touch a handful of people. It does not, however, have any special priority. This is a notebook. If people are interested in my “waxing philosophical,” fine. Otherwise, not. If people are interested in the stories, or anecdotes from day to day life, fine. Otherwise not. They can flit on to another site and find something that interests them more.
I do think of it as a bit of a social locus, but I constantly do my best to be a good friend and not dwell in one space too long. I don’t want to be boring, though I am sure I often am. That’s the nature of a notebook. Some pages are going to be more interesting than others.
Care to read it? It’s completely up to you. In the parlance of the linguists: “Hearer knows best.”
I could have gone a lot longer without this piece of information. I blame the Internet.
I figured somebody had to make a complaint to go along with the rant by Turbulent Velvet regarding the negative possibilities of the social networking of the Internet. It's a great piece, really. Of course I say that after having recieved a nice comment from someone who stumbled into a piece I wrote last November reacting and pointing to an article about Lewis Carrol, and after having checked out a book that some visitor to my site recomended regarding the history of the novel that seems to be just what I'm looking for... I guess you could say that my complaints with the Internet are superficial by comparison.
It all started after a fruitless search for Cicero's De Inventione. Virtually everything else from Cicero is available on the Internet, but not any of his works on rhetoric. I needed it to ground a post I want to write about the classical Roman structure of the essay. I've seen it quoted a dozen places, but I like to go to the source. That's the problem.
Now I'm faced with a lot more work. Chances are, I'll go ahead and transcribe the relevant sections and put them online. The original text is quite rewarding in regard to the different possibilities of speech-making or writing. It teases out the well-honed six-part essay structure into even more subtle choices.
I could have ordered the book, but since I was sure it could be found in the university library, I decided to make the drive back. Being a Friday afternoon, I knew the place would be deserted and I could park more easily. I had to make a pit stop to rid myself of some excess fluid (more than you wanted to know, I'm sure, but it's essential to the story).
I wrote a long time ago about the practice of placing advertising in bathroom stalls on campus. During the homecoming race last year, some bright soul placed a campaign poster featuring a fresh-faced young girl in a placard above the urinals. This year, it was just a long list of health tips, including the aforementioned "fiber makes floaters" gem. I much prefer the campaign posters.
I snagged a photo I meant to put up long ago from this year's homecoming race. It seems that Supergirl ran for homecoming queen. She was prancing around the campus in her tights, but what amazed me most was the incredibly flattering photo. They didn't go quite so far this year with their electioneering, and I didn't notice any photos in the bathroom stalls. It's a shame really, because there were some fine ones.
The up-the-nose shot has always been one of my favorites. She's got nice nostrils, doesn't she?
I think some spaces should just be private. No, I don't want to sing "row row row your boat" while I'm washing my hands to make sure I do it long enough.
I absolutely insist on drinking caffeinated beverages before going to bed. As a matter of fact, my sleep habits are none of your business while I'm urinating. How rude. Keep your health advice to yourself.
However, the electioneering, particularly of attractive young women, doesn't really bother me while I'm standing in the stall.
Student elections also featured an interesting odd couple. The whitebread fellow on the right was elected vice president, while the campus elected the first black female president in the university's history. It's about time, for a campus which is nearly 40% black. I don't have an explanation for the Uncle Sam character.
It's amazing how little the journalism departments on campuses have changed over the years: this cheesy shot would have been perfectly in place in 1977, the last time I was in a college journalism program.
After studying theories from several different subject fields, I find my mind littered with them. They keep overlapping each other in the strangest ways. Unlike oppositions or negations, triangles create space. Two points on a continuum always result in a line, but it takes a minimum of three points to create a space.
The fundamental rhetorical apparatus is the rhetorical triangle, composed of language, speaker, and audience. It is easily flattened into a terrible sort of continuum. This happens every time we write. Notice that in the triangular representation, there are lines that connect the audience with the speaker, and the audience with the language. If you filter the communication through written words, the audience can no longer see the speaker, only the language. The speaker also is limited, having lost the view of his audience in flatland:
Speaker → Language → Audience
However, by placing language at the apex of the pyramid it takes on the significance of defining culture, defining the relationship between speaker and audience. Language is the at the pinnacle of the development of society. This whole idea of banding together in groups must have been a tough sale from the beginning: sacrificing immediate personal gain for long term benefits. It seems clear that a functional, useful rhetoric must be at the top of the list of problems to solve. How do we persuade people to act to improve the general, rather than specific personal advantage? Rhetoric, according to Aristotle, was the art of determining the best means of persuasion for a wide variety of occasions.
Identifying the basic modes of persuasion, the Greeks listed three primary appeals: ethos, pathos, and logos. There is no implied priority in these appeals, however, by imposing on them a hierarchal structure, an interesting model emerges. Each of these terms is loaded with connotations. Ethos, the root word of ethics, can be interpreted as a personal quality of goodness, or, in the broader sense it means custom, character, or kinship. I have placed that at the top of my pyramid. Another appeal is logos, the root of logic, which also implies "the word" in the divine sense, as well as fact or truth. Pathos is the appeal to the heart. Drawing the appeals this way opens up a space; these things do not lie in a straight line. Custom or character does not imply either heart or truth; there is no simple progression to be found.
These concepts translate well into another sort of trinity: that of mind, body, and soul. The apex should be simple to agree upon. Surely soul would be the highest quality of man. Unitary philosophies, or holistic ones, seem to be aimed at the collapse of the space between these distinctions. I do not think that this provides a useful way of looking at it. Appreciated for their differences, these qualities of man open up a space for conversation to take place, and the form of those conversations can also be teased out into three often overlapping forms of discourse
In The Spectator Role and the Beginnings of Writing James Britton proposed a sort of continuum for writing. The modes of writing he describes are:
Transactional ← → Expressive ← → Poetic
The transactional is the most common form of writing; it is the writing by which we transfer knowledge to each other. The poetic transfers feelings. The expressive contains elements of both. The distinction can also be described through roles. When we write expressively, we are both participant and spectator, whereas transactional writing is more closely allied with participation alone. The role of the poetic then, is the role of the spectator. Rather than representing them on a continuum, a triangle makes more sense.
Then I stumbled on Henri Lefebvre's triadic model of representational spaces through a posting on net.narrative.environments. There were two major concepts in this model that appealed to me. First of all, the idea that representational spaces represent an intersection between what we perceive and conceive. As the often stolen lines from Wordsworth go, we half-create what we half-perceive. This seems obvious. However, tying this to materialism and idealism, and thinking about the model of social spaces described there made all my triangles come together.
Social space is "not a thing but rather a set of relations between [objects and products]."
Language
Ethos
Soul
Expressive Writing
Representational Space
Speaker
Logos
Mind
Transactional Writing
Spatial Practice
Audience
Pathos
Body
Poetic Writing
Representation of Space
Britton proposes that expressive writing is the matrix from which all other writing follows. This would make sense, given that it expresses both the inner feelings of a person, and their place in relation to the larger culture. The view of self and world is told through an almost monolithic notion of self: this is how I feel. It's represented often in binaries: I like this. This sucks. Most contemporary writing programs in one fashion or another attempt to open up expressive writing and move it to a higher level, although there is substantial confusion about how to achieve this. Just what is a higher level anyway? I'm beginning to believe that it is tied directly to the relationship of participant and observer.
When an individual writes from these perspectives as if they were one, there is little space for writing to develop. There must be a separation of fact from opinion, logic from feeling, in order to open up a space for more complex writing. These attributes never exist in pure states, however, by attempting to increase the discrimination between them a representational space develops more fully. It's about moving from a point inside the self into other perspectives, with one pole attached firmly to the mind and another firmly rooted in the body that more complex writing evolves. It is only through consciousness of our mind and body, not just our soul, that we become good writers.
Or, I could be completely out to lunch. It was just a thought. I think of triangles a lot. There's a Thin White Rope song that haunts me called "Triangle"
I am feeling just a little down
Nothing I can wrap reasons around
But I can ignore it if I look real hard
And make perfect triangles out of every three stars
Sometimes I make burns on my arms
Cause it moves that feeling from my heart to my arms
And when I'm driving and it keeps me awake
I have so many more triangles to make
Now that I have planted the seed
Maybe those triangles will form without me
Surround the world in their crystalline ache
And freeze the heroes into glassy mosaics
I get lost in these spatial games, like some kid playing with blocks. I want to make things fit together, and move into more dimensions. I want to create some sort of space that these thoughts can find a home in.
It often seems like a crystalline ache.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Adam EMAIL: blog@quicken.iwarp.com URL: http://lostadam.duckerpromotion.com DATE: 03/15/2002 10:24:00 PM In animation we we have a process called Tessellation, where all the NURBS and B-Spline geometry are converted to triangles instead of wire frame. So, for me there is something about triangles as well, but insanly not related to your statements. I'll go away now. -----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Phil O. Mazos EMAIL: URL: DATE: 04/11/2004 4:35:00 PM I, too, see triangles as an underlying structure in just about everything. Consider the Medieval trivium of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric, which holds just as true today as it ever did for good composition. Any good writing is based upon the delicate balance of the triumvirate of Unity, Coherence, Development. And let us not forget the ancient Greek philosophical triad of Goodness, Beauty, and Truth! ----- --------TITLE: Knowledge and Power DATE: 03/13/2002 10:04:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: For the curious.Because I often talk about what I do in the classroom, I thought I might as well provide some of the material I’m using for those who have an interest in approaches to writing. I’ve read dozens of times on the web that modern thinking about “style” can be separated between the poles of Derrida (or fill in the postmodernist of your choice) and Orwell. Just what does that mean? An Orwellian might say that you can look at writing like a game where he who is the most obtuse, wins. Or you can work for clarity. However, the counter-argument is that language is rich and that limiting oneself to the “plain-style” is ludicrous. A postmodernist wants to revel in the language game.
I chose to teach the Orwell essay that this distinction is derived from for several reasons. First, it follows fairly closely the model of the essay put forward by Cicero (which I also taught), and because it is controversial enough to make people have to think about it. Secondly, the majority of teachers in other subject fields (at the undergraduate level anyway) would hold up the “plain-style” as something close to the model of perfection. Orwell rails against the forces of obscurity in Politics and the English Language.
Written in 1946, this essay tears into the structure of hollow political and academic rhetoric. I’ve been thinking it a lot since our country declared war on a feeling. A “war on terror?” I mean, what the hell is that? It doesn’t get much more obscurantist. This morning, I was thinking about the whole “axis of evil” thing too. Lets see, in order to make the “Johnny goes marching off to war” thing symmetrical, we’ve got to imply an alliance analogous to the Japan/Germany axis by dragging North Korea into the front row. These phrases are the embodiment of what Orwell terms “dying metaphors,” metaphors so tired that they have completely lost their meaning. So I thought Orwell’s essay was appropriate, timely, and concise when it comes to representing the almost Lockean view that we should “say what we mean.”
Okay, but I needed a counterpoint. I wanted to show that language that uses some of the things that Orwell rails against can be effective too. I also wanted to differentiate creative writing from writing good non-fiction essays. So, I chose an essay that changed my outlook toward literature early on: Thomas DeQuincey’s Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power.
That essay, sadly, wasn’t to be found anywhere on the Internet. Well, it’s there now. I scanned it and OCR’d it for the class, so now I’ve turned it into a web document. For people unaccustomed to 19th century prose, it is a bit dense. But that was the point. DeQuincey’s style is anything but plain, and yet it is still concisely defined and argued. And the issues he raises are still important today, particularly for a freshman student who might wonder just what the hell literature is, and what good it does. I raised eyebrows in the department with this one, certainly, because it isn’t my job to teach literature.
However, this is a non-fiction expository essay which strongly argues the value of literature. But it does so much more than that. First, DeQuincey expands literature to the realm of sermons, speeches, theater, etc. Just because it isn’t in a book doesn’t mean it isn’t literature. The same tools with which we approach the analysis of writing can be used in any form of discourse. I think that the distinction that DeQuincey makes in this short piece is easily transferred into life. The division of literatures is pragmatic; the primary difference is the work accomplished by the discourse.
The function of the “Literature of Knowledge” is to teach. The function of what we most commonly think of as literature, “Literature of Power” is to move. It’s the wind in the sails of humanity. Without it, we have nothing to move us along. However, I found myself arguing against some of DeQuincey’s points in class today, right along with my students. “Hey, I learn things from the novels I read . . .” etc.
A perfect case is found in his example of Paradise Lost. DeQuincey asserts that a person who reads Milton’s epic learns nothing. I asked the class the obvious question: “What did Eve eat in the garden of Eden?” The answer, which most people would jump at is: “An apple.” That’s not in the Bible; the bible just says that it’s a fruit. The apple comes from Paradise Lost. People who have never read the poem quote facts from it, filtered through its centuries of influence. I think the class was quite thrilled when I explained why Milton made the fruit an apple instead of a kiwi or a banana. It’s a Latin pun. Apple is mal in Latin, and it also means bad. But the distinction between “fact” and “fiction” is a blurry one, and it’s a distinction I’m trying to get them to make in their essays.
So that’s where I’ve been the last few days. I can’t teach literature, but I can preach it just a little. I do believe that there are answers to be found there, although it contains little in the way of “facts.”
Which brings me to Loren’s lament today, regarding commentary on On the Road:
Unfortunately when Diane and I wrote our analysis of the book, some people were upset because we missed the point of the work. NO. We DIDN’T miss the point of the novel. I knew we had missed the meaning Kerouac had for many readers, which was why I asked Jeff Ward of Visible Darkness to write about it from his perspective. But Diane and I read the book NOW, and it provides no real answers to the questions WE were trying to answer. For Diane and I, it was just another dead end road.
William Blake went to his grave singing, with a heart filled with joy in the world, and no fear of leaving it. Yeats reflected on the folly of so many fruitless pursuits as he grew older, and yet still seemed to be happy with the quest for spirit that was his life. These are the guys I look to now, the ones who fill my sails just as Kerouac and Burroughs and Vonnegut and others did when I was younger. It’s all power, folks. You just pick what you need at the time. Literature works.
Yes, I did say reading a certain popular novel made me ready for "the icepick in the forehead" yesterday. I edited it out, because it seemed redundant with my other closing line. This phrase, by the way, is a Frank Zappa reference from Joe's Garage. The other rude line about being done was from Lou Reed. I can't help following all sorts of literary texts.
Talk about the use of the pathetic appeal...Rex sent me a larger photo he gleaned from somewhere out there, and I snipped this sticker from the corner. Persuasion is everywhere.
Of course, that's not as bad as this or this.
Then, oddly enough, I connected a bit of theory with another one of Rex's familiar admonitions:
Peel me an onion.
In one of my classes last night, the head of the Speech Communications department lectured on some of the current theory there, which overlaps a great deal with rhetorical theory. Though the theorists are different, some of the problems spring from the same fountain. Unlike my earlier estimation of them (I called them the milk and cookies department at one point, because it seemed like kindergarten forever), the goal in Speech Communications is to peel the onion.
The focus in Speech Communications is interpersonal relationships. It strikes me as a weird interface between psychology and rhetoric, a sort of applied psychology, which like rhetoric, is focused on negotiation of problems to a desired resolution. It’s persuasion, just as Aristotle defined rhetoric, but it’s more concerned with the touchy-feely side. Logical argument isn’t a primary concern, but instead, like the “New Rhetoric,” its aim is consubstantiality. We are supposed to all get together and have a group hug, I suppose.
But the model of self as an onion is really almost funny. I can't remember the last time I got sufficiently peeled to think of the universe in this sort of way. I'm too tightly knit, interwoven as it were, to think of self in these terms. All my layers interpenetrate.
The Social Penetration Process. I can get behind that. After all, even Rex would admit that penetration is a common goal. That, according to these folks, involves peeling the onion. We start at the outer layers of superficial commonality, moving into the levels of ethical agreement. When we feel comfortable in revealing our deeply held spiritual values, then we're getting nearer to the "core personality."
I love models. But there are big problems with this one. It presupposes a unitary self. That is, according to most current theory, a fallacy. Of course the head of the department knew that. But when you discard the core of the onion, the skin just starts flailing about. I don't think this model works well at all.
Mike Sanders, in another strange coincidence, spoke of another model similar to what the Speech Communications specialist offered last night. John Hiler proposed a model of "time economics" for blogging, where the amount of time invested in linking is far less than the time required to generate real content. Time-economics is a matter of time invested vs. reading time accrued. This has deep resonance with the costs and rewards model of friendship. The theory is that we weigh our friendships based on what the costs are versus the benefits in a reasonable economic model. When the scale tips too far, we shut the friendship down. I don't buy that model either. It presupposes a sort of dialectic continuum to life, a continuum that I increasingly doubt.
Talking to Dr. Kleine during a break, he put it very succinctly: "Dialectic models have limited usefulness when you have more than two people, or more than two alternatives involved." It's not in my opinion, a useful model of web behaviors. It's a rationale which hides the real reason why people often link, rather than write: they don't want to peel the onion.
There are only a few link-pointing blogs that I read regularly, Wood s lot being one of them. The reason is that he provides thoughtful extracts rather than just quick ambiguous pointers. I would suspect that he spends a reasonable amount of time selecting which parts he extracts, because they are often key thoughts in the middle of huge documents. It's hardly a more "efficient" mode of creating traffic, especially when it's done well.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny! EMAIL: URL: DATE: 03/13/2002 4:52:00 PM i better find a man before all the kitties perish. ----- --------TITLE: Audit DATE: 03/13/2002 2:08:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: I got audited today.It was fun, really. I got to show off my kids. I got the call at 8pm last night that Dr. Andrea Hermann needed to sit in on one of my classes sometime in the next few weeks. I picked today, because I really wanted to do a review of the material that I’ve covered so far before they finish up their drafts for next week. There has been a certain nervousness from some people in the department that I might be aiming too high for freshman students.
I mean, who tackles Thomas DeQuincey in freshman comp? Not many teachers on my campus, anyway. The interesting thing for me was that I had another huge paradigm shift when I was trying to sleep last night. I managed to superimpose the classic Greek appeals, James Britton’s classes of writing, and Henri Lefebvre’s representational spaces onto one model. This brings together what I’ve told them about the Roman model of the essay, the steps to an effective sale, and the appeals, into one easy to digest graphic model. So I taught it today.
It came off well. I skipped the techno-babble, as I usually do, and cut right to the chase of how it could work for them. They all managed to remember the Roman model, the appeals, and the types of formal logic when I asked. So there. Freshman students are brighter than what people want to give them credit for. I really feel like they get coddled too much, writing about their summer vacation and such when their writing could actually be doing work for them. I think the models that I’m offering work, are concurrent with the classical models, and at the same time are open to more postmodern approaches.
I suspect I’ll write more about them here in the few days as I get it sorted out (with jargon included, sorry) so that I can fix this little epiphany. Writing is a life skill. It needs to be taught that way, not just as an arcane technology for surviving school.
Damn, I love this job. Students came into class arguing about the Orwell essay we just covered. Great! I don’t agree with all of it either, and it was just gratifying to have them find its weak points on their own, without coaching from me. Of course, Dr. Hermann might have thought that I coached them to think that way, but really I didn’t. Their thoughts were personal, reasoned, and well placed. No argument, or essay, is ever perfect. Figuring out where the writer misses the mark is as important as where they hit. That’s the only way you can spot your own problems, and learn to shore-up your writing to avoid assault.
While I don’t think that writing classes should be feared as chemistry or the sciences, I do believe they should be as meaty as the sciences in terms of real practical knowledge rather than just skill exercises.
I feel like this is where the payoff of all those years of wondering how I would teach comes in. It feels good to present what is really quite complex, as simple enough for even a freshman to understand.
Dr. Hermann just quitely smiled through most of it. I wasn't nervous at all. I'm pretty sure she'll give me a positive evaluation. Dr. Levernier asked me if I was teaching the same class next semester. He told me that if he could match it to his schedule, he wanted to sit in on my class. As one of the co-authors of a writing textbook now in its sixth printing, that is indeed high praise. The way I'm approaching things is quite different from his book, but in some ways I've modeled it after him with a more classical/postmodern approach. His approach is the paragraph. Mine is the essay.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 03/13/2002 4:56:00 PM your classes sounds great. can i take it by correspondence? :D ----- --------TITLE: Wank DATE: 03/11/2002 9:48:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I was just forced to watch an episode of anorexic McBeal in a class. The episode closed with some Michael Bolton clone crooning. I think I’m going to be really ill now.
Leaving the class, a torrential rain started. Thankfully, teaching this morning is still a pleasant memory. Nobody told me there’d be days like these... I wish I could have the three and a half hours I spent reading that novel back this afternoon.
Of course I exaggerate. The highlight of the evenings class was when I hinted at my belief that Socrates was a master manipulator. The professor responded:
If you believe that, then the entire ethical structure of Western philosophy is suspect!
----- --------TITLE: Throwing stones DATE: 03/11/2002 5:32:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
You're right— it is.
With twenty minutes to spare, I finished Stones for Ibarra by Harriet Doerr. It was without a doubt the worst novel I’ve read in a long while. Utterly predictable, depressing, boring, filled with pointless detail... Uh, did I remember to say that I hated it?
My professor thinks that it is one of the best of the twentieth century, risk taking and daring. I try to withhold my sniping in class, but the damn thing is just rotten to the core as far as I’m concerned. It opens by telling what’s going to happen in three paragraphs. The teacher said this was a “risk.” Nabokov does the same thing in Laughter in the Dark with much greater effect. Each of the early chapters has little connection with the main story, except to set the scene. In Mexico, they accept death as a part of life. Alright, I get it already, next! But it never stops. Chapter after chapter ends in meaningless death. Finally, when the major characters are fleshed out, you find out that they are pretty much made of stone. No real feelings, just constant involvement in mundane stuff.
Yech!!!! I just had to rant and get it out of my system. I know this was a fairly popular book years ago, but reading it made me feel much better about ignoring contemporary fiction.
Stick a fork in my ass and turn me over, I’m done.
That settles it. I’m teaching Thomas Dequincey’s “Literature of Knowledge and Literature of Power” on Wednesday. I can’t take any more of this contemporary crap. But I must admit, I did enjoy using Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” today. I know all contemporary writing isn’t bad, it just sometimes smells that way.
A long day grading papers. But at least I’m now nearly caught up. All I have to do is teach two classes, read a medium sized novel, and have it finished in time for my night class.
Then I can start working on the hypertext essay for my Tuesday night class. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll have that finished on time, but I’m going to give it a try. The problem is, constructing it will involve revisiting huge chunks of Aristotle on Rhetoric. Oh well, such is the life of a... just whatever the hell it is that I am.
But for a moment, there can be a little peace. On the good side, the essays were far more interesting than I expected. I’ve got to start writing some stuff about the classes so I’ll have something to turn in for a “journal” for the practicum, but it’s hard to get motivated to construct another journal besides this one. With this one, I get feedback instead of performing a rote exercise to satisfy a teacher that I’m engaged with the material. Hell yes I’m engaged. If I was any more engaged with rhetorical issues at this point, I’d need to be surgically separated!
For some reason, I’ve got a scene, either from a book or a movie in my head about an Native American custom of going to a hill at sunrise each day to sing the world into being. It seems to me that music is just so close to the soul, our world, and our perception of it. It seems fitting that the latest Doubletake features both new photographs by Danny Lyon (one of my heroes) from the reservation, and an article about “internal music.” A few of the photographs from the magazine, and a few that aren’t there, can be found at Lyon on the Rez. It’s well worth a surf.
The article by Andrew Potok details the work of Connie Tomaino at the Institute of Neurologic Function at Beth Abraham Hospital. In brief, it’s an exploration of the function of music in consciousness. Some diseases cause a miscuing between the auditory system and the brain stem, so playing a rhythm to a Parkinson’s patient for example, helps them to walk correctly where they were unable to take a single step before. Fascinating stuff. The conjectures involve the connection with auditory impulses and the emotional processing centers (well discussed in an entry of mine I’m tired of citing). It seems like music can actually substitute or supplant some damaged functions, helping resynchronize an internal clock. This is due to the separate structures of emotional processing vs. temporal processing which I’ve often discussed. However, the article does engage in more simplistic hemispheric hypotheses:
In patients whose language functions have been damaged, as in cases of expressive aphasia, where comprehension is intact but the ability to execute language has been damaged, or with stroke victims, it now seems possible to enhance speech function by singing to their right-brain. A person loses the ability to communicate verbally, but can still sing songs. The centers of speech are dominant in the brains left temporal area, while the part that controls singing is in the right. As a result, some aphasia patients can sing songs even though they are unable to speak. There is clinical evidence that people start recovering the ability to use words and phrases spontaneously.
”Nothing is localized to one part of the brain,” Connie says. “There is constant cross talk. Take the man who couldn’t walk but could dance. It isn’t just the motor cortex that’s involved, but a whole group of locations dealing with the subtlety of movement.”
I suspect the “right / left” thing is Potok’s simplification, not the researcher’s. As I alluded to in the post on Searle, the theories regarding language function in the brain hardly isolate it in one hemisphere. There is a lot of dispute there. However, the idea that sounds are processed differently than other types of input is fascinating. This tends to suggest that there may be different levels of temporal processing going on— a logical temporal ordering, and a musical one. This could help explain the reason why rhythmic sounds help people walk. Music seems to be part of the lizard brain.
I must say I like that idea, myself.
Every time I put my hands in my pants I feel a prick.”
Strange how those little moments of movie dialogue make the world make sense. One of the hazards of the “Shandy style” is being misread. Loren, you’re right. Disagreement doesn’t bother me. It would be nice however, if they were disagreeing with what I said rather than what they thought I said.
Speaking of disagreement, take a look at this flopnozzle. When I was still planning on an MLS, I found out that a fellow I just mentioned below, Dr. Jim Parins, had library science as a minor on his Ph.D. in Victorian Literature. He told me that it was the single most practical thing that he ever did in his program. He now is one of the people who runs the American Native Press Archive. One of my favorite projects as an undergrad was contributing a text to their online presence, The Poems of John Rollin Ridge. Who knows, I may still go after an MLS. I think librarians are cool, myself. To each his own. Thanks Sharon. The first thing I told my kids in starting to do their research was to befriend the reference librarians. They are always among the smartest people on any campus. You can stump the specialists easily, but the librarians, well . . .
Librarians are usually the best source of information regarding the debate over intellectual property, but I just received a great link from a tech writer: The Mouse that Ate the Public Domain. I really like the point made at the end of the article, that a large public domain is essential to the health of the arts. That’s the key thing about libraries. They make borrowing possible. Intellectual property is a thorny topic, but one thing is sure:
Borrowing is ubiquitous, inevitable, and, most importantly, good. Contrary to the romantic notion that true genius inheres in creating something completely new, genius is often better described as opening up new meanings on well-trodden themes.
I can’t figure out why some of them end up here. However, the questions are sometimes amusing. Recently, someone surfed in looking to find the answer to why do men like to masterbate i n women's panties. Sorry Bud, I can’t help you there. I’ve never been drawn to that myself, and it’s a mystery to me too.
However, I can offer an opinion for the search query: William Wordsworth, "Tintern Abbey" sister explanation
The question of why Wordsworth’s sister shows up at the end of Tintern Abbey is a good one. It warms my heart to think that someone out there is searching the web for perspectives on poetry. That poem is a keystone to one aspect of romantic thinking, and if there is anyone out there who hasn’t read it, you owe it to yourself to give it a go. It is truly a masterpiece.
Borrowing from Russell Murphy, Jim Parins, and Paul Yoder (some of my profs), I will attempt to trace the perspective shifts involved. Dr. Murphy was a big proponent of “simple” explanations for complex poems. To understand Romantic poetry, it is important not to get lost in the symbolism involved. The primacy of the romantics lies in their ability to transmit core human feelings, feelings that everyone has, into concrete images rather than abstract algebra. But they do it within a matrix of poetic tradition, and exposure to these traditions and historical perspectives, brought to life by Dr. Yoder, also helps.
Tintern Abbey is a prospect poem. This genre, developing out of Sir John Denham’s (1615-1669) Cooper’s Hill, begins with a meditation on a landscape viewed from above. However, this is merely the point of departure. It’s meant to talk about larger issues, rather than the landscape itself. Denham’s prospect is historical and political, Wordsworth (and other Romantic poets who adopted the genre) moved it into a more personal reflective realm. The scene is set of a traveler who views a vista he has not seen for some time, with some hesitation in his heart. The early lines of Tintern Abbey offer the possibility of reading it as a social commentary. I’ve read papers that focus on the lines that close the first section:
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind
With tranquil restoration:--feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love.
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.
Then the poem takes a big turn, and we are taken away from this spot of time into the real physical universe once again. He turns to the view of the river, but then, he turns to his sister. This is a common moment for any thinking feeling person. We wonder about the world, and in order to feel peace with it we leave it for a brief second and then return. Many people have felt this moment of transcendence, but few have captured it as well as Wordsworth.
The world is a place that we “half create and half perceive.” Shelley took this moment and stretched it much further, but in this short take, you’ve got to give Wordsworth credit. Why is his sister there? Because he is alive, and living in a world filled with people not just speculation. The world is too much with us, and we need to find joy not just in our thoughts but in the people around us. That’s the lesson of Tintern Abbey as far as I’m concerned.
I think that people should drink of this poem often, and deeply. That’s not just the romanticist in me talking, but the man who often lives in his own head who often wishes that when I turned, there would be someone else there. Everybody needs a sister.
I’ve got a problem. People who have read me, or talked to me for very long generally marvel at it. One thing always leads to another. Where I end up is often a surprise to everyone, including me. Some people tell me I’m a good writer. I hate it when that happens.
It’s been happening a lot lately. I keep trying to put it out of my head, because I know what happens anytime I get anywhere near success. I blow it. My ex-wife figured that out, way back when I was a salesman. I could be leading the store for nearly an entire month, but the second I glanced at the figures and saw how well I was doing, my sales dropped drastically. It’s as if I am allergic to success. I hesitate to repeat some of the praise I’ve received in the past two weeks, mostly for that reason.
One of the top two or three students to participate in the program since it’s inception (about ten years). Your writing is a model of clarity and insight, etc. Folks who have been reading me here for long know that isn’t always the case. Often, I get pretty twisted up in ideas and have to write my way out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. That’s largely why I started keeping a web log. So I could isolate the moments of clarity amid all the noise of constant associations. Everything reminds me of something else.
My mentor in the English department has a short attention span. If I want to be put in my place, all I have to do is talk to him. He’s got a Ph.D. from Duke, and is always so wrapped up in his own ideas that he doesn’t have much time to spare for other people. However, he’s brilliant and I talk to him when I can. I was really let down that I couldn’t take the seminar he’s teaching now on Blake, Sterne, and Locke. I spoke to him at the lecture a few days ago. I tried to tell him about what I was working on right now, but it was too complicated to explain in short sentences. He stopped me cold:
C’mon, get to it— you’re worse than Tristram Shandy!
I haven’t read Tristram Shandy, and that’s why I wanted to take that seminar. Blake and Locke I know, but Sterne . . . After the quote from it on Wood s lot that I read the next day, I just had to go out an buy a copy. Damn it, I can’t read it right now. I’ve got too much other stuff to do. But . . . I read through the first eight or so chapters and settled on a suitable defense:
Therefore, my dear friend and companion, if you should think me somewhat sparing of my narrative on my first setting out, — bear with me,— and let me go on, and tell my story my own way: — or if I should seem now and then to trifle upon the road, — or should sometimes put on a fool’s cap with a bell to it, for a moment or two as we pass along,-- don’t fly off, — but rather courteously give me a little credit for a little more wisdom than appears on my outside, — and as we jogg on, either laugh with me, or at me, or in short, do any thing, — only keep your temper.
Sometimes thinking like Tristram Shandy can be problematic. Unfortunately, I don’t have much choice in the matter. I suppose I'll always be irritating to somebody.
Akron Valley, Pennsylvania. December 2001.
You won't believe me maybe but it's true. Where I come from. Where white smoke like steam rises through cracks in the earth. Where the mines sunk deep inside the earth are burning. Wind Ridge, Bobtown, McCracken, Cheet were the names of the mines when they had names. When the mines were still being worked, before the fires.
Where do you live, I live in Hell. I am a child of Hell. I am an American and a child of Hell. Ask me if I am happy, I am.Joyce Carol Oates
The 10 year aniversary issue of Blind Spot is quite good. Click the links on the author's names to see a few samples. Call me crazy, but I really do love Friedlander and Baldessari.
----- --------TITLE: Searley DATE: 03/08/2002 5:23:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: SearleyOne of the great things about coming back to school was the chance to meet so many really smart people. Some of them are even nice. One of my professors (vague identification to avoid slander) took a seminar during his doctoral studies from John R. Searle, who was visiting professor. The professor in question, besides being brilliant, is also one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. I’ve really never heard him say a negative thing about anyone— except John Searle.
He has said repeatedly that Searle was rude, arrogant, full of himself and generally not a good person. However astute his work in linguistics might be, he just isn’t a fun person to be around. I’ve started noticing this as I read more things that Searle has written.
I started poking around after Wood s lot pointed at a great article in the New York Review of Books regarding Stephen Pinker’s recent book on language, Words and Rules. I’ve cited Searle’s work a few times around here, and I was really interested in one of the primary points in that review:
The different logical character of the particular and the general suggests that different cognitive abilities and indeed different parts of the brain are involved in the two sorts of abilities. Studies of brain-damaged patients suggest that this is so. One can have damage to the capacity for memorizing words, without hurting the capacity to apply rules. Pinker's account here is the most intellectually important part of his book. Recent technological advances in brain imaging, especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can give us information about which structures in the brain are processing which information. The good news, Pinker tells us, is that some recent studies show that different parts of the brain are activated for words and rules, in his special sense of these notions. The bad news is that the different research teams do not agree on which parts of the brain are activated by each process. Much of the importance of this work derives from the fact that if he is right then Noam Chomsky is wrong to think of language competence as a distinct faculty in the brain.
The question is not essentially one of anatomy. It is not whether there is a single location in the brain for the language faculty or two different locations. The question is rather a functional question. Is there one set of functions performed by the brain, or are there two distinct sets of functions? According to Pinker's theory there are two quite different faculties, and they differ both anatomically and in the principles of their operation. This issue is still very much in doubt.
Why does Searle assert that this means that Chomsky is wrong? As far as I know, Chomsky wasn't arguing about anatomy, but rather, language function. Chomsky’s argument is that we are hardwired for language. What difference does it make if the wiring is more complicated than was first thought? Why be so abrasive about it? “A “distinct faculty” does not imply a single location in the brain. I suspect that this agonism is just hardwired into Searle.
I was looking at another article in Reason magazine where Searle takes on the postmodernists:
Reason: One version of "postmodernism" which you discuss is "relativism." There are many varieties of relativism, and it's pretty clear from your book that you take the arguments for these views to be pretty bad.
Searle: I think they're terrible.
Reason: How did you characterize these arguments, and what do you think is wrong with them?
Searle: There are a number of arguments. The one that most affects people today is what I call "perspectivalism." That's the idea that we never have unmediated access to reality, that it's always mediated by our perspectives. We have a certain perspective on the world, we have a certain position in society that we occupy, we have a certain set of interests that we articulate, and it's only in relation to these perspectives that we can have knowledge of reality. So the argument goes, because all knowledge is perspectival there is no such thing as objective knowledge-you can't really know things about the real world or about things as they are in themselves.
Now that's just a bad argument. I grant you the tautology: All knowledge is our knowledge. All knowledge is possessed by human beings who operate in a certain context and from a certain perspective. Those seem to me to be trivial truths. But the conclusion that therefore you can never have objectively valid knowledge of how things really are just doesn't follow. It's a bad argument. And that's typical of a whole lot of these arguments.
The problem that all these guys have is that once you give me that first premise-that there is a reality that exists totally independently of us-then the other steps follow naturally. Step 1, external realism: You've got a real world that exists independently of human beings. And step 2: Words in the language can be used to refer to objects and states of affairs in that external reality. And then step 3: if If 1 and 2 are right, then some organization of those words can state objective truth about that reality. Step 4 is we can have knowledge, objective knowledge, of that truth. At some point they have to resist that derivation, because then you've got this objectivity of knowledge and truth on which the Enlightenment vision rests, and that's what they want to reject.
I do love Searle's take on Derrida though:
Searle: With Derrida, you can hardly misread him, because he's so obscure. Every time you say, "He says so and so, " he always says, "You misunderstood me." But if you try to figure out the correct interpretation, then that's not so easy. I once said this to Michel Foucault, who was more hostile to Derrida even than I am, and Foucault said that Derrida practiced the method of obscurantisme terroriste (terrorism of obscurantism). We were speaking French. And I said, "What the hell do you mean by that?" And he said, "He writes so obscurely you can't tell what he's saying, that's the obscurantism part, and then when you criticize him, he can always say, 'You didn't understand me; you're an idiot.' That's the terrorism part." And I like that. So I wrote an article about Derrida. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quoted that passage, and he said yes.
Foucault was often lumped with Derrida. That's very unfair to Foucault. He was a different caliber of thinker altogether.
Okay, I’m done being Searley. I just wanted to save these bits for my own reference, I’ll try to write something more interesting later.
I went to a lecture last night by Chris Castiglia: “Monica Lewinsky, The Scarlet Letter, and The Music Man.”
I can’t cover it in detail, because it danced with incoherence and I’m tied up in other stuff. However, I just wanted to jot a few notes.
Castiglia opened with the premise that American democracy is based on an idea that moral values are considered to be private and internal; this is a rather perverse conception in his view, because democracy is by definition public and external to the individual. He then covered some material regarding phrenology in the 19th century. “Perverse behavior” was thought to reside in some sort of internal place in the body (predictable by the bumps on your head). His contention was that the attempts to eradicate perversion from the body opened up a space where moral values could supposedly reside in the American consciousness. Castigila also noted that according to the phrenology “maps” of the early president’s heads, they all were noticeably deficient in the bumps thought to be connected with fantasy.
Then he sang a song from Les Misérables. Seriously, I’m not kidding. Yes, he is gay. The next part of the lecture was about the nature of crushes. Crushes reside entirely in the land of fantasy, and by his definition are only crushes when they represent an unattainable fantasy ideal. He sketched a portrait of the Broadway musical as the ultimate representation of the crush, both in structure and in plot. Then he revealed that the song he sang was sung by Lewinsky at her high school talent show. She won a big prize for it.
Next, it was off into Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter. Superimposing the Lewinsky debacle on the Scarlet Letter was perhaps the most entertaining part. I never thought of her as Hester Prynne before. Fun stuff. I think he overplayed the fantasy part of the novel, but, still it was an interesting thesis.
He lost me somewhere in the middle of The Music Man, and I’m not sure if I’m buying his thesis all that much, but it was fun. Ultimately he argued that Monica Lewinsky represents a new hero for the country, because she was never a “rat” and displayed a healthy fantasy crush. The funniest thing though, was Zabelle Stodola describing how they met. Her specialty is early American captivity narratives (stories written by white folks held captive by the natives). Captivity narratives also played a big part in Castiglia’s first book. Dr. Stodola proclaimed:
“We met in Chicago when I was researching there about ten years ago. While Chris has moved on, I’m still wrapped up in bondage.”
Epideictic in action: a trail of breadcrumbs that is fascinating regarding controversy surrounding an invitation to Laura Bush to speak at commencement for UCLA. The rhetoric involved is just fascinating. I was really amused by this, particularly one embedded paragraph in the sea of quotes:
Laura Bush seems good-hearted and would surely give a nice speech here. I try not to hold against her my belief that her husband stole the presidency, plunged the economy into recession, shredded half the Bill of Rights, aggravated world tensions, and shoveled our budget surplus and natural environment over to his corporate pals, all this beginning long before the 9/11 atrocities (which were helpfully funded by the $43 million Bush sent the Taliban last May over the objections of those silly feminists and "liberal morons" at universities).
Real deliberative discourse from Jonathon Delacour: The long and short of it. He takes on a topic I've fished around a few times in the distant past which is becoming increasingly important due to RSS syndication: the length of blog posts. Obviously, I chafe at the dictum of brevity. I'll stifle my urge to quote large sections, and instead suggest that you read the whole thing. It's well considered, and certainly future directed. I think this is one of the key points which separates true deliberative discourse rather than metablogging (though he does label it as such).
I've been watching and marveling at the Pepys Project. Though it has flown high on Daypop and Blogdex since its inception, it seems to me that there are relatively few listings on it, compared to all the linkage. It seems like a great idea though: locating and indexing bloggers geographically. It's sort of like the ageless project, in that it is an attempt to impose some sort of logic in organizing blog listings. An interesting alternative to just surfing randomly by "most recently updated." Good blogs are hard to find, and this sort of project in making sense of the writing community seems inevitable.
I suppose I'll get around to opting in eventually, but there is a part of me that wonders if the blogging community isn't like the art or academic world: listing yourself too many places cheapens your image. It's not just being seen, but being seen in the right places. The nagging question concerns what sort of readers you want to attract. I suspect that many don't want their immediate neighbors reading their blogs, so they might be reluctant to advertize in this venue.
----- --------TITLE: Standards DATE: 03/06/2002 10:14:00 AM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: StandardsI was sitting on a retaining wall with my legs crossed in a half-lotus reading Écrits when another student walked up to me and said: “you look just like a student!” Of course, not being quick-witted enough, I failed to utter the correct comeback: “Hey, I resemble that remark!”
As I mentioned yesterday, I have a big problem with goal-oriented strategies. If I adopted one, I would have quit being a student last year. I have two shiny degree certificates that arrived in the mail yesterday (I hate ceremony) that are emblazoned with magna cum laude. One of them is in “Professional and Technical Writing,” the second in English literature. If I jumped on the corporate train, I could make far more money with those certificates than I could dream of with the doctorate that everyone is urging me to get. Bah. I’ve got higher standards than that— it has nothing to do with letters after my name or financial success. It's a way of life. I won't be jumping on any trains or issuing any manifestos, because ultimately, I do feel like I have a clue.
Driving home, a different perspective on the argument I made yesterday occurred to me. Dr. Yoder once simplified the debate between John Locke and William Blake to me in this way:
Blake’s standard of measure was Genius.
Locke’s standard was mediocrity.
It’s a completely different perspective. Rather than saying that things are better or worse than the norm, why not measure them against the ultimate attainment? Of course, everything suffers by this comparison, and it makes life a quest for higher levels rather than complacent acceptance of a norm.
What I was reading in Lacan yesterday just resonated with me as the ultimate in educational philosophy. I spoke to Dr. Levernier this morning, and in the process realized that his strategy is much the same. In teaching American Literature, he does his best to overcome everyone’s programmed notion of literature. It’s a hard fight, especially for people like me who are steeped in the British tradition. But he did it for me, and I hope that someday, I can do it for other people as effectively as Dr. Levernier. What Lacan proposes in “Function and Field of Speech and Language” is this:
I consider it to be an urgent task to disengage from concepts that are being deadened by routine use the meaning that they regain both from a re-examination of their history and from a reflection on their subjective foundations.
That, no doubt, is the teacher’s prime function — the function from which all others proceed, and the one in which the price of experience is best inscribed.
If this function is neglected, meaning is obscured in an action whose effects are entirely dependent on meaning, and the rules of psychoanalytic technique, being reduced to mere recipes, rob the analytic experience of any status as knowledge and even of any criterion of reality.
No “seven habits” for me, thank you. That stuff impoverishes the soul. As Blake so aptly puts it, it’s all about the “mental fight.” Which implies a proactive conflict, a constant assault of new knowledge against old. Begin with an end in mind? NEVER!
I prefer Isocrates’ notion of Antidosis, echoed by Shelley in his Defence of Poetry. The flexing of the mental muscles strengthens the mind in the same way that one strengthens the body through exercise. Use your brain, not a recipe. That is, unless you are comfortable with forever reaching for mediocrity.
Mike Sanders proffered the top three tips from a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People on Monday. I really hate this crap. I was forced to listen to it for years in sales training, and heard even more of it when I first started back to school. It is utterly ridiculous reductive shit. That isn't to say that it doesn't have some basis in fact; it just depends on how you define effective.
My lecture for my classes on Monday was to superimpose the model of effective sales upon the Roman model of the essay. It works quite well, actually. The majority of the steps are there, only with new names coined in the 20th century. Writing is often sales, but not always. To say that all writing is sales is the sort of simplification that I'm talking about. It misses the point. The point is to communicate effectively. But I digress, let's get down to it.
Let's take a look at the language of those three tips:
1) Be Proactive
relating to, caused by, or being interference between previous learning and the recall or performance of later learning
acting in anticipation of future problems, needs, or changes
2) Begin with the End in Mind
3) Put First Things First
The real growth happens when you step outside of habit, and look for innovative solutions to problems rather than the tried and true. Otherwise, you are destined to repeat the same dull "effective" round over and over. This makes sense in a bureaucratic environment perhaps, but not in a dynamic human one. Things change. What was once first, often becomes last. So why be stuck with the model that is dictated? If being effective means avoiding innovation (and in the business model, it usually does) then by all means, put first things first.
I believe that being reactive and open to change is a far more valuable skill. However, there are no short courses available in that. It takes experience in dealing with things outside the comfortable business model. It takes living.
Just say no to trite models. Live, instead of being "effective."
Read good books, not garbage.
----- --------TITLE: Inquiring minds DATE: 03/05/2002 12:07:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: ProblemsThough the authorship of Problems has been contested, I like to think it was Aristotle. It casts a different light on the nature of serious philosophical debate. It’s a book of questions that one might imagine jotted down subsequent to an after-hours party:
Why is it that it is not those who are very drunk that are most troublesome in their cups, but those who are only half blotto? Is it because they have neither drunk so little that they still resemble the sober nor so much that they are in the incapacitated state of those who have drunk deep? Further, those who are sober have more power of judgment, while those who are very drunk make no attempt to exercise their judgment; but those who are only half blotto can still exercise their judgment because they are not very drunk, but they exercise it badly because they are not sober, and they are ready to despise some of their neighbors and imagine that they are being slighted by others.
Why is it that to those who are very drunk everything seems to revolve in a circle, and as soon as the wine takes hold of them they cannot see objects at a distance, and so this is used by some as a test of drunkenness? . . .
Why is it that to those who are drunk one thing at which they are looking sometimes appears to be many? . . .
Why is it that the tongue of those who are drunk stumbles? Is it because, just as the whole body staggars in drunkeness, so also the tongue stumbles and cannot articulate clearly? Or, is it because the flesh of the tongue is spongy ? It therefore becomes saturated and swells up . . .
Why is it that those who are drunk are incapable of having sexual intercourse? Is it because to do so a certain part of the body must be in a state of greater heat than the rest, and this is impossible in the drunken owing to the to the large quantity of heat present in the whole body; for the heat set up by the movement is extinguished by the greater surrounding heat, because they have in them a considerable quantity of unconcocted moisture?
Why is it that one who is having sexual intercourse, and also a dying person, casts his eyes upward, while the sleeper casts his eyes downward? . . .
Why do the eyes and buttocks of those who indulge too frequently in sexual intercourse sink very noticably, though the latter are near and the former far from the sexual organs? Is it because these parts co-operate very noticeably in the effort made in the act of coition, contracting at the point of emission of the semen? . . .
Why is it that those who desire to submit to sexual intercourse feel a great shame about confessing it, which they do not feel in confessing a desire for meat or drink or anything of that kind? Is it because the desire for most things is necessary and its non-satisfaction is sometimes fatal to life, but sexual desires proceed from something beyond mere necessity?
Inquiring minds want to know!
I finally got around to cruising my new two-volume Princeton edition of Aristotle last night while unwinding after class. Yes, I find amusement in the strangest places. It dawns on me that it was actually the cause of a few laughs in class. People are of the impression that I find the weirdest scholarly stuff entertaining. They’re right.
Of course, I first looked at On Memory. Aristotle makes some interesting distinctions. Declaring first that in order to remember something, we must have perceived it first, he continues:
Memory is, therefore, neither perception or conception, but a state or affectation of one of these, conditioned by lapses of time. As already observed, there is no such thing as memory of the present while present; for the present is object only of perception, and the future, of expectation, but the object of memory is the past. All memory, therefore, implies a time elapsed; consequently only those animals who perceive time remember, and the organ whereby they perceive time is also that whereby they remember.
Without an image thinking is impossible. There is in such activity as affectation identical with one in geometrical demonstrations. . . . Thus it is clear that the cognition of intellectual objects involves an image and the image is an affectation of the common sense. Thus memory belongs incidentally to the faculty of thought, and essentially it belongs to the primary faculty of sense-perception.
If asked of which among the parts of the soul memory is a function, we reply, manifestly of that part which imagination also appertains; and all objects of which there is imagination are also objects of memory, while those which do not exist without imagination are objects of memory incidentally.
However, what really hit me was Aristotle’s constant references to the relationship of forgetting, perception, and the melancholic temperament. Aristotle proposes that humans are the only ones that deliberate on issues, the only ones who concern themselves with the future, but that contemplation of the future is in the now:
That the affectation is corporeal, i.e., that recollection is searching for an image in a corporeal substrate, is proved by the fact that some persons, when, despite the most strenuous application of thought, they have been unable to recollect, feel discomfort, which even thought they abandon the effort of recollection, persists in them nonetheless; and especially in those of melancholic temperament. For those are most powerfully moved by image. The reason why the effort of recollection is not under the control of their will is that, as those who throw a stone cannot stop it at their will when thrown, so he who tries to recollect the hunts sets up a process in a material part, in which resides the affectation.
The mission of man on earth is to remember.
I don’t know where I thought I was going with all this, except to save that notion form Aristotle that memory, once started, is like throwing a stone. It is unstoppable. The remainder of his essay on memory, by the way, deals with such contemporary issues as getting a song stuck in your head. Of course, he blames it all on moisture. He was Greek after all. But also central is the role that imagination plays in the human memory. This is something that seems to have been lost by all the interpreters of Aristotle over the ages. That's why I like to go to the source. Memory as an affectation? Now there's a concept!
Canberra is nothing like Bakersfield. I’m relieved. Thanks Jonathon!
Of course, he raised another issue that I’m dying to write about. On the Road changed my life at 16, but The Americans also changed it at 18, and on top of that, Let us Now Praise Famous Men and American Photographs changed my life around 30. There is a tremendous chain of thought surrounding those books that I’m dying to let out. But it will have to wait until after the firestorm that is the first half of my week. Not to mention the recent article about Steinbeck that has me thinking about Horace Bristol, and my father, and other things.
But I can’t close out the day without mentioning the best confirmation of all: Girls Just Want to be Mean.
The team's conclusion was that girls were, in fact, just as aggressive as boys, though in a different way. They were not as likely to engage in physical fights, for example, but their superior social intelligence enabled them to wage complicated battles with other girls aimed at damaging relationships or reputations -- leaving nasty messages by cellphone or spreading scurrilous rumors by e-mail, making friends with one girl as revenge against another, gossiping about someone just loudly enough to be overheard. Turning the notion of women's greater empathy on its head, Bjorkqvist focused on the destructive uses to which such emotional attunement could be put.
Unlike boys, who tend to bully acquaintances or strangers, girls frequently attack within tightly knit friendship networks, making aggression harder to identify and intensifying the damage to the victims. Within the hidden culture of aggression, girls fight with body language and relationships instead of fists and knives. In this world, friendship is a weapon, and the sting of a shout pales in comparison to a day of someone's silence. There is no gesture more devastating than the back turning away.
Perhaps I should be happy that I have no relationships to be thwarted by right now? Nah, it’s too much fun dealing with everything else involved. Girls may be mean, but damn it, they’re fun!
I was a bit bored, so I took a look at the Daypop and Blogdex indexes to see what people were looking at. It seems like paranoia is perhaps the biggest cash-crop of the new millennium. Blaming it on the shrub-in-charge [sic] is grand sport. I don’t want to join in beating around the Bush, the sic makes me sick. I stay away from politics. I don’t understand how Nixon, Reagan, or any of the latest bumper-crop of idiots got elected. I don’t really have that much interest in it, because I’m far more interested in deeper human concerns. Besides, to steal Protagoras’ argument: “there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man’s life.”
The shifting nature of the massive community of online writers around the globe is of deeper abiding interest to me. But it’s been frustrating to figure out how to comment on it without resorting to epideictic. Praise or blame? Are these the only two options? In the grand scheme, no. However, when it comes to debate in a public forum this genre of discourse is the most natural. Thinking about the “pilgrims progress” on the Internet, I think this is just a healthy growth stage.
The branches of Roman rhetoric (stolen from Aristotle, of course) are marked with attention to kairos, the proper time and place for constructing an effective argument. Dr. Kleine suggested that it is helpful to connect the branches with places and times. In the case of epideictic, the place is the public square, and it is primarily concerned with the past. This notion seems to be played out in the obsessions with his and her stories of both blogging and the personalities to be found on the Internet, and it couldn’t be closer (at least for now) to the concept of a world-wide public square filled with hundreds of thousands of voices.
But the “branch” analogy is also useful in terms of thinking of it as a tree. Epideictic is the lowest row of branches on the tree. Just above the roots, it’s where the flowers bloom. The next set of branches, for the Romans, was the forensic. This type of rhetoric is most often connected with the courtroom, but its primary concern is justice vs. injustice. Its mode of persuasion is sometimes praise and blame, but not always. And its goal is a disposition in the present. Is it right or wrong? Though it looks to the past for its evidence, the mode of action moves firmly into the present. The venue is of a much more limited nature, and in the US system at least, includes a jury of peers rather than a mob. I would suggest that the growth of blogging circles, and group blogs like metafilter, are a move up the tree of discourse into the forensic.
At the top of the tree is deliberative discourse. Of course, the branches get thinner and shorter near the top of the tree. There isn’t much of this going on at this stage of development, I think. However, damn it all, I’ve landed myself back in politics. The domain of the deliberative is the legislature. Its mode of action is based in the present, but looking to the future. I don’t think “blogging about blogging” counts as deliberative discourse, it’s largely metacognitive epideictic. The point of deliberative discourse is to suggest a course of action for the future, to make plans and projections for a better future. The future, in that respect, looks pretty bleak. But the Internet is young, and it’s forcing a crisis due to the proliferation of epideictic discourse.
Daniel posted a terrifying narrative about a blogger who was fired from her job for expressing her opinion on her blog. A recent Wired story about defamation lawsuits that I found cruising blogdex was also scary. I’ve been enjoying the festival of voices, though most do little beyond praise or blame. The idea that we may be headed for a time where we have to look out for what we say in public places points out the failure of deliberative discourse in our time. It seems like a huge cluster-fuck to me.
I was watching Heartbreak Ridge on TNT this morning. Each time Clint Eastwood uttered the words “cluster-fuck” they were neatly changed to “cluster-flop” in a voiceover. It scares me most that one day the Internet might become like that, and that the utopian dreams of the metabloggers might be reduced to some arbitrary code of conduct bent on self-protection. Only if this “cluster-flop” is stopped can the real voices be heard. Time and time again, the majority of citizens have stood against censorship. I can only hope that this trend continues. But somewhere around half of my country voted for a president [sic] that seems hell bent on silencing dissenting voices both in this country, and around the globe. It’s too bad there isn’t more deliberation going on. I’m hoping this all won’t be a cluster-flop.
Loren invited me to comment on On the Road days ago, and I agreed with some disclaimers that should probably be voiced publicly. I read at least five or six Kerouac novels growing up and in my twenties. On the Road is the one that sticks out to me now, mostly because it was the first one I read. The memory of it is vague in comparison to things I’ve worked on more recently, but as I read his ongoing commentary I knew I would respond before he asked. I read Kerouac purely as a young reader, not as a critic. My critical tendencies are much stronger now and I knew I couldn’t suppress them anymore than he could. The danger of criticism is that it can slay your heroes.
Diane’s isolation of the themes of the book point out the problematic nature of women’s rights, sexual attitudes, and redemptive journeys in the post-war context. The rules were changing, and it could easily be argued that Kerouac missed the point of what real rebellion was about. The same critique was leveled against the Romantic poets by the Victorians nipping at their heels. The more I thought about it, the more I was drawn into the challenge that each new “generation” faces, and the problematic nature of the concept of generations.
Now that I have a deeper understanding of the ebb and flow of literary history, I thought it might be fun to wade from what I now think of as the “deep-end” back to the shallow, because in many ways I believe what Blake said: “Exuberance is Beauty.” Though I don’t spend much time thinking about these guys anymore, I think it’s possible to look at them critically without killing them.
The post which follows is my feeble attempt to draw on what I know best (the Romantics) to cast some light on the battle to revise the Beats. They weren’t politically shrewd or even stylistically astute. They were, however, energetic. And that energy is for me is the spirit of their age.
I believe in the worth of history. However, the historical perspective is troublesome because with every telling of the tale we cannot cease our compulsion to rewrite it in our own image, as we are now, or rather, as we would like it to be. Placing writers like Jack Keroauc in the larger context of constructs like “the Beat generation” limits them, but at the same time, illuminates their difference from the arbitrary constructs.
The troublesome concept of “generations” can be traced to the romantic essayist William Hazlitt. In his book The Spirit of the Age, he offers commentary and gross generalizations about his “generation” which are at once contradictory and comforting in their simplicity. For example, in his chapter on Coleridge he proposes:
The present is an age of talkers, and not of doers; and the reason is, that the world is growing old. We are far advanced in the Arts and Sciences, that we live in retrospect, and doat on past achievements. The accumulation of past knowledge has been so great, that we are lost in wonder at the height that it has reached, instead of attempting to climb or add to it; while the variety of objects distracts and dazzles the looker-on. What niche remains unoccupied? What path untried? What is the use of doing anything, unless we could do better than all those who have gone before us?
Lord Byron is dead: he also died a martyr to his zeal in the cause of freedom, for the last, best hopes of man. Let that be his excuse and his epitaph!
Hazlitt’s case for William Godwin, using Wordsworth as a mouthpiece, points at the problem of perspectives that shift with age:
'Throw aside your books of chemistry,' said Wordsworth to a young man, a student in the Temple, 'and read Godwin on Necessity.' Sad necessity! Fatal reverse! Is truth then so variable? Is it one thing at twenty and another at forty? Is it at a burning heat in 1793, and below zero in 1814? Not so, in the name of manhood and of common sense! Let us pause here a little. Mr. Godwin indulged in extreme opinions, and carried with him all the most sanguine and fearless understandings of the time. What then? Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless? Is the very God of our idolatry all of a sudden to become an abomination and an anathema? Could so many young men of talent, of education, and of principle have been hurried away by what had neither truth nor nature, not one particle of honest feeling nor the least show of reason in it?'
I believe that retrospective critiques of Kerouac and others who sought to break the bounds of the weight of literary tradition, to find the spirit of their age, suffer greatly when examined through the framework they sought to overthrow. Because they sought to break through, however, they must be examined inside that matrix, which has moved on since the time they wrote. Did they capture a spirit, or merely expose their irreverence for the world to see? History is the final judge, jury, and executioner in these matters.
I do not doubt the sincerity of Kerouac’s belief, only the ultimate worth of a lifestyle built on restless movement and above all else, speed. Age tempers these notions: “When I was faster I was always behind,” as Neil Young says, or as the penultimate line in Easy Rider succinctly puts it, perhaps the best reflection of the sixties is: “We blew it.” As my father always said, "Hindsight is 20:20." Longshoremen philosopher Eric Hoffer declares reason why we feel compelled to start moving best: “The best impetus for moving forward is to have something to run away from.” Generalizations of history are good at describing the disenchantment, the "beaten" nature of the beats, and why they took their show on the road. The question addressed and left unanswered by Kerouac is: where do you run when there is no place left to go?
The only thing that remains is to revel in the trip itself. This is great advice when you are young, but age brings reflections on what you have left behind. On the Road cannot be read with that weight held in the mind. A free-flowing, stream of consciousness prose style is perhaps the only real contribution of Kerouac when viewed through the lens of age. However, to sense only that is to miss the spirit of freedom, a freedom from possibility which lies at the core of Kerouac (and perhaps Henry Miller too, from an earlier generation). The labels of Lost Generation or the later Beat Generation are shaky simplifications that don’t really hold up. But it’s the way that history deals with things.
Hazlitt's Wordsworth was astute: “Because those opinions were overcharged, were they therefore altogether groundless?” Wordsworth's question does not require an answer, for those who read only to revel in the freedom. Literature scholars are bound to attempt an answer, however. And the answer, in Kerouac’s case, is to perhaps just dodge and say that he was not groundless, just unrealized. He has stiff competition from the generations that came before and after when it comes to his worth as a literary figure. But there is no denying his importance as a central figure as a spirit of his age.
I revisited some memories of Keroauc from his close friends in the oral biography Jack’s Book. Alan Ginsberg relates their first meeting with William Burroughs:
So Jack and I made a formal visit to Bill, and I remember that he had copies of Yeats’ A Vision, which Lucien had been carrying around. Shakespeare, Kafka: The Castle or The Trial, The Castle I think; Korzybski’s Science and Santity, Spengler’s Decline of the West, Blake, a copy of Hart Crane, which he gave me and I still have, Rimbaud, Cocteau’s Opium. So those were the books he was reading, and I hadn’t read any of those. And he loaned books to us . . .
Perhaps though, it’s fitting that the spirit of this age be incomplete and unrealized. Perhaps that’s true of all the ages, and only history can find the neat closure that we so fervently crave. I think that the new pluralist trends are a good thing; there is no one spirit of the age, only spirits that we can seek to comprehend.
Yes, I know that Spirit of the Age is a Hawkwind song too. But Hazlitt said it first. Hazlitt's defense of Godwin would be the only sort of defense that I would offer for Kerouac, but this matters little to a young reader who would drink deeply of the speed, the movement, and the joy that is deeply conveyed with its dark side intact, in the writing of Jack Kerouac. Under 25? You must read On the Road. At least, if you have the flame of disenchantment within you. Who doesn't, when they are young?
----- --------TITLE: Cities DATE: 03/01/2002 7:59:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
I was surprised to find out yesterday that Houston is the fourth largest city in the US. I was so incredulous as a matter of fact, that I had to look it up. The 1990 census data confirmed it. Now Tom Waits' observation (during a SXSW concert) that people in Texas must be friendly, because they have all that space but choose to live together in big groups makes more sense. Scrolling through the list of city populations generated more surprises.
Bakersfield was number 97! Now that’s a shocker, I wouldn’t have even thought it was in the top 100. I’ve always thought of it as a small town. When my family moved there in the early sixties, I have a childhood memory of being fixated with two things as we drove into town: the “Sun Fun Stay Play” sign, which didn’t last long, and the population sign. It read 69,000.
Wow, I thought (I must have been four years old at the time). But compared to my house in the woods outside of Ojai, it did seem like a big city. Of course, as a teenager I had been to LA several times. Now that was a city. Bakersfield seemed like a wide spot in the road by comparison. Thinking of Kerouac lately, I realized that when he passed through it was probably more like 30,000 people.
The second shock was to find that Little Rock is number 96. I’m movin’ on up now. I got myself a de-luxe apartment on the west side. But, friends have been telling me how much Bakersfield has grown since I left (it was around 250,000 then). So I wondered if maybe the balance might have shifted, since Bakersfield was one of the fastest growing places in California when I left.
Shock number three. The 2000 figures show Bakersfield at 396,000. However, Little Rock must be growing faster. The 2000 figure is 548,000. I’m sure this includes North Little Rock, just across the river, which is a fairly substantial place. But damn, I never thought this place was that big either. So much for my small town feeling. I don’t suppose a half a million people qualify as a small town. But Little Rock still has something close to a small town mentality, though I confess that it's actually less "hickish" than Bakersfield.
There’s a price to be paid for this expansion. I was assaulted by a TV ad warning that Britney Spears is doing a concert here in the next few months. Sheesh. For laughs, I did a search. I wanted to see if she was playing Bakersfield. She wasn't. Don't I feel special now. I was also happy to find that if you do a google search for Britney Spears the second site listed is Britney's Guide to Semiconductor Physics. Thank god for link-weighting. It’s actually a serious site, with serious content. I think more fourteen-year olds should know the ins and outs of the lasers that play their compact disks. I would encourage as many links to this as possible so that it might even dethrone the “official” site!
Just for giggles, I had to look up the figures for Canberra— 313,000 according to the tourist web site. So, the capitol of that continent is smaller than Bakersfield? Now that does make for an interesting picture. Okay, so Sydney is twice the size of LA. . . that wasn’t the point. It’s just strange trying to picture places you haven’t been. I’m sure Canberra has nothing in common with Bakersfield, it just seemed like a funny thing to compare. Or, at least it would be funny if you’d ever been to Bakersfield.
Every city on earth is unique, with its own quirks. It cracked me up when I revisited the lyrics to Cities to catch the bit about Memphis— “I smell home cooking / its only the river, only the river.” Before I had been there, a friend here in Little Rock told me that there was something special about Memphis— “It’s the smell,” he said. Evidently, David Byrne agrees.
However, I must confess that this particular train of thought was triggered by a conversation with a West African native, Marcus, who goes to the university here. It seems that he came into the US through Tijuana, and ended up living in Burbank before moving to Arkansas. We were talking about how different it was here. Marcus was quick to proclaim: “this is the land of opportunity!” as he recruited me to come to an African drum festival on Saturday night. In Arkansas, this is a special event. In California, I could go see wild percussion any day of the week. I miss that part of it, really. But he’s right. It will all get here soon enough. But by then, I’ll probably be gone.
It’s still nearly impossible for me to think of Little Rock as a city. Though, if you photograph it just right, it looks like one.
I’ve been following with great interest thus far the commentary on On the Road at In a Dark Time. In particular, Diane’s isolation of the themes and Loren’s observations on the geography involved made me think about how difficult it is to capture the past, because as humans we are constantly shifting in perspective. That is definitely the case with my perception of the book and I wish I had time to read it again right now. I’ve been trying to figure out how old I was when I first read it, but I’m pretty sure I was sixteen. It was around the time I took the photograph displayed above, which was 1975.
It was the first concert I ever attended— Steppenwolf at the Bakersfield Civic Auditorium with probably around 4-5,000 people in attendance. I felt like I did fairly well for a rookie. I’d been taking pictures less than six months, and I borrowed an old Mamiya Sekor 1000DTL with a telephoto lens from school. I picked it because it had a spot meter. Good choice, I found out. Concert photography, especially in big arenas, is tough.
Who knew that about 13 years later I’d be photographing a dozen bands a week? Photographing this concert convinced me that I didn’t want to do it anymore; it was too much work. For the thousands of concerts I went to in the dozen years that followed this, I never took a camera. I just enjoyed the show. That is, until I discovered that photographing musicians in bars rather than stadiums had its own rewards. But that part of my history is well documented in the galleries around here. I was thinking about how much I loved Steppenwolf as a kid. I was thinking how this became almost an embarrassment when punk-rock rolled around. Punk rock changed my life. The Minutemen pushed me over the edge; I turned my back on “hard rock” around 1984.
On the Road is like that for me too. It became a guilty pleasure, once I discovered how incredible and complex literature could be. The beats were just, well, a beat— the pulsation of an artery— as Blake would say, which seemed like a lifetime in the long trip down the road of discovery for me. I’d say the same for the Surrealists. These things, for me now, are self-defeating delusions of youth. A sort of “rite of passage.” I grew out of them, but I remember them fondly. There’s much more to say, and I have entries in my head concerning Kerouac, Robert Frank, and Herman Hesse. These were like towns I passed through on my way down the road.
The omnipresence of that road, in that so many people of my age ended up on it, is astounding. I took an upper level history course on US History 1945-80 a few years ago, and it shifted my thinking about the late 50s and early 60s significantly regarding the motivation that so many have felt to hit the road. I’d like to apply that lens to some of the problems with On the Road but I have a headache too severe to attempt it right now. But I stumbled across the photo of Steppenwolf, at the far edge of this mess of thoughts, and it was strange. The last mix tape I made for my car included a song from John Kay’s 1972 solo album Forgotten Songs and Unsung Heroes.
I bought the album for 50 cents at a massive album sale in the mid 80s, and several of my friends made fun of me for it. But I still had a soft spot in my heart for the guy in leather pants, even though I was smarter then. A girl I knew told me a story about how John Kay was an asshole who slobbered all over her at the Country Club in LA, and turned several shades of green when I said I liked the album. This album wasn’t “born to be wild,” just moving folk-rock. A song from it has been playing in the car for weeks now, and I feel strangely close to “Many a Mile.” It has a bit of the spirit of On the Road
I’ve damn near walked this world around—another city, another town
Another friend to say goodbye— another time to sit and cry
And it’s many a mile I have been on this road
It’s many a mile I have gone.
I’ve seen your towns they’re all the same— the only difference is in the name
And the only life I’ve ever known has been my suitcase and the open road
And it’s many a mile I have been on this road
It’s many a mile I have gone.
There was a girl who knew me best— you know she gave my poor heart rest
She was my world, my joy, my dear— and now she’s gone to god knows where
And it’s many a mile I have been on this road
It’s many a mile I have gone.
So I fill my glass up to the brim
And through my glass the world looks dim
But I know outside there’s light somewhere
Maybe my rambling will take me there
And it’s many a mile I have been on this road
It’s many a mile I will go.
The road, in the Kerouacian sense, ended in the seventies. This song was written by a Native American named Patrick Sky in the sixties. The road became a commodified dream, and there isn’t much looking back. That’s progress for you. The quest has moved inward once again, and in most ways, it’s a better thing. But there is an incredible nostalgia to it, but anyone who aspires to dreams such as these needs to be reminded of the perceptive observation of Bob Dylan: nostalgia is death.
Envoi
Tyger Tyger burning bright,
Look out! You'll set the jungle alight.
A belated thank-you to Louise(from Wales) for the book of Milliganimals, a happy memory with the recent passing of Spike Milligan.
----- --------TITLE: Photography and Baudelaire DATE: 02/27/2002 8:19:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY: Photography and BaudelaireSomething else has been nagging at me this week that I wanted to explore. Last Friday, Jim Hart cited and commented briefly on an article called Paradoxes of Painting. I wrote a short comment on his site, and noticed that shortly afterward this article was flying high on Blogdex. Being the closet anti-social type that I am, I decided that I wouldn't expand that comment into a documented entry since so many other people were apparently talking about it.
Then on Monday, Jonathan Delecour added some significant commentary from the perspective of a photographer, closing with words that just rang for me:
Fifteen years later, I have no idea whether the images were art or not. But they certainly met the need that Kafka wrote about for "those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us." The only reason the pictures had such energy was that I had utterly lost interest in photography as art.
It is a terrible time for painting, but a marvellous time for painters. Compare today with (say) the 1950s. Pablo Picasso, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse were names that wielded Hollywood glamour with the public.
During this lamentable period, a new industry arose which contributed not a little to conform stupidity in its faith and to ruin whatever might remain of the divine in the French mind.
The “divine” which Baudelaire is speaking of is the art of painting, the “industry,” photography. During his time, photographs of prostitutes sold for more money than the prostitutes themselves. The commodification of desire which he addresses in this essay is much the same as the idolatry we now place on the memory of painters of the past. The battleground is that of mechanical reproduction which displaces and removes the “aura” from art, an issue taken up by one of Baudelaire’s most perceptive readers, Walter Benjamin, nearly a century later. But Benjamin gives full credit to his source.
Baudelaire observes, almost prophetically:
Poetry and progress are like two ambitious men who hate each other with an instinctive hatred, and when they meet on the same road one of them has to give place. If photography is allowed to supplement art in some of its functions, it will soon have supplanted or corrupted it altogether, thanks to the stupidity of the multitude that is its natural ally. It is time, then, for a return it to return to its true duty, which is to be the servant of the sciences and arts— but the very humble servant, like printing or shorthand, which have neither created nor supplemented literature.
Let it rescue from oblivion those tumbling ruins, those books and manuscripts which time is devouring, precious things whose form is disolving and which demand a place in the archives of our memory— it will be thanked and applauded. But if it be allowed to encroach on the domain on the impalpable and the imaginary, upon anything whose value depends solely on the addition of something from a man’s soul, then it will be much the worse for us!
Baudelaire’s core argument was much the same as the Prospect Magazine article. One only need substitute the “postmodern smirk” with the “idolatrous mob” and the plagiarism is perfectly symmetrical. Baudelaire later softened his perspective, claiming that photography liberated painting. Baudelaire was there first, and he deserves the real credit for the majority of concepts in that article. There was nothing original, save a comparison with photography’s effectiveness as an art medium with the power of a potato chip to knock a man down. To say this, in the context of an unrealized part of Baudelaire’s argument, is to chase fervently into the realm of the ridiculous.
Recall that Baudelaire compared photography to shorthand or printing. If we deny the camera as an artistic medium, following this logic, we must also reject the book. You’d have to read the writers longhand in order to experience transcendence from literature. Printing then, could be declared ineffectual, a “potato chip in the wind.”
Transcendence does not reside in any object, but in the soul. Intending transcendence does not by necessity assure its presence, either in a painting or a photograph. In fact, like Jonathan, I find it to be an impediment to its attainment. To argue over the “validity” of technology is just the same crisis which Baudelaire cites regarding poetry and progress. Progress will usually win, in the short term. It will create anxiety, as exemplified by Baudelaire’s initial response and the latecomer article in Prospect magazine, but like Shelley, I think poetry is a force that will never be denied for long. Baudelaire didn't spend much more space than this single essay critiquing the capability of photography in the hands of a capable artist. He accepted it, eventually.
The questions implied in the Prospect Magazine article were hardly fresh or innovative. It's just that same reactionary response to the challenge of technology that goes round and round. Then people forget about it and just use it, for whatever ends they like. It wouldn't have bothered me as much if it wasn't such a blatant case of theft of ideas.
The real paradox to me is how such shoddy scholarship passes for fresh news.
It was beat-up, but strong. My brother had a BSA 650, but it was broken down. I think it spent more time in pieces than it did together. My best friend, Dan, had a Honda 350. I had ridden it many times before, and I thought I knew how to handle a motorcycle. David offered to let me ride his brand new used Triumph.
”I’ve got to warn you, the suspension is really stiff. I like it that way, so I can do wheelies” David said.
“Sure, I can handle it,” I said with typical youthful enthusiasm.
“Just be really careful as you ease out on the clutch,” my brother said.
“This bike is a bit more powerful than you’re used to.”
As I sat on the bike, I knew something was different. It was about half the size of my friends Honda 350, but a lot heavier. It nearly tipped over right after I straddled it. I was to pull out of the driveway, and make a 90 degree turn onto the road in front of the house. I figured I would take it around the block. It was a country block, about a mile on each side and our house sat in the center, a half-mile from the first intersection.
I eased out on the clutch, and in the blink of an eye I was on the dirt on the other side of the road.
”Just lean the direction you want to go” my brother shouted.
I immediately pulled back on the clutch and barely twitched my shoulder toward the road, and I was off. I was really scared as I shifted into second. I looked down at the speedometer, and just my little twitch of power in first had me going almost 30 miles per hour. I hit second, and gave it a little gas. Forty-five. I had just shifted into third, saw that I was already going 60 as the stop sign approached. I stopped at the intersection, and held my breath as I tried to turn again.
This time was smoother. I took it up to around 80 and enjoyed the feeling for only a few moments before I was at the next stop sign. As I approached the third turn, I wasn’t taking any chances. There was no stop sign, so I was just going to make a gentle turn at around 20 mph.
No sooner than I started to lean, ever so slightly, the bike went that direction. It felt really good as I banked into it. But then, abruptly, the bike flew out from under me. That flash of fright came back. The bike was fine, I was fine, it was just so damn embarrassing. I wasn’t hardly moving at all, what the hell happened? I kicked the bike over and it started right up. I just dusted myself off and took it home without further incident. I told everyone about it, being the honest idiot I was. They all laughed. I was glad they weren’t there to see it.
This was the summer between high school and college, and I lusted after one of those machines for the longest time. It was just pure speed, in a tiny little package. I could really see how people could become addicted to riding. But photography was just too expensive an obsession, and I never managed to own both a motorcycle and a camera. It’s probably a good thing, after cataloguing the injuries that my brother inflicted on himself because of his bike.
I later found out that in order to stiffen the suspension, David had removed the springs from one side of the front-end and substituted a broom handle. Just one side, mind you, so that’s what made this bike so squirrelly in the turns. Right turns were no problem, but lefts...
David didn’t care. He really just enjoyed popping wheelies.
I don’t mean in the On the Road, beatnik friend, crazy personality, kind of way. I mean it in the clinical sense. I don’t think he started out that way, it was induced by overuse of a drug called PCP (an animal tranquilizer). He just loved the stuff. He snorted it, in powder form, constantly. It wasn’t really the “magic dust” it was cracked up to be.
I tried it some, when I was at the age where the Who’s 5:15 was my theme song. I was “out of my brain on the train” more than a few times for treks to San Francisco on the Amtrack. But PCP was a drug with no redeeming qualities whatsoever, as far as I was concerned. Just a little too much, once, was all it took for me to become a Reaganite and just say no. I couldn’t feel anything anymore, but I could think. And all those thoughts were paranoid. I thought that if I closed my eyes I would die. Sight was the only faculty that was still working as I lay paralyzed and paranoid, after running to every room of the house to look out the window and see if "they" were coming to get me.
I never understood David. He was my brother’s wife’s brother, and though he claimed that the brotherhood reached out to me there was always something sinister back behind him. He would rip off anyone with no trace of conscience. As I said, he was crazy. After a number of sociopathic episodes, he was diagnosed as a paranoid psychotic. They gave him thorazine. As a confirmed drug lover, he was anxious to spread them around to all of his friends, particularly if he could trade them for dust. My brother said, “It’s kind of a weird high, wanna try it?” Ever the experimentalist, I had to give it a go.
Thorazine was actually quite a lot like PCP in bodily effects, with only one important difference. It makes thinking a very unprofitable proposition. No matter how hard I tried, I just couldn’t think of anything. It was one of the scariest drugs I’ve ever done. I’ve never felt so voided, so non-human in my life. Not an experience I’d like to repeat. Though the drug was milder than PCP in most ways, I just cannot imagine existing for an extended length of time without having thoughts. There isn’t anything on the planet scarier to me.
A few nights ago, I woke up with that feeling. There wasn’t a thought in my head. I couldn’t remember any dreams, I hadn’t written anything in my sleep, I was just a void. It made me think of thorazine. I thought about visiting friends in ward 3b of Kern Medical Center in Bakersfield after they had been sedated with thorazine as a matter of standard practice. I thought about how much they didn’t even seem like people I knew at first. They were just there, taking up space. It seems to me that thought is the primary quality of human existence, and to be deprived of it is a darker place than any jail. For a second, I thought of David.
He beat his mother, and held some of his siblings hostage before he was finally interred. I didn’t visit him. David wasn’t a friend of mine. He was just there. Taking up space. Something not quite human, but not quite animal. Someone with chemistry gone horribly wrong. I don’t know what happened to him, but I feel fairly certain it wasn’t good.
I made up my mind to put those thoughts out of my head, and write about the one positive memory of David I can think of. I’ll do that a little later. There was a picture, and a first for me on that day. It was a crossroads time, where I could have gone a certain direction, but didn’t. I went to college instead. Though that path ended quickly, at least it diverted me from the realm of thoughtlessness.
I don’t think there is anything worse in life than experiencing thoughtlessness, either as a witness, or as a victim of it. I can’t universally condemn drugs, but some drugs, I can.
No thorazine thoughtlessness for me, thank you. Even the memory of it was chilling.
Bakersfield (my "hometown") is such an icon. I forgot about the reference in On the Road until In a Dark Time mentioned it. I read that book for the first time in Milt's Coffee Shop, just off highway 99 in Bakersfield. If you've read it, or haven't and want to, Loren's running commentary is a good thing. Give it a try, while you anxiously await Shauny's return. I must say, 72 comments must be some sort of personal blog record.
Though I hate Tom Hanks, I was also pleased to see that in Castaway his salvation came in the form of a portable toilet from Bakersfield. That's the poetic nature of the town, really. It may seem like a pile of dirt and shit, but it's always there when you need it.
Off to school!
----- --------TITLE: Rhetorical theorists DATE: 02/26/2002 4:56:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: For those in search of more academic contentI’ve been struggling for the past couple of days with summaries of three rhetorical theorists. So, rather than tie up the blog with them I decided to put them up separately. Corrections, emendations, and comments are welcome.
My favorite is Protagoras, sort of the grand old man of rhetoric as far as I’m concerned. Unfortunately, most of what we know about him is filtered through Plato, but I think his point of view is best identified in the modern context with Habermas. Bear in mind that these were written as simple two page summaries, not exhaustive critiques.
But if you’ve been curious about what I’ve been up to, or have any interest in rhetorical theory, I think they were a fun little project. The sources aren’t attributed, but there is a huge pile of books about to swallow me that fed into this thing. Some of the concepts are difficult to express simply, but I hope I did all right.
I woke up with memories of thorazine, and thought about writing an entry about that but it had to wait until I finished this stuff up. Maybe later, but I have class tonight and papers to critique. For now, this is the only new content I can offer.
I burned a bunch of MP3s to CD to free up space, and the juxtapositions are often interesting when you just pop one of those disks in and hit play. First up was The City Waites Pills to Purge Melancholy: Lewd Songs and Low Ballads from the 18th century. I’d highly recommend this one to anyone who has a taste for the bizarre and/or the 18th century. But then, I was right back where I started.
Silence is better than nothing.
I can’t wait for the Eyes Adrift album to come out. Yeah, so I’m into survivors. Krist (from Nirvana) and Curt (from the Meat Puppets) and Bud (from Sublime) seem to be on to something.
Silence and nothing are not the same thing.
Listening to the SF gig, I was especially taken by Solid.
After spending hours writing a capsule summary of Protagoras, this makes far too much sense to me. He saw the world as plastic, and men as plastic, living in a world of constant flux. He refused to argue about the presence of gods, or the validity of sensations. His response was to say that man can only judge the world in relation to his perceptions of it. It doesn’t matter if feelings are “real” or not; we can only make the best decisions we can based on what evidence we have within our reach.
Writing fixes a moment, nothing more. I’m not nearly so depressive as it might seem (right now at least), but even if I were— I could cut myself because I’m solid and I’ve always been that way. Thanks Curt!
There are a lot more Meat Puppets live gigs at The Meat Puppets Repository.
You have stumbled onto the blog of just another white guy who needs to get laid.
{Blatant personal content meant to discourage my oddly growing readership}
When I was a kid, I was a science-geek who was always making strange smells in the garage. Some of them nearly killed me, like making mustard gas and turning a half-horsepower motor into a spin painting machine. Okay, so the machine wasn’t the problem. It was the 220-volt shock that knocked me half-way across the garage.
When I got to high school, at first I was a math geek who won lots of awards in an event called “leap-frog” where if you couldn’t solve a problem, you could pass it to a partner. My partner was a tall girl named Marilyn who was much smarter than I was. No sports trophies on the mantelpiece for me, mine were all in math. I also hung out with the theater crowd because of my newly developed affinity for electricity (and smoking dope on the roof of the building). I was a lighting technician. Though I was often asked to read lines, I never tried to act. I loved to watch and I also loved crawling around narrow passages in high places, plugging things in. I loved to watch so much that I became a photographer. I had a job filming football games in 16mm and I never bothered to tell them that the letter on my jacket was for theater. My writing was so poor that I couldn’t take literature classes. I cheated by getting my photography teacher to help me understand Blake and Milton.
In community college, I was sucked into the Art department. Poor writing skills made the study of literature impossible; they actually wouldn't let me in. The real lesson to be learned in any art department is: “Why are you wasting your time here when you could be out making art?” So, rather than becoming a productive well-paid geek, I became a starving geek. I took their lessons to heart and dropped out.
Fast-forward through twenty years of making photographs and studying art history. Loving and losing, living in my car and doing lots of drugs, getting married, raising a teen-age instant family, and then flirting briefly with becoming a computer-geek long before there was an Internet, but then going back to what I thought I did best— making photographs. Then the big mistake: I started reading literature again. Fast-forward through life-changing cataclysm where the loving and losing part takes over again. Slow-motion through my entry into a medium-sized university with an amazingly dedicated English department. Fast-forward through a fairly chaotic Rhetoric program which improved my writing skills enough to make me feel confident, so confident in fact that I ended up in the master’s program standing on the other side of the room trying to improve other people’s writing.
So much for a monolithic notion of self. How do you put those pieces together (and there are many more, actually) into a picture of a rather eclectic person who scrawls out barely readable prose out on a wide variety of topics each day?
I’m thinking that the mustard gas and shock treatment had as much to do with it as anything.
The later Victorian poets paved the way for the triumph of the symbol, pushed to its limits into the symbol-mongering of high Modernism. While it is fun stuff, when the symbol becomes a cipher, a stand-in for real experience, I have to draw the line. Yeats is unique to me in that respect, because he danced upon the edge of mythos and symbol. When you fall off the edge, art becomes math.
Continuing to meditate on color today, I stepped back into the symbolist den. Some of the systems that evolved were compelling. I revisited Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art. In the translator’s preface to the Dover edition, Michael Sadler relates that in genealogical terms, Kandinsky is seen as the heir to Gaugin, while Picasso is heir to Cézanne.
The distinction, as Sadler sees it, is the distinction between the realist and the symbolist. The forgone conclusion is that “realists” cannot be spiritual, and unless a case is made for Cézanne as a religious painter, Picasso cannot stand with Kandinsky as a “prophet of an art of spiritual harmony.” I don’t think that he would want to be grouped with those in search of harmony. Picasso’s universe is dynamic and full of unrest; I find it more “human” and closer to the world as I know it. Mystics are in constant search for a system. Kandinsky saw color as a field to build such a system.
At the outset, he recognizes the futility cataloguing the effects of color:
There are many examples of color working that refuse to be classified. A Dresden doctor relates of one of his patients, whom he designates as “an exceptionally sensitive person,” that could not eat of a certain sauce without tasting “blue,” i.e. without experiencing a feeling of seeing a blue color. It would be possible to suggest, by way of explanation of this, that in highly sensitive people, the way to the soul is so direct and the soul so impressionable, that any impression of taste communicates immediately to the soul, and thence to the other organs of sense (in this case the eyes). This would imply an echo or reverberation, such as occurs sometimes in musical instruments which, without being touched, sound in harmony with some other instrument struck at the moment.
I spent a short period of time playing with color photography. I was always overcome by blue. The distinction between shades was never right, and the film just collapsed the melody that I saw with my eyes. I just gave up on the whole idea. I could train my brain to process what would happen when I recorded something on black and white film, but color film never resonated with the colors I felt in my mind. Perhaps there was just too much feedback going on, reducing everything to a fuzz-tone. I wanted to be true to the blues, and I found it best to do that in black and white.
I like Kandinsky’s concept of color as movement, which he expressed it in a Yeats-like diagram:
As is the case with most of these things, it starts from antitheses. Kandinsky and Yeats both saw absolute white and absolute black as discord. There is concord in their opposition of subjective and objective. There is a similar spinning motion involved. However, Kandinsky sets the motion of blue in an inward direction, concentric, as compared to the external, or ex-centric motion of yellow. Kandinsky cuts to the core of color as both a centrifugal and centripetal force.
Kandinsky also treats color rhetorically, as an "appeal" to either a spectator, or to an internal spiritual state. His distinction heralds a higher version of Modernism and its notion of the value of rhetoric. Yeats described the process of persuasion in typically pithy fashion: "A rhetorician writes to convince others. A poet writes to convince himself." In Kandinsky's version, the self is absent. It has been replaced by an abstract spirit, for Kandinsky claims that art should reach to a higher purpose than just the revelation or assertion of self. Like Eliot, Kandinsky seems to propose that in the grand scheme of art, self is unimportant. It's the spirit that counts.
Of course, there is a spectrum of colors and states involved in Kandinsky’s model of color:
It seems poetic that red would be motion within itself, while green would be spiritually extinguished and motionless. Color takes care of itself, as far as I’m concerned. Yeah, I see in color. But I just can’t deal with it as an artist. Maybe I'm just too sensitive to it.
Harmony in perfect proportion is gray; there is no motion. Photography is an attempt to fix things. It seems only natural that it would arise from discord on either side, and result in a gray lack of motion. At least in the case of black and white still photography.
Anything else is not nearly as “spiritual,” at least in my opinion.
But on the other hand, I’m not a symbolist. I’m more of a realist, and while these systems are fun, I’ve got little use for them past intellectual curiosity. I feel spiritually closer to Picasso than I do Kandinsky. Life is more fun when it's de-ciphered. However, Kandinsky's view of color is incredibly seductive:
Generally speaking, colour is a power which directly influences the soul. Colour is the keyboard, the eyes are the hammers, the soul is the piano with many strings. The artist is the hand which plays, touching one key or another, to cause vibrations in the soul.
It is evident therefore that colour harmony must rest only on a corresponding vibration in the human soul; and this is one of the guiding principles of the inner need.
People are always looking for good vibrations. Color and music can provide them, but I'm not so sure that's what photography is all about. I suppose I tend to think of photographs as artifacts and curios, "documents for artists," as Atget billed them. They are objects of desire rather than saviours of the soul, I suppose, forever connected to the desiring machine.
----- --------TITLE: Lisa DATE: 02/22/2002 10:06:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
My friend Scott was always quick to announce that he didn’t jam. He wrote songs. I liked his reasoning, and it became a part of me. I don’t like jamming much at all. It just wanders around and goes nowhere. I like to get somewhere when I write, even if it’s just a closing paradox. I’m forever trying to get things to gel.
But that doesn’t mean I don’t riff sometimes. Sometimes, weird connections result. I was thinking about Technicolor and quicksand.
Quicksand is easy. When too much fluid quickly enters a loose collection of silica particles, a flux results. The flux doesn’t bear weight easily, and things that rest upon it slide down, engulfed. Is this a bad thing? It’s actually close to HP Grice’s view of the process of making meaning. Essentially, humanity is awash in particles of meaning. We reach out to adjacent particles of meaning (implicatures) and depending on where we are in the cultural flux, we grasp at the particles of best fit dependent on our situation. But the postmodernists claim that the concrete grasp of meaning is impossible and our only choice is to swim in the flux playfully rather than drown, struggling against the shifting tide of history.
The particles of meaning could also be called beliefs. In order to be useful, they need not be fixed— just close to where we are at that point in time. But quicksand is a much more poetic term for the process involved, and naturally it made me think of the Bowie song.
Quicksand
I'm closer to the Golden Dawn
Immersed in Crowley's uniform
Of imagery
I'm living in a silent film
Portraying Himmler's sacred realm
Of dream reality
I'm frightened by the total goal
Drawing to the ragged hole
And I ain't got the power, anymore
No I ain't got the power anymore
How can I make this gel with where I am now? It’s easier than it seems.
WB Yeats was a member of the Golden Dawn. Yeats and his beloved Maud Gonne were wrapped up in it, and Yeats was instrumental in exiling Crowley from the order. Yeats believed in responsibilities, whereas Crowley’s edict (appropriated from Rabelais) was “Do what thou wilt.” Freedom from moral responsibility was not something that Yeats could buy into, though as I researched it today, the parallels with Crowley are astounding. The oft quoted Crowley maxim was conveyed in a book supposedly dictated by spirit voices to his wife in 1904, thirteen years before Yeats claimed his own credo was delivered by the same method. The quicksand deepens.
Yeats cut deep to the core of mythos throughout most of his career. It was also the project of Maud Gonne and the women of the Golden Dawn to create rituals for a “castle of heroes” where the old ways of moral responsibility might be recaptured. They were repulsed by Crowley’s debauchery, though they were hardly prudes themselves. The “secret knowledge” that Yeats felt was “just for schoolmates” was part of an effort to reclaim a higher moral ground in Ireland.
The Western Esoteric tradition, which both Yeats and Crowley are voices of, sought to reclaim the power of the individual in a neo-romantic way. There is a conflict between freedom and responsibilties that Bowie conveys amazingly well through his slippery dialogic song. I find it interesting that Bowie chose the image of “living in a silent film” to convey the monochrome nature of the conflict. You can envision the goose-stepping propoganda films, and Ezra Pound's (or perhaps Mussolini's) Italy where the trains run on time. All systems are by nature reductive; even when couched in elaborate mystical mumbo-jumbo they don’t capture the full spectrum of life experience. Sometimes bad guys don’t wear black, even if we wish they would, as we all drag closer to that ragged hole in the ground where we find rest.
I'm the twisted name on Garbo's eyes
Living proof of Churchill's lies
I'm destiny
I'm torn between the light and dark
Where others see their targets
Divine symmetry
Should I kiss the viper's fang
Or herald loud the death of Man
I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore
“The vipers fang” is a Golden Dawn reference as well,and it seems implicit that if we all did what we wanted it would be the end of society. But there is no stability to be found at either pole; the chorus of nihilism is the only relaxation of tension contained in the song.
Don't believe in yourself
Don't deceive with belief
Knowledge comes with death's release
But in the grand old Greek tradition, the actions of the speaker are not in concord with the chorus. Though the nihilist cry that nothing is worth believing seems trapped in an endless loop, the credo is far outside real human experience. One doesn't have to be a prophet to believe in something. And believing something doesn't mean that you'll believe just anything.
I’m not a prophet or a stone age man
Just a mortal with the potential of a superman
I'm living on
I'm tethered to the logic of Homo Sapien
Can't take my eyes from the great salvation
Of bullshit faith
If I don't explain what you ought to know
You can tell me all about it
On the next Bardo
I'm sinking in the quicksand of my thought
And I ain't got the power anymore
The spectrum expressed here isn’t colorful, it’s reason versus the emotional need for faith. I’ve been told my worldview is monochromatic, and I suppose it is. Too much time as a photographer. Color film (and or CCD sensors) don’t ring true for me. Technicolor lies. When I owned a photo lab in the early 80s, I sent film out to the Technicolor processing plant in Fresno, California. My slides always came back blue. Though it was flattering on skyscapes, it was quite far from the reality of a blanched greyish-brown California sky.
Nothing really captures the spectrum of reality and it seems as if reduction and negation are our only tools to deal with it. Yes, it is quicksand. I may not have the power, but I’m doing my best to learn to swim through the particles I can grasp. I don’t think I’d look as good in a funny hat as Crowley does.
I can’t jam. I’m stuck with making jelly out of my brain. It beats having the blues, especially the phony Technicolor ones.
In a Dark Time is right about poems being “living things.” I'd extend that to words in general. Language is a living, evolving, changing thing. When I first heard this Bowie song, I had no clue about Nietzsche’s superman, or the Golden Dawn, or any of this stuff. I just liked the song. My feelings and interpretation have changed, obviously, over the years. They are deeper now, but I still mistrust the notion of color. I’ve sunk a long way into the quicksand.
One of the weird observations that has been made about me over the years is that I don’t think the way other people do. My process is different, and some people I’ve known have found it fascinating. They just couldn’t figure out how I got from A to B. I get pretty twisted-up sometimes.
But I don’t jam.
Yeats is a complex poet. I really don’t want to launch off into a scholarly dissertation about it, but there are some bits and pieces I could throw out for consideration. Like Loren, when I discuss poetry in my blog it’s more of a personal reaction, a personal interpretation of themes and images which may or may not be academically “correct.” If I wanted to write academically about Yeats, I’ve got an inside track for that.
However, I think many things which are gleaned from reading scholarship or conversing with scholars help the process of deepening the resonance of poetry. The frequent tower image in Yeats is a good example. But before I launch into that I thought I’d offer a short description of what the work called A Vision is.
There were two primary editions of A Vision. Though it’s out of print right now, there are lots of used copies to be had. The first edition is incredibly expensive, as some may have noticed, and the second in its first printing also commands a high price. However, there are massive numbers of the paperback reprints of the second edition out there, starting at around $7.50. Just do a search on ABE and you’ll be able to find copies. What’s the big deal about the difference in editions?
The book was first printed with an introduction that was an elaborate subterfuge. Yeats describes how a book of metaphysical lore was passed on to him by a mysterious traveler from the east. It was written by Giraldus in Cracow in 1594, and it contained the system which Yeats had transcribed as A Vision. This was Yeats’s story in 1925.
In 1938, Yeats recanted through an epistolary preface entitled “A Packet for Ezra Pound,” telling the “true” source of the information in the book. He transcribed it from “spirit communications” which his wife produced through automatic writing while in a trance. The 3,000 pages of transcription of this "miracle" were eventually published separately as well, to try to lend credibility to Yeats's story. This book supposedly has its origin in “the other side,” and the work known as A Vision is Yeats’s synopsis of the system revealed through his wife.
Regardless of the source, it’s a fascinating work. But I actually was going to talk about towers.
The image of the tower in Yeats is not the contemporary ivory tower of academia. Its source is probably best traced to Tennyson’s “Lady of Shallot.” Arthurian subject matter was a big thing in the Victorian era, which Yeats straddled during his poetic career. Like Hopkins and Hardy, Yeats is on the boundary line between Victorian and Modern. But to find the real source of conflict, you really have to go back to the Romantics, which Yeats himself did with great frequency, positioning himself in the company of Blake and Shelley.
Harold Bloom argued, as I have mentioned before, that the Romantic quest for self-knowledge was largely an internalization of the medieval quest-romance. Romantic values came into question dramatically in Tennyson, who dealt in alternating themes of engagement and withdrawal: to continue the search for self through art as a part of life, or to withdraw to a distant tower and create “art for arts sake.” There was tremendous anxiety of influence, to use another of Bloom’s terms, and the tower image is an encapsulation of a longstanding poetic conversation.
The Lady of Shallot sat in her tower, weaving a tapestry. When she fell in love with a knight far below, she traveled a river to find him and died. The message of this, to Yeats’s boyhood circle was that it was best to stay in the tower and make art. Withdraw into “art for art’s sake” as it were.
If you read Tennyson’s poem, in parallel with Yeats’s The Tower the image will become much clearer. Yeats repeats the same theme from a different perspective. The production of “art” occurs in the vista beneath the tower, rather than the tower itself. Yeats did seek to join art and life in a way far closer to the Romantics than the Victorians. But the overlaps in imagery are no mistake; he’s picked up Tennyson’s quandary and pushed it in an entirely new direction. It’s a theme that runs constantly through most of Yeats’s poems: the relationship between art and life.
But the tower is also a physical reality for Yeats. In 1917, he bought one. So when he speaks of “pacing on the battlements,” he actually did. Many of his pre- Raphaelite brethren painted the scene of the “Lady of Shallot.” Yeats went a step further and lived in a version of it.
I’m not a Yeats scholar, but I know one. Russell Murphy made Yeats live for me, and his presence haunts my thought a great deal of the time, which might be stating the obvious given the constant shadow he seems to cast over my blog. Yeats was a man with a troubled, multiple identity that shifts from poem to poem. Somehow, I can identify with that.
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I think that "Lapis Lazuli" has an affinity for Browning’s The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s, where the art looks on life with a somewhat wry grin. Yeats is like a bridge into the twentieth century, but it’s important not to forget that he is making his great stride from a start in the Victorian age.
I was watching The Big Lebowski this afternoon. It’s been a favorite of mine for a long time. Though I would choose the Meat Puppets version of “Tumbling Tumbleweeds” over the original, I find a great deal of consubstantiality with the dude. Aside from having the same first name, and the same taste in drinks, and a shared hatred of the Eagles, I often find myself in opposition with the nihilists. As Walter says,
You can say what you want about National Socialism, but at least it’s an ethos.
Without an ethos, there can be no communication. There must be core values of shared implicature for communication to occur. We must understand each other's motives and desires. If there is sufficient overlap, a leveling process ensues as values are transferred and modified. This does seem to be inextricably bound to negation, where values in conflict must be excluded for concord to occur. If a common ethos is established, depending on the zone of consubstantiality, friendship and even love occur.
Nihilism prohibits love by its very nature. That’s why I don’t feel like I can succumb to it. The essential quality of love, to me at least, is placing someone else’s welfare above your own. The translation of this into a tragic formula has been complete in my experience; everyone I’ve ever loved, I’ve had to let go of. Because my presence, in one form or another, proved damaging to them.
Friendship is quite similar to love in some respects. “Love thy neighbor as thyself” and all that. I suspect it’s a parity relation. Rather than holding the welfare of a friend above our own, we hold it close to the same level as our own. The balances shift, as values come in conflict, but stable long term friendships are marked by this oscillation, and return to parity after periods of disagreement and disconnection.
Ron queried: “Can our disembodied friendships be as meaningful as our embodied friendships?” I am the wrong person to ask about this. Other than my ex-wife, I have had few “embodied” friendships in the past six years. Most of the people I have called friend now live in a different state; I suppose it’s this disconnection that leads me to rant so much in this environment, hoping that someone will hear, hoping that someone will share my view.
I try to avoid online crushes, but as Shauny commented, they play some part in linking activities. When you read what people share of themselves on the web, you construct images of them. Sometimes you really start to feel a “real” sense of friendship, a friendship built on something completely outside the physical. It’s inevitable, and dangerous. I’ve made the transition from online to “meatspace” with a few people I’ve met online with mixed results. Sometimes, people do look perfect far away [obscure Bottle Rockets song reference]. I suspect that is the case with me. The last time I met someone as the result of an online exchange, I came away with the feeling that I should have left it in the abstract. I rarely have much in common with people’s ideas of me.
However, this doesn’t stop the process of reaching for consubstantiality, for interpenetration with another. It begins with shared values, shared hopes, shared dreams. These things can be expressed both through speech and silence. I’m much better at speech. I can’t seem to handle the silent parts too well.
The ultimate end of nihilism is silence. I choose belief instead. I surf lots of sites, and take the wafer thin-slices of people into my mouth, drink an occasional white Russian (rather than wine), and hope for the miracle.
This time it was “Normative Agreement and Models of Reasoning” by Chris Campolo from UC Riverside. Nothing much to talk about there, it was less about models of reasoning than the effect of implicature on premises for reasoning. HP Grice again, but under a different set of labels from a different set of theorists.
I confirmed a suspicion though. Philosophy lectures are even more ghettoized than literature lectures. There were five people, counting me and two professors. Real high demand items, these lectures.
To respond to a comment from this evening in the open, rather than buried in an entry soon to scroll off: Yes, Turbulent Velvet, I was perhaps a little off in the Artaud reference. I should have said Picabia. Though eventually I’m sure I’ll get to Deleuze and Guattari, most of that vocabulary is a bit older. It’s from the Dadaist heritage. I suppose I should offer an illustration:
Where the machine is
there is always an abyss and nothingness . . .
And I shall henceforth devote myself
exclusively
to the theater
as I understand it
a theater of blood
a theater which every performance will have achieved some gain
I keep formulating in my head a sort of reactive cycle, where the appeal to the emotions always returns in our modes of communication. Emotion is the one universal affective that just won't die, no matter how much theorizing is done about it. I try to avoid being locked up in any language ghetto, including the postmodern one. I tend to stagger and weave across different fields, so I suppose that’s why I’ve ended up in Rhetoric.
It’s only talk. [King Crimson reference intentional]
I went to an interesting lecture, Self Deception in Kant: If we are free, can we deceive ourselves?
A visiting professor from the University of South Carolina cleared up some stuff for me. I never thought of Kant as an idealist before, but he was. Kant “solved” the problem of moral law by dividing the will into two different dimensions: a “moral” will that must always act in accordance with an unknown, idealistic moral law and a separate “capricious” will which can act based in self interest. Morality, as Kant saw it, was a reciprocal of freedom: “Freedom and unconditional practical law reciprocally imply each other.” In other words, for Kant, without moral law there can be no concept of freedom. Kant takes a lot of flak about that, and the professor set himself up as a defender of Kant. Cool stuff; but the lecture was mislabeled. The promotional stuff said: “No philosophical knowledge required.” I don’t think so. I was struggling to follow it, and I’ve read huge amounts of Kant.
On another front, I was intrigued by the procession of concepts of self among the philosophers that the professor wrote his dissertation on. Kant saw the self as unknowable: “I have no knowledge of myself as I am but merely as I appear to myself.” He quoted a Police lyric, speculating that perhaps Sting was a Kantian: “In the desert that I call my soul, I always play a starring role...”
So lonely, indeed. Hegel evidently revised this position, proposing that the self arrives late. We start out without one, but as time goes on we have a chance to find it. Kierkegaard reverts back to Kant’s position, that the self is unknowable. The muck gets deep so quickly in all this. I just wanted to record a couple of notes. However, it seems interesting to me that both K’s actually agree on something.
I’m glad I’m not a philosophy major. I’d have a lot more headaches.
There’s been a disturbing trend at school lately though. Everyone keeps asking: “Have you picked out a Ph.D. program yet?” Christ, I’m not even halfway through my masters yet. Dr. Kleine said yesterday that he wished he could confer a Ph.D. on me right now so I could just get to work. It’s been really weird for me the last few years. Most of my professors treat me more like an equal than a student. I feel like arguing with them. Geez folks, I’m not that smart, just that weird.
Linking to other blogs can take many forms, for many reasons. Sometimes, you link to another blog because you agree. Sometimes, you link to disagree. It’s only right to note the source of your affirmation/disagreement.
A while ago, In a Dark Time described a philosophy quite close to my own regarding the links on his side-bar. I think they are important too, and I change mine frequently. Over time, I have discovered that they are one of the most functional and useful parts of my site, for me at least.
I do a lot of surfing. My favorites list is so long and unruly that I seldom get back to places I stumble on and find interesting. Months can pass before I revisit places that I thought were interesting at some previous moment. A person can only read so many sites in a day, so maintaining links on my site has a practical side. The places I want to visit frequently are right there when I visit my own site to make sure that a post is displayed properly. Once I’ve verified that things are okay, I can launch off to somewhere else. I use my links; I’m not so sure anyone else does.
So, the hierarchy that evolves is one of frequency of visitation, not an appraisal of quality. I try to update them at least once a month. Sites rise and fall, and rise again, both due to my reading habits and the frequency of updates on the particular site. As an added benefit, as the list has grown longer, my browser tells me if it’s been two weeks since I’ve visited a site. The link becomes bold to me, as a reminder, because I have my history set to purge once every two weeks.
Mike Sanders often calls for “longer blogrolls” and greater affirmation in the blogging community. I agree, but it’s a qualified sort of agreement. Putting a bunch of links on your site that you don’t visit yourself is the worst kind of false advertising. I put links up that I read on a regular basis. I don’t feel obligated to link to everyone who links to me, and am not disappointed when I link to someone and they don’t link back. If they don’t read me, what’s the point? When I find a new blog I like, I often surf their links to see if there is more good stuff that I haven’t found yet. I strive to keep things diverse in my linkage, because I don’t want just one point of view.
I’ve often thought of the web as an overgrown high school, with all its attendant cliques. I try not to find myself forced into one. I successfully avoided that all through school; I avoid the popular crowd almost as a matter of habit. There is no need to link to what they have to say, because many other people will be talking about it if they say something good. I want to know what’s going on in the fringes, on those sites that get few hits per day (like mine). Linking is a tool to find them, and to have them find me (if they look at their referrer logs, that is). If they are interested in what I have to say, I’ve made a new friend. Otherwise, not.
Throughout life, friendships change and shift. Linking is a way to keep friendships solid, and a reminder that people actually do read and care about other people. I think it’s perhaps one of the most significant parts of any site.
Except for content of course. If there’s no new content on a regular basis, why link?
Anne Ruggles Gere raises some thorny issues about voice in this article, which occupies chapter 2 of the Writing and Healing anthology edited by my professor, Charles Anderson and Marian MacCurdy. Issues of voice are quite complicated because through voice we express ourselves in ways that are shaped by our perception of self.
Gere opens the article by telling a story about her experience trying out to be a cheerleader in the seventh grade. She worked hard to make the squad but failed, because as she was told, “Your voice just isn’t loud enough.” I’ve never been told that, quite the opposite actually: I’ve often been told my voice is too loud. In retrospect, perhaps that’s why I felt more comfortable retreating into the silence of photographs. Every time I spoke, I felt as if I was dominating things. People often look at me like some kind of “leader” merely because I have little trouble speaking up. But I try not to. I choke back more words than I speak. My words just flow in torrents any time I open up the gate. I suppose I was trying to fix that by becoming a photographer. When I make photographs, I seldom speak. In fact, I find it nearly impossible to speak when my visual centers are working at the peak of their capacity. Through photography, I was looking for a quieter and more eloquent voice, a voice that wouldn’t make other people become silent: a voice that would encourage people to talk to me, rather than be silent.
Writing has shifted and modified my view of self, because I became more conscious of the games that people play when they express themselves. Everyone does it; they bend their voice to fit the situation, to try to find some common ground where connections might be formed. I really like Gere’s take on the opposite side of the coin:
Being told that my voice was too soft had as much influence on my understanding of the concept as anything I’ve read in professional journals. The term we use most frequently to describe voice— authentic— takes on meaning when we connect that word “authentic” with our own lives. Feeling inadequate or not powerful enough shapes one’s understanding of voice just as feeling important and in control does. Connecting to one’s life does not, however, mean continuing to think of voice in individual terms. Many of our current discussions about voice presume a stable, coherent self while our conversations about other aspects of composition take for granted a more complicated and less unified concept of self we call “the writer.” In wanting to be a cheerleader, I sought to join other voices, and I believe that the finely textured personal and autobiographical writing now emerging in the academy leads us to public and social contexts rather than private and individualistic ones.
This was just so incredibly well put and relevant to the questions of voice in blogging that I had to put it out there. Voice is a multivalent quality. It isn’t just “being true to yourself” it is also seeking to connect with communities of voices. The most important pole to steer by, as far as I’m concerned, is a sense that the voice we speak is connected in some way with the conglomerate self that we hold close. It isn’t a fixed thing, it shifts dependent on the situation in which we express it.
The questions that I find interesting are not “what is voice?” or “what is authentic?” but instead, how has the open sharing of ideas and personalities in the first truly global environment, the Internet, leveled or shifted the playing field when it comes to forging those connections which language (and/or self) drives us to seek.
Voice and authenticity are much larger things than the presence of personalities on the Internet. Blogging presents these qualities in a new context, with new depth and complexity. The interrogation going on, at least the parts that I’ve read, don’t do more than scratch the surface of the differences involved, focusing only on the similarities to the larger questions. What’s so different about blogging? I’m still not sure. I haven’t really isolated any good specific rather than general questions to ask. Hyperlinking pops up from time to time as one of those differences, and yet hyperlinking is just the latest twist on “intertextuality” which is also one of those deep and abiding questions about the nature of discourse. The Internet didn’t invent intertexuality; it has only accelerated it. However, it is possible that it has strengthened the ability to claim validity, by linking to supporting or dissenting positions, accelerating judgment.
So, is this blogging stuff just another manifestation for our need for speed? Or, is it deeper— reaching out to find some language, some voice that can be used to touch people beyond ourselves? I agree with Gere. Voice and authenticity are much bigger than just the act of inflicting our selves on each other.
That, by the way, was William Blake’s definition of friendship:
We impose upon each other.
Many blog writers I’ve known over the last few years cite friendship as a primary motivation. To make friends, because a person can never have enough friends.
The normal flow of things was broken yesterday. I had just finished teaching my classes, which both went well, and settled down to read some critical articles for my night class. I decided to take a break and watch The Mothman Prophecies, but by the end of the first hour I descended into a migraine.
It washed over me in waves of intense pain, and I settled into bed and closed my eyes. I used to have migraines fairly frequently, but since returning to school they have mostly subsided. Though I was quite prepared for class, I missed it. I never do that. I managed to escape into sleep, and woke up around midnight for a while. I watched the rest of the movie and then slept, until 9am when Dr. Crisp called to say that he was feeling ill so my afternoon class today was cancelled.
The articles I was reading yesterday had to do with speech and silence, and authority and voice. Strange how that happens; lots of material I wanted to blog more about these topics; I may get back to them this afternoon if I can recapture the train of thought. But it was broken by a different sort of pain than what usually disrupts me.
I feel better today, but I’m oddly dislocated. I woke up thinking of Chaucer, in his little cubicle above the bridge. I was thinking about how our models today are not brilliant men with skills above the norm. The actors and actresses, sports figures and celebrities which garner the greatest monetary rewards in society are largely ordinary people who have been singled out because of their talents to inspire in ways that have little to do with intelligence. The most essential people in our society are paid the least, because we run away from the mundane into the fantasy worlds of entertainment and sport; we don’t want to be reminded that the core values that support society are tedious boring work. Escape is the most highly praised commodity by far.
But the stories that grant most people escape are written by committee. It’s not the efforts of great men, but instead a sort of social consensus voted upon by dollars. Leading the parade are hollow puppets, with strings pulled not by master manipulators, but instead by the winds of popular opinion.
Okay, so that isn’t that profound. It’s just what I was thinking about this morning. When I clear my head, I may be able to return to that broken train of thought which reaches deeper that a cursory survey of surface values.
Yesterday, I was thinking of silence. Appropriately enough, it was expressed in silence. I was thinking about the increasing numbers of e-mails I get from people who define themselves by withholding, by saying little other than they read what I say and are puzzled or amused by it. I withhold little, because I have nothing to lose. My life is quite ordinary, and I’ve spent much more time focusing on what I say rather than what I don’t say. Perhaps it’s time for a change. Or perhaps not.
I was just thinking about how much has changed in the last six years or so. Once upon a time, when I got that constricted feeling in my chest that said “if you stick around the house one more second you’ll explode” I’d go down to a bar. Not because I had a drinking problem really, but because that’s where all my friends were.
Most of my friends were musicians. There was something about the serious ones, the ones who burned inside. It reminded me that feeling was a good thing, and that it’s okay to be down as long as you try to turn it into something. But I was also friends with a lot of bartenders and waitresses, because like myself, they were spectators of an ever-changing freak-show. I only know a few people here in Arkansas, and chances are if I walked into a bar I might find someone I could talk to, but I don’t go out much anymore.
I went to Walmart. I needed light bulbs. They’ve been burning out all over the house. It’s the price of reading in every room. As I watched the employees scraping the floor around the endcap displays, and wheeling pallet-jacks around the aisles, I thought about the picture I must present to the casual reader of my blog. Let’s get one thing out in the open. For most of my life, I’ve been a shlep. Shlep this here, move it there, and answering an endless stream of questions: “Oh, that’s over on aisle five.”
When I got to Arkansas, I became a different kind of shlep. I shlepped business cards and other printing jobs over a hundred mile route each day. Then I graduated to button pusher. I sat at a processing machine, churning out 3,000 to 5,000 photographic prints a day. I think that’s part of what forced a change. It was so boring that I would put a book on the table beside me and read.
The job is history, but the reading isn’t. Now, when I want to run into someone I know I go to a bookstore. I ran into three people I knew tonight at Barnes and Noble. Now the topic of conversation is likely to be Hopkins and Yeats, rather than Nirvana and Pearl Jam. Most of the people I know here have no clue how weird that makes me feel.
Light reading is no longer Trouser Press and Spin, it’s I.A. Richard’s Philosophy of Rhetoric and Genette’s Narrative Discourse. What, me an academic? How the fuck did that happen. I must have got slammed too hard in the pit.
Okay, so I’ve always been a closet literature reader. It just took the exciting and thrilling sights of Arkansas to bring me out of the closet. Okay, I’m out now.
After-hours party philosophy and the encrustations of the ages carry similar weight though. There are some lessons that only life can teach you. However, once you’ve learned them, it’s good to get back to the books. My main desire was that if I had to say “may I help you” all the time, it would be to direct them towards something good to read, rather than drain-cleaner for their backed-up sink.
The afternoon movie was something completely different. Requiem for a Dream was a film I remember Luke mentioning when it first came out. In my Usenet trawling, I ran across it weeks ago. I downloaded it, but hadn’t watched it until today. It is truly a disturbing film, and as the reviewer on the site I linked above noted, there are few films in the same class as this one. You read that all the time, but this time, I agree.
I had no clue until after I watched it that it was based on a Hubert Selby Jr. novel. I had been thinking about him a lot, going into the “Writing and Healing” class. Every week Dr. Anderson cautions us that dealing with this material is guaranteed to bum you right out. For the most part, it’s no problem for me because I’ve been living with melancholia for a long time, and I can deal. The only writing that has ever pushed me near the edge of coping is Selby. I’m not sure I can read this book now, because the film just left me shaking and nauseous. It might be different if I didn't know people like this, but there is no turning back once you enter the film.
My mom called right afterward with the usual disturbing news from “home.” It actually made me feel better. Strange how that works.
Selby just rips at your guts. I remember when I read Last Exit to Brooklyn there were sections where I just had to put the book down and walk away for a while. You can’t do that with a movie. It’s been three hours since I watched it, and it just won’t let go. I’m going to have to get outside. If I read the book, it won’t be for a long while. Some things are just too much.
The official site is a bit much too. Just dragging and clicking around turns into an odd adventure.
I’ll never look at my refrigerator quite the same again.
To judge something to be authentic is to authorize it. It’s a question of authority, after all, this determination of truth versus fabrication. Stories present a special case, because though they are fabricated, they convey truths beneath the surface. In many cases, they are a distillation of coded, authenticated, behaviors. I was watching First Knight this morning. Though it’s fairly universally reviled, I find this oversimplification of Arthurian legend quite compelling. It cuts to the chase. For example, Guinevere asserts to Lancelot:
Justice? How can there be justice if you find no power higher than yourself?
Concerning the gods, I cannot know either that they exist or that they do not exist for there is much to prevent one’s knowing: the obscurity of the subject and the shortness of man’s life.
For saying this, Protagoras was expelled from Athens and all his books were burned. Only fragments survive, largely citations of them in other texts, but they are incredible. Where Arthur's celebration of the value of community and cooperation (and militaristic solutions to problems) has survived and passed from generation to generation, Protagoras is lost to obscurity and he is branded genus-cidaly a Sophist. (Hi)story has judged Arthur more valuble than any agnostic. We like clean simple judgments, not complex ones. Protagora’s criteria for judgment seems both simple and complex. Sextus is one of the few authors that seemed to see the depth involved:
Protagoras, too, will have it that of all things the measure is man, of things that they are, and of things that they are not, meaning by “measure” the standard of judgment, and using the word chremata rather than pragmata for “things”.
I don’t know Greek enough to say if this is accurate, but chremata seems quite close to chroma, or color, which would relate it to a spectrum rather than a simpler notion of "things" as fixed, ideal quantities. As Sextus continues, he seems to suggest that my instinct is correct:
And for this reason he [Protagoras] posits only what appears to the individual, thus introducing relativity . . . Now what he says is that matter is in a state of flux, and that as it changes there is a continuous replacement of the effluvia which it gives off; accordance with one’s age and aspects of bodily condition. He says too that reasons [logoi] of all the appearances are present in the matter, so the matter is capable as far as lies in its own power, of being everything that appears to everybody.
This is dangerously close to the modern cliché “it’s all good” which is a stone’s throw from “it’s all true,” and even closer to “it’s all authentic”. For if man is the measure, or judge, of all things, and all men are equal, then all perceptions are equally valid. However, it’s the pesky problem of self, or the defintion of "what is man" that creates problems.
Men, however, apprehend different things at different times according to their various dispositions. For the man whose condition is natural grasps, out of what is contained in matter, what appears to those in a natural condition, whereas man whose condition is not natural grasps what can appear to those in that condition. The same account, moreover, must be given of differences in age, the question of whether one is asleep or awake, and every type of variation in one's condition.
Protagoras makes the whole process of judgment problematic. The world in flux is perceived by humans in flux, and the only possible anchor suggested is the idea of “a natural condition” which of course, no one can agree upon. At least not without resort to authority: authority that is in and of itself a problem.
Zucker’s Lancelot vacillates in his enlightened self interest only slightly as he internalizes the values of Camelot: the highest form of natural society. A society built on fabricated legends, told by stories in flux, which change to suit the shifting qualities of nature. His self is transformed while he defines himself as author of his own story. Lancelot Arthur-izes his behavior.
To thine own self be true? Fine, I can accept that. But which self?
This sentence closes “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean. I read the novella this afternoon, for a class I have on Monday. The waters that Maclean speaks of are life itself; the metaphor that blossoms at its close is that underneath these waters are words. But it isn’t the words that haunt a writer, it is the life that washes over them.
The novella is so much better than the movie. That sounds like a cliché, because it is. Movies just don’t have the transformative powers of books. Books develop a vocabulary through use, nuancing the meanings slightly, deflecting them, transforming metaphors into containers of meaning that last far beyond the two or three hour limit of a movie. And they gesture back to other texts, building on the avalanche of meanings that centuries of culture have proposed and refined. I particularly liked Maclean’s gesture at Wordsworth:
Poets talk of “spots of time,” but it is really fisherman who experience eternity compressed into a moment. No one can tell what a spot of time is until suddenly the whole world is a fish and the fish is gone. I shall remember that son of a bitch forever.
One of the funniest scenes in it was the discovery of Neal and Old Rawhide on the beach, asleep and face-down in the sand after their drunken reverie. Old Rawhide has two letters on each butt cheek, and they first think they are initials. But then they dismiss the idea:
“Well,” he said, they don’t fit because she has LO tattooed on one cheek of her ass and VE on the other.”
I told him, “LOVE spells love, with a hash-mark in between.”
“I’ll be damned,” he said, and backed away and started to study the situation all over again.
She jumped straight up like a barber pole. She was red, white, and blue. She was white where she’d been lying on her belly in the sand, and her back completed the patriotic color scheme, red into her hair except for the blue-black tattoo. Somebody should have spun around her and played “Stars and Stripes Forever.”
Now that’s my idea of patriotism.
I can’t wait to finish the rest of the stories in the collection.
For some reason this morning, I thought of Howard. I don’t recall his last name, but I remember a lot of late night conversations. I hadn’t thought of him in a long time, and this time I connected it with some lines from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium.”
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress
While in my mid-twenties, I was assistant manager of a hardware store. Howard was the night man in the lumber yard. He looked a bit like Karl Malden with glowing nose offsetting a thin gaunt body wearing a tattered coat; it was the same sort of coat that you see on winos in the street wear, moth-eaten and threadbare. Howard was in his 60s, and irascible. I was forever running interference between him and the kids who worked the nightshift.
Howard didn’t take any shit. His story was a long and complex one, and I learned so much from this man. I got bored easily, so I was forever tearing up the store and building new displays to keep busy. Howard had much experience with this; he used to be a carpenter, and he built all the store fixtures for a major local department store. He passed the tricks on to me, and we talked a bit about his life.
He made enough money as a carpenter to buy a shop in Carmel, California, where he and his wife collected and sold sea shells. Yes, Howard really did sell sea shells by the sea shore. It was quite a lucrative business, but he developed a disease. He was an alcoholic. Howard lost it all, and he told me he was on the streets for over twenty years. He slept in gutters, and fought for survival each day. You could see it in his eyes. Howard was always aware of everything around him; you couldn’t sneak-up on Howard.
When I knew him, he was in the program. He owned nothing, save a rusted bicycle that he rode to work each day from a flophouse downtown. Work for him was a joyous and happy thing, and we crafted a lot of displays together. He was always on time, and always ready to work. He didn’t share his stories easily; it took a lot of coaxing to learn this much. The kids at the hardware store had no idea that such a wealth of life experiences was right there at their fingertips, but I listened and learned from this tattered coat upon a stick.
A few years later, I heard that Howard was hit by a car while riding his bike and became an invalid. I didn’t know how to contact him. I’m sure he’s gone by now. But even as a grumpy old man his soul did sing. And he lives in bits and pieces, in my memory.
The ever-sharp Mike Sanders blogged a bunch of stuff about authenticity, self, and mask. The authenticity question I have avoided, because authenticity is a concept that lies outside the world we live in, at least according to postmodern theory. According to Baudrillard the path of history has been a map of the precession of simulacra; the real no longer exists. The real has been replaced by the hyperreal. Because that is the case, there is no authenticity anymore.
I can't say that I agree completely. However, the question of authenticity is inextricably linked to the questions of mask and self. Oddly enough, that is precisely the terminology that WB Yeats used to describe the gyres which rule existence. However, in Yeats's conception what most people refer to as "mask" is really an interface between the creative mind and the emotions, which were what Yeats defined as the mask. If it sounds confusing, it is. Dr. Murphy tried to convince me that where Blake and Shelley were algebra, Yeats is calculus. I don't agree. Blake is ultimately more confusing and difficult to grasp. I've been working on Blake for years, and I couldn't condense it to a "short version" the way I can Yeats. I've been talking about Yeats's system for a few days, and it is difficult to envision. So I made a cheesy graphic:
The "self" has four parts, divided between the objective and the subjective. The objective faculty is the "will"; the subjective is the "creative mind". The negations of these things are the "mask" and the "body of fate," emotions and chance. The objective and the subjective rotate in opposite directions like tornados interpenetrating each other. The will is opposed to the mask, in Yeats's system the emotions and will are forever separate. The creative mind is in opposition to fate: things that cannot be shaped by the mind. Yeats mapped this rotation out into 28 phases, like the phases of the moon, but I'm not going to go there tonight. The key point is the oppositions involved. In this view the self is multivalent, containing both subjective and objective parts churning desperately against each other.
Ultimately, the entire paradigm is a HUGE confusing mess, and difficult to talk about. But I do find visualizing the storm of life in this way to be somewhat helpful. It may not be accurate in a scientific sense, but in an emotional one, it has resonance. The emotions constantly move in and out of phase with the creative mind.
I just thought I'd throw this out there, because I know my discussions of gyres may not be easy to follow. I also like Baudrillard's precession of simulacra; in many ways this encompasses maps like Yeats's. We keep trying to make sense of self and mask, and we create simulations to try to envision it. But the world dances and spins, just outside the reach of any neat conceptual model.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Raymon EMAIL: rmontalbetti@hotmail.com URL: http://radio.weblogs.com/drama DATE: 02/17/2002 5:47:00 PM Hi Visible Darkness:I had to look it up to make sure it meant what I thought it did. It was used in a peculiar context, in a peculiar book.
“I” am not a subject; not an object. “I” am an abject.
I started reading Victor Vitanza’s Negation, Subjectivity, and The History of Rhetoric. Or, it might be more apt to say I was engulfed by it. It’s hard to describe at this point. Like most postmodern tomes, it’s filled with critical doublespeak, and yet, it’s just plain fun. That is, if you can get the jokes. Some of them are obtuse to the extreme.
Vitanza wants to create a new history of rhetoric: “Histories of unfettered desire. Desire in language and everything else.” He constantly gestures at many texts I’ve never read, and many that I have. His agenda is one of pure desire, but desire of a special type. Desire without organs:
(Organs = ways of territorializing, or of deterritorializing and reterritorializing —denegating and renegating— the flow of desire. Without Organs = perpetual deterritorializing)
Sometimes, I find that I must un/make particular comments of mine. (I must put my “I”/eye— so to s/peak— in parenthesis.) When reading en parentheses, just laugh.
Needless to say, this one is going to take a while to read. But I just had to comment on it while I was still laughing. Talking to one of my professors that knows him, he is a short little white guy with gray hair. Funny, but I sort of pictured some kind of neo-boho in a beret. His prose is just terrific, if not maddening. Like many of the people in the field with even the slightest tinge of humanism left, he’s looking for a rhetoric of yes instead of a rhetoric of not. NOT a book for beginners.
I’ve read at least half of his references, so it makes a reasonable amount of sense to me, but it would be a real mountain to climb for someone not well versed in critical theory. But it’s just so damn fun. Once you get the jokes.
Vitanza presents a definition of self that I like a lot, buried deep in the mire:
. . .this “I” would become a series of flows, energies, movements, capacities, a series of parts and segments capable of becoming linked together in ways other than those which congeal them by standard academic operating procedures. (. . .un/just as these “Becauses” link but do not necessarily legitimately link, or couple. Yes, I am for illegitimate couplings! As I will tout later, by way of Jean-Francois Lyotard and Ovid and Hélène Cixous, it is necessary to link [be social] but not how to link. Here, throughout, therefore, I link one traditional or revisionary machine to a desiring machine.
He seems to summon the ghost of Artaud. Humans as desiring machines? I must say I like that. I like that a lot. It beats the heck out of “symbol-making creatures.” All this is just from the introduction. I must say, this one is going to take a while to wrap my mind around. But I like it so far.
I prefer being an “abject” to being either a subject or an object.
Valentine's blues? You really need to visit Romanza! Sheer genius, I'm telling you.
Smoking crack and having sex in airplane bathrooms can cause problems.
This story give all new meaning to a brush with the law.
Fans of rules for blogging and other such manifestos should take heed. Arrogant bastards will be punished. It's my blog and I'll swear if I want to. . .
It's too bad that my University doesn't sponsor debates on nudity.
And one last thing: Famous Photographer Comics. They are in Italian, but the pictures do give you the gist of the thing. Don't miss Tina Modatti, Paul Strand and Jan Saudek. Of course, knowing a bit about these photographers helps the cartoons make sense too. Via Consumptive.
Okay, that should help with the low frivolity quotient that my blog has been suffering from.
----- --------TITLE: Last of the Romantics DATE: 02/14/2002 6:31:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Last of the RomanticsI’ve danced around a theme for a while, so I might as well dive right in. Yeats made many mistakes, particularly in the realm of belief. But the hungry heart behind it is a spirit that I can understand. I thought I might take a second to celebrate and interpolate, in my opinion, his finest poem. Though A Vision is the culmination of his life’s work, it is his reflection, written near the end of his life that just rings in my heart. I have never been able to free myself of this poem.
The Circus Animals’ DesertionI
I SOUGHT a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
I think of my efforts on this web site in many ways as my own peculiar circus, a mélange of ideas and images gathered over the course of too many years. Too many late nights. Too much loneliness. The last time I met someone new (outside of school) she looked at me, after having read my writing on this site, and declared: “You’re not how I pictured you. You have such sad eyes.”
But, “being but a broken man, / I must be satisfied with my heart.” That is just the way things are. I’ve carried it with me beating, counting off the moments of time spent searching. I moved so quickly for so many years. And then, abruptly, time began to slow and then stop.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes?
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride?
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
'The Countess Cathleen' was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy,
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
There is at heart always a romantic quest not to be alone. But opposing forces, deception and hatred and lies do drive us to make sense of it all. The themes are old, but the understanding of them is wanting. That’s what Yeats thought his gift must be. At first it was the realm of pure symbol, the ultimate in polyvalent signifers. Then it was the system, dictated by spirits to his wife which became A Vision. But here we find the admission that he ended up the fool, the bit of straw in the wind, who lost the knowledge of just what was behind the dream.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart.
There is a Blake illustration that I know Yeats had in mind when constructing this final, arresting image. It’s of a man holding a ladder up to the moon. The caption reads: “I Want! I Want!”
The creative mind places the rungs on the ladder as it tries to reach out for more. It starts from nothing, and builds a ladder to the stars. But in the end, our skills fade away and we end up back in the dust. Bits of cloth and bone, that’s all we are in the end. And only the desire of the heart can drive us, with all its attendant despair.
I don’t think this poem is sad, myself, just true. Eventually, we all just crumble and fade. But it is such a beautiful dream, while it lasts. I have not given up on the dream of life yet.
I really like being able to meet and interact with some of the adjunct teachers. There are some odd side-effects though. I find out how little I agree with most of them. Reading and reviewing some pieces today, as we were discussing grading strategies, there was one piece that really made me feel weird.
It was a piece about photography, written by a 17-year-old, that everyone else just loved and gave an A. Mechanically, the piece was quite good, with only a handful of errors. There was strong evidence of metacognitive reflection in a few sections, as the writer explored the infinite possibilities of photography. But it was flat. It jumped from one scene to another with no real development or arc with little conception of a strategy for conveying the ideas. It was just a long ramble that failed to reveal much in the way of feelings, and it stopped just short of some very powerful ideas. I gave it a B-, or maybe even a C+. The other teachers were shocked.
My justification was that it was in dire need of revision to be a coherent and interesting read. The spark of creativity that was shining in the thing was just buried by its lack of motive or direction. One of the other teachers found the “story” aspect of the essay most significant. Because it was a creative tale, she thought that the effort alone was worth the reward of a high mark. She noted several questions on the draft, aimed at drawing out “the writer’s voice” and increasing the depth of description. She explained that because she was from a creative-writing track, she felt that things like plot and development were not as important as helping writers “find themselves.”
I choked back the response I wanted to give. Most of the current praxis in pedagogy rejects her stance as “romantic.” It is out of vogue to think that a teacher’s job is to promote “individual expression.” I agree with this, in a limited and qualified way. However, it is because I am at heart a romantic. Romanticism did not glorify and promote the individual. It promoted vision. But it also believed that vision cannot be taught. It can however be recognized, and facilitated. The vision, in the case of this essay, was not in the telling of events from the writer’s personal life. It was in his reflection on photography as a larger thing, capable of infinite choice, and ultimately and agent of persuasion. These things occupied only two paragraphs of the long and rambling essay. The writer’s “voice” actually obscured the valuable content and lesson to be learned from the essay. If you learn to see into the soul of writing, voice takes care of itself.
This doesn’t mean that I’m insensitive to the issues of voice, just that I think that it is far more important to see the big picture at work. If you can’t form a coherent whole when you write, you stand no chance of finding a voice to speak with. I think it is the job of all people to find themselves, and define themselves in relationship with the world. It’s not a teacher’s job. It is a teacher’s job to transmit the skills which can help this process along. The student has to do their own work, when it comes to defining themselves, and I think it is pretentious and meddlesome to intrude on it. I critique the writing, not the writer.
As a person, yes, the writer was an A student. As a piece of writing, it barely rated a B to me. I am not seduced by creativity alone. Creativity does fools no good at all, if they cannot express themselves clearly.
Being a romantic, for me, means wanting to climb to the top of the tornado. To take the flight of imagination to its fullest height. It takes wings to get there though. Coddling people seems to me to be a great disservice. The writer finds his own voice. A teacher should be an intelligent reader and coach, not a psychotherapist. The writing teacher, to me at least, should teach writing— not personality.
Social constructivists claim that teachers do teach world view and help construct personalities. I think this is bull to a large extent. A small grain of truth, with a bunch of crap wrapped around it. Yes, I’m sure that teachers have influence on these things, but I don’t feel it should be center-stage in pedagogy. Skills come first, as far as I’m concerned. If you have the tools, you can construct your own world. Can creativity be taught? I don’t think so. That’s up to the individual’s effort. But skills can be increased by recognizing creativity when it happens, and moving to strengthen it rather than just reward it.
I don’t know why my feelings have gone so out of control in the last few years. It’s as if they are something separate and disconnected from my “self” with no rhyme or reason to their behavior. Today, lurking just beneath the surface there is this lumbering sort of anger, the kind of anger that builds into violence. I know it won’t get that far, my rationality does rule it, but there is utterly no reason for this feeling.
But it’s there. Just out of reach. Coloring the way I look at things, influencing choices I make, and generally being a pain in the ass. There is absolutely no reason for it. Things are going well. Little is denied to me. I am standing in a center where I can see things spinning around. Yeats’s gyres are spinning through their phases.
Perhaps it’s Phase 28:
Will — The Fool.
Mask (from Phase 14). True — Oblivion. False — Malignity.
Creative Mind (from Phase 2). True — Physical Activity. False — Cunning.
Body of Fate (from Phase 16). — The Fool is his own Body of FateThe natural man, the Fool desiring his Mask, grows malignant, not as the Hunchback, who is jealous of those who can still feel, but through terror and out of jealousy of all that can act with intelligence and effect. It is his true business to become his own opposite, to pass from a semblance of Phase 14 to the reality of Phase 28, and this he does under the influence of his own mind and body — he is his own Body of Fate for having no active intelligence he owns nothing of the exterior world but his own mind and body. He is but a straw blown by the wind, with no mind but the wind and no act but a nameless drifting and turning, and is sometimes called “The Child of God”. At his worst his hands and feet and eyes, his will and his feelings, obey obscure subconscious fantasies, while at his best he would know all wisdom if he could know anything. The physical world suggests to his mind pictures and events that have no relation to his needs or even his desires; his thoughts are an aimless reverie; his acts are aimless like his thoughts; and it is in this aimlessness that he finds his joy.
WB Yeats, A Vision
That about sums it up, really. It’s strange to me that I have the talent of turning the pages of a book to just the part I need. It seems almost more instinctual than rational. It’s also strange to me that I seem to read at about twice the speed of most of my fellow teachers. Each time we’ve gone through workshops, I’m always left staring off into space while the rest of the people continue reading. Inside my head, I do feel like a straw drifting in the wind.
Perhaps it’s because I’m a fool.
Even though Dutchbint's Valentines are at least honest appraisals of the situation, since I've been in Arkansas Valentine's Day has been especially difficult. No wonder I'm reading the "hard stuff" lately. It's evasion. I really hate this damn day. I may have to go to a meeting tomorrow with a bunch of happily married folks and choke it back. Bastards! What right have you got to be in love and happy! Why can't you be miserable like most of us! But if suppose that if a blogger has a right to command that people not judge him, I have the right to want to stop the force of love. Anyone who has read me long enough knows that I'm only joking.
People judge all the time. It's in our nature. Hot or not? People fall in love all the time too. But not with me.
Sorry for the outburst of sour grapes, it's just that the last girlfriend I had left me on Valentine's Day.
----- --------TITLE: Tornados DATE: 02/13/2002 7:03:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Stepping into the tornadoThis afternoon, I was reading Yeats. There are weird things that surround my peculiar fascination with him. It started with a mistake.
I was living in California, married and at an impasse. I felt like I was going in circles, repeating the same dull round. Then I struck up a correspondence with a woman from Arkansas which turned into love like a quick summer storm. But I couldn’t throw out my principles, and lie and deceive. My wife found out by accident, and I just couldn’t lie about it. She didn’t want to end things, especially over someone I hadn’t even physically met. A bargain was struck. My wife flew to Florida to visit her grandmother on the day that my new love arrived. We spent a week together, to see if things were real.
It couldn’t have been more real. It was as if a tornado had touched down in my life shredding everything in its path. I dropped her off at LAX to go home, and I had a few hours wait before my wife arrived home, before I had to tell her that our ten-year marriage was over. I was looking for a book to read, and I’d been talking with a guy I worked with who was doing his master's thesis on Keats. At the time, I was not a literature student. I was a photographer. So my brain saw The Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats and read it as Keats. Oops.
I bought the book, and really enjoyed it. There was just something so strangely appropriate, because many of the poems were concerned with growing old. I suppose I was at a crossroads, wondering where I wanted to be as I grew old. The poems were also a strange vortex to me, drawing me in and making me want to know more.
I left them unconsidered for several years after the new relationship fell apart. It was too painful a memory. But then, four years back at school studying literature, I had the opportunity to take a seminar on Yeats taught by Russell Murphy, who edits the Yeats-Eliot Review. Suddenly the twisting gyres of Yeats’s universe filled my head. I had a much better sense of what they meant. Dr. Murphy offered to publish my final paper, but I still haven’t revised it. It was high praise, but there is just so much pain wrapped up in the poems and my feelings about them. The paper was about Blake and Shelley, and what they meant to Yeats. One day, I’ll have to go back to it.
But that is all just prelude, to what I was thinking today.
Harold Bloom sees Yeats’s A Vision as a failure, a failure based on an attempt for closure. Without going into two much detail, Yeats was also trying to revise dialectic. He saw the forces of the universe as opposing gyres, the objective and subjective twisting and turning in opposite directions while interpenetrating each other. He borrowed from Blake’s notions of contraries and negations, and evolved it into a closed system based in the phases of the moon, but the driving force is like two tornados intersecting. Bloom claims that Blake’s notion of vortices is a more workable system, also built in a rebellion against the encroachment of dialectic.
For Blake, there are two limits: ultimate expansion and ultimate contraction. The ultimate in contraction is opaque, dark, lightless, Satan. The ultimate in expansion is God. Man sees the world from a perspective in the midst of a vortex stretching from the contraction of Satan to the expansion of heaven. The goal of life should be to reach higher in the vortex, up to a world of infinite expansion, reaching out to God. That was the problem, as he saw it, with reason and abstract reductionism. The spinning of the vortex, for Blake, never stops. Even in heaven.
Shortly after arriving in Arkansas, my brother told me about his tornado experience. He was sitting in his little guard shack in the middle of the night when a tornado picked him up and sat him back down, unharmed, about a hundred yards away. He claimed that he just hasn’t seen the world the same since.
I could say the same thing, except the tornado that caught me took me around 1500 miles. There has been no completeness, no phases, no movement toward perfection. Just endless mental fight to try to make the circles a little wider. To get away from ground zero of the thing that tore up my life.
But Yeats still provides a compelling, and comforting case:
'But such as you an I do not seem old
Like men who live by habit. Every day
I ride with the falcon to the river's edge
Or carry the ringed mail upon my back,
Or court a woman; neither enemy,
Game-bird, nor woman does the same thing twice;
And so a hunter carries in the eye
A mimicry of youth. Can poet's thought
That springs from body and in body falls
Like this pure jet, now lost amid blue sky,
Now bathing lily leaf and fish's scale,
Be mimicry?WB Yeats, "The Gift of Harun Al-Rashid" 55-66
At the very least, I think Yeats refutes Plato quite nicely.
I paced and read and thought for hours, trying to figure out how to describe the notions whirling around in my head. A few things are coming together, tenuously. They could fly apart at any second. So, instead of relating those, I'll just back up and finish what I started yesterday.
In a few hours reading, under stress, I finally managed to grasp a few more particles of Jurgen Habermas’s Theory of Communicative Action. I felt sorry for the class, because the excerpt we were asked to read (I have read all of volume 1 at least) makes little sense if you don’t know speech-act theory. Dr. Kleine attempted to convey speech-act theory to everyone in a lecture that he claimed would take ten minutes. It took 45. But contextualizing Habermas within the indictment of dialectic found in the Weaver and Burke articles I wrote about yesterday pushed everything into sharper focus in my mind. It is still difficult to describe, but outside the excerpt the class read, I found the connecting link. Habermas cites the motives of “the first international symposium on questions of informal logic”:
- Serious doubt about whether deductive logic and the standard inductive logic approaches are sufficient to model all, or even the major forms of legitimate argument.
- A conviction that there are standards, norms, or advice for argument evaluation that are at once logical— not purely rhetorical or domain specific— and at the same time not captured by the categories of deductive validity, soundness, and inductive strength.
- A desire to provide a complete theory of reasoning that goes beyond formal deductive and inductive logic.
As I dug deeper into the radically confusing thing, I saw more of what Habermas is up to. He is attempting to separate the constantive aspect of language from the performative, a project that originator of speech act-theory John Austin gave up on. In the end, Austin felt that all language was performative, that is to say that it accomplishes work. Language does things. Constantives, a term he thought could be used to describe language that just describes, in the end only make assertions about the state of the world, it does not reflect an actual state— they perform the action of bending the world to fit the language. Habermas does not directly refer to H.P. Grice's theory of implicature, but it seems strangely close. Habermas wants to re-assert the value of language as a constantive force.
Here’s the magic part. Grice asserted that there were free particles of meaning which we draw on when we interpret indirect statements. We make inferences based on social conventions and other things outside the utterance which we turn into meaning. We generate meaning out of thin air. Habermas attempts to explore the possibility that beyond the performative level of language, there is deep structure of communicative action where we transmit the particles of implicature that societies use to create meaning. This makes a great deal of sense. Buried deep inside the stories, the logic, and all modes of communication there are these free particles which are in effect, the conventions or nomos of a society.
We make choices and form arguments based on these implicatures, not just the mechanisms of inductive and deductive logic. The deep implication is that we assign value based on a code that we just don’t understand yet— language.
Reading Kenneth Burke’s “Definition of Man” resurrected some weird thoughts. He placed a big emphasis on the importance of man’s negative approach to morality: Thou shalt not. However, not is a complex operator. We separate existence by declaring this not that. It’s a gesture of definition; things are divided into named quantities, defined more by what they are not rather than what they are. Unable to establish authority to declare what something is, we reach to define by surrounding it, rather than embracing it. Somehow, this becomes refined into binary negations, which if combined, cancel each other. The picture becomes clearer. Just add it up: if a is not b, and these two quantities cancel each other, then they are opposites. But this is a special case, not the norm, in the land of not.
Dialectic operates on the principle of canceling the oppositions to simplify things. If a is in conflict with b and a is true, then b must be false and discarded, because only one proposition can be true. There is no room for relative levels of true, in the land of not. If a quantity is judged “good” and other things are not like it, then they must be the negation, or “bad.” This is physis. A thing cannot be both what it is, and what it is not. The foundation of this is in the literate creation, the verb to be. But are all questions, particularly moral ones, assertions of being true or false? Sometimes, things just are. Outside the question of right and wrong, there is the purely relative realm of story.
I am beginning to see a large connection between story and sermon. Richard Weaver, in his article “The Cultural Role of Rhetoric” asserts that dialectic “fails to see that language is sermonic.” By substituting an ideal realm of abstract “gods” like truth or deity, it breeds a sort of agnosticism that seeks to break ties with any sort of belief in the truth of culture as a whole, or nomos. It sets up abstract texts, whether they be religious or theoretic, as a measurement of value that sidesteps the question of value itself. It creates a closed system of truth, where everything outside is by definition not truth. This circling of the wagons of culture to exclude culture as a standard in and of itself is dangerous. I like the way he puts it:
This brings us to the necessity of concluding that upholders of mere dialectic, whether they appear in this modern form or another, are among the most subversive enemies of society and culture. They are attacking an ultimate source of cohesion in the interest of a doctrine which can issue only in nullity. It is of no service to man to impugn his feeling about the world qua feeling. Feeling is the source of that healthful tension between man and what is— both objectively and subjectively. If man could be brought to believe that all feeling about the world is wrong, there would be nothing for him but collapse.
The hazards of dialectic reductionism are also neatly expressed by Kenneth Burke by reworking an old nursery
rhyme:
If all the thermo-nuclear warheads
Were one thermo-nuclear warhead
What a great thermo-nuclear warhead that would be.
If all the intercontinental ballistic missiles
Were one intercontinental ballistic missile
What a great intercontinental ballistic missile that would be.
If all the military men
Were one military man
What a great military man that would be.
And if all the land masses
Were one land mass
What a great land mass that would be.
And if the great military man
Took the great thermo-nuclear warhead
And put it into the great intercontinental ballistic missile
And dropped it on the great land mass,
What great PROGRESS that would be!
It’s a sticky mess. The coherence of popular opinion creates culture. However, it is constantly assailed as a standard, particularly by those who would call upon an external agency to stabilize a particular position. However, it can’t be excluded in the fashion that dialectic seeks to attain. It took a long time for me to realize that the only difference between dialectic and dialogic is that dialectic implies a power relation. However, it seems that the notion of a dialogic approach to knowledge is also doomed by its multiplicity. I don’t trust popular opinion much either. But must these terms be negations? I respect more and more William Blake’s opinion that there are substantial differences between negations and contraries. Both positions seem essential. As Blake puts it, “Without Contraries there is no progression.”
We preach our positions to one another. We choose among available positions to form our own lifestyles. Society cannot exist without nomos. But we are subject to natural laws of physis. The strong do dominate the weak. But there has to be a balance somewhere, and an understanding of what authorizes one position in relationship to the other. We need to figure out how to assign value without exclusion, but more than that we need to know how to choose what to believe. There is no society without belief.
This is actually the 7am to 9pm day for me, but it went by in a whirl. Both day classes were good, and I think I solved my little conflict problem. Most of the people seem really anxious to learn, and I've already got one paper back revised. I felt really good today.
In Dr. Anderson's class, we watched Dolores Claiborne. The readings we had this week gave me an idea for my paper in the class. I think I'm going to do a textual analysis of Defoe's Journal of a Plague Year to see what the nodes of authority are in the text.
Defoe is trying to make sense of horrendous events at a time when science and religion were first coming into conflict. I haven't read it before, and it is one of the earliest "documentary fictions" in English literature. In 1717, people were grasping for some way to establish standards for reasoning, while the impact of Christianity was still strong. I wonder how it all plays out in a time of crisis? I think I'm going to look into it. I know the book marks a radical turn in political perspective for Defoe, and I wonder how much the tragic experience shifted the "balance of power" in his view.
Dr. Anderson wrote an interesting response to my introductory essay. He said that reading it felt a little like going from 0 to infinity in a quarter mile. I suppose I do that a lot. I take in ideas, and then I take off. He also told me, as we walked to his car tonight, that I sound like I'm studying for my comprehensive exams for a Ph.D. Not really, I'm just trying to make some sense of stuff, and it seems like I'm finding a new piece in the puzzle every day.
In a Dark Time is doing Plath right now, so I had to pick up my copy of Ariel to look through it again. One of my students, Adam, has taken to surfing my site from time to time. He also seems to be doing quite well at blogging. His first essay did remind me of a poem by Plath, so I suppose I'll just have to quote it.
The Night Dances
A smile fell in the grass.
Irretrievable!
And how will your night dances
Lose themselves. In mathematics?
Such pure leaps and spirals—
Surely they travel
The world forever, I shall not entirely
Sit emptied of beauties, the gift
Of your small breath, the drenched grass
Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.
Their flesh bears no relation.
Cold folds of ego, the calla,
And the tiger, embellishing itself—
Spots, and a spread of hot petals.
The comets
Have such a space to cross,
Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off—
Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling
Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given
These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes
Six-sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair
Touching and melting.
Nowhere.
This reminds me of so much more, though. It reminds me that I preferred to photograph dead flowers. Their shapes were so beautiful as they died. It reminds me of the calla lilies around the stage in the Nirvana unplugged performance. It reminds me of a Neil Young lyric: "I see a comet in the sky tonight / makes me feel like I'm all right / I'm moving pretty fast, for my size." It reminds me of the snow that fell last week. It reminds me of the constant calculations, trying to put a frame around the mountains of knowledge that pass across my eyes each week. It reminds me that it's been a long time since I made a woman smile.
I meant to do this days ago. In a Dark Time paused for a moment from his fantastic poetic explorations to remark:
Increasingly in our society people need to feel “popular” to be happy. Some seem to even feel a need to attain their “15 minutes of fame.” They will do anything to be noticed, to be “somebody.” If they produce a blog and are desperate enough, their blog might very well become “popular,” or at least get an amazing number of hits. Does that mean that their life “doesn’t suck?” Does this kind of popularity have any meaning at all, except, perhaps, to confirm that an amazing number of people have bad taste?
On the other hand, another person might produce a web page that appeals to a limited audience. As a result, the page gets only a limited number of hits, but it draws the people the blogger was looking for. Does that mean that his life “sucks?” As far as I am concerned, if the person has produced the page he wants to produce, it doesn’t require a certain number of hits to validate the worth of that page. As Emerson says, “The reward of a thing well done is to have done it.”
My site traffic has virtually doubled in the last month. This means that it’s gone from next to nothing to almost something. The majority don’t say anything at all, but a few people have made me feel really good about keeping up with this blogging stuff.
I’ve offered the clarification before, but this isn’t strictly an academic blog. I write about what I’m thinking mostly, and a good portion of that might be considered academic. I don’t think of it that way really. I just think of it as human. I get lonely and I whine in a way that would be totally out of place in an academic setting. Someday, I may split things up but for now I’ve decided to keep the mix of personal and scholarly. Because after all, that’s who I am.
I’m not sure what “I’m looking for” in the way of an audience, I only know that I have really enjoyed coming into contact with people and ideas that otherwise might be missed. I don’t think I was “looking for validation” when I started this thing, just hoping to make a few friends. And I have.
For example, I really want to thank Michele Zappavigna for e-mailing me with the address for her poems. They were a wonderful break for me, and a breath of fresh air when I was feeling a little stale. I encourage people to give them a look.
I really do think that blogging is a good thing, and I want to continue to focus on those great people out there that always give me good things to think about. I wish I had more time to write more interesting stuff, but I want to take advantage of what little time I have to fix this moment, which is a good one for me. It’s a time that I feel like I’m doing something good, and that people care.
When my brain chemistry flips and that feeling fades away, at least I can look into my archives and see that occasionally, I was happy.
I didn’t even hit my peak 25 paper level. I think I made it through 17 before my brain was fried. These weren’t as good as the last bunch on the average, but I discovered a peculiar phenomenon.
It takes much longer to make good comments on good writing. When I finished going through a really excellent piece, I looked at the paper to see that I had made more suggestions than I ever had on the malformed stuff. It was mostly a petty tightening, removing some surplus words and suggesting more powerful synonyms. But it made the page look like I hated it when I didn’t. I loved it. I suspect the writer will take it in the spirit that it’s intended— suggestions to take something good and make it better. I always hated getting papers back without a mark (it did happen to me a lot as an undergraduate). I knew I wasn’t that good.
The hardest ones to try to figure out how to make suggestions for were ones that I just couldn’t hardly make a mark on at all. I had a paper written almost exclusively in passive voice, for example. There was no way that I could suggest on every sentence that it really needed an agent for the action, otherwise it would just lay there on the page. What can you say when the whole thing just needs to be blown-up and redone?
I had an art teacher do that to me once. He’d just look at what I was doing and say “wrong” and walk on. He’d never offer any suggestion as to how to fix it. I couldn’t do that to someone, but it looks like I didn’t pay that much attention when all I could do was make general suggestions about technique and voice.
But we’re going into the easy part now: research papers. These things are so stock and formulaic that all a person has to do is fill the blanks into the form. They seem more like house painting, compared to trying to create a masterpiece. I read innovative ones from time to time, especially in narrative theory where they try to make the form of the paper the same as the idea they are trying to convey, but the standard college research paper is a fairly dull beast by comparison.
Research itself is the artistic side of it, for me at least. It becomes a real challenge to locate things; collating the finished product is just craft. I could say the same thing of all the bureaucratic crap I’m so far behind on.I finally surveyed the 8am class blogs, and they are mostly doing well. Some people have really taken to the concept. I’d say I have about 75% participation, which is actually better than I expected. People are using them for venting spaces, and that’s a good thing. It will be interesting to see how their research unfolds in this new environment.
What makes me nervous though, is their abilities as readers. How can you possibly write a research paper without correctly summarizing an article? I’ve decided to use this week’s Onion as material. I’m going to have them write abstracts of the stories. Hopefully, this time they will get past summarizing the first paragraph, but we’ll see.
Reading so much stuff on the Sophists has put me behind in my other class readings, and I’ll have to grade about seven more essays in the morning, but for now I’m spent. It was all the tabulating and spreadsheeting after I quit reading papers. Drags a person right down.
News that there will be three new Bob Mould albums this year made me think back. I was a big Hüsker Dü fan way back when. At one time, I thought SST was the record label that would change the world. But given what I’ve been reading today, I thought of a new slant on an old part of the punk aesthetic.
The Minutemen and Hüsker Dü used to print the lyrics to their songs in square blocks of text with no line breaks. It seemed annoying at first, but later it seemed downright conversational. Now that I think about it again, it was rebellion against the verse / chorus / verse structure of traditional rock and roll. Looking at the textual patterns, I see parataxis at work.
Oral memory is a chained thing: it is paratactic, and composed with mostly conjunctive phrases with no subordination. Hypotaxis, or the use of subordinate clauses (such as an embedded chorus) is really a product of literacy. Oral tales seldom exactly repeat, they repeat with variations on a theme. This is done in a few rock tunes, but not many. Purging the rock influence also meant purging the verse / chorus / verse structure. These habits have stayed with a few writers, like Bob Mould. Though doesn’t always stick to it, he seems to be incredibly effective when he does. I was looking at one of my favorite songs of his, “Hanging Tree” from his second solo record and it follows the old pattern:
Another exit on the freeway another bridge I cannot bear to cross alone and I’ve been on the mend I’ve been getting ready to change my name again and once I had a love so fair once I had a reason to keep on left a paragraph taped up on my door it said don’t wait up cause I’m not coming home so I’ve been driving far and wide to find my call in life I’ve been looking for a place where I belong I guess a little pain never killed anyone I guess I feel that way again I can’t come clean I cannot stay got no reason to explain I’ve been here too long I need a change and I hope you’ll understand stained glass window never gonna carry my name been laid to rest in a field of sticks and stones and above my head all that’s left are footsteps of some kid too young too far away from home so don’t send me invitations to your big parade place of residence unknown in my eyes there is no compromise there is no calm before the storm these things happen all the time should I throw myself from the hanging tree? is there a place for those of us who don’t belong I haven’t found it yet
It goes on and on and on in an endless narrative. Some people do things. Some people get hurt. Some people express it all too well.
Like Bob Mould.
It’s the nomos vs. physis argument all over again! In book one of the Republic, Plato relates Socrates going on and on about justice, reaching such wonderful conclusions as: “in the use of each thing, justice is useless but in its uselessness useful” (333d). Eventually, Thrasymachus gets enough of the doubletalk and boldly asserts that justice is nothing more than the strong dominating the weak. I suspect that Bush is taking up the position of Thrasymachus.
You see, his argument is based on the way things are, physis, or nature. Thrasymachus will have nothing to do with the power of social convention, or nomos. It is the way of nature that the strong will dominate the weak. You can’t fool mother nature. This is exactly what Protagoras claimed to do: to make the weak argument the stronger. However, this was branded as sophistry, and the Platonic view prevailed. The response of Western civilization has been to make justice an abstract quality, separate and apart from nature, an ideal. However, Thrasymachus’ argument can’t be easily refuted. He argues that the unjust, because of their strength, often rise to power and must then be considered the just because of the influence the exert over others. In this way, the unjust profit over the just. The unjust end up controlling the definition of justice.
I feel like I understand my government better after reading the Republic.
How we vocalize things reflects our view of the world. In Dr. Anderson’s class last week, we watched Pay it Forward to look at the way that verb tenses portray our perception of events. We’d been looking at it in texts, but it was interesting to hear it play out in well written conversation.
The passive voice is a product of the literate age. It removes the agent from a act, making it abstract and hard to grasp. Mistakes were made. Nobody made them, of course. This is the staple of bureaucratic discourse. When Jon Bon Jovi appears on the scene, to tell Helen Hunt that he has recovered and is no longer a drunk, he speaks entirely in the passive voice. He takes no responsibility as an agent of suffering, the suffering just happened. This linguistic construction distances our lives from ourselves, so we can try to make sense of it. But in doing this, we become uninvolved, and safe from criticism.
Kevin Spacey’s revelation of his past shows how he thinks of his experience. He tells the story in past tense, until he gets to the central image of being set on fire by his father. Then, he shifts to present tense. It is as if the traumatic event is still happening inside him, right then, right now. We use language to make sense of time, and we haven't made sense of an event we betray ourselves in our language.
I found out today, reading The Older Sophists, that Protagoras is credited with introducing verb tenses, and the gendering of nouns. His world view was relativistic, and he increased the power of language to convey that relativity. More than that, he expected to be paid for his language skills. His new verbal technology could be had, but only for a price. It is this aspect that troubled most of his contemporaries, and resulted in his being marginalized as an important figure of the classical age. It is the economic aspect that made “sophistry” a dirty word. The problem is, Plato was paid for his skill as well. History seems to have forgotten that bit. We all get tense, when it comes to money.
Temporal ordering is only found in more highly developed creatures; it may be what separates us from lower animals. It’s hard to place perspective on the amount of work it required to transfer this to language, so we could take the next step in evolution. Lower animals live in a perpetual present, untroubled with any notions of past. Traumatic feelings are locked outside of temporal ordering as well, and turn us back to where we began: in a perpetual present. Until we got tense about it, that is.
In The Muse Learns to Write Eric Havelock proposes two theories, a “general theory of orality” coupled with a “special theory of orality” which applies only to Greek culture before the 4th century B.C. It’s a fascinating perspective on the impact of technology with deep resonance to many contemporary fields. The reason for a “special theory,” rather than an all encompassing one is that because we live with the weight of centuries of being literate, and all things are considered through the lens of our perspective as literate humans.
This was not the case when writing as a technology was new. There were no established “rules,” no dominant literate culture to measure and compare with. The impact of a fully developed literate culture on non-literate people can be measured now, however, in the case of Greece, literate culture was just beginning to form. There were no dominant “rules” for it, just competing proposals. Obviously, Plato, and later Aristotle, won. The world hasn’t been the same since. But why Greece? The common explanation is that the Greek alphabetic technology was the first to equivocate the written word completely with the sound of orality. It made it possible to move from an auditory culture into a visual one. It was the proximity to the word as spoken to the word as written.
I really need to learn Greek. The differences introduced by translations pointed out by Havelock really make it difficult to get a sense of what it was like, when writing was new. The verb “to be” was not used much at all in early, orally influenced writing. Things did not have a presence in and of themselves, they were defined solely by their actions. It wasn’t until Plato’s time that concepts like “self” were discussed.
It wasn't until language could be dealt with visually, as a representation outside the speaker, that the concept of “speaker” or “author” became part of our vocabulary. It’s hard to fathom a world without self. Havelock’s case is convincing though, that our concepts of “self” were only made possible through the separation of language from our being through coding it in visual representation. It was making language visible that made us leap into the distant realms of abstraction.
However, it seems as if modern technologies may be the source of yet another quantum leap. It is our ability to record sound, to be able to play it back unaltered, that reintroduces the values of oral culture back to the forefront. All the things that were good about sound-based culture can be recaptured, but with a higher degree of sophistication and complexity. Sound, rather than being immediate and physical, becomes separated and abstract as well. It can develop beyond its tribal roots, and into a new means of transmitting culture. It's interesting to me that folk music also lacked the notion of songwriters, until music could be recorded. Only composers that could write their music down, in visual notation, survive as known quantities, or selves.
I’ve often thought that contemporary music has been richer and more progressive than modern poetry. Music becomes the code of a lifestyle, much like the oral poetic tradition was in the age before writing. The world exists as a mesh of conflicting technologies, and perhaps we are returning to our roots in a way that few people are really taking notice of. The transitions are subtle, and hard to identify when they are in process. Significant differences get lost in the translation.
Rather than surviving in a fleeting world of auditory information which is fixed solid in visual representation, we are now faced with the prospect of dealing with both modes as a source for transmitting societal codes. They are in conflict, not just because of their syntax, but by their paradigm. Sound appears and is gone, but now it's not gone forever. We can return to the voices which please us, any time we like.
Sometime, I may get used to having my world view rocked almost every day. But until then, I suppose I'll keep blogging about it. A long time ago, I read Eric Havelock's Preface to Plato. It was an eye-opening experience, but now my eyes are even wider.
The Muse Learns to Write is even better. It's the same topic really, oral vs. written culture, but it was written much later and has nearly as much information in a shorter read. The revolutionary nature of Preface to Plato is placed into context with several other books that were issued the same year (1963), and the subsequent developments are explored. Havelock now attributes the birth of these new perspectives on the rebirth of oral culture through radio. He also draws some innovative new connections regarding the persistence of oral characteristics in communication. We repeat things and memorize them because it gives us pleasure. Think of children's nursery rhymes, with their repetition. Think of the way that a child prefers to watch or listen to the same tapes over and over. Orality is still programmed into us, even in these days of literate culture.
I read the whole thing this afternoon, but I keep coming back to it. Havelock raises interesting differences that slipped by me before. Oral cultures do not deal with abstract concepts, only agents and actions. Memory is the only tool to preserve society, rather than a fall-back written text. Things must be dealt with directly and without artifice, because otherwise they won't be remembered. Havelock states the case for narrative well:
The narrative format invites attention because narrative is for most people the most pleasurable form that language, spoken or written, takes. Its content is not ideology but action, and those situations which action creates. Action requires agents who are doing who are doing something or saying something about what they are doing, or having something done to them. A language of action rather than reflection appears to be a prerequisite for oral memorization.
Big stuff. I've only glanced at it so far, but The Older Sophists is an incredible collation of texts. Briefly reviewing the entries on Protagoras, it seems as if he's the one responsible for the first sort of speech-act classifications for discourse. I think there's a paper in here somewhere, I just need to find it and write it.
----- --------TITLE: More notes DATE: 02/08/2002 2:55:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Notes to self:I really must read Carol Barton's "To stand upright will ask thee skill": The Pinnacle and the Paradigm more carefully later. It is an interesting look at the core issues of Paradise Regain'd during the temptation of Jesus. They are rhetorical. While Eve was easily tempted by Satan's rhetoric in Paradise Lost, Jesus is not seduced. The battlefield of Paradise Regain'd is the words themselves, rather than a more dramatic war scene. It's about resisting temptation, and forgiveness, or as Barton puts it: Christian heroism.
Another strange nugget: Was Napoléon a Junkie?
Accept that Napoléon's body did indeed contain a very high level of arsenic. Does that justify the assumption that he was poisoned - murdered?
At the beginning of the 19th century, most of today's recreational drugs were not known in Europe.
. . .the recreational drugs of Europeans were extraordinary to our modern thinking: such things as arsenic, strychnine and antimony.
These substances, and others, were widely used in the most unexpected ways. For example, ladies rubbed arsenic on their faces to make their skin white; they dropped belladonna into their eyes to dilate the pupils for a 'wide-eyed' look; men had their horses' coats brushed with antimony to make them glossy. Deadly poisons all, but easily obtained.
Arsenic was also used by some as a mind-altering drug, much as marijuana or cocaine is used today. In small doses it gave the user a feeling of well-being, strength, and sexual staying power.
But arsenic was very much a drug of dependence. The user was forced to continue to ingest the substance in larger and larger quantities, both to obtain the effect, and also to stave off withdrawal symptoms. Dosages soon reached levels that would be immediately fatal to a non-user, yet to cease would bring on the terrible symptoms of acute arsenical poisoning. Inevitably, doses reached levels intolerable even to the experienced user's body, and physical deterioration and death ensued.
The Jane Austen Society is having an essay contest. It's only a $500 prize, but it's open to virtually everyone. Details at the web page. For the fans of the Gothic genre, a bunch of new stuff has been added to Beckfordiana, the William Beckford website. I haven't explored this one yet, but I really want to.
Need something to read? The Diaries of Samuel Pepys have been marked down significantly. All eleven volumes have been marked down to $49.98 at Daedalus books. Now that's a deal. If you're into 17th or 18th century diaries, that is.
Every time I turn around there's another interesting conference. It's like these people are reading my mind:
Emotions in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America November 7-10, 2002
Junior and senior scholars are invited to submit paper proposals for a conference entitled "Emotions in Early Modern Europe and Colonial North America," to be held at the German Historical Institute in Washington, D.C., USA, on November 7-10, 2002.
"Interest in 'the emotional' has burgeoned in the last decade, not only in anthropology, but in psychology, sociology, philosophy, history and feminist studies" Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White wrote in 1986. They could have made the same statement with even more justification in 2002.
You know, when you read other people’s writing for ten hours straight, some of it good, some of it bad, it just makes it hard to come up with anything interesting to say in your blog. Hopefully, people won’t think ill of me. I generate a lot of words, but I try to make them count.
Today flat out exhausted me, and I’ve learned my limit. I can’t read and comment intelligently on more than 25 essays a day. Most of them were really good, but a few pissed me off. Why in the hell would someone at a university choose to write a rambling mess about how they hate school? I’m easy, but that was just over the top. Thankfully, there were enough diamonds in the rough to keep me amused.
A bunch of new books were delivered today, but I didn’t even get to open them. This teaching nonsense is a lot of work. However, I did find the perfect essay to use for teaching the basic form and citation style for an essay, How to make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich (Courtesy of the Journal of Mundane Behaviour). Though it’s not written in conventional narrative form, it easily could be. The outline style shows a good organizational strategy laid bare, at the very least. I think I’ll compare and contrast this with a good bibliographic essay, The Relationship between Schizophrenia and Mysticism. There’s quite a range here, and I suspect I’ll tell them to aim somewhere in the center.
I watched movies, including recently downloaded copies of Zoolander and The Count of Monte Christo. I actually didn't think of much at all, other than the constant theme of revenge which permeates many of the stories that seem to survive and be retold. I've often wondered how we ever got from “Do unto others...” to “An eye for and eye...” Forgiveness is a hard quality to come by, unless of course you’re stupid. There has been a lot of writing about it going on, but it seems as if we don’t transmit the story unless the evil guy actually gets his just reward. It’s the instrument of vengeance that fuels the debate, no one seems to take the “vengeance is mine, sayeth the lord” part very seriously. Is it necessary to deal out punishment to be a good citizen? I don’t think so, but that’s what the master narratives say.
I do want to clarify one thing though: I have never sought to separate feeling from thinking or to value it more highly. Thinking, for me, involves both feeling and reasoning. They work together, and recent evidence I’ve been looking at really suggests that they function differently. There is a false sense of hierarchy proposed that implies that reason can control feeling, and thus is more important. I keep after a holy grail of sorts, the idea that they can be cooperative and synergistic, by teasing out the differences.
However, that synergy in some cases doesn’t seem to be a good one. The revenge question is one strong case. Reason would suggest that forgiving an enemy, and allowing them to make amends for their wrongs would be more productive in the long haul. However, feelings seem to dictate that a need for closure will not be achieved until the unjust are punished. It’s a complex mess, to be sure, and the binary division of the two does not answer fundamental questions about human behavior. Seeing the two factors in thinking separated and at odds with each other is a model of limited utility, but it is the most convenient way of talking about it sometimes. Another more limited way of approaching it would be to separate conscious vs. unconscious desires and motives, because it does seem that our emotional beings are often subsumed, causing them to be manifest in odd ways. That’s why meditation or hypnosis may be a big tool to control that uncontrollable side, to bring people into harmony with both sides of their “thinking”.
Life is complicated. So is thinking. Obviously, I do too much thinking most of the time. It pisses me off how quickly it starts up again. Yesterday, I was mostly enjoying the snow, and being stupid like Zoolander.
It's really pretty stuff, especially when you can look at it from a nicely heated apartment.
No freezing rain this time, no power outages.
Just a nice day off.
I do believe I could give Kiri a run for her money regarding the “most caffeinated blogger” award. It’s miracle stuff as far as I’m concerned. If you listen to some, they claim that caffeine fueled the industrial revolution. Before the introduction of coffee and tea into England, people just couldn’t stay awake for those long factory hours. However, a snip in a review of an old favorite record of mine triggered an odd chain of thought.
Stav Sherez wrote a compelling paean to the legacy of the Dream Syndicate’s first album:
Though their reference points were obvious, the Dream Syndicate created a sound quite unlike anything that came before them, or indeed, after. This is where American rock music reinvented itself from the decaffeinated wastelands of AOR, where it blowtorched the recent past and made way for a future that was to include Grunge, Post Rock and alt.country. Quite simply some of the most wildly exciting music ever made.
But the caffeine reference reminded me of a pilgrimage that Rex and I made to the Music Machine in North Hollywood in 1985 to see Danny and Dusty (Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate and Dan Stuart of Green on Red) with an exciting opening band called Thin White Rope. Danny and Dusty were drunk, but Guy Kyser, standing at the edge of this photo, was caffeinated. Their show was pure sculptured feedback, building Spanish caves in the long cavernous hall. It was one of those shows I still think about today.
Maybe it was the caffeine. Maybe that’s what made this era in rock so great to me. I’ve never been one for atmospheric music. I want music to make my eyes bug out.
I found an old interview which covers the problem of information overload nicely:
MONDO 2000: Do you think the overload of information makes it harder to find oneself?
Guy Kyser: No, you can find yourself more easily. But it's a lot harder to get someone else to pay attention once you do. Everyone's already overloaded
Lucky me, and all that. Just when I have 50 essays to read and grade, the weather gives me a break. Light fluffy stuff has been falling outside, not much of it so far, but being the paranoid state, they have already declared the schools closed. So I can get caught up a bit.
I’ll have to read some of those self-esteem articles that several blogs are on about right now, but I suspect that it’s just more of the usual:
SELF=BAD
MARXIST/CAPITALIST COGS IN THE WHEEL= GOOD
However, there is something to be said for Henry Miller's perspective, paraphrased from memory: “In America, everyone is taught that they can grow up to be president; people in Europe don’t suffer from this delusion, so they are happier with just being what they are.” Runaway self-esteem is a problem; it ends up in unrealistic expectations and unhappiness.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in ancient Greece lately, and as I begin to contrast this with Rome, it seems that there is an increased separation between the general population and the perception of knowledge. The Greeks were concerned with educating everyone to be good citizens. This concern seems to be lost, as rhetoric is stripped of its power as tool to improve people as moral evaluative beings. Rhetoric instead becomes the tool of the ruling class, bent more on legislating and developing policy. It’s as if they gave up on the idea that ordinary people had a right to determine right and wrong. This became the province of law, which was applied by those who were specially trained to deal with it. The public becomes largely unimportant, and a nuisance.
Especially if they have pesky qualities like self-esteem. They’re much harder to subjugate that way. They’re just supposed to feel lucky that they have such great leaders to see them through. I tend to think it’s because somewhere along the line we gave up on the idea that we could train people to be good citizens. We can make them good mechanics, good carpenters, good businessmen, but good people? Nope, that’s an accident of birth. All men are created equal, it’s just that some are more equal than others.
Thomas Carlyle argued that lesser men need their great men to look up to. He was a fan of Kings, and scared stiff of democracy. Most intellectuals through history have been, including Plato with his Republic filled with the best and brightest. Only a vocal minority, the Sophists, argued that there was no level criterion to measure the best by. It’s only the continual process of valuation that causes self-esteem to be a problem at all. Since we apparently can’t teach people how to value things without resorting to edicts from our “great men,” self-esteem is always going to be problematic.
Just tell them to shut up and shop, yeah, that's the ticket.
I almost never read the mainstream press. It’s a defensive gesture against the negativity, the constant carping about surface characteristics that never reaches beyond the shallow puddle of its readership to wonder why things are the way they are. I like to assume, though its sometimes a stretch, that people don’t really want to disconnect themselves from the world through such gross generalizations.
A while back, Mike Sanders uttered a Dickens-like plea:
Maybe we can create a Tipping Point of positivity. Maybe 150 bloggers who consistently recognize the virtues of other bloggers. Longer blogrolling list. More accolades. More cross-blogging. More thinking. More feeling. More laughing. More listening. More hearing. More emoting. More of whatever you want to do.
He gives away this point of view in his closing summation: “Whatever the reason for the Blog phenomenon, it's not going to go away anytime soon. The main positive change: far fewer cat pictures!” How nice for you, to turn what you seem to see as a retched pool of writing into a positive thing. What really kills me is his musing on the motivations of people who blog:
- Ego gratification.
Some people need to be the center of attention. It makes them feel good about themselves to tell the world what important things they've been doing and what profound thoughts they've been having. Curiously, while this looks like the most obvious reason for a Web log, I think it's probably the least likely reason, since it's too trite and shallow.
- Antidepersonalization.
When people begin to think that they are nothing more than a cog in the wheel of society, they look for any way to differentiate themselves. The Web log proves they are different. Just read it. You'll see.
- Elimination of frustration.
Day-to-day life, especially in the city, is wrought with frustration, and the Web log gives people the ability to complain to the world. You get to read a lot of complaining in these logs. If you think I'm a complainer, oh boy!
- Societal need to share.
As a cynic who gets paid to write, I have a hard time with this explanation. But it seems some people genuinely like to "share," and this is one way.
- Wanna-be writers.
A lot of people want to be published writers. Blogs make it happen without the hassle of getting someone else to do it or having to write well—although there is good writing to be found. Some is shockingly good. Most of it is miserable. I expect to see those Open Learning classes around the country offering courses in Blog writing.
I remember one explanation I heard for the birth of the novel— it started as a form of gossip. That’s why the earliest forms are epistolary, composed from letters. One person telling stories and secrets to another. Then it evolved into more complex structures, built on the need to share stories with each other. To gossip, to share, not to gratify ego or earn a living. It’s just talking, in a global form. At least it seems that way to me. And I would like to see more of it, not less, myself.
I never even knew I had one. Like most folks, my knowledge of the grey lump inside my skull was limited to some pretty basic divisions: cerebrum, cerebellum, etc. I never stopped to think that there was a lizard in there.
Most folks that have had the basics know that the cerebellum or hindbrain controls the autonomic functions like breathing and basic muscle controls. It's the oldest part of the apparatus. That section, and the midbrain control most of our "instinctual" behaviors.
The newer part, the cerebrum, contains the main cognitive stuff; 60% is dedicated to associative thinking, making connections as it were. The remaining 40% has been related to processing specific motor and sensory activities. Where are those pesky memories and such? Are they controlled by these "new parts" of the human brain?
In the core of the cerebellum is a leftover reptilian, or perhaps lizard-type brain. That's where memories are processed. Research has shown that the hippocampus is responsible for processing conscious, declarative, explicit recollections of events. It seems to sort out the autobiographical memory.
The hippocampus is not well developed at birth, but the neighboring area, the amygdala is. Research suggests that the emotions are first processed by the aymgdala, which gives them their significance first before the cognitive process takes over. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes good sense.
Fight or flight? We don't have time to think it over and cogitate on it. Especially when we are newly born! Our emotional responses to stimuli govern our very survival. So with good reasons, our emotions are processed separate from our rational selves. They bypass the normal associative structures that our brains dedicate so much real estate to. Emotions are relayed to our cognitive machine, but only after they have impacted our core limbic system. They are placed in memory before we get the chance to think about it.
This is big stuff. I'm still processing it, but I wanted to sketch a rough outline while it was still fresh. You can't reason yourself out of feeling things, and it seems that way by design. This has broad implications, to think that there is a completely separate area that makes us feel— and that we feel before we think. The initial stages of memory are non-declarative, implicit, and unconscious. We can't stop them, or process them away. Emotions matter, and they begin even before we are able to think about them. Memory begins before rationality can make any sense of it, in a tiny little almond shaped place called the amygdala.
Another interesting thing about the differentiation in real estate is that the hippocampus deals with temporal ordering, whereas the emotional center, the amygdala, is largely atemporal— emotions are not memorized in a narrative form. They are processed without temporal ordering. They are imagistic, abstract, and not organized in the same way as other information.
Oh, and one more thing— notice that all these structures are buried deep, away from the surface that might be damaged. We can survive without our reason, but not without our instinctual mechanisms and feelings!
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: ana ma roopa EMAIL: anamaroopa@eudoramail.com URL: http://nyet DATE: 02/06/2002 8:08:00 AM Nice to see this on your page. It becomes even more interesting, for me anyway, when the yogic metaphor gets added into this western psych and disect model. And the Newsweek article of last May is way too superficial, had the cart before the horse. Here in India is a fair amount of info relating east to west in terms of the brain and mind. Meditation amazes me more and more as the years go by, and if one thinks of the body and brain as merely (!) a gross-level coagulation of an ever more ephemeral collection of energies, going all the way back, in, to purely consciousness, well, then it's really big stuff. ----- --------TITLE: Quick notes DATE: 02/04/2002 4:23:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Quick notes to self:Hopefully, I'll be able to process a bunch of stuff I just learned about parts of the brain that I didn't know that I had and write an intelligent blog entry about it. But in the meantime, since I've got to leave for class soon, I'll just note some interesting links.
A link from Wood s lot has turned up a great issue from 2000 of the Janus Head Review, Regarding a Critical Rhetoric. There's just too much great stuff in there to talk about right now, including rhetoric and dreams, not to mention stuff about psychology and rhetoric. Great idea generating stuff.
I strongly recommend the new exhibition at Photo-eye of the works of Elijah Gowin. I was quite impressed both by the photographs, and the issues he brings up in his statements:
Artist Statement
Raised in the North by Southern parents, I have always considered my Southern roots to provide a true sense of home and place. A slice of family land in Virginia, guarded by stories of relatives long dead, provides me with a feeling of belonging. Yet this landscape of thick, tangled underbrush is restricting as well as comforting. My acute awareness of place thus involves both a closeness and separateness from these surroundings. Flannery O’Connor felt a similar polarity in her relationship to her home in Georgia when she said "To know oneself is to know one’s region. It is also to know the world, and it is also, paradoxically, a form of exile from that world." Often separated from this region, I have been able to clarify my interest in thinking of place as an artistic influence.
Process Statement
In this body of work, titled Hymnal of Dreams, I am presenting a new set of constructions, rituals and characters based upon history and personal experiences of the South. Often narrative, these images present some question, and show the struggle for resolution. This constructed landscape, although arising from the past is about searching for meaning in the present. How we handle, arrange, and value objects and archetypes reflects our contemporary state of mind.
It's all about the present. Bringing things together into an acceptance of consciousness as we can know it. Augustine was on about that a lot too. Geez, I think too much, but I love it!
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 02/04/2002 5:17:00 PM i dunno how you take in so much so quickly... my brain could go belly up and die ----- --------TITLE: Without Jesus, you have nothing DATE: 02/03/2002 10:00:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I was reading a citation on The Obvious about bending to religion, and it dovetailed with a metaphoric problem. How do we deal with relationships in the world?
Bending is perhaps the most pervasive metaphor applied to that. We bend, modify our goals or will, in the face of the wind of civilization. Or do we? I encountered a far more troubling metaphor from Dr. Anderson, he sees the process of social integration as a surgical one: we suture ourselves into the world. It’s a painful image, to be sure— it’s hardly as elegant or as pleasant sounding. But perhaps it’s more accurate; I’m not really sure yet. Severe disruptions or traumas are like painfully ripping out the stitches of our carefully woven lives. It aggravates our flesh, and is guaranteed to form scar tissue.
I am certain that the ties that bind us to communities are not easily broken; they become connected systems, with channels transmitting codes into us as we replicate our codes in others. Rex and I were talking on the phone last night, and he mentioned to me that the most common trauma that hypnotherapists are asked to deal with is loneliness. It seems impossible to feel completely connected to others, so perhaps all relationships are of a stitched variety, and when the stitches are weak, we chafe against the loneliness. Humans are dismal creatures when alone; it takes community to accomplish much of anything.
At the extreme, it can be suggested that we have no real identity outside our community formed values. But the cry of the damaged self, a constant current in most expressive writing, permeates most of literature. So far, I don’t buy most of the efforts to explain it away. I really like the conclusion to Dr. Anderson’s article “Suture, Stigma, and the Pages That Heal” regarding the gap in our understanding of real human writing. Writers that express themselves, particularly in pain, foul up the neat theoretical binaries:
These writers complicate the simple binaries that underlie so much discussion of writing at our conferences and in our professional publications — academic/personal, political/solipsistic, self/other, postmodern/romantic. They invite us to look for a more complex interaction of discourse, other, act, society, history, and subject, one in which the self may or may not exist (depending on which side of the theoretical line one comes down on), but in which the sense of self plays a vital role.
By sense of self, I mean that part that wrestles with the other, the part that feels the pressure of stigma and breaks the sutures by which it is bound to a hard subjectivity it cannot occupy if it is to survive. I mean the part that feels pain, love, joy, and grief, the part that acts, the part that speaks across the pages to bring a future where silence means respect, where people can let go and take up again, where difference is real because wholeness is possible, where personal, academic, and political are inextricably bound, and were we may rise, phoenix-like, from the language of confusion and come to know who it is that we have become. I have seen it happen.
I do believe that writing helps us figure out who we are becoming. The sense that we can know “what we have become” seems a bit foolish, because the flux never stops. Writing taught me that. I am never the same person who finishes writing something that I was, before the writing was begun. It’s part of a process of change, of deepening and broadening the horizons. Of living.
Because I am living, I feel and think. The two are inseparable. I write about both.
Digging deep into the transitions that society has traveled through has been my ponderous project for a while. There are convenient versions strewn all about, the Reader’s Digest version of history, which receives its stamp of approval in survey courses that seek to prepare people for life. You pass, move on to the next step of becoming a productive citizen. But things are never quite that simple.
The Romantic poets were not a “movement” of poets that sought to valorize the individual, celebrate nature, etc.— it was a bunch of people in a particular place and time that didn’t really agree on much at all. So why do we lump them? Because it’s convenient. Six weeks and you have your requisite dose of literature of that period, then it’s time to move on. You may confidently state ”Beauty is truth, truth beauty” without the slightest clue of what Keats was on about in the poem.
Lesson 1: any time you read anything it is important to keep track of who the implied speaker is. This is me, Jeff Ward, coming at you through the miracle of verbal and internet technologies. But these are but impressions of a moment, subject to change without notice. I’ll save you the “my blog isn’t me” speech. You’ve heard that before, and soon you’ll be hearing that declamation as often as you hear the “Beauty is truth” bit. I try to provide ample context for my remarks, but there are always things unstated, bits of my history you don’t know. Digesting a poem to its punch line leaves much of the conversation out.
The next time you hear those lines, read the poem: Ode on a Grecian Urn was written by a man obsessed with the difficulty of embracing joy. It fades, or is crushed like a grape against the palate. So he interrogates an object, and imagines what this beautiful object might reply. The urn, unlike joy, has remained:
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty, — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” — that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
Reading carefully is a difficult thing for most people. They’d rather let someone else digest it for them. So they can take the test, give the right answer, and pass. But there aren’t any “right answers” regarding this poem, just questions about what Keats really intended. And we can’t ask him. You can however, ask me to clarify what I mean. I’m still alive.
And I choose not to pass, but to linger. I like thinking about the big questions raised by little distinctions.
----- --------TITLE: Cheese DATE: 02/02/2002 8:31:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Some do it out of habit, while others zoom right in on the center of attention. I’ve never been able to figure out why some people crave attention so much. I suppose that for some, it’s an assertion of their individuality. Look at me. I’m different.
Vanity license plates on cars bug me. Sitting in a fast-food drive through on Friday, I was behind “Kanky”— maybe it’s some kind of Arkansas thing. Or, it could be that kinky was taken. As I got out on the road and headed toward the university, I came face to face with “JDUBBYA”— as a “JW” this one really bugged me. Any connection with the snot in the Whitehouse wouldn’t find itself plastered on the back of my car. Ohio plates on that one though, it seems that bad taste crosses state lines. But it does often command the spotlight.
Leaving school, there was a traffic snarl. I had to turn the other way. I found myself in a forest called Boyle Park, with no sign of city nearby, three blocks from the mess. I hadn’t traveled that road before, and there was little sign of human presence save the ancient steel bridges across the crisscrossing of hundreds of small streams. It dawned on me that in nature, some things are colored and arrayed to attract attention, and some things are camouflaged. Usually, this is tied to reproductive behavior.
Maybe that’s it. Look at me. I’m lovable. I put silly things on my car for you.
What can a lover say to that? When you don’t value yourself much, it’s easy to say yes. I said yes. She didn’t believe me. Her husband would die for her, and seemed to have proved this to her in ways beyond question. It didn’t matter that she claimed that she didn’t love him anymore. The question was, if I was to replace his role in her life, “Would I die?”
I’ve got a problem with dying. Lots of my friends have done it, and they made it seem simple. A bit too many drugs, and the job is done. A short step off a tall building, and it’s done. No more pain, no more worries. But I have a problem. As fucked-up as it seems most of the time, I still love life. I really don’t want to miss anything. And if you’re not here, there’s nothing more to see. I like seeing new stuff all the time.
That doesn’t mean that I’m afraid of death; if I could trade my life for someone else’s happiness, I suppose I’d do it. But if I died, I suspect it wouldn’t make anyone happy at this point. It might even make a precious few sad. Why are love and death so often equated?
This isn’t new. Love is often written as a tragic thing, but I think that’s a bad story to accept. I think it should be a creative thing, not a destructive thing. Maybe I’m just weird that way. But the issues it always clouds are truth and morality. I didn’t see the lies until it was too late. I might as well have been dead when it was over, but I wasn’t. I was still looking at the world through sad eyes, waiting for what happens next.
Your case is not so extraordinary, beyond thought or reason. The Goddess in her anger has smitten you, and you are in love.
What wonder is this? There are many thousands that suffer with you.
So, you will die for love! And all the others, who love, and who will love, must they die too?
How will that profit them? The tide of love, at its full surge, is not withstandable.
Upon the yielding spirit she comes gently, but to the proud and the fanatic heart she is a torturer with the brand of shame.
She wings her way through the air; she is in the sea, in its foaming billows; from her everything, that is, is born.
For she engenders in us and sows the seed of desire whereof we're born, all our children, living on the earth.Euripides, Hippolytus.
I briefly mentioned an advance copy of an article I was going to read from my professor, Dr. Michael Kleine, regarding the problem of creating a kinder, gentler modern rhetoric. I’ve been digesting it for a few days, it’s called “The Heuristic Potential of Rhetoric Reclaimed: Toward Imagining a Techne of Dialogical Arrangement.” The article is actually easy to state in plain language: Dr. Kleine has suggested that what we know about conversational discourse analysis (he is a linguist) can be applied to the problem of rhetorical invention to provide a new mode of rhetoric.
He’s actually promoting a schizophrenic sort of writing, a writing that emulates the model of conversational “turns” where points of view are interrogated and defended in two voices. Not in the agonistic sense of classical rhetoric, where a stronger position is defended against a weaker one, but in a space which emulates the conversational “floor” where positions are treated on an equal basis. At first, it seemed like it was delusional: how can one speaker be both advocate and challenger? Then, I discovered an example in Prodicus.
In “Heracles on the Crossroad” Prodicus (in a secondhand account) describes how Heracles meets Virtue and Vice. The oration began with a sensual description of these two women, but narration ceases as the conversation between the two possibilities begins. The core of the “pitch” on both sides is pleasure— pleasure now from Vice, or pleasure in the future, from the Gods, by Virtue. At no point does the orator seem to favor one over the other, and the actual decision made by Heracles is only implied. The rhetor doesn’t judge, or point, or direct the argument at all. The argument is purely supplied through conversation.
I remember how much I hated Plato when I first read him. Aristotle too. The reason why was that their motives and steering of the “dialogues” was just so blatant. This is not the case with Prodicus, his approach seems nearly identical to the techne suggested by Dr. Kleine. Trying to figure out the 5th century B.C. is pretty tough, and the perspectives of the Sophists or Plato and Aristotle are not the only ones available. The dramatists, like Aristophanes and Euripides put in their two cents too.
I decided to read Hippolytus again. I first found this play, oddly enough, through a Thin White Rope song, “Some Velvet Morning.” It’s a cover of a Lee Hazlewood song, and it’s just haunting.
Some velvet morning when I’m straight
I’m gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you about Phaedra
And how she gave me life
And how she made it end
Some velvet morning when I’m straight
Short synopsis: Hippolytus, a chaste young man and bastard son of Phaedra, is hopelessly in love with Artemus (the goddess). Aphrodite gets pissed off, because he isn’t paying her tribute since he won’t fall in love with a human. She forces Phaedra to fall in love with him (in the non-socially acceptable way). Phaedra goes mad, holding back those forbidden feelings. She eventually breaks down and confesses to her nurse, and the nurse professes an oddly familiar point of view:
The life of man entire is misery:
he finds no resting place, no haven from calamity.
But something other dearer still than life
the darkness hides and mist encompasses;
we are proved luckless lovers of this thing
that glitters in the underworld: no man
can tell us of the stuff of it, expounding
what is, and what is not: we know nothing of it.
Idly, we drift, on idle stories carried.
The chaste, they love not vice of their own will,
but yet they love it. Cypris [Aphrodite], you are no god.
You are something stronger than a God if that can be,
You have ruined her and me and all this house.
This is the deadly thing which devastates
well-ordered cities and the homes of men—
that’s it, the art of oversubtle words.
It’s not the words ringing delight in the ear
that one should speak, but those that have the power
to save their hearer’s honorable name.
These words doom everything. Phaedra hangs herself, and leaves a note claiming that Hippolytus raped her. Theseus, Phaedra’s husband, banishes him. Theseus’s father was Poseidon, and he utters a curse on Hippolytus which daddy takes care of. As Hippolytus rides away on the beach, a huge bull comes out of the ocean and wrecks his chariot, mortally wounding him (this explains the video!). Artemus appears in the end to tell Theseus the truth, and the last discussion is on the futility of teaching as Hippolytus is dying:
Theseus:
What fools men are! You work and work for nothing,
you teach ten thousand tasks to one another,
invent, discover everything. One thing only
you do not know: one thing you never hunt for—
a way to teach fools wisdom.
Hippolytus:
Clever indeed
would be the teacher able to compel
the stupid to be wise! This is no time
for such fine logic chopping. I am afraid
your tongue runs wild through sorrow
Theseus:
If there were some token now, some mark to make the division
clear between friend and friend, the true and false!
All men should have two voices, one the just voice,
and one as chance would have it. In this way
the treacherous scheming voice would be confuted
by the just, and we should never be deceived.
While still implied to be agonistic, this contains Dr. Kleine’s argument in a nutshell. I wasn’t expecting to find it offered in 428 BC. But, then, you never know. Some good ideas just don’t want to quit. I wonder if he knows about this? I suppose I’ll have to mention it to him next Tuesday.
Following one of Luke's links, I found some happy news underneath a woeful tale. It seems that Blake's original watercolors for Blair's Grave have surfaced!
I really hope a facsimile is published. These drawings were important to a point I was making in a paper, and I used several prototype drawings to illustrate the way the image which forms the frontispiece to Jerusalem was well wrought. A brief history of these drawings casts an interesting light on the nature of genius— it is the nature of genius to get screwed.
Illustrating Blair's poem "The Grave" was to be a big turning point in Blake's career. He spent over a year producing illustrations for Edward Young's Night Thoughts early in his career, which was a dismal commercial failure. Only 42 of 300 illustrations were used, and in desperation he accepted the patronage of William Haley and moved from London to Felpham, on the coast. Though hopes were high, he didn't find much relief there. In the end, he was accused of sedition and moved back to London worse off than when he began.
The contract with Cromek to illustrate "The Grave" should have been a good start at getting back on his feet. Though he produced incredible work for it, Cromek was unsure of the salability of Blake's engravings. So he had the drawings engraved by Schavronetti instead, cheating Blake out of the bulk of his money. The engravings by Schavronetti are competent, but they don't have the real spirit of Blake. Now, for the first time, we can see what those illustrations were supposed to look like. I'm jazzed.
For those with a more fiscally interested bent, like Cromek, think of the return on the investment these days: the drawings were lost after their last sale in 1836 for one pound five shillings. They are now expected to sell for over a million. Nice profit, if you can enjoy it. Blake's currently residing in a potters field, and it won't do him any good.
Oh, and I agree with you about Wil Wheaton, Luke. My first impression was: So? What's next, a blog by Gary Coleman?
Language is a lava lamp? There’s just something really nice about this image. After all, I do often sit and stare at it for hours. Yes, I am easily amused.
Camile Paglia argues eloquently for the classics. I’ve been reading more Greek philosophy than ever in the last few years, and it’s amazing how little the questions have really changed. There will be a lot more posts coming in that direction, right now I’m trying to digest Prodicus.
The universe is dark, unforgiving, and random. But I never saw much to this argument. Everywhere I look I see patterns.
I took randomness to heart when I was young. My photography teacher in high school took a sabbatical, after I graduated, and I used to go visit him. He was always so light and free when it came to matters of art and literature, and his constant advice to me was that I should lighten up and have some fun. He helped me with Milton and Blake, and he helped me relax in my worries about finding a “voice.” I think that's one of the reasons why I've always felt drawn to teaching. This man, and a few more, really changed my life. I was particularly inspired by one project he did while completing his MFA.
He took a map of the city and drew a grid of 52 squares. He developed a procedure where he would use a deck of cards to pick a location, a time, and a direction to point a camera. Then he’d make a photograph there. He took a proof sheet of 36 images made in this fashion and blew it up to 30”x 40” and then displayed it next to a description of the process. At the time the University of California at Bakersfield was filled with many of the movers and shakers in the conceptual art field, and this project was well received.
The point of the process was to show that art is everywhere. Even taken totally at random, these photographs had a singular beauty. The same teacher introduced me to Kurt Vonnegut, who asserts through one of his characters that “life would be little changed if I had done nothing more than carry a rubber dog bone from room to room for sixty years.” I suspect this is true as well. But it doesn’t make the patterns stop.
So I believe in randomness as a way of life, not as a way of death. The inevitable conclusion of reading a lot of Sartre is “What’s the point?” The question, restated by my teacher would be “Does there need to be a point?”
She didn’t seem to understand my resistance to proofs of pointlessness. There’s a subtle distinction there. In her world view, the universe was an evil machine bent on her destruction. A tornado ripped her home apart when she was growing up. Medical mistakes screwed up her body. She seemed to be quite relieved with by the thought that there was no point behind it. On the other hand, I want to believe that there is something behind the patterns of beauty in this world. Though I suspect that they are indeed random, I don’t see them as dark and unforgiving. I think forgiveness is the glue that holds it together. No, there doesn’t have to be a point. But there are indeed patterns, even if sometimes we fudge and forgive to make things fit.
The pattern between us followed her belief system, not mine. I couldn’t overcome it. When you want the universe to be dark, cold, and unforgiving— things do have a tendency to turn out that way.
I don’t believe they are equivocal. Equating them begins a carefully reasoned path into religion. Starting from the fundamental questions, St. Augustine gets right to the core in his Confessions:
What, then, am I my God? What is my nature? A life that is ever varying, full of change, and of immense power. The wide plains of my memory and its innumerable caverns and hollows are full beyond compute of countless things of all kinds. Material things are there by means of their images; knowledge is there of itself; emotions are there in the form of ideas or impressions of some kind, for memory retains them even while the mind does not experience them, although whatever is in the memory must also be in the mind. My mind has the freedom of them all. I can glide from one to the other. I can probe deep into them and never find the end of them. This is the power of memory! This is the great force of life in living man, mortal though he is!
Augustine goes on to propose that we do not recognize things unless we remember them. Therefore, qualities like joy and happiness can only exist in the mind because we experienced them somewhere before. There must be an origin, a God to explain why these qualities seem so familiar to us. If you buy that thinking and remembering are the same thing, then human experience is a closed thing dependent on an original experience, an experience of God— because if the mind is infinite but based on memory, then the memory must be of the infinite.
I’ll bet you didn’t think I could get here from there. The line of argument can also be tied into the debate of nomos vs. physis between Plato and the Sophists. If all thinking is memory, then how do things get named? The Sophists, like the postmodernists, believed that language was arbitrary. They asserted that there is no one “correct” name for anything. It was depends on the ethics of the situation, nomos, a sort of little t truth. Nomos is is truth only when it works; humans are free to rename things when the renaming works to clarify the situation, because the only truth that exists is the truth inside each of us. Plato and Aristotle championed physis a physical capitol T truth that lies outside, that can be discovered, that can be correct at all times for all people. There is a metaphysical hierarchy, perhaps only vaguely remembered by humans, which assigns all things one and only one proper name.
To name things is to reclaim them. Protagoras, the oldest of the Sophists, was also perhaps the worlds first agnostic. He felt that “God” couldn’t be proved or disproved, but more than that, that it really didn’t make any difference in our day to day lives. We define and name our world each day as we travel through it, without the need for outside guidance. This comes from a distinct difference in the view of language. To embrace memory as a guiding force, and reasoned correctness in naming, is to accept that spirituality is not only possible but essential.
But it can be a maddening concept, especially for an artist. It sounds like so much new age hokum to say “you must find your own voice.” Maybe lemon and honey will help? I don’t think so. The term is used to denote a form of self, a self that we express. The trouble with the concept is that it implies that each artist has just one proper “voice.” Writers use the term in the same way, but they don’t really take it so seriously as visual artists. Writers work with multiple voices that can be generated once you find a “center” to work from.
When I think about it, this makes the model of self that Dr. Anderson proposed on Monday really fit well. While postmodernist theory tends to suggest that there is no self, only interaction with others, Dr. Anderson suggested that there may not be a self, but rather multiple selves. It seems interesting to lay these out in terms of a molecular model. There is a core of genetic predisposition, perhaps, which accounts for a particle in the nucleus. Somehow, experientially, we develop other particles that do not change much over time. However, revolving around this mass there are hundreds of other selves that rotate and interact dependant on situation that modify and develop over time.
Dr. Anderson’s proposal was tied to a model of what happens after trauma. He suggested that traumatic experience causes a collapse of all these multiple selves into one self— a self that bases all its concepts in relation to trauma. The healing process then is a return to multiple selves, an expansion back to the larger discursive space that non-traumatized individuals inhabit.
In an oddly related tangent, I was thinking about how photography works. I was a chemistry and biology kind of guy before I became an artist type. I knew, going into my first photography class, that a photon entering certain silver halide compounds would cause a disruption in the orbital path and form a latent image. Then, subsequent chemical reactions could be used to isolate and reveal these disruptions. That’s one perspective that a chemistry teacher (who also taught photography) shared with me.
But when I took the class, it was taught by a former English teacher. The first day, when he slid the paper in the tray and an image would start to appear, students all around squealed in delight and asked “how does it do that?” The teacher just smiled and said:
“It’s magic!”
Being a more pragmatic person these days, I was thinking about the difference between these two explanations. Let’s see, in the first explanation, a hypothetical particle (I’ve never seen a photon, have you?) impacts with other hypothetical particles and they change orbit. The tricky thing is, it isn’t necessarily a particle. Sometimes it acts like a wave. Sometimes it seems more like a packet of energy. There exists reasoned proof that we cannot really know what it is— because the act of constructing an experiment to figure it out dictates the result. Uh, photons sound like magic to me. Something outside our understanding, or the possibility of our understanding if you listen to some. I still like the English teacher’s explanation better. It’s shorter and cuts to the heart of things without the complexity. It is a valid explanation. However, to make better films and papers, delving deeply towards the limit of what we can know is the best strategy. Magic doesn’t seem to make better films or papers. But magic makes better pictures.
I was watching White Man’s Burden this afternoon, and though it’s an appallingly shallow film, it reminded me of some issues that have come up in teaching. My classes are about 50% black, and it hasn’t been a problem for me. As the final core course in writing, all the writers I’m dealing with are of a fairly high level, and if I had to make a value judgment about it, I’d say that the black writers are all on the high side of normal when it comes to skills. The university is probably about 25% black on the average, so it was odd to hear from some of the other new teachers that their classes were nearly 70% black. Writing is writing, as far as I’m concerned, though I must confess that the percentages made it clear to me that when selecting essays I needed to make sure that there was a healthy assortment of black writers present. It’s not a matter of setting quotas, but more a matter of making sure that something “connects” with the students in my classes.
I have a fairly broad background in literature so it’s not a difficult task to think of good pieces to use, though I must admit that I fight the temptation to include 18th and 19th century stuff because I’m afraid they just won’t get it. I did use Phyllis Wheatley (the first published African-American poet) in class last week though, because she is just too good to be missed. Another teacher chose Maya Angelou. After reading one of her pieces, she said that a burly white student announced:
“That SUCKED!”
“Could it be that you think that because you’re a rich white boy from Sylvan Hills?”
There’s just a shock of immersion that all these first year students are dealing with. It’s a different universe, where there is no real power or privilege dynamic other than the usual teacher/student one.
The swap of power dynamics in White Man’s Burden reminded me of the oddity of having more upper class black and lower class whites in my classes, and there is just no such thing as “typical” as far as I can see in the makeup of our classes. I’ve always been a bit of a generalist, and so far that has been a big advantage in trying to hold things together and connect with people. But this also has made me notice a rather scary thing when searching for web resources.
Women writers are well represented on the web. Lots of stuff to choose from, much of it arcane but still, lots of useful stuff. But in looking for some favorite African-American writers, I can’t find anything by Eldridge Cleaver, little from James Baldwin, and most of Martin Luther King’s catalogue is also noticeably absent. I’m sure that when I dig a little deeper I will be able to find some Henry Louis Gates, but even the sites that focus on African-American lit are just shallow puddles compared to the wealth available in other areas. Maybe it’s copyright issues, but this just doesn’t seem right. There is just too much good stuff out there to keep it under lock and key. It bugs me.
A kitten was wandering around the parking lot of the bar. One of the bouncers, a big soft-hearted fellow decided to rescue it. The promoter, a cat hater, decided he wanted to play pool and knock the cat into the corner pocket. But the bouncer was larger beast, and didn't let that happen— the kitten chose the corner pocket on its own. He wasn’t put there by a person with hatred for shy and retiring beasts, because that promoter respected the larger beast. Bouncers are assertive beasts who usually get their way.
So are presidents. I made the mistake of watching part of his state of the union address. It was like seeing Joe McCarthy’s ghost. “And in her prayers, she said ‘Semper Fi’” Uh oh, I smell a master narrative. And the poor little boy sent his football to heaven . . . I got angry and then I got nauseous. Missiles will save us, yes, that’s it. We’ve got to spend more money on high tech weapons, to fight those who might go down to the corners store and buy some fertilizer and force their opinions on us explosively. Yes, we must root out the filthy communists, er, I mean terrorists, from every corner of the globe. They’re everywhere. Maybe there’s one sitting next to you right now . . .
The question is always there as to which story to believe. Who believes the triumphant Johnny comes marching home bit? But it’s always a persuasive story. It isn’t that we believe it, really, I think, it’s just that we want to believe it so badly. The promoter really didn’t offer to knock the kitten in the side pocket. If I remember correctly, he wanted to take it skeet shooting and use it for a target. But that was a joke, and everyone knew it. Too bad we can’t figure out that the “war is good” narrative is bullshit too.
Woke up this morning to read a great article, “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral Argument” by Walter Fisher. It opens with a quote from Kenneth Burke:
The corrective of the scientific rationalization would seem necessarily to be a rationale of art— not, however, a performer’s art, not a specialist’s art for some to produce and many to observe, but an art in its widest aspects, an art of living.
I don’t care for Burke much, but in looking at this fragment I see a fundamental premise at work. The corrective for one rationale is another rationale? This is a side-step, an evasion of more fundamental oppositions, which are dealt with by Fisher. It made me think of the 18th century method of dealing with the emotions— to rationalize and apply logic to them— which was totally overthrown in the revolt of Romanticism. The comparison of reason vs. the emotions, or rationality vs. magic, or any other convenient lumping strategy may be just a diversion from other core issues. In order to make Burke’s stratagem effective, a redefinition of what constitutes reason is in order, which is exactly what Fisher suggests.
The core assumptions of the article are easy for me to accept. Fisher asserts:
“Humans as rhetorical beings are as much valuing as they are reasoning animals.”
Fisher’s usage of paradigm must be clarified. While I think it works well in the linguistic sense (a set of available elements), he defines it more broadly as “a representation designed to formalize the structure of a component of experience and to direct understanding and inquiry into the nature and functions of that experience.” The structure of the classical world is represented as the Rational World Paradigm:
Rather than adopting Burke’s construct of man as a symbol making creature, Fisher proposes the metaphor of homo narrans, man the storyteller. The narrative paradigm alternative proposed by Fisher makes a lot of sense:
I do believe that this is a paradigm I can work with. It’s a wider view of humanity, and in my opinion a more truthful view. It also dovetails nicely with some theories of self that Dr. Anderson was working with last night. More to come on all this, I am sure.
Monday is my 7am to 9pm day. But it was a good day. I love working with writers. I heard several essays with potential today, and I can’t wait to read the final drafts. I tried to convince everyone to take responsibility for their writing, to ask questions, and not accept “I like it” for an answer. They just don’t know how lucky they are, to have people who have to listen to what they have to say. Real life isn’t like that. That’s the great thing about school.
I really need to get going on my templates for Movable Type, that will cure the comments problem I suspect, but is bound to create others. Technology is a good thing, but so many of the people in my class are scared of it. I tried to convince them that using blogger is no more difficult than using a telephone or a microwave oven, and that’s the way they should think of it. So far, about half of both classes have started blogs. I think it’s a good thing.
But the real treat of the day was the long night class. Three hours of textual analysis for the most part, trying to draw distinctions between “healing narratives.” A bunch of good stuff, dealing with the levels of language and levels of displacement when people tell stories about traumatic events. I can’t discuss most of it here, because I have taken the “vow of secrecy” but I certainly will elaborate on the theoretical aspect of it as I dig in. Language is really a magical thing.
One of the oddities was the usage of the naming function of language, which had me constantly flashing back to Wordsworth’s poems on the naming of places. Another thing was a rather unique slant on the complex nature of the postmodern self. I really liked the introduction to a collection of essays called Healing Narratives edited by my teacher. He deals rather well with the problem posed by taking the “self” out of writing in the postmodern classroom. I’ve often remarked here that I don’t think we can be expected to be purely cogs in the Marxist discourse machine. I’m glad Dr. Anderson feels that way too.
I love taking apart writing to see what makes it tick. Especially when it isn’t my own.
I could weave a tragic narrative around the photograph I posted yesterday, but I won’t. For those who might wonder, yes, unless otherwise credited all the photographs on this site are mine. But it’s kind of the “other me,” the me that I’m still having problems dealing with. Once upon a time, I was a photographer instead of a writer. I’m hoping that one day in the future I will be both.
Sometimes I think too much.
Sometimes I feel too much
I can’t honestly think of a time that I stopped thinking or feeling.
Sometimes, I’d like to get out of the memory business.
I’ve never been asked to write an essay about why I took a particular class before, but I just did— 2,000 words worth. Still fighting the depression. Writing workshops tomorrow, in the classes I’m teaching that I need to produce handouts for. More material to read for other classes. Got up early and did laundry, oh joy.
I hesitate to tell people what I’m feeling when things get this dark. Synthesis has his fingers on the pulse of many threads regarding self-reflective blogging. There is an aspect of “writing oneself into existence” but there is also an element of “exorcising the demons.” Both elements are a part of the writing process itself, not just blogging. So the web has the potential to make people more scattered and chaotic than ever before— if this is the case, why did it take the addition of a temporal element (blogs) to make it come together as a mass communication medium? Writing is usually an attempt to force cohesion where it didn't exist before. It summons the angel in us all, in the desire to reach out and touch our fellow humans. But what if you don’t want to summon your demons?
“If I exorcise my devils, my angels may leave too”
Tom Waits has his finger on that. Most of my essay dealt with issues of displacement in writing. We displace ourselves from reality when we use metaphors to describe it. We displace ourselves from reality when we make up stories or allegories based in real experiences to give them closure, to force them to make sense. We displace ourselves from telling people what we think when we do little more than link, either by quoting or hyperlink, to the ideas of others. In an odd fashion, we bring ourselves closer to becoming by separating the knower from the known. But there are different levels of displacement. Teasing out the levels of displacement may be part of my project for the class. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but there’s got to be a way to codify it, to compare types of displacement on a more abstract level.
But maybe not. After all, consciousness is a sort of magic. That’s why I often make comparisons to poetry. A great poem, for me at least, is a poem that is barely held together by the relationships which it attempts to contain. At any moment, it can fly apart into incoherence, if only the slightest link is broken. Nobody likes things that are too easy. The obvious isn’t much fun.
Time for a drive. Over six hours of writing in a row is just too much. The magic idea, however, is neither freaky nor too much. Sometimes, there just isn’t any other explanation.
Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s summation of his career as a magazine writer reminded me of Nicole’s worrying about being “a professional writer.” It also reminded me of Pennebaker’s theory that writing heals by externalizing experience. It also made me feel good about perhaps following my present career path, encouraging writers. It echoes the lesson I learned as a photographer too. Art and life are inseparable. Art and money have nothing to do with each other. Every time I hear anyone talking about writing, or producing art for a “market” I break out in hives.
There was a time, in the 50s and 60s when magazines like Life and others provided a place where writers and artists could stretch out without fewer worries about demographics. They were run by people with more taste than marketing savy. But the golden age of print is gone, and the new age has not provided any alternative. Vonnegut said everything I wanted to say, at the time I read that blog entry, only better.
Thanks to popular magazines, I learned on the job to be a fiction writer. Such paid literary apprenticeships, with standards of performance so low, don't exist anymore. Mine was an opportunity to get to know myself. Those who wrote for self-consciously literary publications had this advantage, their talent and sophistication aside: They already knew what they could do and who they were.
There may be more Americans than ever now embarking on voyages of self-discovery like mine, by writing stories, come hell or high water, as well as they can. I lecture at eight colleges and universities each year, and have been doing so for two decades. Half of those one hundred sixty institutions have a writer-in-residence and a course in creative writing. When I quit General Electric to become a writer, there were only two such courses, one at the University of Iowa, the other at Stanford, which my President's daughter now attends.
Given that it is no longer possible to make a living writing short stories, and that the odds against a novel's being successful are a thousand to one, creative-writing courses could be perceived as frauds, as would pharmacy courses if there were no drugstores. Be that as it may, students themselves demanded creative writing courses while they were demanding so many other things, passionately and chaotically, during the Vietnam War.
What students wanted and got, and what so many of their children are getting, was a cheap way to externalize what was inside them, to see in black and-white who they were and what they might become. I italicize cheap because it takes a ton of money to make a movie or a TV show. Never mind that you have to deal with the scum of the earth if you try to make one.
There are on many campuses, moreover, local papers, weeklies or monthlies, that publish short stories but cannot pay for them. What the heck, practicing an art isn't a way to earn money. It's a way to make one's soul grow.
Bon voyage.
Some people are lucky, like Kurt Vonnegut. Most of the time, I think they deserve it. Some people, like me, are not. But that doesn’t mean I don’t feel like my soul is growing, sailing off someplace— I don’t know where. That’s been enough so far. I hope I can continue to convince myself that that it will always be enough.
Limits of the Past: The Human Sciences and the Turn to Memory
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Colloquium
Vanderbilt University
19-20 April 2002
Since the cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences, the place of memory in shaping cultural meaning and collective and individual action has been a focus of scholars from a wide range of fields. For many reasons-the end of the twentieth century and the millennium in western calendars; the vast deployment of nationalist myths in ethnic confrontations over the last two decades; the nostalgic trend in literature, cinema, and the media-the uses of memory have also become an ever-present marker of our own modernity. This conference seeks to explore the borders of the turn to memory to
examine how memory liberates, constrains, or otherwise affects social and political possibilities. The point of the conference is less to highlight the dominance of memory in culture than to come to terms with implications of the turn to memory for interpreting social practice.
The conference is an invitation to graduate students in the humanities and social sciences to think through the nature of “memory work” in the constitution of our understanding of the world. What limitations compromise a memorial construction of the world? What are the implications of the turn to memory for scholarly praxis and disciplinarity? How do the dynamics of memory work vary within and among disciplines, their media and modes of discourse? What are the issues with which the turn to memory cannot necessarily engage? If memory is both a force for unity and collective action and a force for divisiveness and manipulation, what bearing does it have for the present? These are only some of the questions contributors might address.
They extended the deadline for abstracts until February 8th, but the conference does conflict with my classes. I am sorely tempted to submit an abstract to this thing; Nashville isn't that far, and much of my work on Blake revolved around his perception of memory as an enemy to the progress of man. The topic is just close to my heart, but what, me give a paper? Not likely just now. I'm too confused.
The final question is the one I'd like to address. Social memory has become increasingly complex since Blake's time, but the basic conflict is the same: failure of the grand narratives and difficulty separating heroes from villians. The concept of a "gladiator" culture that refuses to abate. Sheesh, I've got to quit thinking about it, I can't go.
I had forgotten the Homer Simpson axiom that “beer was the cause and solution of all life’s problems.” The odd thing is, I usually only drink beer when I feel good. When I feel bad, it’s hard liquor. The resulting hangover usually forces the epiphany: “I’m too old for this shit...”
I finished my synopsis/reaction to Opening Up by James Pennebaker. If you’re interested in the subjects of trauma, confession, and inhibition be sure to check out the links provided by Michael Rubin. I know I will. Thanks Michael!
And I must give a major hug to Shauny, for her constant reassurance that I am not writing in a vacuum. I urge everyone, even those who (like me) don’t believe in awards, to vote for her in the Bloggies. She is indeed, one of the best kept secrets out there. Reading her musings keeps me well entertained, though I’ll say, as I often do— I am easily amused.
I woke up to what seemed like an Indian chant: “Hih-a-tee-yah” but it turned out to be just the neighbor's kids upstairs. It was freezing, and I forgot to turn on the heat. But I’m warmer now, now that I’m getting some things done. There's so much I want to write about these days. Maybe I should cut back on the sleep thing?
Thanks for reading. I do appreciate you all.
I was talking about suicide notes and such last May, brought about by viewing Girl, Interrupted, and noticed that the mental hospital involved in the story, McLane, seemed to have a major literary pedigree.
Now, I find out that John Nash also did time there. The Atlantic now has a nice interview with Alex Beam, author of Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premiere Mental Hospital. One of the primary driving forces behind treating mental illness at the time this hospital was founded was the removal of troubled people from crowded urban surroundings. There has been a big shift in my thinking since I left California, and sometimes I wonder if this is really a good thing. Its been theraputic though, even if it wasn't what I expected.
There is a shift in perspective, far from the madding crowd. Reading Kurt Vonnegut’s thoughts on being a “Middle Westerner,” I think it has more to do with world-view than just the removal of distraction. Sometimes Arkansas seems like my asylum, though with “territorial vanity” I am always quick to declare myself a Californian. California is a country all its own. California is the end of everything. Go west young man? There isn’t any further west to go. It’s a closed space, shut off by oceans and mountains and deserts. So it’s self contained. Californians feel that there isn’t much need to look outside its borders for much of anything. California has it all. Or does it?
California is nearly rootless, because it’s roots wither in the ocean, the deserts, and the mountains. There is no sense of America. Vonnegut describes this succinctly:
Anglo-Americans and African-Americans whose ancestors came to the Middle West from the South commonly have a much more compelling awareness of a homeland elsewhere in the past than do I— in Dixie, of course, not the British Isles or Africa.
What geography can give all Middle Westerners, along with the fresh water and topsoil, if they let it, is awe for a fertile continent stretching forever in all directions.
Makes you religious. Takes your breath away.
Arkansas is not Middle Western. The land is green, and filled with hills and variegated territory. It isn’t the South, either. Shortly after I got here, I drove to Memphis, Tennessee. Home of Elvis and all that. A friend here told me, there’s just something about Memphis— “It’s the smell,” he said. I ventured into Mississippi, down the infamous Highway 61. Now that’s the South.
I drove to Missouri a couple of years ago. It scared the crap out of me, a land of pick-ups with gun racks and CB radios. I’ve never heard a CB radio in Arkansas. People use cell-phones (and even have indoor plumbing!) around here. Missouri is the Midwest, or what I’ve seen of it, but I must admit a desire to check out Lawrence, Kansas, which is not that far and the home of William S. Burroughs. Recently, I went tripping through East Texas. Each of these trips took less time than a trip from Southern California to San Francisco, and the change in terrain and attitude was just breathless.
I don’t suppose I really felt like an American, until I came here. There’s more to it than I ever dreamed. I’ve been thinking about continuing this pilgrimage east, though Dr. Kleine keeps urging me to consider the Midwest, or the North, where I’ve never been. It’s been my therapy. Going back to California isn’t on my list, though I talk about it all the time. It’s just my point of reference, my territorial vanity. There are places that form us, and I am glad that my make-up is now more complex. For all his time in London, Luke is still Australian. Perhaps if Australia goes on a bender, I might even end up there.
For now, I’m enjoying my time in this asylum. A few white-russians, and some cheesy movies, and I could be anywhere. We're all allowed our territorial pissings, now aren't we?
I overslept. I wasn’t late for class, but I had to forgo my shower. I felt like hell. It’s chemical. I’m a pretty classic case of manic-depression.
It’s dark. There’s lots of positive things going on. People seem to be giving me compliments that I don’t feel I deserve. I’ve received e-mails from people I haven’t heard from in a long while, saying that they miss me. My ex-wife tells me that I can’t handle success. She says I shoot myself in the foot every time things start to look good. Someone cast a spell on me. But it’s not working. I still feel horrible. But there’s no reason for it. It’s chemical.
Sleep sounds good, but I know if I lay down I won’t be able to stop thinking. William Styron got it right in his book, Darkness Visible. It’s like noise. I struggle to find ways to cut through the noise. Studying complex things helps. I bought three more books today, a Cambridge textbook on discourse pragmatics, a philosophy book on the Sophists, and Kurt Vonnegut’s latest book of short stories. Bad chemicals. Vonnegut knows a lot about that.
I need to finish the entry on Pennebaker’s book. I need to write an essay for a class on Monday. But all I can think about is an essay, or a blog entry, that I want to write about switch plates and outlet covers. It’s hard to explain; it’s just one of those ghosts of incomplete experiences. Maybe tomorrow. Tonight, I think I’ll just watch a newly downloaded copy of Barbarella. I think I’ll just roll around in the noise for a while. I know it will lift.
I appreciate the comments from new readers lately. I’m sorry I’m not more entertaining right now. It’s chemical. It will change, it always does. I know myself pretty well. I surf a chemical roller-coaster; I’ve done it all my life. But when things are good, they are damn good. That’s why I learn to live with the noise, and skip the chemical levelers.
At the bottom of every hill there are old lovers. Reading “Lovers Anonymous” by Vonnegut, I laughed when he described a club made up of guys in love with the same woman, Sheila Hinkley, that was formed when she married another man. Old lovers become emblems, but lose their urgency. I like the way Vonnegut describes it:
“Sheila Hinkley is now a spare whitewall tire on the Thunderbird of my dreams”
I would have never read a book like Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions by choice. However, it was assigned for one of my classes, and now I’m glad I did.
Want to feel like blogging is a good thing? Take a look at this book. It offers conclusive, scientific evidence that disclosing yourself (rather than hiding behind a persona or writing about trivialities) is healthy. The subject is a complex one, however, and it covers a lot of fascinating territory.
According to my prof, Dr. Anderson, James W. Pennebaker is the major expert in the field of writing and healing. Reading his book, I can understand why. Despite the “Oprah Book Club” style title, it contains a great overview of what happens when we confess.
Elegies, and the literature of grieving has long been a fascination of mine. Not for the psychology, but for the sheer power of expression involved. Coping with the powerful emotions of grief is a tough thing, and words do help, though I'm still searching for theories of why.
This chapter deals with the effects of non-disclosure. It seems that not being able to talk about events and behaviors or traumatic events forces them inward, into a cycle that cannot be broken. The only way that these things can be dealt with is by acknowledging them, and confessing them to someone else. This can take many forms: talking, writing, and prayer. A person who lacks any outlet for their feelings can never get past them, and as they increase in intensity a large amount of physical work is required to keep them inhibited. This is why inhibition causes health problems.
An interesting study is introduced. Tests of immune system activity were done immediately following writing activities. Writing about emotional events caused a huge increase in immune system activity. Writing about trivial events did not. The evidence seems to show that it is a function of disclosure, of confession, rather than catharsis. Subjects usually feel worse after writing about emotional subjects, not better. However, the impact on immune system response is solid and positive, even though in the short term the writing did not make the subjects feel better.
Introduces studies on brain wave activity. This is fascinating stuff. Using the bicameral hypothesis, the study notes that speech is located in the left brain, whereas the parts of the brain that control negative emotions seem to be located in the right brain. Brain wave studies show that writing about emotional events causes the brain wave activity to become more in sync. Thinking becomes more evenly distributed when we use language to deal with emotions.
Try not to think about pink elephants. This chapter introduces the idea that any attempt to not think about something makes us think about it more. Drawing a distinction between high level (self-reflective) and low level (purely reactive) thinking, the chapter proposes that a shift into low level thinking is one method that people use to cope with thoughts they don’t want to have. We literally make ourselves stupid, and non-reflective, just to cope with unwanted thoughts. Penebaker groups exercise in with this, because it allows us to not be reflective. However, over the long term, the thoughts, like pink elephants, don’t go away.
This chapter details the attempts to codify the grieving process. While bent on prescription, eventually he does admit that people respond differently, and perhaps the majority of people need no help in coping. Some of us are just natural born copers, but some aren’t.
This chapter offers two views of how writing deals with traumatic experience. The first view is that traumas can be interpreted as incomplete experiences: divorce, early death, etc. Even in the case of violent trauma, the question “Why me?” remains unanswered, causing the experience to be incomplete. The second view is that writing externalizes the experience, separates us from it, so that we can better cope with it. Studies about test subjects who improved after writing, compared with those that experienced no improvement, suggest that in order to be effective, writing must operate in the realm of higher level reflective thinking.
Discusses the difficulties involved with the social network of friends which we may confide in. There are problems of recriminations, and gossip. The overarching issue seems to be one of trust and fear of recriminations. This is why it seems easier to disclose deep personal issues to total strangers that you will never see: there is no possibility of recrimination. This plays deeply to the core of the unique nature of blogging, I think. Because I have nothing to fear from people halfway across the globe, I feel freer to write what I want to. Another issue strongly discussed is the issue of transference. For each positive benefit from disclosure, the listener suffers by taking the trauma of others upon them. I suspect this has much to do with the spontaneous efforts by some to limit blogs to non-emotional topics. There is a fear that goes hand-in-hand with the weight of disclosure.
Pennebaker's research shows that the physiological effects of writing about positive emotional experiences are much the same as negative ones. If the feelings are released by writing or talking, there are positive health benefits. Sexual repression, and suppression of emotions works exactly the same way as trauma in causing a breakdown of the immune system and confusion of brain wave activity. No big surprises. However, there is a tedious temporal outline of the “stages of love” which pissed me off. While he dismissed most models of grieving, he seems quite at ease with pigeonholing love.
First, this chapter revisits the “Nature vs. Nurture” debate. Citing studies on identical twins, it reaches the conclusion that approximately 30-50% of our personality make-up seems to be genetic. This percentage shows that heredity is indeed a significant factor, but that is not exclusive or insurmountable. The real question is if there is any reason to attempt to change personality with regards to inhibition. It seems that “super-inhibited” individuals do live productive and happy lives, though slightly less inhibited people, called “chronically inhibited,” do seem to enjoy health benefits from lowering their inhibition level. The lines are indistinct, at best. Pennebaker offers a test to determine your level of inhibition:
Details the impact of traumatic experiences, shared experiences, on cities. Dallas, after the Kennedy assassination, towns in Washington, after the Mt. St. Helens eruption, and San Francisco after the 1989 earthquake. The most interesting thing that comes out in these studies is that there is often an “inhibition period” where residents refuse to talk about the events. This is tied to the notion of completion as well: if residents aren’t sure the traumatic event is really over, they don’t want to talk about it.
Describes the ritual nature, and social functions of confession. Explores the effect of environment on confessional experiences. Perhaps the most significant thing revealed in this chapter is the sliding scale of “deep feelings” that we use. The depth of confession varies with the context and environment.
The summation of the book offers the theory that writing organizes traumas, and goes further to describe the benifits of writing on health and well being:
Pennebaker seems to be really sure of himself as he declares the possible downsides to writing. First, writing should not be a substitute for action. Second, he declares that the type of writing I’m often accused of as counterproductive:
It’s grand to be smart. But intelligence and a classical education do not guarantee anyone emotional stability or personal insight. If you find that your writing often moves in a safe and non-personal direction, wherein you are citing the works of Virginia Wolfe to explain the ultimate failure of Napoleon, your writing may be quite interesting and even publishable. But don’t expect intellectualization to improve your health.
The final caveats regard writing as "an exercise in complaining" and "writing as an exercise in self-absorption." Writing is a poor substitute for friends. Duh, I could have told him that.
“You can’t find the words?” Dr. Brown suggested.
There was a tinge of anxiety in the healer’s voice, and he shifted about, putting body English on whatever Eliot was about to do.“I can’t find the words,” Eliot agreed.
“Well, said the Senator, “if you can’t put it into words, you certainly can’t use it at a sanity hearing.”
Eliot nodded in appreciation of the truth of this. “Did— did I even begin to put it into words?”
“You simply announced,” said the Senator, “that you had just been struck by an idea that would clear up this whole mess instantly, beautiful and fairly. And then you looked up in a tree.”
“Um,” said Eliot. He pretended to think, then shrugged. “Whatever it was, it’s slipped my mind.”
Kurt Vonnegut, God bless you, Mr. Rosewater
When I opened up the patio doors the blast of air froze me there. The only cure for bad days is to do something. But the party tonight is cancelled. There’s so much I have to do.
I turned on the TV and heard a common twisted pronunciation.
“My dad was a fer-tog-rapher”
I was one of those once. Every time I raised the camera to my eye in anyone’s presence, they’d say:
“What are you taking a picture of that fer?”
I suppose that my writing is no different. I tend to shun the warm and fuzzies, and aim straight into the what pho. There’s got to be some light behind that cloud somewhere.
But at least, even when it’s dark, things can be beautiful. There’s just something about looking into the darkness, trying to make it visible, trying to feel something. It may be a crude substitute for light, but at least it’s visible. It’s not fuzzy. It’s hard, cold, and distinct.
Shattered bits of a mirror, I suppose. The edges are sharp and cutting. There are just so many fragments laying about, wrapped in a curse of bad luck.
I was re-reading the end of On the Road again. I was thinking about Dean Moriarty. I was thinking about the kind of friend that could write you 18,000 words in a letter, hitchhike halfway across the country to see you only to be left by the side of the road in a moth-eaten coat. I was thinking about God as Pooh-Bear.
I was fighting the urge to call California. The phone rang. It was a friend from California. Then the sky split open. The power went out for a few moments, and I timed a thunderclap that took 30 seconds to subside. And the rain poured.
It was calmer when I hung up the phone.
Dark thoughts, darker than even Coleridge’s Pains of Sleep can convey. I suppose that’s why I keep writing. I turned off the TV. I keep seeing myself as John Nash as an old man, with all the students laughing at me as I shuffle off to the library. It’s just too scary. It’s warm, in the mid-seventies, and wet. I walk out on the patio and survey the satellite dishes.
Am I really the scholar type? Most people seem to think I am. It doesn’t really seem that way to me. I just see patterns. I always have. When I was in high school, I was in the math club. My strength was figuring out the pattern behind sequences of numbers; I won awards and stuff. Then, in junior college, it was art. Life in Southern California was just so unreal, half the time it seemed like the only way I could make it real was to take pictures of it.
So I did that. Taking pictures, in my rose-colored hindsight, was the only thing that ever really made sense to me. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and make pictures as the sun came up. It made me feel better. I’d put them up on the walls of my apartments (I always lived alone) and try to figure out what patterns seemed to reoccur in them. I wondered why certain shapes and arrangements were always repeated, over and over, as if I was trying somehow to make them right.
Then I got married. I didn’t take pictures for a long time. It was as if I fell into a vortex, but it was a vortex that pulled me out. It was photographing swirling people on the dance floor. I invented a new way of seeing for myself that broke all those old patterns. But eventually, those patterns got old too.
So I tried to get a life. It didn’t work. Without the affirmation I got from the pictures I used to make (many people love pictures of themselves, especially in California), I had to find it somewhere else. Realizing that I loved art, and I love literature, I thought perhaps if I went back to school I might meet other people who loved these things too. I did, but unfortunately, because somehow in this transition I became “old” to most people, the only ones I could really talk to were my professors. So now, I’m on my way to becoming a professor too.
How did this happen? I was sucked in by the pattern, the patchwork of language that people put together to try to touch one another. It makes people seem more real to me, when I can see how their mind forms thoughts on a page. Without that, people seem all too unreal. People tell me I communicate well. It’s just a habit that comes from seeing patterns, and emulating them.
But what if they aren’t really there? What if the random, dark, existential universe is really all there is? What if I become a guy who talks to people who aren’t there? I’ve seen it happen to close friends. I don’t want to start hating this world so much that I create another one. So I write. And write. And try to think of better things to write for another day.
And now it's starting to rain. Can things get any more bleak?
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/23/2002 11:25:00 PM well i hope not. that's quite bleak enough. -----COMMENT: AUTHOR: Rex EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/24/2002 9:41:00 PM So, If You were Enjoying Yourself what would You do differently ? ----- --------TITLE: Dead Grammas DATE: 01/23/2002 8:44:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: There's always beerSometimes it seems like words have a shape, a form that just rotates in my head. I struggle to find those words among the pages scattered round my room, but the books don’t cooperate. Just write something yourself, damn it, I hear myself say.
But it’s never that easy. It’s as if there are ghosts in the room, beckoning echoes of people, almost like heat signatures of feelings that won’t fade. When you burn yourself, it heals. If you’re frozen, you always thaw. Common feelings always reset, return to normal, level out. When you miss people, they’re just ghosts. When there are holes in your life, they don’t naturally seal over.
But what if what you really miss, is someone you’ve never met? There’s a song by Thin White Rope called “Dead Grammas on a Train” that tells the poignant story of a train wreck that killed the grandma of “his perfect one.” When the present isn’t what you want it to be, there are two fundamental choices. You can look back to the past, in idealized admiration, or forward to the future in anxious anticipation. That is, unless the grandma of your perfect one was killed in a train wreck.
Then everything collapses. “Some are born to sweet delight / Some are born to endless night” (Blake, not Morrison). I think about what to do from here. Do I teach community college, teach myself Latin and Greek and get another cat? It isn’t a pretty picture, at least to me. The spirit of the flaneur doesn’t want to leave. Okay, so if you can’t be happy you can at least watch other people be happy, right? For years, that was my home, inside my head as I watched it go by, never thinking much about the reality that I didn’t have much of a life myself. I tried to get one, but I ended up in Arkansas. And how do I go back, to being the watcher I was? Hey, I may not have been all that happy, but at least I got the endorphin rush of making things that made me think. Now, I rely on the words of others all too much, getting the same sort of rush from time to time when I figure out what they were really trying to say. Small thrills. Small moments. Small life.
Affirmation is the trickiest of things; it’s wrong to expect it from one person alone. It’s a group thing. That’s why fame intoxicates, and losing it causes a hangover. I remember standing on a street corner with 16x20 mounted prints hoping someone would be curious enough to look. There were few takers, and it felt demeaning. I can remember going into bars with a little box of 8x10s and having everyone gather around to look, and having people compete over who would see them next. I’d trade anything for some of those smiles right now. There is low, and then there is subterranean. And there is this place, filled with nothing but ghosts. Or the terror of entering a doctoral program and actually trying to be “original.”
Or there’s always beer. Maybe partying will help.
In my enthusiasm I do not accept Stieglitz as an infallible master, nor would he want me to. He said: "Friends made me out a god, when all I asked was to be treated as a human being, then turned on me when I couldn't be all they asked and 291 closed. But I have been thankful to every person who has hurt me. There has been one who has stood by me through it all -a girl from Texas. You see her paintings here stacked all around this room, this room that my brother allows me-and one for O'Keeffe downstairs. I have nothing left, deserted by friends and wife and child-yet in no period of my life have I been so enthusiastic and interested in photography and anxious to work.
Yes, O'Keeffe has painted and I have photographed, I will show you." Then he showed us a few of his photographs, perhaps ten; most were in storage. The hands sewing, the breasts, a rather abstract nude. "Ah, you do feel deeply," Stieglitz said, "and that little girl over there trembles with emotion" (as much from the barrage of words as from the photographs!-E. W.) "You will go away and tell of this meeting and some will say ‘Stieglitz has hypnotized you,' but I have only bared to the world a woman's life. Every woman has her virginal moments, even a prostitute. I have tried to grasp such moments too.
The struggle is to live and express life untouched by the ideas of neighbors and friends. After all we only know what we feel, and I have been unafraid to say what I feel. You see that in my work. I have broken every photographic law, optics included. I have put my lens a foot from the sitter's face because I thought when talking intimately one doesn't stand ten feet away; and knowing that it takes time to get deep into the very innermost nature of matter, I have given exposures of several minutes stopped way down.
You see my prints, the eye is able to wander all over them, finding satisfaction in every portion, the ear is given as much consideration as the nose, but it is a task, this desire to obtain detail and simplification at the same time. To make your subject forget a headrest during such long exposures is heartbreaking. If you had come to me four years ago I should not have been ripe to give you what I do now." Nor I ripe to receive it.
Returning to remarks on my work I quote Stieglitz: “I like the way you attack each picture as a fresh problem, you are not formulated. This is very interesting, and this the first complete failure you have shown. There must be an absolute release, nothing left unconsidered. But I will show you! I see you are not satisfied. You do not think you are great do you?” Then with a laugh, “I don’t think that I am.”
You have no respect for cognitive reverie you know that?
Yes, but pizza, now pizza I have enormous respect for— and of course beer.
I have respect for beer!
I empathize with Nash, for his ineptitude with women, and his grappling with the concept of an original idea. Yesterday, I had a flash of insight regarding the difficulties facing rhetoric. It seems to me that classical rhetoric is a rhetoric of one direction— missives are launched like missiles, crafted to persuade. Though the needs of an audience are valued, they are valued only in that they allow the missile to be smarter in reaching its target. Once a text leaves the hands of a rhetor, it's a one way trip.
Modern rhetoric faces the challenge of being a kinder and gentler rhetoric, a rhetoric of dialogue, of conversational interchange. It is bi-directional, dialectic, and not martial in its intent. It is supposed to change both the rhetor, and the audience, in a mutually beneficial way. How is this possible? Just as the unidirectional World Wide Web is not what Tim Berners-Lee envisioned, modern rhetoric falls short of the concept, and still follows the classical assumptions. Two way communication is great to talk about, but nearly impossible to practice. Blog conversations work that way too. Each person launches their viewpoint, tentatively, into an ocean of others. Others seldom comment, and the basic text does not become modified, it only moves on to new texts.
How is it possible, outside the realm of theoretical speculation, to have a text that is both coherent, and subject to revision from both sides? Just after I formulated this question yesterday afternoon, I found that Dr. Kleine had just had an article accepted for publication on the very same topic. So much for my original idea.
Of course I could still work on it— but it just isn't the same. My answer would probably be different and Dr. Kleine, in his usual self-deprecating way, didn't seem very confident with his answer to the problem. I get to read his article next week, but it seems weird that every time I think of something, someone else has been there first.
I've met a lot of truly brilliant people since I came to Arkansas. Each one has their own specialty, and modes of invention. I spoke to Dr. Levernier, an instrumental figure in reconfiguring the canon of American literature today, on my way to class this morning. He reads things in a truly unique way, offering perspectives that I would never dream of. I was amazed when I taught class today that nearly everyone read a text I gave them in the same way. It was a narrow reading, which missed the entire substance of the article. It dawned on me that finding that one original way to approach things is a defining character of genius. Genius seems to truly be "a table for one, with the eagle circling Prometheus chained to his rock."
The first two articles I had my classes read were on this topic. There were several definitions offered. Plato saw genius as a character of being possessed by a spirit, as did William Blake. Longinus saw genius as the character of being in possession of the time in which it lives. Mary MacLane's perception of genius was much like the Platonic version, but she added the attribute of being able to see far inward; geniuses are people who truly know themselves. Must this come at the expense of relationships with others? Sometimes, this really seems to be the case.
The price paid for that "one original idea" is isolation. This isn't a very comforting thought. At least it's something I don't have to worry about— I haven't had an original idea yet.
Last night, Dr. Kleine added a new wrinkle to my thinking about it. He noted that there are two types of genius, genius that works through an outpouring of uncontrolled thought like Beethoven, and genius that sees things in pictures, pictures which only must be committed to the page after conception, like Mozart. I suppose I fit more with Mozart, but I'm hardly on the same planet. I think in pictures. So why did I ever end up in the word business? That's something I still haven't figured out.
I have long tried to come to terms with the isolation that results from seeing the world in a different way. If I were a genius, I suppose that might be some small comfort. But I'm not, perhaps that's why I think about it so much. At least I have a respect for cognitive reverie and beer.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: Cameron EMAIL: wynlyndd@hotmail.com URL: DATE: 01/23/2002 7:45:00 PM Not to sully your scholarly web site with pop drivel, but I had to give a Home Simpson quote
There is a word
Which bears a sword
Can pierce an armed man -
It hurls its barbed syllables
And is mute again -
But where it fell
The saved will tell
On patriotic day,
Some epauletted Brother
Gave his breath away.
Wherever runs the breathless sun -
Wherever roams the day,
There is its noiseless onset -
There is its victory!
Behold the keenest marksman!
The most accomplished shot!
Time's sublimest target
Is a soul "forgot"!Emily Dickinson #42
That charge isn’t an easy one to answer. Some things just can’t be explained any other way. For example, I was reading an article by Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede called “On Distinctions Between Classical and Modern Rhetoric” today. It offers the thesis that in the classical world, the perception of what constitutes necessary or universal truth, or episteme, was fixed and thus, there was a truth that was independent of what we say about it. The function of the rhetor was to convey truth. However, for modern rhetoric:
Connections among thought, language, and reality are thought to be grounded not in an independent, charitable reality but in the nature of the knower instead, and reality is not so much discovered or discoverable but instead constituted by the interplay of thought and language.
Okay, so if reality is constituted by thought and language, then it is also contingent on our point of view. “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees,” to quote William Blake. It seems not a difficult leap to see that the representation, in pictures or language, of reality is by its very nature iconic, or an idealized view. However, given what we know about the fallacies of the universal, that makes these icons also phantasms, eidolons constructed from moment to moment based on “the interplay of thought and language.” There is really nothing dualistic about something being at once ideal and imaginary; it only becomes Platonic when the real is considered to be imaginary, and the ideal a separate knowable thing.
That’s why Plato expelled poets from his republic. Because they created a competition for the real, by creating imaginary ideals. The concept of eidolons is not Platonic in the slightest. We’re constantly told that truth is an unknowable thing in the postmodern world, that it is constituted from moment to moment through the processes of history. Truth is relative. Ultimately, if this is the case, then philosophy is useless.
The schism between Rhetoric and Philosophy is this: Philosophy deals with absolutes. Rhetoric deals with possibilities. In the grandest sense, postmodern philosophy is not really philosophy but rhetoric. Clear as mud?
How about this, from Michael Polynyi (cited by Lunsford and Ede)
We must inevitably see the universe from a center lying within ourselves and speak about it in terms of a human language shaped by the exigencies of human intercourse. Any attempt rigorously to eliminate our human perspective from our pictures of the world must lead to absurdity.
Mike Sanders has been ruminating on issues of pleasure as they relate to blogging. It jogged my brain cells back to a text I've spent a lot of time with, Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry. Shelley saw man as a harp, stretched tight and blown by winds both inside and out to produce songs of pleasure. The good, to Shelley, would always be naturally reinforced by this process because it was the most pleasurable. There is no need for ethics or morality, if we only follow our pleasure. Of course, Shelley was branded as being immoral, because he denied the moral sentiments any place in his poetry. I like his argument on the subject, because I believe that life itself is a poetic act.
The whole objection however of the immorality of poetry rests upon a misconception of the manner in which poetry acts to produce the moral improvement of man. Ethical science arranges the elements which poetry has created, and propounds schemes and proposes examples of civil and domestic life: nor is it for want of admirable doctrines that men hate, and despise, and censure, and deceive, and subjugate one another.
But poetry acts in another and a diviner manner. It awakens and enlarges the mind itself by rendering it the receptacle of a thousand unapprehended combinations of thought. Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world; and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar; it re-produces all that it represents, and the impersonations clothed in its Elysian light stand thenceforward in the minds of those who have once contemplated them, as memorials of that gentle and exalted content which extends itself over all thoughts and actions with which it co-exists.
The great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action or person, not our own. A man to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.
The great instrument of moral good is the imagination: and poetry administers to the effect by acting upon the cause. Poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination by replenishing it with thoughts of ever new delight, which have the power of attracting and assimilating to their own nature all other thoughts, and which form new intervals and interstices whose void forever craves fresh food. Poetry strengthens the faculty which is the organ of the moral nature of man in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb. A Poet therefore would do ill to embody his own conceptions of right and wrong which are usually those of his place and time in his poetical creations, which participate in neither.
Poetry has been working on my organ for a long time now. I like it. It feels good. But blogging is a newer pleasure, and it's interesting to compare the attributes. Blogging, as a flexing of the mental faculties, is related to the type of pleasure which Shelley was on about. Stretching the mind, outside itself and into the otherness that surrounds, is a good thing. Reading the thoughts of others, and contributing my own becomes a sort of cooking and eating. I'm always hungry for good food.
----- --------TITLE: Weston's daybooks DATE: 01/21/2002 6:30:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Jeremy lamented that Edward Weston's Daybooks are out of print.So, I thought I'd put up one of Weston's entries, oddly enough concerned with writing:
July 4. 4:30 —with rain-like fog: not so pleasant for weekenders. I arose early, to be alone, to see my new work now mounted, to write and think quietly. Always someone sociably inclined to drop in for morning coffee,—Sonya, Cole, an early riser, Everett Ruess, camping in our garage,— a boy who has potentialities in painting and writing, and though I agree morning coffee can be a delightful ceremony, it is the one time I wish to be alone. Every day I must write with chattering all around me,—no wonder I feel like destroying as poorly-said my entries of the day before. This sounds like a poor excuse for poor writing, maybe is. I should not attempt to write then?—but I must write— Well, what luck! Here comes Sonya at this ungodly hour—couldn't sleep with a bad cold and Everett rushes from the garage with paper in his hand bound for the woods on a hurry call— I am finished again —just this one thought-if my technique in writing was as strong as my technique in photography could I not write despite confusion?—for I am usually surrounded by near or distant confusion while photographing. I lack technique in writing, hence weak or incomplete expression. I have to think—and one must not think—have no need to while creating. Yet I go stumbling along, and someday may arrive.
I still haven't forgiven Sontag for trashing Weston. His daybooks, and his photographs were a big inspiration for me. So, the whole modernist project was flawed? Show me a human who isn't.
We all go stumbling along, hoping one day to arrive.
----- --------TITLE: Dream Repair DATE: 01/20/2002 9:59:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Next Friday, I think I’m going to challenge a lot of people’s beliefs about a cultural icon. I’ve decided that I really have to tell them the truth. Martin Luther King was a plagarist.
Many people in the United States get tomorrow off, because Reagan signed a bill into law declaring a holiday in memory of Martin Luther King. He was an incredibly skillful rhetorician, and as the negative connotation of the word implies, there is a distinctly untruthful side to his life. He had many affairs. He plagiarized much of his work toward his doctoral dissertation, and the case could be made that he’s one of the worlds most successful liars. But should this tarnish the luster of a man that galvanized a nation to stand up for fundamental human rights?
Perhaps it shouldn’t, but it does. Like Bill Clinton’s skillful evasions, the indiscretions will survive the good that his tenure as president produced. I must admit that the commodification of King troubles me more than his use of stolen words. Why is it impossible to gain access to his sermons without paying for them? Should words of peace and freedom be just another product on the marketplace? The behavior of his family “protecting the King legacy” is shameful.
But all that aside, his words have a power that should be taught. As borne out by the researchers at the King Papers Project, there is also a consistency to them, regardless of their source. There is much to learn from Dr. King. I do feel that he deserves his holiday, for his rhetorical power alone. I will use his 1964 Nobel Prize acceptance speech to teach the structures of logical argument, the power of parallelism, and the overwhelming strength of belief.
I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land.
“And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid.”
I still believe that we shall overcome.
This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet new strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born.Martin Luther King
Slouching towards Bethlehem? I suppose so. The lesson of rhetoric is that truth can only be measured relatively, and I can forgive his cheating at school. But that doesn't make it right. But discounting his legacy of peace and freedom gains nothing. It makes us lose a precious moment in history, a moment that should be commemorated.
----- --------TITLE: Warhol and Sontag DATE: 01/20/2002 4:32:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Luke has pointed out a fine article on Andy Warhol, American Beauty ----- EXTENDED BODY:I particularly like Jonathan Jones's observation that "Warhol became an artist when he stopped drawing an elegant Madison Avenue fantasy world and painted - with an honesty and lack of pretension that remains awe-inspiring - the universal pleasures and terrors of everyday life." Well said. In many ways, I think of him as the peak of modernism.
What? You say, ready to take the postmodern line that Warhol was the dawn of appropriation and recycling— the curious gaming approach to art which has become the standard faire of those who came after. That's what happens when you spend so much time talking about the medium, being totally unconcerned with the message. Warhol's contribution was to take the modernist obsession with the mundane and take it up to the next level, exposing "universal pleasures and terrors of everyday life" to be their own kind of spectacle, the scariness of uniformity in the machine culture.
I will never forget reading his approach to interviews: "An interviewer should just tell me what they want me to say, and I'll repeat it back to them" (paraphrased). But his mirror on pop culture is filled with distortions, disruptions which are the part and parcel of celebrity , of reading what we want to see, rather than what's there. That is, to me, the high modernist principle: acceptance of the symbol, rather than the reality.
Also of interest today was another good article from the Guardian on Susan Sontag. She shares the same reputation of ambivalent aloofness which Warhol is famous for. I've had a hate/love/hate/love relationship with her for a long time. I hated On Photography when I first read it because she trashed my modernist icons. Then I loved Under the Sign of Saturn and Against Interpretation. Her thoughts on cinema seemed hopelessly elitist, and I hated them. Her thoughts on September 11th, recently causing controversy, caused me to rally to support her again. But then, when I read this bit, I felt sorry for her:
Her transatlantic lifestyle, shared between New York, Paris and, to a lesser extent, Berlin and London, seems to be born from a deeply ambivalent attitude to the US, which many American commentators understand as a sign of her aloofness. "I don't like America enough to want to live anywhere else except Manhattan," she says. "And what I like about Manhattan is that it's full of foreigners. The America I live in is the America of the cities. The rest is just drive-through."
Words are fun things, and of course the core of many acts of communication. Lately, I’ve been exploring the context and development of a bunch of them, trying to reach a deeper understanding of what they’re all about. I thought I’d jot down a few notes on the subject.
Crisis, a word all too familiar these days, seems to be a relative of krisis, a Greek word meaning judgment. How appropriate is that? Judgment has been the subject of quite an ongoing crisis.
Theory, a word that I spend a lot of time with, comes from the Greek theoria which has several nuances lost in the current usage:
- Contemplation
- Speculation
- Sight
This discovery made me remember a distinction proposed by Pythagoras. In the arena there are three classes:
- The performers who sell their talent.
- The merchants who sell their wares.
- The spectators who watch the show.
The more I think about it, the more I want to retain my amateur status. Intercourse, without hope of gain, holds different values than the goal oriented motives of commerce.
The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
Too many people are out of love
The whores hustle and the hustlers whore
The city’s ripped right to the core
[PJ Harvey]
Theory rips me up. Descriptive theory, I can handle fine. The theory of the spectator, or of the lover. But prescriptive theory bothers me. It’s the theory of the hustler, the theory of the whore.
I met a seer,
Passing the hues and objects of the world,
The fields of art and learning, pleasure, sense,
To gleen eidólons.
Put in thy chants said he,
No more the puzzling hour nor day, nor segments, parts, put in
Put first before the rest as light for all an entrance-song of all,
That of eidólons.
Ever the dim beginning,
Ever the growth, the rounding of the circle,
Ever the summit and the merge at last, (to surely start again,)
Eidólons! eidólons!
Ever the mutable,
Ever materials, changing, crumbling, re-cohering,
Ever the ateliers, the factories divine,
Issuing eidólons
Lo, I or you,
Or woman, man, or state, known or unknown,
We seeming solid wealth, strength, beauty build,
But really build eidólons.Walt Whitman, "Eidólons" (1-20) from Leaves of Grass
Synthesis seems to be concerned about photographs produced by bloggers. It's funny how these things come together, because as he suspected, I connect the dots in a different way.
I was motivated to read Whitman after I first read Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. It was because of a one word connection: eidolons. The dictionary provides a wonderful clue why the word eidolons was used by both of them. The word has two meanings, and both fit.
- A phantom; an apparition.
- An image of an ideal.
The Spectator is ourselves, all of us who glance through collections of photographs— in magazines and newspapers, in books, albums, archives . . . And the person or thing photographed is the target, the referent, a kind of little simulacrum, any eidolon emitted by the object, which I should like to call the Spectrum of the Photograph, because this word retains, through its root, a relation to "spectacle" and adds to it that rather terrible thing which there is in any photograph: the return of the dead.
The essay cited by Synthesis is a clever one, but in my opinion the summation of William J. Mitchell's How to Do Things with Pictures is a hollow muckraking assertion that has not come to pass in the eight years since it was written:
The growing circulation of the new graphic currency that digital imaging technology mints is relentlessly destabilizing the old photographic orthodoxy, denaturing the established rules of graphic communication, and disrupting the familiar practices of image production and exchange. This condition demands, with increasing urgency, a fundamental critical reappraisal of the uses to which we put graphic artifacts, the values we therefore assign to them, and the ethical principles that guide our transactions with them.
Thus the rules that societies have evolved for acceptable and effective usage of photographs in acts of communication are both clear (if not always explicit) and widely understood. These rules valorize photographs as uniquely reliable and transparent conveyors of visual information and concomitantly structure familiar practices of graphic production and exchange--among them the practices of photojournalism, feature illustration, advertising photography, photo-illustrated fiction, the legal use of photographic evidence, the family snapshot, photographic portraiture, photo identification, medical imaging, and art photography. Photography has established a powerful orthodoxy of graphic communication.
There's a good reason for this orthodoxy. People learn a language by hearing and internalizing it, and these schemas have been with us for a long time. Photographs on blogs have a sense of immediacy missing from other forms, the same quality shared by blog writing, but they do not operate outside orthodoxy. Photographers, especially new ones, imitate conventions which are often stale, and largely stolen from photo-illustration, snapshots, and "art".
Same tune, different means of transmission. The medium may massage, but it really isn't sending any new messages. The only real difference is accessability; now rather than just family and friends' snaps, we can see the efforts of millions.
Revisiting Mitchell's essay, I can now recognize how much of it is taken from literary criticism. Doing Things With Texts is the name of a book by MH Abrams, and the mirror analogy in the first paragraph is also taken from Abrams, whose landmark book was The Mirror and The Lamp. When I was just a photographer, I never noticed this. I have always questioned the postmodern approach to use, value, and ethics regarding photographs. Critical approaches are useful for the interpretation of language artifacts, including visual ones, but they do not reduce or change the fundamental utility of them.
Are blog photographs different? No more different than the difference between doing it for money (professional) and doing it for love (amateur). That distinction has been around since Whitman too, and blogging certainly hasn't changed it. Attributing the difference between blog photojournalism and professional photojournalism to anything more than the difference between pro and amateur is just chasing an eidolon.
----- --------TITLE: Sex and Chocolate DATE: 01/17/2002 8:07:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: NewsbitsIt's always fun to click on a link and find out that it's in my own backyard. Three teachers just lost their licenses due to sexual misconduct. Great, it means that the job market is getting better... But why is it that I always hear about it happening in Arkansas, or the Central Valley. There was another case in Fresno.
Blame Canada...
Is it a coincidence that after writing December 20th about the male bodies proclivity to porn and pizza, quoting Drew Carey, that today I read that Canadian prison inmates were given porn and pizza on New Years Eve? This is just odd.
Conservatives might argue that they should have listened to Britney Spears, who claims that chocolate is just like an orgasm. Uh, I beg to differ. Otherwise, those teachers would have been hanging out in a candy shop instead of seducing 15-year-old girls. Even 400 pound pigs will die for sex.
----- --------TITLE: Oysters DATE: 01/17/2002 7:35:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: More fun than a barrel of oysters?The pronunciation of "tea" has been the main subject of discussion lately on the C-18L list. Evidently it is pronounced "tay" in Gaelic, and Alexander Pope rhymed it that way. I find it hard to think of myself as a "tay" drinker. Tee hee. Tay was the original pronunciation in Dutch, were the word originates, so leave it to the English to reinvent it. Remember, as Monty Python says, that the Dutch don't really have a language, they just gargle and call it a language.
However, the real fun came in when they were seriously debating how big a barrel of oysters was. I found out that oyster barrels are indeed of a different size than you'd think, holding four dozen oysters. Not a very big barrel, I'd say.
In other news, Neil Young's new album is going to be called "Are You Passionate?". A rather silly question, for anyone who knows me. I also discovered that Concrete Blonde has reunited, has a new album that came out a couple of days ago, and now has an official site. Wow, I knew there must be a reason why I dragged out those old dusty albums a while back. I can't say that I'm all that impressed with the single posted at the official site, I'm not a big ballad guy. But I'll buy the record. I'm a sucker that way.
However, I got really pissed at the diary section of the site. It's dark red text on a black background, and tiny text at that. I had to bump up the font size, and highlight it to be able to read it. Has anyone ever heard of usability?
Enough carping. I'm done now. I suppose I'm just looking for some grain of sand to turn into a pearl, but the world isn't cooperating lately.
----- --------TITLE: The Old Man DATE: 01/17/2002 2:03:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: The old man diedAnd it wasn't for want of the price of tea and a slice...
Even though the story is from Monday, I just stumbled on it today. Gregorio Fuentes died at the age of 104. He was the inspiration for Ernest Hemingway's novella The Old Man and the Sea.
The Old Man and the Sea was one of those books that my father made me read before he would talk to me. It was a weird game we played. "Hey, kid you don't know shit until you've read . . ." It set me on a Hemingway binge, and I read a lot of his novels growing up. I just loved the writing style, terse and short. To the point.
It reminds me of a conversation I've been having a lot with other teachers. I don't want to teach "fru-fru" writing. You can probably figure out that I have a severe allergy to flowery description, and inflated emotional rhetoric. There's nothing wrong with emotions, it's just that life isn't a hallmark card. Cut to the chase, damn it. Like Hemingway.
----- --------TITLE: New Orleans Gallery DATE: 01/16/2002 7:51:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: An excuse to go to New OrleansHow can you go wrong with a name like A Gallery for Fine Photography? While I wish they had a snazzier web site, at least they have a fine line-up of photographers.
----- --------TITLE: Genuis DATE: 01/16/2002 11:06:00 AM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Between classesI turned on the TV. The Waltons were on. I remember really hating that show growing up, though my mom loved it. I found out later that my Dad hates Ralph Waite. Maybe I got the "I hate the Waltons" gene. It only took about thirty seconds to hear: "Girls who say gosh, golly, and darn will wind up sleeping alone in a barn." While I may admit the truth of this statement, I really prefer girls who say "Holy Shit!" and "Damn" myself.
Speaking of "Holy Shit!," there's been a big discussion on the Nassr-L list about the nature of the "Pleasure Dome" in Coleridge's Kubla Khan, regarding whether it is a dome floating in mid-air, unsupported, or if it is meant to be a bedouin tent. One of the scholars on the list pointed to new archeological findings in the summer issue of National Geographic. They've found some glass, thought to be part of that dome. Cool stuff, I wish there was more information online somewhere. Personally, I think the tent hypothesis is pretty lame.
Concerning the damned, Ron Asheton of the Stooges has a great interview at Perfect Sound Forever. Also, according to Rolling Stone several important Sonic Youth records are going to be remastered and rereleased. Damn, now I'll have to buy them again.
Also recently unearthed, is a rave review of my favorite album of 2001, Steve Wynn's Here Come the Miracles. I wish Steve Wynn wasn't such a secret to most people. He builds some mighty fine pleasure domes himself.
Morning class went pretty well, but though I prepared what I thought was enough material for a class and a half, I got through it all pretty thoroughly with five minutes to spare. I've got to work on this. I don't want them to get into the habit of leaving early. This time though, I gave them the Mary MacLane excerpt and an article from the New York Times. I bet the dictionaries will have to come out for the Times article. And this is a good thing. I thought since Mary MacLane makes the outrageous claim of being a genius, it might be fun to figure out what people think genius really is.
----- --------TITLE: Attitude DATE: 01/15/2002 11:01:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I hadn't thought about the word that much lately, until I read an essay, and a blog entry today.
In a Dark Time wrote in "The Last Reincarnation" that the shift in "attitude" from his students was one of the reasons why he gave up on teaching. He felt he could no longer deal with it. Coming on the heels of discovering Joseph Epstein's article You Got Attitude?, it was one of those weird web synchronicities.
I like attitude. That's the reason why I chose to assign Mary MacLane in my classes. She has attitude, an attitude I like. Badger was writing about music as a lifestyle choice, and of his preference for passion in music writing. I agree wholeheartedly. Anyone who thinks that they can write dispassionately about something that is created, by design, to move the emotions is practicing the worst form of self deception. The no-attitude attitude? There's no such thing. Growing up in the desolate aftermath of the 60s, I thought as a teenager that there were hundreds of lifestyle choices to be made. Looking back, I think it's less a matter of lifestyle, than attitude.
When I was a salesman, one of those hokey motivational signs that hung in the break room queried:
Attitudes are infectious. Is yours worth catching?
*A late night addendum: In Rhetorical Theory tonight, I stepped up to "play" one of my favorite rhetoricians, Protagoras. This means I get to present his point of view, as if I were him. We joked a bit about wearing togas to get the right "attitude." As a side benefit, I also get to play his primary opposition, Plato. This will be fun. I've been reading Plato with Blake's "infernal method" for a long time. I'm not sure why, but I also volunteered to be Jurgen Habermas. I'm not quite sure how I'll play that one...
----- --------TITLE: Cats DATE: 01/14/2002 10:43:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
The day went great, and ended on a fine note with Shauna's literary observations. I really must agree. Obviously, somebody's not doing something right.
There isn't time to write out the course of the day, but it sailed along smoothly. I think I'm really going to have fun teaching, though I must admit it's hard to find well written articles about dentistry. It's hard for me to not want to assign some literature stuff, and I want to get as many people as I can turned on to blogging. So, I'm going to give people some excerpts from The Story of Mary MacLane and see what sort of reactions I get. I think I'll leave out the parts about her being a radical bisexual bad girl, and let them figure that out for themselves. It's hard to find male diarists to quote that aren't so far out that they won't identify, but surely everyone is interested in the diary of a young girl?
I'll find out. If you haven't checked her out, you might be surprised. There's no Anne Frank style stuff here, this woman had a firm grip on life. I want to provide balanced readings from both male and female authors, but, the more I review stuff I come to feel that guys are just boring. Maybe it's because I'm a guy. And I have been accused of being boring.
I like girls. Sorry, I can't help it.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/14/2002 11:08:00 PM is this for real? that mary thing? interesting!This is going to be fun. I showed up for class fifteen minutes early to find that there were already 18 students in the room. Eager people, I like that. By the time 8 am rolled around, there were 22 out of the 25 registered people there. Both of my classes are full. Way cool.
So now I’ve got fifty people to get to know. I think I’m going to like this. The only thing odd is the high density of dentistry majors. Now there’s a subject I know very little about! Should be fun. The preliminary writing I had them do shows that they are concerned about making A’s too. That’s a good sign. I hope I can oblige.
Damn, this is going to be a long day. I have to go back shortly for my second class teaching, then there is a seminar tonight until 9pm. Now that’s a day: 7:45 am to 9 pm. But I may duck in here from time to time. There’s no telling.
I was thrilled to find that not only do the Wipers have an Official site, but they also have MP3s available at MP3.com.
There is a nice flash promo for The History of Portland Punk and also for a new album, Electric Medicine, due in March. I'm really excited now.
For those who don't recognize it, the Wipers logo is actually a play on Ohm's law. It's more than fitting for perhaps the most electric of sounds I've ever heard. I'm so glad I got the chance to see him. He doesn't play out much, and there's almost a sort of religious quality to it. But it's certainly an electric church. Many of his songs just cut me to the bone, like "Window Shop for Love."
There is also an unofficial site with some interesting interview snippets. I particularly liked this bit:
Standing on the small stage, playing to fewer people that his accomplishments deserve, Greg Sage turns up his guitar and his swooping, soaring songs. It's a beautiful noise of a power that seems larger than life, with an interior cry, like the eye of a hurricane. As Sage says, it's a "falling effect, but also like catching yourself in a fall."
Bargain of the centuryI thought it had to be a joke. CDNow listed a Wipers Box Set for $7.49!
I ordered it, of course, and am just blown away. It's not one of those lame "greatest hits" things at all. It's their first three albums, complete and in order, plus bonus tracks.
The Wipers have long been one of the best kept secrets around, known only to musicians mostly. They were the vangard of what later was called "grunge."
It's not quite punk. It's not quite rock. But it is perhaps the best definition of what I call intense.
Three CDs of suicidal angst, what more could a person want?
The original albums were all short, around 30 minutes, so the addition of the bonus tracks makes it three CDs of pure genius that clock out at close to an hour each. $7.49? Sold!
I remember a visit to a record store in Mesa, Arizona, where a guy was just amazed that I asked about Greg Sage. "He lives a few blocks away. I call him the 'mad scientist' cause he always comes in in a white lab coat. He's got a studio in his house, and he seldom leaves." I drove past the house a few times, and thought about the strange experiments that must go on inside.
I met him a few months later, when he opened for Nirvana. He wasn't playing live much then. He cut a hypnotic circle on the left side of the stage, drilling the most amazing chords into the floor. That's where my jaw probably still is. One of these days I'll have to go back to get it.
----- --------TITLE: 18th century newspapers DATE: 01/13/2002 12:43:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Old newspapersThe C-18L list has provided another fun diversion. While most literature people will be familiar with the phrase "Grub Street Hacks," it takes on new meaning when you actually read some of their work. Rictor Norton has compiled some excerpts from early 18th century newspapers guaranteed to amuse. I was particularly taken by the description of some visiting Cherokee in 1730:
Friday night about 11, the Indian Prince walking in Covent Garden, was pick’d up by the infamous Jenny Tite, who took 2 rings off his fingers, and made off with them. — I think this Lady for the future deserves the title of the famous Jenny Tite, on account of this amour with his R. Highness, who not knowing the use of money on these occasions, might present her with these 2 rings.
There's just too much great stuff here to mention, Sodomites, for example. A letter to the editor suggests that they be punished in a rather severe way, "that a skilful surgeon be provided immediately to take out his testicles, and that then the Hangman sear up his scrotum with an hot iron." But there are also some touching love stories too:
William Gardham and Mary Langhorne, that were taken [in bed together] at an inn in this city, and after examination were committed to Newgate, the former on suspicion of poisoning his wife, and the latter of poisoning her husband, were try’d at York the last Assizes, and both acquitted; thereupon they were immediately married.
What are you looking for when you read? It’s a behavior that requires a certain amount of effort, and if you’re like me, you always want to be effected in some degree commensurate with the time you spent applying yourself to the task. Much has been written about the short attention span that web reading promotes. Is this really the case? Every few months I get an e-mail from someone telling me that they spent hours on my site, something that they claim they never do. Sometimes, I read an entire site myself.
It takes a certain sense of connection. I begin to wonder if the web actually promotes these connections by its sheer diversity. When the audience is so broad and multi-leveled, the chances of stumbling onto someone that satisfies your own peculiar needs as a reader are greater. However, the formula for effective web writing seems to be well quantified.
Effective Web Writing by Crawford Killian brings together the question of audience needs, and the means to satisfy those needs. Most of it is stuff that will be familiar to web writers, but it’s good to see it gathered together in one article. I especially liked his description of the “hooks’ for increasing readership:
- questions - they make us seek the answer,
- unusual statements - we love surprises,
- promise of conflict - we love fights,
- news pegs - to tie content to the coattails of some big current event, and
- direct address - we love personal attention.
Sometimes the web seems like a multi-chambered stomach, were everyone digests things in different ways. Quotes are often like those bits of undigested corn, pieces of reading that persist because of their hardness, their resistance to being broken down any further. This feeds the “short attention span” theory nicely. We pick quotes because we can't improve on the message they transmit, or digest them further without losing their essence.
But what about the other end of the scale? Why do people spend long periods of time at some sites? Maybe it’s because they take us outside ourselves. The popularity of novels in the romance genre, and the psychological factors that go along with it suggest that we have a need to be transported, to identify with someone we’re not. Perhaps it’s only when you find someone that you identify with that the attention span lengthens. I don’t know, but with increasing access to unique personalities, it seems likely that chances of identifying with someone are greater.
A new link I’ve added to my literary section on the sidebar is Corvey Women Writers on the Web. It documents 1,071 works by 471 women writers whose works were available from 1796-1834. This is only one section of a major library collected by a reader whose tastes fell outside the scope of standard popular faire. It’s a window into a neglected literature, a literature of transport and transformation, not just a literature of correct taste. The drive to find the things that we identify with operates outside the condensation of feelings into easily quantifiable quotes. To see the web as a reducer of attention spans ignores that there are some who do indeed read, and care about diversity and depth. This, is really quite an old thought, buried by the pursuit of the new.
I can remember when Friday nights were spent having a good time, instead of waiting for a dryer. What life-starved idiot does laundry on a Friday night besides me?
Site traffic has dropped like a rock, and it landed on my toe. I was looking at something though.
I seem to attract the unresolved. I'm not sure what to make of that.
It is nice to see that Australians like me though, and that non-prophets do to.
Though I wish I was big in Japan, the fact that there are commercial visitors bugs me. But I'll just hope it's people who are avoiding work. I can identify with that. I'm doing it right now.
If it wasn't for dear Shauna and Nicole, I'd feel like I was writing in a vacumn sometimes. But it's not fair to have expectations of a readership; this is just life-blather. Every once in a while I try to join a conversation, or say something of interest to someone besides myself. But this place exists mainly to clear my head about things. I'm pretty unresolved, and it often shows.
Sorry for the "lonely guy" post. I try to keep myself to only one or so of those per month. I've recieved several letters of encouragement in the past few weeks, and there's no reason for what I'm feeling. But I feel it, so I just had to get it out of my system. Mopping up the lake just isn't helping matters much tonight.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/12/2002 8:41:00 PM only one a month! i'd be writing one every day if i didn't restrain myself. heh. anyway. don't stop. ----- --------TITLE: Life sucks DATE: 01/11/2002 8:08:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Just when I thought my luck had changed.It must be bad luck day. First, my site has been down a great deal of the day. Now, the toilet has flooded half the apartment. It's going to be a long night. It takes a boat to get into the bathroom.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/11/2002 8:38:00 PM oooh you poor chook :( ----- --------TITLE: Gorgeous Day DATE: 01/11/2002 7:25:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: A gorgeous day.I’ve had the patio doors open all afternoon; it’s been in the high 60s, and the sky is clear and blue. But then, so am I. HBO is running all five episodes of the first season of Six Feet Under. This time, I’m sticking a tape in the VCR so I can get buried when I feel like it.
Rachel Griffiths just does it for me in her role as Brenda. I have a thing for brilliant women. And I have a thing for bittersweet stories. What can you say about a show that always has death as it’s centerpiece? Love and death is the stuff that most stories are built upon, and it’s refreshing to watch a show that doesn’t cloak these things. There is comedy in both, if you know where to look. And that’s a good thing, because otherwise we’d all just run around sniveling.
It’s getting cool outside, so it’s time to close the doors. Rain is coming in later in the week. I love the endless variety to the weather around here. There’s no time to get used to anything. Just like the short span between life and death, and the brief flash between love and estrangement. It must be natural I guess, after all, this is the Natural State.
"People who take things that seriously should just go out and commit suicide. I was drunk when I wrote most of those songs - I don't remember anything!"
Though it seems more like a writing workshop exercise than literature, there's just something engaging about it. It's like a little fast-food blog. Thanks for mentioning it, Nicole.
It's nothing more than a collection of paragraphs, really. Some of them flirt with coffee-house profundity, some of them are silly, some of them just seem right.
The perfect book for just flipping through, when you think you write about stupid things. It's an exercise in conciseness, a quality I so often lack.
It demonstrates why I have such a love/hate relationship with contemporary literature. Parts of it are just self-involved navel gazing, parts of it are just delightful. Some of the thoughts I can identify with:
September 29, 1996
If I had two dwarves who followed me around and inquired endlessly into my philosophy, I'd want them to be named Munley and Leffage. And I'd say to them, "Munley and Leffage, I have no philosophy, or none I'd want anyone else to know about. Why would I want anyone else to know my philosophy — I'm no Emperor, and my life is not something which should ever be repeated."
April 1, 1997 (April Fools Day)
Such a hot day, my balls are hanging so far down, I can't help but think of the chosen one, the one whose face was made to bear witness to this hanging down — the lips, the soft cheeks, the softly closed eyes, the eyelashes, the chin, the face fated to absorb that delicate pressure — my balls being dragged slowly, slowly across the forehead, down the brim of the nose . . . Where art thou? Where art thou not?
I've never thought about writing about my balls. That takes a certain amount of, well, balls. Come to think of it, I've never written anything about body parts at all. Most ideas I have can't be contained too well in a single paragraph. I admire people who can do that though, so that's why I find the book to be quite fun. Because it isn't me at all; I like things that aren't me these days.
----- --------TITLE: Horses DATE: 01/10/2002 11:39:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
A few days ago I made notice of the accuracy of Poe’s appraisal of Shelley. It was still fresh in my mind when I heard that it’s time to spend more money a new edition. I should be collecting books on writing, because there are a few important things I need, but I’m drawn into Shelley in a way I can’t explain. I’m way past loving the way he did, or dying young, but the power of his expression just resonates with me. I suppose to more “mature” scholars, Shelley might be a guilty pleasure, like Dali, who attracts the youthful and then ultimately dissapoints, as our scope is broadened. Sometimes though, first impressions are best. Shelley was all about the futile quest to love life, when the reality of life so frequently disappoints.
I’ve been circling like Gerard Manley Hopkins Windhover, waiting to “gash gold-vermilion” reading Poe, Melville, Baudelaire, and Ovid, before returning again to Shelley. I just can’t stay away. As Poe said, what seems to be “the diffuseness of one idea, is really the conglomerate concision of many.” Increasingly, I read Ovid to find the mother lode of images that Shelley mined. And it starts in the oddest ways.
I couldn’t stop thinking about water fleas, Daphnia. I used to study them under the microscope when I was a kid. I feel like a Daphnia these days. Wheels churning inside me, in constant view of those who might pass through here. My skin is transparent. My thoughts and concerns are easy to see. There’s a heart in there, beating strongly and churning as I gather up all the smaller things around me to consume. I’m in a small pond. It could dry up any second leaving nothing but calcium to turn into petrified chalk.
I realized that I didn’t really know the story of Apollo and Daphne. So I turned to Ovid, and found that it was a bittersweet love story. Apollo pursued her, while Daphne did not return his love. She prayed to be transformed, dissolved, to disappear, to lose her form so that no one would pursue her. She became a laurel tree. Even still, Apollo was not deterred.
And yet
Apollo loves her still; he leans against
the trunk; he feels the heart that beats beneath
the new made bark; within his arms he clasps
the branches as if they were human limbs;
and his lips kiss the wood, but still it shrinks
from his embrace, at which he cries “But since
you cannot be my wife, you’ll be my tree.
O laurel, I shall always wear your leaves
. . .
And even as my head is ever young,
and my hair is ever long, may you, unshorn,
wear your leaves, too, forever; never lose
that loveliness, o laurel, which is yours!”
It becomes another piece in the cascade of conglomerate concision. A while ago, I wrote about my epiphany about Echo and Narcissus. It provided new depth to Shelley’s images of echoing caves, always underneath pine trees, thought by many scholars to be Shelley’s symbol for the perseverance of man. Given the discovery of the image, recurrent in many poets including Gray and Milton, it seems to be a somber gesture of futility and mourning. The image is found in Alastor, near the end of the poem with what becomes startling clarity and concision when it is combined with the story of yet another pair of frustrated lovers, Daphne and Apollo. Shelley takes Ovid's tales and just cubes them, folding them upon themselves and adding his own.
Yet the grey precipice and solemn pine
And torrent, were not all; — one silent nook
Was there. Even on the edge of the vast mountain,
Upheld by knotty roots and fallen rocks,
It overlooked on its serenity
The dark earth, and the bending vault of stars.
It was a tranquil spot, that seemed to smile
Even in the lap of horror. Ivy clasped
The fissured stones with its entwining arms,
And did embower with leaves for ever green,
And berries dark, the smooth and even space
Of its inviolated floor, and here
The children of the autumnal whirlwind bore,
In wanton sport, those bright leaves, whose decay,
Red, yellow, or etherially pale,
Rivals the pride of summer. ‘Tis the haunt
Of every gentle wind, whose breath can teach
The wilds to love tranquility. One step,
One human step alone, has ever broken
The stillness of its solitude: — one voice
Alone inspired its echoes . . .
Its motions, render up its majesty,
Scatter its music on the unfeeling storm,
And to damp leaves and blue cavern mould,
Nurse of rainbow flowers and branching moss,
Commit the colors of that varying cheek,
That snowy breast, those dark and drooping eyes.
The power and evergreen futility of love permeates the brain. Beauty in lap of horror, mutability of all things except the lone voice that echoes in the caves rips into me. For some reason, tonight I feel like I spent some time rolling in those leaves, and they are piled deep. I get drunk on this stuff, I’m sorry. Thank you for your indulgence, perhaps there’s just too much Shelley in me. Sorry to be so transparent, but some feelings, and moments, must be fixed.
Looking around for readings for my comp classes I found the one I think I want to open with, courtesy of the Vocabula Review. It's just well, nice. I've been told many times to remove certain words from my vocabulary because they are little more than verbal filler, and the article provides a nice explanation why certain words can be problematic for writers. My favorite rant on that score was from Dr. Marc Arnold, who suggested that we remove "very" from our spell-check dictionaries, and when we've accidently used it to substitute "damned" for it. I try to follow that advice, but I slip sometimes.
Nice Distinctions cuts quickly to the core of language change, and the resistance to it, and the awkward shifts of meaning that have occurred. The cool thing is that I know that many students will misread even this, and miss the point.
No one can stop the process of change, but these sorts of issues are good reason to choose one word over another, in order to communicate most clearly.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/11/2002 12:41:00 AM very good.
BE DRUNKEN, ALWAYS. That is the point; nothing else matters. If you would not feel the horrible burden of Time weigh you down and crush you to the earth, be drunken continually.
Drunken with what? With wine, with poetry or virtue as you please. But be drunken.
And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or on the green grass in a ditch, or in the dreary solitude of your own room, you should awaken and find the drunkenness half or entirely gone, ask of the wind, of the wave, of the star, of the bird, of the clock, of all that flies, of all that sings, of all that speaks, ask what hour it is; and the wind, wave, star, bird, or clock will answer you: "It is the hour to be drunken! Be drunken, if you would not be the martyred slaves of Time; be drunken continually! With wine, with poetry or with virtue, as you please."
Charles Baudelaire
The problem is, today I feel like I have a hangover.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/11/2002 12:36:00 AM wow! that's a mad photo :) ----- --------TITLE: Teaching DATE: 01/09/2002 6:33:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Tired.Full day teaching workshop tomorrow. But I’ve already got my heroes, as far as teaching goes. I just need to get the procedural specifics down. I’m so freaking tired today for some reason. Third quadruple cappuccino, suns gone down, and I’m still not awake. Maybe I should just let it go until tomorrow.
Of all the essays I’ve read recently, “Despite Tough Guys, Life Is Not the Only School for Novelists” by Kurt Vonnegut sums up what I’d like to do best:
When I taught at Iowa, then Harvard, then City College, here is what I tried to get away with, only in effect, not actually: I asked each student to open his or her mouth as wide as possible. I reached in with thumb and forefinger to a point directly beneath his or her epiglottis. There is the free end of a spool of tape there.
I pinched it, then pulled it out gradually, gently, so as not to make the student gag. When I got several feet of it out where we could see it, the student and I read what was written there.
That, to me, sounds like teaching.
I’d been waiting for Movable Type to go through a few releases before I took the plunge. I thought it would be nicer to use something that is currently being developed; not that I have any real complaints with Greymatter, but there are some nice features to MT. Since I’d like to use blogging as a teaching tool, I thought the ability to manage multiple blogs would be a plus, as well as category system for keeping track of my own wandering.
So, I just set it up. Two hours, including downloading every module and the kitchen sink that was missing from my server. Not bad, really. Don’t look for anything to change around here right away. I thought it would be nice to celebrate my first year of blogging with a changeover to a new look. That would be in February, if you weren’t keeping track.
One of the things that has bugged me about redesigning, the way things are, is that changing the templates would totally screw up many of my previous entries: they were designed for this “look,” you know? So, with MT I can just create a new one and leave this blog as it is. Then, any future redesigns can be made just by switching to a new blog, leaving the old one intact.
I suspect I’ll be blogging for a long time to come, and I don’t want to have to rework my previous efforts, so I won’t be importing anything over. It will be new. A fresh start, I like that. But don’t look for it till February.
Sometimes, going to new places can shift you back upon yourself. They can help you find your voice.
I was struggling to make some sense of myself through photography. I'd stumble through streets and alleys, all too often photographing the same things over and over.
I'd put the pictures up on my walls, and try to make something out of them. I wasn't "trying" to be a photographer, it just sort of happened that way. I liked looking at things. I liked things that bugged me. But miles of film weren't showing any growth, or change. Just the same old things, restated.
Then Rex took me to Venice Beach, California. An hour there netted me more things to think about than I had achieved in the five years that preceded this. It was as if I found my voice.
I went back a lot. But the change impacted my whole life, even when I wasn't there. I just saw the world differently. Sure, Bakersfield didn't have chainsaw jugglers and girls on skates. But it had light, shape, and shade. The trick wasn't in the scenery, but the perception of it.
Some places just exude a "sense of place." For others, it's a subtle quality that you miss when you live there everyday. Every place is special, and you don't realize that until you are confronted with the oddity of places that aren't home.
I did grow to feel at home in Venice, but I never lived there. I often fantasized about renting a place and staying there a few months. I never did.
Since that time, I've found a few places where I really feel at home, Santa Fe, New Mexico, for example, but I've never lived in one. I think that finding my voice had a lot to do with becoming comfortable with the idea that for me, there would never be a home. When I became comfortable with always being a visitor, a stranger, no matter where I stood, then I figured out who I was. Being comfortable with being uncomfortable? There's just something odd about that. But then, being odd is a large part of my identity too.
So a big sigh was uttered when I read this offer on the C-18L list:
Wanna hobnob on the conference circuit but don't have the funds? Need a
place to stay for the short-term while you research at UCLA, Clark, USC
Libraries?
I have an unusually large two room apartment in commodified-beatnik Venice
Beach. Borders Santa Monica. I am offering a room (but you get the run
of the whole place) for short-term stays (up to a week) at $30-40/day (grad.
students/asst. profs/independent scholars) and $50/day (other profs.).
Price includes breakfast. You can rent the whole apartment for $100/day.
Cheaper than a hotel. Full kitchen, bath, etc. Free internet access.
Fax machine. Nice sunsets from front windows. 5 minute walk to beach.
Shops, dive bars, and trendy restaurants within minutes. Near 3 major bus lines
(30 min. to UCLA; or 10-15 minute drive by car). This part of LA is one
of the only areas where the buses are actually decent.
Apartment also has 20 vol. OED, most scholarly eds of all 17th and 18th-c
major British poets (California Dryden, Yale Johnson and Pope, etc.), plus
much of the major criticism and biogs., etc. A mish-mash of everything
else.
I was thinking that the first place I live where I feel comfortable in having a 20 vol. OED will be home (I'd get one, but I certainly don't want to move it!). Maybe someday. But for now, I'm comfortable with being a stranger, drifting around, doing my best to notice what is strange and wonderful about each place I pass through. Few places scared me as much as Venice though, because I just felt so damned "right" there. I say scared, because perhaps feeling "right" would be the death of me. It certainly worked out that way the last time. I ended up in Arkansas.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 01/09/2002 4:38:00 PM that was gooood :) ----- --------TITLE: Holding on DATE: 01/08/2002 3:03:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Holding onto thingsIt's nice to know that I'm not the only one who can't hold a pencil correctly. I'm a dismal failure at pencils, and chopsticks. I'm sure there's a joke in there somewhere.
Sometimes, only knowing part of the story doesn't help. For example, how did the man get seperated from his penis found in the freezer? Uh, was he resting it there to cool down, and have to cut it off to get free? Or, is there some other explanation? Weird stuff. However, some of the news I stumbled on this morning wasn't quite as funny. A missing 13 year old girl was found tied to a bed by some sick fuck she met on the Internet. Personally, I found the Internet a great tool for meeting people; shit like this is just scary. Maybe it's having good instincts, or because I'm not a 13 year old girl. Or, perhaps it's just the way that the media work at spinning the news. CNN has decided to increase it's journalistic integrity by declaring that Paula Zahn is sexy. That helps me trust her to deliver the truth in a timely fashion.
I'm not sure what the answer is. A high school in Swaziland is requiring chastity pledges, but that does seem a bit odd coming from a King who was fined one cow for violating his own chastity pledge, by marrying a 17 year old girl as his ninth wife.
Enough of this nonsense, next I'll be talking about the false rumor that Britney Spears is going to pose nude for PETA. Keeping dumb animals safe and all that. Maybe we should protect fat men from the kissing chimp too.
Enough! or too much.
----- --------TITLE: Get out of town DATE: 01/07/2002 7:28:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Dark RoadsDriving last night, I was awed by the carpet of stars, and dark country roads leading hundreds of directions in Arkansas. Then, in my e-mail tonight comes a quote I haven’t heard before:
Those dark Arkansas roads, that is the sound I'm after. — Miles Davis
People often say that writers write what they know. They also write what they love. And no one loves in general. One loves in particular, in a distinct landscape, with its own weather, shaded or exposed by specific trees, at one time and not another, in an idiosyncratic language spoken a certain way and all those details evoke what is most important, most fleeting, most missed.
. . . About what I advise aspiring writers and students of writing: I advise them to begin a daily practice of reading and writing and to allow the books they love to enter their regular lives.— Mona Simpson
Maybe it’s just me, but I think that blogging represents a quantum leap in writing practice, because of its very nature: frequency is the key, more than brevity or connection with current events or dialogue. And there is no denying the power of passion, only it’s lasting power. Sustain is a major issue, and looking at people with the longest lasting and most consistently interesting blogs like not.so.soft and What’s New Pussycat shows that it takes a balance of involvement and detachment to keep things moving smoothly. The dynamic of that is interesting to me, because after time reading blogs, I genuinely care about the happiness and well being of the people who write blogs only when there exists enough of them to have some sense of pathos, an identification with pieces of their personality that I connect with. However, without detached consideration that these things are, after all, only words— things grind to a halt; excessive feeling can cause paralysis.
I’m grateful that some people like to read me, and I try to balance my overthinking with some things that are at least a little amusing. I felt a serious connection with some of Barry Lopez’s comments that closed the article about the Key West Literary conference:
In my experience, if you want to write, nobody's going to stop you. . . .
Working with language is just a part of your personality. The public makes a judgment as to whether it's relevant to one or 40,000 people.
Read widely and deeply.
Realize that you can go to workshops and learn about the technique but you can't learn how to be somebody.
Pay attention to learning who you are and what your deep interests are, and pursue those things.
“Get out of town.”
. . . Put yourself in places where you don't feel you have the answers, because there are no answers.
. . . You can't teach people hunger and discipline. If you don't have that, being a writer is just not going to happen.
Find out what is alive in each person and try to bring it to life.
When I got a sandwich this afternoon, I was thrilled with the clerk. She was a large black woman who rattled off the options with the focus and directness of an airline pilot reading a pre-flight checklist. When she got to the “name” part, she said: “Thanks Mr. Jeff, I’ll call you when it’s ready.”
Mr. Jeff, I kind of like that. I’ve been dreading the idea of students calling me Mr. Ward, because Mr. Ward is either my father, or me when I get into trouble. When people call me Mr., it’s never a good thing. So I think I’ll put that on the syllabus for my classes: Jeff, or Mr. Jeff, not Mr. Ward, unless you’re pissed at me for some reason.
Tracking down a light dimmer, it suddenly struck me just how weird this place is. Virtually everyone talks to each other, and you can’t go shopping without having at least a few conversations in the stores. For a Californian, this is just plain weird. In California, people mind their own business and don’t nice each other to death. But it does make it seem warmer here, even when it’s cold.
But the real day-maker was the stop at a convienence store where a tall man with a strong resemblance to Michael Jordan was wearing and enormous white fuzzy fez. It actually looked quite wonderful on him, even if he might resemble a flattened black-stemmed Q-Tip.
Ah, it's much better in here now. Dimmers also lower the color temperature of the light and the room is warm, friendly and comfortable. Now, I've got to get to work!
Running across a busy four-lane street, I find that my ankle still doesn’t like that at all. My career as a runner is done. I’m taking advantage of the car I rented over the weekend to get my old Ford serviced, and luckily the garage is right across the street from the rental place. But in unpacking from my drive I took out all the CDs, and ended up listening to NPR for the first time in a long time. The program was about ECT.
Some of my favorite creative people have been through electro-convulsive therapy, many of them involuntarily, including Roy Harper. I started thinking about why ECT is such an effective treatment for depression. I think the answer may be hinted at by one of the side effects, memory loss.
One of the curious things about creative activity is the long association of the creative muse with memory. Why is that? Sure, writers and other artists mine memory for the material to flesh out their creations, but it is paradoxical to think that new creations can only come from old experiences. Going back to Blake, it seems that he is one of the few artists that really appreciated the deathly grip that memory has on us. It makes our thoughts and actions a futile rehash of evils that have happened before. Blake ranted about replacing “the daughters of memory,” the muses, with “the daughters of inspiration.” Maybe, the evils of depression also feed on the daughters of memory.
ECT shakes up those pathways, disrupting memory, and allows people to start over. Maybe that’s what the muses are really all about. The disruption of those familiar patterns, allowing the brain to take in new breath, and hence, new life. As a depressive, I know that I never want to get out, or do anything, or confront anything, when I’m depressed. So it locks into a cycle, chains you up inside your own memories until you just can’t shake it off. The only weapon I have found to fight it is to keep searching for new things that get me past it. So far, so good. I’m always out there, looking to hit on those daughters of inspiration.
Damn, it's still too bright in here though. I forgot to buy a new dimmer, but I did get my books for a class on “Writing and Healing,” six books, including a couple of novels. They love to load the stuff on in grad school. I can’t wait to dig into some of the theory there: I’ve always been puzzled by the idea that by writing about bad experiences in our past we can overcome them through catharsis. I’ve never experienced that, but writing does seem to help. It seems to me that being slaves to memory is particularly bad when it comes to tragic experiences. And yet, it works for some reason. Writing can make you feel better. This is really fascinating stuff, to me, I’m just hoping that there isn’t a bunch of new-agey feel good crap in it.
----- --------TITLE: Wow, I'm now a teacher DATE: 01/07/2002 1:08:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Damn it’s bright in hereThe dimmer for my halogen light died, so getting up and turning it on makes the living room seem like the proverbial “white room” now. But it’s just as well. Got the phone call I needed, with information that I’m glad I didn’t have before.
I have to teach an 8 a.m. class. Yuck, to say the least. Not a morning person, as the lack of entries in the typical 9 a.m.- 12 p.m. slot of my blog might suggest. As Tom Waits said, “Never saw the morning, till I stayed up all night.” My second class is at noon, and I’m afraid that the 8 a.m. students may get shortchanged; my brain just doesn’t work that well in the morning. So I predict a lot of handouts, just to make sure that I get my point across even if I can’t speak coherently.
Both classes are Composition II, research papers, so of course I’m thrilled about that. I just don’t think I’d be that comfortable with remedial classes. I want to make smart people more brilliant; it seems to me that would be more rewarding than just getting people up to speed. But maybe that’s just me. And I do think the ability to research things is the first major step on that ladder.
Timing has been perfect for the last few days; I woke up just before the phone call, so I was actually reasonably coherent when I got it. Now it’s time to get to work on syllabi, and perhaps most important, find the floor of this goddamned apartment. I feel pretty jazzed, and I just had to share first.
Life is good, for a change!
So, it was a weekend filled with frivolous things. Lots of just plain life, unmediated, perhaps slightly focused. There are plenty of story ideas, and a perceptible shift in priorities, just in time for school to knock me back in line anyway. Still, for the first time in many years it felt like a real vacation. I needed it so badly, to back away and get perspective on some things. I feel positively cleansed. What did I do? Nearly nothing, except getting the hell out of town.
So, I’m easily amused. But for the first time since I can remember, the experience wasn’t related to words much at all. It was more about sunsets and stars, about wheels turning outside rather than inside my head. Yeah, so it was just a few days. The other wheels never stop for long, but it was nice to give them a little rest. Maybe I’ll generate something tangible from it, but that wasn’t the point. It felt good to be moving, and stopped at the same time. Coming back into the city, the flickering lights reminded me that it’s just damn pretty around here, even with a few oddities. You just have to open your eyes.
But I must admit that seeing the "Hickory Shopping Center" just outside of town is now "Hick enter" Okay, so I lied; that’s at least slightly word related.
Catching up with Wood s lot brought a visit to Christopher Green's Where Did the Word "Cognitive" Come From Anyway? Though Green claims that the word has a well-wrought meaning, the dividing line is a finely teased one. Considerations of emotions are, for cognitive psychology anyway, limited to those which influence “truth-evaluative” behaviors. And that, is the reason why Kant was forced to leap into metaphysics to explain why they influence our thinking. There’s a problem, an antimony that can’t be resolved, though it can be explained:
- Thesis. The judgment of taste is not based upon concepts, for if it were, it would be open to dispute (decision by means of proofs).
- Antithesis. The judgment of taste is based on concepts; for otherwise, despite the diversity of judgment, there could be no room for contention in the matter (a claim to the necessary agreement of others with this judgment).
But how can such a thing ever be evaluated? It depends purely on the “sample” of the people whose opinions you admit. Because someone else doesn’t like what you do, does that make them wrong? I don’t think so, so that’s why I lean toward the thesis, that there is no way that taste can be subject to “concepts.” However, how can you explain that people can, and do, agree? Kant fell back on a sensus communis, a kind of public sense that falls outside the realm of concepts. Because such metaphysical speculations do not willingly submit to the “truth-value” test, we’re left with faith.
Therein lies the paradox. Cognitive approaches must, in order to embrace emotional decision making, place some value on things suprasensible, which effectively violates the dictum that they only be concerned with “truth-evaluative” behaviors. There’s just no accounting for taste, in the truest sense of the word.
Apart from the late night stupiphanies, I’ve been doing too much thinking about the old reason vs. emotion thing. This keeps leading me back to Kant, not as a trigger, but as perhaps the progenitor of the cognitive approach to emotions, and the questioning of the subject/object nature of feelings.
A review I read a while ago, To Feel and Feel Not by Simon Blackburn, addresses a point of view that seems quite Kantian. Without emotion, our decision making processes are at a standstill, so it seems that any theory of judgment or reason must embrace the emotions as a cognitive faculty. This can be done without “emotional sogginess” of the therapy industry, as Blackburn so succinctly puts it. Feelings do impact on an instinctual “fight or flight” level, but most important to me is consideration of what overrides that basic form of emotional cognition: our perception of the sublime and the beautiful.
It occurs to me that there is a difference between reflexive feelings, and recursive ones. Some feelings fold back upon themselves, constantly rethinking themselves, reevaluating themselves, reprocessing, reordering, refiguring, etc. Roland Barthe’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments is a perfect example of that. Some feelings, like love, are just so self-reflective that they seem to develop a life of their own, outside the stimulus that provoked the emotional arousal. Lust, on the other hand, seems to be more purely reflexive, a response to a stimulus that fades fairly quickly once the stimulus is removed. I was also thinking about the way that my brain processed situations when I was photographing them.
Instinct, in the flavor that I embraced, was not a static thing. It was a constant revaluation of the scene, emotionally, not logically, which constructed sets of probabilities regarding the best place to stand, and the best time to press the button. It went far beyond simple stimulus-response behaviour. It wasn’t just a matter of an instant, but a sort of stepping into the flow of a situation, recursively revaluating it each instant, not for logical possibilities, but for emotional ones. Shit happens. Be prepared, be there, before it happens. There is a nearly imperceptible delay between when you press the shutter and the image is seized; you have to anticipate, and it becomes a sort of mind-reading activity. I used to think of it as reflexive, but I’m reconsidering this. I’m beginning to think that it’s recursive. Decisions based on a continuing response, not a momentary one, to emotional arousal.
Love reinvents itself; lust does not. Left with no object to react to, love turns away to other things, into life itself, sustaining itself without the need for external stimuli, or governance. That is of course unless you’re a pathetic romantic suicide like Werther: to think that love is dependent on anyone’s reaction to it, is the tragic mistake. As Shelley said in Prometheus Unbound “all things are subject, but eternal Love.” Maybe it’s the recursion. Yeah, that’s the ticket.
About 2:45 a.m. I woke up. It was as if someone had driven a knife from a point just behind my right ear all the way through to my nose. I hate headaches that wake you up. Four Advil. Toss and turn. Peanut butter (hey, it works sometimes). Nothing would assuage my swelling itching brain.
The only treatment that is reasonably effective in stubborn cases like this is a hot bath. It speeds the progress of the pain relievers and opens the sinuses so that perhaps the brain has a little more room. I lit my Catholic prayer candles, not for any spiritual reason, but because the light from the regular fixture hurt my eyes. As I sunk under the water, it occurred to me that these candles had been totally unused since this time last year, when I dug them out during a massive statewide power failure. They didn't have any special properties, because the damn electricity was out for a week, so I'm sure they have little in the way of curative powers. But water and darkness usually do. I lay motionless underwater for almost half an hour before a thought would finally penetrate my brain.
Ridiculous. Just where did that word come from anyway? I always get that feeling as I wrinkle and shrink under the influence of water. It couldn’t be from getting rid of the dick, which shrinks so suddenly when subjected to water. Besides that, the penis doesn't really disappear, it just retreats, cowering. It’s impossible to maintain seriousness in a candlelit tub of water. The cold air was tickling my cheek, but as I moved my neck I could feel the hot water loosening up the muscles a bit. I began to have some confidence that I might indeed, live through the night. My eyes began to open eventually, and I had to look it up.
From the Latin, ridiculus, laughable, literally from ridEre, to laugh. At least now I can smile about it, and try to go back to sleep, after writing this ridiculous blog entry. Hey, at least it wasn’t about another word that begins with F.
In general, our first impressions are true ones— the chief difficulty is in making sure they are the first. In early youth we read a poem, for instance, and are enraptured with it. At manhood we are assured by our reason that we had no reason to be enraptured. But some years elapse, and we return to our primitive admiration, just as matured judgment enables us to precisely see what and why we admired.
Thus, as individuals, we think in cycles, and may, from the frequency or infrequency of our revolutions about the various thoughts form an accurate estimate of the advance of our thought toward maturity. It is really wonderful to observe how closely, in all the essentials of truth, the child-opinion coincides with that of the man proper — of the man at his best.
Edgar Allan Poe
I really need to read more American lit. This reminds me of some things that I was thinking about regarding the predictable patterns of writing. It’s as if the thoughts go round and round, and assume forms which we become comfortable with. Perhaps it’s instinct at work, trying to show us where our real concerns are, what impulses are the valid ones, etc. But people get locked in bad cycles too, so the problem remains: how do you tell? Maybe it just takes time, watching the wheels go round and round.
I don't think reason really helps much in that respect, but maybe it's just me.
After writing the muddled observations about Kant, leave it to Edgar Allan Poe to bring the big issues into sharper focus. In a short essay called “Instinct vs. Reason— A Black Cat” he said what I was thinking far better than I ever could:
Instinct, so far from being an inferior reason, is perhaps the most exacted intellect of them all. It will appear to the true philosopher as the divine mind itself acting immediately upon it’s creatures . . .
The leading distinction between instinct and reason seems to be, that, while one is infinitely more exact, the more certain, and the more far-seeing in its sphere of action— the sphere of action of the other is of the far wider extent.
I think Poe had a pretty good handle on Shelley too: “If ever poet sang— as a bird sings— earnestly — impulsively— with utter abandonment — to himself solely— for the mere joy of his own song...” Of course, like many critics of his time, he felt as if Shelley was a poor craftsman, and his works were not finely worked out. I’d disagree on some poems, but agree on others. However, the intuition that Shelley’s poems were just sketches, notes to himself where “what seems like diffuseness of one idea is a conglomerate concision of many” just seems right on the mark. Maybe that’s my problem: I read too much Shelley.
Poe contrasts Shelley with Tennyson, who was perhaps the finest of craftsmen, though not always the most intuitive of poets and proposes that if by “happy chance” the analytic qualities of Tennyson, and the intuitive exuberance of Shelley should meet in one poet, it would be the greatest poet the world had ever seen. However Poe notes the antagonism between the qualities, and perhaps the impossibility of such a quest.
I was thinking about the space/time thing, and couldn’t really get my mind around the problem. But then I started thinking about the leap of intuition, in the media stone age that McLuhan wrote in, that it took to come up with the idea that space and time would be changed by the way that we communicate. Is communication an inevitability, or is it determined by the process of cognition itself? I’m not a fan of either option, predestination or reason. Especially if thinking is exclusively the process of logic, or if you're asking me to believe in an invisible man who pulls the strings.
I tend to be ruled by impulses. Of course I think about my impulses, but what form does that thought take? I ended up reading more on Kant. When I was doing some research on the sublime, we crossed paths. The power of strong experience, the stretching quality of confrontation with the unknown, was proof that “practical reason” extended past fears for personal safety, and deeper into a sort of intuition which is not derived from logic alone. Kant saw it as a sort of synthesis, particularly with regard to our sense of beauty. Beauty, for Kant was a thing without antecedent, determined when our imagination and our understanding are in harmony. So, where does this magic come from? How do you tell a good intuition from a bad one? Kant was quick to point out that our concepts of the sublime and the beautiful operate outside morality.
Intuition is formed from an immediate relation to an object, according to Kant, and he further postulates that there is a substratum, something that underlies individuals which persists even as they pass away which is not deducible through any sort of categorical, logical judgment. So, are primary judgements— things based more on feeling and intuition, more valid than judgments based on comparisons of logical alternatives? It’s hard to say. I’ve made some mistakes in that regard, but for the most part, I believe that they are.
For Kant, time and space were a priori and outside the consideration of judgment. But I think that the “substratum,” the place where intuition must come from, is subject to time. This is not too contradictory with the idea of the substratum as soul, because it implies that there is a flux, a changing quality to it, perhaps almost in a karmic sense. So, are those flashes of insight based on some sort of proximity to soul?
I’m getting muddled in all this, but it sort of relates to the connections that are forged thorough communication. It seems like there is a need to touch “the concerns of all other men,” as McLuhan put it. I don't think these communications are logically driven. It’s about touching souls. We want to reach into that substratum, and it does seem to be almost by design. I think it only crosses in brief moments, in flashes, but it’s there.
The words I used to live by as a photographer were “chance favors the prepared mind.” I had to get myself psychically prepared to accept, and trust my intuition as to when to press the button. I suppose that’s why I favor intuition, over logic.
I was thinking about some stuff, and flipped through some old paperbacks found from a used book store. Years ago my reading was much more random, less focused than it is now. But there seems to be an odd pattern to the randomness, an enjoyment of frivolity. More than ever, I like the feeling of being outside.
Electric circuitry has overthrown the regime of “time” and “space” and pours upon us instantly and continuously the concerns of all other men. It has reconstituted dialogue on a global scale. Its message is Total Change, ending psychic, social, economic, and political parochialism. The old civic, state, and national groupings have become unworkable. Nothing can be further from the spirit of the new technology than “a place for everything and everything in its place.” You can’t go home again.Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage (1967).
It seems that blogs fall into three major types
1) Blogs with links to interesting and funny stuff and people
2) Blogs expounding opinions
3) Blogs which focus on self discovery
Many blogs combine all three of the above. But I think it is the everyday logging nature of blogs which distinguish them. The need to publish on a regular basis. The structure that the most current blog entry is first. This seems to me what distinguishes blogs from personal web pages.
I agree with the focus on temporality here. Perhaps time has not been overthrown nearly so completely as space, by the new technology. There is a certain mortality to writing when it’s presented in this format, a reality that makes it about life rather than just a means of exchanging ideas, because like life, blogging is temporal. Perhaps the dreamed of release from temporality only comes from death, or in the “petit mort.”
Something has spoken to me in the night, burning the tapers of the waning year; something has spoken in the night, and told me I shall die, I know not where. Saying:
“To lose the earth you know, for greater knowing; to lose the life you have, for greater life; to leave the friends you loved, for greater loving; to find a land more kind than home, more large than earth—
—Wheron the pillars of this earth are founded, toward which the conscience of the world is tending— a wind is rising, and the rivers flow.”
Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again
I suppose that’s what bothers me most about the theorizing about hypertext. You can’t overthrow time, except through death or orgasm. Theories of writing that don’t include the temporal aspect seem to be hopelessly doomed.
One of the best New Year’s I’ve had in a while. Now, I look around the place and realize that I have far too much to accomplish and too little time. There isn’t much need for a year in review, because it’s all here lurking in the archives of oblivion. And that’s where they should be, really, because “the best impetus for moving forward is to have something to run away from” (Eric Hoffer, loosely paraphrased). But to be completely honest, that isn’t really the case this year, and I’m happy about that.
With help, I’ve managed to avoid being excessively maudlin (I think, anyway) and have had lots of good stuff to concentrate on in the now rather than the then. But history is always a part of us, and can’t be ignored. Sometimes I wonder if its all a dream, as things tend to merge together and transform in the present, and I increasingly think that while detachment is needed to deal with the past, it’s not detachment from the past, but from the present that allows the past to make sense. Everything is unique; it’s not the same as it once was. Experience changes everything.
I’m flattered that there are a few people out there who enjoy reading these changes. I know that the process of trying to write something at least vaguely interesting each day has changed me. Writing is a good thing, especially when it captures this process of discovery. I won’t say that I’m “unfolding” but my writing certainly exposes a few of the wrinkles. I don’t think that it’s a good analogy, because that would imply that when everything is said and done, I’ll be flat. I seek to avoid that at all costs. If you’ve been following me for any length of time, you know that I can be pretty convoluted. I plan to stay that way. And I plan to keep writing about the thoughts that cross those convolutions each day.
So, no year in review. Just an anxious looking forward, hopefully to better things.
----- --------TITLE: Clocks move on DATE: 12/31/2001 10:03:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Writing this song won't take very long
Trying not to use the world "old"
Thinking about taking chances and doubts
That still linger in the cold
Looking forward, all that I can see
Is good things happening to you and to me
I'm not waiting for times to change
I'm gonna live like a free-roaming soulNeil Young, "Looking Forward"
Happy New Year and all that. Time marches on. Just remember, financing is available. Call now. Operators are standing by. A day of sloth; maybe my brain will function again after midnight.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauna EMAIL: URL: http://shauny.org/pussycat DATE: 01/01/2002 12:46:00 AM happy new year :) love all these photos. woohoo! ----- --------TITLE: Church Chat DATE: 12/31/2001 3:19:00 PM AUTHOR: Linkage ----- BODY: Church chatAimee from Raindogs highlighted the story of another book burning. It’s Harry Potter, of course. We must “save the children.” The nice thing about it was that she also provided the phone number to the Pastor’s secretary, so that you can let your voice be heard about the felicity of book burning. Feel like annoying small minds? Phone them:
Rhonda is the Pastor’s Secretary: She will tell you all about the night of the “ Holy Bonfire”.
Christ Community Church
(505) 437-4241
2960 Scenic Dr, Alamogordo, NM 88310
Moreover many of those who had become believers came and openly confessed that they had been using magical spells. And a good many of those who formerly practised magic collected their books and burnt them publicly.Acts 19:18,19 New English Bible, Oxford.
Being the curious type, I had to take a look at the passage to find the context for this biblical support of book burning. It’s really quite interesting. It seems that there were a group of Jewish mystics (Ephesians) who often performed exorcisms. They often called upon the name of Jesus to perform these rites, though they were not Christians. An evil spirit, during one of these exorcisms, rose up and said:
“Jesus I know, and Paul I know; but who are you?” (Acts 19: 15)
Of course the evil spirit gave them a sound thrashing, and they rushed off and burnt their books. Some of them became Christians, and the Bible also is quick to note what the books were worth: “when the value of the books was calculated, it was found to come to fifty thousand silver coins” (Acts 19:19). I can only hope that these “false mystics” that are burning JK Rowling’s books provide similar financial support to her. They do have to pay for the books they’re burning, after all.
Why don’t people who use the Bible to support such ludicrous actions grasp the irony of yanking words out of context? It was the “magicians” that burned the books, not Paul and the Apostles. “God did extraordinary miracles through Paul . . . and the evil spirits came out of them” (Acts 19: 11). God and his apostles didn’t burn books: only the embarrassed Ephesians did! So, have the people at Christ's Church been practicing magic, and now they need to atone for their sins?
Sometimes, you’ve just got to laugh. Maybe it's all the excess nuclear radiation from developing bombs in Alamogordo. Maybe it's the heat that's baked their brains. Maybe they just need something fun to do on Sunday. Burning things up is usually the American way to have fun.
I love it when the voices and words don't match the pictures. Just like real life. Trying to piece together meanings from little clues, it doesn't really matter much if you're right or wrong. The basic narrative is so engrained in our consciousness, that we construct meaning without really having a sense of the full picture. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was perhaps the prototype for most science fiction. Man reaches too far. Gets stomped.
Looking down at the OED, still open from last night I see another great one:
Futilitarian
- (A person) dedicated to futile pursuits
Sci-fi movies might be silly, but it was quite refreshing to see Val Kilmer blast off while saying Fuck this Planet!. Red Planet was also novel in that there were no cold-war type tyrannical subplots, the real meat and potatoes of most sci-fi. No evil military, no vindictive monsters, just machines gone wrong and an ecology impossible to predict. Not a great film, but amusing anyway. After all, sometimes, it's just fun to watch Tokyo get stomped.
So much for the thin veneer of scholarship that seems to be dominating my blog lately. Now I'm just getting silly.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: demitria monde thraam EMAIL: monde@involution.org URL: http://involution.org DATE: 01/05/2002 6:53:00 PM I have been an old Japanese Monster Movie fan since I was barely old enough to say "Godzilla" properly, although when I think about it, it must have come out sounding a lot more like "Gojira", which WOULD be the proper (Nipponese) way to say it.I take it upon myself to research the strangest things. Fuzzy? Just where did this description come from, and what does it really mean? Sounds like a three-am project to me.
So, consulting the online Merriam Webster reveals:
Etymology: perhaps from Low German fussig loose, spongy
Date: 1713
1 : marked by or giving a suggestion of fuzz
2 : lacking in clarity or definition
1 : Not firm, spongy.
2 : Frayed into loose, light fibres; covered with fuzz; fluffy.
3 : Blurred, indistinct; imprecise, vague.
It was somewhat disheartening though, to find out that fuzzy-wuzzy wasn't a bear. Apparently, he had hair. According to the OED, he was either a black person, or a Sudanese soldier, or a resident of New Guinea.
I suppose it's my fault for posting while fuzzy. I'm just not sure if it's spongy, frayed, or indistinct. I think I'll opt for spongy. Because I absorb the weirdest things, and . . . well, I'll leave it at that.
----- --------TITLE: Tinker, again DATE: 12/29/2001 10:56:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
I was entertaining myself a little with Words on Words by John Bremner. I ran across a new synonym for “stripper” that I hadn’t heard before:
Ecdysiast
He thought it was a good idea to relate stripteasing to “the associated zoological phenomenon of molting” and he flirted with moltician before rejecting it because of its likeness to mortician. He then came up with ecdysiast, from the Greek ekdysis, the stripping of an outer layer of skin.
The spell check in Microsoft Word recognizes it, but I didn’t. I have yet to see a stripper remove their skin, but I’m sure they could get top dollar among those who enjoy a good public humiliation. I suppose it depends on which part of the activity you prefer, the strip or the tease. I suppose that Gypsy Rose Lee was right:
“Ecdysiast he calls me! Why, the man is an intellectual snob. He has been reading books. Dictionaries. We don’t wear feathers and molt them off . . . . What does he know about stripping?”
Sorry Mencken, but I think it’s more about the tease.
There was a cheesy line in some movie I was watching a few weeks ago that I wanted to jot down to remember:
"But Honey, you promised to take me to Egypt to see the giant sphinxster!"
I was also thinking about how much I miss having a cat. It's been a long time, but I told myself since I'd be moving on from here that I shouldn't complicate things any more than I have to. Now, today, I turn around and find cats and sphinxes in the same poem!
The wise men love the cats for their perversity;
They love them passionately for their sensual seasons;
Sweet subtle cats, so traitorous in their treasons
That, as they, shiver in their dire adversity.
Lovers of strange science, and of sensuality,
They seek the intense horror that makes them furious;
They had been seized as his ghastly slaves by Erebus,
Had they inclined to him their sombre savagery.
They assume in dreaming the ancient attitudes
Of the great Sphinxes in the depths of their solitudes
That seem always to sleep in their virginity;
Their pregnant reins are full of Signs of Magic,
Strange sparks of gold, like fine dust, magically
Shine like stars in their regards, tenebrous, tragic.Baudelaire, "The Cats," from Les Fleurs de Mal
Maybe it's the glint of constant curiosity, meted out with disdain. Cats always seem so wise. But they can also be little sphincters, slaves of Erebus, the personification of darkness. Maybe it's me, but they often seem to be dreaming, lost in their own world. Maybe that's why I admire them so much.
----- --------TITLE: Passion DATE: 12/29/2001 5:59:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Thinking about passionI’ve always been drawn to passionate people. I suppose there is an element of the moth to flame thing; it causes a lot of suffering. But looking at the etymology, it seems to make more sense: from pati, the Latin verb “to suffer.”
Is the usage of passion to be suffering really obsolete? The first thing that I lamented when I moved to Arkansas was that I was now separate from my friends who really burned. To feel passion is to feel desire; I’d make a crappy Buddhist, because I can’t ever seem to shut down completely. I am always desirous. I don’t want my desire to cease, and I feel drained when I am around people who don’t feel the same sort of passion. But the end result seems to always be suffering. Maybe Buddah was right, but I just can’t see any other way to live.
So, I’m always looking for some way to find more fuel, to burn it up, to convert it to some sort of flame that generates light, and warmth. But that’s perhaps the root of the problem. Another usage of passion is the sense of being acted upon by outside forces. The only way to avoid this is to close up, turn within, and avoid contact with the world. Fuck that. To live a passionate life is to be acted upon, influenced by the world and to suffer as a result. Sounds enticing, eh?
I think that some people just don’t have a choice in the matter. They wear their nerves on the outside, and don’t have any choice but to feel. I sort of admire people who don’t have this problem, but I can’t really imagine it. All my senses remain open, reaching, searching, and trying to construct new worlds. Worlds where passion can be sustained.
Passion is “an object of desire or deep interest.” I feel that way about the world, and life in general. Even with the suffering, it beats the hell out of being bored. That’s why the teased-out fine distinctions of amorous discourse fascinate me. Barthes speaks of “loves languor” in a way that makes me really think about the delicious quality to waiting. As frustrating as it is, it’s a moment where time stops, and everything is consumed in flames, in passion:
The Satyr says: I want my desire to be satisfied immediately. If I see a sleeping face, parted lips, an open hand, I want to be able hurl myself upon them. This Satyr— the figure of the Immediate— is the very contrary of the Languorous. In languor, I merely wait: “I knew no end to desiring you.” (Desire is everywhere, but in the amorous state it becomes something very special: languor.)
A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
I think that’s what great writing aspires to. The ability to suspend time in languorous desire. But the object of that desire is always a carefully constructed fiction, of things read and misread. It’s a fictional world, but damn it I’d like to live there. Where I’m constantly feeling desire, constantly feeling as if time has stopped, beating mortality through love. Writing has dealt with death, time, and mortality from the beginning. It’s only weapon isn’t conquest, or greatness, but the languor of transmitting the passion, the love for life stretching backward and forward and time, unceasing, and unchanging.
Sustaining those feelings is the greatest goal of language, I think, in the broadest sense. Because languor is in its own way a suffering, a waiting for desires to be fulfilled, I just can’t imagine life without passion or suffering. Making it last, without end, is perhaps the ultimate problem. I don’t see how it can be done, without a certain amount of fiction.
Here's a nice gallery of naked ladies on bowling pins.[via Raindogs]
Jack's Christmas post from a homeless shelter made me think about why I like Tom Waits so much:
It really hits home down here how appropriate his name is, too. Tom Waits. Waits for what? For everything. That's what it's all about down here. Wait for food. Wait for shelter. Wait for a hot shower or a cold shitter. You wait for everything in this system. It's not the cold or the brutality that gets you most days, not the hunger or the pain, but the tedious nature of standing in long lines with no promise of getting what yr waiting for at the end of it all...
Song
But all love's soft, yet mighty powers,
It is a thing unfit
That men should fuck in time of flowers,
Or when the smock's beshit.
Fair nasty nymph, be clean and kind,
And all my joys restore
By using paper still behind
And spunges for before.
My spotless flames can ne'er decay
If after every close,
My smoking prick escape the fray
Without a bloody nose.
If thou wouldst have me true, be wise
And take to cleanly sinning;
None but fresh lovers' pricks can rise
At Phyllis in foul linen.John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, c. Sept. 1680.
Now that's a, er, grounded view of love. But what would you expect from the first poet to publish a poem containing the word fuck.
----- --------TITLE: Stitches DATE: 12/28/2001 1:50:00 AM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Language is a skin; I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tips of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly, focuses upon a single signified, which is “I desire you,” and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); on the other hand, I enwrap the other in my words, I caress, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure.
(To speak amorously is to expend without an end in sight, without a crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm.)Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
A recent program on HBO, def poetry, proclaims that it isn’t the sort of poetry you read in school. They’re right. The self-conscious prattle of folks like Jewel wouldn’t have any place at my school. Neither would the sing-song rap style delivery: that sort of basic metrics was nearly over by the mid-eighteenth century. Stilted diction is precisely what Wordsworth and Coleridge were so on about in Lyrical Ballads. Poetry is about much more than merely sounding “poetic.” However, I suppose what Russell Simmons really meant to say was that “it’s all about reality and passion.” I guess my classroom experience of poetry was different: for most of my teachers, that’s what it was all about too.
A moment with one of my teachers, Russell Murphy, has stuck with me for a long time now. I believe we were discussing Shelley when Murphy launched into an exposition about the power of love:
“Love is stronger than hate because it requires no object.”
I’ve been thinking about that every since. Even on the surface, it seems like a troublesome idea. What about the overwhelming power of teen-angst? Or the pointless anger of the alienated individual in society? I suppose that these things inevitably find some object to manifest their hatred; while it may sometimes develop in a vacuum, hate cannot survive without some way to vent its spleen. Can love?
In the most basic constructions, love takes an object. I love you. I love chocolate. I love language. In this sense, it is transitive. But reviewing English Grammar: Principles and Facts by Jeffrey Kaplan, a hard-line Chomskian text, it offers the suggestion that verbs which behave as both transitive and intransitive may indeed really be intransitive, because their objects are usually linked through causal relation. Therefore, the use of verbs like love with an object are merely a special case, with an active supportive grammar, rather than a unique linguistic variety of verb, separate from the catagories of transitive or intransitive. Of course, the same argument could then be applied to making hate an intransitive verb as well.
I suspect the difference is one of sustain. Love is often sustained through language; the rhetoric of hate usually exhausts itself, exhausts itself with the disappearance of its object. And yet love sustains itself, subject to no force but the inevitable desire which commands that it be actualized. It moves on and on, inexorably reaching for the “other.” Even after the being or object that provoked it is gone, love finds new life in language.
Barthes seems to feel that love is transitive, unlike Murphy. Nevertheless, at the same time he seems to grant special privilege to the language of love, when it wakes up and accepts that discourse does not require a direct object.
To know that one does not write for the other, to know that these things I am going to write will never cause me to be loved by the one I love (the other), to know that writing compensates for nothing, sublimates nothing, that it is precisely there where you are not— this is the beginning of writing.
Barthes, ibid.
I am caught in this contradiction: on the one hand, I believe I know better than anyone and triumphantly assert my knowledge to the other (“I know you—I’m the only one who really knows you!”); and on the other hand, I am often struck by the obvious fact that the other is impenetrable, intractable, not to be found; I cannot open up the other, trace back the other’s origins, solve the riddle. Where does the other come from? Who is the other? I wear myself out, I shall never know.
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments
Watching some old western with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn Monroe on AMC, the commentator mentioned Mitchum’s method of dealing with Monroe’s method acting: he’d slap her on the backside, and say, “let’s just play this scene like real people.”
I left late in the afternoon, on Christmas Eve, for the drive to my parents. It seemed to be a good omen to enter the freeway behind a ’66 Chevelle SS, 427, belching smoke and fire with a front windshield cracked like a spider web radiating around its rearview mirror. The drive was smooth, only five sections of one-lane compared to the eight of the Thanksgiving drive. I got to the nuclear power plant at Russellville as the sun went down.
I always have a Wordsworthian spot of time when passing through Russellville, and this time was no exception. The clouds were fanned out like the fronds of a palm leaf, irradiating electric colors around the pure white water plume. I took out the tape of stories I was listening to, from James Joyce’s Dubliners. Eveline pissed me off. Why didn’t she have the courage to go with her lover?
I was starting to get drowsy anyhow, so I put on The Grey Race by Bad Religion. Nothing like punk-rock with multi-syllabic words to wake you right up.
splintered dreams of unity (our lives are parallel)
so far from reality (our lives are parallel)
independent trajectories (our lives are parallel)
separate terms of equality (our lives are parallel)
. . .
side by side suffering loneliness (our lives are parallel)
phoney collective progress (our lives are parallel)
accepting that it's all such a mess (our lives are parallel)
gesturing without hope of redress (our lives are parallel)
But I decided that this year would be different. Last year, Christmas was an adventure. I read Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus on Christmas day, then drove through the worst ice-storm in a decade to get home. After getting home, the power went out for a week and I shivered under the covers listening to Tom Waits through headphones. Not this year. Please, not again, this year.
I suppose that’s why I took the Barthes with me. I was hoping for something more uplifting, and I suppose I found it. I couldn’t sleep, as usual, and made my way through 160 pages. Mom and Dad seemed to be recovering fairly well from David’s death, but there was this sort of aura. We talked about David’s kids, mostly, and how they were doing. It seems that James had his license suspended, and Mom mused about how “26 is such a difficult age.” It was for me, that’s for damn sure. As I recall, I was living out of my car, and showering at friends houses so that I could keep my job. My brother seemed to be in fairly good spirits, given that he lost his job just before Christmas. We sat and traded stories of crazy youth for a while. Sometimes it helps to remember that once upon a time, things were fun. I suppose that’s why the bad part of those years doesn’t bother me that much. They were fun years, after all.
Driving back, the sky was dark and I wasn’t in the mood to listen to literature. I put on a tape of the Meat Puppets first four albums, and remembered how much fun I was having when those albums came out. It isn’t punk rock to march to, unless you’ve had an incredible amount of acid.
Got no head
It's a bucket with teeth
It likes to dream
It likes to sleep
It knows hot
It knows cool
It know what's what
It's no fool
Fill up the bucket with
Whatever you got
Make sure it's something
That the bucket likes a lot
The Barthes book has triggered a lot of little epiphanies when it comes to the process of writing, and just “who” I think of my audience as. I suppose I want to keep writing in a rather special way: with a goal of the state of constant arousal. It seems like a higher way to use language, rather than just reporting the state of disunion.
When passion's trance is overpast,
If tenderness of truth should last
Or live—whilst all wild feelings keep
Some mortal slumber, dark and deep—
I should not weep, I should not weep!
If were enough to feel, and see
Thy soft eyes gazing tenderly . . .
And dream the rest—and burn and be
The secret food of fires unseen,
Could thou but be what thou hast been!
After the slumber of the year
The woodland violets reappear;
All things revive in field or grove
And sky and sea, but two, which move
And form all others—life and love.—Percy Shelley
Christmas is a hellish time for me.
Merry Christmas to the normal folks who don't have this problem. It's off to the parents, to make believe I'm happy for a while. Nothing like a three and a half hour drive past brown and dying hills on a torn-up freeway to put you in the holiday spirit.
The Joy Harjo festival that seemed to cascade across the net, now manifest on Wood s lot, made me think about the girl who introduced me to her poetry.
It was the only time I’ve flirted with the idea of a Lolita thing. I thought she was in her mid-twenties, which didn’t bother me. It turned out she was 19. She got married a little while after we met, so nothing ever happened but conversation. By the time she divorced only two or three months later, I had come to my senses.
But she had some potential as a poet, the piece above is just a bit of high school juvenilia, written oddly enough when she lived on Coleridge street. If she ever stops smoking so much dope, she might become a good poet yet. She does know what good poetry is. I thought there were roses tattooed on her arm, but she corrected me. They were gardenias, the sad and beautiful flower of Billie Holliday. And that’s what she was. A sad and beautiful flower. She had a dog just like Shauna's. I'm more of a cat person.
She used to proofread my stories. She gave me good advice. Her husband used to beat her. I really didn't like that, but she told me that she beat him back. We worked in the same place for a while, but I was fired. It was the only time in my life I've ever been fired.
I take that back. I was fired once before, on December 23rd as I recall. Merry Christmas. It turned out okay; I had a job again within two hours. However, when I was fired from the job where I worked with this girl, I just borrowed to stay in school. I haven't worked since, that is, until I start teaching next semester.
I wonder where she is right now?
My ex-wife stopped by this afternoon. I haven’t seen her in several months, and she’s looking good. She doesn’t really look pregnant. She stopped by to ask if I’d help her move into a new apartment, a two bedroom. She’s hoping that she can extricate herself from the father of her child soon. He’s a nice enough guy, but a kid, who doesn’t really “get” her. It's sort of weird. She's eight years younger than me, and he's about seven years younger than her, but I think age is a mental thing.
She gave me a present. I haven’t opened it. All I had to give were some Steve Wynn CDs, but I suspect that I’ll get her a present in January. I tend to hibernate during the Christmas season, and make up for it later. I hate fighting the crowds. I asked her to read the opening to Laughter in the Dark. I could tell that she was intrigued as I was. She borrowed it.
She’s afraid the baby will be a Pisces. She said that she’d had to deal with too many of them in her life.
We watched some videos, and I felt horrible because I’d just woken up. But it was nice to see that she’s doing well. I decided it was time to shave off the three days worth of fuzz on my face.
Now, its time to have a pizza.
PLAYBOY: What are you working on, Kurt?
VONNEGUT: On a divorce. Which is a full-time job. Didn't you find it a full-time job?
HELLER: Oh, it's more than a full-time job. You ought to go back and read that section in No Laughing Matter on the divorce. I went through all the lawyers. But yours is going to be a tranquil one, you told me.
VONNEGUT: It seems to me divorce is so common now. It ought to be more institutionalized. It's like a head-on collision every time. It's supposed to be a surprise but it's commonplace. Deliver your line about never having dreamed of being married.
HELLER: It's in Something Happened: "I want a divorce; I dream of a divorce. I was never sure I wanted to get married. But I always knew I wanted a divorce."
. . .
VONNEGUT: Nietzsche had a little one-liner on how to choose a wife. He said, "Are you willing to have a conversation with this woman for the next forty years?" That's how to pick a wife.
HELLER: If people were more widely read, there'd be fewer marriages.
Thanks again, Mr. Watt.
----- --------TITLE: Slice DATE: 12/22/2001 11:08:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY:
I don't understand why this would be such a troublesome distinction.
Some blogs intend to convey an agenda.
Some blogs intend to convey links.
It would be simplistic to say that all blogs are expressive, to use speech-act terminology. Blogs display points of view, but that's not the distinction I was trying to make. The most interesting part is their function as directives.
Slices are seldom clean and simple, and they are usually presented behind barriers. Each person determines what the function of their slice is, by their intention.
To class blogs that deal directly with personal life as being simply more expressive, is to overlook the possibility that a more concrete distinction may exist. I think that the directive function of language, and the distinctions within it, are more instructive. Classes of speech acts aren't ironclad, but instead sort of general groupings of language functions. According to the linguist Matthew Coulthard:
Directives are all attempts by a speaker to get the hearer to do something — in this class the speaker is WANTING to achieve a future situation where the world will match his words and thus this class includes not simply 'order' or request, but more subtly, 'invite', 'dare', and 'challenge'.
Commisives are, like directives, concerned with altering the world to match the words, but this time the point is to commit the speaker himself to acting and it necessarily involves INTENTION.
I think that when I read blogs more acutely focused on what people themselves are doing, and want to do, that this inward directed intention sets them apart from the crowd of those who are merely displaying a viewpoint. I think blogs that have this more inward intention are different. That's why I said so in the first place. Inwardly directed blogs, blogs focused on the thoughts and feelings of the people who write are not just expressive, but commissive in the sense that they are intentionally focused in a different direction than selling themselves to others. They want to change their world, not necessarily someone elses.
The distinction couldn't possibly be more real.
Obviously, it's not black and white. When you think about the people who read your site, it's easy to shift into a more directive, polemic, mode. But it's also possible to shift back, as voicing your opinion causes it to shift and be refined. Another student in Composition theory called this the hermeneutic dance. I liked that description a lot. It happens every time we write. But I think broad catagories of intention are useful in looking at what blogging does.
As usual, when called upon, I will clarify & clarify & clarify until my blog becomes a very boring place. Save the "we're all selling something" comment. I was a salesman for too long, and that thought gives me indigestion. I'm not a product.
The real truth is that it's all rhetoric. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. Calling rhetoric "sales" demeans it in a very profound way. Persuasion is used both pragamatically and poetically, but it is aimed in different directions. I like WB Yeats's distinction between rhetoric and poetics:
----- --------TITLE: Joy Harjo DATE: 12/22/2001 5:46:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: The Obvious? relayed a Joy Harjo poem, but I like this one better.
The Poet writes to convince himself.
The Rhetorician writes to convince others.
Nautilaus
This is how I cut myself open
— with a half pint of whiskey, then
there's enough dream to fall through
to pure bone and shell
where ocean has carved out
warm sea animals,
and has driven the night
dark and in me
like a labyrinth of knives.
From She Had Some Horses (1983).
He tells you what’s going to happen, and then it does.
I haven’t read Lolita, but you’d have to live in a cave to not know that story. I stumbled onto the narrative summary of Laughter in the Dark that opens the book while reading a book on narrative theory a few days ago. I seemed to remember buying it years ago, in one of those truck-load book sales for 50 cents. I dug around and found it last night. I couldn’t put it down. I finished it around five a.m..
It’s been a long time since I’ve done that with a book; the closest I’ve come to it is reading the entire first book of Faust by Goethe in one night, while I was supposed to be reading Byron’s Manfred for the third or fourth time. But how could I resist. I mean, the summary is:
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved, was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.
I can flesh out a few of the details (of the book at least) without destroying the pleasure of it. Albinus doesn’t really seem too happy as the book opens. He’s got an itch, because his wife Elisabeth isn’t very stimulating, intellectually or otherwise. They’ve been married for nine years. They have a daughter, eight years old, named Irma. Albinus is an art scholar with a thing for movies. I liked his idea for a film: a classic painting rendered on screen gradually comes to life, and the inhabitants begin to move around and interact. Not your typical cartoon.
Albinus goes to the movies, and becomes obsessed with a young girl at the theatre, Margot. It’s alluded, later in the book, that she might only be 16 years old. His wife is 35, but Albinus’s age is never really established, unless I missed it. Margot is quite a piece of work. She wants to be an actress, but mostly she’s looking for a man to support her. There is the inevitable affair. Margot gets Albinus to set her up in an apartment, and then sends a letter to his house. A mistake in timing (or is it a mistake?) exposes the affair to his wife. Elisabeth moves out.
Albinus, eager to please his mistress, sets her up with a supporting role in a movie. All the illusions come crashing down when Irma becomes sick and dies, just before the premiere of the film. Rather than consoling his wife, or grieving for the death of his daughter, Albinus persists in his obsession with his mistress. Margot becomes distraught and disillusioned when she sees herself onscreen. She’s a crappy actress. Albinus and Margot pack up and go to Switzerland, in the company of an artist named Rex.
Of course, Rex and Margot were having an affair all along. A friend of Albinus’s named Conrad exposes the affair, and Albinus decides to kill Margot. But he is thwarted, and coming down from the mountains they have a car accident. Albinus is trepanned, and is permanently blind. The doctor wants to put Albinus in a sanatorium, but Margot hatches a plot to steal all his money. She moves him into a chalet, and unknown to him, Rex moves in too. They continue to carry on in front of him, and he can’t tell, except for hearing things from time to time. His wife’s brother rescues him from this hell eventually, and takes him back to Germany. But in trying to exact vengeance on Margot, he ends up shooting himself. The final scene is told in the form of a scripted movie.
Predictable? Damn right. Most things are. Compelling and fascinating? Yes, because the beauty is in the details, just like Nabokov says in his opening summary. Knowing what happens doesn’t lessen the pleasure of reading it at all.
It’s really quite charming; I haven’t read a modern novel in a long time. Nabokov’s control of language is just incredible. There was a device that stuck out wonderfully in the opening chapters. The husband’s response to flouting (of conversational maxims) by his wife is usually “Just dropped from the moon?” This seemed odd, until I got to the description of his future mistress’s childhood: “the sky was there, just waiting for her to star.” Beautiful.
But what made me stop and blog was the association created by a different description:
Frau Levandovsky, an elderly woman of good proportions with a genteel manner, albeit marred by a certain fruitiness of speech, and a large purple blotch on her cheek the size of a hand: she used to explain it by her mother’s being frightened by a fire whilst expecting her.
There was a young girl in one of my classes last semester who comes close to this description. She was a very religious girl, genteel and very Arkansan, who had a birthmark that covered at least 30% of her face. She got married during the course of the class, and her wedding video was used as part of her final project. When the groom kissed the bride, there were huge shouts from the crowd. She explained that she and her husband had never kissed before, only held hands.
That was perhaps the oddest example of the impact of religion I’ve ever heard. She said it was actually her husbands idea. They wanted everything to be “new” when they got married. Jaws all around the room dragged the floor in disbelief, but incredible as it sounds, I do believe her. But it still freaks me out. I wanted to write it down while I still remembered it.
I can't imagine having that much self-control. I wasn't the only one in the room that felt that way.
----- --------TITLE: Missive DATE: 12/21/2001 5:48:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: MissiveI tend to think of writing blog entries as a letter writing activity. Not quite a diary, really, because if I wrote solely of self-congratulatory or self-deprecating thoughts inside my head, or day to day occurrences, my imaginary audience would not care to read them. But it is, above all else, an introspective activity. And I am often too introspective for my own good.
Most weblogs are drivel, banal shit written by angst-ridden teenagers and adults sharing feelings, thoughts, and mind-numbing details about their daily lives that provide little insight into anything or anyone.
But the gems can be found amongst the long-since abandoned or forgotten sites. These gems are personality- driven. That is, the person or persons writing for them are genuinely interesting. They are storytellers. They understand the need for a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They draw together like-minded links into themes for the day, for the week, for a lifetime. The authors of such weblogs and online journals have an inner drive for their work. They don’t look for adoration or attention from other folks online. It comes to them naturally by the power of their work, by the originality of their stories, or by the genuine nature of their words.
The piece was originally written before the blogging explosion, before software began to facilitate the activity and the sheer volume of daily writing became so staggering. While people who share their thoughts online, writing messages to an imaginary audience may come and go, the impulse does not seem to be abating in any way. I think this is a good thing. Somebody said, on a weblog that has faded from memory, “Who cares if you had cornflakes this morning?” I’d have to answer, “I do,” as long as it’s in the context of a story that interests me.
The popularity of sites that often share mundane insights like this shows that I’m not alone. Slice of life sites are more popular than “soapbox” sites, which I confess, this site flirts with all too often.
But I must declare that these are missives, not missiles, and I write about deep issues because I’m trying to figure them out for myself, not because I’m trying to sell my point of view to someone else. It feels more like writing a letter to a friend. A friend I wish I had, a friend who shares my interests who I want to explain the stuff I’ve discovered to. A friend that is always there when I feel like talking.
Reading even a few entries on my site provides a great explanation why I don’t have many friends. I’m just too intense, and I take things too seriously, but most of all:
I have too much sustain.
I can't remember the last time I watched so many movies in a row. I mean, actually watched them without reading a book at the same time. I'm losing sleep, watching Sleeper.
While wishing I had an orb and an orgasmatron, I can't help but still laugh at Woody Allen's response to the idea of having his brain simplified:
My brain? That's my second-favorite organ!
And then there is the all too brilliant summation, which nearly describes my point of view:
So if you don't believe in politics, and you don't believe in science, and you don't believe in God, what do you believe in?
Sex and death. Two things that come once in a lifetime. But at least after death you're not nauseous.
According to some “rules” I’ve seen circulating around, I shouldn’t be blogging. One of the primary tenets is that a person is supposed to be brief. I’m a dismal failure at that. I like writing, so I do it frequently and to excess, like I have done most things in my life.
I found an echo of my point of view in this little bit, though it might even be considered long by blogging standards:
Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved, was not loved; and his life ended in disaster.This is the whole story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling, and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.
[Nabokov, Laughter in the Dark]
Time for that late night walk.
----- --------TITLE: Marx and Time DATE: 12/20/2001 8:51:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Turner Classic Movies claims to be "answering the tough questions tonight."Watching Go West by the Marx Brothers oddly reminded me of a Leaving Trains song from the seminal album Fuck called "Temporal Slut." Falling James is a nice guy, happily an ex-husband of Courtney Love. I was luckily able to photograph a side project of his involving my friend Slim, called the Space Okies. I'll have to dig those photos out someday.
But I digress.
While I'm digressing, the altavista translator is great for hours of fun. A German article about the Leaving Trains translates quite nicely. Here's the section about Well Down Blue Highway, the first album of theirs that I heard:
The debut has a very melancholischen Unterton and sounds in the comparison to the later work of the LEAVING TRAINS somewhat unausgegoren and toughly, but nothing the despite are some beads on the disk, which let hope for large. Until today James has never also only a lausigen cent for " waves down Blue Highway " seen. Enigma, the exploiter sow. James operates in the local public library, picks dear novels out for old Vetteln, is mostly deprimiert, no woman does not want Sex with it and many clubs to want the Trains not post, because James has so a large lip and so that a safe guarantor for annoyance is.
Where was I? Oh, yeah, the Marx Brothers. The movie featured some nicely stereotypical movie Indians running around saying How! Ever wonder why Indians in the movies say how? Why not Why or Where or When? Anyway, the only way that the Marx brothers are able to communicate with the Indians is when Harpo turns a loom (textism?) into a harp and begins to play. Music has an interesting correspondence with speech acts. They are both durative: they take place over time. Musicians are, in the best sense of the word, temporal sluts that communicate in a way that is meaningless without a sense of time.
The only way to impose a sense of time on a written text is through narrative. Give it a beginning, a middle and an end. Use tricks to speed it up and slow it down, through meter and alliteration, imitate the presence of existential time. I think that's the key difference between conventional hypertext and blogging: the presence of a sense of time. Without it, there is no narrative.
I like the definition of time offered by Michael J. Toolan in Narrative: A Critical Linguistic Approach:
Time is perceived repetition within perceived irreversible change
Turner Classic Movies answers the big questions, indeed. Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex is up later. I can't wait.
----- --------TITLE: You're not in Kansas anymore DATE: 12/20/2001 3:56:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: I'm not sure why, but my first response to things is to argue.I started thinking about patterns that we communicate with, complicated this morning by getting up to read some of The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts by Umberto Eco. The early diagrams in the book seem to be a sort of process model of cognition. I hate process modeling. I suppose I want to believe that people are unique, and irreducible to some predefined process. But linguistic models, even in their flawed state, do make more sense than most of the alternatives. I seem to want to argue with everything though.
Why is that? Is it because my yellow brick road abruptly ended a while back? I never got to the castle, never met the wizard, though I did encounter a wicked witch along the way. I never got my heart, didn't find my brain, and can't click my heels three times and go back to California. I just keep digging and arguing, digging and arguing, until I feel buried. It gets pretty deep in here. Be sure to wipe your feet on the way out.
Many variants of postmodernism reduce everything to a sort of language game. It's all play, really, not humorless pronouncements that there is no truth. Paralyzed by postmodernism? I think not, postmodernism revels in the flux that modern life has become. Backing out of this particularly obfuscating report, I find that the philosophy behind it is one of those new-agey things, focusing, which attempts to insert a new form of knowledge, body knowledge into the equation. Uh, it sounds just like meditation. The really funny thing about it was that while I was reading that page, Drew Carey was on the TV. He answered the suggestion that he "listen to his body" in this way:
If I listened to my body, I'd always be eating pizza and watching porno tapes.
Why? Because it results in stuff like the Auto Winer. I suppose that I could be reduced in this way as well, as could most of the blogs I read. They follow patterns. We all do. It's a sort of comfort zone that we lapse into. People develop habits. Habits aren't people. While useful, the analysis of patterns doesn't mean that there is nothing underneath. Quite the opposite, really. This is why it always gets back to metaphysics, no matter how hard you try.
Ultimately, this means that we can't know for sure. It always gets back to figuring out what works. Seems to me, that is what the "Postmodern Condition" is all about. It's Keats's Negative Capability all over again:
When man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without an irritable reaching after fact & reason
However, that "irritable reaching" is what most of us do, including me. That's why I argue, and play the language game I guess. Personally, I think it beats doing nothing but sitting around eating pizza and watching pornos. It's funny to me how linguistic theory always seems to end up in contradictory, Zen-like pronouncements too. Eco posits that there are "open" and "closed" texts, texts that invite and shape interpretation, and texts that are closed to alternative explanations. He uses Superman comics as an example of a closed text.
But distinctions like this are impossible to prove conclusively, and Eco admits this. So why try? In order to dig deeper into the heart of language. I suspect that it would be more productive to think of the functioning of these texts as broad and narrow. But he doesn't do that. He merely insists that though the text is largely "closed" it is still open. How Zen is that? It gets downright confusing when you try to figure out how things work.
I keep clicking my heels, but I'm still in Arkansas, and Dorothy is nowhere to be seen.
----- --------TITLE: Venice Beach, redux DATE: 12/19/2001 7:30:00 PM AUTHOR: Photography ----- BODY:
Giving, the Hollywood Way talks about bell-ringers that stand outside supermarkets of a different sort.
The Geek Syndrome explores the thin line between genius and autism. At least I have nothing to worry about on that score, I'm miles away from both.
What Have They Done To My Art? offers an explanation why recorded music sounds so crappy these days. His theory works pretty well for me. Thanks for the tip, Mr. Watt.
The Great Pig in the Sky does a good job of summarizing the pro/con arguments about Pink Floyd, and then offers up the author's personal ethos:
----- --------TITLE: Implicature DATE: 12/19/2001 4:50:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: Interpretation is not Conversation. ----- EXTENDED BODY:
Actually, what’s worse than either of those stereotypes is the dope like me who argues that post-Syd Floyd is superior but tries not to be caught dead listening to it, primarily because he spent the best years of his life having its catalog encoded into his DNA. Which is why nowadays I try not to be too smug while listening only to Syd’s solo records, disdaining both camps and shooting for some golden mean.
I should stop picking at this, but I really feel that it has some serious flaws. But it gives me a sense of being in conversation, something I don't get enough of. Occasionally, someone comments on one of my little narratives, and that gives me some sense of affirmation, but it isn't essential to my writing activity. I do however feel that it is important to my feeling a sense of growth as a writer.
Interpretation is what I just did with the Kurt Cobain lyrics. He can't respond to tell me I'm full of shit. Chances are, he'd just say "choice is yours," but isn't that always the case with interpretation? Conversation is different. Conversation involves (not is) implicature. In fact, it's an essential part of any conversation. Conversation occurs only when exchanges happen, called by linguist Harvey Sacks, turns. According to Sacks, a conversation consists of at least two turns.— question and response, greeting and acknowledgment, or some variation of turn taking, usually called adjacency pairs.
Does this happen on the web? Yes. Is it an essential part of writing on the web? Perhaps, but it's not a given. Linguistic discourse analysis, as a field, can provide a lot of insight into what happens on the web, and elsewhere, regarding conversation. Linguist H.P. Grice, who first developed the theory of implicature proposes that for conversation to occur, there is a general "Cooperative Principle" in force:
"Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange in which you are engaged."
- Maxims of Quantity:
- Make your contribution as informative as is required.
- Do not make your contribution more informative than is required.
- Maxims of Quality:
Supermaxim: Try to make your contribution one that is true.
- Do not say what you believe to be false.
- Do not say that for which you lack adequate evidence.
- Maxim of Relation:
- Be relevant.
- Maxims of Manner:
Supermaxim: Be perspicuous.
- Avoid obscurity /of expression.
- Avoid ambiguity.
- Be brief.
- Be orderly.
Perhaps, to use Grice's terminology, I've just flouted the maxims of quantity and relation. But I do that all the time. Too much information? Okay, so I'll get back to implicature as a fundamental part of conversation.
Conversations are filled with all sorts of indirect statements, statements whose meaning does not exist coded in what is being said. Participants in conversations literally pull meaning out of thin air. I can't remember if it was Labov or Grice who said that these meaning units are floating in free space, waiting to be plucked as needed, to make sense of utterances. This makes conversation seem like an event that is contingent on a sort of magical relationship with things we can't control, know, or see. In the truest sense of the word, conversation is magic.
This is why I suspect that true conversation is so rare on the Internet. It requires that a lot of conditions be present. Another strong linguistic necessity is the notion of common ground. Common ground is where these free floating molecules of implicature exist. Without common ground, communication cannot occur.
We choose for example to infer that a rising tone at the end of a sentence signals a question, in English at least. This implicature is based on the socially accepted form of language. We chose from a variety of possible inferences, floating in space, and pull out the inference that provides the "best fit" with our experience of the signal that is being transmitted to us. Mistakes happen all the time, but we stumble on anyway, because as social creatures we want to have a conversation. Discourse analysis has lead many theorists to declare that without a theory of implicature, conversation cannot be systematically explored. It's perhaps the most important and mysterious thing about it.
However, the most interesting thing to me is the function of narrative in all this. Labov describes the attraction of narrative quite nicely:
It gradually appeared that narratives are privileged forms of discourse which play a central role in almost every conversation. Our efforts to define other speech events with comparable precision have shown us that narrative is the prototype, perhaps the only example of a well formed speech event with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The explosion of stories which eclipse the notion of conversation on the web is what fascinates me. It's the only way that closure is ever even approached in writing. Conversations don't have clear beginnings, middles, or ends, at least from a linguistic standpoint. But they often seem to include stories, stories that make you smile, cry, or laugh.
I do believe that Labov is right, that narrative is the prototype, the foundation which conversation springs from. And though there are few active and continuing classically defined conversations on the web, there are lots of narratives to stimulate them.
Linking to independant sites alone is barely classifiable as conversation. However, responding to them and linking to them is. Posting a comment creates a conversational adjacency pair, as well. The tools are there, but not everyone uses them. Perhaps it's because this common ground is fairly new, and people are just getting comfortable with this newest form of conversation.
----- --------TITLE: Come as you are DATE: 12/19/2001 1:04:00 PM AUTHOR: Music ----- BODY: Who am I writing to? — You, of course!
Come as you are, as you were
As I want you to be
As a friend, as a friend, as an old enemy
Take your time, hurry up
Choice is yours, don't be late
Take a rest as a friend, as an old memoria
Memoria, memoria, memoria, memoria.
Come dowsed in mud, soaked in bleach
As I want you to be
As a trend, as a friend, as an old memoria
Memoria, memoria, memoria, memoria.
And I swear that I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
Memoria, memoria, memoria, memoria.
And I swear that I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
No I don't have a gun
Memoria, memoria. . .
Watching an audience shot video of a Nirvana performance on 12/31/93 I started thinking about this song again. It came up a lot after Kurt killed himself, because of the irony involved. But there is a lot more to these words than just the irony. I like to think that the repetition of the word “memoria” carries a great deal more significance than the obvious conclusion that it works metrically, where memory does not. The declension in Latin, which Kurt may or may not have been familiar with, places it in the present tense. It isn’t “in memoriam,” a past memory, but a thought borne by the mind, in the present. Consequently, it presents one more contradiction for the song— “an old memoria” is an oxymoron, echoing “as you are, as you were,” or “as a friend, as an old enemy.” Resolving the song requires dealing with the contrast: does it imply that the person addressed by the song was once an enemy, but is now a friend, or does it imply that the person accepts them as both?
I would give primacy to the latter explanation. I think the key is the phrase “as I want you to be.” Any audience is an image held in the mind, a memoria, of what we want them to be. Memoria is also the final stage of rhetoric. The only word that has greater frequency in this part of the song is the word as, used as a preposition to compare, but also to subordinate these thoughts within the overarching theme of memoria.
The closing lyrics, outside the obviously ironic context of the memory of what Kurt did to himself, suggest a sort of vulnerability to the contradiction. A gun can be either an offensive, or defensive weapon. In the end, I suppose he didn’t have a gun in that sense, really. Except, in his songs, as he was so incredibly careful and complex in composing this lament to “audience,” which highlights the linguistic affinity of enemy and memory. The image of audience that we carry in our heads is always, trend, friend, and enemy.
This connects in a really odd way with William Blake. The memory that he sought to fight was of the past, not of the present, though. The grand narratives that drive us on, to Blake, were the enemy. That sort of ahistoricism is most definately modern; embracing the problems of dealing with the everpresent nature of memory, as it impacts the present, is more pronouncedly postmodern. Cobain's enemy was clearly in the present.
But I swear that I don’t have a gun, either. Really. I mean it.
Synthesis wrote piece that I read a few days back on “self” and “other” as related to blogging, suggesting that there is an “other” that we write to while blogging. I didn’t respond at the time, but too many chips have fallen into place to ignore it any longer.
I searched in vain for an angry entry that I thought I wrote about a statement by Doc Searls, but maybe I never wrote it. Maybe I just thought it. I’ve written so much in the past year that it becomes hard to separate what I have written with what I have thought.
As I recall, the statement was in an article about blogging, where Searls said that when he blogs he doesn’t write for an audience, and that is what separates his blog from his professional writing. Bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. All writing is done for an audience, even if it’s just for yourself. Any writer should know that, intuitively, otherwise there would be no compulsion to write.
I visted Doc Searls weblog again for the first time in a long time. Not to my taste, really. But judging from what I read today, he has surely revised that stance, because now he is speaking of his weblog as a conversation. Hmm, I think I’ve read that somewhere before.
I suppose what draws me into weblogs more than anything else is personality. If I want reporting, I’ll read a newspaper. If I want links, I’ll visit the appropriate directory or design site to see what’s new. However, the function of weblogs in bringing out what is important that needs to be reported, or what’s interesting that is worth visiting, is directly tied to the personality of the blog in question. That’s what’s really amazing about it. It saves a lot of time in finding what is most significant to you on the web, if you can locate people who share common interests. But more than that, an entirely new form of long distance relationship can be created by this common search for information. You actually start to care about people on the other side of the screen.
Most people on the so-called “top tier” of bloggers don’t interest me much. What some people revel in as “great writing” doesn’t do much for me either. Most of it is purely adjectival obfuscation. It’s a mask. We all wear them, though. And it isn’t just a phenomenon of blogging, it’s a part of human communication that is accentuated and spun out of control through the technology of writing.
To get to the really interesting stuff, as a photographer with a great deal of experience with people who say cheese, I can tell you that I don’t believe that they “smile for the camera”. They smile for the photographer, not the technology. He is a clearly present audience, and all photographs, smiled for or not, usually represent a sort of transaction between photographer and subject. I don’t believe that people give much thought to “smiling for eternity,” when there is a live human being in front of them. It’s an audience, so they amplify their mask. It takes a lot of rapport and patience to let the guard slip down enough to make an honest photograph, a transaction that cuts beneath the surface of the mask. For many photographers, the mask is more interesting than the person underneath, so they don’t bother with this at all.
One of the best treatments I’ve read of the audience question is “The Writers Audience is Always a Fiction” by Walter Ong. Here’s the part that cuts to the quick:
Masks are inevitable in all human communication, even oral. Role playing is both different from actuality and an entry into actuality: play and actuality (the world of “work”) are dialectically related to one another. From the very beginning, an infant becomes an actual speaker by playing at being a speaker, much as a person who cannot swim, after developing some ancillary skills, one day plays at swimming and finds that he is swimming in truth. But oral communication, which is built into existential actuality more directly than written, has within it a momentum that works for the removal of masks.
Lovers try to strip off all masks. And in all communication, insofar as it is related to actual experience, there must be a movement of love. Those who have loved many years may reach a point where almost all masks are gone. But never all. The lover’s plight is tied to the fact that every one of us puts on a mask to address himself, too.
Such masks to relate ourselves to ourselves we also try to put aside, and with wisdom and grace we to some extent succeed in casting them off. When the last mask comes off, sainthood is achieved, and the vision of God. But this can only be with death.
However, I personally think this is counterproductive. The lack of disclosure on most blogs removes them from any concept of authenticity, tying the mask on more firmly than ever. Conversation requires trust. It’s easier to listen, when you know who you’re listening to. So much of blog culture seems like a zipless fuck, you get off in a moment, and move on to another anonymous partner, rather than thinking anything about love.
Regardless of what some might think, all attempts at communication are about something, whether we acknowledge it or not.
I've seen it done before, as a gesture of personality. People love lists. So, for the heck of it before I put them back on the shelf (Christmas break, you know), a list of the books that have come out recently for one reason or another:
One of these days I'll have to read a novel or comic strip again or a book on music, for that matter. Sometimes I think I'm too hung up on learning how things work, instead of creating things that work.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 12/19/2001 6:29:00 PM you should have thrown in a john grisham and seen if anyone had noticed :P ----- --------TITLE: Postmodern Rant DATE: 12/17/2001 9:23:00 PM AUTHOR: General ----- BODY: It's not that obviousIt a truly postmodern fashion, definitions of postmodernism are troublesome. I had difficulties with Postmodernism and its Critics. The page is put together by students, quoting secondary sources. It's amazing to me to think that anthropologists think that the "modern" began in the renaissance.
For literature folks, the distinctions are much finer. Modernism began somewhere in the 1890s, and there is some dispute if it's really over at all. It depends on your definition of postmodernism. According to the Encyclopedia of Literary Theory, in my field anyway, the postmodern begins around 1960 in works that "display certain characteristics such as reflexivity, irony and a mixing of popular and high art forms." The difficulty of the definition is elaborated thusly:
Either seen as a continuation of the more radical aspects of modernism or as marking a rupture with such things as modernist ahistoricism or yearning for closure, postmodernism has been linked to "the cultural logic of late capitalism (Jameson); the general condition of knowledge in times of technology (Lyotard); the replacing of a modernist epistemological focus with an ontological one (McHale); and the substitution of the of the simulacrum for the real (Baudrillard). Postmodern literature has been called a literature of replenishment (Barth), on one hand, and the literature of an inflationary economy (Newman) on the other. In short, there is little agreement on the reasons for its existence or on the evaluation of its effects.
Here's my take, for what it's worth. Technology gravitates into systems. All systems have a central organizing principle. Humanity has been searching for organizing principles for a long time. One by one, these organizing principles have been found to be flawed. To disrupt the system by removing the center of the system, is to set it into flux, or freeplay. That's deconstruction, or to use de Man's term, the system is demystified. Some, like Derrida, feel that there can be no mythic organizing principle that cannot be removed. To be postmodern, perhaps, is to doubt everything. However a few, like Habermas and Ricouer, suspect that there is an underlying center, a linguistic one, that allows for generalized theory. I like Zigmunt Bauman's metaphor for the postmodern condition: liquid modernity, a flux that can be poured into a container that is continually shifting in shape, due to the constant failure of systems.
Clear as mud? How about this: postmodernism is a buzzword for a dozen or more competing ways of describing the mess we're in right now.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 12/19/2001 6:26:00 PM i like your definition. oh the WANK we got at uni about post modernism. i did a communication degree so you can imagine scores of wannable journalists wanking on about postmodernism. cack. ----- --------TITLE: The rhetorical baseball diamond DATE: 12/17/2001 12:47:00 AM AUTHOR: Schoolwork ----- BODY: For almost a week, the pattern has remained the same.Just before sundown, it starts to rain. Some days, there is a little thunder and lightning around sunset. It always calms, and a soft and insistent rain fills the night. I haven't been able to sleep until the sun comes up. Occasionally, there has been a gap in the rain, and like Patsy Cline, I've gone walking after midnight. But tonight, it's raining harder.
I've been reviewing classical rhetoric, getting ready for the next round of classes, trying to commit classes to memory. Maybe coding it into a table will help. Stolen from Roland Barthes, here's the classic technè rhétorikè.
1. | Inventio | ||
Euresis | invenire quid dictas | finding what to say | |
2. | Disposito | ||
Taxis | inventa disponere | ordering what is found | |
3. | Elocutio | ||
Lexis | ornare verbis | adding the ornament of words, figures | |
4. | Actio | ||
Hypocrisis | agere et pronuntiare | performing the discourse like an actor: gestures and diction | |
5. | Memoria | ||
Mnémè | memoriae mandare | committing to memory |
Barthes seperates the first three divisions into a sort of rhetorical triangle, or a baseball diamond of sorts:
Why is this important and why am I writing about it? Because I'm trying to conceptualize it in new ways. Barthes describes the challenge to writers succinctly: the agonizing question that Rhetoric seeks to answer is "what is to be said?"
Looking at this diagram tonight, it dawned on me that writing is really a sort of game. The bases of res and verba can also be related as signified and signifier, or in my twisted logic, first and third base. It's hard to get to first base. To figure out what you're trying to signify, what "thing" you want to address. Second base lines up with the pitchers mound. Figuring out how to arrange things, you are furthest away from the target audience. It's a pity that Barthe's diagram is mashed in this fashion. Taxis, or arrangement, is purely syntagmatic. All writers learn their pitches by reading other writers, adding their own embelishments perhaps, but mostly staying close to the rules which most non-writers aren't aware of. Sometimes the writers themselves don't even recognize how formulaic it is. But when you round that base to third, you must confront the lexis, the vocabulary, of the audience. You can see where you want to be, but the techné has taken you for a long trip away from the thing you started with. If your discourse contacts though, you score.
Sorry folks, but I'd just never thought about it this way before, as a game. But then, I was never any good at sports either.
The rain stopped. Maybe it's time to go for a walk.
----- COMMENT: AUTHOR: shauny EMAIL: URL: DATE: 12/19/2001 6:23:00 PM wow.. it's strange to think of writing like that. rather than just vomiting out some words. heh. ----- --------
