The Internet verse Tradition Part 1

It began as a discussion between one of my closest friends and myself years ago. But now with us both beginning our professional lives it is time for the discussion to move up a notch and to become a series of dialogues I hope to have here.

The topic is grand and vague and in most cases too confusing to understand what the hell is going on, but somewhere in the language lies a very interesting debate over the future of human interaction and the creation of art. The Role of The Internet, on its surface a seemingly endless answer with parts that are constantly growing and changing with or against time. But that simple yet confounding fact does not exempt the internet and its future from discussion, just the contrary actually. So now it is time to begin again. Pay close attention Mark, I’m ready to do this on your turf now:

The first concept I have been struggling with is the idea of separating two very distinct areas of the Internet’s development (I don’t mean to say there are only two but rather that there are two that this will focus on, or at least that there are two I don’t want to get confused over). The first is the internet as a tool of communication, as the great democratization of information distribution, where as my friend reported he was able to hear about the Hudson crash through Twitter faster than any “credible” news media service could deliver. Now the second area is the Internet as a medium for the creation and publication of art and it is in this title that I want to explore. I want to look at the pros and cons of the Internet as the democratization of publishing, or rather I want to look at the idea that the Internet is doing such a thing to begin with.

The question at hand is whether or not editors and “credible” publishing services are needed as filters for highlighting what is actually worth reading. On the opposite side of the fence, that of the internet users, the editors are replaced (or augmented by) the sheer populairty given select published pieces by the masses. Thus the question really is: Should the masses control what is read or the editors or some combination of both? We should start with that last addition, perhaps the internet has no intentions of destroying the traditional methods of publication and critisicm, but if that were true than we shouldn’t have seen the destruction of nearly every newspapers book review section save the Times. So it is clear that we can agree a change is happening, and that this change is destroying, to a certain extent, the authority of traditional editors and critics.

But maybe it isn’t destroying them, maybe those critics and editors are moving to the Internet, are combining with it to create a new format for finding the next great literary publication. Along with that point is the Long Tail effect of the Internet to allow for every possible niche market to find itself and its companions, but in order to find what you are looking for in that respect you have to be pretty experienced with how to search, is that an assumption we can make about the masses?

Anyway that’s enough for part 1, I apologize for introducing a lot of differing points but I had to start somewhere. The real question I have for the Internet is this: How will it protect the minority opinion in art if the masses are always dictating the path?

-huysmans

Bob Dylan, Visual Art, and Marketing

The recent Times interview with Bob Dylan has mostly gotten attention for the (characteristically cryptic) endorsement of Barack Obama that Dylan threw in at the end. The Times even published a news article about their own feature in order to expand on the point. As a Dylan acolyte, I am certainly glad to hear that the man himself likes the same candidate as me, but there’s more to the interview than that endorsement, and it relates in particular to the subject of this blog, which is art. Dylan has become a painter.

The particular point I want to comment on is the position of an artist with a reputation in one area crossing over into an unrelated one. Of course, the celebrity novel that rides on name recognition rather than actual quality is not an unfamiliar thing, and one could easily assume the same of Dylan’s visual art – that it would not be in a gallery if it were made by an unknown. (Dylan has published a novel, by the way, although it’s hardly the sort of thing you’d expect to come of a celebrity book deal – from what I’ve read of it, it’s reminiscent of André Breton’s automatically-written Nadja. It’s calledTarantula.)

But while a People Magazine-level actor would hardly have trouble getting a novel out there, the world of visual art is different from that of trade publishing. Sez Dylan, “The critics didn’t want to review it. The publisher told me they couldn’t get past the idea of another singer who dabbled. You know, like, ‘David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Paul McCartney…Everyone’s doing it these days.’ No one from the singing profession was going to be taken seriously by the art world, I was told, but that was OK.”

Perhaps this reflects well on the visual art establishment – that Dylan’s celebrity status turned out to be a hindrance to getting his art out there rather than a boon. Dylan himself compares the visual art world favorably to the music industry: “From the small steps I’ve taken in [the art world], I’d say, yeah, the people are honest, upfront and deliver what they say. Basically, they are who they say they are. They don’t pretend.” In any case, it shows that critics have a much more prominent place in visual art than in literature, which tends to listen much more to the market than to the experts. What complicates the issue is that it’s not just a matter of the difference between a gallery, which is a destination, and a book, which is a product: the first edition of Dylan’s art book, Drawn Blank, came out in 1994, while his first gallery exhibition, held in London, is just opening until this Saturday.

As regards the art, I’m reserving final judgment until I see more of it, but I haven’t been blown away yet. From the examples that the Times article provides, it seems to go for the same sort of mood that Dylan’s most imagistic songs convey, and it pulls it off fairly well. I’m not sure whether it really adds anything substantive to that mood, but I like to think that it’s getting attention for its own merits, and not just because it’s Bob Dylan. Even if it’s read as outsider art, which it probably could be considered, that’s a better position to be in than celebrity tie-in.

~therighthandofnixon

Taste (1)

To extend what I was talking about last time a bit–

Alright, so we admit a plurality of tastes. We admit that our own preferences are not objective truth. But that doesn’t mean we have to stop making judgments about things. We admit that our opinions are subjective, but we don’t have to stop caring about them. If someone becomes so disengaged from their own taste that that have not stake in it at all, then they have, in a sense, ceased to live. Objectivity about life can be taken too far – you have to value your own perspective over that of others to some degree, even it it means not being objective. There are some senses in which one cannot reason logically about culture without ceasing to participate in it. The Bergson that I’ve been reading has not really converted me, but there’s something in his argument that (and I am simplifying things) time can only truly be understood through the intuition: that intellectualizing it, as we do when we try to measure it, causes it to lose something essential, since time is essentially subjective. Certainly this notion anticipated the Uncertainty Principle. Could it apply to our experience of culture as well?

~therighthandofnixon

American Blog Post

From Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One:

“Dennis sat in one of the arm-chairs, put his feet on the trolley and settled himself to read. Life in the Air force had converted him from an amateur to a mere addict. There were certain trite passages of poetry which from a diverse multitude of associations never failed to yield the sensations he craved; he never experimented; these were the branded drug, the sure specific, big magic. He opened the anthology as a woman opens her familiar pack of cigarettes.

“Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle.

“‘I wither slowly in thine arms,‘ he read. ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world,” and repeated to himself: ‘Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world” . . . as a monk will repeat a single pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.”

I posted earlier about evocative phrases that seem to be evocative only, in some way, through cheap trickery, and here they are is again. Dennis Barlow is not only a poetry addict, but a well-known hack poet, and like nearly every character in a Waugh novel, is entirely superficial and devoid of any genuine concern for the world. Whether we’re only meant to be laughing at Dennis for his superficial use of the poem (Tennyson’s “Tithonus”), or whether Waugh is making fun of Tennyson as well (which seems likely), this sort of relationship between reader and phrase is familiar. All Dennis is after, here, is the physiological effect that the particular phrase “at the quiet limit of the world” has on him. There is certainly something wrong with his superficial style of reading and failure to move beyond the old and familiar, and that is the main point of this scene, but it also brings up an issue about poetry in general that I can’t resolve. I can’t come up with a qualitative difference between a good poetic phrase, which still has a primary purpose of creating sensations, and a “branded drug” that may turn off the discerning reader, but that is nevertheless effective. What makes one way of evoking a sensation seem ‘cheap’ while another does not?

One major difference, I suppose, is originality, which bears on the reader as well as on the poet. Outside of poetry, one example of the “branded drug” I’ve found is the use of of the word ‘American’ to give a sense of import to a title. Thus, American Pastoral, American Psycho, American Gods, American Splendor, American Graffiti, American Beauty, American Beauty, American Gangster, American Gangster, American Water. The word, used in this context, seems to have turned, over the years, into an empty commonplace used to signify that This Is Big And Important. (American Pie doesn’t count because it is nearly impossible to make food sound serious.) The reason it might seem empty now, as it seems for me, is simply that it’s been done so many times before – setting the doubts that that casts on the creator aside, that gives it the sense of being prepackaged, particularly since it is used in the title, where it can easily resemble a brand.

But it’s not just originality or novelty, and it’s not just the fact that flashy phrases can distract from bad writing, dull ideas, aesthetic blunders, and so on. Some phrases just seem easier than they ought to be, and we, too clever to be so readily manipulated, push them away. I think there is more to our preference for poetry that avoids taking shortcuts on the way to our seratonin glands than simple admiration for the amount of effort put in by the poet. But where exactly is the corny different from what we perceive as genuinely powerful?

~therighthandofnixon

Used Saves

In university bookstores run by Follett, used books get slapped with stickers that look like this:

This has to be a masterpiece of advertising copy. Sure, the typography is not great, but there’s something in the text – beyond the obvious use of ‘your’ to imply familiarity and the probably unintentional Jesus reference – that has a distinct effect, at least on me. The difficulty I’ve had trying to characterize this effect is what convinces me that whoever made this thing was really on to something. Something about the way ‘used’ is separated from the noun it modifies, and the sentence fragment ‘textbooks from your bookstore’ – not one textbook, not any specific collection of textbooks, just textbooks in general – brings on a storm of associations ranging from a bounty of wholesome oats to the inscrutable expression on the face of Ostade’s Fishmonger. Perhaps PR people have commandeered Agatha Christie’s secret to popularity [cached], and found themselves a phrase that, through some accident of neurology, causes a release of serotonin regardless of context. I don’t know, but there is something about this sentence-and-a-half.

Used saves. Textbooks from your bookstore.
                                                Shantih     shantih     shantih

~therighthandofnixon

Henry Green

I recently read Living (1929) by the fairly obscure author Henry Green. Green fits into a general current in British fiction at the time of upper-class authors attempting to approach working-class life on its own level (or going slumming, if we’re being less charitable). Green took this project more literally than authors like George Orwell who attempted something similar – Green, a member of the aristocracy, actually went to work in his father’s factory out of what he later described as class guilt – and he took an idiosyncratic approach to prose that’s apparent from the beginning. On the second page:

“‘Tis ‘im, who was works manager, and Mr Dupret’s son were going about this factory. They went through engineer’s shop. Sparrows flew by belts that ran from lathes on floor up to shafting above by skylights. The men had thrown crumbs for them on floor.”

The most easily pinned-down of this style’s many peculiarities is the use of articles. The narrator usually omits ‘the’ and ‘a,’ but uses ‘this’ and ‘that’ as determiners a lot more often than they would typically be used. (There can be something disturbing about unusual uses of ‘this’ and ‘that,’ a lot more disturbing than you would think syntax could be.) The Wikipedia article claims, without a citation, that this styles is meant to mimic Arabic. Certainly, at times the narrator’s voice sounds like it’s not entirely fluent in English, but there’s more to it than that. Again and again the narrator conspicuously does things that omniscient narrators do not do, like make comments that do not seem to attach to any character and seemingly lose track of the story. It resembles more than anything else an oral storyteller who is ad-libbing from memory. The narrator is incompetent. It is certainly not an imitation of the voices of the blue-collar characters, who speak in a colorful but competent English, but it seems to be a mockery of someone, though it’s not clear whom.

The reason Green chose to use an unusual style is that he felt the need to distance himself from his subjects, to avoid coming off as condescending. I don’t think that it’s meant as a mockery of the less-educated, but there certainly is something off-putting about it. If it really is an imitation of an Arabic speaker’s English, then I could call it insulting or at least fetishistic, but I can’t come up with any particular reason to think that. There’s no reference to Arabic in the novel that I recall. The style was probably just an arbitrary choice, but I can’t help but wonder why he did it how he did.

~therighthandofnixon

Ends in Tragedy

In “The Frames of Comic ‘Freedom,’” Umberto Eco discusses three broad genres of literature: tragedy, comedy, and humor. The distinction he makes between comedy and humor is a topic for another post, but I want to comment on what he says about tragedy: that because it embodies society’s standards, it always supports those standards. I think that, rather, tragedies tend to be equivocal about society.

In a tragedy, as Eco describes it, a character meets with misfortune because he or she breaks the rules of society. Such a story is conservative, he claims, because its resolution is reached when the rules reassert themselves in the character’s punishment, which would imply that there is something wrong with the character’s transgression. The story, simply put, warns the reader against doing something similar to what the character has done.

I don’t see this warning as inherent to the form. Eco uses the example of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, which, he writes, “Madame Bovary is first of all a long and passionate argument against adultery, or, at least, about the impossibility of adultery in nineteenth-century bourgeois society.” If it is the latter, then why couldn’t the novel be read as criticizing a society that created a woman who is unable to conform to the rules it imposes on her? That is not the only reading, but I think a reading like it is possible for almost any tragedy.

It is rather, I think, stories with happy endings that unilaterally uphold laws. The (fairly bad but extremely successful) Victorian novel Lady Audley’s Secret, which has an eminently happy ending for every single character except the transgressor, Lady Audley, whose sad fate no one regrets, serves as a good example – in that novel, it is clear that we are meant to be happy at the end, and we cannot sympathize with Lady Audley if we want to do that. The normative claim is clear: the return to order that occurs when Lady Audley is punished for her misdeeds is a good thing, and thus that order is good.

At the end of tragedy, on the other hand, we are left wondering who is to blame. It is not often obvious; the ending of a tragedy usually has a sense of inevitability to it which precludes simple judgments. Is the tragedy of Madame Bovary Emma’s fault for her moral weakness? Her husband’s for his failure to recognize her unhappiness? Society’s for failing to create a place for her? Society’s for creating her? Or is it merely an accident of circumstances that leads to her fall? Ambiguities like this lie at the end of every tragedy. It is only the story with the happy ending, which requires a specific reaction from the reader in order to be appreciated, that makes unilateral decrees.

~therighthandofnixon