a la ventura: cassie’s syncopated heart

The genius of the heart who silences all that is loud and self-satisfied, teaching it to listen; who smooths rough souls and lets them taste a new desire — to lie still as a mirror, that the deep sky may mirror itself in them [...] the genius of the heart from whose touch everyone walks away richer, not haveing received grace and surprised, not as blessed and oppressed by alien goods, but richer in himself, newer to himself than before, broken open, blown at and sounded out by a thawing wind, perhaps more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents, full of new dissatisfaction and undertows [...] namely, no less a one than the god Dionysus, that great ambiguous one.
-Friedrich Nietzsche

Even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass [...]
She made up the person she wanted to be
And changed into a new personality
-Siouxsie And The Banshees, “Hall of Mirrors”

“It was nice to experience other people.” -Cassie Ventura, in response to questions about her forthcoming album

The two most traditional aspects of dancing — the formal art, and the public ritual of courtship — have gradually separated from each other. Technical skill has been incorporated into competitive dance, and especially into troupe dancing, which is inspiring (and a little intimidating, to me anyway, even though I do Support Our Troupes). Public courtship has become a free-form, Dionysian celebration at clubs, concerts, and festivals. Dance has become more playful; when you’re not dancing with anyone in particular, there aren’t any rules.

Dancing by yourself is a game you play with who you are, which is why the image of dancing in front of a mirror has always been so irresistible. The best mirror song, “The Man In The Mirror,” was written by Michael Jackson, the same man who essentially invented modern solo dancing. “You” are somewhere between your body and its reflection. In musical terms, that places you somewhere between the accent (i.e. the beat) and the unaccented measure — between who you are and who you could be.

This is not without its frightening side. The Kraftwerk song “Hall of Mirrors,” and the cover by Siouxsie, are terrifying. Britney’s always used solitude to scary effect, most recently in “Hold It Against Me,” where she beats the shit out of herself. The “it” is, of course, “your body,” which is as much a prison as it is a playground.

Jacques Lacan is not always the clearest writer, but he’s the authority on this issue thanks to his essay on “The Mirror Stage,” where he writes,

The jubilant assumption of his [image in the mirror] by the [infant] still trapped in his motor impotence [...] seems to me to manifest in an exemplary situation the symbolic matrix in which the I is precipitated in a primordial form [...] the total form of his body, by which the subject anticipates the maturation of his power in a mirage [...] that freezes it and in a symmetry that reverses it, in opposition to the turbulent movements [that is, the dance] with which the subject feels he animates it.

This culminates in “the finally donned armor of an alienating identity that will mark his entire mental development with its rigid structure.” In other words, the infant moves from playing with his limbs, to feeling trapped by them, to trying to dominate his situation by over-identifying himself with his own prison: “this is me.” This ends in madness:

The subject’s capture by his situation gives us the most general formulation of madness — the kind found within the asylum as well as the kind that deafens the world with its sound and fury.

Lacan feels that “psychoanalysis alone” recognizes “the knot of imaginary servitude that love must always untie anew or sever,” but he is wrong. Music recognizes it as well. The trick is to use the mirrors themselves to disturb the pattern and provoke an unsettled openness. Thus Nietzsche’s “new desire — to lie still as a mirror,” and paradoxically to become “more unsure, tenderer, more fragile, more broken, but full of hopes that as yet have no name, full of new will and currents.” Rhythmically, this is expressed by syncopation. I wrote about syncopation at the end of 2011, even though, at the time, I didn’t realize that’s what it was:

A lot of people ask me why I insist on comparing Katy B to the Bee Gees, which somehow manages to insult everyone, no matter which artist they prefer. Well, you know how “Stayin’ Alive” creates that weird, fluid rhythmic space where no matter how you dance, you seem to be on the beat? Which was pretty much the best thing ever for people with my dancing skills? That same trick works over and over again on the Katy B album. Katy slows it down to a purr where the beat skitters and freaks out, and then she sings her lungs out while the beat stalls and fills with bass. The result is bigger than the space it is given, bigger than headphones, bigger than a warehouse.

Syncopation in fact co-evolves, at least in the West, with melodic techniques that are, themselves, kinds of mirrors. Here’s Number 13 from “The Art of Fugue,” by Johann Sebastian Bach:

Actually, it’s easier to see the involution here (the dance, dance, involution):

Those are merely examples of “chamber pop,” but the future of pop music is in syncopation, which is why I was so relieved to discover that Cassie hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s still around and is cooking up a new album.

In case you don’t remember Cassie, she’s the R&B singer who showed up in 2006 with “Me & U,” an attempt to distill Ciara, Beyonce, and Janet into the simplest terms possible. Even the title is all of four characters long. She moves and she doesn’t; she’s been waiting, and she’s thinking about making that move.

She went on hiatus, appearing (of course) in the dancing movie Step Up 2: The Streets, and releasing some generic, charming singles, including “Is It You?” and “Official Girl.” But now Cassie’s back for real with “King of Hearts,” backed up by a small army of other singles, most of which haven’t gotten much attention yet: “Make U A Believer,” “Balcony” with Jeezy, and “Let’s Get Crazy” with Akon. I found out she was back when Pitchfork added the Richard X remix of “King of Hearts” to their list of best new songs.

Forget the remix, though. Like Kanye West’s own remix of “King of Hearts,” it’s an attempt to control and standardize Cassie, who is otherwise a force of nature. Richard X inserts the steady hum of an outboard motor, and so robs the song of that crucial, breathless wobble.

In 2005, her album cover made her look like a pop star from 1986; now, in 2012, she’s embracing a hairstyle from the proud Black fashions of the early 1990s, paired with clothes from the late Sixties. Rihanna, of all people, is copying her. Cassie strikes me as really, truly, off the wall. But that could be reading way too much into some pieces of dance music. I mean, it’s not like she’s dancing in front of a mirror, or something.

When you left them back on the farm
For the city at dawn
The drone of the young and the hum
Of the pretty were songs
You thought you’d never forget
It’s a pity they’re gone

When the sun goes down and the moon appears
You go looking for love in the hall of mirrors

alain de botton’s religious atheism

The dream is always the same. I awaken to find I’ve been transformed, not into a hideous insect, but into something much worse: Alain de Botton, my doppelganger.

Like me, de Botton loves Proust. Like me, de Botton likes classical and medieval philosophy, and approaches philosophy as a conversation about the conduct of life. By themselves, those facts aren’t overly remarkable. But now he’s jumped the shark. He’s on tour promoting a book on basically the exact same subject as my dissertation. His new book, Religion for Atheists, asks what a secular society can “import” from religious traditions. For four years now, I’ve been looking at Henry James, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and T. S. Eliot, investigating their projects for rebuilding society. Every one of these artists wanted to rebuild society by applying religious ideas and practices in creative new ways. If there was world enough and time, I would have studied even more figures, from the poet Hilda Doolittle to James’s own brother William.

In other words, the secular appropriation of religion has been underway since the 19th Century. At many points during the 20th Century, it was almost unchallenged as the artistic raison d’etre. During certain periods, “reinventing religion” is what almost every artist and intellectual was trying to do. Still, for the most part, secular religion failed. There were many reasons why, including the fact that most people were, and are, actually religious, and find this whole endeavor either amusing or offensive. The dream isn’t necessarily over, but we’re not at liberty to just shrug off those monumental attempts if we want to change anything at all.

Alain de Botton ignores the history, skipping ahead to present the world with his own eccentric mixture of commonplace advice and wild speculation. He’s getting good publicity because it makes fantastic copy. Wouldn’t it be wild if restaurants were like this? In a short newspaper column, it’s perfectly easy to stop right there. It’s an instant “think piece.” It works for every possible reader. Religious readers will appreciate de Botton’s stern reproofs to atheists who think we can do without religion. Atheists will appreciate that he says “atheist” a lot. He seems bipartisan.

Yet when you stop to consider de Botton’s actual claims and ideas, they crumble at the slightest pressure. Mostly, this is because an equivalent for what de Botton’s proposing already exists, though not always.

Secular Temples
We already have secular temples. They’re called museums, campuses, libraries, parks. I know — this is such an obvious objection that it almost feels like something must be wrong with it, but de Botton’s idea is really that empty. The fact that he’s included drawings of a “secular temple” is the sort of overreach that I’d find slightly endearing — if it wasn’t echoing the complaints of fascists who really did build new temples, enshrining their power.

Agape Restaurants
That is, restaurants where strangers “break bread” together and interact. If de Botton doesn’t think this exists, he hasn’t looked very hard. There are lots of cafeterias and restaurants that seat strangers together. I’ve been to such places in cities all over the world. Most Hare Krishna restaurants operate this way, as do many university eating facilities. There are also restaurants of all sorts, mostly quite normal, but with a slightly “hippie” mentality and thus communal seating. de Botton gets away with asking “Why don’t we eat together?” because he’s writing for middle-class professionals; after a long day of stressful interactions, the last thing they want is to be surrounded by importunate strangers. But that doesn’t mean a few people wouldn’t like a chance to do some hand-wringing about our tragically lonely eating habits. de Botton’s pitching to them.

He claims we don’t sing together. We do. It’s called “karaoke.” We get up in front of huge crowds of strangers and sing our lungs out. If that’s too technological and modern, and de Botton prefers a group of people singing without mikes, in a circle around a guitar player — that happens too. It’s rarer than karaoke, to be sure, but at some point one must ask: who are we to start imposing one condition after another on how people do their communal singing? At an earlier point in history the church organ was a technological wonder, too.

He claims we don’t go on pilgrimages — because he’s thinking of himself. Young people go on pilgrimages constantly. Youth hostels are stuffed with pilgrims. Some of them are on a religious quest. Others are just looking for culture, adventure, and romance. If older people weren’t pinned down by work and family, they would probably turn pilgrim also, much more often they do right now. Still, there are older pilgrims. They eat, pray, and love.

It’s obvious that he hasn’t gone to raves, or to the Burning Man Festival, or to countless other contemporary, thriving experiments in “intentional community.” I’m not naive about the limitations of such events, which are severe, but I also wouldn’t embark on a book about the post-religious in ignorance of them. One of their greatest limitations also goes for “agape restaurants”: they self-select. You get a group of people who are unusually willing to interact with strangers under novel conditions. That is not a representative slice of any industrialized Western society, nor is it the only community to which the participants belong. They go home, and go back to knowing nobody on their street.

There are versions of this book that might, conceivably, be good. I could imagine a good “Communalism, Humility, and Consolation for Dummies” book. It would tell you how to sing karaoke, where to find cafeterias, how to go on a modern pilgrimage, and how to approach conflict in a more humble manner. It wouldn’t be for society; it would be for you. I can also imagine a good book about lessons from underrepresented religions. Let’s hear about Zoroaster. Let’s hear about Quetzalcoatl. Let’s hear from Shinto. If we need a new approach, is it really going to come from Judao-Christianity and Buddhism, the same combination that failed T. S. Eliot? By ignoring even Islam, de Botton guarantees that his book will have very little new to say.

I have no idea why de Botton thinks his book is compatible with his Twitter feed, but it’s not, and the disconnect is instructive. I unfollowed him a while back, but checking in right now, here’s one of his latest thefts from Proust: “We should keep a diary of incidents of envy — from which to deduce what to do next.” Also this: “There are people we’d have forgotten about long ago if they hadn’t started to ignore us.” Every time de Botton posts a tweet, he’s broadcasting to a world full of strangers. The chance to be magnificent comes again, and again, and again. He’s not missing it by accident when he flatters our prickliness or envy. He’s not trying to spread light or warmth. The only reason to buy his book, or take his recycled “thesis” seriously, would be in order to do the same. To do nothing.

It’s like I sang in front of strangers the other night, while they shouted along: Well I’m sorry, but I don’t pray that way.

what we write about when we write about not writing: a music post

Last Friday, Maura Johnston posted a blog entry @ The Village Voice entitled “How Not To Write About Female Musicians: A Handy Guide.”

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!

Music: The Tallest Man on Earth

Dear readers,

The following are annotations I sent my close friend tomemos, to accompany his birthday present. If you haven’t heard the songs themselves, delay no longer!

***

Naturally, I don’t want to try to shape these songs overmuch, either, but I can offer my impressions of them, abetted by Google, which informs me that a “cadejo” is a Central American spirit that appears to travelers at night. The white cadejo protects travelers from harm; the black one, an incarnation of the devil, leads them to their deaths.

Probably the song that troubles me the most is “Sometimes the blues…”, so much so that I find it odd he would use that as the title for his EP. I really don’t know what it means when, after announcing that sometimes the blues is just a passing bird, he sings “why can’t that always be?” So, in my confusion, I have to guess, just as I’ve had to guess what Adele means by “rolling in the deep.” He may be saying that the unhappiness that haunts him intermittently, and seems to follow him around, is itself both transient and beautiful understood in hindsight. Yet, despite this, there are some sadnesses that go so deep they don’t fade away with the next month or place, and there are some times when he isn’t able to summon the artistic vision that transforms longing into a thing of beauty.

Musically, the song feels unfinished. One reviewer compared it to Oasis; I’d almost agree with that, but I’d say it sounds like an Oasis demo. (And, of course, when I foolishly spend $20 on the remastered collector’s edition of What’s The Story, Morning Glory?, I will have those demos.) He seems to want the electric guitar to be a jarring instrument; the song signifies an anthem it declines to become.

“The Wild Hunt” makes me cheerful. I like the energetic strumming, reminiscent of so much early Dylan, especially Dylan’s more deliberately martial songs, like “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changin”. Lyrically, it’s a melancholy song, like most of his work, including another standout on the EP, “Like The Wheel.”

“Like The Wheel” caught my ear at first because I loved how he constructed it around a prayer. It’s the kind of prayer that still makes sense even when his listener is secular and “my Lord” is an empty figure, because he seems to be praying to a person he’d like to become. Looking at the lyrics more closely now, there’s a lot more than that going on, and I’m reminded of how similar the line “I plan to be forgotten when I’m gone,” from “The Wild Hunt,” is to “Please let the kindness of forgetting set me free.”

All these references to hiding and being forgotten, somewhere in the wilderness, are hymns to transformation: “Well if you could reinvent my name / Well if you could redirect my day [...] perhaps I’ll reach the other side.” That’s why there is so little difference between the black and white cadejo: for him, both are omens of luck. The self for which he is searching, he imagines as a physical treasure buried in a remote and forbidding place, and most of what he writes captures him at some point along the way there. Even on his first album, the same themes appeared, except the catalyst is hibernation rather than travel (“And if I ever get to slumber / I’ll be that mole deep in the ground / And I won’t be found”). It’s less that he’s a solipsist, or indifferent to other people, and more that he’s imagining re-finding all his comrades in that distant continent where their paths again converge.

Until then, we endure, and like his sparkling, finger-picked arpeggios, bright and evanescent thoughts give us enough light for the hesitant, necessary march. The wild hunt is coming, and we live until the call.

On Writer’s Block and Responding to the Joker comments

Dear readers,

Happy Indian summer, everybody! Even if you’ve already headed back to school, or are working an eight-to-five, there’s a dreamlike haze to August, a feeling as though there’s still one or two chances to make good on the hedonistic plans you had for summer, and a suspension of crushing drudgery until the days get shorter and you have to go to those special clinics where the lights are “full spectrum.”

Personally, I’ve found it impossible to blog anything this August, at least until now. Partly that’s because of the goofy comments on my Batman post (exceptions: Daniel Roberts, va, Bill, tomemos). People, you can do better. Both here and at the Valve I’ve had people quoting at me some eighties comic wherein the Joker was declared “super-sane,” and it just makes me want to scream. Just because he’s an interesting villain and we’re interested in subverting normality doesn’t mean we can genially overlook the murders he’s committing. That’s overwrought, theoretical analysis obscuring basic facts, and it’s the most common way criticism shipwrecks.

When Heath Ledger died, he left behind him a small body of exceptional work, much of which will survive as classic (above all Batman and Brokeback Mountain). That is a wonderful thing to have achieved, though I am sorry he died so young. Since I did not know him personally, although I think we did party once at this club at like four in the morning but who can really remember because that night was CRAZY, that is as much as I can say about his death. It seems unlikely to me that a man who could become so many different characters was really driven over an edge by playing the Joker, any more than playing a gay character made him gay. Perhaps the reason that the idea of Ledger getting sucked into the movie is so compelling is that we get to express our anxieties about the ways we ourselves are saturated by films and imitate them.

The politics of the movie are determinedly centrist. It could be cause for liberal alarm that Batman is a self-directed vigilante, but unlike most Dirty Harrys, he has two friendly old concerned dads keeping him in check. In the next movie Jack Nicholson is slated to play his third dad and golf caddy. Between Batman’s spy system and Morgan Freeman’s concern about his spy system, you get the same sort of inconclusive, inoffensive political ping-pong delivered everyday by CNN and the New York Times.

The pathos of the film is that we want to root for the Joker, but we can’t: we understand the principle he represents, and feel in our bones the need for liberation and chaos and detonating the status quo, but people cannot die as part of that process. They cannot be turned from followers into victims — that doesn’t liberate them. So we are caught between hero and villain, hating the city itself and its systems of power…the proud, Gothic high rises of a city whose name has become part and parcel with Batman, “Baltimore.”

I highly recommend Daniel’s post, va’s fascinating comment, and Steven’s final moment where he announces that the sexual fantasies in Fellini movies are entirely realizable in real life. To which I say, if that’s not a good starting premise for a verité blog, nothing is. Certainly better than attacking the culture of teenyboppers, who are only out to “shake it” to savage primal rhythms before driving to “make out point” (their term for movie theaters) and who don’t think long attention spans are “groovy.” Have these kids even heard Vivaldi? That’s some “kickin” glissando, man!

Finally, a post that I wrote a fair while ago called “Zizek the Embarrassment” got quoted in The Nation, and The Nation refused to attribute it. It really got me down. Here’s a magazine that I’ve been reading since high school — that fills every corner of my parents’ house in neat, outraged piles — refusing to let any sunlight filter down to the netroots. I’m not a purist about this medium. Blogging doesn’t have to be cut off from the mainstream media. But unless it’s their blog, that’s how they want it. So these posts are for the questions that don’t have any answers, and for the grits when there ain’t enough eggs to cook, and for the hoods of the world misunderstood. Greenzo out.

Sad Songs

Then we should be right in doing away with the lamentations of men of note and in attributing them to women, and not to the most worthy of them either, and to inferior men, in order that those whom we say we are breeding for the guardianship of the land may disdain to act like these. [...]

What, then, are the dirgelike modes of music? Tell me, for you are a musician.

The mixed Lydian, he said, and the tense or higher Lyidan, and similar modes.

These, then, said I, we must do away with.
-Plato, Republic Book III

***

I promised almost two years ago that I’d write a post defending sad songs. Now’s a good time to do it, since I’ve been listening to the new album by Bon Iver (For Emma, Forever Ago). He sounds a little like Nick Drake or Elliott Smith: he double-tracks his voice, and his singing approximates to a wail. He’s climbed from his little makeshift studio in a snowed-in Midwestern cabin to the mainstream via portals like NPR, so it may appear that the sad song doesn’t need defending. We’re certainly drenched in ballads of every description, from Rihanna’s new single “Take A Bow” (I’m guessing she hasn’t even heard Bedtime Stories) to Colin Meloy Sings Live.

Bon Iver is really an exception, though. On a lot of the best albums I’ve bought in recent years, an absolutely heartbreaking or despairing song is actually impossible. There are other negative emotions present — regret, alienation, anxiety — but the fact is that garage-rock bands like the Strokes or Franz Ferdinand are too propulsive to write desperately sad songs, and so are dance bands like the Knife or LCD Soundsystem. “I Will Survive,” amplified and sweetened by self-help, has seeped into every last verse coming from the pop factories. Beyoncé will survive (“Irreplaceable”), Shakira will survive (“Don’t Bother”), and Justin will also survive (“What Goes Around…”). (Spoiler alert: on Duffy’s new album, she comes close to not surviving, but then she totally does.)

Even a song that you would think was so utterly and unmistakably sad that it couldn’t possibly become blunted, namely “Hurt,” a fast current of icy black water if ever there was one, turned into an affectionate celebration of Johnny Cash’s relationship to June Carter Cash. In the late recordings Cash made with Rick Rubin, there is a struggle between Cash’s ability to sing darkly, and his turn of mind, which had actually become very sentimental and pious. There are a lot of awful religious songs on those American Recordings, and some of that seeps into the absolute best work. It’s not a “crown of thorns,” OK? It’s a crown of shit.

An aesthetic identity is a source of joy and comfort: underlying most modern songs of misery, whether they are Colin Meloy’s Victorian fantasies or a sassy breakup song, is the artist’s own constructed persona. You can hear Cash enjoying the chance to re-work songs like “Personal Jesus” by translating them into his Southern Gothic style. Cat Power, whose public persona was at once point merely her penchant for breakdowns, made herself over into a sober, twee Dusty Springfield and now sings “New York, New York” with ingratiating awkwardness instead of turning “Satisfaction” into a desolate lament. It is almost as though the relationship between performer and audience is now continually present in the songs themselves, giving the singer a reason to hope and to move forward, and giving the audience cathartic group therapy. The rhetorical self-consciousness changes and mollifies the very emotions of the song.

But if a song doesn’t do this, if it has no inclination to demonstrate resilience, what is its nature? Particularly now that gyms and iPods have run off together to Ibiza, Plato has returned in force, and (in one form or another) the brave “marching song” is ubiquitous. Even if a song is bittersweet, it keeps you moving on the treadmill. The somatic, imitative theory persists: slow songs make you move slower and feel gloomy, which is why they were banished from the Republic.

In the moment, it is probably true that sad songs kill the mood. I know this because I run approximately 10% slower while listening to Elliott Smith than I do while listening to “In Heaven” by DJ Sammy. (The treadmill has a digital readout.) But in the long run, the essence of the great sad song, something as crystalline as the Beatles performing “Yesterday,” is the sublime. It is a confrontation with something that may have roots in the everyday — it may begin with a breakup, or a death, or the ashes of a wasted year — but it touches what is irremediably tragic and without hope. Persona does not survive the sublime: the speaking voice is split apart by it, turned inchoate and uncertain. We take as much of it as we can stand, and though that is exhausting, it does not really make us sad. It shadows what is, what is left, making it burn white as bone or phosphor.

I crouch like a crow
Contrasting the snow
For the agony, I’d rather know
-”Blindsided”

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies

(x-posted to The Valve)

Amardeep Singh at The Valve drew my attention to this article by William Deresiewicz, writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long Sunday.

This is Deresiewicz:

Twenty years after Professing Literature, the “conflicts” still exist, but given the larger context in which they’re taking place, they scarcely matter anymore. The real story of academic literary criticism today is that the profession is, however slowly, dying.

CR responds:

The decline of the English major has corresponded with the decline of two complexly, but distinctly, related things. They are: the reign of theory and what we might call the politicized classroom. These two factors are complexly related, in my mind, because I’m mostly sure that the politics of theory, as practiced by English departments, wasn’t much of a politics at all, and certainly wasn’t a politics with any (easy) applicability in the real world. Further, the de-politicization of the classroom is something that I’d mostly attribute not simply to the failure of theory, but mostly to the changing atmosphere after 9/11, when conservative attacks on “liberal bias” were front and center in the news [...] I am beginning to feel that students have felt the change in the atmosphere of the English department and have responded by finding other subjects in which to major.

Amardeep, in his post, links to a terrifically helpful report from 2001-2002 to ground his point that “theory” has not been responsible for the decline of the English major.

I am on my way to responding to a fascinating special issue of the Yale Journal of Criticism (Vol. 18, No. 2), edited by Michael Szalay and Valve contributor Sean McCann, entitled “Essays on the Sixties from Some Who Weren’t There,” and featuring Szalay and McCann’s own essay “Do You Believe in Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left.” So, in some ways, this post is a prelude. It is also a reflection on what it means to be apprenticing for a profession that Deresiewicz, an Associate Professor at Yale, thinks “is, however slowly, dying.” To put this in perspective, the job Deresiewicz currently holds is, for anybody in my position, more or less the pinnacle of their professional hopes ten years out.

***

Rather than letting “the decline of the English major” remain an abstraction, let me give some particulars of my own experience. When I was getting my B.A. in English, of my eight closest friends, five were either English or Comparative Literature majors; all had taken part in an intensive humanities program freshman year that included housing all the participants together. By senior year, there was absolutely no distinction between our academic work and the rest of our time. We were working on essays and theses about Henry James, Marcel Proust, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Samuel Beckett, and so on; we were writing our own manifestos, poems, and really long emails; we were drinking cheap vodka (or sometimes some new thing purchased with fledgling credit cards, like cinnamon schnapps) and watching Barfly, High Fidelity, or a student production of Dangerous Liaisons. I’d throw a party, my friend would sit cross-legged on the floor, soliloquizing about track 13 on Exile on Main Street and then disappearing home to write a story called “Rocket Queen.” A series of intensely heated arguments about Heidegger, conducted mostly at around three in the morning, led me to an independent study on Being and Time and my first real introduction to Continental philosophy and “theory.”

By 2002, one year after graduation, my girlfriend at the time had completed her M.A. in Slavic Literature at Stanford, with plans to write and direct for the stage; my other five friends had been accepted to graduate programs in English (Cornell, U. of Chicago), Comparative Literature (U. Penn), and Slavic Literature (UC Berkeley). I began graduate studies in English at UC Irvine in 2003.

Of those five people, one is still in graduate school doing literary studies; she is currently on the job market. My friend who majored in Slavic Literature, once he realized the kind of work he would be allowed to do (historicizing work on lesser-known Russian authors), switched to graduate work in computer science. The rest dropped out in order to attend law school.

When my roommate at Irvine, a new friend and a remarkable scholar, and yet another college friend switched from literature to law school in the space of a year, I remember telling my parents that the discipline had lost its edge. Nothing was “happening,” as we say, and young intellectuals were looking for other ways to have a social impact, or other careers to pursue while they worked on their own poems and novels.

In the four years since then, things have gotten much worse. This is particularly true in California, where Arnold Schwarzenegger has continually sought to cut funding for higher education, but it is true everywhere in the United States. There are practical problems: increased fees and overhead costs, shrinking budgets for grants, less guaranteed teaching, fewer tenure-track jobs. This financial squeeze is one cause of a rash of damaging wars within literary studies, and academia more generally, that illustrate how desperate the situation has become.

For example, there is the spectacle of professors calling for the reform or elimination of tenure, using the same specious arguments that conservatives used during the first Bush Administration about tenured high school teachers; in essence, the idea is to treat teachers like salesmen working on commission. There are also media outlets like The New York Times calling for taxes on university endowments, then supplementing that with reminders that professors aren’t no better than anybody else, and shouldn’t be so uppity. At his blog Acephalous, Scott Kaufman took on the unenviable job of calling out K.C. Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College who created a sensation by fearlessly exposing “political correctness” among fellow professors at Duke.

About a year and a half ago, at the Valve, I wrote:

The ideological differences between Badiou and Michaels, or Zizek and Michaels, are not trivial. (Neither are the differences between Zizek and Badiou.) I am not suggesting that the well-rehearsed disagreements between Lacanians and historicists can be easily overcome. Nonetheless, my belief in the projects of universalism and equality leave me out of patience with the refusal to recognize common ground.

I am reminded of the chapter “The Great Petulance,” from Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain: “What was it, then? What was in the air? A love of quarrels. Acute petulance. Nameless impatience. A universal penchant for nasty verbal exchanges and outbursts of rage” (673, trans. Woods). The great petulance follows the death of Mynheer Peeperkorn in Mann; for us, it has followed the death of the brilliant and charismatic figure of Derrida.

I now believe that the kind of reconciliation I hoped for in that post will not arrive, at least not without significant clashes coming first. It’s the nature of the blogosphere to invite articulate conflict, of course, but even so I’ve watched one conversation after another in which I participated, and which I thought were cordial dialogues about academia, quickly become bitter disputes. (I should add that in the time since that post, it has become clear that Slavoj Zizek can’t replace Derrida. His fatuous and repetitive lists of political “ironies,” e.g. that Whole Foods is just another capitalist organ, have begun to alienate even his most devoted followers.)

As things stand, there are basically four schools of thought about literary studies:

(1) Critical thinking and writing skills. Some academics believe that the primary value of literary studies is in teaching marketable writing skills, along with “critical thinking,” which is basically the ability to separate yourself from received ideas and representations, and fits with old Jeffersonian ideas about a democratic citizenry. These people are usually the most eager to sink literary studies into broader writing and rhetoric programs, and they like to try to reach students by using multimedia and the Internet (e.g. applying critical thinking skills to a YouTube video). Politically, they advocate a sort of deliberative centrism that in the United States reads as “Democratic.”

The biggest problem with this is that all humanities scholars are qualified to teach writing and critical thinking; these general skills have no special relationship to literary studies.

(2) Historicism. Considering historicism as a whole school of thought, one that has gathered momentum now independent of Michel Foucault and even Stephen Greenblatt, the project is a Marxist project that seeks to explain the material foundations for ideological products (i.e. literary works). There is some lingering regard here for the literary in and of itself, insofar as these literary critics believe that literature represents and preserves ideology in ways other artifacts do not.

This approach blurs the lines between history and literary studies, but the deeper problem is one of sensibility: this particular version of Marxism condescends to its subjects. Because historicism suppresses the counterfactual element in literature — imaginative leaps in excess of historical givens, and frequently opposed to them — it comes off as both pedestrian and pessimistic.

If this seems excessively harsh, consider how many historicist works center on claims about a) popular scientific errors of the time, b) wishful utopianism or progressivism, c) wishful literary solutions to real and perhaps insoluble problems, or d) secret sympathies between a narrative and the prevailing social hierarchy.

(3) The mandarins. This group represents the strange alliance between scholars who have disappeared into the labyrinth of theoretical debate, and scholars who have made aesthetics, in some “purified” form, their justification and refuge. It encompasses both spiraling Zizekian or Derridean ironies as well as Harold Bloom’s gasps of awe. This group mainly consists of academics who already have tenure, or other people in relatively privileged situations, and gets some support (at least on the blogs) from people outside academia who like to think of literature and philosophy as lofty, removed realms. Stanley Fish’s “Think Again” columns fall very much in this category.

(4) The militants. A group that no longer exists, and so will have to be invented. In Saint Paul, Alain Badiou writes in the prologue that “there is currently a widespread search for a new militant figure [on the order of Paul]—even if it takes the form of denying its possibility—called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of this century, which can be said to have been that of the party militant” (2).

I’m amused by Badiou’s notion of a widespread search: it brings to mind comic book scenarios of searching for a hero or a cure, and perhaps also the image of bloodhounds sniffing out a forest. In truth, no such search is really underway. The very idea is horrifying to professors most invested in teaching critical thinking, who see their job as teaching resistance to militancy and dogmatism. It is equally annoying to many other academics who believe that literature and philosophy are not the proper arenas for militancy, either because culture is ineffectual at producing radical change, or because it is a distant Olympus of intellectual pleasure.

What does it mean to speak of militancy within literary studies? It means passionate commitment to a way of living in the world, one that feels itself to be somewhat at odds with its own time. I love what CR has to say about the rise of self-censorship and phony irony during political discussions with students, but I am also certain that the answer is not just making extreme political statements. The vitality of contemporary popular music is based in part on its association with ways of living life: hedonism, excess, self-expression, community. The glamour that attaches to writing fiction and poetry gains similarly from our notion of that life: among recent critical successes, one might look at Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, which is joyously concerned with the communities of bohemians and would-be artists in Mexico. This delight in the absolutism of living through art is equally there in Annie Dillard’s ascetic experiments in sharpened consciousness, and in Jonathan Lethem’s version of nerdy urban hip. When I think back on my engagement with literature and art in college, it was an essential part of a whole life I was living at that time. It is not merely that no major theoretical school has emerged since Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble, as Deresiewicz writes — it is also that one can trace the decline of that work’s meaningfulness in Butler’s persistent effort afterwards to detach her queer studies from the lived experiences of alternative lifestyles, alternative communities, and drag. It is really any wonder that our private conversations come to linger more on the films of Pedro Almodovar or on camp films like Priscilla Queen of the Desert, where drag is not merely the subject, but is also allowed to be present? Yet that arc repeats itself everywhere in the profession.

In short, militancy is another word for idealism, both in the sense of hopefulness, and in the sense of living according to ideas, taken broadly to include all forms of intentional representation. It sounds very adolescent, surely, and yet there is something strange in Deresiewicz’s complaint that “the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by teenagers.” This isn’t true at all; the profession’s intellectual agenda is being set by the condescending notions of adults about what makes something feel relevant to younger persons, as well as by our own preference for “sexy” topics, identity myths, and multimedia. In fact, the alienated attitude our students adopt derives from the distance we ourselves keep from the literature in question. Furthermore, education always defines itself in relation to youth: without its ardor and skepticism, there would be no Socratic dialogues, no Emile, nor any other treasure of pedagogy.

***

What the profession is experiencing now is less an absolute decline than it is a drop-off following an unprecedented boom in the 1960s; historically speaking, the 1960s were an anomalous period of extraordinary interest in literary studies. In my next post, I will examine how then-popular ideas about culture, identity, and experience created this boom, the backlash against those ideas, and why that backlash has finally led to the presently underwhelming state of literary studies and Continental philosophy.

Why Americans Did Not Watch The Oscars

(x-posted to The Valve)

The Oscars mean two things to most Americans. First, it’s a chance to celebrate the most impressive films of the year, from a mainstream point of view. We wash ourselves clean of forgettable trash like Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer, and look back (through a series of painfully short and choppy montages) at films that reflected national fears, intoxications, and bouts of moral seriousness. Second, it’s a celebrity parade and fashion event. This year we didn’t need it. Why?

No Country For Women

At this particular moment, the filmmakers able to hold the aestheticist high ground are making Westerns and gangster movies (blatantly indebted to Westerns) without women. Petitpoussin already faced down this trend here, though she was content just to fire one shot, touch the brim of her hat, and move on in her quiet, laconic way. There Will Be Blood was so pathetically lopsided in this respect that it became farcical. In the final scene of the film, Paul Thomas Anderson attempts to achieve the iconicity of the word “rosebud” by having Daniel Day-Lewis give a speech about “drinking another man’s milkshake,” which means siphoning the oil from an adjoining piece of land.

If it was still 1988, then maybe, just maybe, that wouldn’t be a ridiculous speech. However, it’s 2008, and “your milkshake” and “my milkshake” irresistibly recalls the Kelis song “Milkshake”:

My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard
And they’re like, it’s better than yours
Damn right, it’s better than yours
I could teach you, but I’d have to charge

All his life, virile Daniel Day-Lewis sits apart from women, and Paul Thomas Anderson exiles them from the frames, until the whole sexual life of the film is channeled into the gushing spurts of black oil and the oil merges with Kelis’s bizarrely euphemistic dirty talk. It’s sort of homoerotic, since it comes during an intimate moment between Day-Lewis and his enemy (a boy preacher), but the film has no idea what to make of that; mostly, it’s the inevitable return of the repressed.

It’s worth observing that one of most emotionally turbulent moments in the film comes through Kelis’s metaphor, since men without emotion were so central to 2007′s heralded films. Even Joel and Ethan Coen were guilty of finding this problem more interesting than it really is: grim lands demand grim heroes, money and death have a chill touch, and the masculine cult should be celebrated and condemned. Romance becomes the sterile, pre-pubescent romances of technology and treasure: Javier Bardem blows up a car and performs surgery on himself, Denzel Washington finds a good way to transport heroin, the fields are so rich with oil that Day-Lewis gets some on his shoe.

In fact, what emerges from the supposed aesthetic purism of this year’s nominated films is really the cowardice of the Academy. Superficially, Daniel Plainview (Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood) is a pawn: the sum of his life’s ambitions amounts to choosing to work with one oil monopoly rather than another. Nonetheless, the film tries to minimize that truth, and compares unfavorably with Gangs of New York, where Day-Lewis played a very similar character but the politics (and the little thug’s illusion of power) were the central point of the final act, not one rich man’s boring decline into decadence. The academy was too stodgy to award Gangs of New York an Oscar for Best Picture, preferring to wait until The Departed, which had about as much political meaning as a hair-dye infomercial. By the same token, when a film appeared that embraced the homoeroticism of the Western mythos, Brokeback Mountain, the Oscar went to Crash.

Julianne Moore, where have you gone? When Paul Thomas Anderson completed his real flawed masterpiece, Magnolia, Moore was there, giving an unforgettable performance as a gold-digger gradually discovering her feelings for her husband. When the Coen Bros. made the modern comedy classic The Big Lebowski, Moore was there as the painter and radical feminist Maud Lebowski, and it’s through her collision with the Dude that “the whole durned human comedy keeps perpetuatin’ itself.” In Children of Men, clearly the best picture of 2007, Moore was the leader of the insurgents who convinces Clive Owen to return to the cause. These films weren’t preachy or self-consciously politically correct about gender; they were simply realistic.

Admittedly, the Coen Bros. did better than Anderson: we have Llewelyn’s wife and her hilariously grumpy mother, as well as a miscellaneous woman who manages the trailer park where Llewelyn lives. These women are the only characters who refuse to play Anton’s games of death — the trailer park woman won’t give Anton information, and Carla Jean won’t flip a coin for her life. They are victims of the men around them, including Llewelyn, who puts their lives in danger while dreaming that he’s saving Carla Jean from continuing to work at Wal-Mart. The film almost manages to suggest that all the men — the “good” guys like Llewelyn, the bounty hunters, the suits, the police — are caught up perpetuating the machinery of death. But Carla Jean is still little more than Andromeda in chains, little more than Naomi Watts in Eastern Promises, compared to Maud Lebowski or Marge Gunderson from Fargo. Confronted by this artificial wasteland of maleness, audiences were supposed to applaud; most of them just turned away. It was The Godfather without Kay, Casablanca without Ilsa.

Perhaps it is a coincidence that vitiated political commentary and lopsided representations of gender went hand-in-hand this year, but I don’t think so. The great political film of the year was Michael Clayton, and it owed much of its power to Tilda Swinton’s astonishingly believable villain. Female characters do not merely create possibilities for heterosexual romance and desire, or for (potentially sexist) outpourings of emotion. Without them, you cannot portray what Martin Heidegger termed “average everydayness,” the interwoven fabric of consummation and disappointment, luxury and poverty, birth and death, family and social life that gives rise to the political. Look at the examples from television — try to imagine The Sopranos without Carmela and Meadow. Al Swearengen (from Deadwood) is a better version of Daniel Plainview, in part because we see him interact with Trixie, Alma Garret, and the cripple Jewel. The hermetic world of men is also the American cult of the exceptional individual, taken to the point of feverish delusion and inimical to the common ground that political thought and work requires.

The unfortunate complement to these tough-guy films are the insular domestic dramas. They have incredibly weak male characters, mostly of the man-child variety, and take similarly improbable turns in order to be nothing more than twee celebrations of family. They’re love poems to America’s white suburbs with facades of anti-suburban hip. Last year, it was Little Miss Sunshine. This year, it was Little Miss Pregnant Sunshine. The Academy turned a blind eye to Quentin Tarantino yet again, but I’ll take The Bride or Zoë Bell over Juno anyday.

Fashion at the Oscars; or, Goodbye Red Velvet Carpet

One of the most interesting effects of the increasingly horizontal possibility of celebrity — reality television, celebrity bloggers, and so forth — has been the way it has redounded on traditional arenas and duties of celebrity. To the best of our ability, we now try to put ourselves in the position of celebrities, which means reacting to the phenomenon with the same ambivalence that they seem to feel. It’s no longer that we want celebrities to be flawed, human, and approachable — “grounded,” as the old compliment used to go — but rather that the process by which ordinary people with talent become famous is now our primary concern.

Think of how central Britney Spears’s story has been to the entire year in tabloid reporting. Her adventures this year were sold to us as a series of nightmares about custody and control. Britney’s out of control! Britney’s lost custody of her children! Various antagonists, including Britney’s mother, manager, and boyfriend, all took turns in the role of the morally dubious handler who seizes control of Britney’s life, particularly when she was forcibly committed to a mental health institution. They, in turn, would accuse each other of trying to control Britney, either directly, or through drugs, or by exploiting Britney’s insecurities and/or mental health problems. The reception of Britney’s artistic work was likewise transformed. For example, when Britney gave a terrible performance of the single “Gimme More” on the MTV Music Awards, viewers responded with comments like “Why can’t they find her a decent wig?” The anonymous “they” of this comment stands in for all of the people, of whom we are now fully aware, who find ways to manipulate Britney into being a marketable commodity.

The allure of the red carpet pre-show at the Oscars always had to do with our relationship to the stars: at their most distant and un-approachable, they were symbols of style. We still believe icons like Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn to have been stylish; even as television announcers gave us the names of the designers for each piece, we gave the stars credit for picking it out, and for exemplifying the glamour to which it alludes.

Three reality shows in particular — American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway — have de-mystified glamour to an extraordinary degree. (To some extent, the makeover shows have also contributed to this, but they are as much concerned with normalcy as with celebrity.) The dynamic of each show works to objectify glamour as something existing outside of any particular human being, to which any human being can aspire. The brutal honesty of Simon Cowell, Tyra Banks, and Tim Gunn is delicious for viewers in its cruelty, but is also meant impersonally. Glamour is not subjective; if it were, you could never teach it.

Therefore, it’s no longer possible to be much interested in what celebrities are wearing on the red carpet, because it’s no longer possible to attribute to them their own choices. If a celebrity is wearing something terrific, we understand that they have been guided to this choice by a series of handlers working with them. If they wear something terrible, we just wonder why they can’t get better advisors. It’s the same with the rest of the celebrity’s functions: while a dinosaur like Hugh Hefner might still have a reputation for throwing wild parties, a show like Super Sweet Sixteen makes it clear that party planners throw parties. The hosts merely afford them.

The dynamic has become the same sadomasochistic dynamic running through Britney’s story. For example, it was leaked to the press that the women on America’s Next Top Model were forced to go without food or sleep, denied ways of amusing themselves (like books), and generally put under unbearable strain. The show itself flaunted trials like having the models do photo shoots in icy water. Far from diminishing the show’s popularity, these revelations served to confirm what we already knew, which was that the process of becoming famous is a painful and violent re-education, with all the dramatic tension centered on what the wannabe accepts, and what she resists, and how, and for how long, all the while risking returning defeated to an ordinary life. Meanwhile, we are increasingly willing to watch specialists perform: dance coaches, karate coaches, personal trainers, stunt men and women, party planners, makeup artists, fashion designers. (My pick for movie of the year, Death Proof, is about stunt drivers battling an evil stunt driver.) It used to be that the red carpet was the stage for the individual accomplishment of taste. The depth of the image was the star’s own subjectivity. Now that we are conscious of the objective and cooperative process of producing style, depth is provided by interactions between people, insofar as each will or will not sacrifice themselves to the demands of the ideal. Anything less, for the contemporary viewer, is too shallow to do justice to the illusion.

Teaching Literature

(x-posted to The Valve)

Look, I realize that there is a serious danger inherent in only writing posts about teaching literature. It’s not all I do, it’s not something I want to do exclusively, and above all it doesn’t make for ideal blogging unless it is leavened with humorous posts on occasional topics.

Nonetheless, Dr. Crazy wrote such an odd post that I have to respond in brief. The inspiration for the post was great: why do you teach literature? A White Bear wrote in with some fascinating observations about how her students respond to literature; she has observed them relying on a phony positivity that tries to immediately neutralize texts by applauding them for being conventional, and then applauding them for being different. This leads to several interesting conclusions, such as a) AWB is back and you should read her, and b) it’s a worthwhile question for any teacher to answer. If you happen to be a teacher, perhaps you will answer it in the space provided for comments.

I teach literature because I love reading it, and I want other people to feel comfortable investigating it. My interest in literature stems from my interest in other people’s experiences of life. To me, it matters a great deal how other people perceive the world and their place in it, and how their speech encodes — often with such astonishing density — those amalgamated experiences and interpretations. If you happen to see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, then you might agree that it succeeds in making the ordinary experiences of a bourgeois Frenchman matter. Bauby, the protagonist, has an unsatisfying love affair, struggles to converse with his father, suffers a terrible illness, and learns from an acquaintance who spent four years as a hostage in Beirut. Were it not for literature, I suspect we would hunger even more for honest characterizations of life. As Wallace Shawn once observed,

We live in such ludicrous ignorance of each other. I mean, we usually don’t know the things we’d like to know even about our supposedly closest friends! I mean…I mean, you know, suppose you’re going through some kind of hell in your own life, well, you would love to know if your friends have experienced similar things. But we just don’t dare to ask each other!

Literature steps into the breach. I confess, at this moment, to total indifference about how we handle the relief from this ignorance that literature provides. For some people, it is an ethical revelation. For others, it is merely interesting. For aspiring writers, works of literature enable acts of literary usurpation. Regardless, we have no other antenna so finely attuned to the aftershocks of experience. For many of my students, serious conversations about bodily, imperfectly comprehended life depend upon some knowledge of literature, and some appreciation for it. The rest of the time, etiquette and convention bar the way. Other forms of popular culture, such as movies and music, do related work. Nonetheless, writing retains its singular value because it is a solitary and largely atechnical enterprise. It does not require collaborators, unlike most films, nor does it require much by way of money, dexterity, or materials.

Dr. Crazy writes that she inspires curiosity; I want to focus on the kind of curiosity specific to literature, namely social or empathetic curiosity. She writes that it disrupts the consumer model of education; that’s true, but not because it’s impractical. It actually disrupts the entrepreneurial model of education, because it privileges solicitousness over selling. She writes that she wants to instruct students in fineness and complexity, chracterizing this as the accomplishment of depth. More accurately, it is the accomplishment of style.

In the end, Dr. Crazy writes that understanding literature makes students capable of conversing with the rich, and inspires them to make space for pleasure. Neither claim holds much water. While it would be nice if every rich family resembled the families in Match Point or Quiz Show, in fact most I’ve known resembled the Wilcoxes from E. M. Forster’s Howard’s End. They awkwardly combined erudite, cultured conversation with patriarchal business sense, and even a certain impatience with culture.

As for the second point, my students are avid and self-aware consumers of pleasure, and it’s not my place to legislate what those pleasures should be. Naturally, literature has its peculiar joys, but so do things I often forego, such as early morning walks.

A White Bear writes, very wittily, that she teaches in order to plead with her students not to be suckers. I do love the salty, healthy skepticism that aesthetic training provides. Nonetheless, I have to admit that most often books make readers look like suckers. They bore their friends with the details of character and plot. They buy tributary, explanatory books with annotations or critical essays. They name various things after books or parts of books, including cats, computers, and their personas on the Internet. Whenever a reader is acting most naturally, minus the solemnizing accessories of a leather chair and a study, she looks like a dreamer, a fool, or both. Yes, that’s what I teach. It’s not always dignified, but it’s irreplaceable.

***

I have learned, via the Constructivist, that scholar of golf and Gojira, that I have the power to tag five people. My votes are for Scott, tomemos, Sisyphus, Rough Theory, and Larval Subjects to respond, since I’d welcome posts covering other fields in the humanities.

In Response To Stanley Fish’s “Will The Humanities Save Us?”

(x-posted to The Valve)

Bill Benzon calls our attention to a new blog entry by Stanley Fish, posted by The New York Times here.

It is easy to imagine how, after a lifetime of dedicated scholarship, an emeritus professor like Fish might react in frustration against the platitudes in Education’s End, a new book by professor of law Anthony Kronman. Kronman has little to offer us; his vision of college as a place for the “nurturing of those intellectual and moral habits that together form the basis for living the best life one can” is a rhetorically tepid, repackaged version of a pedagogical philosophy shared by many earlier authors, including Matthew Arnold and Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne figures prominently in Alexander Nehamas’s book The Art of Living, which is entirely devoted to the enormous history of this idea within the Western philosophical tradition alone, to say nothing of history, literary studies, or the other constituent disciplines of the humanities.

That said, the banality of Kronman’s prose is no excuse for what Fish has written. Fish ends his post thus:

To the question “of what use are the humanities?”, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say, and anything that is said – even when it takes the form of Kronman’s inspiring cadences – diminishes the object of its supposed praise.

The crux of Fish’s argument against literature as an agent of moral self-fashioning goes like this:

If [Kronman's position] were true, the most generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people on earth would be the members of literature and philosophy departments, who spend every waking hour with great books and great thoughts, and as someone who’s been there (for 45 years) I can tell you it just isn’t so. Teachers and students of literature and philosophy don’t learn how to be good and wise; they learn how to analyze literary effects and to distinguish between different accounts of the foundations of knowledge.

It my sincere belief that this argument is worthless. I hope, when I am finished, that it will be ashamed to show its face again. It is hardly original with Fish; rather, it is everywhere, since it makes scholars in the humanities feel humble and forthright, and it makes people hostile towards the humanities rejoice.

***

To begin with, there is no universal standard of behavior to which Fish can appeal in order to prove his point. Instead, one of the foundational principles of much study in the humanities is the idea of incomparability: we give up trying to decide whether one individual, or one culture, is essentially superior to another. Look at the description he chooses: “generous, patient, good-hearted and honest people.” Such an account of the supposed purpose of literary studies would have sickened Friedrich Nietzsche, who wrote:

The oppressed, downtrodden, outraged exhort one another with the vengeful cunning of impotence: “let us be different from the evil, namely good! And he is good who does not outrage, who harms nobody, who does not attack, who does not requite, who leaves revenge to God, who keeps himself hidden as we do, who avoids evil and desires little from life, like, us, the patient, humble, and just.” (Genealogy of Morals, 1.14)

Nietzsche also described honesty as the virtue of those afraid of what secrets others may keep from them. Of course, nobody has to take Nietzsche at his word, but there is value in confronting him with sympathy, or with hatred. Here Kronman hits the mark. He writes about students considering “which alternatives lie closest to their own evolving sense of self,” and, presumably, which others lie furthest away. There is no reason to assume that engagement with texts produces a certain type of person, least of all a person who could equally belong to a Christian ministry.

Fish makes the ministry his standard for a justified moral vocation: “Teachers of literature and philosophy are competent in a subject, not in a ministry.” In fact, ministers are also engaged in interpreting and teaching texts. Their proper subject is theology, and they are just as prone as other human beings to moral and ethical lapses. This fact has not yet extinguished religion, or forced it to withdraw into a sterile self-regard. Fish attacks the humanities but not other forums for moral education and reflection. He writes as though he had never read Chaucer, or, more to the point, as though he were a stranger to Milton.

Fish’s sample consists of “the members of literature and philosophy departments.” That is, his sample of the human population bears absolutely no relation to the actual participation of thinking people in what we might call “the humanities.” Artists, lay readers of all kinds, and students — to name only three of the many constituencies of the arts and human sciences — are excluded here, along with any thought of the purposes the humanities serve outside of the academy. Fish also imposes judgment from the outside; while he vastly overvalues his own anecdotal observations, he leaves no space for personal accounts of a profound experience of an intellectual work. I know, from reading an earlier blog post, that Fish has been an ardent admirer of Frank Sinatra for most of his life, and that he sees Sinatra as a symbol of “single-minded dedication to craft.” Craft is, of course, the most reflexive virtue of a work of art, but it is a virtue nonetheless, and not the only one a reader, interlocutor, or listener may choose to admire. The idea of devoting oneself to a craft is precisely the sort of moral valuation that opens out onto many human enterprises, including scholarship, and endows life with resonance and meaning. Fish will have his Sinatra, but deprive us of ours.

Fish writes that the humanities are their own good, and believes in studying them for their sake. I believe in studying them for our sake. But I do not mean for the sake of the salvation of mankind, understood in some grandiose manner. There truly is a difference between the evangelist and the reader. Humanism is not, as Fish seems to think, a substitute for Sunday school. It is the emergence of a reflective capacity within human culture, and so represents the possibility of a truly self-determined culture for individuals and collectives alike. The humanities are an archive of reflective modes of encounter and expression: close reading, historical reconstruction, artistic making, anthropological study, and so on. The arts and human sciences do not make us better people, according to some a priori moral standard that Fish, despite himself, cannot help bringing to bear upon them. Instead, they make witnesses and authors of us. They make us responsible, and free.