A stretch of river LI: In which the Meridian and Scruffy witness something that might as well have occurred on a planet in a galaxy far, far away

Image found here.

Picture, if you will, an early-fall afternoon, the sun slanting goldenly, gloriously through the just-turning leaves of the walnuts and cottonwoods of the northeast corner of Riverside Park. Picture, further, an open space in those trees measuring, oh, a hundred yards in length by 50 or so yards wide, bounded on three sides by the trees and on the fourth by a road which follows the bend in the Little Arkansas. Between that road and the river there's a sidewalk, and it's along that way that Scruffy and I stroll as we trace the perimeter of the park in the afternoons.

On that above-mentioned early-fall afternoon in that open space, Scruffy and I see something that makes us stop and watch for a while. It is a man and his two golden retrievers. The retrievers are not on leashes. They lope about happily in the open space. Their coats gleam just as goldenly as the light that shines on them. The man has with him a toy that resembles a cylindrically-shaped, very well-fed squirrel. He throws it a fair distance (it must be weighted) and one dog fetches it and brings it to him while the other watches in that happy/dumb look bred into all golden retrievers.

The retrievers, their tongues lolling, seem to lope in slow motion, they move so fluidly, the light moving across their coats like liquid.

The light sort of lands with a dull thud on Scruffy.

They are not on leashes.

Scruffy is on a leash; his owner holds its loop in a death-grip. Scruffy looks at them and at me and at them and at me, wistfully, as if to say, "They are not on leashes."

The retrievers return to their owner when he calls them. "Calls them"--not "shouts at them" or "runs after them" or "bribes them with liver treats" or "turns and walks back home, hoping that they'll feel abandoned and follow him home out of fear."

(Now the reader has some insight into why Scruffy is on a leash.)

They do not dawdle or cower when called: they lope that easy lope of theirs up to their owner, their tails wagging.

"You see that magical space, that enchanted glade over there, Scruffy?" I say. "That there is Planet Obedient Dog."

Now it is my turn to look wistfully over there.

"We may never ever get to visit there. But, you know, it's nice to dream we might some day. One small step for a man and his dog . . . "

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Blindness

This, contra the subject of my previous post, appears to be worth your while.

This is based on the excellent novel by Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago. The novel is a fast--because absolutely gripping--read; I hope you'll have a chance to read it before going to see the film. The premise: an unexplained blindness suddenly strikes masses of people worldwide, and world governments quarantine the afflicted in compounds of various sorts in their attempts to halt the spread, dropping off food to them but otherwise leaving them to fend for themselves. It is not pretty, as you might imagine. There is squalor and violence as the need to survive leads to the emergence of baser instincts in some. But there is also courage and decency and love--it seems that the need to survive can also bring out our better angels.

Fans of McCarthy's The Road should like Blindness as well. Though their premises are very different and they end in different ways, they traverse much the same thematic terrain. In fact, while reading The Road I was struck by the similarity of its texture to that of Saramago's novel.

It sounds strange to say, "Go see Blindness" but, well, you should. Or at least read the novel.

UPDATE: Christopher Orr's review of the film isn't positive, but he does raise the question I did in comments of how, given film's inherently visual nature, this particular film would deal with a text most of whose characters cannot see.

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"Not your grandfather's Moby-Dick"

Ahab. Illustration by Rockwell Kent for the 1930 Random House edition of Moby-Dick. Now: to see a film of Moby-Dick that looked like these illustrations . . .

"It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me." So says Ishmael of the titular character in Moby-Dick. But I can't say the following exactly puts roses on my cheeks:

Universal Pictures has made a splashy preemptive buy of "Moby Dick," a reimagining of the Herman Melville whale tale that Timur Bekmambetov ("Wanted") will direct.

Studio paid high six figures to Adam Cooper and Bill Collage to pen the screenplay.

The writers revere Melville’s original text, but their graphic novel-style version will change the structure. Gone is the first-person narration by the young seaman Ishmael, who observes how Ahab’s obsession with killing the great white whale overwhelms his good judgment as captain.

This change will allow them to depict the whale’s decimation of other ships prior to its encounter with Ahab’s Pequod, and Ahab will be depicted more as a charismatic leader than a brooding obsessive.

"Our vision isn’t your grandfather’s ‘Moby Dick,’" Cooper said. "This is an opportunity to take a timeless classic and capitalize on the advances in visual effects to tell what at its core is an action-adventure revenge story."

Sigh. I guess I see a different core.

Like anyone asked me about this. But if they had, I'd tell them they need Cormac McCarthy involved on this project (Moby-Dick is his favorite novel, and one way of beginning to think about Blood Meridian is to read it as a re-writing of Melville's novel. But what concerns me more is the shift in narrative structure. I do have to say that the addition of a sort of prequel showing Moby-Dick's destroying ships makes a certain kind of sense for American audiences: hours of showing a bunch of sailors introspectively staring off at the ocean while pondering the nature of whiteness might be fine for those dilettante European cineastes, but we Americans want blood! Wooden ships sinking! Iron men drowning! As little dialogue as possible (gotta think about the foreign markets)! So, probably, not a lot, if any, of the establishing of Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg; no processing of a whale; no Pip; and--it goes without saying--no lengthy meditation on the nature of whales. I mean, how would you CGI that stuff? Might as well go and film it in a coffee shop.

And that last leads me to say this: I think it would be a serious mistake to not convey Ahab's grand madness/mad grandeur. To make him merely "charismatic"--that is nuts. Otherwise, his desire to hunt Moby-Dick acquires a different spin: a simple ego trip, just as Starbuck senses, that it will be hard to feel much sympathy for. Perversely, it's precisely in Ahab's madness that we feel a connection to him. Who among us has not known suffering or seen others suffer for no reason that, God or no God, we can make sense of and felt either anger or despair or both because of that utter lack of an answer?:

All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event--in the living act, the undoubted deed--there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there's naught beyond. But 'tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principle, I will wreak that hate upon him.

Ahab is us. He's nuts, and we know it, but he is us. Most "charismatic" people, though, are not us--we're boring, dull--nor are most of them nuts. We kinda sorta wonder what it would be like to be them for a day or so. I have no desire to be Ahab, because I already am him in a very basic, fundamental way (minus, I think, the madness).

I wish these folks well. I certainly don't want them to make a hash of Moby-Dick, but I can't say as the description in Variety bodes well.

What say you?

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Faulkner on family you didn't know you had

Image found here.

From a transcript of Q&A sessions with students at the University of Virginia, April 27th, 1957:

Q: This genealogy with all these people that were connected with each other, McCaslins and everybody--was that made up before the books were written or as each one was written?

A: No, that came along as these people appeared--I would think of one character to write a story about and suddenly he would drag in a lot of people I never saw or heard of before, and so the genealogy developed itself.

(This Faulkner kick I'm on will pass once my reading changes--promise.)

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You may now call me Bang Wal-Mart Palin

"It's mine, dammit," he said without blinking. "Get your own."

Sarah Palin Baby-Name Generator

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The "ideology of form" and Go Down, Moses

Hosam Aboul-Ela’s book, Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition, begins at the same place Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi does: that it might be useful to read Faulkner not as a Modernist or American writer, but as one whose region has much in common with those of other colonized places of the world, what Aboul-Ela calls the Other South. But whereas Glissant limits his discussion to Faulkner as a Caribbean (or Plantation) writer, Aboul-Ela’s range is more global and more overtly materialist in orientation. He uses the work of Peruvian intellectual José Carlos Mariátegui (1894-1930), a progenitor of (economic) dependency theory as a starting point for articulating a theory of postcolonial experience that originates in those regions rather than in Europe or the United States. He devotes a little over half his book to laying out the resulting “Mariátegui Tradition” before moving on to reading Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy (The Hamlet, The Town, and The Mansion) and Absalom, Absalom! through this critical lens.

Given the orientation of the intellectual tradition of the Other South that Aboul-Ela outlines, it’s understandable why he chooses these works to discuss at length: they are the Faulkner novels that lend themselves most readily to such readings, driven as the plots of each are by the arrival in Mississippi of outsiders and their getting and controlling of property and wealth and the attendant power to the benefit of the Few As Possible and the detriment of local folks. But a chapter section entitled “The Ideology of Faulkner’s Form,” his lead-in to his reading of Absalom, Absalom!, made me curious, in connection with some comments I made here, what Aboul-Ela might have to say about the ideology inherent in Go Down, Moses‘ form. So, I once again mount my GDM hobby-horse.

More here.

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Synecdoche, New York

The trailer for Charlie Kaufman's new film (which he also directed):

'Synedoche New York' Theatrical Trailer @ Yahoo! Video

I really like this guy's work, so keep that in mind when I say: It's been a long time since I was last left gasping for air at the end of a trailer.

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"Ideology of form"

In what sense might one promote a politics when choosing to write, say, a sonnet rather than a blank-verse poem on the same subject, or when making decisions about diction in that poem? Or when a novelist chooses odd, a-chronological arrangements of material, or multiple narrators who speak on behalf of a character who never speaks directly to the reader on his/her own behalf, instead of a conventional, single-voiced narrator relating the story's action in chronological order? Or, for that matter, choosing to write a novel at all?

Reading Hosam Aboul-Ela's intriguing book Other South: Faulkner, Coloniality, and the Mariátegui Tradition raises these questions for me--or, rather, reminds me of them--via his discussion of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! Along the same lines as Edouard Glissant in his book, Faulkner, Mississippi (which I first posted about here), Aboul-Ela makes the case that Faulkner might be usefully read from what he calls an Other South (roughly, a Third-World) perspective, in that, following historian C. Vann Woodward's argument, the South during Reconstruction and, depending on one's politics, maybe even beyond 1964, was in essence colonized by the United States government, economically as well as politically. Thus, Aboul-Ela argues, perhaps Faulkner's interests and agendas diverge from those of the other "high Modernist" and, for that matter, other American writers he's commonly associated with. He specifically claims that Faulkner's tendency toward novels with multiple narrators seeking to retell, from different perspectives, tales that they themselves know only piecemeal or through hearsay, is at odds with the usual Modernist stance re History but seems to have caused real resonance in later writers of the Other South--not just the Latin American writers Faulkner is usually associated with, but also Arab writers from North Africa and the Middle East, as well as writers from the Indian subcontinent. Further, some of these writers claim not to have read Faulkner before they produced their own works which seem, nevertheless, to bear certain resemblances; this presents us with the possibility that people growing up in different cultures that share broad similarities but who otherwise don't know each other may as a result of those similarities create similar sorts of (narrative) art.

Over at Domestic Issue I'll have up a wonkier post that heads in a different direction from the above; but it struck me, as I thought over that phrase "ideology of form" that most of us may wonder why a writer adopts the structure s/he does, but that we wonder, I'd assume, for broadly aesthetic reasons: What does the author gain with this approach? We're all comfortable with the idea that a work's content implies, however indirectly, some sort of politics, but I found myself wondering if those of you out there who are readers have ever wondered whether the form a work takes--the structure the writer gives it--reflects an ideology; that is, a choice of form made for a reasons other than the material presented in the work or for thematic reasons.

Some examples of what I mean:

In the early decades of the novel-as-genre's emergence in English, the cultural élite were extremely dismissive of novels. Who, after all, couldn't write prose narrative? Where was the skill in that? (Consider as well that then, as now, women soon became the primary writers and consumers of novels.) Poetry, because of its long respected tradition and elaborate rules (not just for the various closed forms but for things like the diction deemed appropriate for poetry), was regarded as the king of the literary arts.

During the Harlem Renaissance, writers had lengthy debates among themselves and in print about what form(s) African-American art should take so as to be most faithful to the experience of black people and attract and hold an audience (in those days, mostly white) without pandering to that audience. Some advocated adopting the forms and language of mainstream European poetic tradition; others argued in favor of adapting and inventing poetic forms and language to reflect African-American art forms such as the blues and jazz.

Georg Lukács, a Marxist critic, very much disliked modern novels' stylistic innovations because they represented to him the chief problem of the modern era generally: the dissolution of contemporary society and the growing isolation and even alienation of the individual from society--which, of course, Marxism sought in part to address. Lukács preferred so-called Realist novels, arguing that they adhere most closely to objective reality. On the other hand, Mikhail Bakhtin's critical writings celebrated precisely that multivoiced quality of the novel, and for the same reason Lukács disliked it: its faithful depiction of life lived in the Here and Now.

Anyway. Some stuff to chew on.

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"Most Like an Arch This Marriage," by John Ciardi

One of the lovelier poems on marriage you'll ever run across. Found here.

Most like an arch—-an entrance which upholds
and shores the stone-crush up the air like lace.
Mass made idea, and idea held in place.
A lock in time. Inside half-heaven unfolds.

Most like an arch—-two weaknesses that lean
into a strength. Two fallings become firm.
Two joined abeyances become a term
naming the fact that teaches fact to mean.

Not quite that? Not much less. World as it is,
what’s strong and separate falters. All I do
at piling stone on stone apart from you
is roofless around nothing. Till we kiss

I am no more than upright and unset.
It is by falling in and in we make
the all-bearing point, for one another’s sake,
in faultless failing, raised by our own weight.

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16 de Septiembre

Detail of El grito ["shout"] de Dolores (1960-61) by Juan O'Gorman. Mural at the Museo Nacional de Historia, Castillo de Chapultepec, Mexico City. Miguel Hidalgo is the figure in black in the foreground. Image found here.

In case you have been casting about today for a semi-legitimate reason to drink a (good) Mexican beer, you could do worse than this: This is the 198th Mexican Independence Day, commemorating that early morning on this date in 1810 when, in his church in Dolores (now Dolores de Hidalgo), Guanajuato, Father Miguel Hidalgo took down a banner of the Virgen de la Guadalupe from his church and used it as his flag to lead his parishioners, mostly mestizos and Indians, in revolt against Spain. So, in terms of equivalency to dates in our nation's history, it would be something like celebrating the anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord as our Independence Day.

In every public square in Mexico at midnight, the people gather to hear the city's mayor or, if it's a state capital, the governor stand at a balcony to re-enact the "Grito" Hidalgo used to lead his army to fight. The YouTube below is of last year's Grito in Mexico City, with President Calderón leading the Grito. The narration is in Spanish but it is, visually, mostly self-explanatory. Two brief notes, though. The color guard you see at the beginning represents the Niños héroes ("boy heroes"), the legendary young cadets who, rather than surrender to the U.S. army as it stormed Chapultepec during the Mexican War ("From the halls of Montezuma . . ."), wrapped themselves in a Mexican flag and jumped off a cliff to their death. The second comment is that the square you see is the Zócalo, which, I was once told, is the third-largest public square in the world; when full (and it probably was last night), it can hold well over 200,000 people.



Third note: Mexicans love their fireworks.

The other reason today is noteworthy is that a month from now will be the first full day in Mexico City for the Mrs. and me. I'm going there to do some picture-taking for sabbatical work, and she will have her first substantive experience in a foreign country (a couple of hours in Nuevo Laredo do not count, she figures). How fortunate for both of us that many of the things I want to get pictures of just happen to be at places that first-time visitors should visit . . . or are on their way to said places. While there, we'll also have the pleasure of meeting René, a long-time friend of this blog and the writer of Teoría del Caos, and we have a day trip to Cuernavaca planned as well.

What's that term . . . ? Oh, yes: "working vacation."

There was a time when I didn't like that term so much.

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Another new reason I will miss David Foster Wallace

You can subtitle this post, "Why you should never, ever, skip Wallace's footnotes."

This is the entirety of the 17th and final footnote to Wallace's August 2006 New York Times article on the finals of Wimbledon that year, "Roger Federer as Religious Experience." Though you should read the whole thing--especially if you are a Federer fan or a tennis fan in particular--this footnote is quintessential Wallace. Some quick context: the bus driver referred to had, early on, described Wimbledon as a "bloody near-religious experience;" William Caines, who had flipped the coin at courtside to determine the first service for the match, is a then-seven-year-old boy who had survived surgery for liver cancer at age two, and the subsequent chemotherapy.

In the third set of the ’06 final, at three games all and 30-15, Nadal kicks his second serve high to Federer’s backhand. Nadal’s clearly been coached to go high and heavy to Federer’s backhand, and that’s what he does, point after point. Federer slices the return back to Nadal’s center and two feet short — not short enough to let the Spaniard hit a winner, but short enough to draw him slightly into the court, whence Nadal winds up and puts all his forehand’s strength into a hard heavy shot to (again) Federer’s backhand. The pace he’s put on the ball means that Nadal is still backpedaling to the baseline as Federer leaves his feet and cranks a very hard topspin backhand down the line to Nadal’s deuce side, which Nadal — out of position but world-class fast — reaches and manages to one-hand back deep to (again) Federer’s backhand side, but this ball’s floaty and slow, and Federer has time to step around and hit an inside-out forehand, a forehand as hard as anyone’s hit all tournament, with just enough topspin to bring it down in Nadal’s ad corner, and the Spaniard gets there but can’t return it. Big ovation. Again, what looks like an overwhelming baseline winner was actually set up by that first clever semi-short slice and Nadal’s own predictability about where and how hard he’ll hit every ball. Federer sure whaled that last forehand, though. People are looking at each other and applauding. The thing with Federer is that he’s Mozart and Metallica at the same time, and the harmony’s somehow exquisite.

By the way, it’s right around here, or the next game, watching, that three separate inner-type things come together and mesh. One is a feeling of deep personal privilege at being alive to get to see this; another is the thought that William Caines is probably somewhere here in the Centre Court crowd, too, watching, maybe with his mum. The third thing is a sudden memory of the earnest way the press bus driver promised just this experience. Because there is one. 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; 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.

Look at that, indeed.

(Hat-tip: a commenter on the DFW thread at The New Republic's blog, The Plank)

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A new reason I'll miss David Foster Wallace

Image found here.

Here are the concluding paragraphs from his short talk, "Some Remarks on Kafka's Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed," in Consider the Lobster and Other Essays:

What Kafka's stories have . . . is a grotesque, gorgeous, and thoroughly modern complexity, an ambivalence that becomes the multivalent Both/And logic of the, quote, "unconscious," which I personally think is just a fancy word for soul. Kafka's humor--not only not neurotic but anti-neurotic, heroically sane, is, finally, a religious humor, but religious in the manner of Kierkegaard and Rilke and the Psalms, a harrowing spirituality against which even Ms. [Flannery] O'Connor's bloody grace seems a little bit easy, the souls at stake pre-made.

And it is this, I think, that makes Kafka's wit inaccessible to children whom our culture has trained to see jokes as entertainment and entertainment as reassurance. It's not that students don't "get" Kafka's humor but that we've taught them to see humor as something you get--the same way we've taught them that a self is something you just have. No wonder they cannot appreciate the really central Kafka joke: that the horrific struggle to establish a human self results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home. It's hard to put into words, up at the blackboard, believe me. You can tell [students] that maybe it's good they don't "get" Kafka. You can ask them to imagine his stories as all about a kind of door. To envision us approaching and pounding on this door, increasingly hard, pounding and pounding, not just wanting admission but needing it; we don't know what it is but we can feel it, this total desperation to enter, pounding and ramming and kicking. That, finally, the door opens . . . and it opens outward--we've been inside what we wanted all along. Das ist komish. (64-65)

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David Foster Wallace

The news of Wallace's death--apparently a suicide--has just floored me. By sheer coincidence I had just bought a remaindered copy of his most recent essay collection, Consider the Lobster, and was looking forward to reading it when I wanted/needed to get away from sabbatical stuff. What better way to honor an author you admire, especially on the occasion of his death, than by reading his work? The other reason this has hit so hard is that Wallace is almost my exact contemporary, born only two months before me, but also, I felt, someone I felt some philosophical kinships with.

Wallace was the rare postmodernist who, you feel as you read him, truly, deeply cares about the loss of very Grand Narratives of American culture that he's examining and finding to be lacking: that those narratives, the best of them, really do point to something needed that we dismiss at our societal peril until or unless something "better" comes along. Irony and humor were his Cuisinart, too, but always, I feel, with the end goal of showing us the dangers of a media- and image-obsessed culture. His extended meditation on Alcoholics Anonymous in his magnum opus, Infinite Jest, is a model of what I mean: he notes the power of the idea of the Higher Power even among those AAers who aren't religious and asks how that can be, yet even though it lacks a logical explanation it is nevertheless so--it can't be denied.

For those curious about his work, I highly recommend as a starting place his first collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments. The title essay alone, a hundred-page recounting of a week he spent on a cruise liner, is vintage Wallace and more than worth the cost of the book: by turns guffawingly hysterical, detail-obsessed, and piercingly analytical. Do NOT skip over the footnotes, here or anywhere in Wallace's work--they are not just chock-full of information but a crucial part of the show as well. That collection also includes essays on tennis stars, on television, on David Lynch, on a trip to a state fair, on contemporary fiction that, though now over ten years old, are striking in their immediacy and urgency.

Infinite Jest is Wallace's Ulysses:it's not only bigger than that novel, it's every bit as demanding in its way. I completely understand it if its size causes you to hesitate; but if you enjoy his essays, you'll want to take on that novel some time. I can also recommend his second collection of stories, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: a collection that will, quite simply, cause you to entirely reconsider what the short story form can be made to do. He has two other collections of stories as well that I've not yet read all the way through, Girl with Curious Hair and Oblivion; his first novel, The Broom of the System; and a non-fiction work discussing the concept of infinity, Everything and More.

Mary of Either/Or has a nice remembrance of Wallace as well, comparing his work to that of Douglas Coupland.

I will miss this man and the work he will now never write.

UPDATE: Wallace here reading an excerpt from his essay on the Illinois State Fair. "None of this is made up."



UPDATE II: Trysh Travis of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society was kind enough to e-mail me a link to this remembrance of Wallace that speaks eloquently of how Wallace valued his experiences as he attended AA meetings to gather material for Infinite Jest. I hope you'll go have a look.

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Being and Nothingness and a Cloud of Dust

Pre-Game Coin Toss Makes Jacksonville Jaguars Realize Randomness Of Life

(via Andrew Sullivan, and in memory of my bloggy friend Winston Rand, whose beloved Titans get mentioned.)

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Of being deferential

As you may have guessed via my previous post, I don't hold Sarah Palin in very high regard for having agreed, without blinking, to be John McCain's running mate, nor John McCain for selecting her in the first place, and I see her ignorance (which is, of course, something different from being stupid, and I do not think she is that) of the Bush Doctrine as only one of the more compelling of many pieces of evidence I can offer in support of that opinion. As the proud father of two daughters myself, I have other reasons for that opinion that are, shall we say, more informed by the passions than by the intellect; and seeing as the blogosphere already has more than enough rhetorical frothing to go around, I'll spare you that.

But seeing as the linked-to post touches on women, I'd like to say a few words about two closely-associated words that have been used by Palin's defenders as they characterize the criticism her candidacy has received, "deferential" and "respectful." And to do so, I'll write about a time when I submitted my own 13-year-old daughter to unmitigated ridicule.

Made you look! Made you look!
Actually, "very gentle ribbing" is a much more accurate description--and only for a brief while.

Some background: G. (the 13-year-old) and C. (who is 10) are beautiful, intelligent and thoughtful, strong girls. Even better, that's not just their proud parents' opinion: their friends' parents seem genuinely to agree with that assessment, and they know this about themselves but without being arrogant about it (about which more in a bit). They are entering the treacherous territory of adolescence, so, you know, their mother and I are knocking on wood whenever any is handy. So far, though, so good.

The other day, my older daughter G. and I were talking on a theme which I understand is a matter of all-consuming importance to most adolescent girls: her friends, and friends of her friends. Well, actually, it was more like my listening to her offer up a monologue on this theme, but that's okay. I want, as much is possible, for topography to be the only distance between us. I was happy that she was eager to share all that with me. Anyway, at one point she was describing a circle of friends which she is not a part of whom she described as "sedated--which means, you know, they're very calm, they don't get excited about much."

Me: Um, I don't think that's the word you want--at least, I hope it's not.

G: "Sedated" doesn't mean that?

Me: No--that describes someone who's been tranquilized.

G (laughing): No--that's not what I meant!

Me: I think the word you want is "sedate."

G (still laughing): Oh--okay.

Sorry if this makes me sound monstrous, but I'll say it anyway: G., despite my loving her and despite her recently scoring quite well on the ACT, is not someone I would defer to in matters of vocabulary. The rate she's going, though, I might find myself doing that one of these days. She's smart as a whip. But, for now, I'm still ahead of her in the book-larnin' department. I sincerely look forward to deferring to her one day. But that day has yet to arrive.

My choosing to defer to someone means that I have come to recognize that that person knows at least as much as I do, if not more, about a given subject. Sure: all people, until or unless they show they don't merit it, deserve our basic respect as fellow human beings. But it does not follow that I should defer to them just as a matter of course. It is reasonable to expect a person to demonstrate his or her credentials before we can make a fair assessment of that person. G., to her credit, had a good laugh at her own expense because of her confusion over "sedated"--that laughter made me respect her even more than I already do.

Now: lest you leave here thinking that G. is a buffoon or that I regard her as such, earlier this week she and I talked about an acquaintance of hers whose behavior indicates she may have anorexia. G. was a full--and intelligent, informed and sensitive--participant in that discussion. She has read articles about eating disorders in a girls' magazine that she subscribes to, and she displayed to me that she understood and took seriously what she had read--and her acquaintance's condition. She was so well informed, in fact, that I couldn't really add to her understanding, apart from encouraging her to talk to a teacher or a counselor about this girl.

It is at times like that when I find myself briefly forgetting that she is only 13. That forgetting, I would submit, is a sort of deferral. Certainly, it was a silent acknowledgment on my part that G. indeed knew whereof she spoke.

I cannot, yet, say the same thing of Sarah Palin. Though I respect her as a fellow human being, as a mother who indeed made a difficult but informed choice regarding her fifth child, and as an obviously-skilled politician, I simply have no reason to be deferential to her as a vice-presidential nominee. Nor does anyone else for that matter, with the exception of the person(s) who thought it would be a good idea for her to be the nominee. They are welcome to defer all they want, but no one else is otherwise under any obligation to. I don't say that because she is a woman, or I disagree with her politics or religion, or I am a low-information voter; it's because there is an exceedingly small body of information (never mind accomplishments--I'll settle for ideas and opinions attributed to her) available that would allow reasonable people, partisans or not, to assess her abilities, here and now and not in the future, as a potential Chief Executive. That's just demonstrably so, and it is no insult to her or to any woman--any person--to say that sort of thing when it's simple fact. Yet the McCain campaign asks us to believe that to protest this lack of information and to see to want to know more is not being deferential.

Emerson famously said, "I hate quotations; tell me what you know." Until yesterday, all we'd had from Governor Palin are quotes; to a certain extent, even after yesterday, we still don't have much more. There has to be something to defer to. When that shows up, then we'll talk; then, we won't be arguing about someone who, at least as regards her fitness for the office of Vice-President, remains a cipher.

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An excerpt from today's Charles Gibson interview with Sarah Palin on ABC:

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September 11: The Life/Art Confluence

The cover art for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, originally scheduled for release on Reprise on September 11, 2001. Wikipedia. Image found here.

I have posted before about this day: the usual sorts of posts one has seen or will see on the anniversary of this day. In rereading my versions of those sorts of posts, I see no need to add to them.

Instead, I want to simply note a couple of musical moments that are especially striking for their timing and place and that for me, seven years on, still resonate powerfully.

I'll just let you ponder the eerie confluence of cover art and planned release date for Wilco's album. But the music, too--not just lyrically but sonically as well--is a powerful irruption of our usual ways of thinking about what our expectations and assumptions are regarding "pop music." Just what does it mean when Jeff Tweedy, in "I Am Trying to Break Your Heart," sings, "I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue"--and in that wavering nasal-y voice of his, no less? And how is it that that tinny electric piano riff in "Poor Places" nevertheless manages to sound so grand? No matter. Whatever Wilco is selling in this album, I'm still more than willing to buy.

Here are some selections to listen to:

"I Am Trying to Break Your Heart"
"I'm the Man Who Loves You"
"Poor Places"

The other moment I want to mention is Laurie Anderson's performances in New York on September 19-20, 2001. Though she was ostensibly on tour in support of her lovely August 2001 studio release Life on a String, those songs, in combination with older material (1980's "O Superman" most especially), become quite powerful in this moment. Yet she makes no claims to know or see anything more than anyone else does, as you'll hear in her spoken intro to "Here With You."

Here are those tracks:

"Here With You"
"O Superman"

And here is the first paragraph from her liner notes for this album:

Playing my music on September 19th at Town Hall was one of the most intense evenings I've ever had as a performer. Live music is about being in the present and many people had been living almost exclusively in the present since the 11th of September. The atmosphere in the city was eerie, like during a strange holiday. The driven people in New York had all suddenly experienced enormous fear and uncertainty. Unable to predict, we were simply looking and listening.

Even if you're not a fan of Anderson's music, there's little sense, listening to this, that "you had to have been there." At that point in time, we all were there.

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"They endured": Further comments on Glissant's Faulkner, Mississippi

Caroline Barr (1840-1940), the Faulkner family maid, to whom Go Down, Moses is dedicated. Image found here.

"They endured," as readers of "Appendix: Compson" know, is the sum total of how Faulkner describes Dilsey, the Compson's black maid in The Sound and the Fury. Glissant finds that a crucial textual touchstone in his effort to determine how Faulkner locates African-Amercans in his (Faulkner's) vision of the South. If you read closely the excerpts from Glissant's Faulkner book that I included elsewhere, two arguments emerge.

The first is that Faulkner confers not merely a sort of nobility upon black people relative to whites, he even holds them aloft--or prefers to hold them aloft--from History. They, unlike Faulkner's whites, have no fate, no destiny to work out:

[Zack Edmonds] thought [as he looks at Lucas Beauchamp], and not for the first time: I am not only looking at a face older than mine and which has seen and winnowed more, but at a man most of whose blood was pure ten thousand years when my own anonymous beginnings became mixed enough to produce me. (Go Down, Moses 69, italics in the original).

Though Glissant does not say so explicitly, his early statement that Faulkner's vision is that of epic invites the analogy: In that epic vision of the South, blacks are to the gods as whites are to mortals . . . except, of course, blacks are by and large unable to shape circumstances to their own advantage. Marginalized deities? The second is that, while Faulkner clearly sees such a positioning as honorific and ennobling of black people, Glissant and, by extension, African-Americans, see this (or should see this) as patronizing at best and, at worst, a denial of the same human agency that Faulkner's whites have been cursed with.

All the above is why, as I've thought about all this, Go Down, Moses seems such a central text in the Faulkner canon--perhaps even the central text--and I'm not just saying that because if it weren't for this novel I might very well not have written the dissertation (such as it is) that I did, much less be revisiting it now. In GDM, it seems clear, we find not only, through Ike McCaslin in particular, Faulkner's clearest iteration of his conception of black people, we also find its most forceful rebuttal--as forceful as any that Glissant or any other critic could offer. The question that arises in my mind is, just how aware was Faulkner that his novel does that.

More here.

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"What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last 8 years of failure?"

In case anyone is just dying to know this blog's thinking about the election . . .

Crickets. Just as I suspected. Ah, well.

. . . I'll just refer you to this. Keep that question in mind as you listen to the rhetoric of the campaign whose manager has determined that this election will not be about issues--that's my question as well:



Nothing has happened in the past week that makes that question any less relevant.

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In which the Meridian ponders his place in the Wichita blogosphere

I recently learned via the indispensable-for-Wichita Douglas and Main that there is now an interactive map of Wichita websites, done London Tube style, that shows and links to the city's most-visited sites and blogs. It's attractive-looking and functional besides.

Anyway, good old Blog Meridian, it appears, is among those sites, thanks to you reading these words and to those who find their way here via search engines and folks kind enough to have linked to me in the past. It's a surprise and an honor to appear alongside those other, very good blogs. But relatively little of this blog's traffic comes from Wichita, or even from Kansas. Because of that, and because this blog isn't focused exclusively on Wichita, I have mused at various times in the past on just in what sense this is a "Wichita blog." The obvious answer--that its writer lives in the city--after all seems at variance with the notion of a blogosphere, doesn't it? By that I mean that a blog's "location" is its subject matter, its preoccupations, and not where the writer sits down to post to it.

Ah, well. Whatever the answer to those questions, it's nice to have one's presence in said blogosphere noticed, and in a positive sense at that. So thanks, good people of 2wichita, and thanks for calling attention to this thing called the Wichita blogosphere.

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Adventures at the Wichita Art Museum #4: David C. Driskell

UPDATE: Here is the travelling schedule for the exhibition. I keep forgetting there's this thing called Google . . .

African Saint. 2005. Linocut. Image found here.

A black man, certainly serious, perhaps a bit bemused, peers through the eyelet at the top of his stylized shepherd's crook at the world, his head cocked as if to see/understand it more clearly. This print, part of the Driskell exhibit at the Wichita Art Museum through November (the companion text is Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking), strikes me as a quick summary of what Driskell's art is about: an exploration, via the decidedly mainstream Western medium of printmaking, of equally-mainstream subjects and themes in Western art history via an African-American gaze.

As I walked about the exhibit yesterday, I got that sinking feeling one sometimes gets when encountering a previously-Unknown Unknown: I'd never heard of Driskell before but felt I should have. Fortunately, yesterday's dreary weather kept folks away from the museum, so the exhibition space was basically empty except for me and these accessible yet intellectually- and emotionally-engaging works. As it turns out, Driskell is held in extremely high regard: the University of Maryland has recently opened a major center for the study of African-American and African diaspora art and named it for him. Indeed, his biography credits him with establishing the study of the history of African-American art as an academic discipline.

The WAM does not yet have any works by Driskell in its permanent collection; the Kansas connection is that Driskell studied for a time with Henry Varnum Poor of Chapman, Kansas, who founded the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where Driskell studied in the 1950s. But no matter how tenuous the Kansas connection, I'm very glad this exhibit is here, and you local art mavens should be as well.

Below the fold: more about that shepherd's crook, and a couple more images.

Think of that crook as being analogous to a keyhole of a closed door and of African Americans historically having had to peer though that keyhole at all things Western even as African and African-American art and cultural forms are appropriated by the mainstream. Just as one example: An important touchstone for Driskell is Picasso's early Cubist paintings--many of Driskell's still lifes look like they could be woodcut copies of Picassos. But it's not so much that Picasso is an Influence in Driskell's work--it's more like he is peering through Picasso to revisit one of his sources of inspiration in African masks. In Eve and the Apple II (1968; image found here), there's a visual indebtedness to Picasso's Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (and perhaps as well to De Kooning's Woman series). But whereas Picasso's prostitutes manage to convey an emotional blankness as they regard the viewer, Driskell's Eve seems to be on the verge of speaking. Perhaps it is the swell of her abdomen that creates that sense in me--if she is pregnant in this image, this is a post-lapsarian Eve (Adam and Eve conceive their children after the Fall), an Eve who indeed would have plenty to say (though, curiously, in Genesis Eve speaks after the Fall only when having given birth to Cain (4:1) and Seth (4:25)). Thus, though Driskell's is obviously a more recent image than his ostensible influences, it actually feels older. Driskell's Eve invokes the story of the Fall (note the Tree in the upper-right of the image) but also a story even older than that: the story of Creation and its human manifestation in the ancient, transcultural esteeming and worshiping of fertility--the cross-sectioned apple revealing its seeds in the lower-right, placed even with Eve's abdomen. "I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord," Eve says when she gives birth to Cain; despite the Fall, it is through conception and birth that humans have some small sense of what being a Creator is like. You can't get much more primordial than that.

Similar to Eve and the Apple as regards its dialogue with the Western tradition is Reclining Nude (2000; image found here). Driskell's woman again recalls Picasso's but also any number of other similarly-posed women in the tradition of Titian's Venus of Urbino. But surely her ample breasts and hips are gestures as well toward ancient depictions of fertility goddesses; the swirls and curves of vegetation that frame her body likewise convey a sense of lushness that complements the evocations of fertility and, even more fundamentally, the life force.

Though these are representative works, the exhibition demonstrates that Driskell works in a variety of other styles as well, ranging in their technique from the elegant to the crude, from the single subject to the densely-populated, from black-and-white to dizzyingly-colored works that create a collage-like effect. Given the WAM's relative thinness of its holdings in African-American art, it's a real treat to have this fine exhibition here for as long as it will be here.

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Lynn Westmoreland, His Songs and Sayings; or, Who says white folks don't know how to signify?

Bumped up because it has more stuff added to it:

A. B. Frost, 1851-1928. "Terrapin speaking to Brer Rabbit" Illustration for Uncle Remus, His Songs and Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation by Joel Chandler Harris. Image found here.

For a discussion of "signifying," go here

Lynn Westmoreland, Republican Congressman from Georgia, yesterday:

"Just from what little I've seen of her [Michelle] and Mister Obama, Senator Obama, they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity," Westmoreland said.

When a reporter sought clarification on the racially loaded word, Westmoreland replied, "Uppity, yeah."

Lynn Westmoreland, today:

“I’ve never heard that term used in a racially derogatory sense. It is important to note that the dictionary definition of ‘uppity’ is ‘affecting an air of inflated self-esteem —- snobbish.’ That’s what we meant by uppity when we used it in the mill village where I grew up.”

Oxford English Dictionary (whose definition for "uppity" does agree with Westmoreland's, by the way), the four examples of usage given, oldest-known first:

1880 J. C. Harris, Uncle Remus, 86 Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck. 1933 Times Lit. Suppl. 9 Nov. 776a Grammy is living contentedly enough with an 'uppity' young creature named Penny 1952 F. L. Allen, Big Change 11 viii 130 The effect of the automobile revolution was especially noticeable in the South, where one began to hear whites complaining about 'uppity niggers' on the highways, where there was no Jim Crow. 1982 B. Chatwin On the Black Hill v. 28 He had a head for figures and a method for dealing with 'uppity' tenants.

With the exception of Chatwin's novel, which is set in Wales, all these usages for "uppity" directly describe African-Americans not knowing their place, in the judgment of the speakers¹ (the Times Literary Supplement passage is from a review of Roark Bradford's Kingdom Coming (hat-tip: Edge of the American West, which beat me to the OED by a day).

Call me a skeptic, but I do doubt that the citizens of the Georgia mill-town of Westmoreland's formative years had their understanding of "uppity" shaped by Bruce Chatwin novels.

All words require other words around them in order to signify. But the language of race and of social standing, especially in the South, requires context as well in order for them to fully signify. Westmoreland may not know his fellow Georgian Joel Chandler Harris introduced "uppity" into the American lexicon in precisely the way he says it does not know it meant, but here he looks like nothing so much as Harris's Brer Rabbit avoiding becoming the main course of Brer Fox's barbecue.

I expect--and hope--that he will be less successful than Brer Rabbit. Figuratively speaking, you understand.

Indeed: Haste the day when Westmoreland's more-than-a-little-disingenuous professed ignorance of this adjective's racial and racist origins indeed comes to pass and we can all indeed be ignorant enough of those origins to use it to pejoratively describe any person, regardless of color, who is in some way too big for his britches. That time may in fact be occurring among younger people, judging from some comments at other sites regarding Westmoreland's comment. In the meantime, though, even granting Westmoreland the benefit of the doubt here, his implied ignorance of his own state and region's social and cultural history is breathtaking. I of course have no direct proof that Westmoreland is lying, but as this rhyming couplet from a toasting poem that Henry Louis Gates Jr. quotes in his book The Signifying Monkey makes clear, there's another--and better--reason to be angry with Westmoreland:

[Lion] said, "Monkey, I'm not kicking your ass for lyin',
I'm kicking your hairy ass for signifyin'." (57)

__________
¹ A slight modification to my comments on the usage of "uppity" above:

The Harris story the OED usage example comes from is "The Fate of Mr. Jack Sparrow"; a fuller context for that passage follows:

"Lemme tell you dis," said the old man, laying down the section of horse-collar he had been plaiting, and looking hard at the little boy-"lemme tell you dis-der ain't no way fer ter make tattlers en tailb'arers turn out good. No, dey ain't. I bin mixin' up wid fokes now gwine on eighty year, en I ain't seed no tattler come ter no good een'. Dat I ain't. En ef ole man M'thoozlum wuz livin' clean twel yit, he'd up'n tell you de same. Sho ez youer settin' dar. You 'member w'at 'come er de bird w'at went tattlin' 'roun' 'bout Brer Rabbit?"

The little boy didn't remember, but he was very anxious to know, and he also wanted to know what kind of a bird it was that so disgraced itself.

"Hit wuz wunner dese yer uppity little Jack Sparrers, I speck," said the old man; "dey wuz allers bodder'n' longer udder fokes's bizness, en dey keeps at it down ter dis day-peckin' yer, en pickin' dar, en scratchin' out yander.

Tattling, as I know I had, um, impressed upon me when I was a child, is a form of not minding one's own business, of not knowing one's place. And since the Uncle Remus tales aren't overtly racialized (by that, I mean that the different characters don't appear to stand for black or white people but just for people), neither is this first in-print usage at all "racial" but, rather, social in its immediate context.

That said, I and, I suspect, most Southerners would recognize that that context becomes much blurrier when used by a white person to describe a black person. Here's an example of what I mean, using the first part of Westmoreland's statement above: "Just from what little I've seen of her and Mister Obama, Senator Obama." Note the emendation from "Mister" to "Senator." I don't think anyone would have objected to his simply having left the title as "Mister." Perhaps, as a fellow elected official, Westmoreland simply, as a matter of instinct, corrects himself in favor of the title indicating Obama's elected position, as other Congresspeople and Senators do when speaking of each other in public--in Westmoreland's defense, "Michelle's" presence in the statement complicates matters, making it harder to be automatically officious when he comes up to "Obama." But, as anyone who has seen that great scene in In the Heat of the Night between Rod Steiger and Sidney Poitier knows, how whites and blacks address each other was (and for some, I suspect, remains) a vexed issue. So perhaps Westmoreland has all that in mind as well as he's speaking. But, again: if the latter is the case, then for him to plead ignorance of how "uppity" traditionally signifies when whites speak of African-Americans is disingenuous.

One last thing: Westmoreland's saying "they're a member of an elitist class individual that thinks that they're uppity." Setting aside what the word signifies, "uppity" is a judgment others place on a person. People, as the OED examples make clear, don't think that about themselves.

Of course, there is a last possibility, as suggested by the tortured grammar of the statement: that Congressman Westmoreland is, um, not terribly bright:



LAST UPDATE (I promise): The phone conversation reported between a commenter and Westmoreland's office here (scroll down a bit) demonstrates quite elegantly how two can play Westmoreland's game.

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"The illusion just happens": Revisiting Mad Men

Edward Hopper, Office at Night, 1940. Click to enlarge. Image found here.

I remember what I said before about Mad Men. But then the Mrs. and I sat down this past weekend to watch the 6 episodes of Season Two presently available via Cox Cable's on-demand service.

The Mrs. and I agree: If Hopper paintings could talk . . . with, for me, the emphasis on the "talking" bit.

[Aside: I'd originally said "Vermeer," she said "Hopper." She wins; whatever else Mad Men is, there's no escaping its American-ness.]

When advertising works well you don't even know you're being spoken to in a way. The illusion just happens.--Michael Gladis, who plays copywriter Paul Kinsey on the show, speaking on "the craft of ads."

And so it was for me as I watched these episodes, just as it has been for me with my recurring visits, both personal and virtual, with especially-compelling Hopper paintings. "The illusion just happens." Which is to say that whereas, in that earlier post, when I said this--

I would have said "photorealist painting" instead of "interior decoration magazine," but the ideas is the same: Cultural references as discreetly-deployed throw-pillows. Surface is all.

--now, having actually seen some episodes, I'm not distracted by that surface (though I was more than a little startled when one episode began with "The Infanta," the opening song on the Decemberists' album Picaresque). The show is, after all, about what lies below surfaces, whether of fabric, of image and, in particular, of language.

I'm still not sure what these people and their stories have to do with me--there's still, for me, an emotional distance between me and them, they still being new to me and all. But I do have to say that this show's craft, the demands it makes on the viewer to watch and listen closely, makes for compelling watching.

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"Why do they live there. Why do they live at all."

Faulkner at Rowan Oak, 1962. Photograph by Martin C. Dain. Image found here.

Back from extended holiday. Here's hoping yours was as restful and bratwurst-filled as mine was.

I've just begun reading Martinican writer and literary theorist Edouard Glissant's strikingly-written book, Faulkner, Mississippi. Part reading of Faulkner from a Creole Caribbean perspective, part personal memoir of Glissant's 1989 experience teaching Faulkner and exploring Faulkner's South, it (so far) reads something like a Faulkner novel as it seems to defer stating its own take on Faulkner even as it speaks of Faulkner's own novels' technique of deferral. Glissant's goal seems not so much to argue something as it is to immerse the reader in his version of Faulkner's version of the South--it's so far very similar, in other words, to Faulkner's approach to his materials in Absalom, Absalom! So, if you liked/didn't like that novel . . .

Early on in Glissant's book, I ran into this passage which puts things in such a way that I don't recall having read anywhere else. You Faulkner fans--see what you think:

How can one understand, or at least envision, the South's "damnation"? Is it connected to the South's dark entanglement with slavery, inextricable from its roots and its tormented history?

To these basic, primordial questions the work makes no reply. They remain implicit and unresolved. On the one hand, the work is revealed as infinite, not locked in by any "answer" or solution. On the other, the characters in the work are not "types," determined in advance by possible answers conceived by the author; they are people prey to this gaping wound [of those unanswered questions], to a suspension of being, a stasis, an unhappy deferral acted out through wild exuberance or repressed within. Whether savagely racist, pathologically antiracist, or morbidly indifferent, these people are not compelled by such questions, but they inhabit the vertigo.

The inconceivable and impossible situation of the country (its failure to respond to basic questions) has become an absolute. This is a place of contradiction, where the human situation is not to be studied but should be given a chance to ask the questions. For these reasons, there is no study of character in Faulkner, no so-called narrative weight; rather, we find a vertigo of striking, irremediable people. (22)

UPDATE: In case anyone is curious, I have more to say on Glissant over at Domestic Issue.

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