What is poetry good for?
- To liberate passion.
- To get out from under the past; to surmount
it.
- I am seeking the high walls and higher
ceilings of childhood.
The windows that rise like
stained glass cathedral eyes.
From deep within the cries of the city
There lie thrills that
Can never be silenced.
- To forget, and then recover
For to forget is not to lose.
God remembers everything; only
She can stand it.
Thursday, March 31, 2016
Thursday, November 5, 2015
The Masses, the 'Net, and Dumbness.
Why does so much writing on the internet suck? Then again, why would we expect anything different? I can think of a few reasons, but let's set those aside for the moment. Here's how this Thursday's dose of web inanity came about: First, scrolling through the dread twitter feed, I came across this post, linked to by Freddie DeBoer, who nods in agreement:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/04/no-spooning-isn-t-sexist-the-internet-is-just-broken.html
And yes, Freddie's right, it's a decent overview of the bad incentives that are driving much of the daily flush of stupidity on the web. The solutions offered - essentially, better means of information gathering by advertisers, learning who is reading what, and how completely - are reasonable in their own right, which is to say, in a narrowly utilitarian sense. But there are a couple problems that jump out right away: One, this would seem to mean a further erosion of privacy, and should therefore be treated with the utmost skepticism. I don't want advertisers to know more about what I'm reading and how much I'm reading. I'd rather they know nothing about me, since I don't think I need anything from them, and I sure as hell don't want anything from them. We shouldn't be seeking better advertising, we should be seeking less advertising, to be replaced one day by no advertising. But in the interim, the more cool-headed, incrementalist, reformist, pragmatic side of me concedes, it would be better to slow the relentless race to the bottom of taste and intelligence, and perhaps these better "metrics" would help that cause.
The next point that jumps out, following easily after the first, is the absence of an alternative means of sponsoring journalism or "content" online. The most obvious example would be a subscriber based model, but the author of the Daily Beast article doesn't mention it. This isn't surprising, but it is revealing. On the immediate level, a shift to a subscription-based model isn't really an option, because nobody knows how to make it work, especially in the long term. There's a widespread assumption that a) nobody is willing to pay for content, or b) even if they did, they aren't willing to pay enough money to effectively sustain the model, at least not at the current volume of content production. These are real problems, as I'll get to in a bit, but the fact that they are so easily asserted should tell us that there are reasons beyond mere logistical worries. Taking a step back, we can see signs of what can only be called ideological resistence when it comes to alternatives to advertising. This is the Fukayama problem: history has ended, capitalism is here to stay, and there is no conceivable alternative. As goes capitalism, so goes advertising (and marketing and PR), because there is no other way to imagine the fundamental market relationship existing between consumer and producer. There is nothing empirically wrong with a subscriber model, and some sites do in fact use it, like the NYT, although very few use it exclusively. But it is remains ideologically problematic from the neoliberal capitalist perspective. One can't help but pause and consider the irony of this: the straightforward transaction of content for money is discouraged, because that's too purely capitalistic, too market-based. Far better, in the eyes of the overlords, to have the roundabout, ouroborus-like system of content providers selling audience attention to advertisers, who then sell that attention (if it can really be called that, a more accurate term would be something like "pseudoattention") to the makers of consumable things, who then sell those things back to the people who are reading the articles online... at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
The reasoning here is patent enough. Big corporate entities don't like small, clear-cut transactions between merchants and customers. They prefer mindless consumption by a powerless mass of undiscriminating drones. Any transaction that favors the consumer - that assumes autonomy, individuality, authentic choice - is to be strictly avoided. Advertising, when looked at from enough distance, is never about selling a mere product. It's about selling a mindset, an idea, an entire way of life. It is about reinforcing in the consumer a sense of herself as a passive, wholly dependent entity, a person only in a very narrow sense. This leads to a small, tangential, but important point: I've always wondered how advertising, even if one presumes that is is minimally effective, can possibly be so massive and lucrative a business. For a while I assumed that it was a kind of autocannibalism on the part of the major capitalist players, fueled, essentially, by excess wealth. Sure, somebody somewhere might be influenced by the latest Coke commercial or ad to buy a bottle of Coke. Someone, that is, who wasn't already planning on buying one, or, even less likely, who somehow had never heard of Coke. But how can that instance, even multiplied a few million times, beyond all plausibility, still account for the billions of dollars spent annually on advertising? The answer, I think, is something like what Zizek would say: it's about ideology, stupid. The saturating of the media with emblems, images, symbols that tie meaningful living, fulfillment, happiness, pleasure, sex appeal, success, with products of every shape, color, and use is part of a larger effort to creating a kind of person, and a kind of society, that thinks of itself first as a hydra-headed consumer, effectively disenfranchised and always anxious, wholly dependent on the image-machine for satiation and guidance. This project isn't conspiratorial. The people in charge understand this dynamic perfectly well, and acknowledge it openly, although they obviously frame it differently - put a positive spin on it, as it were. The ad account men think people are consumers, that products are solutions to life, and that this is a good thing. Do they (the advertisers, marketers, brand-owners) believe in the next logical step, that consumption is the very substance of life? I think that if you asked them straight out, they would deny it, offended at the implications. As the credit card ads have it, there are some things in life that money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. The ads, of course, rather blatantly posit that those wispy, ephemeral things that one can't buy - love, happiness, the smile of a young child - are in fact facilitated by money (in this case, credit.) But I think the larger reason for the spillover that occurs, where being a passive consumer comes to be more and more fundamental to our identity as people, is that there exists a vacuum, which nature, as we know, abhors. Bereft of a meaningful model for aspiration, a star to steer by, some stable standard for personhood, some kind of spiritual substrate, one falls back on the next available thing. In capitalism, which destroys the imagination and the community with one hand, while providing consumerism as a balm and a consolation with the other, we have nowhere else to turn but back to the marketplace. We all carry with us the sense that there is something missing, but we have a hard time remembering what it was. And the ad men, aware of our inchoate yearning, are quick to supply us with soothing illusions - fleeting, unsatisfying, like the empty calories of potato chips, because endless flux is necessary - to keep us dazzled, but just stimulating enough prevent despair and self-destruction. The host that is killed too quickly must also kill the parasite. Better to keep it alive, weakened, hobbled, not dead but dying a perpetual death. Viruses don't have to be intelligent to thrive; the same goes for capitalism.
So the current model works just fine, as far as the dominant ideology is concerned. But lets return to the hard ground of logistics for the moment, and re-consider the subscriber model. It boils down to a matter of cumulative costs. I don't think people can afford it, and my own example, while necessarily anecdotal and limited, is, I suspect, broadly relevant. Currently, I live pretty much hand-to-mouth. I'm able to pay down some of my debt, student and otherwise, but only very slowly, and the next hiatus from work will cause the needle to start moving the other way again. I don't save, because I can't afford to, or at least not without sacrificing a great deal of what I enjoy in life. Currently, I subscribe to Netflix, which I share with my girlfriend and my brother. She subscribes to Hulu, which we share, and her parents are Amazon Prime members, which service they share with us. I don't subscribe to any online publications for writing, and I don't give money to the public radio stations I listen to, of which there are at least five, despite their frequent guilt-inducing fund drives. If I were to pay for anywhere near the amount of media I consume, I would be going very rapidly into even more debt. I suspect that my experience is not unique. As much as I would like to pay the writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other people out there who are making really good stuff that I like, I simply can't afford it. I can't even come close to affording it.
I suspect that the media producers, small and large alike, know that this affordability problem is real and pervasive. Even the recent landmark of the NYT website hitting a million subscribers is cold comfort. They still have to advertise, even to their well-paying subscribers, and they have already begun integrated advertising, or "native content," a particularly invidious form of advertising that some people bizarrely seem to think is a solution. None of these innovations will change the fact that many, many readers are just too strapped to afford it all. The current economic conditions of stagnation and decline are exacerbating the issue, but even before the recent crunch, the problem existed. Basically, newspapers have always lost money on subscriptions. Even in their glory days, they stayed in the black (when they could) by bolstering their bottom line with ad sales. They also made profits, it's true; sometimes, they made enormous profits. But those cases were the exceptions, and they also bring us right back to the problems of quality. The biggest, richest papers made their money through ad sales and through pandering to the lowest common denominator. Thus you get sensationalism over investigation, triviality over substance. Yes, there have always been good reporters and good journalism, even at some of the worst rags, big and small. But the really excellent, issue-based journals, the best examples of a democratic press, were almost always in the red. An informed public is a loss leader, in capitalistic terms. It's just one more thing that markets can't do, or can't do well. And so an accommodation is made - not to the stated goal, an informed populace - but to the market, in the form of ads, sensation, and distraction.
What to do? One can jump back again and view the matter from the high, chilly perch of ideological critique, and perhaps divine a hint of an answer. Clearly, in my view, the market is the problem. Any system of keeping citizens informed that is based upon narrow economic interests is bound to fail, and since the businessmen run our society, the cost of the failure will be borne by the people, not the balance sheets of the media outlets. Should the state step in? In the short term, I would say, yes. There's no immediate reason why the state would be worse at providing good journalism than corporations already do. I'm not imagining a centralized news bureau, which I readily admit summons up creepy images of Soviet apparatchiks and Ministries of Information. I'm imagining something that's widely distributed, only centralized in terms of its funding. Something like a Social Security trust fund that disperses money regularly to news outlets far and wide, whose eligibility for funding is determined by stakeholders. It's not a perfect model or a detailed one, but something like ProPublica would fit the bill, only on a much larger scale, and more widely dispersed. It would treat the citizens as citizens rather than customers (which is what they are right now, any use of the euphemism "reader," as in "to our loyal readers..." notwithstanding). This has already been accomplished, to some degree at least, in Great Britain with the BBC. It has its risks and its shortcomings, but it is much more valid in principle than the consumer based model, which is patently corrupt.
To return to the immediate cause of this post: spooning article was dumb. But it was transparently dumb. I don't think a single soul took it seriously, including the author. Okay, he might've taken it halfway seriously, but that's not the same thing. He was also clearly being "playful," either out of genuine playfulness or out of some kind of anticipatory defense against the backlash he must've known was coming (and which his editor and publisher certainly knew was coming, indeed it's obviously why they ran it.) These kind of things might be good to denounce, but it's a bit like blaming the scorpion for stinging the frog, asking the leopard to change her spots, etc. In my view, there are more appropriate targets. Take, for instance, this other piece, also sourced from a link on twitter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/11/against_subtlety_the_case_for_heavy_handedness_in_art.3.html
This piece is less obviously the work of a hack, less clearly an example of clickbait. It's reasonably well-written, and it comes close to having some kind of a point. But it's still bullshit. It's in the same league as Kathryn Shulz's Pond Scum, the most recent example of pseudo-intellectual eyeball-farming. While ostensibly reasoned and informed, it requires only a few seconds of sustained reflection to realize that it is inane, and grossly so.
The basic response, if one is to bother with responding at all (a questionable prospect, I admit), is that subtlety is just one tool available to an artist or craftsman, not the point of the entire enterprise. It's a means, not an end. Nobody who is even marginally serious about making or consuming art has ever argued otherwise. In order to launch his argument, then, the author, Forrest Wickman, needs to construct a strawman. Admittedly, the sheer range of stupid writing on the internet is more than enough straw with which to build. It's true that there are plenty of writers out there who have lazily deployed "on the nose" and "obvious" whenever they want to appear smarter than what they are reading/watching/listening to. But this isn't because they are especially perceptive, it's because they are insecure, and hurried, and terrified of appearing sappy or naive. I won't dwell on this point; David Foster Wallace has more than covered it, and much more acutely and articulately than I could. Suffice it to say that it's still a problem, maybe worse now than ever, and the internet is one of its main wellsprings.
After the strawman has been erected, the sophistry must commence: in this case, a slippery definition of the word subtlety, harkening back to its older usage, when it meant something that was so small as to be hardly noticeable, and when it apparently connoted something minor, petty, or hidden. The meaning has changed, and that ought to be the end of it, but that would mean no thinkpiece, so that point is sidestepped. For a few moments, Wickman seems to be groping, however clumsily, towards a point: clarity is not a vice, sometimes forthright emotion can be powerful and affecting, sometimes ideas must be transmitted directly and forcefully. Subtlety, especially if treated like an end rather than a means, risks being a cover for obscurity or imprecision. No careful, intelligent, subtle reader would disagree. But that's tautological, and not enough of a basis to build a thinkpiece on, even a Slate thinkpiece.
And so other digressions are pursued. Science is invoked. The purpose of art is touched upon, however provisionally and tentatively. Eventually, a picture emerges: not the impish corrective promised by the headline, but a jeremiad that reflects once again the dynamics of the informational marketplace circa late 2015. What this all amounts to is yet another tirade against "serious" or "high" art. This is by now deeply familiar, but it remains incredibly frustrating. It turns out that Wickman has set up a shuffling preamble from which to launch yet another simple-minded, anti-intellectual salvo against any experience that doesn't come with instructions, against any work of art that isn't captioned. Anything that makes the reader/viewer/listener pay attention, never mind actually think, is flatly condemned. Art is conceived as a one-way street: the artist has a message, he packages it in a sleek, pointy container, and sends it soaring, arrow-like, into the soft, slumped mass of the target audience, where it is received without comment and without much even in the way of notice.
Why get worked up about this? It's true that there are many times when I consider just shutting it all off, deleting my twitter account, staying off the web as much as possible, or just being much more selective about what I choose to "consume." I don't think a clean break is either necessary or desirable; there's simply too much good stuff out there. But pieces like Wickman's are more than just instances of relatively smart people being squeezed into mouthpieces for dumb ideas. It's the squeezing that's the problem, and we need to look more carefully at who is applying the force, and how. In that spirit, let me make a final aside that will help to provide some degree of focus. At one point in the piece, Wickman links to a book by John Carey, an Oxford don and frequent book reviewer. As Walter Sobchak would say, he's not exactly a lightweight. But he appears to be spectacularly wrong in at least this instance. The thesis of the book is that High Modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and others, were motivated by their disdain and even genocidal hatred for "the masses." Now, I haven't read the book. I've read a couple reviews, and skimmed the available preview, and I think I get the gist. And I am aware of the basic contours of this argument, which were sketched by Jonathan Rose in his Intellectual History of the British Working Class. The idea is that Modernism is, at root, elitism, and that to a large and perhaps even fundamental degree, the formal innovations, density, and complexity - the stuff that makes Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner "difficult" or "challenging" - was actually a logical response to a growing readership among the hoi polloi, a means of keeping serious readership as a privilege for an enlightened, select few.
There is undoubtedly something to this argument, at least in its broader strokes. It's true that one can find ample evidence of working-class antipathy among many of the dons and doyennes of the High Modernist canon. Many of them were out-and-out misanthropes. But I am highly skeptical that the case can proceed much further. For one thing, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Almost every author mentioned above didn't sell many copies of their books, at least not in their lifetimes. They were always hurting for readers. Why would they favor some kind of vague class privilege at the expense of a wider readership? And many of these writers were at least as disdainful, and in many instances even more so, of the upper classes and their waste, idleness, opulence, frivolity. It would seem that the case is more complex than a vain coterie of ego-stroking mandarins who wanted to perpetuate an archaic system of patronage.
It would seem that Carey introduces some sensational evidence into the proceedings. One would certainly hope he does, to make so sweeping a series of accusations stick. A casual perusal, however, finds a few cherry-red flags. For one thing, the argument against Lewis is apparently Godwinized. He might not be familiar with this chestnut of web polemics, but Carey ought to know that comparing your targets to Hitler is widely recognized as a lazy and largely ineffectual mode of argument. The other, more expected invocation is that of Nietzsche. Still an enormously controversial figure, it is at this point nonetheless possible to say that Nietzsche was not the proto-Nazi he is often made out to be, and that his ideas, while influential in ways great and small, wondrous and terrible, are a good deal more complex than they initially appeared. Simply, he was no simple reactionary, and like some of the artists he would inspire - many of them modernists - he hated the rich, hated nationalism, hated the pettiness and parochialism of the ruling classes. So his use here as evidence against the accused is, to put it mildly, problematic. But it seems as if a modus operandi is being revealed in the prosecution. Guilt by association, and a heavy emphasis on circumstantial evidence. Yes, Lawrence once said something in his personal correspondence that sounds chillingly like a wish to exterminate "the masses," even more chillingly because what he is describing resembles a gas chamber. But that's Lawrence; he is always prone to excess and provocation. Moreover, its clear that he imagines this genocidal act as one of mercy, a way to relieve the sufferings of a broken people, whom he refers to as "the sick, the halt, the maimed." It is still disturbing and wrongheaded? Yes. But to interpret it as simple elitism, and a pledge of allegiance to fascism avant le lettre, is a distortion.
My intention isn't to defend Lawrence, or any of the other writers listed. A more sustained engagement with these ideas, and with Carey's book, is in order and in the works. Many of these writers did have shitty political ideas. But if we are to grapple with this ideas instead of dismissing them, and, far more importantly, if we are going to treat them in relation to the works of art they produced, we're going to have to dispense with cheap sloganeering and sentiment. In other words, we're going to have to be subtle.
Broadly, then, to summarize: The modernists didn't so much hate "the masses" as they hated "mass culture." Their lack of willingness to engage in effusive shows of pity for the people who were being ground into dust seems strange to us, since now, even the most committed enemies of the masses make great shows of caring about them. Many of the high modernist writers were uninterested in economics, and partly as a result, they were shaky on the sources of the misery. But they were right to deplore much of what they saw. The world was being remade in the image of a new god: progress, as exemplified by the machine, mass production, heavy industry, all powered by capitalism. What was sacred about the world, what was profoundly mysterious and sublime, was being either ignored or destroyed outright. They saw what the new world was bringing, and they didn't like it at all. Too often, they conflated their hatred for this world, this culture of decay and sickness, with the people who were, like them, victimized by it. But that is a very different thing than what Carey seems to suppose.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/04/no-spooning-isn-t-sexist-the-internet-is-just-broken.html
And yes, Freddie's right, it's a decent overview of the bad incentives that are driving much of the daily flush of stupidity on the web. The solutions offered - essentially, better means of information gathering by advertisers, learning who is reading what, and how completely - are reasonable in their own right, which is to say, in a narrowly utilitarian sense. But there are a couple problems that jump out right away: One, this would seem to mean a further erosion of privacy, and should therefore be treated with the utmost skepticism. I don't want advertisers to know more about what I'm reading and how much I'm reading. I'd rather they know nothing about me, since I don't think I need anything from them, and I sure as hell don't want anything from them. We shouldn't be seeking better advertising, we should be seeking less advertising, to be replaced one day by no advertising. But in the interim, the more cool-headed, incrementalist, reformist, pragmatic side of me concedes, it would be better to slow the relentless race to the bottom of taste and intelligence, and perhaps these better "metrics" would help that cause.
The next point that jumps out, following easily after the first, is the absence of an alternative means of sponsoring journalism or "content" online. The most obvious example would be a subscriber based model, but the author of the Daily Beast article doesn't mention it. This isn't surprising, but it is revealing. On the immediate level, a shift to a subscription-based model isn't really an option, because nobody knows how to make it work, especially in the long term. There's a widespread assumption that a) nobody is willing to pay for content, or b) even if they did, they aren't willing to pay enough money to effectively sustain the model, at least not at the current volume of content production. These are real problems, as I'll get to in a bit, but the fact that they are so easily asserted should tell us that there are reasons beyond mere logistical worries. Taking a step back, we can see signs of what can only be called ideological resistence when it comes to alternatives to advertising. This is the Fukayama problem: history has ended, capitalism is here to stay, and there is no conceivable alternative. As goes capitalism, so goes advertising (and marketing and PR), because there is no other way to imagine the fundamental market relationship existing between consumer and producer. There is nothing empirically wrong with a subscriber model, and some sites do in fact use it, like the NYT, although very few use it exclusively. But it is remains ideologically problematic from the neoliberal capitalist perspective. One can't help but pause and consider the irony of this: the straightforward transaction of content for money is discouraged, because that's too purely capitalistic, too market-based. Far better, in the eyes of the overlords, to have the roundabout, ouroborus-like system of content providers selling audience attention to advertisers, who then sell that attention (if it can really be called that, a more accurate term would be something like "pseudoattention") to the makers of consumable things, who then sell those things back to the people who are reading the articles online... at least, that's how it's supposed to work.
The reasoning here is patent enough. Big corporate entities don't like small, clear-cut transactions between merchants and customers. They prefer mindless consumption by a powerless mass of undiscriminating drones. Any transaction that favors the consumer - that assumes autonomy, individuality, authentic choice - is to be strictly avoided. Advertising, when looked at from enough distance, is never about selling a mere product. It's about selling a mindset, an idea, an entire way of life. It is about reinforcing in the consumer a sense of herself as a passive, wholly dependent entity, a person only in a very narrow sense. This leads to a small, tangential, but important point: I've always wondered how advertising, even if one presumes that is is minimally effective, can possibly be so massive and lucrative a business. For a while I assumed that it was a kind of autocannibalism on the part of the major capitalist players, fueled, essentially, by excess wealth. Sure, somebody somewhere might be influenced by the latest Coke commercial or ad to buy a bottle of Coke. Someone, that is, who wasn't already planning on buying one, or, even less likely, who somehow had never heard of Coke. But how can that instance, even multiplied a few million times, beyond all plausibility, still account for the billions of dollars spent annually on advertising? The answer, I think, is something like what Zizek would say: it's about ideology, stupid. The saturating of the media with emblems, images, symbols that tie meaningful living, fulfillment, happiness, pleasure, sex appeal, success, with products of every shape, color, and use is part of a larger effort to creating a kind of person, and a kind of society, that thinks of itself first as a hydra-headed consumer, effectively disenfranchised and always anxious, wholly dependent on the image-machine for satiation and guidance. This project isn't conspiratorial. The people in charge understand this dynamic perfectly well, and acknowledge it openly, although they obviously frame it differently - put a positive spin on it, as it were. The ad account men think people are consumers, that products are solutions to life, and that this is a good thing. Do they (the advertisers, marketers, brand-owners) believe in the next logical step, that consumption is the very substance of life? I think that if you asked them straight out, they would deny it, offended at the implications. As the credit card ads have it, there are some things in life that money can't buy. For everything else, there's Mastercard. The ads, of course, rather blatantly posit that those wispy, ephemeral things that one can't buy - love, happiness, the smile of a young child - are in fact facilitated by money (in this case, credit.) But I think the larger reason for the spillover that occurs, where being a passive consumer comes to be more and more fundamental to our identity as people, is that there exists a vacuum, which nature, as we know, abhors. Bereft of a meaningful model for aspiration, a star to steer by, some stable standard for personhood, some kind of spiritual substrate, one falls back on the next available thing. In capitalism, which destroys the imagination and the community with one hand, while providing consumerism as a balm and a consolation with the other, we have nowhere else to turn but back to the marketplace. We all carry with us the sense that there is something missing, but we have a hard time remembering what it was. And the ad men, aware of our inchoate yearning, are quick to supply us with soothing illusions - fleeting, unsatisfying, like the empty calories of potato chips, because endless flux is necessary - to keep us dazzled, but just stimulating enough prevent despair and self-destruction. The host that is killed too quickly must also kill the parasite. Better to keep it alive, weakened, hobbled, not dead but dying a perpetual death. Viruses don't have to be intelligent to thrive; the same goes for capitalism.
So the current model works just fine, as far as the dominant ideology is concerned. But lets return to the hard ground of logistics for the moment, and re-consider the subscriber model. It boils down to a matter of cumulative costs. I don't think people can afford it, and my own example, while necessarily anecdotal and limited, is, I suspect, broadly relevant. Currently, I live pretty much hand-to-mouth. I'm able to pay down some of my debt, student and otherwise, but only very slowly, and the next hiatus from work will cause the needle to start moving the other way again. I don't save, because I can't afford to, or at least not without sacrificing a great deal of what I enjoy in life. Currently, I subscribe to Netflix, which I share with my girlfriend and my brother. She subscribes to Hulu, which we share, and her parents are Amazon Prime members, which service they share with us. I don't subscribe to any online publications for writing, and I don't give money to the public radio stations I listen to, of which there are at least five, despite their frequent guilt-inducing fund drives. If I were to pay for anywhere near the amount of media I consume, I would be going very rapidly into even more debt. I suspect that my experience is not unique. As much as I would like to pay the writers, musicians, filmmakers, and other people out there who are making really good stuff that I like, I simply can't afford it. I can't even come close to affording it.
I suspect that the media producers, small and large alike, know that this affordability problem is real and pervasive. Even the recent landmark of the NYT website hitting a million subscribers is cold comfort. They still have to advertise, even to their well-paying subscribers, and they have already begun integrated advertising, or "native content," a particularly invidious form of advertising that some people bizarrely seem to think is a solution. None of these innovations will change the fact that many, many readers are just too strapped to afford it all. The current economic conditions of stagnation and decline are exacerbating the issue, but even before the recent crunch, the problem existed. Basically, newspapers have always lost money on subscriptions. Even in their glory days, they stayed in the black (when they could) by bolstering their bottom line with ad sales. They also made profits, it's true; sometimes, they made enormous profits. But those cases were the exceptions, and they also bring us right back to the problems of quality. The biggest, richest papers made their money through ad sales and through pandering to the lowest common denominator. Thus you get sensationalism over investigation, triviality over substance. Yes, there have always been good reporters and good journalism, even at some of the worst rags, big and small. But the really excellent, issue-based journals, the best examples of a democratic press, were almost always in the red. An informed public is a loss leader, in capitalistic terms. It's just one more thing that markets can't do, or can't do well. And so an accommodation is made - not to the stated goal, an informed populace - but to the market, in the form of ads, sensation, and distraction.
What to do? One can jump back again and view the matter from the high, chilly perch of ideological critique, and perhaps divine a hint of an answer. Clearly, in my view, the market is the problem. Any system of keeping citizens informed that is based upon narrow economic interests is bound to fail, and since the businessmen run our society, the cost of the failure will be borne by the people, not the balance sheets of the media outlets. Should the state step in? In the short term, I would say, yes. There's no immediate reason why the state would be worse at providing good journalism than corporations already do. I'm not imagining a centralized news bureau, which I readily admit summons up creepy images of Soviet apparatchiks and Ministries of Information. I'm imagining something that's widely distributed, only centralized in terms of its funding. Something like a Social Security trust fund that disperses money regularly to news outlets far and wide, whose eligibility for funding is determined by stakeholders. It's not a perfect model or a detailed one, but something like ProPublica would fit the bill, only on a much larger scale, and more widely dispersed. It would treat the citizens as citizens rather than customers (which is what they are right now, any use of the euphemism "reader," as in "to our loyal readers..." notwithstanding). This has already been accomplished, to some degree at least, in Great Britain with the BBC. It has its risks and its shortcomings, but it is much more valid in principle than the consumer based model, which is patently corrupt.
To return to the immediate cause of this post: spooning article was dumb. But it was transparently dumb. I don't think a single soul took it seriously, including the author. Okay, he might've taken it halfway seriously, but that's not the same thing. He was also clearly being "playful," either out of genuine playfulness or out of some kind of anticipatory defense against the backlash he must've known was coming (and which his editor and publisher certainly knew was coming, indeed it's obviously why they ran it.) These kind of things might be good to denounce, but it's a bit like blaming the scorpion for stinging the frog, asking the leopard to change her spots, etc. In my view, there are more appropriate targets. Take, for instance, this other piece, also sourced from a link on twitter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/11/against_subtlety_the_case_for_heavy_handedness_in_art.3.html
This piece is less obviously the work of a hack, less clearly an example of clickbait. It's reasonably well-written, and it comes close to having some kind of a point. But it's still bullshit. It's in the same league as Kathryn Shulz's Pond Scum, the most recent example of pseudo-intellectual eyeball-farming. While ostensibly reasoned and informed, it requires only a few seconds of sustained reflection to realize that it is inane, and grossly so.
The basic response, if one is to bother with responding at all (a questionable prospect, I admit), is that subtlety is just one tool available to an artist or craftsman, not the point of the entire enterprise. It's a means, not an end. Nobody who is even marginally serious about making or consuming art has ever argued otherwise. In order to launch his argument, then, the author, Forrest Wickman, needs to construct a strawman. Admittedly, the sheer range of stupid writing on the internet is more than enough straw with which to build. It's true that there are plenty of writers out there who have lazily deployed "on the nose" and "obvious" whenever they want to appear smarter than what they are reading/watching/listening to. But this isn't because they are especially perceptive, it's because they are insecure, and hurried, and terrified of appearing sappy or naive. I won't dwell on this point; David Foster Wallace has more than covered it, and much more acutely and articulately than I could. Suffice it to say that it's still a problem, maybe worse now than ever, and the internet is one of its main wellsprings.
After the strawman has been erected, the sophistry must commence: in this case, a slippery definition of the word subtlety, harkening back to its older usage, when it meant something that was so small as to be hardly noticeable, and when it apparently connoted something minor, petty, or hidden. The meaning has changed, and that ought to be the end of it, but that would mean no thinkpiece, so that point is sidestepped. For a few moments, Wickman seems to be groping, however clumsily, towards a point: clarity is not a vice, sometimes forthright emotion can be powerful and affecting, sometimes ideas must be transmitted directly and forcefully. Subtlety, especially if treated like an end rather than a means, risks being a cover for obscurity or imprecision. No careful, intelligent, subtle reader would disagree. But that's tautological, and not enough of a basis to build a thinkpiece on, even a Slate thinkpiece.
And so other digressions are pursued. Science is invoked. The purpose of art is touched upon, however provisionally and tentatively. Eventually, a picture emerges: not the impish corrective promised by the headline, but a jeremiad that reflects once again the dynamics of the informational marketplace circa late 2015. What this all amounts to is yet another tirade against "serious" or "high" art. This is by now deeply familiar, but it remains incredibly frustrating. It turns out that Wickman has set up a shuffling preamble from which to launch yet another simple-minded, anti-intellectual salvo against any experience that doesn't come with instructions, against any work of art that isn't captioned. Anything that makes the reader/viewer/listener pay attention, never mind actually think, is flatly condemned. Art is conceived as a one-way street: the artist has a message, he packages it in a sleek, pointy container, and sends it soaring, arrow-like, into the soft, slumped mass of the target audience, where it is received without comment and without much even in the way of notice.
Why get worked up about this? It's true that there are many times when I consider just shutting it all off, deleting my twitter account, staying off the web as much as possible, or just being much more selective about what I choose to "consume." I don't think a clean break is either necessary or desirable; there's simply too much good stuff out there. But pieces like Wickman's are more than just instances of relatively smart people being squeezed into mouthpieces for dumb ideas. It's the squeezing that's the problem, and we need to look more carefully at who is applying the force, and how. In that spirit, let me make a final aside that will help to provide some degree of focus. At one point in the piece, Wickman links to a book by John Carey, an Oxford don and frequent book reviewer. As Walter Sobchak would say, he's not exactly a lightweight. But he appears to be spectacularly wrong in at least this instance. The thesis of the book is that High Modernist writers like James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis and others, were motivated by their disdain and even genocidal hatred for "the masses." Now, I haven't read the book. I've read a couple reviews, and skimmed the available preview, and I think I get the gist. And I am aware of the basic contours of this argument, which were sketched by Jonathan Rose in his Intellectual History of the British Working Class. The idea is that Modernism is, at root, elitism, and that to a large and perhaps even fundamental degree, the formal innovations, density, and complexity - the stuff that makes Joyce and Woolf and Faulkner "difficult" or "challenging" - was actually a logical response to a growing readership among the hoi polloi, a means of keeping serious readership as a privilege for an enlightened, select few.
There is undoubtedly something to this argument, at least in its broader strokes. It's true that one can find ample evidence of working-class antipathy among many of the dons and doyennes of the High Modernist canon. Many of them were out-and-out misanthropes. But I am highly skeptical that the case can proceed much further. For one thing, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Almost every author mentioned above didn't sell many copies of their books, at least not in their lifetimes. They were always hurting for readers. Why would they favor some kind of vague class privilege at the expense of a wider readership? And many of these writers were at least as disdainful, and in many instances even more so, of the upper classes and their waste, idleness, opulence, frivolity. It would seem that the case is more complex than a vain coterie of ego-stroking mandarins who wanted to perpetuate an archaic system of patronage.
It would seem that Carey introduces some sensational evidence into the proceedings. One would certainly hope he does, to make so sweeping a series of accusations stick. A casual perusal, however, finds a few cherry-red flags. For one thing, the argument against Lewis is apparently Godwinized. He might not be familiar with this chestnut of web polemics, but Carey ought to know that comparing your targets to Hitler is widely recognized as a lazy and largely ineffectual mode of argument. The other, more expected invocation is that of Nietzsche. Still an enormously controversial figure, it is at this point nonetheless possible to say that Nietzsche was not the proto-Nazi he is often made out to be, and that his ideas, while influential in ways great and small, wondrous and terrible, are a good deal more complex than they initially appeared. Simply, he was no simple reactionary, and like some of the artists he would inspire - many of them modernists - he hated the rich, hated nationalism, hated the pettiness and parochialism of the ruling classes. So his use here as evidence against the accused is, to put it mildly, problematic. But it seems as if a modus operandi is being revealed in the prosecution. Guilt by association, and a heavy emphasis on circumstantial evidence. Yes, Lawrence once said something in his personal correspondence that sounds chillingly like a wish to exterminate "the masses," even more chillingly because what he is describing resembles a gas chamber. But that's Lawrence; he is always prone to excess and provocation. Moreover, its clear that he imagines this genocidal act as one of mercy, a way to relieve the sufferings of a broken people, whom he refers to as "the sick, the halt, the maimed." It is still disturbing and wrongheaded? Yes. But to interpret it as simple elitism, and a pledge of allegiance to fascism avant le lettre, is a distortion.
My intention isn't to defend Lawrence, or any of the other writers listed. A more sustained engagement with these ideas, and with Carey's book, is in order and in the works. Many of these writers did have shitty political ideas. But if we are to grapple with this ideas instead of dismissing them, and, far more importantly, if we are going to treat them in relation to the works of art they produced, we're going to have to dispense with cheap sloganeering and sentiment. In other words, we're going to have to be subtle.
Broadly, then, to summarize: The modernists didn't so much hate "the masses" as they hated "mass culture." Their lack of willingness to engage in effusive shows of pity for the people who were being ground into dust seems strange to us, since now, even the most committed enemies of the masses make great shows of caring about them. Many of the high modernist writers were uninterested in economics, and partly as a result, they were shaky on the sources of the misery. But they were right to deplore much of what they saw. The world was being remade in the image of a new god: progress, as exemplified by the machine, mass production, heavy industry, all powered by capitalism. What was sacred about the world, what was profoundly mysterious and sublime, was being either ignored or destroyed outright. They saw what the new world was bringing, and they didn't like it at all. Too often, they conflated their hatred for this world, this culture of decay and sickness, with the people who were, like them, victimized by it. But that is a very different thing than what Carey seems to suppose.
Friday, December 13, 2013
Wavy Gravy
Some re-encountering of the ideas of Peter Lamborn Wilson, and others.
Today, through a quick Wikipedia check on Charles Fourier, I found myself reminded of the poet/thinker PLM, aka Hakim Bey. My introduction to Hakim Bey's writing came in college, where my religions professor Brian Karafin pointed me in his direction. I've read only a bit of Bey's writing - there was a small booklet of his available to read (but not remove) at the NYPL. I don't remember any of it. There's also some Youtube clips of Bey speaking, a couple of which I've viewed.
He comes across as an intelligent guy, a little nutty perhaps, but not the crazy, fringe-y type that his reputation might suggest. Among dabbling in various Occult-style ideas and philosophies, which vary, by my lights, from loopy to historically and perhaps spiritually important, Wilson has also been embroiled in some controversy over his apparent advocacy of pederasty. I don't know much about the controversy, but it certain casts Wilson in a highly dubious light.
All of that being said, there's an interesting interview I came across here, which also includes insights from Christopher Bamford:
http://brooklynrail.org/2007/12/art/green-hermeticism
The stuff about the "theurgic" in art jumped out at me, as well as this:
"Today, art—and perhaps also even science—has become more or less a form of self-expression, whereas if you go back far enough into the history of art or science they always had the theurgic function to heal, nurture, and care for the whole: the divine-cosmic-earthly-human cosmos. But for the greatest modern artists, like Cezanne and Braque and Beuys (and also writers like Joyce and poets like Robert Duncan), it still has that theurgic function."
This strikes me as particularly relevant to my own artistic pursuits. I've always been a bit leery of the cult of self-expression that dominates the talking about and practice of Modern art. Postmodernism can be seen, at least initially, as an attempt to get around this, but it mostly crumbled (in my own view) into hollow, jargon-laden irrelevance. There's some real potential in these ideas, which take the egotism out of Modern art, and harken back to a more universal, transformative, conception of Art. (It's also true that this strain of aesthetic thinking is present throughout the Modern tradition, but it's often hiding just out of sight.)
Also of interest: Bioremediation, and Paul Stamets.
Today, through a quick Wikipedia check on Charles Fourier, I found myself reminded of the poet/thinker PLM, aka Hakim Bey. My introduction to Hakim Bey's writing came in college, where my religions professor Brian Karafin pointed me in his direction. I've read only a bit of Bey's writing - there was a small booklet of his available to read (but not remove) at the NYPL. I don't remember any of it. There's also some Youtube clips of Bey speaking, a couple of which I've viewed.
He comes across as an intelligent guy, a little nutty perhaps, but not the crazy, fringe-y type that his reputation might suggest. Among dabbling in various Occult-style ideas and philosophies, which vary, by my lights, from loopy to historically and perhaps spiritually important, Wilson has also been embroiled in some controversy over his apparent advocacy of pederasty. I don't know much about the controversy, but it certain casts Wilson in a highly dubious light.
All of that being said, there's an interesting interview I came across here, which also includes insights from Christopher Bamford:
http://brooklynrail.org/2007/12/art/green-hermeticism
The stuff about the "theurgic" in art jumped out at me, as well as this:
"Today, art—and perhaps also even science—has become more or less a form of self-expression, whereas if you go back far enough into the history of art or science they always had the theurgic function to heal, nurture, and care for the whole: the divine-cosmic-earthly-human cosmos. But for the greatest modern artists, like Cezanne and Braque and Beuys (and also writers like Joyce and poets like Robert Duncan), it still has that theurgic function."
This strikes me as particularly relevant to my own artistic pursuits. I've always been a bit leery of the cult of self-expression that dominates the talking about and practice of Modern art. Postmodernism can be seen, at least initially, as an attempt to get around this, but it mostly crumbled (in my own view) into hollow, jargon-laden irrelevance. There's some real potential in these ideas, which take the egotism out of Modern art, and harken back to a more universal, transformative, conception of Art. (It's also true that this strain of aesthetic thinking is present throughout the Modern tradition, but it's often hiding just out of sight.)
Also of interest: Bioremediation, and Paul Stamets.
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Thoughts on Style
Prompted, in large part, by this:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/08/the-godfather-and-style.html#entry-more
As usual, it's dense and overheated, like old spinach pie fresh out of the microwave, but there's some fascinating and acute nuggets of truth in the piece.
To sum up, with as much brevity and clarity as possible, Brody thinks that Coppola's success with the first two Godfather movies results from their being made in the right place, at the right time, by a director with just the right sensibility. It's unclear whether Brody believes that their financial, popular, and critical success is the same as their artistic success, but the point is more-or-less well taken. The Godfather (and I'm referring here to both, and will be for the duration, for reasons of simplicity and because Godfather II is so effectively and seamlessly a continuation of its predecessor) is probably the most uncontroversial "masterpiece" in the history of American cinema, surpassing even Citizen Kane, and not just because it enjoys much more popular success than Kane. It's lightning-in-a-bottle good. The harmony of mood, story, character, tone, acting, and image-making are both exquisitely sophisticated and widely palatable. It's as close to Shakespeare as American cinema has ever been - the film is both smart and broad, epic and intimate, sly and self-effacing. Coppola never really topped it, even with Apocalypse Now, which ramped up the atmosphere and became more selfconsiously Art-house without sacrificing too much of the rock-solid instinct for story that served Coppola so well (until it didn't.)
But Coppola had always been a relentless experimenter. He still is, to use only a few frames of Tetro by way of example. The neoclassical mode that Brody describes was exceptionally well-suited for the material - it was the magic moment at which Coppola's particular sensibility matched the source material. I can't speak for the collective nostalgia that Brody then evokes - this part of his essay is plainly conjecture, but it makes for an interesting theory. No doubt some of that stuff is accurate, and it makes for an interesting gloss, although it doesn't explain the lasting appeal and reverence that the Godfather inspires even now.
But for Brody, the downfall is that it was too perfect, too schematic, too composed. Thus, it becomes in his eyes contrived.
Although I'm not among those who regard this stance as sacrilegious, I do think that it's mostly wrong. All the same, it has a certain kernel of truth in it. Brody doesn't come right out and claim that the films of Cassavetes are better (in an earlier post, he compared the two filmmakers) but he does strongly imply that Cassavetes was the superior and more seminal artist. While there's nothing wrong with stating a preference, Brody has the habit of making his aesthetic judgements with the presumed authority and peremptoriness of moral, even legal judgements. This can be intermittently appealing, because it's nice to see someone who wears his convictions so proudly on his sleeve, but it can also be exasperating when it spills over into self-rightousness or puffed-up (and often incoherent) writing.
But give his assessment its due - Godfather does harken back to a bygone era, both in its form and its content; it has nostalgia built in, and nostalgia is one of the most powerful of all emotions when expressed (convincingly) aesthetically. And it does very effectively fuse the old stylistic gloss and rigor with a thoroughly modern frankness in showing the ruthlessness and cynicism of the characters, as well as in the depictions of sex and violence.
Brody doesn't begrudge Coppola his style; he merely complains that Coppola uses it for false ends, writing that as a directorial statement it is "self-effacing" and its ruminations on its subject come across as "arms-length editorial commentary."
Again, this is a statement of preference. For Brody, the ultimate aesthetic achievement is personal expression, with a heavy, even fanatical insistence upon the first word. The best directors have a signature that is as clear as it is indelible - story, character, and content are all subservient to the ideas, and most importantly the personality, of the director. Hence his longstanding and near-religious reverence for Godard, the most essayistic and personally revelatory of all directors. Many others, now and before, would disagree. The opposing view holds that the artist ought to be transparent - that it is the story, not the storyteller, that ought to be front-and-center on the screen. The ideas, personality, and quirks of the creator are all well and good if they serve the needs of the story, but once you reverse that order, you wind up with work that's self-indulgent, obscure, pretentious, etc.
It might be that this is one of those "either-or" statements of preference - Beatles vs. Stones, Picasso vs. Matisse, etc. In this case, we have Coppola vs. Cassavetes. But I like to think that such choices are always false; they don't have much value beyond their function as idle chatter, and are even detrimental if too earnestly embraced. I've come to increasingly value the "expressive/personal" over the "impersonal/craftsmanlike" in all forms, especially cinema, but the truth is that I love them both. What I'm searching for is a unified theory; a way in which I can do, and appreciate, both equally. I don't quite have it down yet, but I'm getting there.
Here's an important example: David Milch. Milch has always claimed that his definition of the successful artist is someone who disappears into his work. Taking the example of Deadwood, we can see that on one level Milch has realized his ambition. The characters are alive and wonderfully differentiated, and the story follows their struggles with the utmost loving care and meticulous attention. And yet at the same time, there is not a frame, or a line, when the presence of Milch isn't felt. He speaks through every single character in the show - one only needs to hear the man speak for a few minutes and that voice will become impossible to miss. Although Milch makes much of the idea that the story speaks for itself and on its own terms, that it has no ulterior message, that it corresponds only to an internally coherent truth, the fact is that his work is highly moral and even didactic; it is the work of someone who is searching for a "way to live." This isn't to say that it's moralizing or pedantic, but it does have a conception of an inner and underlying order and harmony, and it makes no bones about it. This can be starkly contrasted with the deeply anxious and ambivalent stance taken by David Chase, who laughs darkly at the troubling void he sees in the shadows of everyday life. What unites them both is a willingness to investigate, to seek out those shadows and dive into them. They are both relentlessly curious and driven.
So back to Coppola - what is he saying? What is his grand idea, what is the indelible mark of his personality - what can it be said he is working out with The Godfather? Here's the second part of my critique of Brody's approach. Not only does his preference (which, recall, is masked by a too-rigid aesthetic absolutism) blind him to the more subtle aspects of grace in Coppola's opus, his conception of expressiveness is overly concrete. He's looking for a commentary, a self-reflexivity, a layer of irony that doesn't exist in the film. The political subtext of The Godfather is simple and obvious and entirely beside the point. Yes, it makes for a neat allegory of capitalism and its degradation of the family, traditional values, etc. But that's not the real subtext of the film. What Coppola was really after was a family tragedy of a truly classical type - but told as a modern, personal tale. It's the story of a son trying desperately to escape the looming stature of his father, and who realizes that the only way to escape him is to destroy him, not literally, but metaphorically. He becomes the ruthless, thoroughly modern man that his father could not and would not become. He ends up destroying the values in order to preserve their (now empty) vessel/edifice. For all of it's classical, even Oedipal resonance, this is an unmistakably personal tale about the devastating impact of history and time on the family, told from a specific historical moment. The Godfather has been frequently been called a "home movie" by Coppola and by others. Coppola's presence is in the small details, the myriad tiny gestures that make up the film. It's in the recipe for marinara sauce, the little girl dancing on the feet of the tall guy, the micro-moments of which the movie is composed, finally. The truth is that The Godfather is not nearly as tightly constructed as some would make it out to be - it has longueurs and sudden, unexpected moments of explosive fury. It has that famously abrupt, even sudden, ending. It lingers and chugs along. The personal touch, the authorial closeness that Brody seeks, is there, but not in the form he's looking for; he wants ideas, but what exists is emotion, even angst.
My own take is that he's partly right. While I don't agree that G is as classical and fussily stylized as he says, there is some truth to the idea that the film does rely quite heavily on a transparent psychological realism that can sometimes seem overly straightforward.
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2013/08/the-godfather-and-style.html#entry-more
As usual, it's dense and overheated, like old spinach pie fresh out of the microwave, but there's some fascinating and acute nuggets of truth in the piece.
To sum up, with as much brevity and clarity as possible, Brody thinks that Coppola's success with the first two Godfather movies results from their being made in the right place, at the right time, by a director with just the right sensibility. It's unclear whether Brody believes that their financial, popular, and critical success is the same as their artistic success, but the point is more-or-less well taken. The Godfather (and I'm referring here to both, and will be for the duration, for reasons of simplicity and because Godfather II is so effectively and seamlessly a continuation of its predecessor) is probably the most uncontroversial "masterpiece" in the history of American cinema, surpassing even Citizen Kane, and not just because it enjoys much more popular success than Kane. It's lightning-in-a-bottle good. The harmony of mood, story, character, tone, acting, and image-making are both exquisitely sophisticated and widely palatable. It's as close to Shakespeare as American cinema has ever been - the film is both smart and broad, epic and intimate, sly and self-effacing. Coppola never really topped it, even with Apocalypse Now, which ramped up the atmosphere and became more selfconsiously Art-house without sacrificing too much of the rock-solid instinct for story that served Coppola so well (until it didn't.)
But Coppola had always been a relentless experimenter. He still is, to use only a few frames of Tetro by way of example. The neoclassical mode that Brody describes was exceptionally well-suited for the material - it was the magic moment at which Coppola's particular sensibility matched the source material. I can't speak for the collective nostalgia that Brody then evokes - this part of his essay is plainly conjecture, but it makes for an interesting theory. No doubt some of that stuff is accurate, and it makes for an interesting gloss, although it doesn't explain the lasting appeal and reverence that the Godfather inspires even now.
But for Brody, the downfall is that it was too perfect, too schematic, too composed. Thus, it becomes in his eyes contrived.
Although I'm not among those who regard this stance as sacrilegious, I do think that it's mostly wrong. All the same, it has a certain kernel of truth in it. Brody doesn't come right out and claim that the films of Cassavetes are better (in an earlier post, he compared the two filmmakers) but he does strongly imply that Cassavetes was the superior and more seminal artist. While there's nothing wrong with stating a preference, Brody has the habit of making his aesthetic judgements with the presumed authority and peremptoriness of moral, even legal judgements. This can be intermittently appealing, because it's nice to see someone who wears his convictions so proudly on his sleeve, but it can also be exasperating when it spills over into self-rightousness or puffed-up (and often incoherent) writing.
But give his assessment its due - Godfather does harken back to a bygone era, both in its form and its content; it has nostalgia built in, and nostalgia is one of the most powerful of all emotions when expressed (convincingly) aesthetically. And it does very effectively fuse the old stylistic gloss and rigor with a thoroughly modern frankness in showing the ruthlessness and cynicism of the characters, as well as in the depictions of sex and violence.
Brody doesn't begrudge Coppola his style; he merely complains that Coppola uses it for false ends, writing that as a directorial statement it is "self-effacing" and its ruminations on its subject come across as "arms-length editorial commentary."
Again, this is a statement of preference. For Brody, the ultimate aesthetic achievement is personal expression, with a heavy, even fanatical insistence upon the first word. The best directors have a signature that is as clear as it is indelible - story, character, and content are all subservient to the ideas, and most importantly the personality, of the director. Hence his longstanding and near-religious reverence for Godard, the most essayistic and personally revelatory of all directors. Many others, now and before, would disagree. The opposing view holds that the artist ought to be transparent - that it is the story, not the storyteller, that ought to be front-and-center on the screen. The ideas, personality, and quirks of the creator are all well and good if they serve the needs of the story, but once you reverse that order, you wind up with work that's self-indulgent, obscure, pretentious, etc.
It might be that this is one of those "either-or" statements of preference - Beatles vs. Stones, Picasso vs. Matisse, etc. In this case, we have Coppola vs. Cassavetes. But I like to think that such choices are always false; they don't have much value beyond their function as idle chatter, and are even detrimental if too earnestly embraced. I've come to increasingly value the "expressive/personal" over the "impersonal/craftsmanlike" in all forms, especially cinema, but the truth is that I love them both. What I'm searching for is a unified theory; a way in which I can do, and appreciate, both equally. I don't quite have it down yet, but I'm getting there.
Here's an important example: David Milch. Milch has always claimed that his definition of the successful artist is someone who disappears into his work. Taking the example of Deadwood, we can see that on one level Milch has realized his ambition. The characters are alive and wonderfully differentiated, and the story follows their struggles with the utmost loving care and meticulous attention. And yet at the same time, there is not a frame, or a line, when the presence of Milch isn't felt. He speaks through every single character in the show - one only needs to hear the man speak for a few minutes and that voice will become impossible to miss. Although Milch makes much of the idea that the story speaks for itself and on its own terms, that it has no ulterior message, that it corresponds only to an internally coherent truth, the fact is that his work is highly moral and even didactic; it is the work of someone who is searching for a "way to live." This isn't to say that it's moralizing or pedantic, but it does have a conception of an inner and underlying order and harmony, and it makes no bones about it. This can be starkly contrasted with the deeply anxious and ambivalent stance taken by David Chase, who laughs darkly at the troubling void he sees in the shadows of everyday life. What unites them both is a willingness to investigate, to seek out those shadows and dive into them. They are both relentlessly curious and driven.
So back to Coppola - what is he saying? What is his grand idea, what is the indelible mark of his personality - what can it be said he is working out with The Godfather? Here's the second part of my critique of Brody's approach. Not only does his preference (which, recall, is masked by a too-rigid aesthetic absolutism) blind him to the more subtle aspects of grace in Coppola's opus, his conception of expressiveness is overly concrete. He's looking for a commentary, a self-reflexivity, a layer of irony that doesn't exist in the film. The political subtext of The Godfather is simple and obvious and entirely beside the point. Yes, it makes for a neat allegory of capitalism and its degradation of the family, traditional values, etc. But that's not the real subtext of the film. What Coppola was really after was a family tragedy of a truly classical type - but told as a modern, personal tale. It's the story of a son trying desperately to escape the looming stature of his father, and who realizes that the only way to escape him is to destroy him, not literally, but metaphorically. He becomes the ruthless, thoroughly modern man that his father could not and would not become. He ends up destroying the values in order to preserve their (now empty) vessel/edifice. For all of it's classical, even Oedipal resonance, this is an unmistakably personal tale about the devastating impact of history and time on the family, told from a specific historical moment. The Godfather has been frequently been called a "home movie" by Coppola and by others. Coppola's presence is in the small details, the myriad tiny gestures that make up the film. It's in the recipe for marinara sauce, the little girl dancing on the feet of the tall guy, the micro-moments of which the movie is composed, finally. The truth is that The Godfather is not nearly as tightly constructed as some would make it out to be - it has longueurs and sudden, unexpected moments of explosive fury. It has that famously abrupt, even sudden, ending. It lingers and chugs along. The personal touch, the authorial closeness that Brody seeks, is there, but not in the form he's looking for; he wants ideas, but what exists is emotion, even angst.
My own take is that he's partly right. While I don't agree that G is as classical and fussily stylized as he says, there is some truth to the idea that the film does rely quite heavily on a transparent psychological realism that can sometimes seem overly straightforward.
Thursday, July 18, 2013
Seeing the Desert....!
That there's no clear delineation, no border, is one of the first things to understand. Our reliance on maps, our system of political boundaries, predisposes us to look for the marker that divides one space from another. Even when we rationally understand that Nature doesn't draw lines, that she knows only the continuity of everything, on some level we still expect those lines to exist. So when you're heading out to the desert, understand that it will creep up on you. The landscape becomes gradually flat, the flora becomes gradually squat and scrubby. And then you realize that you've arrived. You're in the desert.
Miles beforehand the windmills had appeared. Enormous, majestic, each three-bladed giant in perpetual motion, driven by the eternal Westerly wind. Conservatively estimating that hundreds were visible, I later found out that there are in fact 5,000 windmills in this stretch of desert territory. Don Quixote would either die of joy or go mad on the spot. This is the Kahatchapi Wind Farm, and in ranges from the flat Mojave lowlands into the distant mountains, harvesting power from the prevailing zephyrs. Seeing the windmills from the car, where they seemed to recede even as we approached them, felt like chasing a mirage.
The light was fading from the sky. We tacked towards the windmills, turning off the main highway onto a narrow stretch of asphalt. We drove past a few quiet homes built on plots carved squarely from the creosote. Soon the pavement dead-ended and we pulled aside onto a spit of sand. We got out of the car and stepped into the wind, which was both warm and surprisingly strong, the sky behind us blossoming into a pastel frieze of orange, yellow, crimson, purple, and powder blue. I was mute with awe. The wind kept me silent; even if I'd spoken, Nina wouldn't have heard me. The wind was everywhere. It inflated my tee shirt like a sail, but for all of its implacable force, it had a gentle touch. A perpetual sigh that flows from beyond the mountains, warm and fresh and indistinctly fragrant. When I looked in the other direction, where the hues of blue and purple were slipping into darkness, I could see a strange haze in the atmosphere. I don't know whether this was moisture or dust, kicked up by the moving air and kept aloft.
Windmills belie the idea that technological progress is always brutish and ugly - an idea that I've long cherished, if mostly unconsciously. Something about the scale, the fact that the energy they provide is carbon-free, their silence; they are like benevolent sentinels.
Later, we dined at the Primo Burger.
Miles beforehand the windmills had appeared. Enormous, majestic, each three-bladed giant in perpetual motion, driven by the eternal Westerly wind. Conservatively estimating that hundreds were visible, I later found out that there are in fact 5,000 windmills in this stretch of desert territory. Don Quixote would either die of joy or go mad on the spot. This is the Kahatchapi Wind Farm, and in ranges from the flat Mojave lowlands into the distant mountains, harvesting power from the prevailing zephyrs. Seeing the windmills from the car, where they seemed to recede even as we approached them, felt like chasing a mirage.
The light was fading from the sky. We tacked towards the windmills, turning off the main highway onto a narrow stretch of asphalt. We drove past a few quiet homes built on plots carved squarely from the creosote. Soon the pavement dead-ended and we pulled aside onto a spit of sand. We got out of the car and stepped into the wind, which was both warm and surprisingly strong, the sky behind us blossoming into a pastel frieze of orange, yellow, crimson, purple, and powder blue. I was mute with awe. The wind kept me silent; even if I'd spoken, Nina wouldn't have heard me. The wind was everywhere. It inflated my tee shirt like a sail, but for all of its implacable force, it had a gentle touch. A perpetual sigh that flows from beyond the mountains, warm and fresh and indistinctly fragrant. When I looked in the other direction, where the hues of blue and purple were slipping into darkness, I could see a strange haze in the atmosphere. I don't know whether this was moisture or dust, kicked up by the moving air and kept aloft.
Windmills belie the idea that technological progress is always brutish and ugly - an idea that I've long cherished, if mostly unconsciously. Something about the scale, the fact that the energy they provide is carbon-free, their silence; they are like benevolent sentinels.
Later, we dined at the Primo Burger.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Radio Hill Gardens
Tightly wedged between Downtown and Echo Park, the Radio Hill Gardens are situated on a spit of wild land, gone to seed and mostly inhabited (semi-clandestinely) by a contingent of LA's vast and diverse homeless population. The land itself lies just beyond Chinatown, readily visible if one looks Northeast down Broadway or Hill Street. I had never heard of Radio Hill, and assumed I was looking at the Southernmost reaches of Elysian Park, which in a way I was. Elysian, the second-largest park in Los Angeles, is a 600 acre inverted-crescent of outdoor space. It's the home to both Dodger's Stadium and the Los Angeles Police Academy. The stadium and its sprawling parking lots take up a considerable amount of the acreage, situated in the natural bowl shape formed by the curve of the ridge. It's southernmost tip actually stretches around Radio Hill. So it's easy to view Radio Hill as a kind of extension of Elysian Park, even though the two areas, as I was to find out shortly, are radically different from each other.
Parks are one of the great saving virtues of Los Angeles. That's probably true of most cities, but in hypertrophied LA, with its teeming grid of highways, endless subdivisions, and implacable expanse of hot-blue sky, it's especially true. LA's parks, in relation to the urban and suburban sprawl, often appear overmatched, even the rangy Griffith Park, which is cut through with wide trails and roads. But the green spaces still provide a deeply needed break from the oppressive monotony of concrete, glass, stucco, and asphalt. For the outdoor-minded, the appearance of these quasi-wild places is itself an enticement. They draw you in. For many others, less inclined to partake in nature themselves, it at least makes for pleasant scenery. Upon seeing what turned out to be Radio Hill, I was intrigued. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to explore it. These little oases of wilderness, meager though they are, comprise an integral part of LA's weird appeal. Taking in the haphazard construction of the city, with its innumerable cantons, barrios, enclaves, and subdivisions, can be overwhelming, even to the point of visceral discomfort. It has a sort of third-world feel (although my third-word - developing world, to use the current parlance - is strictly limited, I can't help but conjecture a certain affinity), implying a fevered opportunism, a frantic expansion in all directions, a city built on the wing. More than once, the neighborhood "planning" of LA has been called a "crazy quilt." This is a description that fits, both for its suggestion of colorful patchwork and its invocation of insanity. It's hard to view the human-made texture of Los Angeles as the product of anything other than madness. Glittering and endless, it resembles the vision of someone in the grips of a manic episode: limitless, opulent, jagged, impossible. And yet it exists.
Just to suggest another overheated metaphor - Los Angeles's physical structure can seem like the scattered debris of a great explosion. As though a bomb has detonated and flung the superdense initial matter in all directions, which has since settled and calcified into glittering hillside developments, run-down stretches tract of housing, and occasional flashes of avant-garde fancy.
In either case, LA's sprawl creates all kinds of unexpected juxtapositions. As in the case of Radio Hill, it means that certain areas of the city just winds up being forgotten. As Nina and I walked up the winding road, which had, inexplicably, been recently paved, we gradually found ourselves slipping into the Interzone of LA. If you've lived here and done some exploring, you know what I'm talking about: that liminal place, situated between the settled and the wild, between the grossly overrun and the eerily abandoned. On the south side of the hill (the park is one big hill) the background noise of the city gradually slipped away, even as the majestic view of downtown rose behind us. Cresting the hillside, there was a tiny parking area (again, recently paved, although the main road has long been closed to any vehicle traffic) with two freshly painted handicapped parking spaces. Off to one side was the eponymous radio tower, one of those crude, unintentional monuments of the digital communications era, bristling with drumlike transmitter/receivers and pointy antennae. At its base was a small houselike structure, surrounded by fences. We didn't even bother to approach it. It had that standoffish vibe that I imagine the dwellings of trolls would have. Off to one side was a spectacularly foul-smelling and overflowing dumpster, one of a few that had apparently been deposited here, for reasons unknown.
The flora of Radio Hill is dense and foreboding, especially by Los Angeles park standards. There's been no obvious effort to clean it any time in the recent past, so it's littered with all kinds of trash - wrappers, tattered clothes, cruelly twisted bicycle wheels, empty cigarette packs. It's not an out-and-out dump. Most of the trash exists around the margins, several feet off the main path. But there is a lot of it. The refuse takes a while to notice; you sort of have to let your eyes adjust to it. But once you do, you see how much of it there is, and it settles on you in that bleak, sad way; a heaviness. But it's more than that - for me, at least, there's also that frisson, I suspect borne of danger and a certain lurid fascination with decay, that creeps up your spine. This is a forlorn place. Secret things happen here; mostly sad, some scary, some merely banal. But they happen in secret, off the grid, even though they occur mere fractions of a mile from one of the Grid's great epicenters - the LAPD headquarters.
The signs have all been painted over, in successive layers of graffiti, and are not almost totally illegible. At one time, the top area was meant to be a protected habitat for butterflies and hummingbirds. Now it's an unkempt patch of scrubby trees, wilderness left to its own devices. I don't know if the hummingbirds ever stayed; on this quiet afternoon, there were none. On the other side of the Hill, the 110 Freeway incessantly roars. It's unbearable. All of the park's residents seem to agree with my assessment, and live on the opposite side. As we ventured further into the remains of the garden, past scrub oak trees and poured-concrete benches, my anxiety began to bloom. This is one of those places where very bad things can happen. Upon passing that initial dumpster, I felt a wave of revulsion that felt positively reptilian. I could imagine a dead body decaying in there. I was carrying a plastic cup in one hand, the remains of an iced-tea-to-go. I didn't dare approach any of the dumpsters; besides the foreboding smells emanating from them, it seemed inappropriate to add to their already prodigious loads of refuse.
At the end of the sandy path is a fence. Across the way, Southernmost reach of Elysian Park was bathed in amber light. Compared to where we stood, it looked as lushly green and manicured as a golf course. The fence - black chain-link - which divided the downward slope from the part of the park intended, in bygone days, for "recreation" - had a gaping hole cut into it. Very deliberately, somebody had sliced the fence and curled up the jagged edges. It had the look of a well-worn path.
After seeing that, it was time to go. We had gradually been seeing signs of the indigent inhabitants of Radio Hill. (tbd)
Parks are one of the great saving virtues of Los Angeles. That's probably true of most cities, but in hypertrophied LA, with its teeming grid of highways, endless subdivisions, and implacable expanse of hot-blue sky, it's especially true. LA's parks, in relation to the urban and suburban sprawl, often appear overmatched, even the rangy Griffith Park, which is cut through with wide trails and roads. But the green spaces still provide a deeply needed break from the oppressive monotony of concrete, glass, stucco, and asphalt. For the outdoor-minded, the appearance of these quasi-wild places is itself an enticement. They draw you in. For many others, less inclined to partake in nature themselves, it at least makes for pleasant scenery. Upon seeing what turned out to be Radio Hill, I was intrigued. As soon as I saw it, I wanted to explore it. These little oases of wilderness, meager though they are, comprise an integral part of LA's weird appeal. Taking in the haphazard construction of the city, with its innumerable cantons, barrios, enclaves, and subdivisions, can be overwhelming, even to the point of visceral discomfort. It has a sort of third-world feel (although my third-word - developing world, to use the current parlance - is strictly limited, I can't help but conjecture a certain affinity), implying a fevered opportunism, a frantic expansion in all directions, a city built on the wing. More than once, the neighborhood "planning" of LA has been called a "crazy quilt." This is a description that fits, both for its suggestion of colorful patchwork and its invocation of insanity. It's hard to view the human-made texture of Los Angeles as the product of anything other than madness. Glittering and endless, it resembles the vision of someone in the grips of a manic episode: limitless, opulent, jagged, impossible. And yet it exists.
Just to suggest another overheated metaphor - Los Angeles's physical structure can seem like the scattered debris of a great explosion. As though a bomb has detonated and flung the superdense initial matter in all directions, which has since settled and calcified into glittering hillside developments, run-down stretches tract of housing, and occasional flashes of avant-garde fancy.
In either case, LA's sprawl creates all kinds of unexpected juxtapositions. As in the case of Radio Hill, it means that certain areas of the city just winds up being forgotten. As Nina and I walked up the winding road, which had, inexplicably, been recently paved, we gradually found ourselves slipping into the Interzone of LA. If you've lived here and done some exploring, you know what I'm talking about: that liminal place, situated between the settled and the wild, between the grossly overrun and the eerily abandoned. On the south side of the hill (the park is one big hill) the background noise of the city gradually slipped away, even as the majestic view of downtown rose behind us. Cresting the hillside, there was a tiny parking area (again, recently paved, although the main road has long been closed to any vehicle traffic) with two freshly painted handicapped parking spaces. Off to one side was the eponymous radio tower, one of those crude, unintentional monuments of the digital communications era, bristling with drumlike transmitter/receivers and pointy antennae. At its base was a small houselike structure, surrounded by fences. We didn't even bother to approach it. It had that standoffish vibe that I imagine the dwellings of trolls would have. Off to one side was a spectacularly foul-smelling and overflowing dumpster, one of a few that had apparently been deposited here, for reasons unknown.
The flora of Radio Hill is dense and foreboding, especially by Los Angeles park standards. There's been no obvious effort to clean it any time in the recent past, so it's littered with all kinds of trash - wrappers, tattered clothes, cruelly twisted bicycle wheels, empty cigarette packs. It's not an out-and-out dump. Most of the trash exists around the margins, several feet off the main path. But there is a lot of it. The refuse takes a while to notice; you sort of have to let your eyes adjust to it. But once you do, you see how much of it there is, and it settles on you in that bleak, sad way; a heaviness. But it's more than that - for me, at least, there's also that frisson, I suspect borne of danger and a certain lurid fascination with decay, that creeps up your spine. This is a forlorn place. Secret things happen here; mostly sad, some scary, some merely banal. But they happen in secret, off the grid, even though they occur mere fractions of a mile from one of the Grid's great epicenters - the LAPD headquarters.
The signs have all been painted over, in successive layers of graffiti, and are not almost totally illegible. At one time, the top area was meant to be a protected habitat for butterflies and hummingbirds. Now it's an unkempt patch of scrubby trees, wilderness left to its own devices. I don't know if the hummingbirds ever stayed; on this quiet afternoon, there were none. On the other side of the Hill, the 110 Freeway incessantly roars. It's unbearable. All of the park's residents seem to agree with my assessment, and live on the opposite side. As we ventured further into the remains of the garden, past scrub oak trees and poured-concrete benches, my anxiety began to bloom. This is one of those places where very bad things can happen. Upon passing that initial dumpster, I felt a wave of revulsion that felt positively reptilian. I could imagine a dead body decaying in there. I was carrying a plastic cup in one hand, the remains of an iced-tea-to-go. I didn't dare approach any of the dumpsters; besides the foreboding smells emanating from them, it seemed inappropriate to add to their already prodigious loads of refuse.
At the end of the sandy path is a fence. Across the way, Southernmost reach of Elysian Park was bathed in amber light. Compared to where we stood, it looked as lushly green and manicured as a golf course. The fence - black chain-link - which divided the downward slope from the part of the park intended, in bygone days, for "recreation" - had a gaping hole cut into it. Very deliberately, somebody had sliced the fence and curled up the jagged edges. It had the look of a well-worn path.
After seeing that, it was time to go. We had gradually been seeing signs of the indigent inhabitants of Radio Hill. (tbd)
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
Thoughts on Wendell Berry
I've found my way back. After reading his book of essays entitled "Imagination in Place" and his collection stories A Place in Time, and being moved, provoked, inspired, even at times overwhelmed, by both, I meandered back into his neck of the woods, taking out his book of essays Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community and his novel Hannah Coulter.
It seems to me that Berry is scarily right on almost everything he says. Of course, this overstates things. I've read the title essay of his book, and it shook me, re-opened some wounds of mine, and even left me feeling slightly giddy with hope for a better world.
It's important to note that Berry's conception of sexuality is as profound as it is unsexy. Unsexy, that is, in light of how we've come to regard all things erotic. Berry is not a Bible-thumper, but he is a practicing Christian, and he believes deeply in the centrality of sex to the life not only of the family but of the community. For Berry, sex is the kernel from which all life - familial, communal, artistic, you-name-it - springs. In an industrial, modern culture that devalues persons and communities, sex must also be devalued, must lose its sense of propriety, of awe, of dignity, and even of pleasure.
The knee-jerk reaction of the would-be liberal cosmopolitan is that, at the very least, this overstates things. Berry isn't given anything close to his due in liberal circles for many of the same reasons that Chomsky isn't; he is a true prophet, and much of what he says, while true, goes radically against the grain of the cultural elite. He trucks in truths that are elusive, inconvenient, upsetting.
I will admit to being deeply, even profoundly receptive to Berry's ideas, which is not at all to say that I agree with them entirely, or that my receptiveness isn't colored, even deepened, but a healthy amount of discomfort and skepticism. At times, Berry can seem every bit the fusty, musty ol' coot that he seems to imagine himself as appearing to many of his more, shall we say, urbane readers. He seems to have too high standards for the world, to be atavistic, to harken back to some imagined, irrevocable utopia, a veritable American Eden of community and fellowship. He can seem naive, a bit quaint, even perhaps a little daft (although he is always lucid.) At worst, he can seem irrationally prejudiced: that his longing for his lost, paved-over paradise has curdled into bitterness, and his punctilious good manners and wry stoicism are covering for a dangerous, acid resentment that threatens to boil over.
But I don't really think that's the case. Berry can be cranky, but he always seems to be so with appropriate reserve and self-awareness, and always to temper his crankiness, even his palpable anguish, with hope, humor, and affection for what he cherishes and seeks to preserve in the world. His voice, as lonely as it can seem at times among the literary firmament, is not a voice of despair.
I don't know if I go all the way with him on his rejection of all sex that exists outside the sacrament of marriage. (He isn't a demagogue - he is patently and emphatically not one, since he speaks of real causes and effects, not conjured abstractions of Sin and Purity.) He is right to mark the ways in which sex is degraded and degradation has been made to seem sexy, and how that degradation always extends to people and to the culture at large. But I wonder if it's possible to have a middle ground. Can we allow ourselves to be sexual with those who are other than our spouses? What of sexual play and experimentation - practiced since the dawn of humanity, even in some of the local, communal cultures that Berry is fond of citing as examples of belonging and cohesiveness?
It's liberating to read Berry, because he makes me feel sane. But there is part of me that wonders - how do I live? What do I do now?
It seems to me that Berry is scarily right on almost everything he says. Of course, this overstates things. I've read the title essay of his book, and it shook me, re-opened some wounds of mine, and even left me feeling slightly giddy with hope for a better world.
It's important to note that Berry's conception of sexuality is as profound as it is unsexy. Unsexy, that is, in light of how we've come to regard all things erotic. Berry is not a Bible-thumper, but he is a practicing Christian, and he believes deeply in the centrality of sex to the life not only of the family but of the community. For Berry, sex is the kernel from which all life - familial, communal, artistic, you-name-it - springs. In an industrial, modern culture that devalues persons and communities, sex must also be devalued, must lose its sense of propriety, of awe, of dignity, and even of pleasure.
The knee-jerk reaction of the would-be liberal cosmopolitan is that, at the very least, this overstates things. Berry isn't given anything close to his due in liberal circles for many of the same reasons that Chomsky isn't; he is a true prophet, and much of what he says, while true, goes radically against the grain of the cultural elite. He trucks in truths that are elusive, inconvenient, upsetting.
I will admit to being deeply, even profoundly receptive to Berry's ideas, which is not at all to say that I agree with them entirely, or that my receptiveness isn't colored, even deepened, but a healthy amount of discomfort and skepticism. At times, Berry can seem every bit the fusty, musty ol' coot that he seems to imagine himself as appearing to many of his more, shall we say, urbane readers. He seems to have too high standards for the world, to be atavistic, to harken back to some imagined, irrevocable utopia, a veritable American Eden of community and fellowship. He can seem naive, a bit quaint, even perhaps a little daft (although he is always lucid.) At worst, he can seem irrationally prejudiced: that his longing for his lost, paved-over paradise has curdled into bitterness, and his punctilious good manners and wry stoicism are covering for a dangerous, acid resentment that threatens to boil over.
But I don't really think that's the case. Berry can be cranky, but he always seems to be so with appropriate reserve and self-awareness, and always to temper his crankiness, even his palpable anguish, with hope, humor, and affection for what he cherishes and seeks to preserve in the world. His voice, as lonely as it can seem at times among the literary firmament, is not a voice of despair.
I don't know if I go all the way with him on his rejection of all sex that exists outside the sacrament of marriage. (He isn't a demagogue - he is patently and emphatically not one, since he speaks of real causes and effects, not conjured abstractions of Sin and Purity.) He is right to mark the ways in which sex is degraded and degradation has been made to seem sexy, and how that degradation always extends to people and to the culture at large. But I wonder if it's possible to have a middle ground. Can we allow ourselves to be sexual with those who are other than our spouses? What of sexual play and experimentation - practiced since the dawn of humanity, even in some of the local, communal cultures that Berry is fond of citing as examples of belonging and cohesiveness?
It's liberating to read Berry, because he makes me feel sane. But there is part of me that wonders - how do I live? What do I do now?
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