After teaching this morning I took a moment to listen to Tiger Woods address the planet, not least because our course readings this term contemplate the timeless question of erotic desire. Woods's drama, in other words, is our drama, ancient and cruel.
Also, like the rest of the world, I'm a voyeur, and curious about other people's dirty laundry. (Yet another reason to salute the dignity of fiction: it ain't true; it ain't gossip.)
I must say that I found his speech fascinating. I loved its theatricality, its strategic (by which I mean intentional) futility, its enormous self-regard. I was delighted by the technological failure—exquisitely off-script—that forced us to watch its final minutes in profile, so that Wood's mother, and not Woods himself, became the center of the screen. And I was moved by his return to his mother's arms—the towering infant, back in the maternal sanctuary; and by her obvious love, which any son can imagine: limitless, permanent, unconditional.
But most of all, I realized watching him speak that I was witnessing an event that perfectly embodies the real ambition of middle-class American culture: to avoid the truth, at all cost.
No, I understate the case: the ambition of our culture is not merely to avoid the truth; it is to present the opposite of the truth as the truth.
That's what happened this morning.
I'll have more to say about this, perhaps (I hope!) in a long essay. I'll quickly note that my claim about the contemporary American culture's real goal applies to our current politics, our art (i.e., Avatar), our religions (which is really one religion, the religion of self-idolatry), and our heroes, like this morning's Tiger Woods.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
A Question for English 1B—and Anyone Else
Manhattan, written and directed by Woody Allen, is one of the great films in the history of American cinema. Its primary concern is the love affair between Isaac and Tracy, which runs into numerous obstacles, for a variety of reasons I won't bother to outline here, and appears, when we arrive at the scene below, doomed to fail.
The clip I've embedded is the famous scene near the end of the movie in which Isaac, confused by the emotional turmoil of his life, reclines on a couch and, speaking into a tape recorder, asks, "Why is life worth living?"
Consider the scene and his answer(s). Then I'd like you answer the same question, as if into your own microphone, in a comment below. Please model your response after Isaac's: Give your answer as a specific list, as he does, to what he correctly calls "a very good question."
The clip I've embedded is the famous scene near the end of the movie in which Isaac, confused by the emotional turmoil of his life, reclines on a couch and, speaking into a tape recorder, asks, "Why is life worth living?"
Consider the scene and his answer(s). Then I'd like you answer the same question, as if into your own microphone, in a comment below. Please model your response after Isaac's: Give your answer as a specific list, as he does, to what he correctly calls "a very good question."
Friday, February 5, 2010
The Sands of Time
World War II descends upon Ukraine.
"When one begins a picture one often discovers fine things. One ought to beware of these, destroy one's picture, recreate it many times. On each destruction of a beautiful find, the artist does not suppress it, to tell the truth; rather he transforms it, condenses it, makes it more substantial. The issue is the result of rejected discoveries." — Pablo PicassoOrson Welles said of Citizen Kane that the music was fifty percent responsible for the film's success. I'd put the figure north of fifty percent for this clip.
Thursday, January 21, 2010
Obama and the Tragedy of Hope
On his blog at the New York Review of Books website, Garry Wills, who in the past has brilliantly analyzed Obama's rise to prominence, writes a despairing essay about Obama's first year. I posted a response to Wills beneath his essay; both the essay and my comment can be found at this link:
NYRblog - After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In - The New York Review of Books
NYRblog - After Massachusetts: His Hopes Did Him In - The New York Review of Books
The gist of my observation, particularly regarding Gov. Schwarzenegger and his struggles in Sacramento, was influenced by a fascinating (if almost comically repetitive) book by former Republican state Assemblyman William Bagley titled California's Golden Years: When California Worked and Why
.
Bagley's argument can be summarized in one sentence: If you want a government that works, don't elect ideologues; they don't know how to govern.
An interview with Bagley, which nicely conveys his straightforward exuberance, can be heard here:
Unlike Obama's predecessor, and to the continuing frustration of the liberal ideologues among those who elected him, our current president didn't arrive in Washington and immediately dictate to Congress what to do and how to do it. Instead, he arrived and said: Legislate. He asked his former colleagues to collaborate in the act of governance. He said, Write a bill, debate the bill, pass the bill, and bring it to me. He asked them, in short, to be public servants and to act like adults.
But with Republicans, seemingly without exception, simply refusing to govern—they do not, after all, as they'll tell you themselves, presently believe in government—and with Democrats clumsily struggling with the cacophony of voices that has historically been the Party's moral strength, Congress has been unable to govern.
Democrats now want Obama to rule like Bush. They want him to become what Obama has worked to reverse: the American President as King, as despot, ruling with no tolerance for deviation, ideologically pure, deaf to opposition, above—indifferent to—the law.
This excellent article from The New Republic nicely articulates both the logic and the contradictions of Obama's approach:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/comity-errors
So the question presents itself—for both California and the nation: If our legislators decline the invitations of the Executive Branch to govern, abdicating their constitutional and moral duty as members of the Legislative Branch, if they continue to substitute obstructionism and ideological intransigence for collaborative governance, will the Republic survive?
.Bagley's argument can be summarized in one sentence: If you want a government that works, don't elect ideologues; they don't know how to govern.
An interview with Bagley, which nicely conveys his straightforward exuberance, can be heard here:
Unlike Obama's predecessor, and to the continuing frustration of the liberal ideologues among those who elected him, our current president didn't arrive in Washington and immediately dictate to Congress what to do and how to do it. Instead, he arrived and said: Legislate. He asked his former colleagues to collaborate in the act of governance. He said, Write a bill, debate the bill, pass the bill, and bring it to me. He asked them, in short, to be public servants and to act like adults.
But with Republicans, seemingly without exception, simply refusing to govern—they do not, after all, as they'll tell you themselves, presently believe in government—and with Democrats clumsily struggling with the cacophony of voices that has historically been the Party's moral strength, Congress has been unable to govern.
Democrats now want Obama to rule like Bush. They want him to become what Obama has worked to reverse: the American President as King, as despot, ruling with no tolerance for deviation, ideologically pure, deaf to opposition, above—indifferent to—the law.
This excellent article from The New Republic nicely articulates both the logic and the contradictions of Obama's approach:
http://www.tnr.com/article/politics/comity-errors
So the question presents itself—for both California and the nation: If our legislators decline the invitations of the Executive Branch to govern, abdicating their constitutional and moral duty as members of the Legislative Branch, if they continue to substitute obstructionism and ideological intransigence for collaborative governance, will the Republic survive?
NASCAR and the NBA
Last night a neighbor at the bar was explaining to me that the NBA is made up of "thieves" and "riff-raff," that it's poorly run, that he's not saying this because of the players' tattoos, and that if I want to watch a sport that is both exhilarating and "professionally run," I should watch NASCAR.
(During our conversation, an outstanding game was going on between the Golden State Warriors and the Denver Nuggets. Because of injuries, the Warriors were playing with only eight players in uniform. The game ended in overtime: Nuggets 123, Warriors 118.)
It's unnecessary to note the self-evident fact that the NBA embodies (literally) urban black culture and NASCAR embodies suburban and rural white culture.What struck me after our conversation was the way that athletes in both sports use their bodies to communicate what their respective cultures value.
Anyone older than ten can't help but be struck by the fact that NBA players these days are incredibly tattooed. It appears in some cases that the players have tried to cover every visible patch of skin with a tattoo.
In other words, the players have come to see their own bodies as a way to communicate their cultural values. Many of the tattoos are self-congratulatory (Lebron James: Chosen 1); some honor a mother, a friend, wives or children; others honor $, political heroes, home neighborhoods, Jesus. The tattoos are diverse, varied, extravagant. Yet they all make the same gesture: Upon my body I have narrated my life. Read me.
NASCAR drivers also use their bodies to communicate, but they absolutely never communicate something about their individual lives. Instead, they cover their bodies with corporate logos. Again, this is an expression of what their culture values. Suburban and rural white America value The Corporation. Business. Work. Humility. And the Machine.
Not only do NASCAR drivers decorate their bodies with advertising, they climb inside machines that are similarly covered with advertising—often advertisements for the machine itself.
In addition to the conflicting (perhaps contradictory) emphases of what the athletes of these two sports have inscribed upon their bodies, the sports themselves reflect different values. With basketball, we see that black America values the aggressive, elegant, nearly naked masculinity of its young men. NASCAR, on the other hand, reflects white America's admiration for the invisible bravery of the man inside the machine.
Structurally, the two sports are similarly repetitive. And, like all sports, they are metaphors for the nature of human life.
In the case of basketball, more or less naked men run relentlessly back and forth, back and forth, attempting not merely to score but to humiliate their opposition in the process of scoring. (Hence basketball's obsession with the slam dunk: dunks project erotic aggression, as if by slamming the ball through the opponent's hoop the player effectively fucks the opponent.) The game is refereed (unjustly, futilely) by authorities who cannot be questioned, cannot be touched. The improvisational, graceful, supremely athletic eroticism of basketball gives an otherwise tediously repetitive sport its global appeal.
In the case of NASCAR, a sport whose appeal is limited, more or less, to the U.S., a collection of roaring machines, covered in corporate advertising, relentlessly circle a track, repeating over and over the same cycle. The various positions of the machines shifts minutely from time to time. The endless cycling is occasionally interrupted so that a crew of anonymous workers can swiftly, efficiently attend to the (godlike) machine. The machine then resumes its monotonous, brutal, life-threatening circling.
NASCAR is the assembly line, the corporate career, the sexlessness and anonymity of modern suburban and rural life, transformed into sport. Its principal pleasure is not the eroticism of the body—the running, leaping, and rough dancing of the NBA—but, ironically, The Wreck, when with great delight we witness the death of God, the Machine, as it flips and spins and comes apart, killing, or perhaps saving, the little man strapped inside.
(During our conversation, an outstanding game was going on between the Golden State Warriors and the Denver Nuggets. Because of injuries, the Warriors were playing with only eight players in uniform. The game ended in overtime: Nuggets 123, Warriors 118.)
It's unnecessary to note the self-evident fact that the NBA embodies (literally) urban black culture and NASCAR embodies suburban and rural white culture.What struck me after our conversation was the way that athletes in both sports use their bodies to communicate what their respective cultures value.
Anyone older than ten can't help but be struck by the fact that NBA players these days are incredibly tattooed. It appears in some cases that the players have tried to cover every visible patch of skin with a tattoo.
In other words, the players have come to see their own bodies as a way to communicate their cultural values. Many of the tattoos are self-congratulatory (Lebron James: Chosen 1); some honor a mother, a friend, wives or children; others honor $, political heroes, home neighborhoods, Jesus. The tattoos are diverse, varied, extravagant. Yet they all make the same gesture: Upon my body I have narrated my life. Read me.
NASCAR drivers also use their bodies to communicate, but they absolutely never communicate something about their individual lives. Instead, they cover their bodies with corporate logos. Again, this is an expression of what their culture values. Suburban and rural white America value The Corporation. Business. Work. Humility. And the Machine.
Not only do NASCAR drivers decorate their bodies with advertising, they climb inside machines that are similarly covered with advertising—often advertisements for the machine itself.
In addition to the conflicting (perhaps contradictory) emphases of what the athletes of these two sports have inscribed upon their bodies, the sports themselves reflect different values. With basketball, we see that black America values the aggressive, elegant, nearly naked masculinity of its young men. NASCAR, on the other hand, reflects white America's admiration for the invisible bravery of the man inside the machine.
Structurally, the two sports are similarly repetitive. And, like all sports, they are metaphors for the nature of human life.
In the case of basketball, more or less naked men run relentlessly back and forth, back and forth, attempting not merely to score but to humiliate their opposition in the process of scoring. (Hence basketball's obsession with the slam dunk: dunks project erotic aggression, as if by slamming the ball through the opponent's hoop the player effectively fucks the opponent.) The game is refereed (unjustly, futilely) by authorities who cannot be questioned, cannot be touched. The improvisational, graceful, supremely athletic eroticism of basketball gives an otherwise tediously repetitive sport its global appeal.
In the case of NASCAR, a sport whose appeal is limited, more or less, to the U.S., a collection of roaring machines, covered in corporate advertising, relentlessly circle a track, repeating over and over the same cycle. The various positions of the machines shifts minutely from time to time. The endless cycling is occasionally interrupted so that a crew of anonymous workers can swiftly, efficiently attend to the (godlike) machine. The machine then resumes its monotonous, brutal, life-threatening circling.
NASCAR is the assembly line, the corporate career, the sexlessness and anonymity of modern suburban and rural life, transformed into sport. Its principal pleasure is not the eroticism of the body—the running, leaping, and rough dancing of the NBA—but, ironically, The Wreck, when with great delight we witness the death of God, the Machine, as it flips and spins and comes apart, killing, or perhaps saving, the little man strapped inside.
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
Aesthetics and Politics
I'm drawn, in the world of art, to brokenness, insufficiency, bewilderment, feminine elegance, powerlessness, failure, lovingness, uncertainty, deference, eagerness, recklessness, the chaotic, the new, the insouciant, the heterogeneous, the libertine, the inclusive, the forgotten, the disenfranchised, the disheveled, the exuberant, the experimental, the animalistic, the tentative, the naughty, the droll.
I am repelled by completeness, confidence, steadfastness, triumphalism, certainty, ambition, aggression, order, symmetry, selfishness, the absolute, the bellicose, the nationalistic, the traditional, the individual, the caustic, the outraged, the ascetic, the exclusive, the pantheon, the clean, the powerful, the well-suited, the joyless, the earnest, the cruel.
The same sensibility that shapes my aesthetic life—my attitude toward beauty—shapes my political and religious lives. Consequently, I fail to understand the appeal of modern Protestantism (for example) and the contemporary Republican Party.
Given my upbringing, this difficulty might be a form of self-loathing.
But I find self-loathing interesting—more interesting than self-love.
Haiti
About a week and a half ago I was sitting at my desk at home and felt the brief jolt of a 4.2 earthquake. I learned later that the quake originated about 40 miles from Half Moon Bay, just east of Milpitas.
After it passed, I said out loud, to myself, as if to return to reality, "That was an earthquake." I felt dizzy, even nauseous—not from the shaking, but from what I experienced, at an existential level, as an impossibility. The earth had moved. I could feel my organism's bewilderment. My body didn't care what I knew intellectually; it merely knew that the impossible had happened.
So of course we can't imagine Haiti.
The facts don't help: at least 200,000 dead—the equivalent of 6,000,000 dead Americans, had the catastrophe happened here and matched Haiti's scale. 1,500,000 homeless—the equivalent of 45,000,000 Americans losing their homes in a single catastrophic event. In effect, we've witnessed the end of a nation: its capital wiped out, the State, already fragile, in total collapse, the population decimated (a disproportionate number of the dead will be children), the infrastructure largely destroyed.
The facts don't help: at least 200,000 dead—the equivalent of 6,000,000 dead Americans, had the catastrophe happened here and matched Haiti's scale. 1,500,000 homeless—the equivalent of 45,000,000 Americans losing their homes in a single catastrophic event. In effect, we've witnessed the end of a nation: its capital wiped out, the State, already fragile, in total collapse, the population decimated (a disproportionate number of the dead will be children), the infrastructure largely destroyed.
Seeing the images from Haiti, I remembered my reaction to the little tremor days before: Earthquakes cannot be.
And yet they are. If we're lucky, we resume. Or, perhaps more accurately, begin again.
Sunday, December 27, 2009
A Perfect Piece of Software
For years I've been looking for an easy way to work on the same document on different computers. I've never been good at copying work I've revised from one computer to another; when I do, I often forget which computer I last used. This logistical dilemma has, on more than one occasion, discouraged me enough to stop me from writing.
Dropbox has ended my search for a solution—a perfectly executed, elegant little program that automatically updates any file I ask it to across computers, as I write. And it's free.
Dropbox has ended my search for a solution—a perfectly executed, elegant little program that automatically updates any file I ask it to across computers, as I write. And it's free.
Friday, December 25, 2009
Thursday, December 24, 2009
Ruining the Country
Last night at a local hotel bar I listened to a man explain to the people around him that Mexicans are ruining the country.
He was an older man, bald, pink-faced, probably in his late fifties, wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it. He let us know that he'd served in the Army and had no interest in the opinions of anyone who hadn't.
Just before going to the bar, I'd read this.
I suggest following the link, but I'll quickly summarize what it says: employees of Goldman Sachs (and a few other banks) bought thousands of sub-prime loans, packaged them together, sold the packages to various investment groups, and then bet on their failure. (That's worth re-reading again as a one sentence summary of what's wrong with American capitalist culture.)
Within the article, one finds this quote:
He was an older man, bald, pink-faced, probably in his late fifties, wearing an Amsterdam t-shirt with a marijuana leaf on it. He let us know that he'd served in the Army and had no interest in the opinions of anyone who hadn't.
Just before going to the bar, I'd read this.
I suggest following the link, but I'll quickly summarize what it says: employees of Goldman Sachs (and a few other banks) bought thousands of sub-prime loans, packaged them together, sold the packages to various investment groups, and then bet on their failure. (That's worth re-reading again as a one sentence summary of what's wrong with American capitalist culture.)
Within the article, one finds this quote:
“The simultaneous selling of securities to customers and shorting them because they believed they were going to default is the most cynical use of credit information that I have ever seen,” said Sylvain R. Raynes, an expert in structured finance at R & R Consulting in New York. “When you buy protection against an event that you have a hand in causing, you are buying fire insurance on someone else’s house and then committing arson.”
The article suggests that in effect every home in the country was lit on fire by these arsons—every home, in any case, which lost value when the global financial system locked up because of their bets.
But in the United States we've always admired the ingenuity of criminals. So we do not blame them for stealing our money. Instead, we blame the man born into abject poverty who ventures thousands of miles from home in order to eat. And who succeeds in eating by getting on his bicycle at five in the morning and riding to work, where he grows, harvests, and prepares our food.
Tuesday, December 22, 2009
The Most Depressed Place in America
According to Mental Health America, which claims to be "the country’s leading nonprofit dedicated to helping ALL people live mentally healthier lives," the most depressed state in America is . . . Utah.
Living in Utah—I lived there for many years—one feels an extraordinary, almost surreal pressure to be good.
This pressure leads, I think, to profound unhappiness, in part because we're not made happy by being good.
We especially aren't made happy by being good as it's defined in Utah, where being good means being obedient. Consequently, in Utah culture, being good means ceasing to exist as an individual.
We learn very quickly—as toddlers, really—that the way we articulate our personality is through disobedience. Living begins when obedience ends. Happiness, curiously, begins with disobedience, too—that's been the great (happy) surprise of my adult life.
But in Utah, individuality—personality—is a mark of perversion. It's viewed with suspicion. It represents a kind of egomaniacal impulse to distinguish oneself, Eve-like, from God.
Anyway, here's the chart:
Living in Utah—I lived there for many years—one feels an extraordinary, almost surreal pressure to be good.
This pressure leads, I think, to profound unhappiness, in part because we're not made happy by being good.
We especially aren't made happy by being good as it's defined in Utah, where being good means being obedient. Consequently, in Utah culture, being good means ceasing to exist as an individual.
We learn very quickly—as toddlers, really—that the way we articulate our personality is through disobedience. Living begins when obedience ends. Happiness, curiously, begins with disobedience, too—that's been the great (happy) surprise of my adult life.
But in Utah, individuality—personality—is a mark of perversion. It's viewed with suspicion. It represents a kind of egomaniacal impulse to distinguish oneself, Eve-like, from God.
Anyway, here's the chart:
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Eric, Trendsetting Again
I am now an iPhoner.
An iPhonist? An iPhonee? An iPhonian? An iPhonabee? An iPhoneator? An iPhony?
Yes, that. An iPhony.
An iPhonist? An iPhonee? An iPhonian? An iPhonabee? An iPhoneator? An iPhony?
Yes, that. An iPhony.
The Happiest Place on Earth
Having spent two years in Costa Rica, I'm not surprised to read this.
It's a hell of a country and remembers things that Americans have forgotten, or never learned.
Costa Rica provides universal health care, free education, has no standing army, and has committed itself to some of the strictest environmental laws in the world.
I complained while I lived there that in comparison to the United States or Argentina and Chile, little Costa Rica lacked culture. I said, "Nothing is happening here." But that wasn't true. Costa Rica had developed its own culture, and a great deal was happening. And the people were living well and remained close to the essential pleasures of life.
New York City or Buenos Aires represents a narrow and frankly strange genre of culture. There's a time for that genre in a person's life, certainly. But there are other vital ways of living—ways that might be more important to human health and delight over time than what we find in Manhattan or Palermo.
It's a hell of a country and remembers things that Americans have forgotten, or never learned.
Costa Rica provides universal health care, free education, has no standing army, and has committed itself to some of the strictest environmental laws in the world.
I complained while I lived there that in comparison to the United States or Argentina and Chile, little Costa Rica lacked culture. I said, "Nothing is happening here." But that wasn't true. Costa Rica had developed its own culture, and a great deal was happening. And the people were living well and remained close to the essential pleasures of life.
New York City or Buenos Aires represents a narrow and frankly strange genre of culture. There's a time for that genre in a person's life, certainly. But there are other vital ways of living—ways that might be more important to human health and delight over time than what we find in Manhattan or Palermo.
Friday, December 18, 2009
The Discovery of the Year
Javier Marías is the most exciting author I've encountered since learning of Roberto Bolaño three years ago.
Of course I learned of Marías from Bolaño.
Reading Marías, I can hear his influence on Bolaño—particularly on Bolaño's pacing and dazzling effusiveness.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/dec/15/javier-marias-your-face-tomorrow
Of course I learned of Marías from Bolaño.
Reading Marías, I can hear his influence on Bolaño—particularly on Bolaño's pacing and dazzling effusiveness.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/video/2009/dec/15/javier-marias-your-face-tomorrow
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call — New Orleans
Our civilization doesn’t have adequate images, and I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it does not develop an adequate language or adequate images. . . . That’s what I’m working on: a new grammar of images. — Werner Herzog, Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe
Is there a quality in art—in an artist—more important than delightedness?
Bad Lieutenant, the new film by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is delighted by the world. Unlike most films, it doesn't take delight in the world's demise but in its ongoing, omnivorous—Herzog might use the word "obscene"—beauty.
I suspect most great art, especially visual art, is born of delight: the fertile pleasure the artist, for reasons he or she often can't explain, takes in an image. With an image, the play begins.
The artist intuits that art's language of images forestalls our doom, as only art can, and yearns to speak of our ongoingness.
Herzog exuded this Shakespearean delight in images when I saw him at the University of Utah in—when? 1999? I hadn't heard of him and went with some friends to a lecture he was giving on campus.
Bad Lieutenant, the new film by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, is delighted by the world. Unlike most films, it doesn't take delight in the world's demise but in its ongoing, omnivorous—Herzog might use the word "obscene"—beauty.
I suspect most great art, especially visual art, is born of delight: the fertile pleasure the artist, for reasons he or she often can't explain, takes in an image. With an image, the play begins.
The artist intuits that art's language of images forestalls our doom, as only art can, and yearns to speak of our ongoingness.
Herzog exuded this Shakespearean delight in images when I saw him at the University of Utah in—when? 1999? I hadn't heard of him and went with some friends to a lecture he was giving on campus.
During the lecture, he projected onto a screen behind him the image of a premature infant, just born, grasping the fingers of a doctor and being lifted up, naked, to hang, swinging, from the doctor's fingers. Seeing this image I gasped with just about everyone else in the audience, and wasn't alone, I think, to find myself abruptly in tears.
The great moments in Bad Lieutenant—and there are many of them—arise from the world in the same fashion, naked infants swinging above the void. The plot stops, or at least slows (from its otherwise hurtling pace), and Herzog gives us: a water moccasin gliding through filthy post-Katrina flood waters into a prison cell that holds a drowning inmate; an alligator crushed on a Louisiana highway, its back leg twitching, and beyond it an overturned SUV; two iguanas on a coffee table beside surveilling city cops (the movie comes to a stop to allow the the camera to linger delightedly about the iguanas' heads, probing them, child-like); Nicolas Cage (brilliant again) hunched against the wall behind a rest-home door, working over his neck, his face with an electric shaver; the corpse of a mafia hit-man, and behind the corpse, the hit-man's soul, breakdancing.
During the film's most moving scene, Cage's character, Terence McDonagh, takes his lover to a shed behind his childhood home and describes to her the hours he spent there as a little boy, imagining. After talking, he stands behind her and they look out into the light, as if looking back on their innocence.
Their gazes are themselves a kind of innocence: the innocent delight of the once-upon-a-time artist, imagining.
Imagining: by which we mean: creating images.
During the film's most moving scene, Cage's character, Terence McDonagh, takes his lover to a shed behind his childhood home and describes to her the hours he spent there as a little boy, imagining. After talking, he stands behind her and they look out into the light, as if looking back on their innocence.
Their gazes are themselves a kind of innocence: the innocent delight of the once-upon-a-time artist, imagining.
Imagining: by which we mean: creating images.
This is an exuberant, brilliant movie, simultaneously joyous and grim. Herzog manages that seemingly impossible simultaneity better than anyone. I find most films—especially violent films—insulting, deadening, joyless. Bad Lieutenant takes delight in the brutal strangeness of the world and communicates that delight in a language of images that's adequate to our time and enthralled by the beauty of our haplessness. It is the best movie I've seen this year.
Tuesday, December 15, 2009
Tolstoy in the Kitchen
On the refrigerator there's a photograph of Tolstoy taken a few years, I guess, before his death. I don’t like the look of him. Cheerless. Prophetic. Actually: insane. Physically, psychologically unkempt, and self-certain. Although he does look generous, and unhappy to be sitting for a photograph, which might be sign enough of sanity. Very Russian—his presentation is more culturally determined than I'd expect. And he looks like he’s dying, which I find repulsive.
At the time of the photograph his great work is finished, although he'll still give us Hadji Murad, one of my favorite books—a splendid tale that begins as well as Absalom, Absalom, One Hundred Years of Solitude, even The Trial. “I was returning home by the fields.”
Now I set alongside the aged Tolstoy the cover of my Modern Library edition of War and Peace, which gives us a photograph of Tolstoy in his thirties, on the cusp of greatness.
I don't know why, but the young Tolstoy allows me to see the aged Tolstoy anew. He no longer looks ravaged but merely frail; he seems kind, even majestic, tired, yes, but no less intelligent than he was as a young man, and more plainly spiritual.
Now I set alongside the aged Tolstoy the cover of my Modern Library edition of War and Peace, which gives us a photograph of Tolstoy in his thirties, on the cusp of greatness.
I don't know why, but the young Tolstoy allows me to see the aged Tolstoy anew. He no longer looks ravaged but merely frail; he seems kind, even majestic, tired, yes, but no less intelligent than he was as a young man, and more plainly spiritual.
The young man is in that dying organism.
Because I've been reading War and Peace again (the relatively new, superb Pevear/Volokhonsky translation), it's hard to look at him as he neared the end of his life. I’m frightened of his—our—mortality and by the way his face acknowledges, even foretells his approaching death. It's an honest, doomed face.
Reading Tolstoy ruins my self-esteem.
Reading Tolstoy ruins my self-esteem.
Thursday, December 10, 2009
The Americans, by Robert Frank
Robert Frank's photographs are sometimes affectionately, sometimes bitterly witty. They are austere, lyrical, and post-romantic.
This last quality distinguishes his work from that of his greatest American predecessors (Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Man Ray), and from Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, his contemporaries and kindred spirits.
By spurning romanticism, Frank's art denies us romanticism's consolations. That denial is at the heart of his art's power. Frank's photographs, particularly in The Americans, add beauty to the world without reinforcing or adding to our fantasies of happiness.
While his art isn't itself romantic, he shows us that Americans, like all religious people, are fiercely romantic; and our romanticism—or, specifically, the peculiar manner by which we articulate it—is what he believes merits attention.
Here we arrive at the source of Frank's genius: his refusal to frame Americans romantically has the ironic effect of emphasizing our intensely romantic disposition.
Even at our most downtrodden, our most lonely, there's flair; there's extravagance. (Note, most obviously, the belt buckle. There would be no photograph without it. Beyond that: the tightness of the clothing, the intricate stitching of the boots, the elegant inward under-statedness of the man's stance, the floral curves of the hat, etc.) Our extravagance is embattled, apologetic; the subtle means by which we decorate our world and ourselves gives us a complex splendor and rescues us from pity and from self-pity. (We do not—or did not—have time for self-pity.)
Frank finds beauty where we least expect it: among our most bewildered and despised, among the old and broken, in failure, in what we forget, in inconsequence, and not—during the triumphant American century—in our triumphs.
We've received no greater gift from any photographer.
This slideshow, with its accompanying commentary, offers a wonderful introduction to this astonishing artist:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/298876613/slide-show-dominique-nabokov-on-robert-frank
This last quality distinguishes his work from that of his greatest American predecessors (Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams, and Man Ray), and from Walker Evans and Cartier-Bresson, his contemporaries and kindred spirits.
By spurning romanticism, Frank's art denies us romanticism's consolations. That denial is at the heart of his art's power. Frank's photographs, particularly in The Americans, add beauty to the world without reinforcing or adding to our fantasies of happiness.
While his art isn't itself romantic, he shows us that Americans, like all religious people, are fiercely romantic; and our romanticism—or, specifically, the peculiar manner by which we articulate it—is what he believes merits attention.
Here we arrive at the source of Frank's genius: his refusal to frame Americans romantically has the ironic effect of emphasizing our intensely romantic disposition.
Even at our most downtrodden, our most lonely, there's flair; there's extravagance. (Note, most obviously, the belt buckle. There would be no photograph without it. Beyond that: the tightness of the clothing, the intricate stitching of the boots, the elegant inward under-statedness of the man's stance, the floral curves of the hat, etc.) Our extravagance is embattled, apologetic; the subtle means by which we decorate our world and ourselves gives us a complex splendor and rescues us from pity and from self-pity. (We do not—or did not—have time for self-pity.)
Frank finds beauty where we least expect it: among our most bewildered and despised, among the old and broken, in failure, in what we forget, in inconsequence, and not—during the triumphant American century—in our triumphs.
We've received no greater gift from any photographer.
This slideshow, with its accompanying commentary, offers a wonderful introduction to this astonishing artist:
http://blogs.nybooks.com/post/298876613/slide-show-dominique-nabokov-on-robert-frank
Avril Lavigne
Spring 2003. A warm morning in Costa Rica—I'm teaching at the European School in Heredia, 7th graders, and Marilia Campos is sitting on the counter by the window, listening to her CD player. Her classmates are arriving for the day. Marilia, shouting over the music in her ears, says: "Mr. Eric, do you like Avril Lavigne?"
"I don't think I do, Marilia," I say. I'm shuffling my books.
She waves me over. "Listen to this. She's so good."
I sit next to her on the counter and she gives me one of her earbuds. We sit for a while and listen, the earbuds' wires hanging between us.
The song is "I'm with You." It goes along nicely. Normally.
I glance at Marilia. Listening to the song, I can see that she feels like she's being spoken to honestly. And I can understand why. Sometimes honesty is cliché. The song is just what a boy wants to hear, too.
If the rising cry at 2:49 is not the essence—the raison d'etre—of the pop ballad, I don't know what is.
"I don't think I do, Marilia," I say. I'm shuffling my books.
She waves me over. "Listen to this. She's so good."
I sit next to her on the counter and she gives me one of her earbuds. We sit for a while and listen, the earbuds' wires hanging between us.
The song is "I'm with You." It goes along nicely. Normally.
I glance at Marilia. Listening to the song, I can see that she feels like she's being spoken to honestly. And I can understand why. Sometimes honesty is cliché. The song is just what a boy wants to hear, too.
If the rising cry at 2:49 is not the essence—the raison d'etre—of the pop ballad, I don't know what is.
An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter, by César Aira
Approving words by Roberto Bolaño led me to this strange, elegant writer. I was further encouraged by the fact that he's translated by Chris Andrews—there's no better translator bringing texts from Spanish into English—and when I saw that he's published by New Directions.
Aira continues Borges, which is, I suppose, inevitable, coming as he does from Coronel Pringles, a little town in la provincia de Buenos Aires. (I passed through it by bus, long ago.) In a brief preface, Bolaño also suggests the influence of Witold Gombrowicz, the enfant terrible of Polish/Argentinean literature. I don't hear Gombrowicz, frankly—but I don't hear much that Bolaño hears, and that's no fault of Bolaño's.
I do hear Dostoyevsky.
If a bastard child of Dostoyevsky and Borges doesn't trigger your interest, then you can't be helped.
Consider, for instance, this line—a brilliant summary of the dilemma of the artist in the modern age:
Aira continues Borges, which is, I suppose, inevitable, coming as he does from Coronel Pringles, a little town in la provincia de Buenos Aires. (I passed through it by bus, long ago.) In a brief preface, Bolaño also suggests the influence of Witold Gombrowicz, the enfant terrible of Polish/Argentinean literature. I don't hear Gombrowicz, frankly—but I don't hear much that Bolaño hears, and that's no fault of Bolaño's.
I do hear Dostoyevsky.
If a bastard child of Dostoyevsky and Borges doesn't trigger your interest, then you can't be helped.
Consider, for instance, this line—a brilliant summary of the dilemma of the artist in the modern age:
The variations revolved around a curious impossibility: how could he communicate the proposition “I am a monster”?The influences one hears are to Aira's credit. Bolaño claims Aira is "one of the three or four best writers working in Spanish today." After reading this little book, I don't doubt it.
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