tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-137763622024-03-13T18:15:36.928-04:00The New York Minutereviewing the world at large since 1987.Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.comBlogger86125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-37309743054065787032008-10-17T13:35:00.001-04:002008-10-17T13:36:36.545-04:00Anew<i></i>I'm living in Spain & posting daily to my new blog, <a href="http://jimsligh.wordpress.com/">This Analog Life</a>. My internet presence becomes more & more difficult to make sense out of.<br /><span style="font-size:90;"><br /></span><span style="font-size:90;"></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-59912555818918137402007-11-11T22:35:00.000-05:002007-11-11T22:38:22.418-05:00ReconstructionA blank slate may make this easier. While a new beginning charged with vitality and purpose is prepared, I'm taking this offline for a bit. Soon to reemerge.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:90;"></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-71498494172884904712007-09-03T02:07:00.000-04:002007-09-05T16:07:25.550-04:00The Rime of the Ancient Mariner<i><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Sea Captain of Cortes</span></i><br /><br />There is a broken sea captain on my stoop right now. We're back at 23 Cortes, the brownstones baking into poundcakes in the heat, the Massachusetts Pikeway roaring like the ocean. Off in the distance, the South End shimmers. The Hancock building reflects cloudless.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />The captain is laid out like a rag doll. He has not changed his uniform in ten and a half years. He still wears a white sailors' cap relatives keep washed. He wears Elvis Costello glasses. He chomps cigars. He whistles tunelessly. Occasionally, an only slightly younger woman will come outside and, with the help of a friend, stuff him into a shopping cart and wheel him off into the distance. After a short while, he is wheeled back.<br /><br />General opinion is divided as to why the Sea Captain is the way he is. Some say he was a commercial fisherman in the eighties, that he poached whales, that he had a practice of throwing himself onto the carcasses naked in the middle of the night and rolling in the blubber. This in particular was a mystery - nobody knows why he did it, or why it gave him such evident pleasure to bathe himself in the kill, but it did. There are those who say we shouldn't wonder what happened next, a man goes doing something like that. They might be right.<br /><br />They say a few militant young idealists tried to stop him one day - the poaching, not the nocturnal rolling - and he killed them. With a harpoon gun. <i>PLUNK PLUNK PLUNK</i>, one after the other. Bleeding into their little idealist rubber dinghy. The idealists were overweight and pale. It was unfortunate that the local reporter assigned to cover the story had a morbid sense of humor and none of shame. The headline read: Poaching Ahab Spears Three White Whales.<br /><br />It never saw the light of day, of course. The layout editor near about had a coronary, canned the story, screamed at the reporter for a couple minutes and spent the rest of his life trying to get him fired, which wasn't long, since he got clipped in a seven-car pileup on the PCH five days later.<br /><br />The cub reporter didn't even get fired. He was fresh out of a certain Back Bay journalism school (Go Lions) and had a famous dad, who took it upon himself to take the newspaper's owner - a doughy, unpopular man who sweat profusely and hid surprising naiveté underneath his callous, newspaper-owning exterior - to a glitzy LA restaurant, where they celebrity watched over Boston-imported lobster, and saw - among others - rising star and not-yet-fanatic Mel Gibson. The pleasant afterglow of fame put the owner into a forgiving mood when it came time to consider the cub reporter's future employment; he was shunted aside for form's sake and made a dirt-digging entertainment correspondent with a small army of crack photographers at his disposal, under orders to shoot on sight, which catered to his talent for punchy headlines and his ruthless distaste for phsyical imperfection.<br /><br />And the Sea Captain? Disgraced, imprisoned - by the time he was let out he was a shadow of his former self. He had relatives back east. He tried lobster fishing for a while, but he was doing it with a pole off of a dock in the Boston Harbor, the one in front of the Aquarium. Every once in a while, drunken merchant marines would stumble up to ask him if he'd caught anything. After nine days without food or water, without abandoning his post, he was picked up by the police for loitering. He lost his taste for wandering after that, and for fishing too. Somewhere in his brain lingered a desire to roll in the carcasses of dead whales, but the thought gave him no real pleasure, anymore - just a kind of dry appreciation. Those who hold up this side of things maintain that's what he's thinking about when he smokes his cigars, whistling sea shantys. He loves the Mass Pike, they say, because the sound of the traffic reminds him of surf breaking on a beach.<br /><br />* * *<br /><br />So one school has it. Others say he never saw the ocean in his life, that he both loves and hates the wide expanse of water he cannot bring himself to visit, that the distance terrifies him and excites him, that the great tragedy of his life is that since he was a boy he had dreamed of becoming a sailor, only to be rendered jellyboned and yellow when the time came. Some take it further and say he has never left the stoop at all, that he is paralyzed, either figuratively - Joyce's <span style="font-style: italic;">Dubliners </span>- or actually. Or that like Galileo he has been under house arrest for these longs years and has grown accustomed to it. The Galileans particularly can be found in corners arguing in hushed tones about what got him arrested in the first place - your typical Galilean is a conspiracy nut, and like most conspiracy nuts, the only thing he distrusts more than authority are other nuts like him. There are more Galilean theories than there are Galilean theorists: the Captain is a breakthrough scientist condemned to obscurity by oil corporations, a religious heretic with access to the lost Gospel of James, a Vietnam-era government mind control experiment, a renegade Nazi, a high-ranking Cold War defector.<br /><br />The people who think he has never seen the sea are mostly either Ironists caught up in the fish-out-of-water aspect, or Freudians who smugly point to the phallic seaman hat as compensation for his exile from the great mother-womb of the ocean. The Ironists never fail to point out that the Mariner (as they call him) lives on Cortes, parallel to Columbus and Isabella. Born and raised on a street named after great explorers, weighed down with the examples of history and the illustrations of his childhood storybooks, unable even to approach the fate that mocks him from the streetsigns... - At this point the Ironists chuckle suavely. One of them, wiping tears of mirth from his eyes, draws enough breath to make a smallpox joke.<br /><br />The Mystics don't fail to point out his birthplace either, but keep mirth out of it entirely. They solemnly note the the birthplace is a sign of reincarnation. He <i>is</i> Columbus, they'll say, bowed down by the weight of his sins, by the decimation of an entire race, by the terrible knowledge of his own shortcomings, by the fact that Vespucci got the continent named after himself. There is a sect of Mystic Colerigites who claim to the point of torture that they can see a shadowy seagull around his neck.<br /><br />The bitterest feud, of all the schools and sects that debate the life of the Sea Captain, lies between the Keatsian Fantasists and the Neo-Realists. The Keatsian Fantasists have given up on the idea that we can ever know the Sea Captain's true origins. Reason, they say, cannot give us a satisfactory answer, and so we will while away our time inventing one. They believe that if it is beautiful it may as well be true. They are Keats' teenage daughters, hung up on romance and invention. Their origin myths are deliberately frivolous, and often a little sad. The Captain is an aged leprechaun, his wealth gone, the rainbow sunk beneath the ocean. For centuries he has dived for his shattered pot of gold, sailed the seven seas for his vanished wealth, enslaved entire populations to attempt to reclaim it, marched with Cortes on the Incans on the rumor of gold. Or the Captain is not a sailor at all but a merman, exiled on land for loving a human woman, or perhaps the son of a mermaid and a sailor, brought up on the sea, paralyzed without it, caught on dry land like a gasping fish. He is immortal. He is the <span style="font-style: italic;">only </span>immortal. He is (pick one) Jesus Christ; Cain, son of Abel; William Shakespeare; Mark Twain; Karl Marx; Johaan Gutenberg; Leonardo daVinci; Homer, as it was in Borges' <span style="font-style: italic;">The Aleph</span>. He is a famine-stricken Santa Claus set to sea by commercialization. He is the Ghost of Christmas Past. He is one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, satisfied for the last ten hundred years that humanity can slaughter itself without assistance, waiting patiently for the end of it all.<br /><br />The Neo-Realists, dour young Turks that they are, wish to end all of this pointless theorizing. The truth of the matter is, they say over the din, voices still cracking occasionally, is that the Captain is a sad old man. He wears a thrift store uniform and a hat because he's crazy. He sits outside because he's put there, like a potted plant. He smokes because he's addicted. At this point, the Joyceans try to add an epiphany, but the Neo-Realists usually shout them down. The truth is, they say louder, we call him the Sea Captain because he wears that silly hat and for no other reason. The truth is, life is an awful mess and we don't know why things are where they are.<br /><br />In the corner, the Cynics - and there are always one or two of them - the Cynics smoke cigars and smile mordantly.<br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-39008435665164532382007-09-03T01:36:00.000-04:002007-09-05T16:07:47.551-04:00Little Bears & the Memory of War<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Notes from Madrid</span></em><em></em><br /><br />Madrid is built along the same triumphal lines as all capitals by fiat - St. Petersburg; Washington, D.C. There are palaces, Bourbon and Habsburg, royal gardens, wide boulevards suited for processions and troop movements.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />The melancholy and fanatic Philip II came to it in the middle of the sixteenth century and found a small provincial town alone amidst the endless arid plain and the wind. He declared his reign from there, in that place, whose only virtue was its location - at the center of a stubborn and fractured peninsula. For years the only business of Madrid was the Court.<br /><br />In January, when I was there, the Jardines Botánicas - a walled garden next to the Prado - lie shrouded in a ghostly white haze pierced by sunlight and made luminous. The trees are leafless and mournful. The hedges and the cyprus still bloom green, amidst the dry branches and the old stone and the careful rows where little grows. Its beauty is still evident but it is subdued, autumnal, as something in long decline. Dry leaves cluster the hardbeaten dirt paths. Benches sit empty.<br /><br />Nearby is the Reína Sofia, the contemporary art museum whose fame rests in the huge tormented howl that is Picasso's <em>Guérnica</em>. In a long hall devoted to the deconstruction of the immortal painting is Dora Maar's series of photographs of the painting's creation in stages - the thing that strikes you is its revision. At the very center, leaping up from the middle of the canvas, an arm thrusts a torch aloft. A bull in the corner gazes placidly. But Picasso continues, filling in - details are changed, places painted over. Slowly the bull's face contorts, twists. The arm is broken and then - suddenly - it is removed entirely. The torch - that organic, classical sign of hope and knowledge - is erased and replaced by a bare electric lightbulb. The bull has dropped its mouth down: it is screaming.<br /><br /><em>Guérnica</em> commemorates the first time flights of mechanized bombers began in a systemic way to target civilian populations. Late in the April afternoon, on market day, in 1937, the Basque town was razed to the ground by German and Italian planes under Nationalist command. Incendiaries and explosive shrapnel were used; escort planes strafed the fleeing survivors. The men and boys were at the front; of the ten thousand old men, women, and children in the town, a third were killed and more mutilated.<br /><br />Down the hall, past the compositions, there is a room with pictures from the Civil War. Whole streets are rubble. I recognize the corner my hotel is on; it is cratered. A child stumbles into the frame.<br /><br />I read, recently, Martha Gellhorn's moving wartime dispatch from Barcelona in 1938 - "The Third Winter." By this time the bombings have become matter-of-fact:<br /><br /><blockquote><p>"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours."</p></blockquote><br />All is perverted by war; nothing is left untouched. Fine evenings are transformed into something ominous.<br /><br />I bring up Barcelona, in Catalónia, where even the language is different - Spanish, like Italian, is not the language of a nation, just its most powerful province - only because Gellhorn, in the essay, visits a children's hospital. All of the children in the wards are injured, not sick - they are war-wounded, have shrapnel worked through their skin, lead wrapped around their bones, head injuries. Waiting in line for rations, they can distinguish between the sounds of the explosions; they know when the bombs are falling close by. They scatter and take cover in doorways like veterans. There is a ward, a separate wing - she is asked if she wants to go, she wants to say 'no' but can't quite - where the tubercular cases are kept.<br /><br />The family she visits with that frames these observations has a dying child, a baby. Near the end they promise her that when the war is over, when the Republic has come out of it, they will all meet again.<br /><br />Of course, they don't meet again, and the Fascists win, and even after the end of the War on Fascism, it is thirty years before Franco concedes Spain. I write all this because my friend, who lived in Salamanca for some time and who made me promise to see the <em>Guérnica</em>, said to look too for the old women in Madrid in winter. The locals call them <em>ositos</em> - little bears. They have one heavy fur coat that they treasure in their closets and take out when the season commences to wear about every day.<br /><br />And they are dwarfed by their coats, towered over by their grandchildren. They are toylike. Anybody in Madrid over a certain age, who was a child during the War - the children in Gellhorn's essay - grew up starving, sick, rationed, injured. It affected their growth, stunted it, the men and the women both, so that when you walk down a street in the museum district of Madrid, that capital by fiat, when you walk outside of the Prado and its Goyas, you can see the imprint of civil war on the streets themselves, see it in the people - a living reminder, like the places in trees where the width of a ring speaks fire.</span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-34367802826464019562007-09-02T13:32:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:31:22.914-04:00Recycle, Reuse, Restart.<span style="font-style: italic;">1 September.</span><br /><br />Today the city of Boston swells by two hundred and fifty thousand. Cobblestones and gas lamps and chowder halls strain under the weight. The impact sends the Charles sloshing. Harvard spats are splattered at the boathouse. Waves roll in on a breezeless day at the end of summer. It's warm out, but there's something crisp and cold lurking in the shade. A few of the leaves - just a few, bashfully - have already curled and turned.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />And two hundred and fifty thousand college students sling cumbersome pieces of luggage and brown cardboard boxes and leather satchels and scuffed black shoulder bags that sport vintage indie button pins and denim backpacks and giant sturdy plastic bins with self sealing lids and totes and shoeboxes and garbage bags full of clothing and a laundry basket with a stereo balanced inside it and garment bags and duffels and carryons and rented moving trucks full of secondhand dented furniture and floral couches into dorm singles, doubles, triples, quads, clusters, suites, on-campus apartments, off-campus apartments, Allston houses, Beacon Hill <i>ancien regime</i> closets, Cambridge lofts, and Symphony stop brownstones.<br /><br />U-Hauls and battered trucks and compacts stuffed to the gills double- and triple-park in little side streets, Allston & Brighton a congested mass of car exhaust, sweat, and new tenants cursing over the color the walls have been painted. Lines of mattress-strapped cars knot every major artery in the city, wind across the river into Cambridge, chokes the North End and the South, fills the tangle of streets to the brim. It looks like an evacuation and a home-coming. Everything a man needs to live is out on the curb - kitchen chairs, battered dressers, rotting couches, glassware, stereo speakers, ceiling fans, floor-length mirrors, gilt-framed photographs of Paris, one leather high heel, an empty keg of Coors Lite, a three-year supply of coriander and other exotic spices, umbrellas, portraits of the moon, bonzai trees, a red rubber ball.<br /><br />The city bursts at the seams. Real Boston drowns itself in its pint glass and sighs. The New Year begins.<br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-61434871181639586372007-09-02T13:30:00.000-04:002007-09-02T13:31:57.878-04:00Commonwealth Ave.<span style="font-family:times new roman;"><i><span style="font-size:130%;">3:56 p.m.</span></i><br /></span><br />Down the boulevard-green center strip of Comm Ave, underneath tall leafy trees and a gathering thunderstorm, lovers are sitting on marble stoops below statues of Hope and Victory. A little girl pushing her sister in a stroller is trying to touch William Lloyd Garrison's big bronzed feet.<br /><br /><span style="font-size:90;"></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-33598931987140197882007-08-30T23:10:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:31:49.172-04:00Playlist<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Five Songs for the End of Summer</span></em><br /><br />Wet heat. A ceiling fan casts revolving shadows against white paint. Bare bulbs light your former home like a laboratory; there is the distant sound of breaking glass. August is a month in suspension, broken promises. You haven't done the things you'd planned; you are surrounded now by half-packed boxes, trash bags, collapsible shelves. You have excavated your drawers, your hidden places, wordlessly crumpled up little pieces of nostalgia, put those too big to crumple on the curb. You have torn yourself from sentiment, from many things. The summer is irrecoverable, already fading in memory, like aging film. It is time, you decide, for a fresh start. Everything you abandon you do from fear; you want to get rid of the smell of failure, to walk away without turning back. It is warm, and dark, there is the heavy smell of rotting flowers. You hope many things for the fall.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">1. "Summertime," <span style="font-style: italic;">Porgy & Bess</span>. Ella Fitzgerald & Luis Armstrong.<br /></span>Lazy swingtime, too hot to move, and Louis playing, brassy and inimitable. Ella Fitzgerald is the sweetest thing singing. But as her voice seduces, you forget it's a lie, that while <span style="font-style: italic;">Your daddy's rich, and your momma's good-looking</span>, it's summer that makes it so - that golden sheen. In the sunlight you can forget almost anything, you can even stop the baby fussing, but there's trouble down the road, and stormy weather still to come. In the last days of August, the strings sour melancholy, the cotton swings low, and 'Summertime,' that sweet little lullaby, suddenly sings of days past.<br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">2. <span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>"Holland," <span style="font-style: italic;">Michigan. </span>Sufjan Stevens.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span>Hushed, fractured lines sung in a whisper over a few piano notes that begin and begin again, haltingly, callused fingers rasping on the frets of the acoustic guitar. The few lines hang, widely separated, just a bare handful of images, a few surviving photographs. <span style="font-style: italic;">Lose our clothes in summertime</span>, he sings, wistfully. <span style="font-style: italic;">Lose ourselves, to lose our minds. <span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>He trails off. <span style="font-style: italic;">In the summer heat, I might.<br /><br /></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;">3. "Dinu Lipatti's Bones," <span style="font-style: italic;">The Sunset Tree</span>. The Mountain Goats.<br /></span></span>John Darnielle is chilly and desperate here, on the first of his dozens of LPs and compilations and scratchy cassette-only releases to turn autobiographical. The images are oblique, and guarded, and they forever slide into violence, into the suggestion of loss. <span style="font-style: italic;">We kept our friends at bay all summer long; treated the days as though they'd kill us if they could.</span> The low piano sounds like distant thunder. It is a cold song, suspended, crystalline; the music itself pushes summer away. <span style="font-style: italic;">Wringing out the hours like blood-drenched bedsheets to keep wintertime at bay - but December showed up anyway</span>, he sings, shattered and jittery, waiting for the new day.<span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br /><br />4. "A Summer Wasting," <span style="font-style: italic;">The Boy With the Arab Strap</span>. Belle & Sebastian.<br /><span style="font-weight: bold;"></span></span></span><span><span>Stuart Murdoch's lilting vocals bubble along without care over a bouncy piano line, little throwaway pop harmonies. Here, time's passing - <span style="font-style: italic;">summer in winter, winter in springtime </span>- is nothing to fear, and melody bears him out. <span style="font-style: italic;">I spent the summer wasting / The time was passed so easily. </span>But nothing's wasted, - <span style="font-style: italic;">If the summer's wasted, how could the time feel so free? - </span>and the only melancholy lies in Murdoch's wistful vocals, which would lend anything an air of faint regret.<br /></span></span><span style="font-weight: bold;"><span style="font-weight: bold;"><br />5. "Sleep All Summer," <span style="font-style: italic;">Dignity and Shame</span>. Crooked Fingers.<br /></span></span><span><span>The sad summer songs all come back to nighttime, hot air, pauses, dreams. Croaking, a man wishes over a lovely little guitar line that the setting sun would crash into the ocean and cut the line that ties the tide and the moon, and a woman coos in return that they take empty hearts and fill them with broken things. Over a classic lover's ballad, the two trade apocalyptic declarations of lost romance, trade blows too, and fatalistic lines about curtains falling, fashions fading, <span style="font-style: italic;">an endless summer over</span>. Together, as in loves songs, for their big duet at the chorus, they sing in major key: <span style="font-style: italic;">Cold ways kill cool lovers, strange ways we use each other</span>, and ask each other over and over, <span style="font-style: italic;">Why won't you fall back in love with me? - </span>as if trying to reverse the tides, to sleep until the year passes - to reach backwards and recover what's been lost, or left on a curb in Boston with a thousand thousand other discards, molding, wrecked, valuable, keepsakes too large to carry along, gifts you never wanted, things you can afford to leave behind.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-weight: bold;">Other playlists:</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span><a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2006/07/playlist.html">Eight Anti-Government Songs to Play in a Senate Office Building</a></span><br /></span></span></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-9456453933928568032007-08-27T19:19:00.000-04:002007-08-27T19:44:13.239-04:00Briefly, FandomIndulge me. I've revealed here in asides my abiding affection for <span style="font-style: italic;">Firefly</span>, the only serial Western-in-space by Joss Whedon that features actual cattle herding, Chinese cursing, and a brain-damaged young woman as botched government superweapon. Turns out somebody's made some very attractive<a href="http://www.quantummechanix.com/Blue%20Sun%20Travel%20Posters.html"> Blue Sun travel posters</a>; since Blue Sun is an all-encompassing government contractor with dirty hands, they feature a nasty Orwellian edge. <span style="font-style: italic;">LONDINIUM</span>, reads one in big Metropolis capitols, over a dark, fractured urban mess: <span style="font-style: italic;">The past, present, and future of humanity. </span>And, in two in-jokes that I can't possibly explain concisely (and, as Polonius advises...), we are invited to <span style="font-style: italic;">Historic Serenity Valley National Park</span> - the 'birthplace of unity' - and, in a particularly cruel twist, 'tranquil Miranda.'<br /><br />Oh, hell. Just watch the show.Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-63433816004740355502007-08-26T13:36:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:32:25.417-04:00On Digital Machines & the Structures of Everyday LifeI have been wilting these months under the onslaught of magical anticipation for the iPhone, a machine whose workings are so delicately concealed that it is meant to become an extension of one's body; thinking too, as I read Fernand Braudel's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Structures of Everyday Life</span>, of the 'long journey backwards' (as he writes) 'from the facilities and habits of present-day life,' though I'll save the detailed gloss on Braudel later, the observation that the past is a foreign country being an insufficient commonplace.<br /><br />It was in this state of mind, then, that I came across this passage, from Roberto Calasso's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Ruin of Kasch </span>- a work that takes up (as Italo Calvino puts so well) 'two subjects: the first is [Charles-Maurice de] Talleyrand [-Perigord], and the second is everything else':<br /><span class="fullpost"><blockquote>In 1956, when John Von Neumann used his Silliman Lectures to give a quick summary of recent and ongoing developments in machines that could calculate on their own, and when he began by distinguishing between digital computers and analogue computers, he gave new names to the two poles that secretly sustain us. The digital pole seems biologically secondary and dependent, for exchange always seems secondary to the object being exchanged. But then the digital pole takes command, revealing its ability to envelop the other pole, to absorb it - and, naturally, to exploit it. The digital pole confers great power, but it does not contain, within the machine, the physical reality of the varying values, which is a last palpable memory of the outside world. Digitality is pure sequence of signs: when its dominion is extended to everything, we no longer know what earth sustains us - or even if there still is an earth. We continue to experience the analogue pole, but we no longer know what to call it: it is mute emotion, which overwhelms and no longer flows into its old estuary. Digitality has given it a new bed made of indestructible silicon. Over it flows a silent stream, awaiting the Bateau Ivre.</blockquote>To this I'll add a few simple thoughts: Stripped of 'the physical reality of the varying values' - the lever, the spooled film, the hand crank - the machine contains nothing but signs, the semiotic artificialities that create our world in opposition to nature. But if that dominion is 'extended to everything'? Calasso writes later, 'Within Chinese society, within all societies, the park of the Son of Heaven once epitomized all nature in miniature. Now all nature is our park, and we do not know what it epitomizes.' And in "Endgame: Meditations on a diminishing world," Edward Hoagland writes of the 'fizz of electronics facilitating interior monolgues we carry on together in a solipsism so complete it appears to eclipse the whole out-of-doors.'<br /><br />The workings of the digital machine become incomprehensible, but not mysterious - they do not invite exploration. The convenience obscures the process and worse, breeds indifference to it. Meat is slaughtered, preshaped & deboned, reconstituted, vacuum-sealed, flown & shipped until it arrives an idle choice, one among many. Freeways carry us up and over poverty into downtown; blindness another choice made easier by diversions. A button - soon just a liquid shape on a screen - is pressed, and what we desire, happens.<br /><br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-84842382799716475322007-07-04T12:45:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:32:56.689-04:00July 3rd, Night<div style="text-align: left;"><blockquote>"The Second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. [...] It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shrews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."<br /><br />- John Adams, letter to his wife Abigail, 3 July 1776.</blockquote></div><span class="fullpost"><div style="text-align: center;">I.<br /></div><br />Boston swelters in the heat and sweats liquor. Everyone on the street is drunk. The street littered with grease-stained pizza plates. I'm fortified with two glasses of bourbon on ice and walking down Tremont, hard and angry and feeling very clear about things. An Eastern European man, bullet head, nervous glances, hears the firecrackers and goes for the gun in his pants. He's been holding it under his shirt for the entire block like a rosary. A guy across the street throws a punch. Somebody's set off a box of fireworks in the intersection. They shoot off forty or fifty feet into the air, popping; cars swerve to avoid the burning box in the street. The explosions are reflected in the glass & steel buildings around them, a simulacra of fire.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Catholics around the 19th century iron fountain in the Common have put up fervent hand-painted signs: <span style="font-style: italic;">JESUS IS THE ONLY TRUE WAY TO GOD. </span>A living statue, painted bone white, covered in tin foil and newspaper, stands on the fountain over a blown-out television set. Chinese atrocities against the Falun Gong are displayed by activists on yellowed posterboard, years-old pictures, the same as last summer, kept up lovingly, like heirlooms: stress positions, prisoners tied in front of barking dogs, bruises displayed. A man shot in the head. On one of the bricks in a flower planter, in small, carefully rounded letters, someone has written <span style="font-style: italic;">fuck the u.s. govt</span> in yellow ink.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">III.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Adams would have known, before he died: history is a moving target, and none of us know what will be commemorated in time.<br /></div></div></div></div><br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-91180019824619419512007-06-28T19:37:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:34:50.469-04:00Sufjan Stevens' "Chicago"<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Revisitation, rememory: a feedback loop.<br /></span></em><br />Sufjan Stevens grew up in the far north of the Lower Peninsula; he went to school in the lonely arts academy Interlochen, its cabins amidst pine forest, and to the college in my hometown, <span style="font-style: italic;">sleeping on Lake Michigan / factories and marching bands</span> - memorialized in 3:26 on <span style="font-style: italic;">Michigan</span>. The college station played it the last time I was home, driving through the old Victorian downtown with my sister, listening over the car radio to the overcast piano, melancholy and quiet.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />I listened to "Chicago" looped again, today - the three versions off of <span style="font-style: italic;">Avalanche</span> (the collection of outtakes and extras from <span style="font-style: italic;">Illinois. </span>48 other states have been promised, but are not expected) and I'm trying now to write around the unwritable feeling of recognition, of complicity, I get listening to Sufjan Stevens at all, to talk about the song itself for a moment. <br /><br />"Chicago" lends itself to repetition, to revisitation. No wonder Sufjan Stevens recorded so many variations - "Acoustic"; "Adult Contemporary Easy Listening"; "Multiple Personality Disorder". Listen to all of them and each return, each version, does not detract. They pile on one another, cumulative.<br /><br />You hear for the first time: <span style="font-style: italic;">I fell in love again / all things go, all things go / drove to Chicago / all things known, all things known. <span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span></span>The song repeats itself internally, its refrains suffused with nostalgia: <span style="font-style: italic;">All things go, all things go. </span>The complicity - I grew up where he did, I left as well. <span style="font-style: italic;">I've made a lot of mistakes, I've made a lot of mistakes / I've made a lot of mistakes, I've made a lot of mistakes. </span>The song is a memory that resurfaces, a late-night kind of song, a song that by the end, whatever the version, becomes wordless - a trumpet repeating the theme, halfway triumphant.<br /><br />And then, twice: <span style="font-style: italic;">I fell in love<span style="font-style: italic;">, </span></span>again - but already in the past tense, another one already gone.<br /><br />Three times: the "Multiple Personality Disorder Version," all buzzing synth and handclaps, and you're guilelessly optimistic, punch-drunk: <span style="font-style: italic;">I fell in love, again</span>, - but we all know how this ends.<br /><br />Somehow, though, you keep listening, you go through it all one more time, you recreate the song again, you cue that trumpet and multitracked voices, an implacable chorus that sings, comfortingly, over and over, <span style="font-style: italic;">All things go, all things go.</span><br /><br />I can't quite describe to my satisfaction the feeling I get as the song loops around, draws a breath, repeats, that song sung by a man who grew up in the places I've driven to and camped in, the arts school my Upper Penninsula cousin attended, the college I played piano recitals at when I was little and passed every day, who traveled as I do to Chicago and espouses the quiet, taciturn Christianity of my neighbors - who left, as I did. I am hard pressed. The song comes up again over my speakers, cued up three or four times by accident, and starting again it hits me sideways, again.</span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-49139622986204239312007-05-26T12:25:00.000-04:002007-09-05T02:33:36.880-04:00Identical Hogs, & Eroded Memory<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >When nothing will ever be the same again</span></em><br /><br />In May of last year, <span style="font-style: italic;">Harper's </span>published an article, "Swine of the Times: The Makings of the Modern Pig," by Nathanael Johnson. Laid up with summer fever, phlegmatic and aching, I'm catching up on reading and re-reading, though the pressure pooling behind my eyes makes writing about it difficult.<br /><br />(Above the blogs I frequent, ranging from <a href="http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/05/irtnog_by_eb_wh.html">academia</a> - <a href="http://admirersofbaroqueart.blogspot.com/2007/05/defining-baroque-i.html">to</a> <a href="http://vunex.blogspot.com/2007/04/against-eye.html">the</a> <a href="http://heaventree.wordpress.com/2007/05/16/in-which-he-reads-something/">arts</a> - to <a href="http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/01/there-is-only-thisall-else-is-unreal.html">cinema</a>, [with <a href="http://www.unfogged.com/">some</a> <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2007/05/stretch-of-river-xxxviii-in-which.html">imponderables</a>], you'll find a list of Readings: a brief, luminous 1982 essay on aesthetics by John Berger; a discursive post at <a href="http://lakecounty.typepad.com/life_in_lake_county/">A Lake Country Point of View</a> that begins with a small flower and spirals outward, gathering in linguistics, myth, history, touching on Persia, soil chemistry, wolves - ; a <span style="font-style: italic;">New Yorker </span>profile of the ruler of former-Soviet <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">Kalmykia</span>, an autocratic Buddhist millionaire chess master; a <span style="font-style: italic;">Discover </span>article on exotic fungal parasites & their control of hosts' minds. I'll be adding to the list in the future. If I don't have anything new up, you might try one of these.)<br /><br />Parenthetical housekeeping put aside, let's turn to Nathanael Johnson and swine.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">I.<br /></div><br />The modern hog farm depends on <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">artificial</span> insemination: boars must be coaxed into ejaculating into jars, sows stimulated and encouraged by lined workers and then injected as though a pastry were being filled. 'It all seems,' Johnson writes, 'an awful lot of trouble for something creatures normally do without encouragement.' It is a recent development:<br /><blockquote>In 1990 artificial insemination accounted for only 7 percent of America's swine breeding. At that time large confinement operations were just emerging as industry leaders. These big operations aimed to maximise their efficiency by producing standardized pigs, which grew at predictable rates and produced predictably uniform meat. To make a standardized pig pig, these companies needed standardized genetics, which they could most easily distribute in the form of semen. According to the most recent count, more than 90 percent of large hog farms used <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6"><span>artificial</span></span> insemination.</blockquote>Pork, like every other American agricultural commodity, has become centralized & standardized along industrial lines; <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">techne</span> provides the means to maximise efficiency and profit. The number of hog farms in America has decreased by a factor of ten (more than 650,00 to less than 70,000) in the last twenty years. In packing plants, swine carcasses are moved via <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">conveyor</span> into a machinated curved knife, which 'slices the cylindrical loin from inside of the body cavity. If the animals aren't just the right proportions, the knife will hit the wrong spot, wasting meat or cutting into bone.' The demand for uniformity ('cookie-cutter <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">perfection</span>') outweighs the risk: A herd of standard pigs can now be <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">devastated</span> by a single pathogen because of their genetic uniformity; pigs are kept hermetically sealed, behind razor wire, filtered air, concrete, filed in close together, fed antibiotics that grow the pig faster but also breed resistant disease. They never leave the barn. In group pens, 'pigs sometimes go a little crazy. They often attack one another, at times killing and eating their pen mates.'<br /><br />The reason? Stress. Johnson:<br /><blockquote>Pigs are, after all, highly intelligent animals - probably more intelligent than dogs - and, like dogs, they grow restless without anything to do. When swine cannot so much as turn around in their crates, they often develop repetitive movements, biting at the air and swinging their heads from side to side - movements that some students of animal behavior say signal frustration or neurosis.<br /><br />As breeders have pushed for efficiency, they have also relaxed the standards for physical traits that allow pigs to stand on concrete their whole lives without going lame. Hogs can live up to twenty years in the wild, but large pork producers usually cull sows after less than four years. Sows can produce more than ten litters, and older sows birth larger, healthier pigs. In confinement a <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">sow's</span> health won't hold up much past three litters.</blockquote>Some pigs tremble all their lives in confinement or die of shock when a barn door closes; they go lame in crates or insane with boredom. Stress produces acid, breaking down the muscle tissue, turning it to mush, bleaching it of color, souring the taste; this only became a problem after a combination of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">overbreeding</span> and cramped living conditions lived out on a 2'x7' rectangle of concrete.<br /><blockquote>The industry has responded admirably to the demand for consistent, copious, and cheap pork. But in satisfying those desires, it has done away with the other qualities that once distinguished pork, like flavor and variety.</blockquote><br /><div style="text-align: center;">II.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">Believing in Progress makes it difficult to consider anything irretrievably lost; certainly not in our lifetime. In one that has been so short as mine. We are accustomed to considering modernity an expansion of options, not a winnowing. We are self-<span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13"><span>conscious</span></span>, self-aware - of ourselves, of our place in history. As Emerson wrote of <span style="font-style: italic;">his </span>time, 'Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14"><span>criticism</span></span>' - with the exception that we are too self-are to build sepulchres, or to reverence. We <span style="font-style: italic;">know</span> more than they, after all.<br /><br />We do not consider, by and large, any experience to be inaccessible to us. One of the things that strikes me about the piece above is the thought that what I am eating is in some fundamental way <span style="font-style: italic;">different </span>from what a person ate a century ago, or even fifty years ago - or twenty. That in reading an account of a man eating pork I think I understand, but I don't: the <span style="font-style: italic;">substance</span> of the thing, the taste, has changed.<br /><br />That the category still exists makes it worse. Maybe the danger isn't in losing things forever - all things fade; there is <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15"><span>remembrance</span></span>. The danger, perhaps, is that we won't even notice they've gone - will think that we still have what in reality is a pale copy, a substitute.<br /><br /><br /><div style="text-align: center;">III.<br /><br /><div style="text-align: left;">This is a passage taken from Erik <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">Fosnes</span> Hansen's segmented and wandering novel <span style="font-style: italic;">Tales of Protection</span> (translated from the Norwegian by Nadia Christensen):<br /><br /></div></div></div></div><blockquote><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: center;"><div style="text-align: left;">He sat down with difficult, stretched out his leg again, raised his glass, sniffed down into it.<br /><br />"I tell you, there's a great deal of re-creation in the mere atmosphere of a glass of brandy like this. But what am I thinking of - wouldn't you like a glass too?"<br /><br />"Yes, thank you."<br /><br />He started to get up from the chair again, but this time she forestalled him. He let it happen.<br /><br />"Re-creation, yes," he said, as she went to the cupboard to fill a glass. "That means to restore. No, no, don't take from the fancy bottle, take from the little ugly one. That's the best."<br /><br />"This one?" She held up a dark bottle with no label.<br /><br />"Yes, that's right."<br /><br />A dark brown fluid ran thickly into the glass. She corked the bottle, sat down with him, they raised their glasses to each other.<br /><br />A stream of warmth and light rose from her abdomen to her head.<br /><br />"Well?" he smiled.<br /><br />" - powerful!" she said, when she caught her breath again.<br /><br />"That's a Madeira from the West Indies," he said, "from 1828, if I remember correctly. Just taste that, it was made when Goethe was still alive, and Beethoven had died only the year before."<br /><br />She drank some more. A sunny landscape rose in her, she <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17">seemed</span> to see hands, brown hands, in the sunlight, green leaves, a yellow beach, a blue sea.<br /><br />"Since then it's been drawn again and again, almost every twenty years, so it would keep. Quite unique, isn't it?"<br /><br />"It tastes absolutely pure," she said, "and yet heavy."<br /><br />"Yes," he said, "you can truly talk about restoring something when you drink an <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_18"><span>elixir</span></span> like that." He leaned back, suddenly seemed very young, very dreamy. "Eighteen twenty-eight - tastes like a good year for people," he said. "No chemicals in the alcoholic beverages, no <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_19"><span>pollution</span></span> in the grapes." He sighed. "Besides, it's good for the thighbone. Best medicine to be found."<br /></div></div></div></div></blockquote><br /><div style="text-align: center;">IV.<br /></div><br />Lamenting what is lost is inherently conservative in both of the word's senses: longing after a lost Eden; trying to conserve the Garden. It does not trust that the future will bring better things, or that something lost can be replaced by another of merely equal value.<br /><br />Perhaps it's appropriate, tangentially, that the nearest equivalent to the passage quoted above happened to a former teacher at my California boarding school (having been invited, and somewhat bewildered): it was in an idyllic retreat north of San Francisco called the <a href="http://sociology.ucsc.edu/whorulesamerica/power/bohemian_grove.html">Bohemian Club</a>, a campground in a redwood grove where rich and powerful men - business leaders, politicians, cabinet officers, think tank trustees, solidly Republican and conservative - Clarence Thomas was among those present - mingle with artists and intellectuals in a secluded natural setting, Jimmy Buffet playing guitar on a porch, alcohol trucked in by the barrel. One night, he shared his cabin with a Southern gentleman who had a bottle of Kentucky bourbon dating to 1861, before the Civil War. He insisted on opening it; my teacher remembered it as 'pretty good, though I don't know bourbon.'<br /><br />Emerson is correct - we are a retrospective age - but we're less interested in sepulchre than in a kind of endless historical <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_20">taxonomy</span>. Never has there been more media, more to read, to view - more historians working, more critics writing. The <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_21">retrospect</span> grows shorter and shorter. Popularly, the news cycle creates instant nostalgia - twenty years ago, ten, last year (best ever!), a month, a week.<br /><br />Sick as I am, I'll end with the questions these fragments raise in me: whether substitution erodes our memory, makes us unable to imagine the world as fully as we had; how what we consume literally composes us and more broadly composes our world; what standardization and copying implies for nature as in food as in art.<br /><br />And, as much as I think that we are less aware of history than we should be, less fully aware of our place in things, too indifferent to the way things have been - is Emerson right, following the passage I <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2007/05/foolish-consistency-is-hobgoblin-of.html">quoted</a>, when he calls on us to 'cast off the dry bones of the past' and 'enjoy an original relation to the universe?' Is it simply that we need <span style="font-style: italic;">less </span>of this endless citation, of the Anxiety of Influence? Or do we need reminders that the world was not always this way?<br /><br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-63063087184925560062007-05-20T02:15:00.000-04:002007-05-20T14:50:16.943-04:00Asked & Answered<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Commencement Edition</span></em><br /><br />Today, with commencement on the mind of anyone tied to the academic calendar and the onset of spring - look below for <a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2007/05/may-in-boston-commencement.html">two</a> <a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2007/05/enigmatic-fragments-from-my-notebooks.html">iterations</a> of that death/rebirth jazz to see how omnipresent it is here - I'm addressing questions posed by John B. over at <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/">Blog Meridian</a>. His questions to others displayed his characteristic thoughtfulness and attention; a flurry of volunteers made it something of a <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2007/05/asked-and-answered-ii.html">repeat feature</a>, and though late to the party I couldn't help but bite. (The conditions stipulate I pass it on, but I know the size of my readership).<br /><br />Here, below the fold, are five questions, taken, one concludes, from the very ceremony John has just attended:<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">1. Do you like the phrase 'appertaining thereto'? Would you consider registering a complaint if the dean or the president didn't use it in the course of certifying the graduates?<br /><br /></span>Phrase strikes me as a bit dry and lifeless; it certainly lacks the beauty of that old chestnut <span style="font-style: italic;">cellar door</span>, and even its utility is dubious, the syllables ungainly and inefficient, better in the original Latin. <span style="font-style: italic;">Registering a complaint </span>is the sort of legalist solution favored by those who covet words like <span style="font-style: italic;">appertaining thereto</span>, which have the power to reduce the world around us to something that smells faintly of stone dust and dry water. (<span style="font-style: italic;">Register a complaint? </span>No: direct action, lunch with the dean, well-placed bribes, a handshake. These things change worlds.)<br /><br />David Simon, creator of HBO's incomparable <span style="font-style: italic;">The Wire</span>, now remarks as a matter of course that it shows how institutions make human beings worth less every day. Surely, to conceive of the world as a place that <span style="font-style: italic;">appertains</span>, (and <span style="font-style: italic;">thence </span>to where, exactly?) is to begin building a clausal edifice that renders any one of us childlike and bankrupt beneath it.<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"> Appertaining thereto</span></span> is cousin to boilerplate and euphemism (ex. '<span style="font-style: italic;">pacification</span>'; it's what we trot out to paper over horror, discount human life, make difficult little particulars into empty banalities.<br /><br />I might instead certify graduates by apologizing for eating the plums in the icebox.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">2.</span> <span style="font-style: italic;">Which seems more like something you would do while attending commencement:<br />a) Bringing a copy of Ferlinghetti's </span>A Coney Island of the Mind<span style="font-style: italic;">;<br />b) Actually approve the daring of your colleage's attempt to rap for part of the commencement address, even if <ahem> less than successful;<br />c) Make origami swans out of your program.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></ahem></span>C, realistically. I am always at a loss for what to do with my hands. I prefer something to occupy them: a gin & tonic, a piano, a silver dollar. I do not yet know how to make a reliable origami swan; programs that fall into my hands are twisted into wreckage, ugly paper ducklings. Somebody, I will learn, and my fidgeted programs will grow up beautiful.<br /><br />B brings up nothing but bad memories of <a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=izzCWcRy6q0">Karl Rove</a> at this year's White House Press Correspondent's dinner.<br /><br />A, I harbor affection for; <span style="font-style: italic;">A Coney Island of the Mind </span>is on my window sill at this very moment, wedged to the left of a collected Borges, Calasso's <span style="font-style: italic;">The Marriage of Cadmus & Harmony</span>, a King James Bible, a bottle of wine, a broken tea glass, and a dead basil plant. Anybody attending commencement with paperback Ferlinghetti tucked into their back pocket I suspect of waiting<span style="font-style: italic;"> for a rebirth of wonder / and I am waiting for someone / to really discover America / and wail<span style="font-style: italic;"> - </span></span>all that Turner <span style="font-style: italic;">new symbolic western frontier </span>jazz and who knows how much of it is tongue in cheek? - because with the Beats, you could never tell, but at least either way they weren't apathetic and that's more than you can say these days (even discounting the <span style="font-style: italic;">kids these days!</span>). Beautiful dream or not, I'm not there with poetry - it's impractical - but my heart goes out a little bit to somebody who is, who's bothered to clutch at Ferlinghetti and a rebirth of wonder and go with their hands full to an event where a handshake is all that's required and jazz is being bulldozed by <span style="font-style: italic;">appertaining thereto</span>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span></span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">3. As a faculty member, how would you determine which students, apart from those you know well (</span>sotto voce: <span style="font-style: italic;">and think deserve to graduate), you will applaud for?</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span>I'm faced with several options: I can be selective, and glower stone-faced at the mass of students not fortunate enough to have basked in the light of my favor; democratic and exhausted, giving uncritical and unstinting applause to everyone; superficial along several different axis - applaud only the pretty ones, or only the good walkers, or only those with interesting first/last names; mathematical, applauding every fourth student, or using an algorithm I derive, brilliantly, from the letters of their name; supportive - of that young graduate, Ferlinghetti improbably clutched to chest, say; or the inevitable streaker; or the one who trips, or whose name is mispronounced, or who fumbles the diploma hand-off.<br /><br />I'm most likely to try all of these things - indecision being one of my flaws - before giving up on each in turn for stoicism, which is only fatigue by any other name.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">4. Out on the lawn after the second ceremony, you see that Kevin Durant is here (his brother graduated from the college) and hear that he has signed some autographs. Do you:<br />a) Go up to him and ask for one as well;<br />b) Watch from a distance and even wish people would leave him alone;<br />c) Ask, 'Kevin </span>who?!'<br /><br />C, I don't know who Kevin Durant is.<br /><br />B, If I did, I still find college basketball more interesting on a tactical level than the NBA, because they're operating on a plane I can actually comprehend, technically.<br /><br />I also feel reticent when it comes to any kind of fame; I don't like to feel as though I'm forcing attention on them, even though most of the people I admire creatively are only celebrities if the word is stretched thin. It really has nothing to do with celebrity at all; I do the same thing with professors I like after class, when they're being mobbed by students (the most persistant of whom also seem to be the most obnoxious and least discerning; why lump myself in with them?)<br /><br />This is rather self-centered of me.<br /><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">5. You've been asked to deliver a commencement address. What is one thing you know you would want to say to the graduates?<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>Besides <span style="font-style: italic;">appertaining thereto </span>and apologizing for the plums I ate in the icebox? The words don't matter, of course; commencement is ritual, the speech some Latin mumbled over the blessing: Endings are a new beginning. Your generation faces a unique challenge. One in which all of you will play your part, as future leaders of this country. Do not forget the things you've learned here, that will stay with you for the rest of your life. Your apathy, apertaining thereto political hegemony, is pacification collateral damage less than four not to exceed more than five, hope, future, Our Nation's Children, Enjoy Coca-Cola.<br /><br />One thing I might say? <span style="font-style: italic;">Wake up.</span><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><br /></span></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-14235308158440340962007-05-16T10:07:00.000-04:002007-05-20T02:13:06.018-04:00May in Boston: CommencementMay in Boston: sunlight, flower blossoms, green shade. A Red Sox fan from Minnesota pays the T driver with a ten dollar bill. In Somerville, outside a 19th century Victorian painted moss green, five young men grill hot dogs and smoke marijuana from a small threaded piece of copper tubing. The kids staying for the summer pick up two, three jobs, wait tables, pour sangria on the patios, throw back 2 a.m. shift drinks. An actor friend gets work – and his SAG card – hand doubling for second unit photography in a Kevin Spacey film about blackjack. College students commence, in one way or another; they begin something different.<br /><br />The city, though, stays the same. It has been raining for five days – one of those pitch-black nor’easters that sweep the city annually in the middle of May, forty degree caprice, ill will, fine mist that freezes midair. Joan Didion writes, in an essay about Los Angeles I’ll be quoting later to different ends, that New England winters determine how life is lived here: long, bitter, cold. Boston shivers the fuck out of itself six months out of the year, smokes cigarettes down to the filter, chokes down its drink and says too loudly it’s the best possible city on Earth, fuck anyone who says different. Blue laws, curfew, cost of living, racial divide and shoddy light rail aside. It’s a city you love like those aging couples who enjoy tearing into each other too much to get a divorce.<br /><br />My father went to graduate school at Boston College in the 70s; back then, a bus ad gave comical directions to Hollywood in a way that encapsulates the city’s provincialism. It was a map of the United States, Boston bulging out front and center, the rest of the country reduced to an appendage the size of Florida. It read, approximately: <i>Directions to California. Turn left onto Mass Pike. Take Mass Pike to Newton Center. Continue west.</i><br /><br />And meanwhile, while the weather defeats my optimistic use of the word <i>fecund</i> and keeps me indoors, Emerson College, arts school for careerists, has graduated another senior class: goateed Spielberg-cap director; Midwest marketer/beauty pageant queen; Brazilian conga drummer cum film producer; Harvard-hopping French socialite; Jewish editor in black sedan; blonde Buddhist artist in handlebar mustache; Irish all-singing all-dancing revue; melancholy improvisatory comedian; lumberjack IT technician; actor recently fined for unarmed nighttime B&E; Croatian femme fatale; Jersey Model UN-type assistant director; poets, gaffers, film geeks, trash novelists, associate producers, news anchors, disc jockeys, and others too numerous to mention. <br /><br />Most are fleeing this little city. Many are going to Los Angeles. <br /><br />For them: good-bye, good luck, directions above.Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-8669844534186274892007-05-04T17:43:00.000-04:002007-05-04T18:41:06.601-04:00Enigmatic Fragments from my Notebooks<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >A Year in Retrospect</span></em><br /><br />Early May inspires nostalgia and hope in equal measure; for those of us still on the academic calendar, trees start to uncurl in the sun and flowers blossom just as everything comes to an end. The blood fizzes, rebels. People disappear suddenly. Everything is in flux. We throw out stacks of paper, pack up boxes, we move to other apartments, other cities, we leave the country.<br /><br />End something in Spring and you feel the death/rebirth jazz in tripletime, the <span style="font-style: italic;">fecund</span>: ends begetting beginnings, decay and growth intertwined, the snake eating its own tail. End a school year and you're connected to the phases of the moon, illiterate astronomers, pre-Hellenistic Greece, the dawn of agriculture.<br /><br />It all leads to a certain amount of naval-gazing. I'm no different. I don't take notes in any coherent or helpful sense, but after a year of class and jottings and writing workshops I somehow end with two or three full volumes, filled with cryptic epigrams. I'd forgotten writing most of them, or why I'd written them in the first place. Quotations are marked, but not cited.<br /><br />I'll ask you to consider what these fragments, stripped of explication or context, suggest to you; in the coming months, among other things, I'll be using them as seeds for future work, some of which will appear here. So you might think of this also as a kind of map, or a preview. Below the fold:<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Writing is a tomb.<br /><br /></span>Blindness as revelation /<br /> madness.<br />Gloucester's heart 'burst smilingly.'<br /><br /> Kozintsev, 1969.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><br />A junkyard in an endless forest. A crabapple tree to steal from, whipping the apples a hundred yards away using green branches.<br /><br /> Palimpast.<br /><br />Her uncle the doctor goes to the gym every afternoon; when business is slow, he goes spear-fishing instead. He tells a new dirty joke each time she visits. His receptionist's husband used to be a painter; she did not know this until one day, when she found a charcoal sketch on brown paper rolled up in a desk drawer. It was a young, very pretty woman; she stood in front of a blue window. The window was the only color in the drawing. The receptionist has never discovered who the woman was. Today, her husband spends months refurbishing antique toys. This month, he has provided a Dracula with a real red silk cape. He has carved a tiny spiral staircase, and a small marble column. He has taped Dracula's line from the Bram Stoker movie and rigged a pen cap to trigger a speaker, so that when pressed, the toy will say his line. It has taken him weeks of work.<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><br /> Is Richard human <span style="font-style: italic;">enough</span>?<br /><br />Emphasis by development /<br /> by repetition.<br /><br />The enemy was coming soon. Past the heap, with the sinister, gaping/grappling, the junk run and bicycles, the rusted meadow whoknows what - the enemy was moving, invisible and silent. We had little time.<br /><br /> Outrage us into idealism.<br /><br />1972<br />armchair<br />Thanksgiving<br />Red<br />attic<br />Blood orange<br />bullhorns<br />songbird<br />dogwood<br />tomato<br />secondhand hardcover, heavily annotated<br />a street on the Lower East Side<br />the Tango<br /><br />I wore a very sincere tie. /<br /> A nice blue suit.<br /><br />Nonfiction a way to wrestle parse digest reality, which is more and more incoherent, strange, and variable.<br /><br />Milan Airport: cigarette butts drown en masse in each urinal. A sign in English and Italian that requests objects not be placed there has been creatively defaced.<br /><br /> You must take care to write nonfiction as carefully as if you're lying.<br /><br />The Carlyle Group<br />'Ysreal,' by Diaz<br />uninflected<br />5 Cummings<br /><br />He told me later, dead drunk in a stateside bar. They'd ridden in, camel-mounted & carrying government guns, and he & the rest had watched it like a Western from the tent flaps until one the locals realized and the screaming started. He told me he'd carried a .45 but had only ever thought to use it on himself, and that he had pictures of the aftermath in his jacket pocket if I wanted to see.<br /><br />'We feel it sweet to behold<br />sailors in distress - the vexéd sea -<br />not out of pleasure in the distress<br />of others, but because <span style="font-style: italic;">their distress<br />is the measure of our security.</span><br /><br /> - Lucretius<br /><br />Police procedurals provide a feeling of security that life itself cannot offer.<br /><br />'a battery of men and machines /<br /> conclusions based on fact.'<br /><br />Taxi drivers stopped to salute him. When he entered highway restaurants, people stood up.<br /><br /> O false Cressid,<br />Let all untruths stand by thy stainéd name, & they'll seem glorious.<br /><br /> & Chaos is come.<br /><br />Editing dictates meaning in the cinema.<br /><br />- How can millions of people, their homes & streets, be unreal?<br />- Very easily. A big city must be like a dream.<br /><br />Allegory: To speak openly in public otherwise.<br /><br />French lends itself to abstraction.<br /><br />Synesthesia,<br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Speak Memory, </span>Nabokov<br />Hear color; orange popping<br /> why we like our artificial flavors colored.<br />'this tastes red.'<br /><br />Carpeting everywhere; big plastic crates in the living room; the furnace hissing in the laundry; a lambskin rug; Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinkin' About Tomorrow" on the turntable; somebody practicing piano; model sailboats; bleach stains; china dolls; an old television with rabbit ears; a blue Volvo station wagon; a brown refrigerator.<br /><br />Ideology = the imaginary relationship I have to my real condition.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Romeo & Juliet</span>, unlike its source, is not an admonition, nor is it a warning.<br /><br />'The white race stood upon this undeveloped continent ready and willing to execute the Divine injunction, to replenish the earth and SUBDUE it. The savage race in possession either refused or imperfectly obeyed this first law of the Creator. On the one side stood the white race in the command of God, armed with his law; on the other, the savage resisted the execution of that law.'<br /><br />We find ourselves in the eye of the Other.<br /><br />'For that which is unclean by nature thou canst entertain no<br />hope: no washing will turn the Gipsy white.'<br /><br />Nondescript: Animal not yet classified or described by science.<br /><br />Hearst company mining town, biggest claim in the Western Hemisphere: Lead, Dakota - <span style="font-style: italic;">nothing gold can stay.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span>There is no gap that prose cannot bridge.<br /><br />Today I saw a man sitting in Boylston station pouring Colt .45 into a gatorade bottle while he did whiskey shots from a turkey baster.<br /><br />a matter of emphasis: <span style="font-style: italic;">Goddammit </span>v. <span style="font-style: italic;">God-damn it</span>. Thoughts?<br /><br />Postmodern<br />Tomato<br />Grammatology<br /><br />'Amen, even so come, Lord Jesus!'<span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"><span style="font-style: italic;"></span></span><br /></span></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-68172795135291787112007-04-18T19:30:00.000-04:002007-04-18T23:24:02.429-04:00How The West Was Won By Atari<em><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;">The Past Isn't Dead; It's Not Even Past</span></em><br /><br />Custer, that golden self-dramatist, was butchered wholesale along with his men in 1876, on the centennial. That year, the states and territories that he served celebrated a hundred years of nationhood and Union - through war, having cowed rebellions in the south and the west; and by rail, the Atlantic and Pacific now linked in steel.<br /><br />The dead at Little Bighorn were mutilated: castrated, scalped, defaced, teeth taken, the wounded killed. This was commonplace. U.S. cavalry cut out the sexual organs of Indian women and stitched them to their hatbands. Custer had died in part because the Dakota gold rush had reached the Black Hills: sacred land and, incidentally, foreign soil.<br /><br />I've been researching background for a Western screenplay set in Lead in 1877, just a year later; this is on my mind, as is <em>Deadwood </em>(written about previously <a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2006/06/how-west-was-won.html">here</a>).<br /><br />Below the fold: American exceptionalism, rape, and Atari.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />The Black Hills are the profaned holy ground that David Milch's <em><a href="http://amazon.com/o/ASIN/B0006FO5LO/ref=s9_asin_image_1/102-9352356-8714539?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-2&pf_rd_r=076S0JKSAXDYJXB8A190&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=278240301&pf_rd_i=507846">Deadwood</a> </em>rests on. Custer's defeat looms over the mining camp; everything here could be swept away in an instant. This terror pervades the first four-episode arc. The Sioux, bogeymen & scapegoats - and invisible - lurk at the edges of every utterance, every profanity.<br /><br />And in the face of a newly centennial Union - the capitalization matters; <em>Harper's Weekly</em><em> </em>wrote during the Civil War, "the Union is only another name for freedom, progress, & civilization" - the Sioux are not just impediments, they are in breach of covenant with God Himself, who said: Replenish the earth and <em>subdue </em>it.<br /><br />When Swearengen says <em>heathens</em>, says <em>dirt-worshippers</em>, when road agents leave families massacred in the Indian style, we see the stamp of fear, but also of transference: we carry whiteness and civilization because They do not.<br /><br />The Sioux wars across the Plains weren't setpiece battles but spasms of massacre and butchery. They inspired a Western literature of terror. Writers cried quite consciously for wholesale extermination; it was historical inevitability. This from a speech by Governor Ramsey of Minnesota in 1862, fifteen years earlier in a <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/10146/10146.txt">St. Petersburg newspaper</a> at the onset of the Sioux uprisings:<br /><br /><blockquote>Infants hewn into bloody chips of flesh [...]; rape joined to murder in one awful tragedy; young girls, even children of tender years, outraged by these brutal ravishers till death ended their shame; [...] whole families burned alive[...]. Such are the spectacles, and a thousand nameless horrors besides, which this first experience of Indian warfare has burned into the minds and hearts of our frontier people; and such the enemy with whom we have to deal.</blockquote>That year, on the day after Christmas, in the largest mass execution in U.S. history, 38 Dakota men were hanged to death in Mankato for murder and rape.<br /><br />All of this only touches the surface of history; what it should also do is explain, why, in light of my reading, the fact that yesterday night I was forwarded <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Custer%27s_Revenge">this Wikipedia article</a> seems exceptionally perverse.<br /><br />It's a link to a 1982 video game for the Atari called <em>Custer's Revenge</em>, a pornographic side-scroller that has our hero back from the dead, naked save for bandanna, phallus, and cavalry hat, dodging arrows and other obstacles in order to reach a large-breasted Sioux woman tied to a cactus named Revenge, in order to force sex upon her.<br /><br />Let me be clear: There is a way to personify an American Hero and enact the rape of a subdued native - over and over again - that was mass-produced as a consumer good in the United States of America in the last quarter of the 20th century, just after the bicentennial.<br /><br />When Turner said the frontier was closed, he never could have envisioned this kind of reopening.</span><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-51897687863267039462007-04-09T23:05:00.000-04:002007-04-16T23:08:00.892-04:00Like, PoMo<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Occasioned By A College Seminar</span></em><br /><br />If there's one thing that separates the language of even our articulate young people from their parents and grandparents, it's that equivocating verbal tic: <span style="font-style: italic;">like</span>. Sentences dissolve into them. <span style="font-style: italic;"></span>They loop around only to get lost in their own chaff. <span style="font-style: italic;">I feel like, I mean, it's like that other - basically, like - </span>Sometimes in class I'll listen to somebody and become meditative, entranced. I keep a little tally in pen in the margins. <span style="font-style: italic;">Like </span>replaces <span style="font-style: italic;">said </span>in our oral histories.<br /><br />It's inexplicable, and it is everywhere. And in my media criticism & theory class today, halfway through a lecture on <span style="font-style: italic;">postmodernity</span>, I realized that <span style="font-style: italic;">like </span>isn't just a verbal tic, it's a symptom.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">PoMo</span>: There is no universal truth, Enlightenment rationalism has delivered not progress but barbarism, science has unearthed an inexplicable world. Electrons dissapear, the building blocks of nature change speed when measured, light can be slowed down and bent into a soup. Chaos has come again. We are surrounded not by reality but by images of reality and finally by images of images, art not a mirror held to nature but a mirror held to a mirror, like in a cheap motel. We live amidst simulacra, artificial stimulai that are better, faster, more vibrant than reality. We have access to all choices and many are illusory.<br /><br />Meaning is variable, the reader creates the text, environment determines our consciousness, our consciousness acts out the unknowable impulses of our subconscious, and progress is only apparent, like workers on a treadmill.<br /><br />Pastiche is the rule of the day, as is (witness) reductive simplification.<br /><br />Who wouldn't, conditioned by all of this, speak in fragments linked by equivocation? Or in the self-referential language of comparison? Who wouldn't, when everything is replicated and replicable, a copy of a copy, use a word that <span style="font-style: italic;">seems </span>and <span style="font-style: italic;">replicates </span>in kind as a rhythmic device? Is it, like, a coincidence?<span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-31731087976107629872007-04-06T15:52:00.000-04:002007-04-18T22:00:17.905-04:00Fortifying Oneself With Words<em><span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;">Poetics, the Utility of Fiction, & Hemingway</span></em><br /><br />I spent last Sunday at the <a href="http://www.jfklibrary.org/">John F. Kennedy Museum & Library</a>, attending the <a href="http://www.pen-ne.org/awards/hemingway_award.html">Hemingway Awards</a> for best first work of fiction. The library is a tall white building like a NASA hanger perched on the edge of the Bay, windows looking out over the long stretch of downtown skyline. I rode South, clattering, on the Red Line, and from there on a bus past the U Mass campus, built along hospital lines, the open spaces pocked by large contemporary artworks: deformed plastic birds, roosting; a giant rusting girder like an L; a small stone grotto.<br /><br />This is by way of telling you why certain things have been on my mind. But first:<br /><br /><em>Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera.</em><br /><span class="fullpost"><br />It was a cool, clean day, the sun out and throwing everything into a clear light. At the bus stop while I waited, high schoolers in matching red sweatshirts sang angelic chamber music. While they sung I watched the trains pass, and the grafitti on sides of the highway overpass, and the rusted-out factories. Rounded, Latin words hung in the air in three part harmony. Afterwards there was a sudden rush of giggles and self-conscious gossipy chatter to fill the silence, awkward, half-formed.<br /><br />If you wanted you could detect a kind of throughline in the better speeches and in some of the readings during the award, which encompassed too the <a href="http://www.pen-ne.org/awards/winship_award.html">L.L. Winship/PEN New England</a>.<br /><br />Fiction, it was said, is necessary. We tell stories to help ourselves get by. We - K.C. Frederick said this before his reading - are like <a href="http://www.turksheadreview.com/library/texts/whitman-leavesgrass.html">Whitman's</a> noiseless patient spider, casting filiment after filiment into the void, desperate for a response.<br /><br />I won't give you the ceremony; I'll leave it to you to imagine the short introductory speakers, the varying quality of the speeches, the applause, the airy new-looking auditorium, the Hemingway-themed programs, the reception after, three kinds of dip, pita triangles, fruit and cheese and wine served in plastic glasses, tiny pieces of cork bobbing in Cabernet Sauvignon.<br /><br />Edward P. Jones, author of <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Known-World-Edward-P-Jones/dp/0061159174/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8952364-9875903?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176076004&sr=8-1">The Known World</a></em>, gave the keynote; it was he, among others, who said we tell stories to help ourselves get by. He ended with a story - one about Hemingway.<br /><br />"I don't know whether this one is true," Jones said. "I don't think that it matters." Hemingway's grandson chuckled onstage. I thought about a man down the row from me who I'll describe later.<br /><br />It seems, he said, that Hemingway was in a bar in Key West with a bunch of friends. They'd spent the afternoon competing to see who could tell a story in the fewest words possible. It came to Hemingway. He took a drink, and said:<br /><br /><em>For sale: Baby booties, never worn.</em><br /><em></em><br />All of this is a long way of saying, I came back from the awards and sat down with a book of poetry by Louise Glück, who'd just gotten the L.L. Winship for <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Averno-Poems-Louise-Gluck/dp/0374530742/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-8952364-9875903?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1176076474&sr=1-1">Averno</a>. </em><br /><em></em><br />And it occured to me that I treat poetry differently than, say, novels - I pick my way through it piecemeal, disregarding wholeness. I scavange my way through books of poetry, looking for pieces to steal, a line, a stanza to take with me. I say, <em>a noiseless patient spider</em>, and hold on to that scrap and what it meant.<br /><br />Novels have a wholeness that makes this difficult - Glück, incidentally, does too, which is what struck me. Reading <em>Vita Nova </em>or <em>The Seven Ages </em>it's hard to treat that unadorned language as parts to be stripped. The writing less epigrammatic, the images inextricable.<br /><br />Perhaps there is a way in which lyrical poetry's I, or its we - the anonymity of it, makes it easier to hold on to as a keepsake. Almost as a diagnostic. A scrap of poetry could be seen to trap a particular moment, a particular feeling, as though it were being bottled - distilling to essence in precisely the way a perfumer would, boiling down and condensing into three words that stand for a meadow, a particular day in spring, the feeling of being in love for the first time.<br /><br />Fiction you can't do that with, generally; it's a story, not an image, and the characters however identifiable are not ourselves. Unless I'm missing the diagnosis.<br /><br />I'll translate, taking liberties, that scrap above the fold: <em>They may behead all flowers, but they cannot detain the spring.</em><br /><br />It was a piece of graffiti I saw, written in thick black marker on a white plaster wall in in an alley in the old Jewish quarter in Córdoba. It's by Pablo Neruda, originally. It's something I hold on to shorn from context.<br /><br />Is there a way in which being torn from context diminishes something, takes meaning from it? Does pastiche reduce what was better whole?<br /><br />There's a separate issue here that I won't even touch - a man in black cowboy boots down the row from me confessed halfway through a story about his father's heart attack - a baker, a large man who loved Italian cigars, red wine, meats, who catered for Clint Eastwood during <em>Mystic River </em>- that he hadn't read fiction since he was in college. "Clint Eastwood will live forever," he said. "For twenty years more at least. I saw him once behind the restaurant. You know how some people have that aura? He had it. My father, a great man in many ways, he didn't have that when he was that age. I saw Clint Eastwood when he was 72. My father, God rest his soul, was 72 when he died." He went on: "I don't read fiction anymore. Haven't since college. There's too much in the world to <em>know </em>about. I just finished reading about the incident in the 70s, the U2 spy plane that crashed in Soviet Russia - "<br /><br />Does fiction help us get by? Does fiction inform how we make sense of a world that is not made up out of nothing?<br /><br />I titled this piece a while ago - I had other things on my mind, mix tapes, juxtaposition, raiding the storehouses of a decadent culture. But for now, though I'd said it's difficult, I want to give you a fragment of Louise Glück's work, torn out of context from a poem entitled "The Sensual World," and judge for yourself whether it helps you get by, in its spare admonition, the wide feeling I get reading it, as though the air were thinning.<br /><br /><em>I caution you as I was never cautioned:</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>you will never let go, you will never be satiated.</em><br /><em>You will be damaged and scarred, you will continue to hunger.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Your body will age, you will continue to need.</em><br /><em>You will want the earth, then more of the earth - </em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Sublime, indifferent, it is present, it will not respond.</em><br /><em>It is encompassing, it will not minister.</em><br /><em></em><br /><em>Meaning, it will feed you, it will ravish you,</em><br /><em>it will not keep you alive.</em><br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-49691040309401295622007-03-30T18:54:00.000-04:002007-09-04T17:10:05.307-04:00Notes from Madrid<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Little Bears, </span></em>Guérnica<em>, and the Memory of War</em><br /><br />Madrid is built along the same triumphal lines as all capitals by fiat - St. Petersburg; Washington, D.C. There are palaces, Bourbon and Habsburg, royal gardens, wide boulevards suited for processions and troop movements.<br /><br />The melancholy and fanatic Philip II came to it in the middle of the sixteenth century and found a small provincial town alone amidst the endless arid plain and the wind. He declared his reign from there, in that place, whose only virtue was its location - at the center of a stubborn and fractured peninsula. For years the only business of Madrid was the Court.<br /><br />In January, when I was there, the Jardines Botánicas - a walled garden next to the Prado - lie shrouded in a ghostly white haze pierced by sunlight and made luminous. The trees are leafless and mournful. The hedges and the cyprus still bloom green, amidst the dry branches and the old stone and the careful rows where little grows. Its beauty is still evident but it is subdued, autumnal, as something in long decline. Dry leaves cluster the hardbeaten dirt paths. Benches sit empty.<br /><br />Nearby is the Reína Sofia, the contemporary art museum whose fame rests in the huge tormented howl that is Picasso's <em>Guérnica</em>. In a long hall devoted to the deconstruction of the immortal painting is Dora Maar's series of photographs of the painting's creation in stages - the thing that strikes you is its revision. At the very center, leaping up from the middle of the canvas, an arm thrusts a torch aloft. A bull in the corner gazes placidly. But Picasso continues, filling in - details are changed, places painted over. Slowly the bull's face contorts, twists. The arm is broken and then - suddenly - it is removed entirely. The torch - that organic, classical sign of hope and knowledge - is erased and replaced by a bare electric lightbulb. The bull has dropped its mouth down: it is screaming.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><em>Guérnica</em> commemorates the first time flights of mechanized bombers began in a systemic way to target civilian populations. Late in the April afternoon, on market day, in 1937, the Basque town was razed to the ground by German and Italian planes under Nationalist command. Incendiaries and explosive shrapnel were used; escort planes strafed the fleeing survivors. The men and boys were at the front; of the ten thousand old men, women, and children in the town, a third were killed and more mutilated.<br /><br />Down the hall, past the compositions, there is a room with pictures from the Civil War. Whole streets are rubble. I recognize the corner my hotel is on; it is cratered. A child stumbles into the frame.<br /><br />I read, recently, Martha Gellhorn's moving wartime dispatch from Barcelona in 1938 - "The Third Winter." By this time the bombings have become matter-of-fact:<br /><br /><blockquote><p>"In Barcelona, it was perfect bombing weather. The cafes along the Ramblas were crowded. There was nothing much to drink; a sweet fizzy poison called orangeade and a horrible liquid supposed to be sherry. There was, of course, nothing to eat. Everyone was out enjoying the afternoon sunlight. No bombers had come over for at least two hours."</p></blockquote><br />All is perverted by war; nothing is left untouched. Fine evenings are transformed into something ominous.<br /><br />I bring up Barcelona, in Catalónia, where even the language is different - Spanish, like Italian, is not the language of a nation, just its most powerful province - only because Gellhorn, in the essay, visits a children's hospital. All of the children in the wards are injured, not sick - they are war-wounded, have shrapnel worked through their skin, lead wrapped around their bones, head injuries. Waiting in line for rations, they can distinguish between the sounds of the explosions; they know when the bombs are falling close by. They scatter and take cover in doorways like veterans. There is a ward, a separate wing - she is asked if she wants to go, she wants to say 'no' but can't quite - where the tubercular cases are kept.<br /><br />The family she visits with that frames these observations has a dying child, a baby. Near the end they promise her that when the war is over, when the Republic has come out of it, they will all meet again.<br /><br />Of course, they don't meet again, and the Fascists win, and even after the end of the War on Fascism, it is thirty years before Franco concedes Spain. I write all this because my friend, who lived in Salamanca for some time and who made me promise to see the <em>Guérnica</em>, said to look too for the old women in Madrid in winter. The locals call them <em>ositos</em> - little bears. They have one heavy fur coat that they treasure in their closets and take out when the season commences to wear about every day.<br /><br />And they are dwarfed by their coats, towered over by their grandchildren. They are toylike. Anybody in Madrid over a certain age, who was a child during the War - the children in Gellhorn's essay - grew up starving, sick, rationed, injured. It affected their growth, stunted it, the men and the women both, so that when you walk down a street in the museum district of Madrid, that capital by fiat, when you walk outside of the Prado and its Goyas, you can see the imprint of civil war on the streets themselves, see it in the people - a living reminder, like the places in trees where the width of a ring speaks fire.</span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-30450234524777025022007-03-24T13:53:00.000-04:002007-03-24T15:09:37.197-04:00Art & The Price of Success<span style="font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;"><em>One Hundred Fifty-Nine</em> <a href="http://www.avclub.com/content/home">A.V. Club</a><em> Commentators Are Wrong</em></span><br /><br />Steve Hyden of <em>The Onion A.V. Club </em><a href="http://www.avclub.com/content/blog/does_cheering_against_success_make">asks</a> the perennial indie rock question of artistic merit vs. mainstream success. To wit: <blockquote></blockquote><blockquote><p>"Do you really want your favorite cult indie artist to be commercially successful?"</p></blockquote><p>Below the fold: why this is really more than one question, Hazlitt on the pleasures of hating, and how upwards of a dozen dozen commentators are missing a central point, Hyden included.</p><span class="fullpost"><p>Like I just said: Hyden's one question implies several - whether obscurity and the instant community of fellow listeners is as important to the medium of indie rock as the music itself; whether commercial success = overexposure, crowding (that is, whether a fan base is like a common pasture that can be overgrazed); whether it is possible to debase good art by stripping it of context and attaching it to something deplorable - like a commercial or an American Idol cover. (Theodor Adorno, that dialectic philosopher and dour Frankfurt School media theorist, argued a half century ago that art is only art - as opposed to kitsch - if it is autonomous, indigestible to mainstream society; anything else is false consciousness. Of course, Adorno hated jazz, and died before rock n' roll supposedly brought the revolutionary and the popular together in the 60s).</p><p>Meanwhile, the comments thread erupted in tangential debates - what music snobs are, or how much people hate hipsters. Capitalist boosters of the smug sort (I know; I was one of them in middle school) asked sardonically why anybody would begrudge indie rockers money when money was the entire point of popular music, and whether anybody could possibly be unhappy with that much green. Society was accused of not really listening to music, of being 'music likers' who just need a backbeat to work out to. The Arcade Fire had been mentioned, and so devotees lept to the defense of <em>Neon Bible</em>, which after four or five listens I'm suspecting is good-but-not-great. A lone voice deplored all of this as posturing and listed a series of avant-garde artists and composers that were 'truly original' - a la Adorno, who would have sympathized.</p><p>Before we go on to question some basic assumptions of the debate itself, here's a passage from William Hazlitt's c. 1826 essay "On the Pleasures of Hating":</p><p>The popularity of the most successful writers operates to wean us from them, by the cant and fuss that is made about them, by hearing their names everlastingly repeated, and by the number of ignorant and indiscriminate admirers they draw after them: - we as little like to have to drag others from their unmerited obscurity, lest we should be exposed to the charge of affectation and singularity of taste.</p><p>In some respects, this worry may be universal, as Hazlitt illustrates; certainly, it predates scruffy base-drums-guitar foursomes.</p><p>In others, though, it's very new. The iron-clad divide that indie rock posits between popularity and integrity - unquestioned in Hyden's essay - may be characteristic of fringe groups anywhere, but indie rock isn't a fringe group. To steal a term from Robert Christgau, it's 'semipopular music': certainly not highbrow or esoteric, but not mainstream the way $300 million blockbusters or multiplatinum big-voiced pop is mainstream. I keep referring in a kind of offhand way to a fragmentation of culture; this is what I mean. There's no longer a universal listening experience like there was briefly in the late 60s, when every bestselling artist seemed important to boot (or maybe that's a utopian fallacy). </p><p>Curiously, the beginning assumption of most unreflective indie rockers is that widespread popular culture is pap, and the assumption itself is common enough to have created an entire alternative popular culture: music joins movies, internet applications, video games (and boutique stores). Niche is everything today, perhaps in part because of population growth - there are enough people in each niche to market to - or perhaps because of the way in which identity has transformed over the last century, from something shared in common to something defined against the common.</p><p>All that said, the second thing overlooked in all this palaver about creative genius and commercial success and cult groups and indie snobs might be the price, not of wealth, but of fame. To go back, as Hazlitt does, to writing: read Fitzgerald's "The Crack-Up" or Lillian Ross' unintentionally damning portrait of a drunk, monosyllabic Hemingway. The problem of wide success, I think - and in all the 159 comments I found not one mention of it - isn't listeners no longer being able to use a certain band name as a surefire pick-up line, or crowded Superdomes, but the toll widespread public recognition and the surreal airtight world of the famous takes on artistic endevour. </p><p>Hyden worries from the perspective of a fan; perhaps a little egotistically, I'm worrying about the artist. Sure, you can snot that they had it coming, that they all want fame - hell, everybody today wants fame more than money; the things people say unprompted when they know cameras are present are unbelievable, and maybe that's the consequence of a culture (cf. Facebook) that trains us to preen in the public eye and pay special attention to appearences (blogs?). </p><p>But I don't think that excuses us. The weight of meaning and expectation we put onto our public artists - writers, painters, filmmakers, actors, musicians - corrodes. People collapse after they make it 'big' for a reason. Entertainers are held to the stage by the press of the crowd.</p><p>These are unformed thoughts. Comments - though I doubt I'll get 159 of them - welcome.</p></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-50606653224973292622007-03-22T17:37:00.000-04:002007-03-24T15:10:50.585-04:00Get Out While You Still Can<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >End Times in the American Republic</span></em><br /><br />Two weeks ago, I was in a bar in the Netherlands drinking a half-and-half mix of Brand beer with a friend of mine from the States; she was out on a semester abroad. At some point during the night, she lit a cigarette and took an emphatic pull of her glass and said, "I'm leaving the country after graduation if I can help it. The entire thing's going to fall apart soon and I don't want to be there when it comes down."<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><div style="text-align: center;">I.<br /></div><br />In an accident of release dates that may be more symptomatic than prophetic, indie rock - that favored musical mode of the young college-educated middle class - has seconded. The Arcade Fire's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Neon-Bible-Arcade-Fire/dp/B000MGUZM0/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0567160-1323129?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1174680992&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Neon Bible</span></a> is paranoid and clanging; when it is hopeful, it is hopeful with the sort of ecstatic despair of revivalist tent camps - praising in the teeth of horror - and no coincidence that the thing was recorded in a 19<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_0">th</span>-century church. <span style="font-style: italic;">They don't know where and they don't when it's <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_1">comin</span>'</span>, Win Butler sings on "Keep the Car Running," and then continues <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_2">plaintively</span>: <span style="font-style: italic;">Oh, when is it coming? </span>There are vague and troubled allusions to torture, names and addresses, black tides rising, bombs that whistle down in the background - this is <span style="font-style: italic;">an age that calls darkness light.<br /><br /></span>An entire track is devoted to <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_3">expatriatism</span>: on "Windowsill," which is flawed but instructive for our purposes, Butler repeats the refrain - <span style="font-style: italic;">I don't want to live in my father's house no more </span>- until the music crests and he can no longer tolerate even oblique metaphor: <span style="font-style: italic;">I don't want to live in America no more!</span><br /><br />Meanwhile, on the first track of <span style="font-style: italic;">Armchair Apocrypha</span>, violinist-turned-cryptic Andrew Bird sings quietly, <span style="font-style: italic;">I feel a premonition that we've got to envision the fiery crash.<br /><br /></span>There is something about the times that seems to say, <span style="font-style: italic;">Surely I come quickly.<br /></span><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;">II.<br /></div><span style="font-style: italic;"><br /></span><span>It may be the feeling of gathering speed - that things are moving at a faster and faster rate, outpacing our own abilities of comprehension, that what Wendell Berry (who I quoted <a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2007/03/are-blogs-flawed-as-medium.html">at length</a> just days ago) called 'the machine of human history' is 'a huge flywheel building speed until finally the force of its whirling will break it into pieces.'<br /><br />Jacques <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_4">Barzun's</span> <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Dawn-Decadence-Western-Cultural-Present/dp/0060928832/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0567160-1323129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174687874&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">From Dawn to Decadence</span></a>, also referenced here (it is a day for retrospection), is almost without a fault lucid, tightly wound, analytic, breathtaking in its compression and the connections made, even if it tends reactionary and is sometimes contestable - but when <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_5">Barzun</span> reaches the century in which he lived and worked for almost every year it lasted, he throws up his hands. The prose becomes indirect, impressionistic, exhausted, and behind it all is something lurking and unclear, like the bottom of a muddy pool: we are reaching the end of something, and the beginning; we are living in a decadent era, where 'decadent' is not a value judgement but a description of an age whose options and ideas have been evolved and refined until exhausted.<br /><br />Jonathan <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_6">Huebner</span>, working from a few endlessly debatable methodologies, concluded in a <a href="http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn7616">study</a> two years ago in July that the per <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_7">capita</span> rate of human innovation peaked a century ago, that <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_8">knowledge</span> has become specialized and arcane, that it takes us years and years longer just to achieve basic intellectual fluency, or to know our disciplines (<span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_9">Barzun</span> puts the trend in small capitals and names it: specialization; there are no more Renaissance men, and even the notion of the educated layperson may be dying). We are, he asserts, coming to a long decline; all of this exponential progress is illusory, a <span style="font-style: italic;">busyness</span>. Emerson wrote that progress is 'only apparent, like workers on a treadmill.' The treadmill runs faster than ever.<br /><br />Even the futurists in their optimism note this speed, but for them the flywheel does not fly apart but transforms itself, spins until it becomes a singularity, an event horizon, beyond which everything is changed; in their rhetoric of <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_10">nanoengineering</span> and cheap energy and instantaneous travel one sees reflected the gleaming walls of the New Jerusalem, the jeweled streets, crystal rivers - '<span style="font-style: italic;">new heaven, new earth</span>.'<br /><br />But all of this seems insufficient - or a little grandiose - to describe the feeling of my friend in that Netherlands bar, or the two expatriates I shared sangria with over playing cards on a rooftop in Granada this Christmas. It's not the world they see ending - though some environmentalists join the Christian right in <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_11">demurring</span> - but American hegemony: in runaway inflation, economic collapse, military defeat, political repression.<br /><br /></span><div style="text-align: center;">III.<br /><div style="text-align: left;"><br /><blockquote>Some say the world will end in fire,<br />Some say in ice.<br />From what I've tasted of desire,<br />I hold with those who favor fire.<br />But if it had to perish twice,<br />I think I know enough of hate<br />To know that for destruction ice<br />Is also great<br />And would suffice.<br /><br /> - Robert Frost (December, 1920)</blockquote>There is in some quarters a feeling that American power has run its course - or that American power as linked to a progress-oriented capitalist/consumerist liberal world order is an 'end of history' as temporary as the <span style="font-style: italic;"><span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_12">pax</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_13">Romana</span></span>. Maybe my privileged friends spouting <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_14">expatriatism</span> are just aping the art world of the 1920s and can afford plane tickets.<br /><br />The world is always ending. As <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_15">Diarmaid</span> <span class="blsp-spelling-error" id="SPELLING_ERROR_16">MacCullouch</span> writes in his learned but quite readable history of <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Reformation-Diarmaid-MacCulloch/dp/014303538X/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-0567160-1323129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174689232&sr=8-1">The Reformation</a>, </span>that great religious convulsion would not have acquired the dimensions it did if all of the Christian Occident - wracked by unknown plague (syphilis) at the fulcrum of a <span class="blsp-spelling-corrected" id="SPELLING_ERROR_17"><span>millennium</span></span>, threatened on every border by Turkish and North African Islamic power - had not been convinced that the Last Days were upon them, that this was the last chance for humanity to build the Kingdom of God on earth and prepare the way. The United States inherited this apocalyptic strain of Protestant thought, which was so compelling because in a very real way it screamed the world as it existed was false, the Pope was the Antichrist, we all had been taken in.<br /><br />And paired with this is the idea that Protestant America is a <span style="font-style: italic;">city on a hill</span>, an expression that has been distended far beyond its original intention as a link to a worldwide community of Protestants across the ocean in Europe. We are an example and an experiment. Our politics are perpetually, somebody has proposed, apocalyptic.<br /><br />The world is always ending - read Jared Diamond's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Societies-Choose-Fail-Succeed/dp/0143036556/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0567160-1323129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174689977&sr=1-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Collapse</span>,</a> which keeps almost suggesting a parallel between us and the Last Days of those that have come before. And what's frightening is that things fall apart so quickly, and at the height of their extravagance and sophistication. Athens (see Victor Davis Hansen's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/War-Like-Other-Athenians-Peloponnesian/dp/0812969707/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/104-0567160-1323129?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1174690240&sr=1-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">A War Like No Other,</span></a> and marvel at his current politics considering) ruined itself on the heels of its Golden Age, its fleet larger than it had ever been, its buildings grander, its power at its apex.<br /><br />But worlds are always ending somewhere, for someone - we all die, after all, and anybody who didn't live to see the world past 1950 or so might have thought it their last moments that it would all end shortly. It's a fluke of birthplace and property that I and my generation of indie-rock listening college peers who groove to The Arcade Fire's end times album haven't yet run into cataclysm ourselves.<br /><br />Tomorrow, having piled all of this up, I'll try to make sense of it.<br /></div></div></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-42035905209047609172007-03-19T10:53:00.000-04:002007-03-19T11:32:11.506-04:00Notebooks Vo: 2<em><span style=";font-family:times new roman;font-size:130%;" >Meetings: Three Characters Observed</span></em><br /><br />1. He's wearing oxford lace-ups in black leather, and black socks, under frayed white pants and a shapeless pullover and a faded denim jacket, holding a legal pad crammed fat with stapled sheaves of paper - a professor, almost certainly, tenured and indifferent now to eccentricities. His wife left him seven years ago. He looks to his graduate students and tenderly unwraps baroque theory, historiography, builds clausal edifices and enunciates semicolons and thinks of himself as above such pedestrian emotions as regret. He shaves only rarely, but with a certain self-consciousness; he has tried and cannot manage a full beard.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />He has a high voice, full lips, curly dark hair hidden underneath a footbaall cap. He affects an interest in professional athletics at cocktail parties, and to his students, pale and hatching into young academics. When they chide him, he clucks, "Not everything in life can be abstract, or intellectualized. You cannot discount the value of the physical, the <i>tactile</i>." He once seduced a student in this manner, a month after his wife left him.<br /><br />He listens now on the subway, indulgently, to his female graduatee student relate to him the story of the man she is seeing, her fears that he is an alcoholic, the time he stilled whiskey-and-soda down her shirt on the sidewalk outside of a bar. He lit a cigarette and tried to give her one by way of apology. She worried he might set her on fire. She is wearing pink Chuck Taylors, which he finds both charming and contemptible, a little child-like for somebody her age, a little twee. She has a guileless lack of style. Her flaws charm him. Her unstable love life charms him. He thinks he cannot afford to get involved with a student, but there is no harm in listening, in being the voice of reason, in working out her problems for her. He chews his fingers in mock consternation. He speaks softly. The more hysterical she becomes, the softer he speaks.<br /><br /><br />2. She butters her toast delicately, like she is holding a paintbrush, and tosses her hair. She leans in while he points out something in the book she has propped on the narrow countertop of the café. She covers her mouth while she chews, pretending to brush away crumbs; her mother once said watching a woman chew was like watching a cow and its cud. While he speaks, she makes sure to look interested, to blink her eyes rapidly, to draw her shoulders back.<br /><br />She is barely aware that she does this. She has forgotten completely her mother saying that it will be expected. She'd decided years before that her mother was a vain, shallow woman, that she had pushed parts of herself into the background for years until the only things left were a bright false smile, an almost imperceptible softness, the faint smell of martines. She'd felt that if she were to tap her mother there would be a hollow sound, that if she pushed too hard her mother might crack into fine shards of manicured glass. She resolved in high school to move away, to buy a shabby green coat, lose her virginity, pierce her naval.<br /><br />She finds, now, no harm in flirting a little. She thinks, <span style="font-style: italic;">wouldn't it be easier to marry a rich man. </span>She has become pretty without realizing it, and later that night she will regard her mother with a new and tempered understanding. She begins to understand the temptations.<br /><br /><br />3. He is exceedingly nervous, young, Vietnamese, in a white buttoon-down with thin stripes and jeans, hair carefully parted, alone and asking for a table for two. He feels as though he is being carried along on rails. He is rushing, his vision telescoped: the table is clear in front of him. The rest of the room recedes.<br /><br />He sits, and forgets to the thank the hostess, and stares straight ahead, feeling as though he is traveling at great speed. He can barely catch a breath. The room to either side is a smear of color and movement. He remembers being little and on his first train, being walked to his seat by his mother, who flirted shamelessly with the conductor and was allowed to see him off, he remembers being left there and feeling as though he was sitting perfectly still and watching the world pull itself away from him. He remembers trying to catch a glimpse of his mother in the crowds and seeing nothing, and only hearing later what had happened.<br /><br />He sists now in the small café chair, waiting for the woman he is to meet, the girl he knew, and feels again like that boy, feels again the world rushing by him, feels again helpless and abandoned by fate. He looks at his watch and gestures brusquely for tea and wonders what she will look like, wonders what he will look like to her.<br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-58566115905887871872007-03-17T13:07:00.000-04:002007-03-19T18:58:17.582-04:00Are Blogs Flawed As A Medium?<span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Part (2)<br /><br /></span>At the risk of performing a perfunctory gloss on a tangled and ongoing debate, I'm directing you (and blogging only as a referer, with a minimum of original critical thought, which makes today's <a href="http://jimmysly.blogspot.com/2007/03/note-on-readership.html">earlier post</a> a self-indictment) to Scott Eric Kaufman's <a href="http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/03/n1_vs_litblogge.html">dissection</a> of the dust-up surrounding <a href="http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2007/02/the_intemperate.html">this</a> article in <a href="http://www.nplusonemag.com/">n+1</a> (link is to an excerpt). An original thought below the fold:<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />The entire debate's peculiar to lit-blogging as a subculture, which makes most of the particulars assume the towering proportions of storm-in-a-teacup, and anybody not in the know will have to work very hard not to be bewildered by some of the audience assumptions.<br /><br />All of which makes me think (but not too hard!) about the fragmentation of culture, once so ostensibly hegemonic and universal, and the way that blogs, with their intersection of public discourse and private conversation, start to make the very notion of some sort of common public sphere impossible.<br /><br />It makes a post like this difficult, since I'm not plugged into a prefab online community of blogrolls and ideological dispositions. Who am I couching this to? The debaters, who are exponentially better informed than I and locked in grudge matches? The limitless uninformed masses who couldn't care less?<br /><br />This isn't (or didn't start to be) a theory blog, and God knows I'm not working on a dissertation, so academia itself seems impossibly esoteric. But restarting as I am requires questioning some basic assumptions, aloud and at length, and that's made even more difficult by the pint of Jameson on the windowsill next to my coffee this morning.<br /><br />(to steal from Kaufman's links again, see Edward Champion's clever - but perhaps self-defeating - prefab <a href="http://www.edrants.com/?p=5653">blog post</a>, which makes me feel cliché all over again).<br /><br />Maybe I'd be better off keeping this to the level of link farming: just read Kaufman - he's put the time and sweat into the roundup, and I found the confluence (two conversations about blogging as a medium! two throwaway lines mocking <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Slate</span>!) interesting enough to take a break from red cabbage and whiskey.<br /><br />For those uninclined to work through storms in teacups, I'll quote from his conclusion, which dovetails (is there no original thought anymore?) with a post I've been working out in my head for some time, and which brings to mind Wendell Berry in his frequently anthologized find-nature essay "An Entrance to the Woods," from his <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Recollected Essays, 1965-1980.</span><br /><br />Here's Berry first:<br /><blockquote>[...] For a solid hour or more I drove sixty or seventy miles an hour, hardly aware of the country I was passing through, because on the freeway one does not have to be. The landscape has been subdued so that one may drive over it at seventy miles per hour without any concession whatsoever to one's whereabouts. One might as well be flying.<br /><br />[...] Our senses, after all, were developed to function at foot speeds, and the transition from foot travel to motor travel, in terms of evolutionary time, has been abrupt. The faster one goes, the more strain there is on the senses, the more they fail to take in, the more confusion they must tolerate or gloss over - and the longer it takes to bring the mind to a stop in the presence of anything.<br /><br />[...] The machine is running now with a speed that produces blindness.</blockquote>With Berry in mind, take a look at <a href="http://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2007/03/n1_vs_litblogge.html">Kaufman</a>:<br /><blockquote>The entire “Intellectual Situation” is a meditation on the relation of speed and technology to the cultivation of thought: <blockquote><p>The true mood of the form is spontaneity, alacrity—the right time to reply to a message is right away. But do that and your life is gone.</p></blockquote><p>As with email, so too with cellphones and blogs. The dearth of analytic vim in <em>any</em> blogging community is not necessarily the fault of the individuals comprising it, but a symptom of the temptations of the genre. It <em>is </em>tempting to write book-chat. It <em>is</em> tempting to turn a blog into group therapy. It <em>is</em> tempting to post the same sort of fluff found in <em>Slate</em>. It <em>is</em> tempting to link to the same YouTube video everyone else has. Unless you consciously fight it, the inertia of generic norms will exert its influence on you ... and your blog’ll be the worse for it. That lit-blogs are singled out speaks to their potential—to the potential of people who are still devoted readers—to bring to their blogging the same spirit of resistance they demonstrate every time they choose to read instead of write an email, use their cellphone, or turn on their Wii.<br /></p></blockquote><p></p>And: is dipping into storms in teacups not my own a waste of time? That is, and a girl in the Art of Nonfiction asserted this three weeks ago: Is there no human common ground? "I don't believe that anything is universal," she said, by way of explanation for disliking Montaigne, who had written, "Every man has within him the entire human condition." If we have nothing in common, why bother to write (or read) at all?<br /><span class="fullpost"><br /><span style="font-size:90;"></span></span></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-71121669886820235332007-03-17T01:04:00.000-04:002007-04-18T21:59:16.197-04:00Form Dictating Function<em>A Note on Readership</em><br /><br />If modernism's still gasping along - and there's enough hysteria over originality, plagiarism, copyright to lend credence - blogs aren't helping. The form is all pastiche - self-reflexive, scrapbooking - and impermanent to boot. Digital text is endlessly malleable. The narrow columns and itinerant readership encourage frequent posts, short length, unfinished and unguarded.<br /><br />The blog (as a medium) practically begs us to combine advertisement and content - whatever we write we shape to preen in front of search engines and feed sifters, to reach out and touch other sources, to direct and redirect the reader and arrest a flitting, promiscuous gaze.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />Cf. the way say, <a href="http://www.slate.com/">Slate Magazine</a> solicits clicks as ends in themselves, and mixes content with solicitation - articles phrased as questions and endlessly repackaged, a revolving header that moves faster than the content changes, strategic hyperlinks.<br /><br />That sentence, by way of contrast, has already gone on too long.<br /><br />And all of this, perhaps, is only a roundabout way to get to intertextuality: <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/">Blog Meridian</a>, who's been kind enough in the past to single out some of the work I've done here, <a href="http://blogmeridian.blogspot.com/2007/03/web-20-web-is-using-us.html#links">fronts</a> a clever video on Web 2.0 by a Kansas State professor of cultural anthropology. It does a good job of dramatizing the radical changes in composition that are accompanying this technology (you could almost call it the last, attenuated phase of moveable type's destruction of the illuminated manuscript and its immoveable, singular, hand-crafted text); I'm not sure I can share its unalloyed optimism at the changes being wrought, though - the music swells triumphal as it promises to sweep away of all that's come before, but that really begs the question.<br /><br />How much does form dictate content? How much does technology shape perception, or social networking alter socialization? How much will blogging change the way we write - the way the cinema has affected juxtaposition, scene setting and cuts in literary fiction?<br /><br /></span><span class="fullpost">The reposted video is sandwiched between a detailed two-part parsing of the identity politics surrounding Barack Obama's candidacy, which makes any clear indictment of blogging as a medium look a little silly. But: the questions stand.</span><br /><span class="fullpost"><br />I have to face a Boston snowstorm on St. Patrick's Day in seven hours; these are best left rhetorical on my end. You readers, hypothetical or not, are welcome to take them up in my stead.<br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-13776362.post-47517016792542686782007-03-16T17:31:00.000-04:002007-04-18T22:01:57.778-04:00Notebooks Vo: 1<em><span style="font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:130%;">The Cost of Silence</span></em><br /><br />Yehuda Amichai writes that a man 'doesn't have seasons enough to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes was wrong about that.'<br /><br />Here, in the twilight, against a windowsill, in the middle of a spring hailstorm, I might take some comfort in this: my long silence here has just been a time for gathering stones.<br /><span class="fullpost"><br />But I can't, of course; I know as well as Henry James that writing is mostly muscle memory, and we've all got to keep up the practice while we still can. The things we leave undone stay that way, and all memories fade. James wrote:<br /><br /><br /></span><span class="fullpost"></span><span class="fullpost"><blockquote><p>I have lost too much by losing, or rather by not having acquired, the note-taking habit. It might be of great profit to me; [...] I ought to endeavor to keep, to a certain extent, a record of passing impressions, of all that comes, that goes, that I see, and feel, and observe. To catch and keep something of life - that's what I mean.<br /></p></blockquote>Writing gains its power by making manifest: not for nothing did God speak the Word. Language makes things so. Thoughts are only feeble impressions, grey smoke, dreams. Writing forces us to unstop our mouths, make ourselves clear, render our ideas intelligible, spell out what otherwise we would tremblingly leave unsaid.<br /><br />We write to be read. 'I can't write without a reader,' John Cheever wrote. 'It's precisely like a kiss - you can't do it alone.' The readership we carry awaiting us in our minds informs how much we explain ourselves, and in what language; it makes us think about whether we're being too obscure or too superficial, keeps us on deadline, worries us into greatness.<br /><br />Nobody writes for themselves. Language, after all, that imperfect and baroque abstraction, only operates so that we might make ourselves understood. It automatically gestures towards a common humanity. Writing isn't for ourselves. It can't be. It's at least partly for what we hold in common, or think we hold.</span><span class="fullpost"> If we were alone in this world we wouldn't need to write, except in notes to aid our memory, rendered in shorthand, organized inscrutably in a manner tailored to our own inner workings.<br /><br /></span><span class="fullpost">All that said: I've been silent here too long, and refusing to document along the way has let me forget most of my best ideas, bottle up and block until the weight of everything I'm trying to keep in mind unwritten chokes me and I cease to be able to surprise myself. <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">Thinking</span> is all well and good, but the thing about <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">writing</span> is that after a few minutes you're taking a mysterious sort of dictation. Thought has nothing to do with it. Muses be damned. To realize the implications of a little sentence you've thoughtlessly spilled is more rewarding than sitting around with pursed lips, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">contemplating</span>, in that showy and half-asleep way. Inspiration happens halfway through; it's not a thunderbolt.<br /><br />Henry James and I both: we've been cowards, or unprofilgate, and we've both agonized over it, the gap in talent and renown notwithstanding. Jacques Barzun writes somewhere in the thick, magisterial, invaluable <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life </span>that the 20th century has irreparably damaged a writer's output; we live too well-connected, surrounded by distraction. The world, as Woodsworth might say, is too much with us. François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand - a man from an earlier time - began his career in travel-writing shipboard on the Atlantic Ocean over a period of months. He wrote volumes. I'd like to meet the person capable of sustaining a single thought in an airplane at cruising altitude.<br /><br />This is all by way of a reintroduction, with more to come. If it seems dense, overthought - didn't I just make clear that's the danger of hiatus? The form can't bear too much weight - is already overburdened - so I'll leave my thoughts here, with a last impression, some months old, caught in one of my notebooks:<br /><br />On a bus at night in the South End. A man boarded - he was shouting at his own reflection in the window, spitting on the floor, the people around him, well trained, staring into the middle distance impassively. The seven or eight youths behind me, who had been joking about gay bars and faggots in a way that was making the well-dressed man in front of me flinch, decided to rile him. They started shouting they were with him, shouted go on, <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">say </span>it - his face relaxed into an expression, he raised his fist in a Black Panther salute and suddenly you could see his life arc for decades, you got a vision of him as a boy, his father, you felt the frame expanding, on the verge of some kind of revelation - he got off the bus, he was pounding on the windows, happy to have made friends. The boys were suddenly uncomfortable. They made 'v' signs, laughed uneasily. He's fuckin <span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">crazy</span>, one said, with too much force. They were glad to get away.<br /><br />I won't unpack this here. I've written enough as it is. More to come.<br /><br /><br /></span></span><span class="fullpost"></span></span><span class="fullpost"><blockquote><span style="FONT-STYLE: italic">A Man In His Life</span><br /><br />A man doesn't have time in his life<br />to have time for everything.<br /><blockquote></blockquote>He doesn't have seasons enough<br />to have a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes<br />Was wrong about that.<br /><br />A man needs to love and hate at the same moment,<br />to laugh and cry with the same eyes,<br />with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,<br />to make love in war and war in love.<br />And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,<br />to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest<br />what history<br />takes years and years to do.<br /><br />A man doesn't have time.<br />When he loses he seeks, when he finds,<br />he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves<br />he begins to forget.<br /><br />And his soul is seasoned, his soul<br />is very professional.<br />Only his body remains forever<br />an amateur. It tries and it misses,<br />gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,<br />drunk and blind in its pleasures<br />and its pains.<br /><br />He will die as figs die in autumn,<br />Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,<br />the leaves growing dry on the ground,<br />the bare branches pointing to the place<br />where there's time for everything.<br /><br />- Yehuda Amichai</blockquote><br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Jim Slighhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10376560599362480193noreply@blogger.com0