Ghosts in Our Own Machines: A Review of Naqoyqatsi

It's been pretty quiet 'round these parts as the summer begins to wind down and August and the new semester approach. But I recently posted the following review on Amazon, and I thought I'd post it here (with some minor editing) as well.

Breughel's The Tower of Babel, which also serves as the opening image from Naqoyqatsi. Image found here.

This film, the third and last of the Qatsi trilogy, is every bit as visually and sonically spectacular as its predecessors. But, though it clearly belongs with them, it is finally a less hopeful film than the first two. I suspect, though, that that's part of director Godfrey Reggio's point. Any film that opens with an image of the Tower of Babel is probably not going to be very hope-filled.

In Koyaanisqatsi ("Life Out of Balance") and Powaqqatsi ("Life in Transformation"), the two realms being compared and contrasted (respectively, natural and urban spaces, and indigenous and Western ways of living) were given fairly equivalent amounts of screen time, suggesting (to me, at least) the possibility of an equilibrium being achieved between the two--if not within the space of the film, then among viewers as they ponder how best to live. Perhaps that is why I prefer the first two films. Naqoyqatsi, released 14 years after Powaqqatsi, seems to suggest that that possibility of equilibrium has been lost: Technology, as signified in the film by its recurring sequences of strings of binary numbers, not to mention the digital generation and/or alteration of the vast majority of what we see on the screen, has ceased being only a tool by and through which we interact with nature. It has become, in significant ways, our surrogate for nature, blurring our traditional notions of what is "natural" and what is "artificial." The short sequence in which we see the head of Dolly the sheep (image found here)

encapsulates this idea for me: as she moves her head from side to side, the image blurs, doubling and tripling, raising in a visual way the philosophical questions raised by our ability to clone animals.

Technology, this film seems to argue, is the worst sort of dystopia: one that we don't entirely realize we live in because we can no longer be entirely sure whether what we see is the world as it is, or whether it's been tweaked to our liking or convenience.

As if in counterpoint to all this, though, Philip Glass's score floats over all of what we see; it's scored for a small orchestra and isn't as heavy (or heavy-handed) as was his music for the first two films. Lovers of cello will want to hear in particular Yo-Yo Ma's elegant performances.

I will be showing this film to my students this fall. I am hoping one of them will note the film's outdated computer graphics; I'm hoping he'll say that we have better graphics now. "Better? In what way?" "Ours are more realistic." "Yes--and? Is a near-invisible line between the real and the computer-generated necessarily a good thing?"

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Some weary, stale, flat and unprofitable words on The Pale King

(Apologies for the length of this post--the "collapse post" function isn't working, for some reason.)

A picture from the April 28th performance of The Pale King: Monologues From The Unfinished Novel, hosted by the PEN Center in Beverly Hills. Image found here; "making of" video here.

(Earlier posts here)

I liked The Pale King; I'm glad we have it. That said, though, it's not the best introduction to Wallace's work; I strongly suspect that even some of Wallace's admirers will be puzzled by or even disappointed in it. I think many of its reviews are distorting the experience of reading it: I get the feeling that much of the praise it's receiving has more to do with the meteoric rise in David Foster Wallace's reputation in the time since his death than with the work in front of the reader. (Example: As Lee Konstantinou mentions in passing in his review, linked to below, it wasn't all that long ago--i.e., when Infinite Jest first appeared--that the verdict on Wallace was decidedly more mixed.) In other words, what's being reviewed is a too-short career rather than an unfinished novel that, in its published form, is both (almost certainly) waaay shorter than it would have ended up being and whose sections, in any case, are not in the order Wallace intended (he left behind no outline of that). In my humble opinion, that lionizing should have taken place long before, but that's neither here nor there now. In any case, there's something about unfinished work that leads the reader to look over past work for clues about how the unfinished work might have proceeded. In my earlier posts on this book and Wallace more generally, I've found it both unavoidable and essential to do so--at least initially.

[UPDATE: It may also be that the recent publications of Wallace's honors thesis arguing for the existence of free will, and his commencement address at Kenyon College (both reviewed here), have also re-focused attention on Wallace's prior work--which (speaking for myself) has been all to the good. To my mind, those other pieces lead the reader to note certain preoccupations present in Wallace's work--the non-fiction as well as the fiction--that provide a thematic coherency to it.]

What follows is already shorter than I had thought it would be before getting started on it. I was going to include a fair amount on the idea that The Pale King's real theme isn't boredom but the virtue, to the point of transcendence (even, in one character's case, literal levitation), of paying close attention to the things and people of the world. But Cornel Bonca, in his half of this excellent two-person review in the Los Angeles Review of Books (hat-tip: 3 Quarks Daily), says just about everything I was going to say about that, and says it better besides. Bonca's and Lee Konstantinou's reviews are lengthy reads, but each feels right on the nose, it seems to me.

But neither mentions, at all, Hamlet. A quick Googling of "The Pale King Hamlet" yields, on the first page, this piece by Lea Carpenter at The Big Think (she argues for an implicit link, at the level of the relationship between Art and the world, between Hamlet's concerns and those of Wallace), some re-postings elsewhere of that piece, and, um, my own posts as the only sustained readings of the two texts together. Make of that what you will. Meanwhile, I'll do what I can to broaden my market share in what may prove to be a bust of a critical angle.

Now that I've finished The Pale King, I can't honestly say just how much harder Wallace would have pushed its resonances with Shakespeare's play. Apart from "Sickiled Ore," Illinois, and "Rotting Flesh, La.," which I had mentioned in this post, no further such explicit use of Hamlet's language occurs in what we have. There is that matter of the ghost which haunts Peoria's IRS Regional Examination Center, though, about which more later.

Hamlet found "the uses of this world" boring, but he didn't have that word; "boring," in our modern sense of tedious or uninteresting, is, appropriately enough, a late-18th-century coinage and, thus, a by-product of the Industrial Revolution's machines' reducing most people's notion of work to the activity of watching and maintaining machines as they do stuff. It's difficult not to imagine "boring" as arising from people's describing the work of running a drill press. Hamlet's word for boring was "stale," whose history (thanks, OED) shows that "stale" once referred to the organic leavings from the distilling or brewing process. So, there's also the word's association with waste, offal. But, just to be clear, finding the uses of the world to be stale is not the same thing as saying that the world itself is boring; his image of the world as an unweeded garden suggests that Hamlet believes the world deserves better: "Fie on't! ah fie! 'tis an unweeded garden,/That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature/Possess it merely" (I.ii.; this and later quotes are from here). Yet at this early point in the play, his father dead two months and his mother already remarried, Hamlet despairs, wishing that he could just disappear or that it were permitted to kill himself.

I suggested provisionally in that post I just linked to that The Pale King argues for "something like the inverse of Hamlet's despair, of finding and perhaps even insisting that there be meaning within the system within which one finds oneself and--and this is crucial--which one one finds to be bigger than oneself; that is, that while within it, one feels as though one is in service to something larger and more profound than one's self-gratification." That still feels right, but in a way that I hadn't expected before that it would be.

Plot device aside, one way to think about the function of Hamlet's father's ghost's conversation with his son in I.v. is to give Hamlet a purpose which transcends Hamlet's despair over the world's staleness by placing him in service not just to the memory of his father ("Thus was I/. . . ./sent to my account [note the noun]/With all my imperfections on my head") but also to all of Denmark ("If thou hast nature in thee, bear it not;/Let not the royal bed of Denmark be/A couch for luxury and damned incest.") Hamlet is thus given the opportunity to begin to set things aright, as he understands that: to begin weeding the garden.

The rest of the play, then, becomes a matter of watching Hamlet vacillate between his pledges of fealty to these lofty causes and his self-condemnation for not yet having carried out his pledge. Stated in that way, that's nothing new; but if we say that Hamlet's famed inaction isn't due to overthinking what he has been called to do but, rather, distraction--a lack of attention to that which he's committed himself--that puts a rather different spin on things. Hamlet's tragedy is that, in losing that attention, in succumbing to fatalism, no matter how loftily characterized ("There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow" [V.ii]) lie the seeds of his damnation.

Consider: In I.v., the Ghost explicitly tells Hamlet, "[H]owsoever thou pursuest this act,/Taint not thy mind, nor let thy soul contrive/Against thy mother aught: leave her to heaven/And to those thorns that in her bosom lodge,/To prick and sting her." The matter of Gertrude's punishment is clearly not to be Hamlet's concern, but Heaven's. So, when does the Ghost next appear? In III.iv.--the encounter between Hamlet and Gertrude in her chamber. Hamlet sits in judgment on her actions ("Mother, you have my father much offended") and seeks to compel her to acknowledge what she has done by marrying Claudius, when the Ghost arrives to get Hamlet back on task. Hamlet knows exactly why he's there: "Do you not come your tardy son to chide,/That, lapsed in time and passion, lets go by/The important acting of your dread command?" The Ghost confirms it: "Do not forget: this visitation/Is but to whet thy almost blunted purpose." Hamlet speaks daggers into Gertrude's heart; but, recall, on his way to his mother's room he'd had a chance to put a real dagger into Claudius' heart; and, he's just killed Polonius, too ("I took thee for thy better").

So: Hamlet's great enemy is distraction from the task he has pledged himself to. In The Pale King, the great enemy is boredom with the task; and, sure enough, the Peoria office's Pale King puts in an appearance when one of the examiners, his methods for staving off boredom having failed, succumbs to it. In chapter 33, we meet Lane Dean, Jr., as he "bores" down on the pile of 1040 forms he's checking for errors, all the while using various relaxation techniques to ward off tedium, such as "imagin[ing] a warm pretty beach with mellow surf as instructed in orientation the previous month" (376). Alas, the beach turns, in his mind, to a winter scene, and after a while he begins to believe that Hell is "a fellow [locked] in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enoough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and [left] there to his mind's own devices" (379). When Dean reaches the point that he imagining that the clock's second hand possesses the awareness that "its job was to go around and around inside a circle of numbers forever at the same slow unvarying machinelike rate" (381) and the face of his baby boy (it's in a picture on his desk) morphing into an old man's face and senses that he's half-asleep, that's when it happens:

Getting a little taste, I see.

It was a big older fellow with a seamed face and picket teeth. He wasn't from any Tingle [the nickname for desks at the Center] that Lane Dean had ever observed from his own. The man had on a headlamp with a tan cotton band like some dentists wore and a type of thick black marker in his breast pocket. He smelled of hair oil and some kind of food. He had part of his bottom on the edge of Lane's desk and was cleaning under his thumbnail with a straightened-out paperclip and speaking softly. You could see an undershirt under his shirt; he wore no tie. He kept moving his upper body around in a slight kind of shape or circle, and the movements left a little bit of a vapor trail. None of the wigglers [Dean's fellow workers] in either adjoining row was paying attention to him. Dean checked the face in the photo to make sure he wasn't still dreaming.

They don't ever say it, though. Have you noticed? They talk around it. It's too manifest. As if talking about the air you're breathing, yes? It would be as if saying, I see so-and-so with my eye. What would be the point? (382)

[Aside: Perhaps significant, perhaps not: In III.iv. of Hamlet, Gertrude doesn't see the Ghost; Dean's fellow workers vary between not paying attention to the visitor or pretending not to have seen him.]

"It," of course, is not that bore which begins the chapter (that's the past tense of that sense of bear that means "knuckle down") but something like its opposite: that other bore and its variants, which Dean's visitor discourses on the history of for most of the next three pages, concluding with a quote from Kierkegaard: "Strange that boredom, in itself so staid and solid, should have such power to set in motion." Dean's attention shifts, he notes that the old man's smell is Chinese food and Vitalis. It's, perhaps, hearing the Kierkegaard quote that prompts Dean to consider praying; as if in response, his visitor says, "Note too that interesting first appears just two years after bore. 1768. Mark this, two years after. Can this be so? [. . . .] Invents itself, yes? Not all it invents" (385).

Then he leaves, with no one asking the obvious question, let alone providing the answer to it. But then again, the action in this novel (not to mention the novel itself) is the beginning of that answer.

On down the road: some speculation on how thinking about Hamlet might give us some insight into The Pale King's structure.

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"Where I'm going, you can't follow": On chess boards, Casablanca and postmodern space (updated)

A still from Humphrey Bogart's first scene in Casablanca. On the set, Bogart played chess with Claude Rains and Paul Henried; it was Bogart's idea to have the chess board be Rick's stage business as he talks with Ugarte. According to Roger Ebert's commentary in the edition of Casablanca I have, Bogart preferred chess to poker because in chess, no one can cheat. Image found here.

[UPDATE: This piece in chessville.com is something of a summation of attempts to explain Casablanca's enduring appeal. It includes a nice discussion of the details of Rick's chess board and chess's larger semiotic function in the film--in particular, for both chess and the film, the significance of Rick's playing black.]

Humphrey Bogart doesn't have a traditional entrance in Casablanca. He doesn't walk into a scene. Rather, it's more like the audience makes its entrance into Rick's scene--which is to say, his space: the camera, taking on the point of view of a customer at Rick's who moves through the bar's entrance and seating areas and observing all the bargaining and haggling for papers, for money, for favors, then moves toward a table on which we see a drink, an ashtray, a chess board with a game in progress, and the hands of someone signing someone's tab for a waiter. (Perhaps he's signing our tab--after all, the scene is shot to appear as though we're accompanying the waiter who brings it.) The camera then pulls back to show Rick contemplating the board, holding one of his opponent's already-captured pieces.

The board itself isn't the scene's focus, of course; if it were meant to be, director Michael Curtiz would have made it thus. (Ebert in his commentary notes several times on Curtiz's economy as a director; with very few exceptions, every shot we see in Casablanca functions to help move the story along.) Still, in those shots in which we see the board in this scene, there seem to be some continuity problems that are worth pondering in their own right. Each time it appears, it is as though we're seeing a different game: at least two shots show different, well-advanced games; two others show a board whose game has barely begun, if at all. I think, to be honest, that the only work the chess board is intended to do here is just be a chess board and thus serve as an outward sign of Rick's careful, strategic thinking. We're probably not supposed to notice the pieces' very different arrangements on the board; the film's continuity editor (if it had one) either missed the problem or decided (or Curtiz did) that it didn't matter. But let's imagine for a bit that these inconsistencies are in fact intentional. Then, we can read the chess board as conveying the idea of different games being played simultaneously, all of them on one board, as we stand there waiting for Rick to OK our tab. Rick is in his bar all night, every night. Each night is a new series of simultaneous games for him--in those opening scenes, Rick deals with a bewildering variety of customers and they with each other--all playing out in the space of his bar, whose very tables are laid out like squares of a grid. [Aside: compare the interior of Rick's to the chaotic interior of Ferrari's bar, the Blue Parrot.]

Perhaps that is why, in the scene(s) involving the chessboard(s), we never see who Rick's opponent(s) is/are. "Everybody comes to Rick's," Captain Renault tells Major Strasser earlier in the film. Perhaps, potentially, everyone is Rick's opponent. Even--and especially--Ilsa: the one person most capable of hurting Rick . . . because, we will learn, she already has.


Ilsa confronts Rick in his office. Note the shadow pattern on the walls behind her; click in the image to enlarge. Image found here.

More below the fold.



Again: The last thing I'm claiming here is that Curtiz intends for the chess board to work in his movie in the way I've described it above. However, I do want to claim that these apparent errors in fact end up reinforcing Casablanca's strong sense of de-centeredness, of the city's being comprised of façades behind which little if anything (and certainly nothing pleasant) withstands closer scrutiny. Better put, Casablanca shows us a constantly-shifting space with no constants ruling apart from a far-off, bureaucratic System and, within this place on the periphery of that System's domain, most everyone's acting solely out of his/her self-interest. Few if any here are traditionally Good or Bad; all have in them the potential to be either, though corruption in this place is far more likely than redemption is. We have vague allusions to shadowy pasts; multiple rumors of deaths that turn out not to have been true--or, as Laslow says of the five different rumors regarding his death, "True every single time"; language either emptied of meaning or obliquely acknowledging that its speaker cannot freely speak the truth of a matter; and, presiding over all, the rhetoric and machinery of the Surveillance State. In such a place, people alternate between wanting to believe in and mocking the old verities of love and disinterested sacrifice for others in service to a Greater Cause. The verities are no different from any other narrative whose intrinsic value (never mind their truth or the motives of those who act in accordance with them) can be scrutinized and adopted or mocked, too, because, after all, what does anything matter in the end? ("[I]t doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.")

Chess boards are stylized maps on which one can assert power over another. I suspect Rick much prefers them to real maps, which depict spaces divvied up and controlled by others. I hope no one tells him, though, that he happens to be a character in Casablanca, a movie obsessed with maps and grids--human projections of virtual boundaries onto physical space, over which the vast majority of us have little say, much less the power to control. Consider the film's opening sequence: a raised-relief globe which turns to the western end of the Mediterranean; the camera moves toward France and, at the same time, a wipe replaces the relief map with a two-dimensional paper map that shows the circuitous route people fleeing the Germans had to take to get to Lisbon and thence to the U.S.--this map functioning at the same time as a screen on which is projected newsreel footage of war refugees. The film's central plot device is the possessing of Letters of Transit. Rick Blaine's language often wryly comments on the conflicts between what people wish the world were and its stubborn physical and political realities. Rick says he had come to Casablanca "for the waters;" when Captain Renault asks what waters Rick means, that Casablanca is in the desert, Rick says, "I was misinformed." When the German Major Strasser asks what nationality Rick is, he replies, "A drunkard," which prompts Captain Renault to declare Rick "a citizen of the world"--yet Rick's Everyman's homeland--his saloon--cannot hide him from Ilsa: "Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she had to walk into mine." When Victor Laslow requests a table as far from Major Strasser as possible, Rick tells him, "Well, the geography may be a little difficult to arrange . . ." This world is a rootless one: with the single exception of Ferrari, the owner of the Blue Parrot, who seems to have fully assimilated into the culture of the place, it seems anyone who speaks on the matter would rather be somewhere, anywhere, besides Casablanca. Everyone here is in some sense a refugee. Moreover, the name aside, no one can really say what Casablanca is on its own terms, apart from the palimpsests the expatriates have turned it into.

Casablanca, in other words, is a virtual-space rendering of a place called Casablanca--and that place's correspondence to a real place by that same name is a tenuous one at best. All we know about these places, really, are what we can say about them via the suspect medium of language.

One of this blog's very first posts asked about the source(s) of Casablanca's enormous popularity among both cinephiles and people who just love good movies. Aside from the usual responses of "good acting" and "good story, tautly told," in that earlier post I couldn't make sense of how this film, shot on a very tight 2-month schedule and "just" one of 50 that Warner Bros. made that year, "just" one of the three films Curtiz would direct that year, is #2 on the American Film Institute's Top 100 films. As I watched it yesterday for the first time in quite a while, searching for possible answers, the simplest one of all is the one that occurred to me: It retains its immediacy despite its precise placement in time (December 1941). For this film's first audiences, it must have felt like a newsreel: A reader for Warner's first read the play on which the film is based on December 8, 1941; in the very week of Casablanca's release, the Allies had begun the north Africa campaign. For us watching it today, I daresay, it feels like we are watching our own world in embryonic form--and, if we're really thinking about the particulars of the film's romantic triangle, we're seeing just how difficult it is to love authentically, balancing self-interest and sacrifice, in such a place.

Some films, their intentions aside, just get really, really lucky. Casablanca appears to be one of those films.

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Does Art still matter? I mean, really matter?

These words heard by Socrates in his dream ["Practice music, Socrates!" in Phaedo] are the only indication that he ever experienced any uneasiness about the limits of his logical universe. He may have asked himself: "Have I been too ready to view what was unintelligible to me as being devoid of meaning? Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom, after all, from which the logician is excluded? Perhaps art must be seen as the necessary complement of rational discourse?" --Nietzsche, "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music" XIV

It’s hard to describe — it’s like a thought that’s also a feeling. One wouldn’t want to make too much of it, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance [between Centre Court at Wimbledon and religion]; that would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever deity, entity, energy, or random genetic flux produces sick children also produced Roger Federer, and just look at him down there. Look at that. --David Foster Wallace, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience," n. 17

Picasso, Painter and Model. Drawing. Image found here.

After a fair amount of looking online for a date for this image, I finally cried "Uncle." I think it's from the '30s; but in truth, as I was reminded during my search, it's in a way appropriate that I didn't find one: this theme of the artist at work (or, in more abstract language, the dynamic between artist and subject) is one that Picasso returned to again and again--or, better put, seems never to have put aside--throughout his career. But Picasso of course is by no means the first or only artist to use his/her art to meditate on that dynamic. Nor do only painters do it: in fact, the drawing above and some others you can see at the blog where I found this one were inspired by Honoré de Balzac's short story, "The Unknown Masterpiece." It's the story of a painter who seeks to render a beautiful woman with absolute fidelity to her appearance but ends up instead with a painting whose description makes clear that Balzac is describing a non-representational painting before such things even existed.

It's ironic to think about Balzac, co-founder of literary realism that he was, telling a story whose point winds up being the impossibility of genuine realism in art (and yes, I know that's an oxymoron). But is that not the message of all art? Even postmodernism's big message--beware the Grand Narrative--requires of us a sort of suspicion-driven hyper-acceptance of rationality that leads, as Nietzsche so eloquently and presciently argued by implication, to cultural fragmentation (in "The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music," Nietzsche declaims, "Only a horizon ringed by myths can unify a culture.")--yet, oddly (perversely?), the most compelling postmodern novels are about people at least seeking (though, true, not always finding) some overarching order in a world that in various ways rejects transcendence. People need Grand Narratives, or else all ends up having the same value--which is to say, all becomes valueless. Including art--even the act of making art, as it turns out.

All the above is not quite where I started this morning, in case you were wondering.

My starting place was "Generations" by Jed Perl, The New Republic's art critic. In this meaty review essay, Perl surveys four recent shows of modern and contemporary art and their respective curators' positioning of their contents relative to recent art history and to traditional media, and the role(s) of museums and the marketplace in all that. That's a lot of territory, but if anyone's at all interested in such things, it's well worth your time. Perl's not shy about expressing his opinions; those who value the notion of an artist's attentiveness to and engagement with (though not necessarily slavish worship of) the artistic past will like what he has to say here. Anyway, one of the shows reviewed is a retrospective of Picasso's late work, which, though not always successful, nevertheless shows this man, his place in art history long ago secure, still painting as though painting itself matters.

From Perl's essay:

In his later years the idea of painting, reflected in countless canvases and drawings and prints of the artist at work at his easel, was among Picasso's abiding subjects. And in one of the grandest etchings in the Gagosian show, he invokes Balzac's story "The Unknown Masterpiece," about a seventeenth-century master who labors for years on a portrait of a beautiful woman but ends up with what amounts to an abstraction. This tale of the mysteries of tradition was admired by Cezanne, and was illustrated by Picasso in the 1920s, and would later fascinate de Kooning. In this etching, the confrontation between the artist and the model is complicated by the presence of another naked woman and another older man who, like the artist himself, is in the elegant garb of a Baroque gentleman. There is even an owl perched on top of the easel. The print becomes an allegory of seeing and understanding, with the two gentlemen, one with a paintbrush and one with a scroll, suggesting art and literature, or perhaps the contemplative life of the artist and the active life of the diplomat (which is how the figure is identified in the catalogue).

This magnificent print is about the capacity of painting to contain everything: wisdom and absurdity, sex and ideas, the public and the private. It was done in May 1968, when I imagine Douglas Eklund [whom Perl writes about elsewhere in his essay] thinks painting was in the wilderness, waiting for the Pictures Generation to tell everybody what to do next. The truth is that painting was never in the wilderness.

It was my (ultimately) failed search for the described etching that led me to the one you see at the beginning of this post, but this one is in its own way another version of the described one. In fact, Perl's description of Picasso's painting reminded me as well of Vermeer's The Art of Painting (click the image to enlarge it)--especially in its implicit claim that painting is the grandest of all the arts in its ability to contain all the other arts. But so also did Wagner make such claims for music, as did Nietzsche on his behalf, and Joyce for the novel. Artists have been making such boasts since, probably, there has been Art. But, it seems, no more. Events in the 20th century combined to take the wind out of art's sails, to the point that when Julian Schnabel went around in the '80s saying things like, "I'm the closest thing to Picasso that you'll see in this *#@ life," people got upset not because it wasn't true (and it wasn't/isn't) but because, well, How dare any artist be so declarative of his worth?

At least he wasn't making any declarations about Art's importance! How gauche that would have been.

But some contemporary artists understand--and argue for--Art's importance in the face of our culture's existential abyss. David Foster Wallace does, or did, as I noted here on the occasion of his death almost (already?) a year ago. Poets and musicians speak to this all the time as well. But do visual artists speak these days in more or other than purely conceptual terms about what they are trying to accomplish via their art?

Do they ever speak of the work of Art?

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"All rights and privileges appertaining thereto": Commencement and the decline of Grand Narratives

Steve Jobs, who gave the 2005 commencement address at Stanford. For better or for worse, he is his own Grand Narrative.

My fellow blogger Belle Lettre of Law and Letters fame graduated from "Liberal Law School" yesterday. Sort of. She decided for various reasons to witness this commencement as a spectator. Reading her post this morning led me to think about this past Saturday's commencement at my college that, as a faculty member, I was both spectator of and participant in.

What prompts this post, though, was this little off-hand remark by Ms. Lettre:

It also struck me how many people's families will travel to go to these ceremonies. They must mean something, these rituals and rites of passage.

Coming as it did after her comparing/contrasting differences in ceremonies she has been part of before and that she approves/disapproves of, I must admit that this caught me by surprise.

I happen to like commencement, but I'm not attaching any particular virtue to that. It does give me a chance, though, to gas on for a bit about Grand Narratives generally.

Full disclosure: Ms. Lettre's post is by no means the first time I've encountered detachment in others regarding commencement. The first time, I remember being dumbfounded when a colleague at my previous school told me that he had never attended his commencements, not even for the awarding of his PhD; I am married to a woman who herself didn't attend her college commencement; most of my colleagues--at least the ones who say anything--would prefer not to be bothered and would not be present if commencement were not considered a work day in our contracts. Me, though, I'd be there anyway, even if I still had papers to read and grades to average waiting for me at home (which I did).

We have no secular rites of passage anymore, apart from commencement. Birthdays and New Year's Day are foisted upon us; they are literally as inevitable as the physics that govern the motion of the planets and so, even if we don't celebrate them, we have no choice but to acknowledge them. Commencement, though, is different: it has the edge to it of celebrating a choice freely made, one's submission to a contract whose terms one doesn't set, the acknowledgment of the completion of that contract, and the giddy anxiety of the look ahead to a future that that contract's completion prepares one for.

I know the realities, though. I graduated from high school in 1980, a time, amazing to think back on nowadays, when a high school diploma still had some real-world heft to it. As we know, those days are long gone . . . and in many disciplines, the BA and BS are losing their value except as means to the ends of a) the sort of career advancement that requires just any old college degree; or b) gaining permission to apply for grad school or professional school.

It's in facing these facts and simultaneously saying without fear of contradiction that I find meaning and value in commencement that we see how Grand Narratives function. Yes: Commencement has meaning and value only to the extent that I and others assign it that value. But I say it has those qualities because I know and believe that that value exists apart from my mere say-so. I have seen too many people's lives transformed (including my own) by this thing called Education to deny its value, even though I know also of too many people, many far more deserving than I, for whom all that Education hasn't panned out in real-world terms.

Like all Grand Narratives, Commencement codifies and celebrates promise, in the sense of opportunity and hope. No matter how we think of Grand Narratives, I don't think I know of anyone who truly lives without their supposed illusions. All the more reason, I figure, to be part of affirming the hope that this one remaining secular rite of passage codifies.

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A rambling discourse on discourse; or: Free-floating signifiers, indeed

Today I kept bumping into situations and texts that brought home to me yet again, as if, in my profession, I needed further reminding of it, that language is a slippery fish . . . and that, if some are correct in their thinking, it will only become more so.
First up today was the Sears auto repair shop.  I had learned, to my considerable joy and relief, that Sears could do the remaining work my car required.  This pleased me because I actually have a little credit remaining with them.  So, I arrived there and began to tell them what I had been told at Pep Boys regarding what my car needed.  When I mentioned that it needed "a CV . . . something or other," it suddenly occurred to me that not only had I forgotten the full name for the part (it's a CV half-shaft, by the way), I had no idea what exactly it was that I was talking about--that is, what its function was.  Yet at Pep Boys the fellow told me that I needed a new one "before your wheels fall off."  That, of course, I understand; and that simply made my ignorance of this piece even more painful and embarrassing to bear.  After all: it's not as though this piece was merely some piece of automobile esoterica; it was vital not just to the functioning but also the saftey of my car, and yet I hadn't the foggiest notion of its existence, let alone its job.  At first I thought, rather simply, that this was yet another instance of what happens when any of us wanders into an area of knowledge that has its own language and we're not familiar with it.  But whereas in those other instances my ignorance doesn't unnerve me, in this case it did, profoundly so.  I felt disconneceted from a part of the world that both was and was not connected with mine, one that I should know more about and yet did not.  The automobile is ubiquitous; we here in this nation have relandscaped open spaces and (re)built whole cities to accommodate it.  It's so ubiquitous that we don't even SEE it any more--it no longer registers on our conscience how it has utterly altered the world's topography and, now, climate.  Yet here I was, about to pay $500 to have a part of my car replaced that I hadn't even known existed before Sunday and yet was vital to its operation.  Without knowing it, I got a small intimation of that state I would be reading about later in the introduction to Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition.
CV, I came to learn when the part arrived, stands for "constant velocity."  The CV shafts transfer the power generated by the pistons to the front wheels of the car to push them forward when one steps on the gas pedal.  Once the mechanic explained that, I instantly understood why I'd hear a very loud clicking noise only when I would accelerate.  No more clicking noise now, except in my little brain when I was able to explain the noise my car had been making.  Education is expensive.  I don't know if the lesson I learned has a value equivalent to the $500 I paid; but given the alternative (a car with its wheels falling off while I'm driving it), an ounce of prevention . . .
While I was waiting for my car to be fixed, I read some more in Bhabha's The Location of Culture.  As I noted in my entry about this book, Bhabha continues to say everything I want to argue about the New World as a miscegenated culture, except that he (still) has so far said nothing about miscegenation.  I've not gotten to it yet, but he has a chapter on the New World, so we'll see if he addresses it there.  At any rate, in what I read for today he discusses a small portion of Arendt's The Human Condition.  Arendt is one of those thinkers whose work I bump into with some regularity via other people's work but otherwise know little about.  But of what I HAVE read, I'm always impressed by her levelheadedness, her way of making things sound obvious and profound at the same time.  So today, I decided to go to my favorite Barnes & Noble in town (we actually have two on my side of town) to look for her book and at least read the introduction.  But of course, when I got there, I browsed and found some other things to look at and, in the meantime, forgot all about Arendt.  For the time being, at least. 
At any rate, one of the things I found was a book of art criticism in the John Berger vein by Rebecca Solnit called As Eve Said to the Serpent: On Landscape, Gender, and Art.  I read her essay called "Noah's Alphabet," which consists of musings triggered by a visit to Dublin's museum of natural history.  The visit caused two central responses in her: 1) her appreciation for the animals' forms, which, curiously, she said she could appreciate more in their stuffed, posed states better than she could when the animals are alive (she said that in zoos she hopes to glimpse wildness but is usually disappointed; in the museum, she has no such expectation and so can concentrate on the animals' shapes); 2) (the more sustained and richer of her responses) the museum's displays of animals which were once native to Ireland but no longer exist in the wild causes her to meditate on the fact that the earth is fast losing its wild animals and that even its domesticated animals are no longer as easily seen in rural areas as they once were but are now raised in what we might as well call factories.  She thinks back on bestiaries and how, while we have vestiges of such books in children's ABC books ("aardvark to zebra"), animals are fast losing their privileged place in our cultural conscience as a source of metaphor--in other words, as sparks for the imagination.  My image of language as being a slippery fish, for example, would not help us visualize a certain quality of language if we were no longer familiar with the actual feel of fish.  The results are not just a further impoverishment of our languages' resources but also a further psychic detachment of humans from the very world that nurtures us--what Fredric Jameson describes as "modernism" (postmodernism is/will be that state in which there is no nature--that is, that nature will be of no consequence in our daily living).  The scene Solnit closes with drives this last point home most effectively: she describes a display at one end of a long hall consisting of skeletons of an orangutan, a chimpanzee, a baboon and a human.  The ape skeletons are standing but hunched over, supported by rods as though they were invertebrates; the human skeleton, though, stands ramrod-straight--or hangs, rather, because it is actually suspended from the ceiling by a golden chain that penetrates its skull.  A visual argument against evolutionary theory, at the very least; one could go further, Solnit says, and imagine that that chain links humans to God, keeping us from being grounded on the earth.
Something in that essay, for some reason, reminded me that I had wanted to look at The Human Condition, so I went off to find it.  I turned to Arendt's Prologue, and there I find writing that, though written in the late 1950s, may be even more apropos of our own time--and it seemed especially pointed in my direction today.  She says she started the inquiry that led to this book by attempting to answer a simple question: "What are we doing?"  Her occasion for asking it is the Russians' launching of Sputnik: the first sending out of a manmade object into space and thus, for her, the first concrete sign of technology's ultimate, unspoken purpose--to help us to quite literally escape the earth and its claims on us.  Because technology intervenes between us and nature, we paradoxically find it hard to talk about technology's effects even though it is of us, and this poses a danger to us as social animals: "Whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about."  Yes indeed.  Language helps us make sense: we convey and create meaning through language that we can then transfer to another conscience; and because technology separates us not just from Nature but from each other, language--and thus our attempts to think about the implications of technology--will suffer.
So also suffers our notion of work.  The other blessing/curse of technology is that it is designed to reduce or eliminate the need for human labor.  Arendt must have known, having written one of the definitive studies of totalitarianism, how the following argument would sound to certain ears; nevertheless, she indeed does raise a vital question by implication:
It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the fetters of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won. . . . What we are confronted with is the prospect of a society of laborers without labor, that is, without the only activity left to them.  Surely, nothing could be worse.
She is right in the sense that we've created a leisure class (or, a class with more leisure than it's ever had before) whose members have no sense of what could/should be done with that leisure: "Here we are now/Entertain us."  And the computer now causes many people to believe they are now freed from having to perform even the labor of thinking.  People don't calculate; machines do--that's the most benign example of what I mean.  But each semester I must remind my students that spell-checks only confirm the correctness of a word, not its rightness.  Imagine, then, their imprecision with language generally, impeding comprehension.  I have had two students this semester who, in different ways, held ME accountable because I was not able to convey to them that the words on their page didn't say what they were telling me they intended to say.  Yet such students are in college with the goal of avoiding "labor."  Be sure not to ask them to perform much while in school.
Rambling, indeed.
This was Book Talk, two days early.  Tomorrow: some notes on Joe Henry's album, Tiny Voices.

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Daylight Savings Time; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; King Crimson

A rather crowded agenda for this entry . . . just making up for lost time.
Fearful Syzygy's recent entry on the Dane/Danish fellow/Dansker (which is it nowadays?) who attributes some of Denmark's fiscal rotteness to that nation's version of Daylight Savings Time inspires the first part of this blog.  As of 2 a.m. this morning, we have sprung forward here, "here" signifying most of the U.S.  Arizona opts out of Daylight Savings Time entirely; even stranger, though, is the case of Indiana, which not only is bifurcated by the Eastern and Central time zone lines but also has individual COUNTIES on BOTH sides of that line which have chosen not to spring forward or fall back.  It becomes more than a little complicated to rise with the chickens there in the Hoosier State.And that last line leads me to argue against Daylight Savings Time as well, though for a reason different than the one offered by the fellow in Denmark.  I don't know why DST was initiated there, but here it was proposed by Benjamin Franklin as a way maximizing daylight hours during the winter, when the days grow shorter, for the benefit of farmers.  With the rise of mechanization on farms (one of the simplest signs of that being tractors with headlights on them), that reason no longer applies.  No doubt someone in this country makes arguments in support of DST, but I truly can't imagine what they would be.  At least the chief argument in favor of raising speed limits on major highways to 70 mph was that some people want to drive faster than 65.  So then, at least from my myopic perspective, we keep DST around for the same reason that most school districts keep the 9-month school year: a tradition dating back to our agrarian roots.  Nothing wrong with that, I suppose.  Much can be said in support of the idea that our agrarian society, without sentimentalizing it, was in most respects a healthier society: poor diets, yes, but the labor performed on farms resulted in less obesity in the population; only the upper classes could complain of boredom--now, of course, even the poor are so media-saturated that boredom permeates all societal levels of our culture; and I do think that the sort of communal labor that gets performed in such cultures leads to the sustaining of societies whose people do give at least a small darn about the welfare of their neighbors.  But DST, even in our mostly-agrarian past, didn't nurture the strengths mentioned above.  It didn't save time, the way most machines are supposed to do; it saved daylight so that there was "more" of it for working.  It paradoxically didn't allow farmers to keep time with the rhythms of the sun and seasons but actually tied them more tightly to the workings of gears inside clocks: "Well, the clock says 6, no  matter what the sun says."Could one make an argument that DST, far from aiding farmers in their work, is actually, if not a cause, then at least symptomatic of my nation's move away from agrarianism and toward an urban society?  That and the railroads, whose invention created the need for standardized time zones in the first place?I have no proof for any of the above.  I think Thoreau would dig this, though (I've been teaching a brief excerpt from Walden in my comp classes recently).  We can't revert from urbanism, and I'm not arguing that we should.  But the fact remains, as Thoreau argues and demonstrates so eloquently, that our self-removal from participation in daily and the seasonal rhythms via the Machine has the long-term effect of emptying our lives of a simpler and more genuine meaning for our living.
Speaking of thought-provoking ideas: two weeks ago, I went to see the most recent Charlie Kaufman-written film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (starring Jim Carrey, Kate Wimslet, Kristen Durst, and Elijah Wood in a decidedly anti-Frodo role).  In an earlier entry, the Blog mentioned some favorite directors, but inexplicably left off the list was Spike Jonze's work with Kaufman: Being John Malkovic and Adaptation are really imaginative films in the fullest sense of that adjective, I think, not just for their quirkiness but also in that (and this is especially true of the first one) they at their hearts tell familiar tales but make them appear fresh: What's it like to see the world through the eyes of another person?  What if we could in some way remove ourselves from our decidedly subjective point of view and THEN, in effect, see the world as we see it, but this time from that outsider's perspective?  And, in Adaptation, just where IS that boundary between the writer and his work. It took seeing Eternal Sunshine . . . to see these matters more clearly, to see these films' quirkiness as means to their respective ends.  This is a romance, in both the movie genre AND the Hawthornian senses of that word (In his preface to The Blithedale Romance, Hawthorne says that in romances, the "work is not exactly put side by side with nature," thus permitting "a license with regard to every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which [the author] is bound to produce thereby.")  Via decidedly sci-fi means--kinda like The Matrix, but this time we're inside individual minds rather than (maybe, maybe not) computers--this film examines the relationship between love and memory: what is it exactly that love is?  Is love the result of memory, or is memory the result of love?  How is love (or memory, for that matter?) preserved?  Is that solely an act of the individual who remembers his/her lover, or does it come from somewhere else, ie., outside the individual?  Once we gain our narrative sea-legs in the plot, we root for the lovers, as we're supposed to do in all movie romances; but when approached from the Hawthornian angle, the film becomes less about the particulars of the lovers' relationship and more about a metaphysics of love, a dynamic of love, that we couldn't examine, one suspects, without the literal invasion of a decidedly anti-R/romantic Machine into the plot.  I'm afraid to say much more here for two reasons: 1) The film surprises in many ways, not the least of which is the richness produced by its explorations of that metaphysics of love, and I don't want to spoil that for the potential viewer; 2) If I keep talking about this intellectually and visually magical film, I'll never get to King Crimson in Arkansas today.  Perhaps I can continue that discussion, though, with those who see fit to comment on this entry.
The drive from Wichita to where my children live is 14 hours, so I take along a selection of CDs to listen to.  I try for a variety of things; my selections for the spring break trip were: the Branford Marsalis Quartet, Romare Bearden Revealed; Led Zeppelin, Presence; King Crimson, THRAK; The Rough Guide to Samba; Lizz Wright, Salt; and Yes, The Yes Album.  Oddly, I want to talk about THRAK because it disappointed me.  I like very much early Crimson--the debut album and Red especially stand out, I think--and one of my favorite albums, period, is Discipline.  All these albums have an elegance to them: an emphasis on melody and precision.  Discipline in particular works because of its impossibly tight rhythm section of Tony Levin (bass) and Bill Bruford ("batterie").  More recent Crimson, though, is different.  From this period I have THRAK and The ConstruKction of Light, and each of these albums explores the possibilities of imposing noise over simpler song constructions (and I'm certain there's a better way to say this).  As a comparison: maybe an artier Sonic Youth or Dinosaur Jr.?  I don't mind noise, but what I found myself noticing on THRAK was a lack of melodic variety and, despite a couple of "quiet" songs, an emphasis on heaviness.  It became tedious, wearying to listen to: not the sort of thing one wants one's music to be when driving through the flatlands of the Mississippi alluvial plain.  As for lyrics, one of the refreshing things about Discipline is the wit of Adrian Belew's lyrics--after all this time, they still make my brain smile.  But in THRAK, the words sound forced or tired.  I suppose, then, that it disappoints because it's not the Crimson that I prefer; one could say that it's unfair not to permit a band that's been around for so long the license to experiment with its sound . . . would that Yes would do a bit more of that in its newer work even as it settles into the stage persona of prog-rock oldies band.  But it IS fair for fans not to especially approve of the results of those experiments.I like better The ConstruKction of Light; as its title suggests, to these ears, at least, there's a return to an intricate melodicism underlying the heaviness--you can see why they toured with Tool for about a month a couple of years ago.
Susan and I continue our discussion of Flemish/Dutch painting; more talk of that will be forthcoming.

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