The Best and Worst of Intellectual Blogs 2007

(x-posted to The Valve)

What a very long year it’s been. It’s been a year shaped by the evolution of political discourse in this country and around the world. Here, as people grew increasingly sick of the Bush Administration and the war in Iraq, Democrats regained ground. An appreciation for “intelligent,” sensible approaches to complex problems — the basic Democratic credo since Bill Clinton, but one overshadowed by Bush’s cowboy moralism — put moderates at the forefront.

It was every bit as boring as it sounds.

For intellectual blogs, the year started with bangs and ended with whimpers. Many bloggers embraced the models set forth by the political moderates, and worked to create a more inclusive blogosphere that could speak to disillusioned, uncertain conservatives or, on the other side of the fence, pragmatically-minded liberals. In the spring and early summer, there were intense debates about — among other things — feminist issues (Full Frontal Feminism), the efficacy and significance of the American Christian right, and theoretical problems (Andrew Scull’s take on Michel Foucault). However, as the year wore on, the blogosphere seemed to simply fall to pieces. There was less collaborative work, and less antagonism. The effort involved was simply too great, so opposed blogs began ignoring each other or reconciling on the cheap. A genteel solipsism emerged as the norm among intellectual bloggers: “I know not what others may do, but here is my project, for you to interpret as you will.” In the deepening twilight that has followed the deaths of Jacques Derrida and Richard Rorty, what passed for public intellectual discourse became either irrelevant (Stanley Fish in the New York Times) or strained to the point of hysteria (Slavoj Zizek) whenever it didn’t emulate the new centrism.

I hope, in the year to come, that intellectual bloggers will once more be willing to engage passionately with their commenters, instead of looking on in rueful condescension. I hope that more conversations spanning numerous blogs will arise, even if they take the form of blog wars. In any case, it’s December 24th and time for the best and worst of the intellectual blogosphere 2007.

PART ONE: THE BEST

New blogs. Of course, every year a new crop of bloggers arrives, and they invariably have a lot of energy to devote to the uncertain work of posting entries and writing comments. They’ll take on any subject, inhabit any metaphor, consider any claim on its own merits and immanent grounds. In part because of wonderful conversations taking place via N. Pepperell’s Rough Theory, 2007 was the year of Now-Times, Perverse Egalitarianism, and Wildly Parenthetical. At least one of these blogs began earlier, I seem to recall, but nonetheless this was their debut, as far as we here at the Grammy Awards are concerned.

The power of the image. This was the year when intellectual bloggers (with the exception of me) figured out that HTML is a medium that loves graphics and graphic design. N. Pepperell, having already given Rough Theory a terrific makeover, punctuated a return to considering Hegel with marvelous and evocative stills from The Wizard of Oz. Who can ever forget Antigram’s grainy, witty picture of the dominatrix, which he posted right above an attack on Zizek (and Zizek’s supporters) entitled “We Want Discipline”? (Both sides in the debate over Slavoj Zizek came up with astonishing pictures of the man: in the course of a single day, he can look like an inspired prophet and a debauched vampire.) Over at Acephalous, Scott Kaufman made a group of political blogger malcontents continue to discuss Swift Boat under the imposing aegis of Hello Kitty. Of course, speaking of Full Frontal Feminism, petitpoussin gave one side of the debate its rallying flag by taking a single trenchant and satiric photo.

One world, one blogosphere. The old distinctions between the different blog specializations are breaking down. Bloggers have become incredibly aware of the demands and desires of their audiences — more on this later — and one result was a trend towards posts about culture and even gossip on political and professional blogs. Meanwhile, particularly given the consistently lackluster response to posts about books, most intellectual bloggers turned towards politics and professional matters with increasing frequency. Celebrity gossip and reality television became matters of concern for highbrow writers. Political bloggers showed up on humanities blogs to defend their methods and ideas. Political activism, avant-garde poetics, geeky obsessions, and serious scholarly research — all that and more slowly fused together, thanks partly to mega-sites like Salon, BoingBoing, and Alternet, and partly to local friendships between bloggers of different stripes. This year, Timothy Burke coined the term “Everything Studies,” and the phrase clicked everywhere with bloggers. In short, the old divisions that used to produce segregated readerships no longer applied, and everyone benefited from the change. (Correction: I’m delighted to report that our own John Holbo, at The Valve, was the originator of “Everything Studies.”)

PART TWO : THE WORST

Reputation capital and the rise of the cynical blogger. It is inevitable that blogs will become a well-known, legitimate part of public discourse and self-fashioning; as a result, the romantic model of earnest avowals will go into decline. However, it is my hope that blogging will not become merely another avenue for self-promotion. The reasonable tone of so many bloggers just rang hollow this year: eager to appear intelligent and important, they wrote with the imperturable and phony goodwill of people giving interviews on television. Seminars and posts showed up everywhere on the subject of creating a dignified and impressive online persona: you can get famous by blogging. You can advance your career. You can eventually secure some kind of publication or book deal. The whole thing was more sickening than a conversation with a timeshare salesman.

Too much credit for sarcastic contempt. For example, those funny, funny authors who saw it as their mission to write thoughtless, hypocritical “parodies” of other bloggers, in the hopes of immediately earning vast quantities of readers without having to do the hard work of articulating viewpoints. It is terrific to be funny, and there is always occasion for satire, but it was just sad watching reasonable bloggers try to seem hip by linking to and celebrating their mockers. Just as these blogs got too much credit for a continual recourse to sarcasm, too many commenters got stuck doing the verbal equivalent of very slow, loud clapping. The blogosphere cannot survive on dismissals and exasperated gestures.

Fixed ideas. Yes, we are all in favor of long-form projects, but the number of posts that had five, or eight, or twenty sequels this year exceeded all reasonable limits. It didn’t matter the content of blog — everybody was bitten by the continuity bug, myself included, and the overhead was a disaster. Blame television for producing longer attention spans: when you tuned into a blog you hadn’t read in a while, it was like suddenly finding yourself with Season 6, Disc 3 of The Sopranos. Every time you return to something it should show you a new facet: whether that is something new in you, or new in it, is always hard to say, but each piece must be its own revolution.

LOOKING AHEAD TO 2008

So, what’s ahead for 2008? I can’t predict trends, but I can say what I hope for, and that’s a renaissance of words in their essential loneliness. Intellectual blogging is a medium that thrives because it captures the quietude of those moments when we seal ourselves off from our surroundings in order to consider the printed words of another person. The tremulousness of the word, the expectation of an answer, the abjection and shamelessness of writing for self-publication: in order to be honest, a blogger has to be vulnerable, more so even than the author of a book. What she is writing apparently had to be blogged to be written at all. Given the voluntarism of the blogosphere, polish is merely comic; risk is the only thing worth admiring. The risk of saying too much, the risk of being unread, the risk of being misread — intellectual blogging must change from an indifferent exercise of dignified exposition into the willing practice of risk.

The Feminist Bookstore Video and Yes Means Yes

That prankster Jessica Valenti, of Feministing, is back at it (in the aftermath of her book Full Frontal Feminism) with an essay collection in progress entitled Yes Means Yes. As sometimes happens, I’ve been busier writing comments than posting; you can read the ongoing discussion at tekanji’s Shrub Blog.

Hat tip to Truly Outrageous for a link to Carrie Brownstein’s hilarious performance in the Feminist Bookstore video, which, if you have any contact with New Age culture — and you know you do — you’re bound to enjoy.

A Colder Eye: Yeats, Radiohead, and the Economies of Late Style

(x-posted to The Valve)

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.
-William Butler Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

Now that Radiohead’s new album, In Rainbows, has come to take its place alongside the rest of their canon, it is being compared to all the albums that preceded it. For many of my friends, who were in high school or college when OK Computer and Kid A appeared, the comparisons are grudging but basically unfavorable. The new album lacks the peculiar, engaging science fictions of the earlier albums; archetypal characters like the “Tourist” and the “lucky” man, and recognizable technologies like the airbag, were the only familiar faces in a strange country of fake plastic trees, karma police, and especially androids. The showcase “Paranoid Android” on OK Computer turned into the pseudo-concept of Kid A. He is an android-like character who is actually unnecessary to most of the songs on Kid A, but who nonetheless helped to create a feeling of continuity between the two albums, even as Kid A wandered off into icier, more despairing electronic territory.

For my part, rather than trying to suss out which albums beat out which others — an evaluation that tends to borrow heavily from the personal circumstances surrounding each purchase — I want to compare how Radiohead has evolved with how W. B. Yeats altered his style over time. When Yeats began writing, he wanted to create modern poetry steeped in Celtic myth. In part, he hoped to revitalize the heritage of Ireland; in part, the forlorn romanticism and uncanniness of those images corresponded to his own vision, which in “Coole and Ballylee, 1931″ he called “traditional sanctity and loveliness.” Running through Yeats’s early writing, as in “The Stolen Child,” is the strange complement of a homely, rustic existence, and sudden glimpses into an esoteric other world of pleasure, threat, and love. The image of the weaver unites with the dance; the faery frolic is simultaneously the anxious dream of a troubled, exhausted world.

Yeats never repudiated these early works; the work that time performed on his style was much subtler. He became more involved in the practical labors associated with all of his idealistic hopes for a new Celtic poetics: he took on Irish politics, he investigated the supernatural and wrote mystical books, and he wrote a series of plays that could bring Celtic myth to life on the stage. Meanwhile, poem by poem, the Celtic mythos was taking its place alongside a host of other references, including Greek and Roman texts. The imagery of silver, and gold, and the dance, and the loom, and so on had not disappeared. Rather, they had become the touchstone’s of Yeats’s sensibility, imaginative structures through which he could accomplish life-writing, a term that encompasses autobiography and memoir, but also the vast and freer literature of self-reflection which, among other things, describes the lyrics of most modern pop music.

For example, in “Among School Children,” Yeats begins like this:

I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
the children learn to cipher and to sing,
To study reading-books and history,
To cut and sew, be neat in everything
In the best modern way — the children’s eyes
In momentary wonder stare upon
A sixty-year-old smiling public man.

Which leads here:

Both nuns and mothers worship images,
But those the candles light are not as those
That animate a mother’s reveries,
But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
And yet they too break hearts — O Presences
That passion, piety or affection knows,
And that all heavenly glory symbolise –
O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

Labor is blossoming or dancing where
The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?

(Apologies for the long quote — it’s hard to capture the sense otherwise.) Over the course of the poem, the aging Yeats thinks of his agony and the waste of time upon him, and reflects with sadness on the hope placed in children who nonetheless are destined also to fade. The ghostly presence of the Celtic “otherworld,” to which the child is stolen away in the earlier poem, is here the vision of pleasure without bruise, beauty without despair, understanding without toil, which is impossible.

The last few lines of the poem are often quoted, in part because they imply Presences and processes more real than persons: there is no dancer, only the process of the dance. The different times of a life are woven together like the parts of a tree, and so are the different stages of human life, juxtaposed in the classroom as Yeats moves among the children. But Yeats does phrase his ending as a question, rather than a statement, and gently suggests that the particular sorrows and peregrinations of his life do body him forth as himself. The poem moves dialectically between communal experience, including music, and individual experience, the body that sways but also loses its bloom.

The children resemble the young Yeats. They, like him, are the inheritors of poetry and history, to fashion as they will. They learn to sing, as he does in his poetry, and to cipher, as he did through his writings on mysticism. And, together with this, they are too clean — they cut and sew, weaving this, excluding that, in the ironically “modern way” that forms them into a mass. As Yeats aged, his references became messier, incorporating elements from many more traditions. His style began to vary even within single poems, as it does here, gliding between the old enchanted lyricism and a new sort of straightforward exposition. The style lacks neatness.

Returning to Radiohead, compare this:

Karma police, arrest this man
He talks in maths, he buzzes like a fridge

With this:

You were not to blame for
Bittersweet distractors
Dare not speak his name
Did I cater to you
All your needs?

Neither quote reads correctly without the wailing sound of Thom Yorke’s voice, and the ominous backing from the band, but as foundations for the music, they are strikingly different. “Karma Police” is famously impressionistic. We have a sense that the man he describes here is a nervous, boorish square, and at the same time that Yorke is complicit in the poison of the scene because he is so irritable. But it’s just a sense, vaguely augmented by the paranoid invention of “karma police.” In the second song, Yorke’s singing to an unfaithful lover with a mixture of bitterness and resignation. The masochism of the relationship and the unhappy shallowness of it all are as vivid as initials carved with a knife.

Nothing can detract from OK Computer. The robotic dystopia that Radiohead created with their early albums is still fascinating. But it was also bound to devolve, like the commodity it was, into kitsch. The sad bears that Radiohead used as a brand, like the invented boy Kid A, became branded self-pity without a referent. The band Grandaddy took Radiohead so literally that they produced a whole album, The Sophtware Slump, that (in its unbearable preciousness) laid bare the roots of some of Radiohead’s imagery in 80s junk like D.A.R.R.Y.L. Like Yeats, who in “Sailing To Byzantium” compared himself to “a tattered coat upon a stick,” Radiohead has moved away from the uncanny multitude of their early sci-fi epics, to its complement, the searing, personal awareness of an absence.

You paint yourself white
And fill up with noise
But there’ll be something missing
-”Nude”

Watching I’m Not There

(x-posted to The Valve)

Several nights ago, I had the pleasure of watching I’m Not There, the new Bob Dylan movie that excited everyone so much because of the prospect of seeing Cate Blanchett in drag, talking to Allen “David Cross” Ginsburg.

The film was initially a gigantic disappointment. I came away bitter about it, largely because I wasn’t prepared for the kind of experimenting involved. While I knew that Dylan would be played by several different actors, and assumed there would be stylistic differences between each thread, I was still looking for a biopic capable of explaining how Dylan produced so much great music. I have always loved origin stories more than any other part of grand narratives; Issue #1 is consistently my favorite. I like to study how people and their literary doubles become what they are.

Rather than give us any inkling into the creative processes at work in Dylan’s music, the film is really Dylan’s requiem, which is strange considering that Dylan is still alive. Dylan is a very obliging person, and when he wrote his own autobiography, Chronicles, he emphasized the intellectual friendships that struck him most, along with the claustrophobic places where he manged to land gigs, and the attics where he got access to old records. He writes about himself from the outside, in a practical fashion, drawing the easy causal connection between the period of hope and reckless apprenticeship, when he steeps himself in music and dreams, and the period (still to come at the end of Chronicles) of significance and celebrity.

The irony of almost every book or film about an artist is that, as much as the author wants to crawl inside the author’s head, we are still usually left with a work ethic and dime-a-dozen cultural obsessions. Lots of teenagers loved Nat King Cole as intensely as Ray Charles; when the camera in Control pans slowly across Ian Curtis’s bookshelf, we see a lot of books everybody in the theater has probably read. In order to ask the question of what made Dylan himself, without answering superficially by invoking passion and work, one has to enter the various dreams that his art echoed and magnified until everything about his life was blurry with dreaming.

My re-evaluation of the film came from a moment talking with my friend tomemos, who mentioned that all of the scenes with Richard Gere were performed with characters from The Basement Tapes (or, at least, with characters derived from the songs). Richard Gere makes a lousy Dylan. He’s too sad and hesitant to capture Dylan’s burning intelligence and wit, and too resignedly secular to show us anything about Dylan’s faith. Nonetheless, the character he plays, a version of Billy the Kid who is hiding out like Mortensen in A History of Violence, matters because Dylan undoubtedly thought of himself that way, as an outlaw with roots deep in the American soil. Gere is very convincing as someone Dylan wanted to be and perhaps thinks he attained.

More than one fantasy fills up the empty space of the ideal. Fantasies replace each other over time. For Haynes, Dylan is the sum of his fantasies — the fantasy of being black and young again, the fantasy of being a noble refugee with a history of violence, the fantasy of being a good and simple preacher, the fantasy of being the hippest cat, the fantasy of becoming the voice of his generation by forging its political conscience. Each fantasy was the slightly corny product of the times: the “scene” in London and in Warhol’s factory, the discovery of the blues, the war in Vietnam, the beginning and end of the rock era. In turn, each new fantasy changed Dylan’s direction and unwove the past fabric of his life. Wives, friends, audiences changed. In order to get inside Dylan’s head, Haynes measures the distance between who he thought he was at each moment, and what other realities gave that the lie. From that point of view, the scariest moments in the film are probably the scenes with Heath Ledger, where Dylan is seeing himself in an disturbingly flat fashion, as a harried professional, living out of a suitcase, trying to hold on to partial custody of his children.  It’s like that Calvin and Hobbes strip where Calvin dreams about getting out of bed and brushing his teeth.

Among the shards of every decade across which Dylan has spread his songs, these dreams have been preserved whole: the records, like I’m Not There, of the many people Dylan wasn’t, through whom he managed to survive a reality that would otherwise have suffocated him — and perhaps, without his eerie but courageous voices, more of us.

Absolutely Fun and True Facts, Chapter One: I Am Defamed

Dear readers,

I’m working my way through a draft of my dissertation prospectus, with a little help from Soren Kierkegaard’s Stages on Life’s Way. I’m also really enjoying teaching Persuasion and The Bluest Eye. However, I couldn’t help but notice that me, my blog, and the Valve, where of course I cross-post most of what I write, were all nominated for various piercingly satiric blog Oscars at a blog called Parody Center. Scott Kaufman has the story over at Acephalous, and I recommend that you go there rather than clicking over to the howling, schizophrenic void of the Center itself. But maybe you don’t care that the Center is not safe for work, or maybe you work somewhere where jpegs of self-violating golden statues are the norm, in which case I grudgingly provide you the following link to the thing-in-itself.

Here is an important quotation from this post, in which I am nominated for Aristocratic Parody:

Dr. Josephina Kugelmass’ Romantic Tantrum ( http://kugelmass.wordpress.com/)

for cooking her own elitist Ratatouille; for being timid and restrained in her criticism of dr. Slovenly Zizek;

In this quote, there are several inaccuracies. To begin with, my first name is Joseph. It is not so much that I am offended by the thought of being called “Josephina,” as it is that Josephina Kugelmass is a travel agent who lives in Wichita, and I don’t want to see her or her family adversely affected by my blog. Also, this text (at Parody Center) genders me as a woman. While my gender categories are in no way “fixed” or stable in their significations, I have seen almost every episode of The Sopranos, and have enjoyed them. I also recently listened to practically all of AC/DC’s album Back in Black, last Thursday I think.

My blog is unabashedly romantic. Reading my blog is like drinking a rosewater piña colada on the island of Capri. In general, though, these authors use the word “romantic” so often that it really starts to lose all meaning, like when you buy too many Godiva chocolates and they end up tasting odd, as though somebody had melted saran wrap into them. They call the Valve neo-Romantic, and so forth. I picture them pretending to like conceptual art on a daily basis.

With respect to the charge of elitism, I would like to dispel any rumors once and for all by announcing that I am always looking for ways of achieving lower culture. If there is anyone who can suggest a complete anti-elitist program, I promise to put on hold what I am currently doing with my free time, which is watching Entourage, playing Texas Hold ‘Em poker, planning a belated birthday trip to Las Vegas for New Year’s, and listening to Young Jeezy and Celine Dion. As anyone who knows me can tell you, that is not even a little bit a joke.

I was timid and restrained in my criticisms of Zizek, so let me remedy the situation. One time Zizek came to Irvine to speak, and he told an extended story about the function of obscene and offensive jokes as a bonding ritual in the Yugoslav Army. Allow me to say, ruthlessly if you please, that these jokes, all of which he repeated for our benefit, were kind of boring. Dr. Zizek, hear me roar: YOU HAD TO BE THERE.