I’ve no idea if you’ve been following my updates on cowbird, but it’s turning out to be an interesting ride. On the one hand, I’m still incredibly excited about it. I like many of the writers I’m following. Furthermore, to my mind at least, there’s no question that I’m pushing myself harder there and accomplishing more in terms of my creative writing than I’ve been able to do for many years.
On the other hand, the tone is a little hard to take, and the Cowbird Daily Story isn’t helping. Naturally, being a writer for Cowbird, and knowing there’s A Cowbird Daily Story, makes one eager to get picked for the Cowbird equivalent of the kickball team. Even when you don’t get picked — and I haven’t — you half-consciously, half-unconsciously start to emulate the stories getting the most recognition. There’s an uncomfortable feeling of constraint, because the stories have to be heartfelt, and they have to be true, and the result can veer into the territory of high school poetry.
So here are some excerpts from the Daily Story from a few days ago. It’s called “One Night Stand,” and it pretty well encapsulates the problem:
the truth was i just wasn’t into it
we met at a gay club
i was drunk
i think she was flattered
she got a gay guy to make out with her
maybe her beauty was capable of conversion
but i wasn’t gay
so
we went back to her place
and i wanted passion
to wash over me
to take over
i really wanted that
but i just felt depressed
that a naked girl
who i didn’t know
was on top of me
i didn’t even know
what things would make her laugh
[...]
i can’t use somebody else
to heal my own heart
***
Yes. How very true. On the other hand, here’s another version of that story:
The truth was I just wasn’t into it. We met at a gay club, where I’d gone because I was asking myself questions about my sexuality, questions that remain with me. “I’m not sure I’m gay, and I actually just went through a really bad breakup with a woman,” I said to her. We didn’t make out any further. “I thought my beauty was capable of conversion,” she said. “That’s sort of vain,” I said. There was an awkward silence and then she walked away.
Sure, I felt bad that our interaction ended on a sour note, but it could have been much worse. I could have used descriptions of her naked body, her hair, and her hands to attract interest in a story about my own banal self-loathing. More importantly, I could have avoided telling her the truth, had sex with her, and basically done everything possible to make her hate herself as much as I hated myself. “Thank God I’m not that guy,” I said, finishing my gin and tonic. Then I got up to dance.
A heads-up that the brilliant Annie Correal (@anniecorreal) invited me to join Cowbird a few days ago, and I’m having tons of fun with it. I’ve posted three stories thus far. Cowbird is a (gorgeously designed) social network for storytelling. It’s actually doing something I had planned for this very space (see here)…even if cultural criticism later won its way back into my heart.
I’ll probably cross-post or re-write some of those stories on Cowbird, as I did with the (oddly relevant) story of talking about Buddhism with a park ranger in Chiang Mai, Thailand. Cowbird gives me a chance to write very compact true stories, free of the anxiety that American culture often produces in me. It’s also a chance to show my roots a little more: so far, two of my three stories have been family heirlooms.
The New York Times, incidentally, is all about it. Of course not every story is good, and there is a slight bias towards “sad kid with a big camera” emo stuff…but the overall quality of the writing is remarkable. The site is meant to inspire purposeful writing, and it does.
[Before we begin: if anyone is going to make a Buddhist approach to Western literary theory work, it's Erin McNellis. I can't imagine a stronger source of counter-arguments than her recent essay collection, which I reviewed here.]
Dear American Buddhism: it’s over. I hereby renounce all participation in you, even from the sidelines.
Two years ago, I wrote this post about meditation. Then as now, I was troubled by several things about Western practices of meditation. It is universally considered “good for you,” even though nothing, including broccoli, is always good for everyone under all circumstances. It is often linked with a critique of our noisy modern lives, but not with any collective effort to improve our noisy modern lives. (Instead, you’re supposed to go off to your corner and clear your head.) Finally, the term is incredibly broad, especially for something with supposed medical benefits; it is really a broad rubric, covering a huge range of practices.
Readers responded (mostly at the Valve, which was thriving at the time) by pointing out that a range of different ways of meditating do share a similar goal: the attainment of “mindfulness.” This gave me pause. Even though I could easily think of situations where generic “mindfulness” would be a hindrance, I could also understand trying to become more focused and “present,” as we say nowadays.
Fast-forward to the present day. One of my friends sends me a letter partly about Buddhism and psychoanalysis, writing that the two could co-exist within psychotherapy. Psychoanalysis provides some ways of talking about fundamental psychic structures, while Buddhism suggests an approach closer to CBT. CBT is “cognitive-behavioral therapy,” a modern treatment based on correcting observable patterns (habits, acts) rather than internal states (trauma, repression).
She’s quite right, and that’s probably why it struck me right then that my feelings went beyond losing interest in meditation. I was over, way over, the entire nebula of American Buddhist thought. The way it has been translated, literally and culturally, has made it one of the biggest time-wasters in recent intellectual history. Consider, for example, what happened just now at the junction of Buddhism and CBT: Buddhism gets reduced to a philosophy indifferent to subjectivity. This is exactly how it is used, but far from what it really is. Buddhism insists on relinquishing desire, not ignoring it.
First, I’m revising what I said before about meditation. The reason that few people discuss the negative effects of meditation is very simple: it doesn’t do much, including anything especially harmful. I’ve known lots of people who meditated and lots who didn’t, and, as a group, there is nothing that distinguishes people who meditate. They are not calmer, more observant, or more productive. I’m wincing as I write this, thinking of my friends who cherish meditation, but it’s the truth. It’s not a bad thing that they (or anybody) meditates — it’s just not very significant viewed from the outside. Whether or not meditation does work “behind the scenes,” it never comes onstage, except verbally.
“Mindfulness” is a will-o-the-wisp. You can spend your time chasing it. You can also spend a lot of time discussing it. Neither accomplishes very much. At the end of the day, it’s like so many other cults of this or that mental state (flow, hypomania, inner peace, confidence, “psyching up,” etc). Retrospectively, you can look back on a period of time and say something like “I was in a state of flow” or “I had a great feeling of confidence the whole time.” Prospectively, though, we already know a great deal about what actually affects mental states — food, sleep, exercise, drugs/medication — and none of those things are as important as a good work plan, or, when one is on a social call, having something to say. (Assuming the situation is not extreme. If you haven’t eaten in four days, then I would certainly recommend food over a new work plan.)
Non-attachment is a philosophical principle practiced by nobody I know. I don’t know a single person trying to attain freedom from desire, or even anyone who is taking major steps in that direction. The monastery system in Southeast Asia is a remarkable institution, in part because there’s an actual code of conduct. From the way people throw around phrases like “a Zen attitude,” you’d think that non-attachment means remaining calm if your television breaks. By all means, remain calm. But even if you do throw a fit, you’ll be glad to know that no weighty religious or philosophical matters are at stake. Thinking otherwise would be like me calling myself “Confucian” for attending a family reunion.
Less central concepts, such as samsara and karma, are just not very Buddhist, as we use them. The Golden Rule was not a Buddhist innovation; as for keeping one’s distance from “the world,” that tradition goes back to the Greeks.
This is also true of Buddhist aesthetics. Actual materials from the East, such as bamboo, are of course not inherently Buddhist. Minimalism, as a design philosophy, does not derive from Zen. (The fact that Steve Jobs said otherwise speaks to Jobs’s ability to market himself, as well as his need to create narratives of profundity.) It’s a natural extension of modernism. Eastern thought did influence modernism, but a long time ago, and in a hybrid form. Hinduism, and more particularly the Bhagavad-Gita, were more important than Buddhism back in the day. But you can’t walk into a bookstore and buy 365 Days of Arjuna. Even the spirit of Zen, with its keen absurdist humor, ends up travestied by these overstated connections — Mondrian paintings and Apple computers look beautiful, but they’re in deadly earnest and decidedly unfunny.
Minimalism isn’t the only way Westernized “Buddhism” has been translated into a style. It’s just the only respectable way. “Buddhism” can also be an interpersonal mode, expressed (for example) when people run through a visible breathing routine to calm themselves, all the while communicating perfectly well that they are upset, because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be having to calm themselves. Perhaps as much as half of the show Portlandia involves satirizing this blue state, skin-deep serenity.
As for Buddhism’s recent literary output and influence, the results have been mixed. Siddhartha is a worthwhile novel, though also a problematic one. Kerouac’s Zen book is derivative, and, considering how rapidly he reeled toward his own destruction, a bit depressing. “The Fire Sermon” is just a nice title: Eliot converted to Anglicanism five years later. I stopped reading On Anger when Hanh started theorizing that angry cows produce angry hamburgers, which in turn leach anger into our bodies through our stomachs. The underlying ideas — calmness, vegetarianism — are rationally defensible; they do not need to be buttressed with superstition. The Dalai Lama strikes me as a very kind, sensible person who is, through the accidents of history, in a position of world-historical significance. His books are thoughtful re-statements of commonplace ethical ideas.
Buddhist ideas pop up now and again within critical theory and casual philosophical conversation, but always as the road not taken. As with those moments when “cyclical history” or the “Christian idea of universal love” is Option A, Western thinkers tend to pause briefly at “non-attachment” or “departing the wheel of dharma,” afterwards selecting Option B. I think it’s fair to assert that these concepts are not seriously in play; they are trotted out to show open-mindedness and erudition.
***
None of this invalidates the original tradition. Buddhist ideas remain serious concepts in and of themselves, both insightful and potentially applicable to anyone’s life (regardless of nationality) if that person is willing to consider a radical course of action. Nonetheless — with all due respect to people like Schopenhauer or Hesse who did take them seriously — these ideas mostly spread in the West in the form of panaceas, modified and trivialized by consumerism. Buddhism rejects many core Western values: progress, passion, sociability, wealth. Western religious thinkers have, at times, critiqued one or several of these values, but nothing comes close to Buddhism’s absolute veto. Its cosmology is also hugely different from that of any theistic faith. To invest empty conversations about mindfulness, or generic conversations about compassion, with the reverence due to a religion with a real existence elsewhere is a mistake I am ready, finally, not to continue to make.
***
Another friend of mine, whose insatiable craving for knowledge has led him to make the most unusual experiments and has ended by giving him encyclopaedic knowledge, has assured me that through the practices of Yoga, by withdrawing from the world, by fixing the attention on bodily functions and by peculiar methods of breathing, one can in fact evoke new sensations and coenaesthesias in oneself, which he regards as regressions to primordial states of mind which have long ago been overlaid. He sees in them a physiological basis, as it were, of much of the wisdom of mysticism. It would not be hard to find connections here with a number of obscure modifications of mental life, such as trances and ecstasies. But I am moved to exclaim in the words of Schiller’s diver:-
‘. . . Es freue sich.
Wer da atmet im rosigten Licht.’*
-Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents
*He may rejoice, who breathes in the roseate light!
It was a pretty solid post, overall. Johnston tore into this idiotic profile of Lana Del Rey, which really does have a creepy tone, as though the author needs to be able to pretend that all female musicians are also his girlfriend, and better act like it. She also made quick work of a racist, sexist moment in Esquire where a bunch of unusual real names (e.g. Beyoncé) were mocked as “porn names.”
That said, Johnston jumped the shark twice. As a matter of overall structure, I seriously doubt that she likes Lana Del Rey all that much. I could be wrong, but my reasons are these: first of all, Johnston seems to have good taste in music, and the Lana Del Rey album is very uneven. “National Anthem” is so bad that it reminds me, with an involuntary shudder, of when I had to buy albums on cassette. It’s Del Rey’s “Wild Honey Pie,” except that’s even worse, because it re-uses bits of Track 2, “Off To The Races,” making that (much better) song seem less impressive.
Second, even if the profile really was creepy, you can’t seriously criticize the media for sexualizing Lana Del Rey. She’s defined herself through sultriness. (She’s your little Scarlett! Singing in the garden! Kiss her on her open mouth!) The music video for “Video Games” is so rote it’s almost like a parody: half of the video is her pretending to sing — while giving the camera a sidelong glance through amber waves of hair — and the other half is standard indie-rock “found footage” from 1980s home movies.
Side note: Where do all these home movies come from? I swear to God, there is a gigantic warehouse somewhere full of nothing but home movies for indie rock videos, and PSAs you might sample on your next rap album.
…ANYWAY, as a result, the piece ends up trying to defend Del Rey against the tidal wave of prurient publicity that she has obviously courted (starting with the fact that she’s Lizzie Grant, or used to be). Is it really a feminist move to treat Del Rey as famous by accident? Even Interscope takes flak for trying to persuade us that Del Rey is an indie rocker — another reason I don’t think Johnston likes Born To Die. But she is so intent on playing close to the vest that she won’t even disparage “Born In The USA” by Miley Cyrus.
Honestly, I really hate this approach to cultural meta-criticism. The Internet is full of indignation. Even when it’s justified, as here, there’s no reason Johnston couldn’t have also said something about all this music she’s sticking up for.
But it gets better. Johnston, firing on all cylinders, amassing a body count like a John Woo movie, takes a hip shot at Chuck Klosterman’s piece on tUnE-yArDs, which included the following line:
Garbus will end up with this bizarre 40-year-old life, where her singular claim to fame will be future people saying things like, “Hey, remember that one winter when we all thought tUnE-yArDs was supposed to be brilliant? That fucking puppeteer? Were we all high at the same time? What was wrong with us?”
Johnston responds: Anyone want to get a male critical darling of yore on the phone to talk about his “bizarre 40-year-old life”? I’ll wait.
Are you kidding me? How much time do you have? I’ve got Sunny Day Real Estate and Massive Attack on the line right now, and if you want the “deluxe package,” I’ll throw in Flava Flav, AND Andrew W. K., AND a copy of A Visit From The Goon Squad.
This, of course, led me to Johnston’s entire post responding to Klosterman, and I have to say, she didn’t get it. Klosterman is not just being polite when he calls Merrill Garbus a “serious artist,” and writes that w h o k i l l is “a very good record,” adding “I like your record.” OK, he doesn’t love it, but he likes it, and he did listen to it. His article is about the relationship between artists and fans, and his point is that even though he likes this album, some people who are obsessed with it right now will later try to discredit it, unless Garbus shuts them up with a slew of fantastic albums. Consider what happened to stellastarr — if you even remember the band I’m talking about. The “percussiveness” of w h o k i l l is a mixed blessing. It initially helps the album by making it easy to describe, and, in a way, easy to listen to — I know what I’m supposed to hear. But it also is something I can easily shrug off if the band’s star begins to fall, as though it was just a gimmick.
Perhaps Johnston feels that he should have listened to it six times. If you don’t listen to it six times, how can you possibly claim to have an informed opinion? Well, w h o k i l l is not exactly a bolt out of the blue. It’s musically similar to a lot of other acts, including Vampire Weekend (the percussion) and Ponytail. Life is short. I guarantee that when I recommend a song to friends, they listen to it exactly once unless they like something about it.
A lot of what passes for “debate” about culture descends into one or both sides saying, essentially, “you don’t even have the right to speak on this subject.” That’s no way to vindicate w h o k i l l; if you’re not already a fan, it sounds petulant.
Everything Klosterman says about tUnE-yArDs is right. His observations are so self-evident that I’m not sure why a fan has to take exception. Their lyrics really are indecipherable. I can be a Nirvana fan and still laugh at Weird Al’s “Smells Like Nirvana.” When instead you have a blogger at Slate wondering why “My Country” didn’t become an #OWS anthem, I start to wonder what kind of headphones these tUnE-yArDs fans are using, because I would pay basically any price for them.
Then there’s Klosterman writing that you can’t dance (other than in theory) to tUnE-yArDs — but you can, Johnston counters, because she went to a concert and that’s exactly what she did. No doubt, but live music played outdoors on a [Chan] Marshall stack is not the issue. Klosterman’s point is that the record actually isn’t a dance record, but that a lot of fans will enjoy pretending that it’s hedonistic just because it’s percussive. He’s right. It’s a headphones record. No matter how deep you are in Williamsburg or Silver Lake, if you put on w h o k i l l, you’ll make at least person so mad that you’ll have “the DJing fight,” a staple of any self-respecting hipster party. (This won’t happen right away. For one song, a lot of people will talk about how they totally love w h o k i l l. It will happen halfway through the second song.)
Indie fans have to stop congratulating themselves for dancing. It’s just embarrassing. Nobody comes home from a Justin Timberlake or Rihanna concert and says, “Man, that was so rad. Good crowd. People weren’t too cool for a little ass-shaking.”
To bring things full circle, Johnston does her best to prove that tUnE-yArDs is sexy as hell, quoting her colleague Eric Harvey:
On the sultry slow jam “Powa,” she confesses her preference for ceding control in the bedroom, punctuated with the confession “my man likes me from behind,” before collapsing into a gorgeous orgasmic wail. She one-ups even this on “Riotriot,” admitting an erotic attraction to the Oakland cop she watched handcuff her brother. It’s a quietly stunning moment to hear an artist, especially a woman, so bluntly admit the most repressed form of desire: that which arises when encountering a source of power well beyond your control.
This is laughable. tUnE-yArDs aren’t sultry (cf. Lana Del Rey, above). Yes, “Powa” is a sex song, but despite the masochism, it’s on Garbus’s terms. The song opens like this:
Wait, honey honey
Wait, honey honey
I will never get to sleep
Rebel, rebel, no
I can never get to sleep
I’m a rebel, rebel, no
Hold me til I get to sleep
This is vulnerable; vulnerable can be sexy, but this is so frail that it casts a shadow over the rest of the song. In “Powa,” Garbus sings about sex as if it is her alternative to suicide. Even the title suggests her need to dismantle “power,” a word she fears, by translating it into baby talk.
As an artistic statement, “Powa” is genuine and compelling. Klosterman’s description, “Garbus briefly and convincingly sings like Robert Plant,” conveys a lot more information than Harvey’s cliched “gorgeous orgasmic wail.” It’s good for Garbus to present her sexuality on her own terms, and probably many of her fans find her both genuine and sexy. That is plenty. There’s no reason to enter w h o k i l l in a sensuality contest against Born To Die. It will lose at a game it wasn’t trying to play, and some of the reasons are really banal: for example, you can’t get hot for lyrics you can’t understand. The effect of describing “Powa” as “a gorgeous orgasmic wail” is to make the next Zola Jesus or Janis Joplin article less informative.
Ultimately, both Johnston and Harvey give the impression that they would describe w h o k i l l as more sensual than Lana Del Rey, because Del Rey is fake and cheap. I find this disingenous because I don’t think Johnston (in her job as a critic) is all that interested in Bedroom Music (Especially For Lovers!). She tops her column on w h o k i l l with a picture that makes Garbus look about 14, and just so we don’t get the wrong idea, the picture for the other column isn’t Lana Del Rey but a Rolling Stone cover with Tina Turner. After all, Lana Del Rey was photographed by Terry Richardson, and that guy is terminally icky, even if she was the one who picked him.
Meanwhile, the tortured prose of “she confesses her preference for ceding control in the bedroom” and “admitting an erotic attraction” sounds exactly like what it is: a repressed indie rock Nice Guy trying to prove that he can write about the adult stuff. (Hot tip: “It was more than attraction…IT WAS EROTIC ATTRACTION!” is a hipster fridge magnet waiting to happen.) It’s reasonable to ask whether a Lana Del Rey song in which she sang “my man likes me from behind” would earn as much praise as “Powa.”
Rather than laying into Harvey’s analysis of “Riotriot,” which screams “I’m in a graduate seminar on Jean Genet,” I’ll come clean. “Riotriot” is one of those songs that makes w h o k i l l unlistenable for me. If you want to hear exactly what I’m talking about, fast-forward to 2 minutes and 30 seconds in, when the song goes into a noisy, atonal fit. Yes, I can understand that this is supposed to represent the chaotic experience of a riot, but it doesn’t: it represents the chaotic experience of a certain kind of art school post-punk. I’ve heard this aesthetic done countless times; I must own at least 20 albums with similar songs, thanks to Pitchfork. I wouldn’t say “Riotriot” is a better riot song than “White Riot” by the Clash, or “Guerrilla Radio” by Rage Against The Machine: it just sounds different. Furthermore, none of these songs will ever be featured at an actual riot. Protesters sing slow, melodic songs; that’s what works best for 500 unaccompanied voices.
I pretty much knew I was going to hate w h o k i l l when I saw how the band spelled its name. I’m aesthetically finicky enough to get a headache whenever I see those jagged little capital letters. The album title, with its inexplicable spaces and italicization, added insult to injury. I have no idea what “whokill” means. Is it a question? Is it, like, the first half of some ancient prophecy (“whokill the winged bear, only they shall eat the fruit of splendor”)? “Born To Die” may not be a very subtle album title, but at least I get some emotion out of it.
It is, in no way, essential that I love tUnE-yArDs. I also don’t like the art of Jaspar Johns or Paul Klee. I’m a Rothko guy, a Mondrian guy. Nonetheless, if I had to write a review of w h o k i l l, I would give it a decent score, just like Klosterman. I would do all I could not to describe it as “dance music topped off by a gorgeous wail,” because that would be misleading. I’ll end with how not to end, courtesy of Pitchfork’s Matthew Perpetua:
A lot of what makes w h o k i l l and tUnE-yArDs’ excellent live performances so compelling is the degree to which Garbus commits to her ideas and displays a total conviction in her personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. This, in and of itself, is very inspiring and empowering.
Johnston cites this, approvingly, as summing up the band’s “highly individualistic appeal.”
It does the opposite. It tells us nothing. You could replace the artist and album names with almost anybody in indie rock, and the statement would continue to sound true. The Dirty Projectors make personal, idiosyncratic, high-stakes music. So does EMA. So does Robyn, Cass McCombs, Leonard Cohen. It’s all just so inspiring and empowering!
Of the people I know, the subset who even know who tUnE-yArDs are, are nuts about them. Still, the way they talk about the album makes sense to me. It can be discussed objectively. When you try to do more than that, by making an album magically capable of being all things to all people, you fool yourself into thinking “My Country” is blowing in the wind. So much hyperbole leads, later on, to the kind of backlash that Klosterman is talking about.
***
PS. A couple snippets from Pitchfork reviewer Lindsay Zoladz, who writes an absolutely devastating review of Born To Die in precisely the right way, judging Lana’s album on its own terms:
[She aims] for chatty sparkling opulence…[but] does not have the personality to bring it off. Jay and Kanye made escapist fantasy sound so fun [...] [Lana's] fantasy world makes you long for reality. The sexual politics of Born To Die are troubling [...] For all of its coos about love and devotion, it’s the album equivalent of a faked orgasm– a collection of torch songs with no fire.
As Ron Howard would say: now that’s how you narrate a story. Are you going to drop $10 on somebody else’s faked orgasm? Are you even going to Spotify something with no fire? Of course not.
Be happy everyone! Thanks so much for reading! OKTHXBYE!
The following Facebook conversation represents my best attempt, in concert with my friend Brendan, to make sense, somehow, of the staggering revelation that Martin Amis, at one point in the early 1980s, wrote a (bizarre pastiche simulation of a) young adult guide to beating arcade video games. You don’t have to take my word for it.
As they say on MathNet: the names are made up, but the problems are real.
***
Vladimir: Some of the quotes pulled from this read like amazing parody – as if you were given the comic task of using a favorite author’s voice to narrate a ridiculous piece of pop. Estragon, I’m not sure if you are a Martin Amis fan, but if so I think you’d get as much joy out of this as I did.
Estragon: In a way, doesn’t this would-be Onion article sum up everything that’s vexing about Amis? Here he writes this cheeky, fascinating book, freely mixing literary styles and even literary *objectives* (does he want you to be better at Pac-Man, or does he want you to recover from your Pac-Man addiction? Which?), only to immediately distance himself from it as something regrettable and trite, despite the fact that he takes that very position within the book!
And then, on a case-by-case basis, he’s simultaneously positioning himself as an indifferent channel for The Voice of the People (who he knows will hate economic simulations) and as a player in the scene who’s seen enough of Donkey Kong to hate it the way I hate tUnE-yArDs.
Vladimir: But isn’t that also what’s great about him? If you’re going to be so militant in your ridiculous standards, it’s made even better by at the same time being comically hypocritical. And he would have to distance himself from it, or it would just look ironic. He’s the guy you love to hate, and this just makes it even better.
There’s something so delicious about Amis being a devout video game nerd – a total encapsulation of the excess and distance he is so critical of – and in doing so turning himself into the type of caricature he likes to write about. I swear, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he planned the whole thing.
Estragon: Right — he’s so invested in himself as the figure of the writer, and it leads him to all these amazing reversals. He’s somehow cool enough to have written the book, then too uninterested in cool to claim it, but then right back on the subject of cool within the novels that he’s promoting instead.
Vladimir: What I don’t understand is that it happened relatively late – it’s not like he wrote this book in 1971. He wrote it in 1981, almost a decade after winning the Maugham Award, and well on the road to being a touchstone. So why do it?
Estragon: I swear, if I didn’t know any better, I’d say he planned the whole thing. Unless this map I’ve made with 3×5 cards and yarn across a whole wall contains an error of some sort, I think this is the missing piece we’ve been looking for. We can go public with it tomorrow. Forget what you thought you knew: Martin Amis IS Kilgore Trout.
Vladimir: Solved.
Estragon: Well, regarding that particular issue, all Maugham recipients tend to have a sudden midlife crisis whenever they finally sit down, re-read “Of Human Bondage,” and realize it’s just not particularly good.
Vladimir: Most mid-life crises aren’t quite so apt, though. There’s something amazing about becoming one of the characters you are deriding in your novels, and that’s what this smacks of to me. I’ve been trying to come up with a similar situation that would give me the same warm sense of true irony that this does, but the only one that comes to mind is if Nabokov had turned out to be a pedophile. Which isn’t especially romantic.
***
We stopped there, despite the wonderful possibility of bringing Nabokov to bear: my fault. My only excuse is that if I don’t spend a little time each day working on my queenside openings, then every Tuesday night I’m going to keep on luzhin.
Well, basically, the book Tom Sawyer is about the olden days, back in the days of Huckleberry Finn. Back then, many people were so poor, they had no shoes and often wore only overalls with no shirt. The main character, whose name is Tom Sawyer, was so poor he had to paint something to earn money. Which is tough work, as I know, because I once had to paint a garage, and it took a long time.
–”Ask A High School Student Who Didn’t Do The Required Reading” (The Onion)
We are so determined to play your requests, here at the Kugelmass Episodes, that we’ll do it even if it means publishing undergraduate work that should never, ever be allowed back into the light of day. This one goes out to alert reader Sara Liner.
Reading this was so wonderfully comforting. No matter how dissatisfied I might be with what I write now, it’s fantastic to know that it could be much, much worse…and that it provably was, not so very long ago. “Locates his golden years”? Who the hell even says that? As for my experiments with the noun “veneer,” the less said, the better.
***
The Coens returned to the outcast comedy again with The Big Lebowski, about an unemployed bowler named Jeff Lebowski who becomes involved in the sordid affairs of a millionaire, also named Jeff Lebowski. It is immediately obvious that the Coens intend to draw a contrast: between a lazy, mellow man without ambition or greed, and a pathetic, scheming millionaire whose success is a veneer over corruption.
Except for The Dude and his friends, The Big Lebowski is peopled with stereotypes. Julianne Moore plays Maude Lebowski, a pretentious modern artist who we see splatter-painting, confronting The Dude about vaginal art and playing host to obnoxious colleagues. Lebowski’s trophy wife Bunny is a hunted, irresponsible girl who pretends to kidnap herself in order to pay her debts. There are funny Germans with funny accents, moronic thugs, and vengeful sheriffs. And against them all is the Dude, whose equaniminity elevates him to the status of hero.
Much like Hi McDonnough in Raising Arizona, the Dude is completely unsuited for normal society. However, instead of hearkening back to the outlaw mythos of the 1970s, The Dude locates his golden years in the protest movements of the 60s. After a heyday of drugs and political action, the Dude has declined until all he has left are two bowling buddies and an apartment. Here the Coen brothers use several brilliantly shot fantasies to endorse the Dude’s complacency. In a series of surreal dreams, the Dude imbues bowling with a balletic grace that give it surprising dignity. And the fantasies themselves, unlike Hi’s prophetic dreams, are an escape from banality. All of the Dude’s fantasies occur after he is drugged, knocked unconscious, or about to be threatened. And the “happy ending” of the film is only possible because the Dude cannot be bothered to mourn his wrecked apartment or the abuse he unjustly receives. He accepts it as the price of contact with more “normal” members of society.
For much of their audience, the Coen brothers are beloved for their imaginative, offbeat comic sensibility. However, there is a deeper current to their films that elevates them above other pastiche comedies (like Kevin Smith’s Mallrats or Dogma). The heroes of the Coen films are simple, aging characters whose simplicity and integrity carry them intact through a whirlwind of complications.
First off, sorry for not posting yesterday. As you may have guessed, I got sucked into the endless labyrinth of simmering rage in the comments sections over at Lawyers/Guns/Money, which I encourage everyone to check out if your current boredom level is “critical” or higher on the Kinsey Disaffection Scale.
The mix was prepared in the traditional manner, by which I mean only after I re-watched the mixtape scene from High Fidelity. As I wrote on Twitter, transitioning from Janis Joplin’s “One Night Stand” into Mariah Carey’s “Always Be My Baby” is probably the greatest segue I’ll ever achieve. It’s all downhill from here.
I’ve no idea if you still need an invite to sign up for free music on Spotify, but if so, email me and I’ll happily invite you.
Finally, alert reader Nathan of Perth wrote in with some fresh Quantum-Botticelli results! I celebrated by taking another one of those awful Jungian personality tests on Facebook, where every question asks you whether or not you enjoy planning stuff. My official score was “somebody who, generally speaking, would prefer not to overdo it with the planning and the logic.” This makes me similar to well-known anti-planning, irrational historical figures like Alexander the Great and Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt.
The nice part is that I don’t know Nathan from Adam, so I’m not bringing any background knowledge into play when analyzing his results. It’s not quite a blank slate, though, since of course his gender and his slightly old-fashioned “from Perth” are right there in his name.
Let’s begin!
***
Nathan, the sense I get from looking at your test results is that you’ve been out of school for at least a little while, and work at a job that you consider pretty OK. It’s not always an interesting job, and I’d be surprised if it corresponded exactly to your major in college/university…but that’s not the end of the world, since you’re curious by nature, fairly active, and pursuing a range of intellectual interests on your own time. You’re in at least Year 3 of your job, and may stay with it for many more years.
I’m guessing that you’re not yet married with kids, but that, in some loose sense, you imagine that for the future. (As with all of this, I could be totally wrong.) I’ll also go ahead and wager that a lot of your interests are indoors stuff, including reading and roaming about on the Web.
Your results suggest both shyness and a fairly laid-back attitude. That’s not a common combination. I’d guess that your job is compatible with your temperament, enabling you to do a fair amount of independent work, and sparing you (at least for the most part) the more gregarious types of white-collar work: consecutive meetings, mandatory schmoozing, etc.
Outside of work, I’d guess that you’re happy with your local circle of friends, even though you have some significant differences of opinion with them. That could either be because the group is ideologically diverse, or because you’re a minor exception to (what is otherwise) the rule. This is potentially true of any group of people, but what I mean is that these disputes occasionally catch fire, and can even lead to acrimony; you and your friends talk about things at length, exchange ideas, and are willing to argue about a topic point-by-point.
You’re interested in politics and a variety of other fields of knowledge, and you probably read across a range of academic disciplines. At the same time, you tend to get frustrated by the contentious nature of debates over cultural and intellectual issues; often, this strikes you as a result of the narcissism of small differences. I doubt, along these same lines, that you feel much affection for “hipsters.” (As for other common character types, such as would-be “alpha males,” your basic plan is to avoid those idiots, by avoiding the idiotic places they congregate to exchange business cards. “Going out” is probably not hugely important to you in the first place.) If your parents/siblings are alive, I’d guess that you’re able to see them at least twice a year, even if they don’t all live together.
I’d guess that you’re more interested in books and journalism than you are in pop music, though you probably do collect music, making some effort to hear new stuff. Film: somewhere between a couple DVDs and a small shelf, with some “classic films” (that you bought because you genuinely like them), a few accidental purchases and gifts, and a few pieces of nostalgia. Your friends likely watch more TV than you do, even if you have gotten into shows here and there over the years.
That’s about as much as this form of the test can deliver. I’m certainly becoming aware of some major holes: for example, the test doesn’t say anything about romantic relationships, so I wouldn’t be able to make any guesses about that, or (as the Jungian test does) about your “strengths” and “weaknesses” in relationships. Certainly, if I ever wanted this test to really catch on, I’d have to add in some lovey-dovey stuff.
Your answers were interesting, likable, and honest (at least judging by all appearances).
If nothing else, if these results produce (at the least) some bewildered chuckles, I’ll know my work has not been in vain. When it comes to Groundbreaking Thinkers like myself (and Thomas “Teddy” Edison), that’s the most important thing.
Man oh man, blog fights! Talk about the good old days…brings back memories, it does.
Helping me recover those memories is incensed commenter jeer9, over at Lawyers Guns & Money, who went to the trouble of copying and pasting some of my last post into the long and winding threads trailing from SEK’s pingback. He also went to the trouble of calling upon every awesome trick in Ye Olde Book of Commenting: echo the original language, demand quantification, imply populism v. elitism, include bodily functions, paraphrase very freely, and call the blogger’s intellectual credentials into question.
For your pleasure and edification, here’s his polemic:
Joe? Your Five Rules stink.
1. A blogger is not capable of being “disrespectful” to a dead famous person. That person’s friends and family do not care.
A blogger is quite capable of being tasteless and contemptuous to a dead famous person’s admirers, especially immediately after the passing.
2. In most cases, famous people who die young will still have managed to have more of “a life” than 99.99% of people who die old.
You’ve quantified that, have you? Let me know when the results are published.
3. Many people who are publicly sad about a celebrity death had not thought about that celebrity once in the previous twelve months.
Because a movie or song or role model rarely flashes through one’s mind during meaningful moments as those seldom occur during the course of a year beccause most people aren’t really “living” according to you.
4. Some of the things that lead to celebrity deaths are, in fact, not relevant to the lives of ordinary folks (e.g. Michael Jackson’s personal drug doctor).
Some of the things bloggers concoct are not, in fact, relevant to the lives of ordinary folk, though the grief of ordinary folk is clearly inauthentic and they’d probably need Michael Jackson’s drug doctor if they were capable of understanding how banal and mediocre their lives are.
5. Public mourning is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors.
My bowel movements are affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors such as how much soda I drank that day or whether a particular bathroom has good toilet paper or one-ply. Have you just discovered existentialism? “Blankety Blank Blank” is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors
applies to EVERYTHING.
Wipe your ass and try to say something more intelligent than because Elton John changed a few lyrics the public experienced collective amnesia. But then Elton’s a special person, you know, unlike ordinary folk, and he’s able to hold thoughts about two people in his head at the very same time.
Here are my responses:
A blogger is quite capable of being tasteless and contemptuous to a dead famous person’s admirers, especially immediately after the passing.
Well, sure. But that can happen with a living artist as well. If I make fun of Nickelback, their admirers might become angry at my “contemptuous” post. As for being tasteless, that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis. It’s not a self-evident standard, even the day after an artist dies.
For example, on 9/12/01, The Onion published an entire issue focusing on September 11th. Although they clearly tried to be respectful, there were articles that some Muslims could have found offensive, and other articles that some Americans (of any faith) could have found offensive. That said, the mere fact that somebody could (or did) object doesn’t, by itself, justify the objection.
You’ve quantified that, have you? Let me know when the results are published.
Totally fair. Inventing a percentage was silly. Let me be more clear: the same admirers who mourn so intensely when a performer dies are, by virtue of their hunger for vicarious experience, indirectly capable of encouraging performers to embrace exactly the lifestyle that (in some cases) proves self-destructive. They’re also capable of mourning somebody (e.g. Michael Jackson) they envied and derided a day earlier — and this, too, can affect the actual person. It would be better for everyone if we found our way out of a culture in which famous people automatically seem to live more, and better, than the rest of the populace.
On the other hand, when it comes to artists who have made immortal work, I suppose I do mourn less, because they have left behind so much. The Beatles mean everything to me. When George Harrison died, I remembered him more intensely for a few days, but with gladness.
Because a movie or song or role model rarely flashes through one’s mind during meaningful moments as those seldom occur during the course of a year beccause most people aren’t really “living” according to you.
No, this is a misreading. It’s not that we don’t have role models, or that we don’t find the life and work of certain artists inspiring. It’s that, for such an idealization to have any depth, that can only be true of a finite number of artists. I’m not saying every tweet and status update about Whitney was inauthentic, but after reading, literally, nothing about her, in my entire life, via any of my social networks, I’m willing to say that the reaction to her death within my social networks was exaggerated. If that’s true for me, then it’s probably true for SEK and others.
Some of the things bloggers concoct are not, in fact, relevant to the lives of ordinary folk, though the grief of ordinary folk is clearly inauthentic and they’d probably need Michael Jackson’s drug doctor if they were capable of understanding how banal and mediocre their lives are.
Yes, not all blogging strikes a universal chord…but then, who expects that it would? Everybody understands that different bloggers occupy different niches; the difference with celebrities is that, based on how the media represents them, they are clearly supposed to be meaningful for everyone.
I certainly think that if people understood how banal and dehumanizing some aspects of Michael’s life were, they’d have a better understanding of why he did something (retaining a drug doctor) that, irreducibly, constituted an abuse of immense privilege. I don’t think the 99% are banal and mediocre individuals. I do believe that some aspects of most people’s lives are banal and mediocre, but I largely blame that on systemic injustice.
Have you just discovered existentialism? “Blankety Blank Blank” is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors
applies to EVERYTHING.
Wipe your ass and try to say something more intelligent than because Elton John changed a few lyrics the public experienced collective amnesia. But then Elton’s a special person, you know, unlike ordinary folk, and he’s able to hold thoughts about two people in his head at the very same time.
No, I haven’t just discovered existentialism. I’ve just discovered Kurt Vile, and his new record is fantastic.
As for “it applies to everything, so…” — in physics, gravity applies to just about everything. Should physicists therefore exclude gravity from their theories and calculations?
I put this question to my friend Glaucon.
GLAUCON: Of course the physicists shouldn’t exclude gravity, and neither should cultural analysis shy away from discussing irrational or confused behavior. I can see that now, Socrates.
My point wasn’t that Elton John caused mass amnesia, but rather that his role in the pageant of Diana’s burial not only seemed like a calculated gesture, but also managed to diminish the “truthiness” of the original song. Ironically, this was more true because he changed the lyrics, as opposed to (for example) simply performing a song that she herself loved.
One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.
-Oscar Wilde
So, Whitney Houston died. At “Lawyers, Guns, and Money,” a fairly popular academic blog, Robert Farley posted this sour little non-obituary, which attracted a fair amount of negative attention. My friend SEK responded by posting this, which some of you may recognize as a quote from Bret Easton Ellis’s book American Psycho. (It’s also quoted pretty much word-for-word in the movie.)
I’m not going to try to defend Farley’s post, which I found irritating and disingenuous. I say “disingenuous” because the post was obviously commenter bait; nothing is as dependable as being topical, even if you have nothing to say. It’s not like we really need Farley to tell us about a publication called “The Village Voice.”
The situation with SEK’s post, however, is more complex. I’m certainly not going to call it a great post, mainly because it’s just a long quotation, as opposed to something SEK wrote himself. There’s a reason I post quotations to Tumblr, rather than WordPress. But I think the absurd intensity of the reactions to his post speaks to several recurrent modern headaches. It would be tempting to narrow that down to “problems with blogging” or “problems with the blogosphere” (including commenters), but what happens in the blogosphere is just one symptom of a larger malady.
Most celebrity deaths are not emotional events for me. I cared a lot more about Amy Winehouse’s death than I do about Whitney Houston’s death, for two simple reasons. I like a lot of Amy Winehouse’s songs; I like exactly one Whitney Houston song (“I Will Always Love You”). I thought Winehouse was maybe going to produce a lot more good music; Whitney’s career seemed over. While it may seem callous to calibrate my level of mourning according to what is, or isn’t, in my iTunes library, I would argue that when it comes to celebrities, there’s no other reasonable standard. That’s what it means to make your living as an entertainer.
Nonetheless, like everyone else, I was deluged with blips on my social networks, expressing deep grief over Whitney’s passing. Most of this grief, if not in fact phony, was at least greatly exaggerated. Like so many other things that people do in relation to popular culture, it was a weird, projective emotional performance, designed to convince oneself and others that one has the right emotions in the right amounts. It was annoying that people gave Tony Bennett props for responding to Whitney’s death by speaking out about drug legalization…other celebrities have been saying the same things for years. (It was doubly annoying since he said really obnoxious things about Winehouse “sinning against her talent” by abusing alcohol and drugs.) As with any news story like this, it was hard not to wonder where all this sympathy is when somebody who isn’t famous dies of drug abuse.
It’s significant that SEK was quoting American Psycho; the narrator, Patrick Bateman, is a serial killer who has extremely emotional reactions to sentimental music precisely because he is emotionally paralyzed in real life. Although there isn’t a one-to-one correlation between fake emotions and real emotionlessness, it is nonetheless a legitimate problem. Oscar Wilde obviously cared a great deal about the deaths of literary characters, including that of his own creation Dorian Gray; that wasn’t his point. His point was that one could weep profusely over the death of Little Nell without lifting a finger to help real children like her.
Sure, some people who really loved and comprehended Whitney’s career will write amazing tributes to her, just as John Jeremiah Sullivan was able to write an amazing tribute to Michael Jackson. Still, here are my Five Rules About Celebrity Deaths:
1. A blogger is not capable of being “disrespectful” to a dead famous person. That person’s friends and family do not care.
2. In most cases, famous people who die young will still have managed to have more of “a life” than 99.99% of people who die old.
3. Many people who are publicly sad about a celebrity death had not thought about that celebrity once in the previous twelve months.
4. Some of the things that lead to celebrity deaths are, in fact, not relevant to the lives of ordinary folks (e.g. Michael Jackson’s personal drug doctor).
5. Public mourning is affected by ridiculous, irrelevant factors. For example, the bad economy increased mourning for Steve Jobs. People are more grieved by Whitney Houston’s death than they were by Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s death because her songs were more radio-friendly and sentimental.
In my recent post “Calmedy Central,” I responded to Pico Iyer’s simpering article “The Joy of Quiet” thus:
I realize that a lot of legitimate objections have been made about irony in pop culture; it has its problems and limits, for sure. But anyone who is trying to live deliberately in 2012 is bombarded with all kinds of well-meaning advice, all kinds of criss-crossing, incompatible values. Irony is one way of clearing the space one needs in order to thrive — and clearing it where it counts, in the virtual world of our thoughts.
I consider it entirely fair for SEK to post from American Psycho simply in order to clear the way for subjects that are more important than Whitney Houston’s death. With all due respect to her loved ones and fans, there are a lot of those.
