The Poetry Foundation website has recently posted a new interview with poet Gary Snyder in which he discusses crosscultural influences in Western and East Asian poetry. (The interview also presents links to several of Snyder’s poems.)
At one point, the interviewer suggests that there might be similarities between the process of writing a poem and working on a Zen koan. Snyder argues that there’s a key difference:
The intention of a koan is to make people who are bright in an ordinary way, or ordinary people who are bright in an odd way, work harder and go further into themselves. The language presents an opportunity to perceive a metaphor that calls one not to “thought” but to work. Work is performance. Performance is embodiment, and not subject to ordinary rational analysis—it must spring forth freely and spontaneously, as does life for most working people, who are always dealing with the immediate. That’s one kind of koan. So in a way we’re not talking about “language,” we’re talking about the theater of life.
Poetry, Snyder seems to be arguing, can serve as a means for reaching greater understanding through language’s power to order thought into comprehensibility. But koans, he says, use language to create an immediate transformative experience, something less like language and more deeply connected to the immediacy of life. I know far too little about koans or Rinzai Zen Buddhism to offer thoughts on Snyder’s sense of how koans work. But I’m curious about the other side of the equation here: is there any reason why the experience of reading or writing poetry couldn’t also create a non-rational, transformative effect—an understanding that relies not on rational comprehension of the poem’s language, but rather on the emotional and intellectual experience of encountering a poem on the page?
It seems to me that much of the power of poetry—and of art in general—lies in realms beyond rational understanding. Rhymes, assonances, and alliterations can sometimes feel significant in ways you’d be hard pressed to explain in rational terms; and you can sometimes scan the meter of a line without saying very much of importance about the ways in which its rhythm shapes your understanding of a poem’s meaning. Music works the same way: a song might be powerful in part because of its message, but much of its emotional and experiential force would seem to come from the felt experience of its musical structures and sounds.
A related question: what exactly is the purpose of a poem or a song? Most do lend themselves to some kind of rational understanding—but is that what they’re for? So much of the enjoyment of art is experiential, rather than rational, and so I wonder if meaning in poetry (or music, or any other kind of artistic expression) is ultimately secondary to the felt experience of reading (or listening, viewing, etc.).
John Wray has written a very long NY Times piece on what he views as an important trend in indie rock: the computer-and-sampler-aided solo performer, along the lines of Final Fantasy, Panda Bear, and St. Vincent. Personally, I’m suspicious of any argument that claims to see a unifying or centrally important direction in indie music these days: tastes and practices are far too fragmented and divergent for any over-arching trend to emerge. Critical attempts at canon-making seem very much out of place in a musical culture that is so fundamentally de-centered.
That said, I do think Wray is on to something by calling attention to Panda Bear. If any active band actually is casting a relatively long shadow of influence over other indie musicians, it’s Animal Collective (of which Panda Bear is a member). In handful of years since Animal Collective came on the scene, there’s been a sudden preponderance of indie rock records employing naturalistic imagery, off-kilter rhythms, drum-circle percussion, and vocals mixing sweet singing with sharp shouting outbursts. (One recent example: the much-buzzed-about Dodos—who aren’t half-bad, but definitely need to work on shaking off their influences.) Of course, there are also a far greater number of indie rock bands who aren’t doing anything of the sort—the genre has many leaders and many followers, and no stylistic center of gravity. But clearly other bands have been listening to Animal Collective, and have been impressed by what they’ve heard.
I’ve been impressed, too. For me, Animal Collective stands out in contemporary indie music on the combined strength of their songcraft, musicianship, and inventiveness. The band does not rely on typical indie tactics like collage artistry or crate-digging irony: you can point to a Beach Boys harmony here, a reggae-like melodic turn there, but doing so will help you very little in describing the band’s music. And though they pay an unusual amount of attention to the creation of strange (and sometimes unidentifiable) sounds, the band never sacrifices a tune for the sake of novelty in arrangement. Even their weirdest synth stabs and watery gurgles tend to serve a clear purpose in service of the songs: they both buffet and batter against the band’s often sweetly gorgeous melodies; they help establish the oddball rhythms, and also tug against them, and serve as points of transition for sometimes sudden and dramatic musical transformations.
Animal Collective’s latest release, the very brief between-albums EP Water Curses, has more than its share of strange beauty and surprising moments; closing track “Seal Eyes” is particularly striking, with its broken-down piano and sampler-altered vocals, which seem to both float and wobble, their exact shape and dimensions never quite discernible. Nothing on the has the weight and heft of the best material on Strawberry Jams or Feels, but that’s OK—Water Curses is enjoyable on its own small terms, and seems to exist mostly as a new lens for looking at the sound of their previous record before the band moves on to whatever they might do next.
Tom Waits has posted a tremendously entertaining (if only occasionally informative) interview with himself on the Anti website. A couple of highlights:
Q: What are some unusual things that have been left behind in a cloakroom?
A: Well, Winston Churchill was born in a ladies cloakroom and was one sixteenth Iroquois.
…and:
Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Leona Helmsley’s dog made 12 million last year… and Dean McLaine, a farmer in Ohio made $30,000. It’s just a gigantic version of the madness that grows in every one of our brains. We are monkeys with money and guns.
The whole thing is very much worth reading.
Say somebody offers you a job at a decent wage—enough to support yourself and your family in reasonable comfort, but not so much that you’ll be able to buy the latest designer fashions or consumer electronics with any regularity. Your neighbors will have newer cars and flashier toys—but on the other hand, your boss will only expect you to work thirty hours a week. You won’t be rolling in cash, but you will have lots of time to spend with your friends and family, and to pursue whatever hobbies or pleasures might strike your fancy. What do you think? Would you take the deal?
The United States was essentially faced with this same choice in the 1930s, and decided in favor of money over leisure—of the power to buy more over the freedom do more. As Jeffrey Kaplan points out in his article The Gospel of Consumption (in the May/June issue of Orion Magazine), this wasn’t an inevitability. In 1933, a bill was proposed in Congress that would have mandated a thirty-hour work week for all Americans. The fact that the idea of a thirty hour work week now seems incredible, like some kind of foolish impossibility or wild fantasy, suggests just how profoundly the logic underlying the rival the forty-hour week proposal has shaped the contemporary American mindset about work. In the end, FDR put his weight behind the forty-hour work week idea under pressure from business interests, who saw it as a path to continued economic growth (and also for ever-greater profits for themselves). The average worker would be better off, the argument went, with the ability to earn a higher wage, and thus also the ability to buy more of the consumer products of a modern lifestyle. And further, people who work harder and longer would be able to spend more, and that consumer spending would then drive growth.
But Kaplan argues that American workers might have had a better choice available to them. As an example, he tells the story of the well-known Kellogg cereal corporation, which established a six-hour workday for all of its employees in 1930—a system which would remain in place for at least some workers all the way up to the 1980s. The management at Kellogg felt that shorter shifts would make workers more efficient—but they also wanted to be able to provide more jobs in their community, and strongly believed that workers would have better lives if they had more free time. Kaplan quotes a historian on the company’s motivation:
They hoped to show that the “free exchange of goods, services, and labor in the free market would not have to mean mindless consumerism or eternal exploitation of people and natural resources.” Instead “workers would be liberated by increasingly higher wages and shorter hours for the final freedom promised by the Declaration of Independence—the pursuit of happiness.”
According to Kaplan, most of the Kellogg workers were, indeed, happier with the thirty-hour week—and in fact many of them resisted offers from Kellogg to switch to eight-hour shifts at higher pay for decades, claiming that they’d rather have the time than the money. The lure of “mindless consumerism” was less powerful for them than the prospect of having greater freedom to pursue happiness through non-material means.
Personally, I like the idea of the thirty-hour week a great deal—or at least of having the freedom to pursue whatever it is that makes you happy while still earning enough money to stay reasonably well fed and sheltered. Once you move beyond the level of economic comfort and security, it doesn’t seem likely to me that having more money and buying more things is likely to make you substantially happier. But all the same, I find it hard to imagine how the United States could turn back from the forty-hour work week now: more than seventy years later, a very large part of American culture and economy is based on the idea of working hard and long in order to be able to finance ever-higher levels of consumer spending. No doubt there’s room for some persistent and/or lucky individuals to carve out spaces in which they do not have to buy into this particular order of work and life—but it’s hard to imagine how a broader systemic change in this area might come about anytime soon.
Set in 1983—just as the English skinhead youth subculture was losing sight of its working-class, Jamaican-influenced origins and descending into anti-immigrant sentiment, racism, and violence—Shane Meadows’ 2006 film This Is England suggests that the skinheads’ hatred was fueled not only by nationalism and xenophobia, but also by the psychological wounds afflicted by poverty, political powerlessness, and family abuse. The movie follows Shaun (played ably and movingly by Thomas Turgoose, who would have been roughly 13 when the film was shot, but who looks even younger on screen), a poor boy whose father was killed in the Falklands, as he finds friends among a group of amiable, non-racist teenage skinheads, and then later falls under the sway of Combo (played by Stephen Graham), an older, unstable, and dangerous skinhead of the racist/nationalist variety.
Shaun is the film’s emotional heart, and he’s a very sympathetic figure: it’s easy to feel for him as he grieves for his father and struggles to find friends who’ll accept him despite his poverty. But it’s in the character of Combo where the film’s underlying ideas find their expression: Graham plays him convincingly as a wounded, disaffected young man, who, furious at his own poverty and lack of opportunity, mistakingly directs his anger toward immigrants, rather than toward the government policies and broader economic circumstances that are the actual sources of his problems. But Combo is also the son of an abusive father—and it’s extremely revealing when he can’t bear to hear Milky (the lone black member of Shaun’s circle of skinhead friends, played by Andrew Shim) talk about the happy (if poor) life led by the many members of his Jamaican immigrant family. Combo presents a facade of toughness—and is violent indeed—but he’s also an emotional wreck, damaged by his childhood and heartbroken over what he sees as a betrayal by a young woman who he’d dreamed about throughout his entire time in prison. Meadows shows us the pain that shaped Combo into the confused and monstrous man he’s become—and because of this, we fear for fatherless Shaun, who’s particularly susceptible to Combo’s arguments and charisma, given his own poverty, naiveté, and pain.
In an age of mass-produced, market-tested media products, the word “entertainment” has gained a heavily negative connotation among many serious devotees of the arts. Literature, for example, is expected to be well-crafted, edifying, moving, sophisticated, profound, and so on—whereas mere crass entertainment is to be left to the reality TV shows and mass market paperbacks. Or such is Michael Chabon‘s contention in a recent piece in the LA Times.
Of course, we’re now in an era in which academics hold conferences on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and rock n’ roll is treated with a studious reverence that would make Theodor Adorno turn over in his grave. Fans of highbrow cultural products are increasingly likely to also dig comic books, television shows, and gossipy blogs. And the walls between independent and mainstream have also become increasingly porous: Chabon himself publishes with both a conventional corporate house and also with McSweeney’s.
So, I think Chabon is more closely describing an attitude of generations recently past. But: he does all the same do a very good job of articulating some of the underlying reasons why the kids these days have mostly stopped worrying and learned to love entertainment.
Most notably: Chabon does a good job of unpacking exactly why people might turn up their noses at entertainment. He points out that there’s a kind of guilt-by-association here: because the mainstream entertainment industry produces seemingly infinite numbers of trashy, exploitative reality shows for every rare masterpiece like The Wire, it’s hard for us not to be suspicious of the thrill of pleasure, when we’ve become so accustomed to experiencing it only in debased, degraded, hollowed-out forms. And though Chabon doesn’t mention this, I think it might also be the case (for Americans, at least) that there’s still some lingering cultural Puritanism in operation here: we just can’t quite get over the sense that there’s something bad about enjoying ourselves. And then on top of that there’s some American capitalistic pragmatism, too: if we’re not working, we’re wasting our time, and the pleasure of entertainment sure doesn’t feel like work.
Chabon doesn’t explicitly mention the fact that consuming highbrow cultural products often bears some relationship to class and status: that there might be some sociopolitical underpinnings to why some folks gravitate toward NASCAR and others to Proust. That said, I don’t think there’s anybody out there who actually reads all 1.5 million words of À la recherche du temps perdu solely for the sake of impressing the neighbors. (If that’s their only intention, they’ll just buy the fanciest leatherbound edition they can find and leave it untouched on the shelves.) Education, status, class, and past experience no doubt all play roles in shaping our tastes—but in all cases, pleasure is a big part of what all of us are after. Alluding to Kafka’s famous saying (“A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul”), Chabon writes:
But in the end — here’s my point — it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.
We’re always going after pleasure and entertainment in art: we just sometimes define those terms too narrowly. Chabon explains this as a reaction to the cheapening, deadening effects of mass produced culture; I’d say that’s part of it, and part of it you can blame on class and the Puritans. But in any case: this idea—that the experience of art should be pleasurable, period, regardless of its lowbrow or highbrow origin—is exactly why most younger readers and viewers don’t generally lose much sleep over the debate Chabon wrestles with here. And it also no doubt at least in part explains Chabon’s great popularity with the McSweeney’s set, and with readers in their 20s: his books are very sophisticated and literary, and give off many highbrow signals, but they’re also unabashedly entertaining, and frequently take on themes, characters, settings, and situations (comic books, detectives, etc.) that in years past might have been excluded from highbrow literature. So: there’s nothing in Chabon’s argument here that I disagree with—but the battle being fought here has already been won.
Harper’s has recently reprinted an excerpt from a commencement speech given by novelist Marilynne Robinson at Amherst last year. The full text of an essay based on the speech is available via the Amherst website, and is likely to be of particular interest to those of you who are Knox or Grinnell alums. (Thanks to Maud Newton for the link.)
In the essay, Robinson discusses the radical roots of Knox, Grinnell, Oberlin, and other small Midwestern liberal arts schools, and contrasts their original progressivism, egalitarianism, and commitment to a broad-based learning with today’s general trend toward strictly pragmatic and utilitarian education. Robinson writes that the founders of those schools would be “tearing their beards” to learn of the present-day pressure on colleges and universities to focus on producing good workers and immediately obvious economic value, rather than well-rounded, liberally educated thinkers and scholars. Of the colleges’ founders, Robinson writes:
They would have known from their own experience what kind of world results from the subordination of all other considerations to a utilitarian economics. They were not prudent, but profligate—pouring out the best treasures of learning in swamps and mudholes (their language) in a general project of liberation from which we all would have benefited more if we had simply been generous enough to remember it.
Robinson is moved by the idea of 19th-century Yale Divinity School graduates leaving the comforts of the East in order to offer a liberal education to whoever might want it in the unsettled West. And she’s also impressed by the Midwestern colleges’ early record of achievement: she cites the fact that some of them admitted blacks and women on an equal basis with white men well before the Civil War, and offers the Lincoln-Douglas debate held at Knox as exemplary of the spirit of serious and egalitarian inquiry fostered by progressive liberal arts education at its best. But she also clearly fears that this spirit is all but lost in contemporary America, a casualty of history and narrowly pragmatic mindsets.
Environmental historian Donald Worster’s Dust Bowl points the finger for the agricultural, environmental, and economic disaster on the Great Plains in the 1930s unambiguously in one direction:
[The Dust Bowl] came about because the expansionary energy of the United States had finally encountered a volatile, marginal land, destroying the delicate balance that evolved there….What brought [farmers] to the region was a social system, a set of values, an economic order. There is no word that so fully sums up those elements as “capitalism.”
Worster doesn’t dispute the commonly-held idea that the heavy use of new industrialized farming methods and technologies was the immediate cause of the Dust Bowl’s erosion, crop failures, dust storms, and rapid desertification. But he argues that the unsustainable agricultural practices of the era were reflective of a social order that encouraged capitalistic exploitation without limit:
Americans blazed their way across a richly endowed continent with a ruthless, devastating efficiency unmatched by any people anywhere. When the white men came to the plains, they talked expansively of “busting” and “breaking” the land. And that is exactly what they did. Some environmental catastrophes are nature’s work; others are the slowly accumulating effects of ignorance or poverty. The Dust Bowl, in contrast, was the inevitable outcome of a culture that deliberately, self-consciously, set itself that task of dominating and exploiting the land for all it was worth.
Worster argues that the farmers of the Great Plains were culturally capable of viewing the land in only one way: as a source of capital, a means for the creation of wealth, an asset to be exploited to its fullest potential for generating profit. This encouraged farmers to use methods and technologies that simply weren’t sustainable in the delicate and vulnerable ecology of the Great Plains, and the inevitable result was ecological disaster. Capitalism requires the assumption that wealth and growth are potentially limitless—but in reality, the land very definitely does have its limits in terms of the wealth it can provide, and in the Great Plains, those limits were reached in the 1930s after only a few decades of intensive industrialized agriculture.
I think Worster sometimes treats the farmers of the Great Plains a bit unfairly—he emphasizes the tragedy of their poverty when it supports his case for the economic disaster that followed the ecological crisis that was the Dust Bowl, but he also takes them to task for their small-mindedness and lack of foresight even in those cases in which farmers exploited the land only because doing so was entirely necessary if they hoped to achieve even the barest subsistence living. A Depression dirt farmer simply wasn’t likely to have a wide range of economic choices available to him—and no doubt the idea of trying to work the land for all it was worth held a great deal of appeal when anything less was likely to leave your family hungry. And further, it was no doubt far easier for Worster to apply an ecological consciousness to the situation when he was writing in 1979 than it would have been for an uneducated farmer to do so decades before the word or idea of “ecology” had entered the popular consciousness at all.
That said, I think Worster is entirely correct that unfettered capitalistic exploitation of this sort will inevitably result in ecological disaster. We might not have known better during the 1930s, but in 2008, we surely ought to be able to recognize the fact that land cannot be exploited without limit. Writing in 1979, Worster wasn’t at all convinced that we’d learned the lesson of the Dust Bowl. Farmers have altered or abandoned some of the most dangerous practices of pre-Dust Bowl farming—but in some cases, the replacement methods and technologies have been perhaps even more dangerous. The Great Plains are no longer beset by mammoth dust storms (or at least not very often), but they’re only producing high crop yields and high profits due to the expanded use of poisonous, polluting pesticides, and via practices like the draining of irreplaceable aquifers and watersheds in order to irrigate places that would otherwise be too dry for commercial agriculture. It’s only a matter of time before the watersheds run dry—and maybe we’ll find another technology to replace them, but it will only buy us time before the next ecological disaster strikes.
The solution to the problem is to approach agriculture with an ecological mindset: with sensitivity to the nature of the land, and to the limits of its resources, and with the aim of perpetuating local ecological systems instead of destroying them through unrestrained exploitation. But of course there’s just as much pressure now—if not a great deal more—than there was during the Great Depression to ignore ecological complexities in favor of extreme and unsustainable agricultural production. Then as now, there’s an awful lot of money to be made by ignoring ecological realities and pretending that we’ll always be able to find new resources to exploit, or another technological band-aid to keep the depleted and devastated land producing for one more season.
Elaine Dundy‘s The Dud Avocado is a sharply-observed, disarmingly frank, and extremely funny first novel about a young American woman bumming around Paris on her wealthy uncle’s dime. Originally published in 1958, the book was reissued last year as a part of the fine NYRB classics series, which specializes in reissues of underappreciated books and translations. (Sadly, Elaine Dundy passed away just a few days ago. See the NYRB Classics blog for more information, and links to tributes and an obituary.)
The Dud Avocado succeeds primarily because of the compelling voice of its young first-person narrator, Sally Jay Gorce, an aspiring actress who’s doing her best to get everything she can out of the freedom her uncle’s generosity has provided her. Sally’s narration is energetic, witty, and judgmental: she’s always attempting to assess and categorize every person she meets, wanting to find a way to define them, to figure out exactly who they are. Again and again in the book, Dundy gives us a hilarious summary judgment in Sally’s voice, and then more often then not later reveals that the person in question can’t be so easily categorized. One of the book’s central (and I think most interesting) ideas is that the process of coming of age involves learning to recognize that people generally aren’t who they might at first seem—that the reality of their lives is often much more complicated than whatever image they might be trying to project. There’s a sense in the book that Sally is just too inexperienced, too limited in her youthful and sheltered American perspective, to know enough to accurately the size people up. But at the same time, Dundy seems to suggest that as an adult, you must learn this skill: that sometimes your fortune or even your life may depend on making the right judgments about the people you meet.
It’s 2008, folks. So, that means David Bowie’s soul homage Young Americans is now thirty-three years old; Elvis Costello’s R&B tribute Get Happy! is twenty-eight; Dusty in Memphis is very nearly forty. At this point, the idea of the English soul revival record is so well-established as to be a complete cliche, and any fresh attempt should rightly be met with considerable suspicion. Amy Winehouse has taken a stab at it recently, and though her Back to Black isn’t bad, it definitely suffers in comparison to its classic English soul predecessors. (It also doesn’t hold a candle to the superb work her American backing band, the Dap-Kings, has done under the leadership of Brooklyn’s extraordinary funk and soul traditionalist Sharon Jones.)
But: what to make of Jim, the new retro soul album from Jamie Lidell? What on earth could be the point of yet another English performer making a soul record in 2008? But after I started listening to Jim, that kind of question quickly came to seem trivial and unimportant. Lidell’s record is infectious, joyful, brilliantly produced, and disarmingly sincere. It’s more than good enough, in fact, to eliminate any need for theoretical justification.
Jim‘s opener “Another Day” is a masterpiece— it would make a worthy submission for a doctoral thesis on soul composition and arrangement. But despite its studied perfection, it’s very far from an empty genre exercise: instead, it’s a warm, sweet love song, in which Lidell delivers an ebullient vocal imbued with a sense of hopeful, yearning happiness. He sounds like a man transformed: “Another day, another way for me to / Open up to you,” he sings, with the newfound conviction of a man who’s just figured out how to turn his life around. (In a Pitchfork review, Philip Sherburne points out that the song could just as likely be about art as love: it could be addressed to his audience as a kind of explanation of his shift from the noise and experimentation of his previous work and toward something simpler, and perhaps closer to his own heart). With “Another Day,” Lidell could have coasted on the strength of chorus alone—it has an easygoing, deeply appealing hook, and it’s sunny, natural, and sincere—but the song is also enriched by the great care given to all the details of its arrangement. The production feels clean, clear, and uncluttered, despite the fact that there’s always a great deal going on—including gospel-tinged backing vocals; horns that soothe, drive, and punctuate all at once; and the ingeniously unexpected (but perfectly fitting) combination of handclaps and birdsong.
“Another Day” is a hard act to follow, but it’s far from the only gem on Jim, and the whole record demonstrates both a deep reverence for its source material and an uncanny ability to faithfully reproduce genre nuances without ever descending into one-dimensional imitation or pastiche. The piano in “Wait for Me” has a Motown bounce, but the chorus, with its Steve Cropper-style fills, owes more to the Stax Records sound. “Out of My System” channels Stevie Wonder and the Supremes while also hinting at an Sam and Dave shout-and-stomp number, and meanwhile finds room to fit in surprising touches like synth washes, flanged guitar, and chiming vibes. “All I Want to Do” is a flat-out soul ballad, and “Green Light” aims at an Al Green kind of slow-burning sensuousness, and gets deliciously close.
Often genre exercise records are terribly boring, and just make you wish you were listening to the real thing instead. But Jim is a joy all on its own, and the fact that it reminds me of just how much I love all those old soul records is only icing on the cake.
Three Percent has posted a link to a thoughtful and provocative essay by Quarterly Conversation editor (and blogger) Scott Esposito, who uses the recent American publishing success of Roberto Bolaño to raise questions about how the lack of context can make it difficult for American readers to fully appreciate and understand the work of a foreign literary star in translation.
Esposito is a great admirer of Bolaño, and has been happy to see all the acclaim that his work has recently enjoyed. But at the same time, he worries that American readers are unlikely to be well-equipped to place Bolaño’s work in context, especially given the fact that so very little of the writings of his contemporaries have been made available in English for an American audience.
I loved The Savage Detectives myself—I was floored by the way that Bolaño managed to create dozens of distinctive, memorable, and utterly convincing first-person narrators, whose widely varied voices and stories together create a grand polyphonic whole. The novel struck me as infinitely rich, and worth returning to again and again in order to try to tease out a few more of its marvels. But I don’t doubt for a moment that Esposito is right: I’m sure that my reading of the novel was handicapped by my scanty knowledge of Latin American literature. I perfectly match Esposito’s description of a typical American Bolaño reader, who’s read a smattering of Borges and Marquez, but not much else. I’ve been striving this year to try to read more international fiction, and especially fiction in translation—does anybody out there have any suggestions? I’d particularly like to hear recommendations for relatively contemporary Latin American literature, so I can work myself up for the forthcoming release of the English translation of Bolaño’s 2666.
In a recent article, “Is There a Real Woman in this Multiplex?” NY Times critic Manohla Dargis points out the decided absence of both female filmmakers and substantial roles for women among this summer’s crop of would-be blockbusters. Her tone is exasperated, but also utterly unsurprised, and slightly resigned:
In 2008, when a white woman and a black man are running for president and attracting unprecedented numbers of voters partly because they are giving a face to the wildly under-represented, you might think that Hollywood would get a clue.
Nah.
Dargis notes that it’s not only big action movies aimed at adolescent boys that suffer from this problem: last year’s best art films, There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, both portray worlds that are nearly entirely devoid of women. Further, she makes the sharp observation that the current Judd Apatow comedy factory has presented male leads who are softer and more sensitive than has been typical of the characters in the raunch comedies of seasons past. Because these films generally avoid indulging in some of the more brazen forms of adolescent nudge-and-wink, boys-will-be boys sexism, and instead tend to have story arcs involving the boys growing up a little bit and developing something approaching respect for the women in their lives, they’re perhaps a bit more likely to be enjoyed (or at least tolerated) by female audiences. As A.O. Scott pointed out in his recent review of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, we haven’t yet seen a sex comedy centered around a “relatively ordinary-looking” female protagonist—and given the lack of anything like that, Apatow’s lovable, toothless, nerdy, and more-or-less sensitive male schlubs will just have to do.
Dargis suggests that studio heads (including the growing number of women who now have the power to green light movies) believe that women can’t make commercially successful pictures, reasoning that movies made by women won’t appeal to men. They may be half-right, at least in the sense that women in positions of creative control are probably somewhat more likely to make movies that deal with themes of interest to women, while at the same time many men do seem to be uninterested in (if not outright contemptuous of) stories about women. For some men, it’s perfectly acceptable to denigrate a film focused on women as a “chick flick”—and this is clearly a negative value judgment, a dismissal, rather than a suggestion that women and men might in some cases have different interests (which would in any case still imply that it’s OK for men not to be particularly interested in films about women). And in art house circles, the fact that the vast majority of films are made by and are predominately about men just isn’t discussed much at all—though this really ought to strike the generally liberal and well-educated art house audiences as more than a little odd.
Some small part of this might be a matter of marketing: in the rare cases when Hollywood does make a real go at a film largely about women, it’s often packaged in a way that’s highly likely to turn men off. But under the surface, this fact is reflective of the same problem: many men are only turned off by marketing aimed at women because they believe it isn’t important to be interested in things that interest women—that it’s nothing of their concern, or perhaps that it’s beneath them.
These kinds of problems certainly aren’t confined to the world of cinema. For example: Bitch recently published an excellent story by Sarah Seltzer taking the book pages of the NY Times to task for their persistent, long-running bias against books written from a feminist perspective. This phenomenon is particularly disheartening given the fact that the majority of Americans who read books are women—there’s really no market pressure to appeal to adolescent boys in operation here. Or, take this blog’s third area of interest, music. Rock and roll has always been a boys’ club, and jazz is even worse in this respect. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve read a review of a Sleater-Kinney record that essentially boils down to “these chicks rock pretty hard for girls,” or (only marginally better) in which the critic devotes so much time to talking about what a shame it is that people always view a girl band through the lens of their gender that he consequently runs out of space before he can actually discuss the music. And just try to think of a single canonical jazz band leader or composer who’s a woman—women are permitted to be “great” in jazz only when they’re singing songs written by men, and when men are taking care of most or all of the arranging duties, too.
But perhaps there’s at least some hope for improvement in the not-too-distant future given the rise of the internet and its long tail. Dargis notes that Tyler Perry has recently built a media empire on making films about black people (movies which Hollywood also assumes that white males won’t ever have any interest in). It’s a shame to think of women (being slightly more than half of the world’s population, and all) as a niche audience, but in an increasingly fragmented media culture, perhaps Hollywood (and also independent cinema) will no longer feel quite so much pressure to appeal to the least common denominator. Perhaps in the coming years it will become at least somewhat easier for women filmmakers (and writers, and musicians) to reach audiences that actually are interested in their work—even if that least-common-denominator mainstream might continue to denigrate and ignore them.
This one’s been widely noted in the book blogosphere over the past few days, but I thought that I really ought to post it, even if I came to it a little bit late. The New York Times’ Paper Cuts blog has coverage of a charity event in which writer Rick Moody had the opportunity to shove a pie in notorious critic Dale Peck’s face. (The NY Times post is a bit nauseatingly scenesterish for my taste, but I love the idea of the event itself.)
Given this blog’s focus on positive criticism, and Dale Peck’s status as the reigning king of the literary hatchet job, I feel compelled to link to the YouTube video of the event.
New to DVD is The Savages, writer/director Tamara Jenkins‘ first new feature since 1998′s excellent The Slums of Beverly Hills. Jenkins’ unflinchingly honest script offers the film’s two leads—the always-terrific Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman—a chance to give rich, nuanced performances while exploring emotional and thematic territory rarely given serious consideration on screen. In The Savages, Linney and Hoffman play a brother and sister, Wendy and John, who have to take responsibility for the welfare of their elderly father (who is suffering from dementia) after his longtime girlfriend passes away. Both siblings have long been estranged from their father—he abused them when they were children, and there’s clearly little love lost between them. Still, they feel a responsibility and an obligation to take care of him, and the bulk of the film centers on their struggles to do right by him while also holding their own lives together.
As my girlfriend pointed out to me, the characters’ names, Wendy and Jon, are a probable allusion to Peter Pan‘s John and Wendy Darling. This strikes me as fitting in at least two respects. For one, both Savage siblings seem to be struggling to hold onto their youth: though Wendy is in her late thirties, and Jon in his early forties, both are still struggling to establish themselves in their chosen fields, and both also seem determined to avoid entering (or remaining in) relationships requiring permanent commitment and full adult intimacy. Also, having to take care of their father has returned the Savages to childhood, in a way: they’ve been forced to be their father’s children again, and to be reminded of everything about their childhood that they’ve been trying to escape throughout their adult lives.
One of the great strengths of Jenkins’ writing here is that she avoids excessive psychologizing: the point of the film is not to reveal the ways in which Wendy and Jon’s father’s behavior has shaped their personalities and choices. Rather, this is a given in the film: Jenkins assumes that this is the case (and we see it again and again in small ways in the behavior of the characters), because it’s always the case in any family—but she doesn’t leave it at that. Instead, she uses this fact as a base to explore questions of what it means to be a parent and a child, and to peer unblinkingly into the terror of illness, decline, and death. The Savage siblings do the best they can, but all the same they’re essentially helpless with respect to their father; there’s no cure for what he’s suffering, and it’s a stark fact that the best they can hope for is to offer him some comfort during his last days. Meanwhile, they’re also forced to face the fact that they are aging themselves—that they’re not exactly young anymore, and cannot deny the reality of death.
It’s much to Jenkins’ credit that she entirely avoids sentimentality here: nothing is sugarcoated, and she doesn’t take the easy way out by giving us some improbable scene in which the old man repents of his ways and reconciles with his forgiving children. They don’t forgive him, and even if he might have felt some urge to apologize to them for what he’d done, he’s in no condition to do so: most of the time, he has only the vaguest of ideas about where he is or what’s happening. The film faces the facts of illness, death, and abuse with a matter-of-fact honesty, and doesn’t pretend that there’s anything especially good about any of it. This sometimes makes for difficult, emotionally intense viewing—but every moment of it rings true, and you’re at least left with the consolation of knowing that everyone is bound to be lost in fear, confusion, and pain when facing illness and death in the family.
On Friday night I caught a screening of Alain Resnais‘ perplexing 1961 feature L’Année dernière à Marienbad (English title: Last Year At Marienbad) at Chicago’s Music Box Theatre. Considered by some to be among the greatest films ever made, it’s all the same unavailable on DVD in the United States. I can’t say that it would be likely to top my own list of favorites, but I’m definitely glad that I had the chance to see it. (In a long Chicago Reader review of the film, Jonathan Rosenbaum considers its place in the canon; he isn’t convinced that it’s among the best of the best, but he does seem to like it a great deal.)
Marienbad opens with a very long series of shots of the baroque interiors, walls, and ceilings of a lush old hotel. As the camera slowly pans and circles, a disembodied voice speaks of describes its corridors, mirrors, and curtains (etc.) again and again in various recombinations. The film as a whole has a similar structure and feel: images and events repeat themselves in fragments and out of sequence. Almost all of the dialogue involves an unnamed man attempting to convince an unnamed woman that they had met before under similar circumstances a year earlier and had made plans to run away with each other. The past he’s describing collapses with the present, and what might have happened becomes mixed up with what has happened and what will. The camera returns to the same events over and over again, but with slight alterations: the woman is wearing a different dress, or the event is happening in a different place. No clear timeline or sequence of events is ever established.
The camerawork in the film also emphasizes the collapse of time and space. Sometimes the same characters appear more than once in the same tracking shot. At others, you’ll have the sense that the characters are in a bedroom, but then suddenly (and without any cuts) you’ll realize that they’re walking down a hallway. The exterior of the hotel will sometimes appear to be a background painting, and then the next moment (and again, without any apparent cut), a filmed image. Often the camera will move in slow circles around characters, and of images of characters and rooms in mirrors. As the camera moves, spaces and events shift improbably; it’s never possible to be entirely certain which room you’re looking at, or where the characters will end up when they move down a hall, or even what year it is, or which hotel.
All of this is fascinating, and often visually arresting—but at times the combination of endless repetition and complete disorientation left unsettled and antsy. The past couple of days, I’ve kept thinking about Marienbad, turning it over in my head like a puzzle to be solved; but (as Jonathan Rosenbaum points out) when you’re watching it, the film goes for your emotions just as much as for your intellect. As the camera circles and your disorientation builds, you squirm and shift in your seat, craving resolution and explanation that you know will never come. You end up trapped in the film’s repetitions, and entirely unable to escape its shifting times and spaces until it finally, mercifully, comes to an end.
Sleater-Kinney‘s Carrie Brownstein has been blogging for NPR for several months now, and, in honor of the upcoming 15th anniversary re-release of Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville, she’s recently posted an account of her experiences listening to the record for the first time back in 1993. It’s well worth reading, for fans of Liz Phair and Sleater-Kinney both.
Exile in Guyville was one of the first indie rock albums I ever heard—I bought it in 1994, after having seen the video for Whip-Smart‘s “Supernova” on MTV. As a teenage boy in Decatur, Illinois, I didn’t have any real ability to put Phair’s music in context. Her idiosyncratic guitar-playing, stripped-down lo-fi arrangements, flat notes, and barbed delivery were revelatory for me—I’d never heard anything like it, except perhaps occasionally after midnight on 120 Minutes, watching with the volume down low and my ear pressed up to the television’s speaker because I really wasn’t supposed to be up so late on a schoolnight. Exile—along with records like the Replacements’ Let It Be, The Velvet Underground and Nico, and Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation—expanded my sense of what was possible in music.
Phair’s lyrics also described a world far outside of my experience—adult in its themes and concerns, and expressed with a degree of frankness that I found titillating, fascinating, and also slightly uncomfortable. For a 14-year-old, any foul-mouthed, sexually explicit record is thrilling—and though that was part of Exile‘s appeal for me, I definitely gave it far closer attention than I did any of the various juvenile and sleazy albums that had entered my collection primarily because they possessed a “Parental Advisory” sticker and a reputation for being unsavory. Exile was the kind of record that I would listen to again and again with my headphones on—because I liked it a great deal, and also because I knew that I didn’t understand it very well. It made me want to discover new meanings in the record’s depths—I was struggling to make sense of everything that was being said and played, to understand what this strange new music was all about. (An aside: I wonder sometimes if teenagers today have this same kind of experience at all—of hearing a record for the first time and finding it shockingly, amazingly new—now that all kinds of music are easily available everywhere all the time.)
Listening to Exile today, it still sounds great—though of course my reaction to the album will always be wrapped up in all those hours I spent alone in my bedroom with my headphones on, listening with a uniquely teenage intensity of focus and emotional engagement.
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