Reading (& Drawing) Not Writing
Posted on August 19, 2010
Filed Under Blogging | 2 Comments
I’ve been spending much less time in front of the computer & much more with a book — or a piece of charcoal — in my hands. But I’m beginning to feel the urge to post my little squibs again. In the meantime, I want to note the passing of Bruno S., who has recently become a hero of mine for the way he responded to evil, ignorance, and neglect with a kind of dark joy & courage so quiet one can only hear it in complete silence of the sort that lives between the syllables of old songs.
Outsiders
Posted on July 28, 2010
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A couple of artists I admire died recently: Tuli Kipferberg, musician & raconteur, & John Callahan, cartoonist.
Intermezzi
Posted on July 25, 2010
Filed Under Politics, Reading, Seeing | 1 Comment
I continue my desert studies at William Vollmann University, but I took some time away from the VU campus to read a couple of short books, each of which deals with one’s relation to the Other (though in very different ways), which is also Vollmann’s great theme. Last week, I finished reading my first Slavoj Zizek book, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, having avoided Zizek up to now because he seemed both too prolific and too trendy. Right after finishing the Zizek, I read Susan Sontag’s long essay, Regarding the Pain of Others. In approaching Sontag over the years, I have often found myself repelled by the coldness of her style & her tendency to argue by assertion. Despite my doubts, both these short books accomplished for me what theory / criticism ought to do — that is, both essays helped me sharpen my own thinking and sense of the world.
The first half of First as Tragedy, Then as Farce presents a flyover of post-9/11 politics & culture in the West — it is what I think would have been called a work of political economy before that term went out of fashion with the rise of economics as a science. Zizek is a fluent, even sprightly, writer who can explain difficult concepts clearly and whose point of view can thus come to feel completely natural to the reader, who, if I am at all typical, adopts the author’s assumptions as if they were his own. This is a very effective rhetoric, if that’s what it is — style as rhetoric — but the reader must be on guard so as to not be swept away on a current of enthusiasm, which, admittedly, can be a pleasant experience, especially with a maestro as charismatic as Zizek.
Two big concepts emerge from Zizek’s essay, which is conveniently divided into two parts: 1. An analysis of the ways in which neo-liberalism & late capitalism effectively subvert & incorporate insurgent political movements. Zizek is particularly interested in the way that movements on the political left suffer this fate, but it would be interesting to see how he’d think about the so-called Tea Party movements on the American right, which will almost certainly be absorbed by the neo-liberal Republican Party. The genius of neo-liberalism is its ability to absorb insurgencies & naturalize them, making them safe for domestic consumption, as it were. 2. A thesis about Human Nature in which the capital letters are appropriate. Zizek sets himself up as a champion of “communism” as a mode of life that depends on the assumption that there is a core set of human values that unites all people across any supposed cultural divides. In this, he directly opposes the position of Theory in all its manifestations over the last thirty years, which has held that human nature is a variable construct. In my view, Zizek’s second thesis consists of a great deal of wishful thinking, but perhaps that is because I have been ensnared by theory. In any case, I have a student who, along with a bunch of Dickens and Tolstoy, has just read The Fountainhead this summer: I have recommended Zizek’s book as an antidote.
Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others came along at just the right moment for me. I have been reading William Vollmann’s big book Imperial, about the California county where my mother was born & where I spent a lot of time growing up & looking, too, at the separate volume Vollmann published, under the same title, of his photographs of people and places in Imperial County. Sontag’s book is an attempt to understand the usefulness of images — photographic images in particular. In this late essay, Sontag revises and even reverses her earlier (more aesthetic?) view of photography as a technology of distancing & comes to an understanding of the photograph – particularly the war photograph — as a necessary, if never sufficient, moral document. The second half of this book strikes me as the epitome of what an intellectual discourse looks like: full of passion & doubt.
Imperial by William Vollmann (2)
Posted on July 12, 2010
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I’ve finished Part I of Vollmann’s desert epic & stand in awe of the flexibility and courage of his imagination. The flexibility, I think, is born of desperation & obsession: Vollmann is driven to look at everything about Imperial County (and the geographically and imaginatively much larger entity he calls Imperial), especially his own motives for writing about it and the way writing about it creates an imaginary Imperial; he then worries that the imaginary Imperial cannot do justice to the actuality of the place. All great art calls itself into question, suggests the grounds for its own negation. It is this sort of desperate knowledge of both the power and inadequacy of the imagination that forces Vollmann to bring himself directly into the text in chapters he calls “subdelineations” in order to distinguish them from the more documentary delineations of the other chapters. The courage is both aesthetic & physical. Vollmann dares just about anything in pursuit of the actual, on the page & on the ground. The structure of the book, I think, will be determined — delineated — by the subdelineations, then, where Vollmann brings himself into Imperial & Imperial into himself.
Later: In his second Subdelineation, which comes near the end of Part I, Vollmann presents a long meditation on the difference between fiction and non-fiction & the ability of each to tell the truth. Non-fiction comes out ahead, but not because it is capable in any direct way of presenting the truth, or even, perhaps, a truth. In turning over these ideas, Vollmann actually writes a bit of the novel he might have written had he chosen fiction, then he writes a bit of the novel another character — an INS agent — might have written about the same incident. All this against the background of a sentimental novel from the beginning of the 20th century, set in Imperial, with a heroine named Barbara Worth. For all his hardcore reportorial mojo, Vollmann is throughly pomo.
Wild Lives: Notes for an Essay
Posted on July 3, 2010
Filed Under Birds, Language, Noted, Philosophy | 1 Comment
1. It is gratifying that whaling regulations have not been eased at the recent meeting of the international commission that oversees the “harvest” of marine mammals, but beyond that news & its egregious metaphor, I was fascinated by some of the information about cetaceans in this NY Times article; specifically, I was struck by the way the scientists quoted were defining personhood, if that’s the right term. Dolphins (& presumably whales) are interested in seeing themselves in a mirror, checking out parts of their bodies they can’t ordinarily see. The mirror test is presumed to to demonstrate self-consciousness, fair enough. My terriers will look at themselves in a mirror, but it’s hard to tell whether they see themselves or an image of another dog. They don’t behave as if they are seeing another dog, so perhaps they recognize themselves. Birds will peck at their own image in a mirror & the behavior seems pretty complex. How about fish? I don’t know, but I know some fish are territorial & might react as if another fish were horning in on their territory. I’m not trying to find fault with the mirror test, just noting that it is the human observer who views the animal’s interaction with a mirror & makes a determination. We know what consciousness looks like, or personhood. This is more interesting to me than whether this or that animal reacts to a mirror in a certain way, as interesting as that is.
2. The vocalizations of cetaceans is often compared to music, or song, and somewhat less often (& less directly), to speech. They have tribal dialects, apparently, which suggests language & since they can both learn & teach what they have learned, it appears that it might be something we would recognize as a real language, not just a highly elaborate system of communication. And here we get back to the issue of self-recognition. Language, too, is a mirror. I’m far from expert, but in addition to their vocal communications, don’t at least some species of cetaceans produce & repeat long “symphonic” vocalizations and then work changes on them? If so, this would suggest a sense of the aesthetic in whales & dolphins, though perhaps it is only an elaborate kind of birdsong. [Need further information.]
3. Living in the country, Carole & I take delight in seeing & naming: birds (many species, including jays, woodpeckers, nuthatches, hawks, vultures, ducks, geese, several kinds of finches, bluebirds, thrushes. . .), turtles (painted, snapping), frogs & toads, beavers, skunks, porcupines, deer, and occasionally coyotes & bears. What is the source of our delight? Merely a privilege of the bourgeois, or something deeper?
4. Portrayals of damaged humans, usually children, in fact & fiction: Kasper Hauser, Victor (the Wild Child from 18 c. France; various accounts by Truffaut, T.C. Boyle, etc.), Malcolm (from Marisa Silver’s novel The God of War), Christopher (from The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime). By looking at what these damaged humans possess, as well as what they lack, we highlight the cluster of qualities that allow a person to create & recognize a self. And connected to these accounts, there is the much more abstract set of arguments in Marilynne Robinson’s Absence of Mind that seem to suggest a special place in the universe for human consciousness. Not sure if I can accept the “fine tuning” of physical laws Robinson suggests (but does not assert), but that is not necessary to appreciate her devastating response to “parascientists” like Steven Pinker, Daniel Dennett, and the other reductionists who believe that, because the brain is a physical organ, mind & consciousness are epiphenomena, easily dismissed as ontologically inferior the the various tissues and juices of the brain.
5. Mind as extension in the Cartesian sense. Richard P. Bentall’s Madness Explained: Psychosis and Human Nature argues persuasively that “madness” is not one thing and is not separated by a bright line from other “normal” states of mind; in this vein, he sees mental complaints rather than a discrete set of mental illnesses that can be assigned a particular diagnosis. He also brings forward an impressive amount of evidence that strongly suggests mental illness is a bio-social phenomenon.
Further thoughts a couple of days later: 1. Yesterday evening I was watching Jett, our seven year old Jack Russell as he stood on the deck looking down the road toward the river. There were some kids swimming down there & the other two dogs had been barking in that direction, but Jett was focused, his mouth a little open, his nose moving to sense the air almost as a human would feel a piece of fabric to get the sense of it. The other two dogs were excited, but he was calm, completely self-possessed. I’ve watched all the dogs over the years of course & each has his/her ways of focusing on the world & at the same time being themselves. In fact those two things go together — focusing intently on the world and being an animal self. This goes beyond Santayana’s notion of “animal faith,” which is a kind of confidence that the world will be, perhaps roughly, supportive of our being. For the philosopher, “animal faith” is a common ground for animals & humans, something we humans share with animals but also then surpass in all the usually enumerated ways: reason, language, technology & so on.
2.Over the years I’ve had many encounters with animals that have gone beyond mere observation into something more profound and, I believe, reciprocal, though I don’t want to sentimentalize the notion of reciprocity– I understand that the heron I saw 25 years ago on an estuary near the Pacific “understood” our encounter in the same way I understood it, but the bird did look back at me and allowed me to come quite close & was clearly conscious of me. Wild animals are one thing & domesticated animals another. I freely admit to sentimentalizing our dogs, but I also spend a good deal of time just watching them, trying to understand something about the way they understand the world. Their sensory organs filter the world for them in a way different from mine, of course, but there is enough overlap — we’re all mammals – that we can make sense of each others’ sensory worlds. Also, we share a social world of complex personal interactions that allow us to communicate our sense of the world. And of course we observe each other in action and draw conclusions, seeing the world, in imaginative reconstruction, “through each others’ eyes.”
3.So what kind of cross-species identification does it take to get on a jet ski in the Antarctic Ocean to attack a Japanese whaling vessel & through acid at its crew?
Fugitive
Posted on June 28, 2010
Filed Under Personal, Politics | 3 Comments
I’m about 90% certain I shared a house with this guy in Seattle in 1971. The guy I knew was calling himself Blake (not Dwight) Armstrong & was a good guitar player. He introduced me to some of the old Seattle Wobblies & seemed to know a lot about the Weather Underground, too. (I remember him talking briefly, once, about “self-criticism sessions.” Clearly, he was too much an anarchist to go in for that sort of Maoist groupthink. Liked red wine & marijuana, but then we all did. The photo looks a lot like the person I knew, but I could be wrong. The juice cart / deli detail in the story also makes a connection — my roommate was into health foods long before they became a counter-culture staple. We got along pretty well: played some tennis at the park near the house, hung out a bit, but it was pretty clear he considered me hopelessly bourgeois — loaned me a copy of Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man, still an important book in my view. And I wonder what ever happened to Bruce Altman, a mad musician who also shared that house and later, after I was married, slept on my couch for three weeks before I helped him commit himself to an inpatient psychiatric facility. He’d been picking up secret messages from the radio late at night informing him about the impending revolution. Madness picks up the spirit of the times, I guess. My own madnesses were aesthetic & sexual; in other words, I was hopelessly bourgeois. They were friends of my youth & I miss them.
Imperial by William Vollmann (1)
Posted on June 26, 2010
Filed Under Madness, Personal, Reading | 1 Comment
I think I need to keep a journal of my reading of this book. It is that big a world. I’ve reached page 108, near the end of a chapter Vollmann calls “Subdelineations: Lovescapes (2001),” the first of several chapter titles that begin with the word subdelineations that appear to be more personal in nature than the other chapters that, so far, have functioned, sometimes literally, as delineations of Imperial (the book) & of Imperial County, an arid place in California. The book is both an attempt at knowledge and even understanding of this particular place as well as an admission of the impossibility of anything like the complete knowledge of a place, which would have to be, Vollmann notes, the sum total of all the people who have looked at it or lived in it however long or briefly. This first subdelineation is about the breakup of a love affair: Vollmann tells the reader that his lover of many years has left him. “I just can’t take this anymore,” she says, but we never know what this consists of. The author, wisely, I think, doesn’t say. Vollmann probably doesn’t know either; or he both knows and doesn’t know. What he does know is how it makes him feel and that is what this chapter is about. In order to understand Imperial (To italicize or not? County in California or book?), the reader must understand the author’s life in the place and his life in the book. It takes courage to write this way. This particular chapter is rawly emotional, but that’s only part of what I mean; it take aesthetic courage to believe so throughly in the inclusive principle of literary composition that you include what happened to you as you wrote the book. It’s impossible of course because it leads to an endless recursion, which is one definition of madness. Vollmann courts madness, but is one of the lucky few who are saved by the demands and strictures of his art. I like Vollmann. I admire his impulse toward the exhaustive. Reminds me a little of Norman Mailer, but without Mailer’s brittle machismo.
The Salton Sea
Posted on June 25, 2010
Filed Under Noted, Personal, Seeing | 1 Comment
I mentioned the Salton Sea in my previous post about Marisa Silver’s novel and I’ve just run across a documentary about the sea, Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, produced and directed by Chris Metzler and Jeff Springer and narrated by John Waters. It is not a particularly innovative piece of documentary film making, but it presents a portrait of the place and its people that may be of interest even to people who haven’t been there. There is a political undertone having to do with the allocation of water from the Colorado River, but the film doesn’t do much more than mention it. I’ve also begun reading William Vollmann’s massive study, Imperial, which undertakes an exhaustive description of its eponymous California county, in which the Salton Sea figures prominently. Vollman’s 1000 page book was published with a companion volume of the author’s photographs, which I have also now got on hand. Going back to my roots, you might say — however parched and salt-encrusted they may be. Some people find Vollmann’s meandering prose irritating, but so far I am charmed by it. Give me another six or seven hundered pages & we’ll see!
The God of War by Marisa Silver
Posted on June 24, 2010
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I bought this novel because it is set very near to places I grew up in Southern California. Specifically, the novel is set in Bombay Beach, next to the Salton Sea in Imperial County, California. The book catches the desolation of the place and of the people who live there in language of Sopheclean directness. My grandfather lived in the Imperial Valley from around 1900 until his death at 94 about thirty years ago & I spent many school vacations baking in the 100 degree heat. No landscape moves me as much as that of western Imperial County, with its bare mountains of tumbled rock descending to the sandy floor of the valley. It is surely among the poorest counties in the state, same as the one I live in now, in Northern New York — both are far from the center, affording people greater freedom (of a certain kind) as well as greater risks than wealthier, more settled places nearer the capitals. The greatest risk, perhaps, is loneliness.
Silver’s novel demonstrates what can be accomplished with the basic materials of realist narrative and style. The story is recounted by Ares, now an adult but recalling events that occurred when he was twelve. The plot is rigorously chronological and the prose limpid and without a hint of authorial narcissism. Ares and his younger half-brother Malcolm, who is severely autistic, live with their single mother in a trailer in Bombay Beach, on the Salton Sea. Laurel, the boys’ mother, has fled the pieties and restraints of a Midwestern childhood and come to rest in the desolation of Imperial County. The novel’s plot is too delicate a machine to summarize, but from the opening pages it is apparent that some terrible event will divide the characters’ lives into a stark before and an after. If the heroes of the Greek theater were doomed by the capricious but implacable decrees of the Gods, the ordinary people in this story are propelled toward their fates by the implacability of mere chance. But Ares, the god of war, discovers comes to rest in the strength bestowed by integrity — his mother’s, his brother’s, and his own.
The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard To Master
Posted on June 23, 2010
Filed Under Personal | 2 Comments
A friend from long ago posted some pictures of me & others (circa 1975) on Facebook recently that really, as they say, brought the memories flooding back. For many reasons — some of which I’m aware of & some probably not — I have been the sort of person who leaves people behind, a trait I have often regretted, but never managed to change. Perhaps I have been too selfish to exert the effort to maintain friendship across time & space. Perhaps I have wanted to preserve my memories without the complexities of present time. An only child, I have always tended to be secretive & emotionally distant, I think. The internet, though, has provided something I never could have expected, putting me back in touch with people going back to when I was 14 years old. Here is a picture with Mady Lund, taken by Jim Cervantes in 1976 — it captures an era & for me at least a whole universe of feeling.
