Stern Disappears

I'm a fan of Howard Stern's show, although I haven't listened in months, something I didn't decide to do, but somehow I've drifted away. If I would hit his show on a run it was always the same thing: an interview with a stripper who sounded as though she was 12, and a challenged 12 at that, or someone with one of the array of dysfunctions that Stern examines under a microscope for any possible laughs.

His show, when it was good, was great fun. He lambasted celebrities and presented reasoned arguments of a libertarian strain that enhanced the show (and probably the fan base).

Stern recently made his default visit to Letterman to hype his soon to occur disappearing act into the mists of satellite radio. I only saw part of it. Stern seemed more at ease than I have ever seen him. The change heralds a drop from 6 to 18 million listeners to a few hundred thousand — but he gets 100 million bucks over a period of 5 years to produce his show and other shows. I wonder how much he personally is pulling? When his producer discussed his future pay at their new venue, without being so indiscreet as to mention real figures — the final arena of decorousness in modern culture: money — Stern said, “Did they give you what you want”? Who is the “they”? Stern is the boss-man — he just doesn't want to shoulder the resentment-load that accompanies being the boss.

The narcissistic cult that is the Stern show is still solidly in place, both members of the crew and call-in audience — no matter that Stern has been seeing a psychoanalyst for years now to deal with his pathological self-absorption — not a good ad for the shrink. Although Stern would say, “Well, I'm happier.”

Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate knows he is a narcissist. He says the birth of his daughter “…may finally convince me there are other human beings as real as myself.”

He describes his approach to writing as “confessional realism”. He is very easy to read, in the sense that a very good writer makes you feel at ease, trusting. He has said he likes “long, loping sentences”; his rhythms are translucent, they flow. Years ago I read Lopate's Being With Children, the best book to come out of the alternative schooling movement. I realized later I wasn't interested in teaching, I was interested in the roots of creativity, of the wisdom of growth as it expressed itself in the primordial act: learning. But Lopate's navel-gazing was worth reading independent of any alternative motive.

I'm currently reading his collection of essays, Portrait Of My Body — an unfortunate title — but like his other writing, engaging.

He mixes psychological and sociological observation with a close reading of his own responses. It's like being in the mind of someone as they are in a session with their therapist. It could be this, it could be that, I like this and don't that, but I may be missing this, but probably not…in fact his intro has him asking the reader to approach the material sequentially, which concludes with “forget it”. Lopate is the Gilda Radner character on the old SNL, Emily LaTela, who, after being told her tirade was based on a misunderstanding, would end by saying “never mind”, and smile.

Lopate's observations are sharp, often shockingly honest, and reward with shrewd insight; he is a poet as well, so he has a real feeling for language — there isn't that burden the reader endures from a plodding descriptive drone, the garden variety author, who makes you grit your attention to take in the uni-layered content — writing which leaves out all the ambiguity and richness of texture in which our consciousness daily bathes.

I found this collection a bit much however. Lopate writes best when he is assessing others within a context — his essay on Donald Barthelme for example — and not recalling relationships or mulling locales. Lopate has the fault he ascribes to his father, he tends to brag out of insecurity — it can get tiresome. He tries to balance out the narcissistic focus, which is the predicate of his approach — the indirect self-congratulation always nipping at the reader's heels — with self-deprecation. (Self-deprecation can itself, in a certain context, be an ego assertion: who cares what anyone thinks?, he seems to say; I can admit anything and still be superior to all I survey.) Finally, the danger of self-centered subject matter is that you have to find the personality winning to go on — buy the premise, buy the joke. Only celebrities and public figures seem to have mastered that one — authors seldom have likable personas — it goes against the enterprise — truth and likability are often at odds.

Lopate has some solid things to say about influence and the struggles of artists when they are young to resist received notions:

…I don't really care about extending modernism; I'd rather read Dead Souls and other juicy classics…I drew a blank before the imperative of providing the next link in the avant-garde chain. Moreover, the solemnly heroic, self-congratulatory claims of modernism, its founders' myths of struggle to break new wood, started to bore me…I resist the notion of a progressive dialectic in art…

He is equally eloquent when assessing a conceptual artist, as she sells tickets:

…My eyes glanced over (and glazed over) the artspeak about “questioning the nature of 'truth,'” “decontextualizing,” “methodologies,” “reinforce a wide range of female steotypes,” “the categories of representation,” blahblahblah. Were such a document put in a time capsule, what would our descendants make of this mixture of flat assertion and theory; of the exaggerated taste for undercutting and subversions; of the way simple values like “work,” “truth,” and “fact” were punished for presuming to exist by being placed in the stocks of quotation marks?…

Sickness Is All

Ever wondered what doctors talk about at cocktail parties? Their theories about art. Except they have no real education in art, only the demanding experience of a medical education — an education which often leaves out interpersonal skills I might add — so…

This article attempts to explain the effects of diseases and other human maladies on the creative work of great artists. The MD author goes so far as to claim that the art works themselves are metaphorical expressions of the diseases. This is a familiar genre that is periodically resurrected because sophomoric theorizing is just too delicious to let die; here it manifests itself by an attempt to explain talent, genius, by some negative contrivance; the artists weren't really gifted, they were pathologies to be studied like bugs under a microscope. Their work, well, those are symptoms, like the Sistine Chapel.

This scientism, as former Senior Editor of Scientific American John Horgan describes speculations which masquerade as science, like string theory, is implemented with a “may be” followed by an assertion based on this self-same verbal quicksand:

[Michelangelo] might also have been exposed to lead-based paints. The fruit acids of wine, chiefly tartaric contained in crocks, are excellent solvents of lead in crocks coated with lead glaze. The wine thus contained high levels of lead.

I'm sure the doc is correct that, ” The afflictions these people endured probably could have been ascertained and perhaps treated with modern medical techniques.” Assuming they were correctly diagnosed at a distance of time, space and circumstance that boggles the mind. Whether those maladies expressed themselves in their work or were rather a human triumph of spirit over affliction isn't in question for me.

Writing History

This book review offers the comments of the author of The Rise of American Democracy: A Constant Struggle about the current ideological approach to the writing of history:

…he has expressed his contempt for it, assailing it as filled with “bargain basement Nietzsche and Foucault, admixed with earnest American do-goodism, that still passes for 'theory' in much of the academy.”

Polemicist

Maureen “dowdy brains” Dowd, the woman who likes to make up disparaging nicknames for the bad guys, as she sees them, is the subject of a NYT review. Dowd's bad guys are determined by cant and buddy-membership in a club of hectoring twinkies on the margins of public life who make political discussion impossible nowadays — because together with those on the Right who mirror her hyperbolic inanities, they blare over any chance for real discussion of the issues. Dowd's need to provoke through polemics leaves the reader feeling she is more needy of attention than desirous of serious consideration.

The reviewer, novelist Kathryn Harrison, seems to get it:

Polemics tend to ignore subtleties and contradictions, so one may be reluctant to grant Dowd the authority of a responsible guide…Like most people who work hard at seeming to be naturally funny, Maureen Dowd comes across as someone who very much wants to be liked…it's rare that she resists naming her friends, most of whom have names worth dropping: “my witty friend Frank Bruni, the New York Times restaurant critic”; “my friend Leon Wieseltier”; “the current Cosmo editor, my friend Kate White”; “my late friend Art Cooper, the editor of GQ for 20 years”; “my pal Craig Bierko”; et al.

Pollock

I was prepared to dislike Pollock, Ed Harris' 2000 movie about the great American painter Jackson Pollock. The opening scenes with Pollock, the depressive drunk, inhabiting the screen in the horizontal, didn't encourage me. But Harris showed great integrity in the movie; he made many imaginative leaps into the mindset of, and working methods used by Pollock.

Harris' gentle way of showing Pollock's path from abstract painter with brushes to his full body splatter technique was particularly noteworthy — it is a tough thing to show the development of a sensibility. There are few good movies about artists. This is one of them.

The influential art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg (along with Harold Rosenberg), at once arrogant and understanding, and the surrounding crew, principally his wife, the fine painter Lee Krasner, were conceived in a complex, adult way. Marcia Gay Harden received well-deserved applause for her performance.

Pollock's interior-dwelling retreat from imagery devolved in art that came later into an aesthetic of solipsistic sensibility, which in the current art world is the ying, to the default yang of ironic conceptualism. An artist can't be responsible for those who follow in their wake. There is also a loss of nuance in the embrace of main force energy in Pollock's later work. There's always a trade-off. Pollock provided a true American voice, a visual jazz of improvisation, of the good chance. There is no century or country he could have painted in but the US of A.

Pollock is by no means a great movie. Ed Harris put his own money into the movie and got together with his friends to make it. That has its good and bad sides. His decisions to both direct and star was probably a mistake. He isn't an interior actor — the scenes where he is supposed to be devastated or blasted have him just staring blankly — you can't see inside the character. The end was too long and overly elaborated. Many scenes felt fuzzy in their intentions. However, Harris' feeling for the material, the atmosphere, and fairly accurate representation of the life of an artist at a particular time in a seminal moment in American art was surprisingly well-crafted.

The movie needed fuller treatment — Pollock created a universe, which is what good artists do, and that is unreproducible by other means, only to be seen in the work itself — but the movie, blessedly, provided honorable intelligence in approaching Pollock's still controversial, wonderful, explosive and exciting art.

Pollock's House

Critic Harold Rosenberg: “Whoever undertakes to create soon finds himself engaged in creating himself. Self-transformation and the transformation of others have constituted the radical interest of our century, whether in painting, psychiatry, or political action.”

WB Yeats

The advocate of trance in the creation of art — of the expressiveness of art, W.B. Yeats:

I had set out on life with the thought of putting my very self into poetry…I thought of myself as something unmoving and silent living in the middle of my own mind and body….Then one day I understood quite suddenly, as the way is, that I was seeking something unchanging and unmixed and always outside myself, a Stone or an Elixir that was always out of reach, and that I myself was the fleeting thing that held out its hand.

Sociology of Art

John Updike about the sociology of art and the psychology of its audience:

For the hard working bourgeoisie, art became a relief from life rather than, as in less specialized times, an explanation and intensification of it. To an extent, it is still true that the arts survive as an instrument and emblem of social improvement; one goes to the museum and concerts, and reads books, because other nice people do….Art functions as grease in the social wheels…Art is associated with refinement, and refinement with wealth, and wealth with power.

Holden Caulfield, Deconstructionist

John Searle on the gimmickry of Deconstruction:

Deconstructive prose tends to be systematically evasive…Crucial words are put in quotation marks so as to suggest an ambivalence in the author's stance toward them…Or central theses are imbedded in subordinate clauses and not stated directly…In this way the deconstructionist can make implausible assertions while appearing not to…

I believe anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give the appearance of profundity by making claims that seem paradoxical, but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial…There is an atmosphere of bluff and fakery that pervades much (not all, of course) deconstructive writing. What becomes even more surprising is that the authors seem to think it is all right to engage in these practices, because they hold a theory to the effect that pretentions to objective truth and rationality in science, philosophy, and common sense can be deconstructed as logocentric subterfuges. To put it crudely, they think that since everything is phony anyway, the phoniness of deconstruction is somehow acceptable, indeed commendable, since it lies right on the surface ready for further deconstruction. Thus, the general weaknesses of the deconstructive enterprise become self-justifying…

Searle is describing the adolescent affectation of depth of much modern theorizing in the arts; the result, a detachment that is fundamentally lazy, and honed to aggrandize the bloviator.

Alito

This article about nominee Alito was reassuring. After hearing comparisons made to Scalia, these words, admittedly stated by a friend, but a liberal friend, offer hope:

J. L. Pottenger Jr., a friend of Judge Alito's at Princeton and Yale who is now a professor at Yale, said: “The reason I'm hoping he gets confirmed, even though I am a liberal, maybe an ultraliberal, is because I think he's an honest, well-intentioned guy who believes in judicial restraint in the model of Supreme Court Justice John Harlan and I can't really argue with that as a judicial philosophy. I don't think he's an ideologue. I don't think he's going to be out there trying to roll back the clock.”

It is about as good as you can get with a very conservative administration. It could turn out that Bush, who arrogantly declared a “mandate” after a slim victory, and seemed indifferent to all but the sound of his own distant drummer, will pick two of the best Justices the Court has seen in a long time. All Bush has to do is get Alito confirmed, which he can do with or without the Dems; all Alito has to do is be the fair-minded and restrained individual which people claim.

I have to add: Doesn't this line from the same article look like the perfect premise for a TV sitcom?:

He lives in suburban West Caldwell, N.J. - a quiet homebody with simple tastes married to a live wire and occasional practical joker.

Judge gets home, dour and tired from a long day of deciding the fate of the nation. Walks to sofa; sits on whoopee cushion.

Wild At Heart

David Lynch's 1990 Wild At Heart is emblematic of Lynch's approach to movies. With an innate sense of visceral, sensuous imagery, and very little story sense, or ability to convey emotional content through character development, the movies of his which I have seen have all felt, in retrospect, like a string of powerful moments; not psychological moments, but a series of engrossing icons strung together, each with a meaning that is private and unavailable, but potent. Rhythm-less and contracted, his movies grab you, fascinate you, but give you nothing.

Lynch needs someone to hand him material that has a strong story-line — his eccentric take on things would work well as variations off of an engrossing story. Lynch, in the interviews on the DVD, has a parson's restraint — he seems a Puritan with a Las Vegas fantasy life. Lynch's perfectionism, obsessiveness, bullheadedness, and belief in his material carry the movie finally.

Also of note on these commentaries, once again: the extreme deference, even reverence, the cast crew producers and anyone lucky enough to be in a Hollywood movie exudes about the director; they can't say enough good things about this guy. Even the writer of the novel upon which the movie was based and rewritten for film by Lynch is deferential and decorous to an astonishing extent. You would think the novelist would say, well, Dave changed some things from the book, but I felt my presentation more fully worked. Instead you hear, Well, David was right to change that for the film. If it was right for the book, why not the film?

Lynch's movies make you feel as though you have made the wrong turn on a city street and find yourself surrounded by the inhabitants of a mental hospital — your big job is to get out of there in one piece by assessing which of these are harmless nuts and which true psychos. There wasn't a single character that didn't seem Fedexed directly from a mental ward, after first being filtered for any sign of intelligence.

If Lynch could establish some sense of normalcy the shocking imagery would work better — it would have some human grounding. That's how nightmare's work, and that is what Lynch is giving us, without moral concern or empathy for character or audience; his own personal hell.

Ludwig Speaks To Himself

Wittgenstein, that idolator of genius — as he conceived genius — is described by Stuart Hampshire:

There is a sense in which Wittgenstein pictured philosophy as a very particular kind of talking to oneself, whether in lectures or among friends or in a manuscript journal. The mode is confessional, and the genre was established by Saint Augustine talking to himself about time and personal identity.

Hampshire says that Wittgenstein felt genius was expressed in works that bore no “marks of contrivance” — a phrase from Kant; by contrast, mere talent always betrays itself in obvious manifestations of contrivance, thought Ludwig.

Hampshire relates the story of Walter Pater, who, like Wittgenstein, believed in the interior monologue as a philosophical wellspring; Pater asked at the conclusion of a lecture if his audience had heard his lecture all right. Oscar Wilde was at the lecture and replied, “We overheard you, Master.”

A World Of Meaning

Helen Vendler about poetry and John Ashbery and John Ashbery writing about poetry and about art and about life:

There seems to be a general belief among readers that to write about “poetry” is somehow not to write about “life.” But “poetry” is the construction by consciousness of an apprehensible world. Every person constructs such a world and lives in it. When the poets write about poesis, they are writing about what is done every day by everyone. Most of us do not reflect on it as we do it, but we live nonetheless in our construct of the world. Because the poet writes his constructions down, he cannot be unconscious of them; he must reflect on their structures, their idiom. In recording and enacting the process by which we come to consciousness, form an identity, see our selfhood shadowed and illuminated by circumstance and finally bid farewell to illusions of immortality, Ashbery reveals the nature of personal life in our era. To say that a poem is “about poetry” means, surely, that it is consciously about the way life makes up a world of meaning.

The poets do not write about poesis as a process exclusive to themselves. The arrangements of memory, the articulations of the dreams of the ego, the inventions of culture, are poesis. If we do not understand ourselves as self-constructing animals, we mistake the source of authority, projecting it onto external fictions. The poets, by describing their act of self-making, call us to witness our own processes of soul-making…

Brilliant.

Ashbery:

As though by a giant wave that picks
itself up
Out of a calm sea and retreats again
into nowhere
Once its damage is done.

Heroes

Growing up, you come to terms with the ambiguities which inhabit all things — even that which you most admire. The heroes of my youth, the great artists, time slowly washed over with new knowledge of them as people and further exposure to their work; they became more complicated, their work more complex; their lives sometimes dubious — they turned out to be most human — all the more their achievement.

But some suffered badly. The anti-Semitism of many fine artists still troubles me. Cézanne, and Degas and…well you could go on and on. Was it only “of the time” — to be dismissed? I don't know. I do know I was especially saddened to read of TS Eliot's infection.

Anthony Julius is not swinging wildly here — he clearly sees the demarcations of Eliot's greatness; but he doesn't allow himself the easy and chummy denials that anti-Semitism often paternalistically elicits.

It was said against me that by describing Eliot as an anti-Semite I was implicating him in projects of terror and murder. This was taken to be terribly unfair to Eliot. The holding of anti-Semitic views has become more culpable since the second world war, apparently. This is partly because it is thought the Holocaust for the first time exposed the extent of anti-Semitism's capacity to harm Jews, and partly because anti-Semitism is no longer a general feature of the times. It is now a personal decision and not a prejudice unavoidably “in the air”.

I think this is wrong. anti-Semitism continues to contribute to the general “climate”. It has not dwindled to a marginal, limited phenomenon. Anti-Semitic propaganda is in global circulation, both on the internet and in printed form. Israel's very right to exist is routinely challenged and the project of Jewish self-determination denied. It is the wish of many to deny to Jews those collective rights freely given to others (or urged for them). Jews are still being killed for the fantasy offence of being Jewish. Moral resolution is still required if one is not going to adopt anti-Semitic positions.

Paglia

[via Denis Dutton]

Camille Paglia is like a sports fan with depth. Rather than losing it for the home team, she loses it for art. Art for her is something that matters — her pronouncements have the unhinged assuredness of a home team fanatic. But the focus of her enthusiasm evolved from learning and thinking about art and artists, not from the geographical accident of home team sports mania. She cares about art because she cares about life.

Louis Menand had written a long and interesting piece about Pauline Kael for the NYRB in which he said that Paglia had been one of those very influenced by Kael. I think this is true, but like much talk about influence, you really have to be specific.

Kael's brilliance and huge ego evolved in some of her writing into exhibitionistic hyperbole — look at me, look at my verbal orgasm, Kael often seemed to say. It sometimes felt that it was all about her. But only sometimes. Most times Kael was right on target and her targets were skewered in a way that was very satisfying; boy, did they deserve it. Kael's brilliant insights and no-holds-barred approach were deeply engaging.

Paglia is a variant of that robust voice. But rather than writing about (and being constricted by) a collaborative entertainment form like movies, Paglia covers all of culture and pop culture. Kael used high culture as reference, but lost her context too often — she once compared Renoir the son, a wonderful director, with the genius of Renoir's father. Both father and son were sunny and light filled souls, but it was the father who was best able to express it.

I often don't agree with Paglia's judgments, but she is so great — her energy and intelligence, even when they don't convince in a particular instance, still elicit your admiration for her insights and knowledge — her boldness as she marches in, what seems to me, the right direction — toward an appreciation of art that expresses something that is inclusive of both intellect and emotion and spirit.

The fine interview is here. Some quotes:

• New Criticism was in its arid last stage when I was in college in the mid-1960s, and I detested it for its claustrophobic exclusions. I found it too genteel, too WASP, with its prudish evasion of sex and its hostility to psychoanalytic speculation.
• I am trying to make close reading fashionable again and to embolden graduate students and junior faculty to do likewise. Over the past 35 years, literature and art have too often been reduced to lugubrious victimology or crass political sloganeering.
• I find Eliot grindingly conceptual and calculated; everything is pre-programmed, mapped out like a crossword puzzle. He leaves little to intuition, to the suggestive power of words. And he's too priggish about basic emotion.
• About Ezra Pound: “Too much of it is pastiche—a compulsive showiness, a pillaging of culture for pretentious references that the general reader would need a thousand footnotes for. That's not deep or genuine art-making to me—it's adolescent skittishness, the posturing of a snippy, adenoidal grad student (I remember that type all too well).”
• My theoretical approach is militantly interdisciplinary: I believe that all the arts should be knitted together. It's my recipe for future creativity in the arts. We will never get important new artists again if we keep feeding students a sterile diet of cynical postmodernism.