The Solution Is The Soapbox
The conversation about art, pleasure, discipline and craft is afoot at The Valve, and I thought I’d reprint my long comment from there over here, redacted slightly. I like how it ends. -JK
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Rich Puchalsky writes,
I suspect that it’s going to be a willing embrace of the arbitrary—a willingness to spend the time “listening” to each reasonable worthwhile art / text that you encounter, even though this inevitably means that you spend time with less aesthetically worthy art, and therefore miss more worthy art. But, in effect, this is like a return to childishness, when you are fascinated by ordinary things.
…which is echoed to some extent here, by Ray:
I look at Cory Doctorow and I see someone who does seem to take genuine delight in his “toys”. I wouldn’t want to be him; he wouldn’t want to be me. But that formula seems like a solid basis for friendship rather than something to fix.
The difference being that Rich puts it in terms of a valuable (though not mandatory) moral precept, while Ray makes it external to himself by referencing Doctorow.
Perhaps it’s heresy to say it, but most blogs are good because they spark conversations, not because they are on par with the best that has been thought and said. It’s also a pleasure to read up-to-the-minute documents that analyze contemporary culture, politics, and products; many blogs are like editorial columns. Right now Spurious is the only non-comment blog I’m willing to read, and I think many blogs owe their popularity to the fact that you can read them at work, whereas a book is a little too obvious.
There have always been people who delighted in toys; it would be great if, thanks to them, we had more Creative Commons novels about Disneyland and more sites like Boing Boing. I have to be honest, though, about the fact that libraries and museums appeal to me more than the obsessive clutter of private collections and private Wonderlands. I don’t just mean spaces for books and paintings; I mean common spaces of all kinds. While I enjoy the nostalgic collector’s joy driving artworks like American Splendor and Ghost World, both of which began as comic books, I don’t think the phenomenon of male analog culture has much to contribute to the overall debate, in part because I see it as an ultimately doomed reaction against digitalization. There’s always a limit to what someone can actually use, and within those limits, I have nothing bad to say about other people’s pleasures; on the other hand, a private collection is not limited, and can’t automatically be brooked.
[...]
As for the artwork of friends — like blogging, I understand this through the model of conversation and exchange, rather than as a painful series of mutual obligations. And a lot of it can be extraordinary; the profusion of new independent music has actually raised standards. On the other hand, a huge marketing effort goes into suspending questions about the value of new, mediocre cultural artifacts. I’ll emphasize how complex these issues actually are by pointing out that one of the reasons I like Ghost World is that the characters feel a tremendous imperative toward culture. No matter how eccentric or superficially ordinary the thing might be, they don’t experience it that way, and they certainly don’t think of it as mere “entertainment.”
Finally, I should point out that Pater was more critic than artist. If blogs are any indication, most people do want to have a soapbox for their critical views on culture, politics, and society, all of which require rhetorical skill, research, erudition, and craft. I wouldn’t want to set any limits, in advance, on what their capacity for insight or beauty might be.
“As for the artwork of friends — like blogging, I understand this through the model of conversation and exchange, rather than as a painful series of mutual obligations.”
That’s really why I referred to “friends”: to discourage a reading of mutual obligation. As I’ve written elsewhere, the people who we converse with and who get to know us in some sense are often not really friends in the classic sense, either on-line or off-line.
My main point is that art can be a social experience, not only an aesthetic experience. And that should affect what we choose to read. The idea of a disciplined choice of artworks to experience would, presumably, filter out those works that are aesthetically inferior. (I’m not addressing the more political question of whether mass market works should also be rejected by virtue of being mass market, whether aesthetically inferior or not.) But the primary source of aesthetically questionable art, for me, is not the mass market, but the … I don’t know what to call it. It’s not a market. The friend-acquaintance distribution?
And by “aesthetically questionable”, I don’t mean bad. I mean that every artwork has to compete with a larger and larger archive of previous works. Let’s see: two small poetry books happened to hit my desk on the same day: Chinese Whispers by John Ashbery, The Hum of Distant Turbines by Tommy Twilite. T.T. is a good poet, but I know that the consensus would probably be that he isn’t as good as Ashbery. But I’ve seen him read; he comments on my poems and I comment on his; if my house literally catches on fire, he’s one of the people who’s going to put it out. So all in all I’d rather read him. Spread out over a lifetime, these similar decisions are going to displace a whole chunk of “work I really should read”. I think that theorists of the reading experience really should take this into account in some way, as more than just a foible.
It really depends on whether you’re talking here about art that you or they create, or whether you’re also talking about art that other people like.
As for the first, I agree with you that it’s worth being an audience for friends. At the same time, how many books of poetry can T. T. really write? One a year? It seems unlikely to produce a real overload, unless you’re talking about people who are just constantly producing huge amounts of material. If so, they’re probably neglecting their friendships to do it, and also are forcing you to either pick-and-choose or become a captive.
I have pretty similar tastes to my friends; that’s part of being friends, though it’s certainly not defining. Where we disagree, it’s not really worth anybody making a sacrifice, because there’s already such an excess of agreement.
Oh, no one is forced to read anything. And it’s not really “an audience for friends” — it’s a Bizarro World in which one tenth of all people are poets. As a result, it becomes like parenting; when two parents of small children meet, they talk about their kids. If they’re friends, they’ll actually talk about their kids in depth, share problems and ask for advice perhaps, and so on. But the move for poetry is partially out of the realm of aesthetic production and partially into the world of social interaction.
That’s basically where the entire world is going if we live that long, I think, which is why it may be worth theorizing about — for more than just poetry, clearly.
I don’t know for how many people this is a tricky balance, but it is for me as well as for Rich. You know how when you’re (meaning some “you” other than me, I was a crap student) in school, your reading time is completely taken up by targeted research and other things have to go on hold? Well, school’s never out for an autodidact.
Then as life’s gone on, I’ve made novelist friends and poet friends and academic friends, and I’ve learned from them that in the midst of a writing project your reading time is completely taken up by targeted research and other things have to go on hold. Well, writing projects never stopped once I decided to make blogging my sole publishing medium. (For example, I’ve had a “Me and Pater” post simmering since 2000 or so — I’ll have to send you a pointer if I ever finish it.)
The result is that now I have a stack of unread books by friends, and some of them are getting pretty dusty….
As tricky balances go in my life, though, being faced with a surplus of sources of delight is by far the least painful. You know how when you get into late middle age you start to really understand that you won’t live to experience everything you might want to…? Not as bad a feeling as I feared it would be.
I was a lousy student too, and with a misspent youth — I got to a Master’s Degree before I decided that I didn’t really want to do physics.
I prefer to not just strike a balance, but also to come up with a complex, impersonal rationalization for why doing what I was already doing is actually the best possible thing — what Scott dubbed “Make it what it already is”. The trick is to do this without suggesting to people that their own ways of doing things need disciplinary correction or some such.
If Ray ever finishes “Me and Pater”, I may well read it — although, since I know nothing about Pater, it would normally be difficult to justify doing so without reading some sort of standard text on the subject first, which I’m never going to do. I’m not claiming friendship with Ray, it’s simply that we’re hanging around at the same “place”, and have interacted with each other to some degree. So how to explain this syndrome, which might otherwise look like a very odd sort of selectivity on my part?
Treating it as mutual obligation would immediately take the fun out of it. Plus it would, as Ray writes, interfere with your own work if you seriously felt that you had to read everything rather than just a sample of whatever caught your attention. But there is something to be said for, let’s say, subcultural loyalty. The DIY punk ethos might be adopted. (Where’s the theme song I wrote for John Emerson? Google will know — here it is.) You know, the cab driver with a Ph.D. still defiantly writing essays, the programmer doing lit crit, the high school P.E. teacher poet: that could be a pretty glorious punk scene. The reciprocity is not at the crude level of exchanging texts, but — since everyone in the scene is a producer, not merely a consumer — of providing a mental context for one’s own work.
So far, so ordinary. But what happens when everyone is doing this, and it becomes not a subculture, but almost a culture? That’s what’s already threatening to happen with blogging, with some ridiculous percentage of all people doing it. And that’s when I think that a strategy of accepting arbitrariness works. I read many of the poets that I do because we happen to live in the same town; I read many of the bloggers that I do because they happen to comment on each other’s blogs. It’s not a random sample, since there are links that sort people according to certain similarities, nor it is a kind of obsessional always seeking out the global best that would take up a good deal of time in itself.
I thought I posted a reply here, but it hasn’t appeared — too many links? If it’s still in queue somewhere, don’t bother posting it, I’ll just write it far more shortly.
I think that the mistake I made in describing this concept was in using the word “friends”, which describes a closeness that sometimes occurs, but not for the majority of people. Think of it, instead, as a DIY punk scene, in which everyone is a writer as well as a reader. The reciprocity involved is not “you read my essay, I’ll read your flarf”, which would kill any fun involved, but at the more subtle level of giving each other a mental context to work within.
Rich,
I have to head to bed, but yes, comments with a lot of links get netted by Akismet. If you don’t see a comment showing up right away, just send me some email.
Rich and Ray,
It’s taken me awhile to think through what you’re saying here. Here’s my take on the issue.
First of all, it’s possible that you handle friendships differently than I do. A lot of my friends do some kind of writing — journalism, poetry, academic writing — but not all of them want to share it, and when they do, they have one of three goals. Either they want feedback, or they just want to share, or they think it’s something that would interest me. If they want feedback, I’m usually one of several people they’re contacting, and they recognize that I might not have the time. If they think it will interest or aid me, then I always have the right to respond, regretfully, that it doesn’t. If they just want to share, they always add the disclaimer — if you have time.
In other words, it’s catch as catch can. I’m strongly against the idea that it is punk or otherwise admirable to bury oneself, for social reasons, in a lot of work that you don’t personally find exciting. I say this because I spent years doing exactly that — going to awful concerts, reading pointless verbiage, and listening to mediocre records that were the talk of my small town.
None of this really affected those friendships; they succeeded or failed on the basis of our personal interaction. Part of the reason is that most people who make art want to be famous, as well they should. Unfortunately, this means that when you provide them an audience, they take the liberty of thinking of you as an audience member, which is actually more exciting than thinking that you’re doing them a favor.
I’m not suggesting that I hate being involved with works-in-progress just because Paradise Lost or Lady Soul are beckoning to me. I’m saying that one of my friends has repeatedly promised (unprovoked) to never, ever read my blog, and we get along marvelously.
If this is presented as a matter of personal preference, then of course everyone will have different personal preferences. That doesn’t seem to leave much to talk about. But I don’t think that you’ve quite understood what I meant, or I haven’t communicated it or something.
Let my hypothesize, for the purpose of making the discussion about more than personal preference, that part of the difference may be because we’re in different life stages — or have different relations of production, if you prefer.
I would guess that your relationship to writing is fairly “supported”, not in monetary terms but in those of world-view. You are a humanities grad student, and are expected to write professionally; blogging, even if it doesn’t have professional development characteristics, still helps you keep in touch with other grad students. In short, you have some idea why you’re writing.
I’m not going to speak for Ray, obviously, but I have no real idea why I write. It’s certainly not because I hope to become famous; it has no connection to my job, education, etc.; I’ve never even tried to publish. I could in theory simply stop and take up gardening, or something. So, for me, reading other people who are also writing for no apparent reason provides an important element of mental context. I’m not doing them a favor, I’m centering myself in a world in which people do things like that. And of course that doesn’t mean that I read everything — I only read those works that interest me in some way, although they might not provide as good an aesthetic experience as reading some classic or other.
That said, I guess that I admire your confidence. Didn’t you mention a couple of posts back that you’re forming a band? Are your projected musical skills great enough so that you expect your music to be better than mediocre, on some absolute scale? If not, given your statement that people shouldn’t bother with mediocre local music, how do you justify doing it (assuming that you ever plan to play in front of an audience)?
Well, in all honesty, I should point out that one of the members of the band is in another state, and we only have two members. But that’s not to invalidate your point, or the generosity that enables it. I will certainly be trying to publish writing, in a variety of genres, in the next few years.
Let me put it this way: in order to be at the center of the practice of writing, doesn’t it largely suffice to be a reader? After all, it seems clear enough that Nietzsche was inspired by writers like Pascal and Montaigne, despite their being long dead. He even wrote that they were more alive to him than most people still breathing. A contemporary writer like Marilynne Robinson engages in passionate receptions of — incredibly — John Calvin.
So if we’re talking about the practice of writing for its own sake, where it is interchangeable with gardening, wouldn’t you be gobbling up biographies of writers, along with their works, and centering yourself that way? In other words, I would justify the practice of writing as a solitary practice, if I thought I was unpublishable; but the truth is I’d probably still keep a blog.
I’m not suggesting that you can’t have a wonderful time writing and sharing what you write; the social element in all of this is not unimportant. It’s not the same thing as working in solitude. It’s just that when I lived in Sacramento, for instance, I attended local poetry readings, and most of the poetry was horrible. You know what I’m talking about — poems inspired by Jim Morrison, poems about “a fat lady in a mumu” and her melancholy expression — poems that deserved to be thrown in jail for slandering the purpler emotions. Now, at that time, I figured I would also write poems, in addition to prose, and those nights gave me access to a very kind and accepting community. But, for me, it wasn’t worth sitting through the 24 Peyote Sonnets.
“Let me put it this way: in order to be at the center of the practice of writing, doesn’t it largely suffice to be a reader?”
Oh no, not at all. For “it seems clear enough that Nietzsche was inspired by writers like Pascal and Montaigne” to work, I’d have to think of myself as in some way similar to Nietzsche, Pascal, or Montaigne. A bit overly grandiose, I think. Although perhaps someone like Barbellion would do, for some.
Upon which looking up I ran into this quote from Ray: “Of course, in one way or another, most literature has been dislocated from a community to a public. See, for example, Ron Silliman’s insistance that poetry can only be written as a sworn member of a poetic tribe, although poetry from outside the tribe can sometimes successfully be read.” I have the feeling that Silliman is mostly referring to a community coalescing around a style, while I’m referring to one characterized by arbitrariness, but I think that this is from the same page. (Also see Cahiers de Corey here and here, although I think that he and G.C. who he quotes have not escaped their institutional affiliation.)
The truth is that nearly all poetry is unpublisheable, for some version of the verb “to publish”. Silliman, again, is no doubt a much better poet than I am, but he could never actually live on his poetry unless he was willing to join academia and take up the affirmation business that Josh Corey hints at. (I’m rather down on poetic academia; I’ve seen too many people waste their time and money on a succession of workshops, followed by that institutional fund-raiser, the MFA, which holds out the possibility that one may qualify to be one of the teachers of the next generation of eager students, or at least one of the workshop teachers. It’s a genteel version of capitalism.)
Which brings me back to the local poetry reading. Sure, I’ll stipulate that a lot of this kind of poetry is, indeed, horrible. Some people are trying to improve their craft, and are only temporarily writing horrible work; some are satisfied with it over a long period of time. But the stance of bleaching everything until no trace of purple remains holds no attraction for me. I think that to some extent, we all are that guy writing Jim Morrison poetry, that woman writing about the death of her cat; I was recently reading an Ashbery poem only to see that he was going on about what poetry should be just like any novice poetry writer (if I could enforce one rule at these readings, it might be that any poem that includes the words “poem” or “poetry” is banned, as well as any meditation on writing more generally). You certainly shouldn’t sit through these things if they bore or annoy you. But I’d guess that there’s some element of sympathetic rejection of your own work figured in “Now, at that time, I figured I would also write poems [...]“. The cult of poetic authenticity is a harmful one, in its assertion that anything that someone writes is good because they wrote it, but there’s an opposing cult of aestheticism that is too eager to seperate itself.
Sorry for the confusion, Rich — I intended the Pater comment for Joseph, since I know he’s also interested in Pater and also interested in cultural mésalliances.
And yes, Joseph, I think one of the big differences between people who’ve gained publishing experience (whether that be through writing award-winning novels or publishing a long-since-moribund dissertation) and people who haven’t is that the former don’t get so het up over who’s reading them or not. In fact, that was the original point of my “It’s all writing” comment to A White Bear — that you get used to knowing that oh-my-god my Aunt Sadie might see this or not knowing if Big Celebrity has or not, and self-publishing online isn’t different in that regard.
No confusion, Ray; I understood that you were directing the comment towards Joseph, but thought for that very reason that it would make a good example of the kind of thing one reads because it is available within the scene, rather than out of a pre-existing interest.
Ray, I would be excited to read the Pater piece, either as something appearing on Pseudopodium, or even as a work in progress. Seriously. At least release a teaser trailer on YouTube or something.
A lot of unseemly anxiety does come with trying to publish, but I’d guess the point here isn’t trying to decide how best a person might use their leisure, or how to compare the follies of youth with other follies. On a few occasions, people around Irvine have organized informal fiction and poetry readings, and the results have been wonderful.
Rich,
I completely agree that it is better to take risks, including the risk of melodrama or sentimentality, than to acquire an aestheticist block.
It seems to me that writing tends to be parasitic on regular life: you have to be sequestered away with books and a keyboard, doing the work of reading, writing, and revising. The problem with the Sacramento events wasn’t just the quality of the work; rather, it was the question of whether such an audience was really going to push me to improve.
It seemed to me that if I wanted to get better at poetry, I was going to have to spend a lot of time reading poets that I admired, and fighting with my own words in a different way than I’d do with prose. In that sense, the open mike audience wasn’t going to be harmful, exactly — I could use them as an incentive to keep producing — but there was certainly a risk of substituting those standards for the ones set by the best of Ashbery or Eliot.
I think you were right to suggest that these small circles may change the nature of criticism and art appreciation, since I have albums by small bands (like the Unicorns) that compete with the huge bestsellers from a more monopolistic age (Fleetwood Mac, say).
On the other hand, I also agree with Harold Bloom that the weight of tradition is very heavy, and can’t be easily dodged. A lot of good, new indie records are re-treads of the Beatles, or doo-wop, or Motown, or 80s synth-pop. The same goes for a lot of small-scale writing: good, but smilingly derivative. Thus I imagine that the pieces of writing that will really become events, and will compel critical attention, will still bear the marks of that lonely quarrel with ourselves and tradition that is so much of reading, and writing, and the vertiginous work of trying to innovate.
Joseph, your latest response I pretty much fully agree with, which I guess means that I can finally let this thread go — communication has been achieved.
But, since I always seem to have more to say, here’s some more: the question of standards and where the audience is pushing you is indeed a serious one. Most of America doesn’t really have much of a choice of scene, however; not without being willing to participate in certain gatekeeping rituals that take their own toll.
With regard to changing the nature of criticism, I should be clear that I’m influenced by ideas of leftist post-scarcity, not simply renewing punk nostalgia. “Work as if you lived in the early days of a better nation”, as Alasdair Gray wrote in 1982 Janine. I think that people really should feel free to, let’s say, form bands and play in front of people without either expectation of becoming famous or guilt at making their friends and acquaintances suffer. If Rawlsian problems of distributive justice are to be avoided, that means that in some sense it seems like this should be theorized for everyone, not as an obligation, but as a positive good.
The problem with Harold Bloom’s thought, as I wrote earlier, is that it doesn’t really have any mode of improvement, only of holding off inevitable decay. I think that it’s possible for social change to reset the clock, so to speak. If nothing else, the struggle with tradition must at some point fail when there becomes too much tradition for anyone to take in in one lifetime. At that point, art must of necessity become more naive; it will be impossible to write anything that a skilled enough Googler (or the equivalent sort of critic) will not be able to find a historical cognate for that the artist didn’t know about. At that point, the ability to engage with the present must involve some sort of willingness to let tradition go.