The complicated way to simple: the complete series

Well, things have been hopping around here of late, thanks to the overnight success of Describing Your Way To Happiness. Seriously, it has just been hugely thrilling for me. You guys are the best! Even if I do still get nervous in front of the cameras. :) But actually Colbert was incredibly nice & down to earth! I’m always ready for a little bit of “razzing.” I wanted to say, Stephen, that’s Chapter Six! “Don’t Be Afraid Of Banana Peels,” am I right? But we’ll let him discover that for himself.

Anyway, people have been asking me for a list of the titles that make up my earlier, acclaimed book series, The Complicated Way to Simple, based on the teachings of Deepak Chopra, Andrew Weil, Dave Brubeck, and Manny Ramirez.

Remember, this is an eighteen part series, and each book costs only $19.99. That’s a $160 dollar value!

Here’s the complete list:

The 20 Habits of Spontaneous People

Take It From Me: You Don’t Need A Teacher

How To Convince Anyone To Purchase A Book

The Secret of Using What You Already Know

Wealth: A Spiritual Journey

Extraordinary Sufferers: A Practical Guide To Compassion

How Badly Do You Want Likability?

Overcoming The Win/Lose Mindset That Holds Others Back

Who Yodeled That Bluejay? Healthy Communicators and the Metaphor Smoothie

A Personality Test Designed For You, Your Partner, And Your Friend Samantha Who Happens To Be Standing Beside You Right Now

How To Stop Doing Things And Start Doing Things

Raising An Independent Child: The Comprehensive Guide

Surfing The Brainwave: Surprising Ways Science Is Proving The Wisdom Of The Ancients

A Hidden Code That Is Everywhere: How To Offend Anyone Who Knows About Schizophrenia Without Going Crazy

New Insights (10th Anniversary Edition)

Hi There Young’un!

Astral Ghosts On Peyote, Or, This Book Is No Longer In Print Because That Was A Different Time

Are You A Genius? The Answer May Surprise You, It Surprises A Lot of Geniuses

one good revolution deserves another

Well, guys, it’s over. We had a good run. We had Tony Soprano, Don Draper (back when he was fun), McNulty and Barksdale and Stringer (oh my), Al Swearengen, Hank Moody (back when he was fun), Vincent Chase, Homer Simpson, J.D. and Turk, three generations of Bluth men, two versions of The Office, and assorted male vampires. It was all about us and our troubled male identities. I mean, sure, we had the money, the power, and the upper hand in relationships, but what did it all mean? Because you can still feel lonely in the middle of a penthouse, you know.

Really, isn’t the perfect metaphor for the decline and fall of masculinity on television what happened with Luck? Nary a woman in sight, and still the men sit around, waiting to get paid for doing nothing, until finally three horses die and the show gets canceled.

Now a majority of the best shows, beyond a doubt, are powered by women: Girls, Smash, Cougar Town, Nurse Jackie, Enlightened, Web Therapy, New Girl, The United States of Tara, The Secret Circle, Revenge. This is not the fake girl power of Alias or Chuck, or the hollow regime of Nancy Botwin on Weeds. (Or the fake girl power of Joss Whedon’s shows; they were all great, but none of them were especially pro-woman, including Buffy.) It’s a real passing of the torch.

The shows that are trying, despite everything, to hang onto the old gender roles just don’t stay interesting: for example, Mad Men, Sons of Anarchy, and The Vampire Diaries. Meanwhile, I am certain that Mallory Archer, Jessica Pearson, Lisa Cuddy, and Nan Flanagan get together to unwind over G&Ts.

Similarly, the thing that bugs me about Community right now has everything to do with its critiques of egotism, but perhaps not in the way you’d expect: the problem with its critiques of egotism is that it treats Joel McHale’s ego as if it is still the most important thing in the universe. It’s way more troubled and concerned about Jeff’s problems than it is about Britta or Annie, but there’s really nothing all that special about Jeff. Once upon a time, back in Season 1, he was a hotshot lawyer, but he hasn’t shown many signs of brains or charisma lately.

In fact, there are only a few viable forms of male identity right now: the whipped-but-beloved guy, the gay guy, the rich guy, the hermit (hi Louie!), and the nerdy genius. (We tried out “the stoned guy” for a while, but he didn’t make the cut.) Even the superheroes fall into these categories, although, aside from some afterschool special moments on X-Men, we’re still not really comfortable with gay superheroes.

The sidekicks are suddenly extremely uncomfortable with their subject-positions. Wilson keeps trying to escape from House. Troy is perpetually uneasy when he’s around Abed, unless it’s the end of an episode. John Watson exclaims, in utter exasperation, “In case anyone still cares, I’M NOT GAY!” “Well, I am,” Irene Adler shoots back, cool as a cucumber.

What’s so embarrassing about the rich guys, like Merc Lapidus, and the nerdy guys, like House/Sherlock or Walter White, is that their power is founded upon sexism. But these thrones are in jeopardy, and the symbols are getting rather overt; one of the strongest men on television right now, Tyrion Lannister, is going to end up crossing the desert to find Daenerys Targaryen, in order to give her The Iron Throne.

It’s all pretty wonderful, and it pinpoints the great unsolved problem confronting our society right now: the problem of anxiety. All this excitement over S&M isn’t just about power. It’s about anxiety, which can be soothed either by taking control or by losing it. The women on Girls are fascinating and hilarious, but their anxieties aren’t — their anxieties torture both them and us. In Enlightened, Amy Jellicoe flees to Hawaii to escape from anxiety and rage; in Web Therapy, Kudrow’s self-consciousness makes therapy impossible. Claire Dunphy is unbearable most of the time.

That doesn’t mean that things used to be better. In the old days, Tony Soprano was guzzling Prozac, and Pete Campbell was, well, Pete Campbell. Plus, I’ll take Lafayette Reynolds, Omar Little, and Cameron Tucker any day over characters like Vito Spatafore or Salvatore Romano. Vito and Sal basically get chucked back in the closet so we can feel their pain from a safe distance. (Also, for unclear reasons, all gay men used to be Italian.) Louis C.K. is an engine that runs on pure, high-octane anxiety, like Woody Allen before him.

Power doesn’t just corrupt people. It also drives them insane, and the first prickings of that insanity are sweat and goosebumps. But anxiety is a bigger phenomenon, even, than extremes of power: we put incredible effort into straining for the imaginary midpoint between panic attacks on the one hand, and stoner apathy on the other. Thank goodness that everybody, male and female, gay and straight, is now part of the same fight against the same monster. Daenerys’s enchanting little pets grow up, and once they do, there is no pleasure or joy they do not envy, or that they cannot steal.

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

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.

What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stranger: Heath Ledger’s Joker

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers, this is about the film The Dark Knight and will, of necessity, be crammed absolutely full of spoilers.

***

It seems we are still too close to The Dark Knight; we are reeling. The critics have generally rated the film very high, which is useful but not explanatory, and Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker has already become legendary despite the fact that we don’t really know what is legendary about it. An attempted discussion at The Valve died out amidst cries that comic books are kids’ stuff (or maybe FASCIST!), and our friend Scott at Acephalous showed wonderful enthusiasm tinged with unmistakable vertigo. Some critics have compared the Joker to a wounded child who turned out bad (instead of turning out bat), which is wrong, and others have compared him to the Sex Pistols, which is pleasanter but still not quite right. There’s as much of the bum — the homeless, unemployed and mentally ill man for whom beatings have lost their meaning — in the Joker as there is the punk.

I’m going to start from the premise that Batman’s acting and psychology in this film aren’t very interesting. Christian Bale doesn’t get a chance to act, because neither playboys nor avengers get to feel much emotion, and he doesn’t develop because he did all that in the first movie. Instead, it’s the idea of Batman, the sum total of the things he represents, says, and does, that start the engine of the film — he is the fixed quantity, the “immovable object,” with which the Joker dances. Furthermore, the secondary plot of the film, involving Harvey Dent’s transformation into Two-Face, falls way short of Batman’s chemistry with the Joker. (This is partly due to Aaron Eckhart’s limitations as an actor, which are considerable. He appears to get his ideas for characters from their summaries on Wikipedia.) Thus everything revolves around the Joker. The film forces us to return to him obsessively.

In an interview with Fear.com, Ledger announced that he and Christopher Nolan had “the same idea” about the Joker, but refused to elaborate.

What is the meaning of what Ledger has left us?

***

I advise you to hire a poet.
-Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust

First, it must be said that the Joker is much, much smarter than Batman. Not only does he guess every move that Batman will make throughout the film, adjusting his own actions accordingly, but he shatters the fundamental assumption of any superhero film, which is that superheroes don’t kill supervillains because they (the heroes) are finally so dominant that they have the luxury of mercy. In The Dark Knight, Batman doesn’t kill The Joker because the nature of the separation between the Joker and himself is just too tenuous, and he has to enforce that separation by refusing to kill. The Joker happily calls his bluff, leading to three scenes where The Joker wins by showing no concern for his own life (four if you count the grenades in his jacket).

The reverse is also true, though — The Joker can’t kill Batman, because, he says, “you’re just too much fun.” That’s what we have to understand first before we can pick up on Ledger’s mannerisms and bizarre intonations. The Joker feels about Batman the way Shakespeare might feel if performances of Hamlet were being blocked in court by Thomas Kyd. In the previous film, Batman has taken the crucial plunge by deciding that his own personal neuroses have a global significance and relate in some meaningful way to the ebb and flow of order (law) and chaos (crime) in Gotham City. As a result, the whole city of Gotham has to play along with Batman, pretending as though shining the Bat Signal into the clouds and having one man karate chop his way around the city is the best way to fight crime. Being Batman is an incredibly excessive, libidinal kinkiness, but it is also a sort of splendor, without which the impetus to fight crime is lacking. It may seem ridiculous to assert that we have to let people dress up as sleeker versions of furries in order to persuade them to wield the baton, but in truth The Dark Knight is just illuminating the fantasies that play themselves out more tamely in normal professional lives. The Joker understands this so well that he’s out to climb the ladder and throw it away, by which I mean that he wants to turn the battle between criminals and vigilantes into a non-stop morality spectacular in which every normal ferry trip becomes a live, game show version of the prisoner’s dilemma. His polymorphous perversity is an end run around Batman’s incompletely sublimated fantasies. It’s not necessarily disappointing to him that the people on the ferries don’t detonate each other — I mean, isn’t that wonderful? They got to prove they were good people — Eichmann on the one boat, Bigger Thomas on the other. The Joker claps when Gary Oldman is made commissioner, perfectly well aware that this scene of goodness rewarded is only possible because he (the Joker) killed Commissioner #1. Ladies and gentleman, we are tonight’s entertainment.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to criticize The Dark Knight on the grounds that it is a children’s film or infantile; it is about infantility, and raises questions about how much we can really escape from apparently embarrassing wishes. Part of the problem with a fiction like Enchanted or Harry Potter is that it allows adults to feel themselves at a safe distance from kids’ stuff through (respectively) ironic misdirection and misty, head-patting sentimentality.

Insofar as we can untangle the Joker, the story goes something like this: It is the nature of the self to be melancholic, and thus to long for a return to a critical point of origin, which, if lost, would leave a void threatened by madness. As a result, the individual tries to go back to a point of origin that he has (for all practical purposes) invented, lacerating himself in the process, and so actually becoming the scarred, exiled creature. At the same time, the individual, despite his scars, gradually is able to come closer to the illusion of being identical with his fantasy. Of course, ceasing to distinguish between oneself and the fantasy is also madness: when Batman takes off his mask, he is Bruce Wayne, whereas when the Joker takes off his clown mask at the end of the bank robbery, he is still a clown. The main thing enabling Batman to remain both people without a psychotic breakdown is the Janus figure of the gatekeeper, Alfred, whose two-facedness in this film (part butler, part CIA scorched-earth man) earns him the name in all its fullness.

The role of time in this psychological process is pretty confusing, but there are lots of examples that can help us see our way forward. For example, in the film Fight Club, Edward Norton’s character Jack is trying to recover the manhood that he’s lost to consumerism and the working week. This desire splits off into a persona of its own, named Tyler Durden, who Jack imagines to be Brad Pitt. In order to be Tyler Durden, and thus to recover his own primordial self, Jack has to put himself through physical ordeals (mostly savage fistfights) that smash him (and his life) to pieces but make the Durden aspect of his personality, still represented as an unharmed Adonis, more and more totalizing. In The Dark Knight, the Joker shows up at a meeting of crime bosses from whom he has just stolen $68 million. One of them asks “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t have [my henchman] tear your head off,” to which the Joker replies, “How about a magic trick? I will make this pencil disappear.” The Joker makes the pencil disappear when the henchman moves towards him — the Joker slams the man’s head against a table, killing him instantly when the pencil slices through his head. In other words, the conversation about why the Joker shouldn’t be assaulted happens as the assault is actually being attempted and then foiled: the two things are one and the same, except for the split between the logic of insanity (the Joker as Adrian Brody’s pianist, performing at gunpoint) and practical thinking (the Joker defends himself against an immanent threat). The fantasy of innocent “magic tricks” is realized at the precise moment when it has utterly failed and been replaced by calculating violence. It is a version of what characters experience in Jean Genet’s novels: when the drag queen gains enough aesthetic sense to become, at last, an elegant jeune fille, he is a middle-aged man. When Harvey Dent truly becomes Gotham’s patron saint, he is a dead murderer.

The Joker would like to be completely mad, and so feel no cognitive dissonance at all; when he is accused of being mad, and replies “I’m not — no, I’m not,” his voice is heavy with regret. Even the stories that he tells to Gamble and Dawes are lucid in their very ridiculousness. Consider the story he tells to Gamble: while his father is beating up his mother, the mother defends herself with a kitchen knife, which then inexplicably causes the father to take the kitchen knife and begin ritually carving up his son’s face. What is supposed to be a story about torture and abuse turns into a story about the envy of the excluded: the little boy re-writes the story to make himself the center of attention, introducing a twist that has its own horrible fascination but actually doesn’t “fit.” This is precisely what Batman has done — turn the selfless work of upholding the law into a spectator sport with him in the middle. The second story not only features the Joker scarring his own face rather than trying to undo the damage to his wife’s face, but involves the Joker getting what are clearly external scars by sloshing a razor around inside his mouth. The union of the internal and the external is what Batman wants out of fighting crime, at Hancock-like cost to those around him.

***

In the first film, Batman fought human agents of totalitarian order; here, he fights an anarchist in love with the fireworks of chaos and the excesses of image. My sincere hope for the final installment is that Batman will face off against something inhuman, by which I certainly do not mean campy monsters. It seems to me that the inhuman is also the best possible lead-in for Batman’s conflicted relationship with the person who shares his denatured humanity — Catwoman, invoked slyly here by petitpoussin. (Nobody, as petitpoussin correctly observes, has been able to bring any life to Rachel Dawes.)

That said, what we make of Nolan’s trilogy will be greatly affected by whether we continue to overvalue films like Iron Man. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that Disneyland existed to make Americans believe that the rest of America was real; by the same token, risk-free parables like Iron Man and Harry Potter, towards which we feel genial disbelief, disguise from us the fantastic chimeras that dominate our real lives, and which comprise the glistening heart of The Dark Knight. I mean our dreams, our wishes, our nightmares, our faiths. It is because we are having trouble dealing with Ledger’s Mephistopheles, his tongue snaking around his lips, that we hear so many empty words about his “great performance” in a genre where “the movie is only as good as its villain.” Nolan thinks we deserve a better class of superhero movie: not the kind we need to preserve us in our delusions, but the kind we deserve.

Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner: Side Jobs and the Internet Economy

Such a muddy line between
The things you want
And the things you have to do
-Sheryl Crow, “Leaving Las Vegas”

Over eighty thousand pounds! I knew, didn’t I know I knew? Malabar came in all right. If I ride my horse till I’m sure, then I tell you, Bassett, you can go as high as you like. Did you go for all you were worth, Bassett?
-D. H. Lawrence, “The Rocking Horse Winner”

Some of you might have wondered why my participation in the blogosphere fell off so quickly and dramatically. The answer is that I was teaching myself to play poker.

You cannot survive, at least in Orange County, California, just on the salary a teaching assistant in the humanities receives for half-time work. This is a shame, because when you’re not doing your teaching, you’re supposed to be researching and writing your seminar papers, and then reading for your exams, and then writing your dissertation.

When I made the decision to enter graduate school in 2003, the situation was a little less bleak. For one thing, the average price of gasoline in the OC was $1.80 per gallon. It is now at $4.60 and climbing. The public transportation system in Orange County and Los Angeles is exceptionally poor. There is a metro, but it takes extraordinary luck to find that both starting point and destination are anywhere near to it. This is partly because it was run mostly through the poorest parts of Los Angeles, I imagine to save on building costs and hassles from neighborhood groups. There is a bus system, but it requires a very time-consuming series of changes and runs infrequently. This part of the country is dominated by highways: over-crowded, slow-moving highways. My fianceé’s job currently has her staying in a hotel in Riverside, some 45 minutes away, and living in Long Beach, 35 minutes away. When we move in together next fall, the likelihood is that I’ll have a commute of my own, along with a host of new fees for parking.

In 2003, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had not yet had the opportunity to demonstrate his deep commitment to higher education — each passing year has seen a new budget impasse and new cuts affecting the University of California. The university has responded as it had to: raising rents and fees, cutting disbursements. When I completed my exams, I was awarded a standard fellowship covering all fees (additional to tuition, which is paid by the teaching assistantship). That summer, the fellowship was canceled, and the quarterly fee almost doubled. The fees are slated to increase again this year.

Finally, the university is no longer in a position to guarantee teaching assistantships for all of normative time to degree. There are certainly ways around this — the faculty has been incredibly good at getting funding for teaching programs that can support graduate students in their seventh year and after — but the bottom line is that for most of the people I know who are writing their dissertations, there is no way to avoid significant financial risk if you are entirely dependent on the university. This has not become a union issue because it’s not malfeasance on the part of the administration; it’s the result of politicians reducing funding for higher education, without the private contributions that help compensate other disciplines.

All of this might still be survivable if your car didn’t break down, requiring expensive repairs, but it does. Or if you never traveled, but you do when your friends are getting married. So what fills the gaps?

The Optimizer Economy

Yes, the optimizer economy. This is the entire economy that has grown up during the Information Age (with its boons for self-promotion: cheap desktop publishing, the Internet, etc), targeted at parents who want to give their children an edge. The test prep companies that have been around forever, such as Kaplan or The Princeton Review, now compete with all kinds of small brick-and-mortar startups, some managed out of a home, usually offering comprehensive tutoring in all subjects in addition to test prep. Beyond this there are any number of private tutoring relationships begun through referrals and emails forwarded to graduate student listservs.

The parents have sympathetic motives, the kids often appreciate the attention, and the tutors get to teach. It can work out wonderfully. During the summers I teach test prep and ESL at a boarding school, and that’s a terrific opportunity, because the kids have a rigorous schedule and learn a great deal over five weeks. Teachers have the support and structure they need to get through a real curriculum, and they have creative control over their curricula.

Unfortunately, the day-to-day reality of these part-time tutoring jobs is very different. If you teach for one of the big test prep companies, you are teaching from a book, which is a minor bummer. The major problem is that most of the companies are incredibly exploitative of their workforce, charging twice (or more) per hour what the tutor or teacher receives. In addition, many of them are oriented towards parents, because the parents pay, rather than considering what would be optimal for students. As an example, quantifiable lessons like vocabulary words are emphasized over the much slower and wayward progress of a standard liberal arts education. Yesterday Johnny learned fifty vocabulary words, today he passed a test on them, boom! Learning! This type of lesson also gets around the problem that students aren’t in these enrichment programs very long on any given week, since they supplement regular school, sports, and the rest of the child’s responsibilities. This can also be a problem with individual tutoring: if a student doesn’t see the tutor very often, then progress is slow (e.g. one novel for a whole summer), the curriculum becomes erratic (affected too much by the academic concerns of that week), and the lessons don’t stick.

To sum up: the intensive institutional programs are good, and some individual tutoring relationships work out very well (at least, they’re no worse than harmless), but still the majority of side jobs mean working as basically a knowledge temp, with all the frustrations and disadvantages of any temping job. I chose something else.

No Limit

On a broad scale, what is interesting about poker is not the $5 million dollar televised games between the same 25 celebrities. Nor is it the World Series of Poker Main Event, where people invest a huge amount of money to play against thousands of other people, getting relatively bad odds unless they manage to sneak in via Internet poker promotions. The only real significance of the televised poker craze, as dozens of writers have pointed out, is that it helped to make the game well-respected and popular.

Playing regular cash poker in a casino is feasible, particularly in Las Vegas, but you need a lot of cash if you want to play for more than entertainment. That is, you need many thousands of dollars, because even though good players generally win money, on a given night it is quite possible to lose big instead. In California, you need even more, because the house’s percentage of every hand is vastly higher. That’s necessary because California casinos can’t use poker as a loss leader to attract gamblers who then try their hand at craps, baccarat, roulette, blackjack, sports betting, or the slots.

Economically, the interesting thing about poker is that it has become Internet wage labor, played for small stakes by vast numbers of people sitting at their computers, a lot of whom are now poker professionals in a meager sense.

The most profitable game is “no limit” Texas Hold ‘Em, for the intuitive reason that since there are no limits on betting, you can bet more when the odds are in your favor, and less when they are not. The game has a canon of about twelve books written by Dan Harrington (5), David Sklansky (3), Phil Gordon (2), Doyle Brunson (the infamous Super/System), and Barry Greenstein (Ace on the River). The canon takes a month of study, maybe two. I should note that as of last September I had never played Texas Hold ‘Em once in my entire life.

If you* sit down at a no-limit game and play only the very best possible hands, folding (refusing to bet) the rest, you will be dealt about five playable hands per hour in a live game. Online at one table, you will get about ten playable hands. However, once you get comfortable, you can usually play at least four tables simultaneously online, because you’re folding 83% of what you get and then waiting for the other players to finish the hand. That means you will get a hand favored to win more than once every two minutes. You will get aces or kings, the two best hands, about once every half hour. If you can just manage to win 60% of these hands, or if you win only half but bet more when you win then when you lose, your principal increases by 9% an hour, compounded every time you double your principal and can rise to higher stakes (so about once every twelve hours). Furthermore, by playing four tables, you do what you can’t do live, which is quarter your liability if an unlucky, unlikely card beats you. You get reduced to only 75% of your principal, rather than zero, and can if necessary immediately drop down to lower stakes.

If you had to cash out all of your winnings minus your principal investment, you’d be making better than minimum wage at $100, better than almost all tutoring wages at $800. If you can manage to invest or reach $1600, you stand to make better money than practically any professional-in-training who isn’t at the top of the capitalist food chain. (At a brick-and-mortar casino, this would almost certainly not be enough to make a living. Plus, rather than winning ten dollars at a time off loan adjusters playing before bed in Hamburg, you’d be playing broke retirees from the neighborhood who are spending more than they have in order to be out somewhere.) The Internet sites run every single day, 24 hours a day. It is a skill game, and of course it’s a skill learning to detect bluffs, learning when to stop betting a hand, and learning how to make your good hands seem weak to your opponents. But you only need to be about as good at poker as your local Little League coach is at baseball.

That is the new story: for some people it will be easier, more comfortable, and more sustainable than the other treading-water jobs, like restaurant jobs. This is perhaps what Hardt and Negri meant by the rise of “immaterial labor.” You’ll know one such person, then two, then five, who are sitting at home in the early afternoons, playing poker for money while listening to their record collection. They’ll take the time they have left for their passions — waiting, still waiting, for the miracle to come.

****

* Note: This “you” is a hypothetical you. Your mileage may vary. It usually does.

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.

Parodying Academic Blogging

(x-posted to The Valve)

Dear readers,

In the spirit of the MLAde 2007, produced by two very funny UC Irvine grad students and distributed, guerrilla-style, around the conference, I’m pleased to present this parody of academic blogging, entitled “My Story.”

***

A lot of people, almost none of whom read blogs, and one of whom sent most of his confidential information via e-mail to Nigeria, have asked me how I got into blogging. So I thought I’d blog my answer out loud to the blogosphere. After all, today is Sunday through Thursday, and it’s time for my Blogging About Blogging Sundays Through Thursdays. (But don’t worry, Existential Despair About Capitalism Friday is just four days off!) My story is a lot like other stories about learning to use a very simple web template, and you can read those other stories here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

I guess you could say that some part of me was always a blogger, just as some people know that from birth that they are meant to be accountants or customer service representatives. It began when I was very little; when my parents left me alone in the house, I would watch episodes of television programs on DVD, while feeling terrifically anxious about not doing my reading. I was very much a “boy’s boy,” but still, I would catch myself fantasizing about the feel of tweed against my skin; I would thumb through the glossies, dreaming of the latest Parisian fashions, even though my mother could not afford simulacra, and had to make do with cheap imitations. I would creep upstairs to our attic, to the old dresser my father kept up there, and reach around in the bottom drawer until I found his collection of New Yorker magazines. I didn’t really understand everything I was reading, because we lived in Boise and I was reading the “Talk of the Town,” but the images and words consumed me like a secret fire. I wrote a short story, “Adultery,” and then a poem called “Lonely Cabbages, 1993,” which I posted here after it was rejected by the editors of the New Yorker, as well as many, many other editors, many times.

As the DVDs for Season 3 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer gradually yielded to those containing Season 4, and the space of years made me older and bolder, I began to play with dolls. They were shaped like postmodern theorists, and I found them “hilariously campy.” Under my covers, long after my official bedtime, I would set up little conferences, where I would force the Alain Badiou doll to give a talk entitled “I’m In UR Auditorium Repeating My Book For UR Stipend,” and then I would ask him questions. My questions were long, thought-provoking, and remarkably similar to my dissertation. I felt like the only person in all Idaho brave enough to be ending my questions with periods, and saying “Well, I guess this isn’t really a question per se.”

After this had gone on for a while, I began to wonder who was really listening to the little conferences I held with the postmodernist dolls in my bedroom. It felt like I didn’t have much of an audience, aside from one or two specialists also working in my field who were, in this case, made out of plastic. I wondered if there were other people like me, people who cared above all about serious scholarship, and whether, like me, they wanted to prove it by writing about popular films and beach trips under assumed names. I already had my assumed name all picked out – it was a German word meaning “of or relating to Derrida,” because he is one thinker you have to read in the original German. I modified it, though, so that it was also a pun on three Elvis Costello albums. It took a mere fortnight of continuous effort to pick my blog title, my blog name, my blog epigraph, my blog picture, and my blog design scheme, plus one more day to remove all references to money laundering from my publicly linked MySpace page.

I remember all the milestones. I remember the first time a commenter showed up to tell me about how useless literary critics were compared to writers. “Those who can’t do, teach,” he wrote, starting a wonderful conversation that has continued, ceaselessly, after every single post, to this very day. What I like about him is that he is the people, the real people, not some bloodless academic; he’s like Tiny Tim, and I am like Charles Dickens, giving him the crutches he needs to walk the walk of the learned. Other examples of the salt of the earth who have learned to use my comment box include a schizophrenic person, whose discursive universe is a play of absences and misspellings, and the person who has always had just about enough of me and my blog, for going on two years. I also like the fact that these folks click on my advertising banners, although that may be an accident, since I Advertise Liberally, meaning that ads cover about 65% of the screen. I remember the first time I used the word fuck, in my post “Fuck All The Fucking Bullshit, I’ve Been Reading About Fucking Punk.” I thought that would get me fired from my Ph.D. program, forcing me to earn a living by blogging, but it didn’t, and neither did my post “Things We Think But Do Not Say.”

But, in the end, there’s something very simple that keeps me blogging, and that is a truth that might even sound a little sentimental, but so what, it’s a blog: what I can really write about is how I’m having trouble with my writing. My best days blogging are the ones where I can’t even add one solitary preposition to my half-finished sentence on page 63 of Chapter 4, “Tristam Shandy and the Anti-Topographical Comic,” all of which I chronicled in the post “One Solitary Preposition.” So yes, I’m now in my seventh year of blogging, but allow me this indulgence: I like to call it Season 7, Part 1. It’s the season where the writers got together and deconstructed everything you thought was happening. Beat that, Lawrence Sterne, you stuffy old academic. (I will continue my series of posts on Tristram Shandy and Habermas tomorrow.)

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

(x-posted to The Valve)

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which leads here:

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

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

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

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

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

Returning to Radiohead, compare this:

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

With this:

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

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

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

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

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

Dear readers,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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