joculum

belaboring the point

2009-11-11T17:51:33Z

I tend to cite, enigmatically I’m sure, the most elementary suppositions of anybody’s field of specialization. This is because I, not being a part of anything, remain astonished at the fact that what is assumed as the starting point for one discipline is denied categorically by another, even when they deal with the same subject matter, e.g., the writing of fiction, or the structure of human society, or what have you. (“What have you” includes some fields involving the study of phenomena far outside human interactions, but I’m not going to go there.)

A point I was making earlier is that advisers of would-be writers of genre fiction need to explain the elements that go into a narrative that is both complex and plausible when it comes to alternate ways for human beings to do things. This means that except when they just parrot prevailing academic doctrines, they see what the dominant doctrines do not: that certain tendencies are much more cross-cultural than academicians tend to notice, but much more culturally specific than average folks tend to think.

So writers of alternative fictions are all over the place because some of them think it’s enough to project their own ways of doing things onto some imaginary place, except to drop in a few unicorns amid the Oxford dons and middle-class householders (I don’t have any actual writer in mind here); or others think it’s sufficiently hilarious to go nod-nod, wink-wink while they place in Lost Lemuria a society that is transparently that of the South Side of Chicago, for purposes of comic exploitation.

So such misguided folks have to be slapped around and taught How It Really Works.

And it’s amazing to realize how much was understood over the centuries about How It Really Works, in places where cultures collided and intellectuals had time to think about the process, and to set down their observations in one form or another (but not always forms that we would recognize, nor would we recognize the observations as being about what remains and what perishes in terms of human societies).

It’s even more amazing that the academic disciplines fight one another about “essentialism” and “relativism” and what have you without looking at what is actually being written in other academic disciplines and in the imaginative expressions of the time in which we live.

Grann’s The Lost City of Z shows us a Victorian gentleman explorer colliding with cross-cultural realities, unhappy with his own restrictive society, adopting alien metaphysical beliefs when they coincided with his own preferences. Percy Fawcett not only followed his novelist brother into Buddhism, at least briefly, he took up Theosophy and spiritualism as modes of empirical investigation into the structural truths behind the delusion-ridden British social order—from which order he nevertheless adopted a code of gentlemanly and just plain manly behavior. As Grann points out, Fawcett was bewildered by encounters with Amazonian groups that didn’t fit the prevailing racial models of evolutionary development, and kept adjusting his suppositions and speculations accordingly.

And I suppose some of this complex reality, of the rapid evolution of multiple academic disciplines 1870-1940, has found its way into the more recent fantasy stories that exploit the conventions of 1930s adventure fiction; at least I hope it has. It would be depressing to think that fiction of that sort continues to do a less adequate job than history in terms of depicting the complexity of reality. Grann has done a remarkable job of internalizing the findings of a fair number of academic disciplines while himself becoming obsessed with Fawcett’s story. Fawcett could, as I wrote earlier, be studied as a test case in cultural transition, and as an extraordinary thinker ahead of his time who got as far as he could, given the necessity of literally crashing through the underbrush to find the relevant data—and eventually getting killed in the process. (It is hard not to romanticize the academic disciplines in which one works up all the relevant comparative documentation, studies the competing theories, and then sets out armed with a snakebite kit.)

And Grann’s own legwork has cast light on so many different academic problems that I wonder at the shallowness of the reviews that, nonetheless, got me to read the book, a few months behind schedule, as usual.

glossing the more than slightly demented foregoing posts

2009-11-10T22:58:58Z

I need to read Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy closely...one of many books I own and am not reading more than sporadically. I was just now reading around in a discussion on theinferior4 regarding that other genre, speculative fiction, and its self-congratulatory rhetorics regarding what it does that mainstream fiction cannot, and that mainstream writers are likely to get wrong when they attempt to work within the genre. Here again, the internal discussions are sophisticated, and I do not wish to get enmeshed in them.

Using Grann's book about Fawcett's quest to get at basic questions of human behavior is, of course, quite a lunatic thing to do. And it may be only in America that so many theorists seem baffled by the transmission of ideas and what human beings do with those ideas once they have acquired them. I just see so many writers reinventing the wheel in this regard, or engaging in mystification because they are writing about emotionally exciting topics rather than, say, humdrum hobbies, that I felt impelled to engage in a misguided effort to clear the air, with the result, I'm sure, that the whole area is left more befogged than ever.

museums of innocence

2009-11-09T16:51:17Z

I never posted the upshot of a friends-only query asking for information on the existence of Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence. It was answered not only with the discovery that Pamuk was about to deliver a lecture on the topic that an LJ-Friend attended and reported on to me, but with a feature story in the New York Times the following Sunday. As was said of a certain novel's publication date, timing is everything.

And having posted a serious note unrelated to the Berlin Wall anniversary, I feel compelled to copy here the relevant closing paragraphs of my friends-only post, which LJ-Friends have seen already:

"In December 1989, I took my own Wings of Desire tour of Berlin, taking photographs of the real-life sites I had identified from clues in the movie. I was seized with the desire to do the same with Paris when I saw Amelie years later, but it seemed pointless and beyond my diminished financial resources.) (I assume the then-already-shuttered Antiquitäten shop where Damiel buys what the shooting script puckishly calls his Gastarbeiter coat is long gone, but I wonder if the stretch of Wall where Damiel falls was preserved for its cinematic associations. Probably not.

"I was wearing the successor to my famous black raincoat and a black neck scarf as I wandered silently around the city then adjusting to its sudden destiny of breached boundaries.

"Ignoring like everyone else the injunction that the land within a dozen feet of the Wall belonged to the German Democratic Republic and not to the allied occupation zones of Westberlin, I snoopily looked over the shoulders of Berliner families assiduously chipping away at the surface of the Wall. The adults acted as though I weren't there, but the children greeted me.

"When they went away, I scooped up a tiny painted chunk of Wall they had left behind. Photograph on request.

"You will have to believe me when I say that the photograph shows exactly what I say it reveals. Spectrographic analysis would prove the truth of my narrative.

"I think the Tahir Shah story will have to wait for another time. It is most curious, and is what got me to wondering about Pamuk's."

on never getting it quite right

2009-11-09T16:00:43Z

I had to look up the phrase I had slightly misremembered, of course. I shall let you figure out what it actually was.

"Why haven't I seen this before," as long-suffering joculum readers will already know, are the words of Doctor Edward Morbius when the practical-minded Commander has figured out, from the enigmatic words of his ship's physician, what the monster of Forbidden Planet really is, and the light dawns in Morbius' hitherto self-deceiving brain.

I only occasionally use it for belated realizations in my ongoing Theory of the Theory of Everything, a.k.a. "A Firm Grasp on the Perfectly Obvious."

"Why Haven't I Seen This Before," take number one hundred eight

2009-11-09T15:52:01Z

“Why Haven’t I Seen This Before,” Take Number 108

I’ve written many times that philosophers, anthropologists, novelists, political scientists, psychologists, economists, and intellectual historians should hang out more with one another. (Poets, designers, artists, and architects should chime in when appropriate. Everyone should be made to shut up when appropriate, which is the hard part.)

The creators of courses for fledgling fantasy writers are probably the best theorists of human behavior without quite realizing what it is that they are doing. (Few human beings ever realize what it is that they are doing, so this is not to be held against them. Note that “what it is that they are doing” is not quite “what they are doing,” incidentally. Editors to the contrary, the slight awkwardness of phrase keeps us from lapsing into the inattention of overfamiliar wording. Novelists know this. Academicians do not; indeed they insist upon using the right Magic Words of the Season.)

Those who advise would-be fantasy writers are the right kind of academician because they have to expand the imaginations of their students in plausible ways. This entails realizing the sheer diversity of human behavior, for starters, alongside the variables that keep human behaviors from being infinite.

In the area of torture or of certain forms of forced labor, for example, it is indisputable that, as poet Carolyn Forché wrote in The Country Between Us, “There is nothing one man will not do to another.” But the physics and biology of human existence means that there are some things that one man cannot do to another. The fantasy writer Dante Alighieri, however, was able to invent some excellent variations on human torment by placing them outside of ordinary life, and eventually outside of Time. In the Divine Comedy, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise have rules that limit them, but they aren’t the same rules.

I bring this up, as someone who notoriously is unable to tolerate most fantasy fiction, because the vast subject matter of intellectual history is best understood as a subset of fantasy fiction. Human beings are trying, again and again, to imagine that, in the words of the current activist slogan, “another world is possible.” But most of us behave as though we live in the only possible world, and that we understand this world as fully as it is possible to understand it.

A look at how other people do things quickly demonstrates that our world is certainly not the only possible world, if “world” means how we do things and understand things. And it is a pious belief, at least in certain circles, that our ways of understanding are not to be imposed on others as the only ways of understanding.

But as I’ve said, some ways of doing things are so destructive or self-destructive that they only occur at the margins. And some ways of doing things are so difficult and so contrary to ordinary biological urges that they only occur at the margins. But they occur at the margins in a huge variety of differently organized societies. So theorists of fantasy insist that creators of alternate worlds include food production and defense against sociopaths (usually in the form of the mutual sociopathy known as warfare), and then address the question of when commerce comes in, and burial of the dead, and political power, and eventually such luxuries as madmen and saints.

I had better explain here that where I am going, eventually, is to the question of how ideas are spread. Academics are like the rest of us; they look at what currently is, and they generalize to what they think must always be. But it isn’t so.

In this regard, I recommend reading, against the grain, David Grann’s book about the South American explorer Percy Fawcett The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon. Read in the right way, it is most instructive.

I shall have to skip, for now, what can be learned from the biography of the explorer Percy Fawcett, or actually from the background information that Grann has chosen to give us to explain why Fawcett was who he was. I shall explain this in a separate essay, for once.

What is germane here, as fans of the late anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss know, is Fawcett’s belief in a lost civilization in the Amazon, versus the received opinion that the Amazon is a “counterfeit paradise” incapable of generating a complex society (which is what we mean by “civilization”).

Lévi-Strauss unpacked the incredibly complicated structural underpinnings of tribal mythologies, and suggested that human rationality organizes the world in similar ways the world over. We just don’t recognize the structures of reason at work.

I would suggest the old-fashioned term “imagination” instead, as encompassing abstract reason, emotion, materially purposive behavior, depending on the circumstances and the job to be done or the problem to be solved. But this only works well in English, and most of the fights over how to define the human condition seem to depend on whether one is thinking about the human condition in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Chinese, or Japanese. (This means that the rise of global theorists who think in other languages has been immensely helpful.)

Anyway, in the Amazon we see humanity up against it; there are groupings so totally engaged in the struggle for getting enough to eat that they haven’t developed art, religion, social hierarchy, or burial of the dead. In another bizarre case they seem to have fulfilled Richard Brautigan’s joke about a tribe so primitive that “they didn’t bury their dead or give birth to their children”: they keep up the population by kidnapping children from neighboring groups and raising them, not as slaves, but as fully-fledged group members.

This kind of not-quite-society is hugely appealing to Regular Guys from the English-speaking countries, and it forms the basis of reality-TV shows. It also forms the background structure of a good many post-apocalyptic novels in which society has reverted to good old Hobbes’ “state of nature.”

But most Amazonian groups (I do wish “tribes” weren’t a cuss word these days) aren’t like that. They have art, and they have social hierarchies, and they have in general a complicated mental life apart from the job of figuring out the most efficient way to find a sufficient quantity of food that won’t kill them one way or another.

And this is where the history of the history of ideas comes in: it seems plausible, if not provable, that the various structures were communicated by a now-lost civilization, via the same types of intellectual communication that we find spread across the planet.

In other words, the various skills and preferences aren’t necessarily all derived directly from the aforementioned civilization, but they aren’t independent manifestations either.

Anthropologists going against the received wisdom (okay, one anthropologist, mostly, according to Grann) have found evidence of an Amazonian city built without the use of stone, and thus leaving only the foundation holes and flattened-out causeways and roads that were reclaimed by the jungle after the population succumbed to disease and their wood and thatch architecture decayed. Agricultural techniques for enriching soil appear to have been used extensively, providing a material basis for all this rain-forest urbanism.

We mostly use this information to goose ourselves pleasurably. (“Wow, cool!”) But we ought to look at it as a specific instance of a general case.

Because what survives of “the lost civilization” in various circumstances over the millennia is communicated invisibly and always has been. Ways of thinking, rules for doing things the right way, as in today's small groups scattered around Amazonia.

And those sorts of ideas spread in all sorts of ways, but except in the most rigid and rule-bound of societies they give birth to the same sorts of Invisible Brotherhoods. Invisible brotherhoods don’t have to involve esoteric knowledge; the same structures form around dog-breeding, viticulture, amateur astronomy, et cetera: in ways that are not entirely dissimilar from the distribution of styles of pottery among groupings in the ancient Americas.

I bring this up because it has suddenly struck me as incredible that specialists are astonished every time they discover and begin to describe the distribution of any given subculture. It has most recently come into the news for intensely practical reasons: subcultures that are doing assorted mean nasty ugly things that we don’t want them to be doing. But subcultures doing lovely compassionate cleanly things work by the same rules of (dis)organization, and so do subcultures practicing this or that “potty little enthusiasm,” as some 1900s-1930s Brit like G. K. Chesterton wrote once but that only I seem to remember in exactly those words.

This does get pointed out frequently enough, but writers seem so engrossed with the continuity of institutions such as the Roman Catholic Church and the Communist Party and the Freemasons and the World Health Organization that nobody seems to notice enough of the time that the ideas surrounding such solidified structures are spreading and being freshly organized all the time, in similar ways regardless of the century we are talking about…so that the basic impulses are probably at work as far back as the fabled Paleolithic caves, as only certain fantasy writers seem capable of seeing.

Historians and sociologists waste huge amounts of time looking for subterranean direct linkages between identical-looking organizations and independent thinkers. But there aren’t any. As we now see, ideas and images are viral; the internet gives us a hugely accelerated laboratory in which to observe the workings of imagination, as someone or other takes on what they imagine to be the job that some organization that may or may not exist wants them to do. And then real organizations come into being because they want to fulfill the mission of that other imagined organization. And the multiple organizations resemble one another because they spring from similar structural sources, but not necessarily through the same channel.

It makes for messy linkages and methods for describing them, but it is how human society has operated for millennia. Systematizers just slap overly restrictive grids on the process in their attempts to make sense of it. And when philosophers like A. N. Whitehead or Gilles Deleuze try to spell it out in terms of process or rhizomes or flow or what have you, folks like you and me can’t make heads or tails of it. But it’s how it is.

And it usually takes exasperated instructors of would-be fantasy writers to notice it, usually without noticing what it is that they are noticing.

And yes, if you look at specific studies and areas of specialization in any of the academic disciplines with which I began this essay, every one of them knows this already. So I expect a slew of comments that begin with, “For heaven’s sake, that’s been the foundation of [fill in the blank] for generations!”

Yes, it has, but thousands of pages of academic prose seem to get written in which other intellectuals don’t know that this is the case. Hence my suggestion that all these folks need to hang out more frequently and talk about more than which campus watering hole has the cheapest beer.

on the boundaries between scholarly worlds

2009-11-05T16:55:00Z

I have just written an essay that I may never post to Counterforces regarding the role of the critic in navigating the various effectively autonomous (visual) artworlds—and the degree to which the work of the critic of artworlds is alien even to highly educated inhabitants of other social worlds that don't overlap the assorted artworlds.

I am productively enlightened regarding the latter—the extent to which we who communicate with one another do not inhabit even remotely overlapping conceptual worlds or universes of discourse—by an LJ-Friend's link to a particular graduate student's summaries and critiques of recent scholarly essays on the work of China Mieville. I don't feel comfortable linking to it here because it comes from a friends-only post. However, its subject is the scholarly commentary to be found in: Extrapolation, Volume 50, no 2 Summer 2009: The China Mieville Special Issue, guest edited by Sherryl Vint.

I had been refraining in recent days from a post on The City and the City praising Mieville's adroit combination of a huge variety of actual borders and boundaries: the Green Line in Nicosia; the pre-unification maps of Berlin Hauptstadt der DDR with the city on the other side of the boundary simply a blank space on the map; the Berlin U-Bahn lines running beneath forbidden zones and emerging at an international boundary in Friedrichstraße station; the state lines in America in which drinking is reported to be legal on one side of a building and forbidden on the other (this one may be a rural/urban myth, though I lived in an Atlanta neighborhood in which the line between wet and then-dry counties ran down the middle of the street, resulting in a slew of bars and liquor stores directly across from the public library and doctors' offices); not to mention Mieville's deft use of the actual characteristics of various cities and countries in his fictional territories, each element readily recognizable as having been borrowed almost intact, right down to the title of essays. I would then most likely have gone on to discuss the relationship of Mieville's main conceit in the novel to the psychologies of consciousness I have spent so much time discussing on the joculuum blog.

But now that I have seen what sort of theory-laden Mieville scholarship is out there in worlds of which most of us have no knowledge whatsoever, I think I shall remain silent. Like Charlie Brown when he saw a duckie and a horsie in the clouds where his companions saw elaborate and subtle tableaux.

Two or Three Ideas: Actually, Maybe Only One, re an Earlier Post

2009-11-03T15:25:49Z

The New York Review of Books has the irritating tic of charging its print subscribers extra to access the online edition, so I can do no more than offer you the table of contents: http://www.nybooks.com/contents/20091119

However, the November 19 edition contains a review by Dan Chiasson that buttresses some of my assertions regarding Wallace Stevens in my post of ten or twelve days ago, to the point of making use of the same quotation I used to demonstrate Stevens' relationship to the world via individual visual perceptions rather than extended social interactions. (In fact, Chiasson goes considerably further than I went in that blog post, and I would now go still further, based on lines I've used before from "The Man with the Blue Guitar," section XXXII. But I'll spare you.)

Chiasson's most remarkable revelation, which I can't quote in detail because I can't access the text, is that a number of paintings and sculptures that belonged to Stevens are currently for sale for $2.2 million, and that a Kandinsky lithograph is among them. The Tal Coat painting that Stevens retitled "Angel Surrounded by Peasants" is also one of the works for sale. The poem "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," which introduces Stevens' "necessary angel" of reality, has a completely oblique relationship to the still life: Stevens wrote of the painting that "Now that I have had the new picture at home for a few days, it seems almost domesticated. Tal Coat is supposed to be a man of violence but one soon becomes accustomed to the present picture. I have even given it a title of my own: 'Angel Surrounded by Peasants.' The angel is the Venetian glass bowl on the left with the little spray of leaves in it. The peasants are the terrines, bottles and the glasses that surround it. This title alone tames it as a lump of sugar might tame a lion."

This is a fairly bizarre response to a painting. But it illustrates Stevens' need to perceive intensely and then to transmute physical perception into something manageable via the verbal and visual imagination. He truly is looking at "pictures" (as he always called paintings in his letters) and "throw[ing] away the lights, the definitions," and saying that what he sees is this or that, without using "the rotted names," as in the section of "The Man With the Blue Guitar" cited above.

And I am astonished, though literary critics knew it all along and put it in books such as the Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens, to find that "the necessary angel of earth" started life as a Venetian glass bowl in a painting by Tal Coat. In the angel/bowl's "sight, you see the earth again," just as we see it in a jar placed in Tennessee, round, upon a hill, in "Anecdote of the Jar."

Or in the places where old Neal got off the train in California, to return to my original post about Jack Kerouac and his improbable companions in ecstatic/eks-tatic perception.

But what did Stevens make of Kandinsky's abstract brand of ekstasis? I must return to the collected letters.

And one wonders whether Stevens or Kerouac are ever "standing outside" themselves in this perception of the physical object or its depiction, as it is translated at once into inwardness in a form that Rilke would have recognized. See the Duino Elegies. Or, better, get on with the day's tasks, and stop reading.

quaint and curious volumes, take number whatevereth

2009-11-03T14:46:45Z

Nicolas Bouvier's The Way of the World, the account of his 1953-54 trip from his native Switzerland to the Khyber Pass by way of Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran and Pakistan (Afghanistan would come later), has just been republished in an NYRB Books Classics edition. As usual with these NYRB titles, I know this one only from a display ad.

But seeing the ad brought back memories of seeing Bouvier's photographs from that trip (not reproduced in the account of the journey, which was illustrated by drawings by his travel companion Thierry Vernet) in a traveling exhibition curated by Pierre Starobinski, which came to Oglethorpe University in the spring of 2001.

I was struck by the curator's family name and remarked that he shared it with a famous phenomenological critic of literature. Jean Starobinski, it turned out, is Pierre's father. I hadn't thought of the Geneva School of what Sarah Lawall called "Critics of Consciousness" in a very long while, but they had been my role models back in the innocent pre-poststructuralist day. Don't ask. You don't want to know. It goes back to my Readings in Existential Phenomenology textbook at U.C. Santa Barbara and my quest for some kind of descriptive system of perception and consciousness that would get me out of the blind alleys of the disciples of Carl Jung.

I learn from Wikipedia that Nicolas Bouvier...well, I quote verbatim: "At the end of the 1950s, the World Health Organization asked him to find images on the eye and its diseases. Thus Bouvier discovered, 'through the chances of life,' his profession of 'image searcher,' which perhaps appealed to him because 'images, like music, speak a universal language,' as suggested by Pierre Starobinski in his preface to Le Corps, miroir du Monde - voyage dans le musée imaginaire de Nicolas Bouvier. Another posthumous work, Entre errance et éternité, offers a poetic look at the mountains of the world. The iconographer commented on some of his finds in a series of articles for Le Temps stratégique, collected together as Histoires d'une image."

Poe remains the poet of choice, but who now remembers Chivers?

2009-10-29T14:18:38Z

Now that John Crowley has posted a link to the Poe Bicentenary conference in which he participated, I must overcome my lethargy enough to post regarding our October 18 celebration of the Thomas Holley Chivers bicentenary (okay, it was my celebration, with a few friends dragged along).

Thomas Holley Chivers, longtime readers will recall, is memorialized on a stone in front of the Decatur, Georgia library identifying the site as the location of "Villa Allegra," wherein dwelt the poet Thomas Holley Chivers, M.D., "friend of Edgar Allan Poe," from 1856 to 1858.

Readers will also recall that Chivers, who died here in 1858 and is buried in Decatur Cemetery, took it upon himself to defend his friend's literary legacy after Poe's untimely demise, and did so in spite of his differences with Poe over the role of the poet (Chivers took a Swedenborgian position, that the poet is a seer, rather than Poe's that the poet is a superior wordsmith) and in spite of Poe's rude description of Chivers as "one of the best and one of the worst poets" in America, and the fact that each thought the other had committed plagiarism against him...Chivers being convinced that "The Raven" was based on one of his poems.

I believe I earlier posted some lines of Chivers' lyrical description of Nature that would lead us to believe Chivers was not as bad as all that, but other extracts online make obvious just how ludicrous he was capable of being, making Poe's critique plausible, and making Chivers the patron of all those who savor the prospect of combining elements or verse so contradictory as to guarantee failure.

So when utopyr's friend sinnombre 1 turned out to be in town for an Atlanta university's Parents Weekend, which shouldn't give away too much if I don't give out her offspring's name or his gender—oops—...I informed the crew that it would be necessary to walk over to the Decatur library and place a marigold on the Villa Allegra marker. (I had already driven round the Decatur cemetery and realized I would never find Chivers' actual grave.)

Which we did, and it is documented, but since I haven't downloaded the photo you will simply have to trust me on that score, as you do on everything I write, and as I trust you, except for certain tricksters who have informed us that I should never trust them, even when they are telling the truth.

of actually existing museums and dubiously existing Edwardian adventurers

2009-10-27T15:52:23Z

Artists seem lately to have been enamored of elaborately constructed museum displays of nonexistent archaeological digs or moments in history. I don't mean by the latter guides to scheduled events that never happened, such as the Tokyo world exposition of 1940 or Rome's 1942 expo (idealistic events forestalled by war or financial catastrophe); I mean supposedly hidden events that are now documented, except that the documentation is entirely fictitious. (A Canadian iteration of this was the subject of the cover story of a recent issue of Art Papers and a relatively recent Art Papers Live lecturer has been creating such exhibitions for years; plus my home region's Beauvais Lyons pioneered the Hokes Archives of archaeological and zoological data decades ago.)

Online documentation has made it easier to provide extensive timelines with illustrations for histories that never happened; the sponsoring studio did this with a fictitious historical back story for the original Blair Witch Project, and the website was a good deal more interesting than the film itself was.

Tahir Shah seems to have attempted something similar with regard to his new novel, or this is the guess of T. Shah fans who have perused a couple of linked websites devoted to the study of the elusive Edwardian adventurer who is the subject of the novel: elusive, apparently, because he never existed. (The adventurer's highly unlikely biography is not the determining factor here; I have known people with even less plausible biographical data, whom one would be convinced were made-up characters if one had not spent years copying many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore at their request.)

Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence, on the other hand, is for real, or at least has as much evidence for its existence as one could obtain short of walking through the space itself. And since it is linked to Pamuk's latest novel The Museum of Innocence, we have a link between fiction and physical reality that defeats the claims of professional skeptics.

My longsuffering LiveJournal Friend in Cambridge attended Pamuk's lecture on "Museums and Novels," scheduled helpfully enough within 24 hours of the day on which I originally raised the issue of the trustworthiness of original news reports about the often-delayed Museum of Innocence. (I've since located detailed online reports from recent weeks that weren't available the last time I looked.) I am expecting a full report in due course.

Reality in general has long since turned into a bad rendition of a postmodernist novel; Pamuk has helpfully found a new way to twist the twister.

Jack Kerouac and the innocent eye: belated realizations re vision and visions

2009-10-24T14:30:12Z

“Why haven’t I seen this before,” take one hundred seven: Jack Kerouac and the America of the innocent eye

Wallace Stevens wrote to somebody, if not verbatim then words to this effect, “Life is an affair of people not of places. but for me life is an affair of places and that is the problem.”

With the thousands of books that have been written about painting, fiction and poetry, surely all this has been thought before, but I’m slow.

First off, we know that we don’t all experience the world the same way, even when we have the same cultural and physical equipment. We fall into types of personality that old-fashioned psychologists define with irritating abbreviations like intuitive, extraverted, introverted, analytical, yada yada. All of which means we start with different internal arrangements of the same possibilities and wishes, dreams and desires.

And we navigate life through the function of selective attention. What we see and overlook depends on a huge number of variables, which we usually express in terms of being bamboozled, deceiving ourselves, seeing what is really there, et cetera: but to cite my old fave insight, we never see truth whole, we never see the world whole. This is obvious, and a truism. We don’t “see,” we put pictures of the world together into stories, one way or another.

So how come it has taken me a lifetime to figure out that Jack Kerouac wrote painterly novels?

Reading Jack Kerouac’s 1947-1954 journals published as Windblown World (fortieth anniversaries do that to you) I was struck with rushes of unwanted emotion from recollecting my own early trips in quest of the America that Kerouac saw, when it hit me. Yes. The America that Kerouac saw. I hadn’t known till discovering the book of Kerouac’s drawings and paintings that he had said that if he hadn’t become a novelist he would have been a painter. (He made the right choice, as with most though not all writers who paint…see my essay on Hermann Hesse, Kurt Vonnegut, Kenneth Rexroth, Derek Walcott, et multa alia, in Art Papers a few years back.)

But it explains a lot. Kerouac sees the world as a succession of vivid images and tableaux. The stories are episodic because what counts is the momentary impression, the words spoken by the old hobo, Neal Cassady showing Kerouac all the places he got off the train as a brakeman in California, the one-night stands equivalent to the one-hour visits to the diner, or the night club, or the fleabag hotel with the rust-stained porcelain sink.

The long continuous structured narrative is of no interest whatsoever to him, because it doesn’t have enough vivid visual moments in it.

Now, the only way to live out Kerouac’s vision is to overlook a lot. And I want to go there first, and then end up with a few remarks on Kerouac, Robert Frank’s The Americans, and why the reactions to that book are so revelatory.

People who live by flashes of vision…and I mean “vision” as in seeing real things rather than “seeing things,” though the two overlap…people for whom meaning comes in a succession of vivid visual moments live in webs of seeing and unseeing that are different from people for whom meaning comes in a dry recitation of the facts of the matter as they see them (“facts as they see them”: we won’t go there right now, either), and different again from people for whom meaning comes out of conversation with other people, or extended interactions.

Actually, all of us have all of these tendencies mixed up inside us, as we know and say all the time. But we don’t seem to pay attention to the consequences for daily life.

The division shows up all the time: Facts-of-the-matter-plus-social-interaction types treat their environment as the background to their daily story. Those with enough money hire decorators who buy paintings that match the room. Those with even more money hire decorators who match the room to the paintings. Other types just put together something functional and get on with the story, or the number crunching, or what have you.

Flashes-of-vision or vivid-visual-moment types, on the other hand, focus on the painting to the exclusion of the room, much less the people who happen to be moving through it.

This means, paradoxically, that in the worst cases [* tries to look innocent *] they unsee almost their entire environment. Everything functional exists to be gotten around and ignored as much as possible except when absolutely needed for the job or desire at hand.

Hence the juxtaposition of beauty and unattractive disorder in so many artists’ lives (as distinct from the artists for whom all of life is an artwork…or the perfect balance of the arts-and-letters environments such as Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge)…and we do have studies of some of this, such as a psychological study of the lesser lights of the Beat Generation who constituted the Scene in which Kerouac never felt at home.

The consequences for narrative: see Wallace Stevens, above. Stevens wrote poems that were perceptual moments combined with difficult or whimsical interior monologues, many of which are unreadable for that reason. Novels written on this principle are more readable by those already inclined in this direction and bored by the long narratives of social interaction that most folks call Great Literature. Social-interaction types like Tolstoy; vivid-visual-moments types like Dostoevsky. Guess which one our boy preferred? and most American and Western European novelists and poets overlay the rational-analytical option on the social-interaction or vivid-visual-moment options; you may have an experience, but the raw experience ain’t nothing till you got the experience translated into the machinery of fiction or poetry or theatre or oral storytelling, as anyone who has had to listen to a boring recitation of an interesting event knows from earliest childhood. And of course Kerouac explored structures of narrative obsessionally; he just happened to be using it to look at an America he perceived in brief, separated bursts of looking.

In practice, as we know, in daily life as in literature, everybody pays at least occasional visits to the other possibilities for making one’s way through the world. Those who don’t are the folks who fall into the various contradictory categories of sociopath, the category depending on which of the options is effectively missing from their makeup.

So Kerouac was a natural to write the commentary for Robert Frank’s famous book of photographs. The European photographer taking pictures of 1950s America wasn’t seeing the whole picture either. He was seeing purely visual juxtapositions combined with vivid moments of encounter that implied a whole frame tale. But it would never have occurred to him to try to tell the frame tale or the back story in his photographs, if only because he thought the whole story was already there in front of us.

And Kerouac thought the whole story was right there in the handful of words spoken by the hobo in his novel, or the thoughts he knew had to be in the minds of that awkward newlywed couple in the photograph, or the cute little hatcheck girl or whatever job she had he tells us he wanted to go find and take out.

In practice, Frank’s photographs are open to interpretation precisely because they are vivid visual moments. The America that the social critics think they see in them is imposed on them by social-interaction types arriving with their own mental stories, just as much as Kerouac imposed his own version of the vivid-visual-moment story on the same photos.

And what was really going on was often something else altogether as far as the persons being photographed were concerned, or the persons with whom Kerouac collided on his ecstatic trips across the country en route into the void. But we know already just how many different worlds exist in the same space, depending on what the people present are seeing or not seeing, thinking or failing to think.

Like most vivid-visual-moments types, Kerouac got in trouble as soon as he had to settle in and try to live out a coherent narrative for any length of time. By the time he hit Saint Petersburg with his ailing mama and his latest wife, he was in the phase in which trying to live out the old let’s-go-get-drunk-in-the-Negro-bar experience would get him killed (via the secondary aftereffects of getting the stuffing whopped out of him).

Those of us who knew we would get murdered if we tried stunts like that found more subtle ways of navigating the imaginary parts of real American cities.

sorry

2009-10-22T22:08:35Z

Too many topics refuse to resolve (or even ramify) despite being on my mind.

Except that I wish the Leonard Cohen Unified Heart Tour would take Bob Dylan's example and post a set list online after each performance. I am curious about how flexible the sequence really is, after what seemed like a remarkably strategic way of wrapping things up...or seeming to wrap things up. I've never before witnessed such an exqusite method of making an audience feel they had been given an unusual act of grace. (Actually, I've never seen anybody do it before, exquisitely or otherwise.)

The sequence and the overall set list was subtly different from the "Live in London" CD set.

I'm depressed at reviewers' opinion that the Webb Sisters' own CD will disappoint anyone who comes to them via their rendition of "If It Be Thy Will" on Cohen's European or U.S. tours.

Knowing what prompted this incredibly staged tour, the chorus of "Waiting for the Miracle" felt painfully apropos: "Nothing left to do when you know that you've been taken / Nothing left to do when you're begging for a crumb / Nothing left to do when you've got to go on waiting / Waiting for the miracle to come"

That song followed "Chelsea Hotel," which got an unexpected audience cheer after "We are ugly, but we have the music."

"Waiting for the Miracle" got another small cheer after the one-word change in "Ah, I don't believe you'd like it / You wouldn't like it here / There ain't no entertainment / And the critics are severe"

And Cohen fans doubtless would go on and on, outdone only by Dylanologists in their textual analyses. Who else these days gets this kind of ridiculously detailed scrutiny? There have to be successors in terms of fans who hang on every altered syllable.

Kerouac the painter

2009-10-19T15:01:32Z

Looking for the published version of Jack Kerouac's journals in the Decatur library yesterday (appropriately, the book seem to have been stolen) I discovered that Kerouac's drawings and paintings have now been reproduced with commentary in a book called Departed Angels. I had often wondered why Kerouac had hung his painting of Pope Paul VI on the wall in Saint Petersburg, or more accurately why he had turned to painting, but he actually painted Cardinal Montini in 1958 from a photograph in Life magazine.

Tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of Kerouac's fatal hemorrhage, though he died in the early hours of October 21. My old professor and mentor Bob Detweiler was the first to catalogue the unpublished writings, a meaningless fact that seems to have dropped out of the biographies for that reason, along with anecdotes about Kerouac's last days that may or may not have been true, since they came from Stella, via Detweiler.

When I went through my Beat Generation phase (from which I seem never to have emerged in some ways) most of Kerouac was out of print or obtainable only in Britain, and hunting for vintage copies of Evergreen Review in used bookshops was an adventure.

I seem to be writing increasing numbers of inconsequential biographical posts like this one and am considering an opt-in feature wherein my few readers could request to be put on a limited-filter friends list. I suppose a rigorous use of the lj-cut would solve the problem equally well.

Gregory Crewdson and other photographic topics that writers might (or might not) like

2009-10-16T15:58:18Z

Crossing paths with a LiveJournal Friend at Gregory Crewdson's lecture last night (and since I cannot find her non-LJ photo blog any longer, I wish she would comment, and promote the design business she nad her husband run while she is at it) reminded me that a good many non-photographer LJ Friends would enjoy Crewdson's Twilight (no relation to the novels) and Beneath the Roses.—the books, that is; I can think of few photographs that lose so much when viewed online, and an actual exhibition must be very heaven.

Crewdson sets up elaborately staged panoramas of mysterious events, with no before or after readily apparent: a man stands in the middle or a downtown street in a nighttime summer downpour, a woman sits in a car on a twilit downtown street; the driver's door open and the driver gone, mist and fog veiling the far end of the street; a woman sits on the floor in her living room, which has unaccountably becoming a bloom-crowded flower garden. The influence of David Lynch, Stephen Shore, Robert Frank, Cindy Sherman (not names usually linked in the same sentence) is apparent once Crewdson remarks on it. The longstanding influence of Close Encounters of the Third Kind is obvious once he shows the relevant clips.

But what counts most is the sense of a story that is never, ever stated, one that can't be pieced together even when the pieces seem to belong to the same narrative, which is often. Crewdson claims that a strong visual image occurs to him, and he works on making it happen, not on understanding it.

And in fact it doesn't matter what personal obsessions feed into the image-making. He began the lecture with a reference to his childhood attempts to overhear the therapy sessions of his psychoanalyst father, who had his office in the family basement. Lying with his ear pressed to the living room floor, imagining he was hearing the conversation below, the young Crewdson had no idea what his father did except that it was going on down there: a concern with what is happening beneath the surface of things stuck with him, and a couple of photos in Twilight involve a man looking bemusedly or reaching determinedly into a hole in the floor of the house. But this knowledge adds nothing to our experience of the photo.

Likewise, it doesn't matter that his preoccupation with finding nondescript 1980s automobiles has to do with the look of them in the photos by Stephen Shore and Joel Sternfeld that were taken when, as Crewdson jokes, the cars were easier to find. in fact, it reduces our pleasure in the mystery. Crewdson isn't doing autobiography, and insists in fact that the overall scene matters more than the figures and what the figures are doing.

He may be right...I stepped out of the lecture into a rainy October night that I instantly recognized as a more urban version of a Crewdson photograph. Or an incipient set of Crewdson photographs: The man hunched against the rain in the corner of the entrance to the MARTA rail station, staring blankly and engaged in a cellphone conversation; the unexpectedly blocked-off escalator and the bewildered would-be passengers standing in the rain staring at the brightly lit entrance; the floor of the rail car that suddenly looked like a floor scattered with confetti after a party, framed by the feet of impassive passengers. (Actually, that last one would be by a different well-known photographer, but we won't go there.)

What impressed me about Crewdson's oeuvre was that he started out very much like that, simply finding and tweaking decisive moments of strangeness, or scenes grown suddenly strange in the eye of the beholder. Before the big-budget photo shoots, before taking over whole city streets and enlisting the assistance of whole departments of city government, there were the strange light effects achieved by a young grad student at Yale working with no budget. In between there were the photos shot from above with the help of a tree surgeon, done in houses where he enlisted the help of his volunteers with notes left on the door. (He told one woman, "I want to make a perfect circle out of mulch in your back yard." Her voicemail message in return said simply, "Do what you have to do.")

There were lovely technical questions from the audience about how he matches the light intensity of automobile headlights to the prevailing twilight. (Gels.) It was revealed (probably apparent to most photographers) that he achieves his consistent clarity of focus with immense amounts of compositing of multiple shots in post-production. It was all quite opposite to the original realization that the twilight with which he had been working because it allowed a combination of daylight and artificial light was also the ideal metaphor: it's hard to believe it took him so much time to realize that it was "a time of transition, and of transformation." If true, it illustrates once more the unconscious operations of the primarily visually oriented mind (as distinct from minds both verbal and visual, like the readers and photographers I know). The image comes first; the comprehension later, and the verbal articulation, sometimes not at all. (As I've told more than one artist anguishing over writing an exhibition statement, "They don't make novelists produce their own cover illustration or single image summing up the meaning of the novel.")

So it makes sense that Crewdson would have begun with the assertion that "artists produce from one story, and we are doomed to tell the story over and over again," without ever letting us know what his story is.

Skateboarding in Sarajevo - The Movie

2009-10-05T20:41:40Z

Carol LaFayette's video based on my poem "Skateboarding in Sarajevo: Prelude to an Ordinary Evening in Atlanta" is finally up on YouTube after being effectively out of distribution as a DVD for a couple of years. It pleases me that on YouTube in 2009, this meditation on the early-1990s war in Bosnia and the early-1860s American Civil War (with which Atlanta is associated via the actual siege of 1864, the Cyclorama, and Gone With the Wind) appears alongside a number of recent videos of actual peacetime skateboarding in Sarajevo, unlike the Sarajevans' skateboarding past snipers that gave my poem its title.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSizqAiBYxM

The video of “Skateboarding in Sarajevo” is fiction based on fact: this video is the only time the works in the supposed exhibition were ever on public display; the directors of the Carlos Museum and the High Museum are played by actors; the elegant discomfort that concludes the video was counted down at Carol's direction...an outtake preserved on the original DVD had me exclaiming at a different location, "Tell us what to do, dammit!" which is the story of my life, or one of the many stories, along with Charlie Brown and the football.

joculum @ 2009-10-03T11:23:00

2009-10-03T15:27:26Z

Someday the few non-LJ-friend readers will see a new post on joculum, once I gain a bit more confidence in a lot of things. Until then, new and probably ill-thought-out posts on Counterforces. (Friends will have seen a fair number of even more half-thought-through joculum posts before and after the public one on September 28.)

Friends who are not LJ friends, but who have questions, should e-mail or Facebook-message me. (I seem to have ten times as many Facebook friends as LJ ones, given the number of artists I have written about over the years.)

Meetings With Remarkable Angels

2009-09-28T13:45:32Z

Wings of Desire is such a triumph of moviemaking that we forgive it even its plot inconsistencies (which remind us how much Wenders and company were making it up as they went along). Its sequel Far Away, So Close! is so disappointing that we find it hard to recognize what it got right. But Wenders’ instinct was correct: that the differences in personality set up in the first movie meant that the same set of actions would have completely different consequences in the second one. It’s hard to know whether the sequel would have been more successful if History hadn’t thrown the filmmakers such a curve…just as Until the End of the World had to be revised twice over because History circa 1991 kept making nonsense of their imagined 1999. (And it remains amazing that we got Wings of Desire only because Wenders and his crew had grown so frustrated with the technical problems of filming Until the End of the World.)

What I eventually have to say about Wenders’ plotlines has been said by others, but I think I decided all by myself that art critics were far more like Wenders’ angels of Berlin than were moviemakers, the metaphor that runs throughout Wings of Desire. Moviemakers (and cinematically informed photographers such as Cindy Sherman and Gregory Crewdson) get to make up the whole story, sometimes as they go along, more like novelists playing God. Art critics have to deal with what they are handed. This happens most of the time to be a body of work as centrally important to the artist as any psychoanalytic story ever was; but unlike godlike psychoanalysts whose “nondirective therapy” is anything but nondirective, the art critic is supposed to deal at an objective distance with a body of work that contains an intensely subjective subtext, no matter how remote and downright scientific the artwork may appear to be.

And of course the critic’s primary responsibility is to the audience, not the artist; I engaged in arguments with my erstwhile employer over the years regarding my tendency to avoid hurtful remarks in print media that would be used as documentation forever, even though the review’s main purpose was to tell people what to go see that weekend. I also insisted that it was better to include someone in a so-called laundry list of exhibition participants than to pass them over in silence as though their work had never existed.

But as the angel Damiel remarks in Wings of Desire, there were never enough of us. So much art has gone unseen, and unremarked upon. And now that we have been given the online equivalent of Damiel’s potentially unlimited angelic notebook in which to record our observations, I feel like Walter Benjamin’s Angel of History as the shows I have failed to write about pile up unrecorded and often unseen behind me, leaving a pile of debris as I am swept backwards into the future.

Unfortunately, like Wenders’ and Benjamin’s angels, we are expected to do all this without financial compensation, which in the case of us fallen humans complicates matters considerably. Artists and gallery owners are in the same sinking boat; as one gallery owner remarked the other day, there is something bizarre about making art and putting it on view for free, hoping that someone will walk in and want to give you money because they have fallen in love with it, instead of looking at it, thanking you, and walking out. (Or, as in the case of most art lovers, telling you how much they would love to live with it if only they had enough money to make it possible, which they never will.)

But the Internet has made all of us potentially angelic (or, given the human species, demonic): We can stumble upon the most intimate details of lives almost anywhere on the planet. Even friends-only journals may eventually become narratives that elicit compassion without the capacity to act on it, except for small, sometimes effective and sometimes futile gestures—and that is exactly the condition of Wenders’ angels. It has been pointed out by others that we have been given the technological capacity imagined in Until the End of the World: to view one another’s dreams, and to record our own more easily than ever before in history, with the same addictive consequences as the ones presented in that no-angel vision of what was then the future. (As with the prophets of 2012, it’s interesting when someone puts so much effort into presenting an imagined near future that will so quickly become displaced by the actual past; some friend expressing dismay about Daniel Pinchbeck’s oracular urgency said something like, “Poor Daniel has picked too early a sell-by date.”)

Wenders’ failed sequel is valuable for reminding us of the very different consequences that can flow from closely parallel acts of compassion. But then, as so many works of literature remind us, we are not God the Father, nor God the Mother: even if we fall because of the best of motives, some of us are more likely to end up drunk in the gutter like Cassiel rather than happily making pizza alongside wife and family like Damiel.

One of my few favorite moments in the sequel comes after Cassiel, whose angel self was so horrifiedly bemused when Damiel and the young woman for whom he has fallen finally meet-cute at Nick Cave’s rock concert, receives a solitary moment of fallen revelation while hanging out at the edge of Lou Reed’s performance. Panhandling later at the entrance to a Berlin U-Bahn station, Cassiel encounters Reed and quotes Reed’s own lyrics as a question, “’Why can’t I be good? Why can’t I act like a man?’” And Reed answers emphatically, “If I knew, I would tell you.”

Which must so often be the situation with flawed creators who are expected to be dispensers of wisdom. I shudder occasionally when I remember the dervish’s outburst in Meetings With Remarkable Men (and not just because, given how Peter Brook has presented it, it is a piece of kitsch): “May God kill him who himself does not know, and yet presumes to teach others!”

postponing more substantial entries

2009-09-15T15:42:09Z

I find myself wondering who was responsible for the incidental landscaping that has turned the hill next door to the apartments into such a magical place...since it could have just as well been left dismally functional, with the creek disappearing into a distinctly ordinary drainage pipe under the parking lot.

That in turn reminds me that, of the three urban art environments about which I wrote in Art Papers a few years ago, Urban Nirvana was the superfluity of efflorescent joy contributed by Christine Sibley to the workaday space in which she manufactured the garden ornaments that supplemented her one-of-a-kind ceramic sculptures...the ornaments are being replicated from casts and sold at the Gilded Angel and possibly one or two other Atlanta spaces, but the original art is, of course, a genre as difficult to reproduce as the ambiance of Sibley's funkily poetic garden itself.

The second sculptural environment I wrote about in that article, Robert Cheatham's remarkable backyard grotto has, since his marriage to Sloane, given birth to Freedonia Garden Works, LLC (and Sloane has given birth to Rowan, but that is a separate topic).

I tried to find the photograph of the freestanding "Persephone 2012" sculpture that Robert created for one of their clients, but the photo of Robert that appears below gives a sufficient impression of the work now being done by the man who once created a fairy-tale-worthy Philosopher's Hut that can be tracked down rather quickly at http://www.pd.org/~zeug/rrcvita.html where details of it appear.

And the third urban environment I wrote about is still as anti-garden as you can get, except insofar as Clark Ashton's industrial-strength machines occupy his yard on North Druid Hills Road.

poetry and song (mostly others' song, and mostly remastered)

2009-09-12T21:56:21Z

I suppose for the sake of completeness I ought to mention here my formal debut of the new poems at the poetry reading and electronic music concert tomorrow (Sept 13) at the Atlanta Soto Zen Center: http://www.aszc.org/activities/zenartshow.html

I don't sit zazen myself (even though I managed half-lotus back in the day) but composer Dick Robinson does and this is part of the Zen Center's fundraising arts festival.

Neither dedicatee (who I just realized have the same initials) will be present since the one is deceased and the other, who is quite alive, has no idea that the poems for her exist.

On a more productive note, I have been making my annual rediscovery of the amazing songs of Julie Flanders and Emil Adler from their days as the husband-and-wife songwriting team for October Project. "Paths of Desire" is one of the few songs I encountered in the '90s in which the metaphors actually spoke in such subtle depth to real emotional conditions, so of course it is not to be found on YouTube (even though October Project fans made entire webpages devoted to the lyrics). "Ariel," a close second on the same topic, is findable in video versions.

I also note that the Changelings' CDs have been remastered...but the songs of theirs that I loved from the eponymous first CD aren't on their YouTube channel. Diana Obscura carried on in that vein in her recordings both solo and with her husband, Damon Young (who was a guitarist and vocalist for the Changelings).

I played some role in getting Damon and Diana together with E. K. Huckaby for a memorable performance at Huckaby's art opening at Solomon Projects, and the Changelings together with the equally memorable realist painter Emily Brown, who I believe now exhibits work as Emily di Fonzo (her self-portraits had a hauntingly mysterious quality compatible with the band's sensibility) for a singularly mystico-hallucinatory evening one October at Christine Sibley's now-defunct space Urban Nirvana...Urban Nirvana was one of those idiosyncratic environments of gardens and pet goats and performance spaces that probably resonated in my memory when I saw the wooded hillside across from Vision Properties' apartments. The hill, however, doesn't have Chris Sibley's little statues of Venus or half-finished poem to Persephone painted on a concrete wall.

All these obliterated places and faces, scarcely more than hinted at in online sources. The late Ms Sibley's work has been brought back into production, but the patina is different. The originals have to be sought out in places like the Atlanta Botanical Garden and private gardens like the one at the Inman Park Bed and Breakfast (which I've never seen in spite of its being just down from the Edgewood house and gallery...I found the Sibley reference online).

This is pitched towards the lyric Symbolist side of Sibley's oeuvre that found expression in one side of Urban Nirvana. The other aspect was represented by the dinosaurs made out of old auto parts that adorned the side facing Dekalb Avenue. Sibley was all about lyricism, nature, and good-natured kitsch.

The Changelings' one cover song was the Velvet Underground's "Sunday Morning," with which they usually ended their concerts in those days (after which I lost touch with them). Regeana's rendition was as close as I ever came to hearing what it would have been like to have been there when Nico herself sang it.

we make ourselves pictures of facts

2009-09-10T13:12:29Z

The syntactic ambiguity of that translation of Wittgenstein has just struck me after all these years. Which would explain why there is a difference of opinion as to whether it is the more awkward but less ambiguous "we make to ourselves pictures of facts."

I prefer the idea that we make ourselves pictures of facts. I like being a picture of a fact.

Looking for a photograph by Alisa Lewis that I realized had a certain kinship with a photograph by someone much referenced recently on this blog, I came across, not the photograph, but my lecture citing it. I had no idea I used to be such an articulate fellow:

www.atlantaphotographygroup.org/.../Jerry%20Cullum%20Speaks%20to%20APG%20.pdf -

I have the uneasy feeling that in spite of showing up in a Google search, the URL as found doesn't link to the pdf. We'll see.

Cretan liars, or, our stories, ourselves

2009-09-09T12:47:41Z

Cathy Gere's Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism has been getting enough publicity without me, but I am always deeply indebted when someone pulls together strands of thought from which I have been gathering loose ends inconclusively for decades. So this is a very different note of thanks, for a very different sort of solution.

Gere follows up on her earlier book (which I have now read, belatedly) about Schliemann's mythologization of the archaeology of Mycenae with a book on the imaginative consequences—for art and thought and politics—of Arthur Evans' mythologization of the archaeology of Knossos and the Minoans.

Schliemann simply imposed the story of the Trojan War on every remotely plausible piece of Greek and Trojan antiquity he dug up (The Tomb of Agamemnon, to quote the title of Gere's earlier book). Evans began by exploring a multivalent body of evidence for Minoan culture, then shifted midway through his excavations to impose a pacifist, multicultural mystical narrative on his evidence. He used his mythical Minoans to encourage communal reconciliation between the Christians and Muslims who had lately been killing one another in the 1897 war of liberation.

And just as German nationalists used Schliemann's version of Mycenae to make up their own versions of north-south ethnic linkages, Evans' peace-loving matriarchal Minoans were available for modernists of all stripes to use as they would. From Robert Graves' White Goddess to Sigmund Freud and Hilda Doolittle to...well, the point is that a body of doubtfully interpreted evidence formed a rich basis for various points of view that were sorely needed at that moment.

And the body of evidence kept on being needed for points of view that changed dramatically with the decades; and that fact led to the defense and critique of Evans' thesis for reasons that were inevitably contaminated by the circumstances of an ever-changing present moment; and today archaeologists are re-reading the data to suggest that the Minoans might have been oppressive rascals like the rest of us.

But of course that is exactly the type of cynicism that is most satisfying to our own present moment, so perhaps we are again projecting our own story on the poor Minoans who aren't in a position to speak for themselves, beyond the rather fragmentary evidence that Evans eventually, circa 1930, physically reconstructed into an Art Deco version of a Bronze Age palace.

"We" assume, apparently, that the symmetrical guard stations on the main roads, which Evans said were there to deter brigandage and facilitate communications via courier, were probably there to keep the restive conquered population at bay.

But the two aren't mutually exclusive, depending on circumstances. The same Roman roads in Britain that were effectively dividing tribal territories in the wake of Boudicca's rebellion were also facilitating the transport of paid-for goods that were maintaining the lifestyles of local leaders, who wore togas and built themselves marvelous villas in the style of the colonial occupiers. And in the absence of evidence, we make up our own fairy stories about what the laboring classes must have thought. (Happy at not being raided anymore by the neighboring warlord, or chafing at the presence of Latin- and Greek-speaking camps of soldiers, or both? or neither?)

In any case, Gere traces a major thread of modernist and anti-modernist art, literature and philosophy through the world of alternative origins that Schliemann and Evans provided just at the moment when Europe's traditional origin-stories of all sorts were coming into question. And the various imaginative responses say more about how we make up stories than about what was going on in early Aegean civilizations of which we still have no more than evidence that is vastly open to controversy, and hence to unconscious mythic projections of our own.

That's my story, and I think I'm stickin' to it. It is entirely too simple, but that is in the nature of stories. It is why we tell cycles of stories; it is why one story requires another to correct the mistakes of the first one, and to fill in the things it left out.

here ya go, guys....

2009-09-08T21:18:43Z

I am finally willing to let y'all see my much-improved version of the series of poems that, I have known all along, badly need glossing in terms of the references to various people who have found things that are indisputably something real and rather extraordinary. The discoveries, however, can't possibly be the things that they sincerely believe them to be. Leaving us with my preferred topic of illusion and reality, filtered through...well, I tend to turn into my own explicator, as did various mystics of the Abrahamic revelation who sometimes seem to have written their poems primarily for the opportunity to expound on their deeper meaning. (Not that there is anything wrong with that.) I explicate because no one can reasonably be expected to identify, say, the Carlos Museum's "Cradle of Christianity" exhibition who has not been following the joculum blog all along. And I have never got round to writing about a couple of the remarkable men who make cameo appearances in these poems.

The modernist poems embedded in the titles and text, however, can be found quickly by pretty much anyone who can navigate the Internet sufficiently to have been reading the poems in the first place. One or two of the misleading partial quotations are startling when the surrounding poem puts them in context, and this was, of course, by design. (The one case that was not only not by design, but by embarrassing accident because I was remembering the wrong poem, I pass over in silence. Not.)

I have agreed with Giles Gunn that Robert Frost's "Directive" is one of the great poems of our time, ever since he introduced us to it in his survey literature class for sophomores. The difference being that now I can follow the thread of its deliberately elusive narrative.

the poem revised if not yet completely

2009-09-07T18:41:14Z

September Songs: Three Poems of Early Autumn

For which, my thanks to a woman I shall never meet

I. September First, Two Thousand Nine

…the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.
—W. H. Auden

I sit in one of the—no, that is not the direction we are going,
even though today’s news portends Afghan apocalypse.

It is first autumn; or what the Church calls its new year
in the not so mystic East. (But “The Mystical Life of the Orthodox”
was the name of a leaflet I kept in my wallet for a decade.)
In any case: soft drizzle and a gentle air temperature.
Lawrence’s “slow sad Michaelmas” is a month or so away.
“A day,” I wrote once long ago, “for the gas wall heater,
earl grey tea, and Vivaldi. I listen to a Leonard Cohen album
and drink coffee.” These days, I tend to drink single malt Scotch
and listen to whatever happens to be playing tonight on NPR.

Actually, at the moment I am listening to Marissa Nadler,
another newer singer not unlike the ones I worshipped
when not listening to Cohen or Dylan or Robert Hunter—solo.
It is thirty years later, but the songs apparently keep arriving.
The songwriting and guitar chords and the recording, anyway.

Inside, my heart remains the same.
The rock lyric from Wenders’ Wings of Desire
is as true as anything else. Mein Herz,
mon coeur, hélas: la meme.
Only the beat has sometimes gone uneven.

Starbucks has become the marker for the shifting seasons,
pumpkin spice lattes appearing on September first
tinged with rich magic and poetry, like the 2010 calendars
that began to fill Barnes & Noble shelves in early August.

So I think of Li Po, watching the moon in the clear autumn,
and feel more like Meng Chiao by his gibbon-haunted gorges,
a classic hermit exile, and alternately approving
and setting down self-dramatizing lines in which,
as much as—or is it more than?—Tu Fu ever did
the man meant every single metaphor he invented.

Mist and a hidden moon. Darkness visible
enfolds the asphalt, and the small wooden footbridge
and the green hill where a lone goat grazes, violating
fearlessly an unknown number of zoning ordinances.

II. September, and not 1913

Yet they were of a different kind,
The names that stilled your childish play,
They went about the world like wind,
Yet little time had they to pray
—W. B. Yeats

After three days or so, most weather systems dissipate.
In this season and latitude, rapid reminders of wet air
arrive to contaminate early autumn’s would-be purity.
“Nothing abides,” as the Jewish and Christian Scriptures
instructed some of the South’s earlier immigrants.
For the Mahayana Buddhists, nothing but emptiness
was there to start with. The air is still far from drenched,
but late sunlight sifts through different-looking clouds.

The weather repeats itself annually, and Dr. Freud
reminds us that human behavior does likewise.
This cyclical form of continuous repetition
gave mythic generations the Sense of a Never-Ending.
The grass withers, the flower fades,
but desire and self-deception still cloud our visions.

All things fall and are built—a crash
once interrupted my professor’s talk on Yeats
as a student’s equipment essayed catastrophe.
The prof got a laugh with the “Lapis Lazuli” quote.
That’s the thing you remember for decades after,
that, and maybe “The Second Coming.”

The same professor once went to a redneck bar
and offered, many beers later, “A toast to Wallace Stevens!”
The good old boys obliged and, as he told us later,
“We drank straight through the Norton Anthology.”

Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man
whatever cynical thing it was he said, and though I remember,
most do not, except for those interested in Irish history
or bothered by the social immobility of stonebreakers.

Romantic Ireland’s dead and gone, all right,
and the Celtic Tiger successor isn’t doing too well, either.

The clouds drift closed and open. The last light fades, as usual.
On the hill, the pair of goats graze facing each other
like some hackneyed New Age emblem of yin and yang
though not quite in the Tibetans’ sexual postures.
A toast to old and new delusions. A high passing jetliner,
thus not one stuck in a holding pattern, evokes inevitably
entirely too many tropes and bad metaphors.
A near-full moon is rising, but I know of this lovely fact
only through the day’s meteorological predictions.

III. Directive: or, the Pleasantries of the Incredible

Under a spell, so the wrong ones can’t find it,
So can’t get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn’t.
—Robert Frost

Mornings dawn clear whether you want them to or not.
Cloudy fall gives way again to persistent, sticky summer
and never mind all those tales of temporal inevitability.
On the other hand, winter arrives sooner or later,
and seasonable weather will always win, eventually.

Blessed are those permitted to prevaricate.
The rest of us have to learn how to handle half-truths,
the lesson of Hermes, as transmitted once by a teacher:
“Old father, I promise always to communicate your truth,
but I cannot pledge that it will ever, ever be all the truth,
and I have no power to say that men will read it rightly.”
The oracle at Delphi, yeah. The Greeks were always already
practitioners of the school that takes its name from the god.

A favorite moment from My Dinner With Andre:
“You see, he hosts these things he calls beehives.
He brings together these people who don’t know each other,
and they have no agenda except what he decides right then,
and whatever happens next, well then, that’s a beehive.”
That isn’t at all what Andre said, but it suits my purpose.

At a reading in California, the late Richard Brautigan
performed his “Every girl on earth should have a poem
written for her, if we have to tear the world apart to do it.”
Or words to that effect. Afterwards, a beaming young woman
demanded that he write hers for her right then, on the spot.
He couldn’t do it. Neither could I have, for that matter.
Poems for specific people, whether lovers or strangers,
are harder by far than poems about weather and history,
and require, at the least, thought and emotional distance.
Elegies are easier to write than love poems, but then
the exigencies of verse on demand are said to explain
predictably prosy lines by some of the U.K. Laureates.
Better, perhaps, the sincerely amateur productions
such as the one by an unknown Commonwealth writer
who said of deceased Victoria, “Earth to earth,
ashes to ashes, Into the grave the great Queen dashes.”
For heartfelt grief, we can forgive a misallocated verb,
even if we have to tear this world apart to do it.

The first part is always the pure gift of the god,
the middle is a mix of joy and anxious intellect
and by the end you can hear the machinery creaking.
The quiet repetition of a perennial mystery
that may or may not have been there to start with.
Our own poet of inconclusive quest is Leonard Cohen.

We shall not, spoken resonantly—but we always do—
“cease from exploration,” that is to say,
like those masters on the seeming verge of finding something
who run out of time, or money, or luck, or physical energy.

We shall not cease from the wish for exploration. T. Shah
crashing through the jungle, or traversing upcountry Ethiopia,
unlike the guy who has found the Lost Ark and the Holy Grail,
both of them just a few miles up the road, and right in England.
Watch for his ITV special this upcoming August.

Well, I stood once by the casket that was not the tomb of Jesus,
and pondered the glass vessels and the carved stone cups
that were what they really drank from in Gentile Galilee.
A Roman city was just a few miles away from Nazareth.

That was a museum show, conveniently arranged
a few miles from my apartment. As Kafka put it,
more or less: “You do not even need to leave your room.
Be silent. Wait. The mystery you long for will arrive,
it will have no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”
And you still won’t understand it. When you’re squeezed,
the Master Poet wrote, for information,
that’s when you’ve got to play it dumb
and the end of that message has been invariably restricted
by the overly zealous defenders of intellectual property.
Waiting for the miracle to come.

“The books together,” another father said, “are my successor.”
The sons who learned to farm by digging up fields for treasure.
Why are you asking for another piece of wisdom,
when you haven’t learned at all what to do with the first one?

The day is painfully sunny. The goats, it appears, are still asleep.
And the bridge? It crosses a creek turned into a drainage culvert.
But it all looks lovely in photos, and we can be extremely happy
at the richness given by digital after the demise of Kodachrome.

And an underground river? That remains a real source of poetry,
or at least it will be until or unless the parking lot collapses.

Jerry Cullum
September 1 – 9, 2009

another new poem working against its title

2009-09-02T14:39:37Z

September First, Two Thousand Nine: A Love Poem, of Sorts

I sit alone in a—no, that is not the direction we are going,
although the online news portends Afghan apocalypse.

It is first autumn; or what the Church calls its new year
in the not so mystic East. (But “The Mystical Life of the Orthodox”
was the name of a leaflet I kept in my wallet for a decade.)
In any case: soft drizzle and a gentle air temperature.
Lawrence’s “slow sad Michaelmas” is a month or so away.
“A day,” I wrote once long ago, “for the gas wall heater,
earl grey tea, and Vivaldi. I listen to a Leonard Cohen album
and drink coffee.” These days, I tend towards single malt Scotch
and listen to whatever is playing that night on NPR.

Actually, at the moment I am listening to Marissa Nadler,
another new unknown singer like the ones I worshipped
when not listening to Cohen or Dylan or Robert Hunter—solo.
It is thirty years later, but the songs apparently keep arriving.
The songwriting and guitar chords and the recording, anyway.

Inside, my heart remains the same.
The rock lyric from Wenders’ Wings of Desire
is as true as anything else. Mein Herz,
mon coeur, hélas: la même.
Only the beat has sometimes gone uneven.

Starbucks has become the marker for the shifting seasons,
pumpkin spice lattes appearing on the first day of September
tinged with rich magic and poetry, like the 2010 calendars
that first filled Barnes & Noble shelves in early August.

So I think of Li Po, watching the moon in the clear autumn
and feel more like Meng Chiao in his gibbon-haunted gorges,
a classic hermit exile, alternately resigned and approving
and setting down self-dramatizing lines in which,
as much as—more than—Tu Fu ever did,
the man meant every single metaphor he invented.

Mist and a hidden moon. Darkness visible
enfolds the asphalt, and the small wooden footbridge
and the green hill where a lone goat grazes, violating
fearlessly an unknown number of zoning ordinances.

Jerry Cullum
September 1-2, 2009

travesties of history

2009-08-28T15:00:56Z

As promised, lj-cut:

I am interested in how much those who actually lived through the '60s (and apparently were nevertheless not there, because they do remember it) find themselves reflecting now on the vast gulf of time that yawned between then and the eventual resurrection of hope (more than one resurrection, unfortunately, so we hope this time around it actually rewards our expectations). We sort of know how it all turned out: some attendees at Woodstock did end up, post-doctorate, eking out a bare living editing articles about the economy or a better one editing a science magazine. (Such was the consequence of being dumped on the job market as fledgling PhDs in the decade when university departments were full of tenured professors and the economy was in an oil-shock-related tailspin.)

At the request of more than one person over the decades, I hope soon to write about my forlorn wish to meet Jack Kerouac circa 1969, only to learn I had briefly been in the city he lived in, when I came back from California for a visit to nowhere zen Saint Petersburg, whence he had moved from Lowell, MA because of his invalid mother. In which city he died, forty years ago this October 21, and my mentor Robert Detweiler became his literary executor in the immediate aftermath. (Actually, I believe he was hired by Stella to catalogue the Nachlaß or whatever you would call the unpublished manuscripts and such.)

After the completion of this not very interesting narrative, I may get round to write about not having had to look for Rexroth's daughter, since she drove me back to Isla Vista from some get-together or another at the house of a religious studies professor. (The allusion is to a song that I know only from a Joan Baez album, though it was written by Greg Brown.)

And after that, perhaps the account of the Resist Poets Reading, in which Lawrence Ferlinghetti read "Assassination Raga" immediately after a rock band's performance, and began with "How is the unaided solo voice supposed to compete with that?" And then perhaps the Allen Ginsberg reading that had to be moved to another location in Santa Barbara because Isla Vista was under National-Guard-enforced curfew. And Gary Snyder teaching mantras to Kenneth Rexroth's class (or one mantra, actually: Om Ah Hum Padme Guru Siddhi Hum, "Padme" being pronounced "paymay—or "pémé," depending on the sort of phoneticization you prefer). And, God help us all, Richard Brautigan's dramatic shift from his reading as unknown San Francisco small-press poet to his reading as transient hippie superstar. And Brother Antoninus' first reading after returning to being William Everson. ("At my last reading, I took off my monk's robe. Now what am I going to put on? What am I going to put on?" Other than the business suit he was wearing, obviously.)

Any day now. Real soon.