Danger in the Past

“When a word like dangerous is applied to ideas, language or art, it immediately signals a desire to return to the past. It means that the speaker is fearful … the speaker fears all innovation, which he denounces on each occasion as ‘empty’ (in general that is all that can be found to be said about what is new). However this traditional fear is complicated today by the contrary fear of appearing anachronistic; suspicion towards the new is combined with a few nods in the direction of ‘the call of the present’ or the necessity to ‘rethink the problems of criticism’; ‘the vain return to the past’ is dismissed with a fine oratorical gesture. Regressiveness appears shameful today, just like capitalism. Whence come remarkable jerks and abrupt halts: there is a pretence for a while of accepting modern works, which one ought to discuss since they are being discussed; then, suddenly, a sort of limit having been reached, people proceed to a joint execution. These trials, set up periodically by closed groups, are thus in no way extraordinary; they happen at the end of certain disturbances of equilibrium. But why, today, Criticism?”

— Roland Barthes, Criticism & Truth, trans. Katrine Pilcher Keuneman, 32-33

The Critical Machine

"Let a communication be formed between any number of learned men in the various branches of science and literature; and whether the president or central committee be in London, or Edinburgh, if only they previously lay aside their individuality and pledge themselves inwardly, as well as ostensibly, to administer judgment according to a constitution and code of law; and if by grounding this code on the two-fold basis of universal morals and philosophic reason, independent of all foreseen application to particular works and authors, they obtain the right to speak each as the representative of their body corporate; they shall have their honor and good wishes from me, and I shall accord to them their fair dignities, though self-assumed, not less chearfully than if I could inquire concerning them in the herald's office, or turn to them in the book of peerage. However loud may be the outcries for prevented or subverted reputation, however numerous and impatient the complaints of merciless severity and insupportable despotism, I shall neither feel nor utter aught but to the defence and justication of the critical machine. Should any literary Quixote find himself provoked by its sounds and regular movements, I should admonish him, with Sancho Panza, that it is no giant but a windmill; there it stands on its own place and its own hillock, never goes out of the way to attack any one, and to none and from none either gives or asks assistance. When the public press has poured in any part of its produce between its millstones, it grinds it off, one man's sack the same as another, and with whatever wind may then happen to be blowing. All the two and thirty winds are its friends. Of the whole wide atmosphere it does not desire a single finger-breadth more than what is necessary for its sails to turn round in. But this space must be left free and unimpeded. Gnats, beetles, wasps, butterflies and the whole tribe of ephemerals and insignificants may flit in and out and between; may hum, and buzz, and jar; may shrill their tiny pipes, and wind their puny horns, unchastised and unnoticed. But idlers and bravadoes of larger size and prouder show must beware how they place themselves within its sweep. Much less may they presume to lay hands on the sails, the strength of which is neither greater nor less than as the wind is which drives them round. Whomsoever the remorseless arm slings aloft, or whirls along with it in the air, he has himself alone to blame; though when the same arm throws him from it, it will more often double than break the force of his fall."

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, 239-240

Keywords

"Ambiguity is one of the favorite principles of the modern critic, but this one has backfired rather badly, killing quite a few graduate students. The critic sees the poem through the dictionary, as if the poet had taken the twenty-three definitions of green and used them all at once. But the way the poet uses green does not appear in any dictionary. (Incidentally, someone should analyze the dictionary, if analysis is the order of the day. The dictionary is a kind of large bad poem, or rather a fine piece of science fiction. And the card catalogue of the library is surely the most romantic epic of modern man…)"

— Karl Shapiro, "The Critic in Spite of Himself" in In Defense of Ignorance, 16

Trial balloon

Criticism, bitten by philanthropy, longs to be freed from administration.

"What is an age but something to complain about?"

— Randall Jarrell, "The Age of Criticism"

Risk Society

"The artist, in a sense, creates himself, makes himself interesting, and then places himself on display. It is a fabulous privilege, but only provided he accepts the opposite side of the coin: the risk involved in being studied, analyzed, notated, judged, criticized, disagreed with.

"Those who do the judging — I testify from experience — are cognizant of the enormous privilege of the act of creation, of the risks incurred by the one who exposes himself thus, and in turn feel a secret admiration and respect which would at least partially restore the artist's peace of mind if he could know it. 'You cannot write a great article on what someone else has created; that's criticism,' said Boris Vian.

"In the relations between artist and critic, everything takes place in terms of power, and curiously, the critic never loses sight of this fact that in the power relationship he is the weaker even if he tries to hide the fact with an aggressive tone; while the artist constantly loses sight of his metaphysical supremacy. The artist's lack of perspective can be attributed to emotionalism, sensitivity (or sentimentality), and certainly to the more or less powerful dose of paranoia that seems to be his lot."

— François Truffaut, "What Do Critics Dream About?" in The Films In My Life, trans. Leonard Mayhew, 13

On Figures

"On Figures Quintilian, though he may pay disproportionate attention to them, still is perfectly aware of the danger of the actually and constantly committed fault of separating off some quite ordinary fashion of speech, ticketing it with a long Greek name, and thenceforward regarding the ticket as something real, the attaching of which to similar phrases is an illuminative and profitable exercise of the critical faculty." (18)

Moreover:

"When a man writes even a good oration, much more than that far higher thing a good piece of prose (which may be an oration, if need serves, or anything else), he does not say to himself, 'Now I shall throw in some hyperbaton; now we will exhibit a little anadiplosis; this is the occasion, surely, for a passage of zeugma.' He writes as the spirit moves him, and as the way of art." (33-34)

— George Saintsbury, A History of English Criticism (1911)

Critics are like assholes: everybody is one.

Tampering

"[I]n practice we tend to get in literature immature intellect tampering with imagination and in criticism immature imagination tampering with the intellect. Tampering, I think, is a very deep instinct; we see it in monkeys and in kittens, and in all the young parts of ourselves and also in all the senile parts of ourselves. You have a chance at an intervening maturity where you wouldn't go quite so far as tampering, but it doesn't turn up much."

— R.P. Blackmur, New Criticism in the United States, 26

Fractions and Feelings

Sasha Frere-Jones is just so good sometimes. I love this description of Sonic Youth circa 1986:

"If the bright, square notes of 'Into the Groove' came from a world of easy round numbers, Sonic Youth's music was made of intricate fractions. Each song was crammed with information. Moore swayed as if the stage were heaving, and he sang as though he were trying to calm himself down. Lee Ranaldo, a rugged kid from Long Island with a shaggy hair style, stood stage right, whipping his guitar through the air, now and then crouching to get a better purchase on it. Kim Gordon was center stage, bass in hand; she was the least seasoned musician onstage, and her playing was simple and relentless. Cool, blond, serene, she was like the lead in a movie who refuses to read from the script, more Marina Vlady than Brigitte Bardot."

— "Wonder Town," The New Yorker, June 22, 2009

Non est disputandum

I sometimes think, when I feel like thinking about something I can't do anything about, about the changes in the oppositional "indie rock" ethos since I was in high school, and about indie taste becoming so much more eclectic and elastic. But I hadn't thought to link these concerns in with my day-job worries about "the function of criticism." Now I don't have to; Mike Barthel puts the problem succinctly:

We all know someone who likes the things we hate, and who seems like a smart person. Similarly, most things we like are probably hated by someone else who's a reasonable and decent person. At that point, what is there to argue about? As facile as it may seem, vigorous criticism seems to require that critics divide things up into virtuous and evil, and that other critics disagree with that.

What I like about this formulation is it suggests that criticism will be most "vigorous" and useful when different kinds of people, with different tastes, are trying to get used to each other (as in times of population growth, or globalization, or adolescence) and decide whose values are right. But once they've gotten used to each other, and pluralism and catholicity are the norm, maybe there's not such a big role for critics to play — or maybe the role just has to be different.

I don't think I have anything sensible to say about all this right now, but I appreciate music journalism for occasionally raising these issues, which are among the most repressed in the academic critical field.

Underground Films

Film critic Manny Farber on "Underground Films," 1957:

"…any day now, Americans may realize that scrambling after the obvious in art is a losing game. The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists … The films of the Hawks-Wellman group are underground for more reasons than the fact that the director hides out in sub-surface reaches of his work. The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge …

"The action directors accept the role of hack so that they can involve themselves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types of action: barnstorming, driving, bulldogging. The important thing is not so much the banal-seeming journeys to nowhere that make up the stories, but the tunneling that goes on inside the classic Western-gangster incidents and stock hoodlum-dogface-cowboy types. For instance, Wellman's lean, elliptical talents for creating brassy cheapsters and making gloved references to death, patriotism, masturbation, suggest that he uses private runways to the truth, while more famous directors take a slow, embalming surface route." (Negative Space, 15-17)

Farber's excitingly arguable definition of "underground," which is quite different from what we often take the word to mean when applied to art nowadays, makes me want to do a Keywords-style analysis of it, with particular attention to the evolution of the term in the late 50s/early 60s. The movies that Farber's using "underground" to champion are "male action films" directed by Howard Hawks, William Wellman, Anthony Mann, Robert Aldrich, etc. Briefly, here, Farber seems to want at least three different connotations of "underground" in play:

1. oblique in its formal strategies — "roundabout," "tunneling," and in contradistinction to "scrambling after the obvious"

2. not obviously authored — "the director hides out in sub-surface reaches of his work" — a hiding out which paradoxically confirms the director's ultimate authorship by allowing him to indulge his preference for "private runways to the truth"

3. disreputable — referring both to the films' conditions of viewing ("shabby transience") and their conditions of production and reception ("The action directors accept the role of hack")

For Farber "underground" is a kind of portmanteau concept, combining these three senses (which refer to form, authorship and social status respectively) into a rough category which he can use to classify, and therefore justify, the kinds of films he likes. What Farber doesn't make the word refer to is any type of coterie, conspiracy or social network, which I think has become the primary meaning of "underground" since. (One would assume this usage has political roots, though it would be interesting to try to figure out exactly which ones. A later instance that might reward some attention is the Weather Underground.) He also, while making a point of these filmmaker's opposition or at least indifference to more legitimate film culture, avoids any mention of the "avant-garde," both because it would be silly to apply such a term to Hollywood movies and because he clearly doesn't consider it a prerogative of any of his favorite underground filmmakers to épate la bourgeoisie: that would actually be closer to the sort of over-obvious, over-audience-focused films he attacks elsewhere in the essay.

Thus I think we can isolate, in Farber's article, a relatively pure conception of "underground," before it acquires its decisive association with the "counterculture" (a word yet to be coined). Farber's use remains idiosyncratic, but I think it nonetheless captures the word at an interesting point in its trajectory.

(I may write more on this later, when I read Farber's more famous essay on "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.")

Graphs, Maps, Trees

Graphs: Yeah!
Maps: Maybe.
Trees: Um…

justice league

Ubuweb has now posted a link to a full archive of the 1949 Western Round Table on Modern Art, at which one can view a transcript and read along to their hours of good-quality audio. I bring it up here, especially, because the debate constantly and overtly returns time and again to questions of taste and the public sphere, and especially the role of the museum and the critics as arbiters of taste in relation to abstract art. At one point Wright refers to Mondrian's work as "just monkey business." There's a rather startling exchange between Duchamp and Wright in session C, which is only partly recorded but has full (presumably full) representation in the typescript. I don't have time to say more than this right now (my prospectus defense is tomorrow morning and I've got some class planning to tinker with), but I reckon this archive might be something we all come back to, here and in our various projects. Enjoy!

Evan, it looks like there's a new movie critic in town...

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

Born to Be Wild

Have either of you two ever heard of a music critic named Frank Kogan? I picked up a book of his (Real Punks Don't Wear Black) by chance at the Park Slope Library last week, and am kind of amazed by what I found. Kogan started out writing for his own fanzine Why Music Sucks in the mid-80s and went on to write for the Village Voice and Spin, among (not too many) other places; this is his first and only book, pieced together from over thirty years' worth of record reviews, fanzine rants and miscellaneous other writing. His style is pretty strange: he is self-consciously in the line of great early rock critics (Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Greil Marcus, and especially Richard Meltzer, whom I've never read): that is, very chatty and pugnacious and occasionally taking off into surreal fantasies or obnoxious self-indulgence. But he's got a weirder and more singular sense of humor than any of them, as well as a more theoretical/systematic bent (some of his key concepts, helpfully defined in the preface: "the classroom/hallway split," "Superwords," "fear of contamination," "free lunch," and my favorite, "PBS").

Another difference between Kogan and the first wave of rock critics: he completely loves bubblegum, disco, early hip-hop, hair-metal, and much that they (or you or I, probably) would consider disreputable trash, and treats it no differently than he does critically canonized rock stars. He has really fascinating things to say about James Brown, Dylan, the Rolling Stones, ? and the Mysterians, Jefferson Airplane, the New York Dolls, the Stooges, the Ohio Express, Disco Tex and the Sex-O-Lettes, Spoonie Gee, Teena Marie, L'Trimm, Guns 'N' Roses, Mariah Carey, Toby Keith, etc. He has a consuming interest in the social worlds of high school and junior high, which seem to have established the paradigm for how he hears all music (and it's not such a bad or uncommon paradigm, if you think about it). Unlike say Christgau, who really kills himself trying to be authoritative on all genres of pop, Kogan is unapologetically a dilettante, often admitting he doesn't know much about the artists he writes about (and doesn't think it matters). A point he makes often is that it's artificial to separate pop music, as music, from the world of "flirting and fighting" in which it is produced, consumed and judged. The result is that he comes up with stuff like this:

"When I was thirteen this song by Steppenwolf — first song to use the phrase 'heavy metal,' as far as I know — had a real clever line, 'If the tune makes you smile/You were born to be wild.' Actually, I'd heard it wrong (really went 'Like a true nature's child' or something); this was good, since my version was more useful. I was a hemmed-in kid; no way was I a nature's child. I mean, in my house, on my street, in my school? By my locker? At my desk? You kidding? But 'the tune makes you smile' — I can get there! From my smile to the wild. A first step, at least.
"'I just want to rock and roll all night, and party every day.' That's an old Kiss song. But back when the song was new and my wife Leslie was twelve years old (this was before we married), she heard it as, 'I just want to rock and all night, and part of every day.' OK. Again, a necessary mistake, to make the dream accessible — imaginable — to a twelve-year-old.
"'Up all night, sleep all day,' goes the song by Slaughter that's ruled Dial MTV, MTV's call-in request show, for the last month and a half. Sleep all day? For some readers, no doubt, those words are too much of a compromise (you don't even have to hear it wrong), not mitigated by the utopian 'Maybe we can just stay up twenty-four hours a day' tossed off in the middle. But, see, if you're a bubble-metal band that wants twelve-year-old girls in your demographic, you've got to give them something in their range. At fourteen, Leslie wore black leather and cheered in homeroom whenever it was announced over the intercom that the school's football team had lost. When you're fourteen, everything's possible. But twelve-year-olds have a sense of reality." (277)

Anyway, it's sort of a crazy book: besides the music writing there are autobiographical reminiscences about his attempts at political organization in high school; actual letters, poems, lyrics and journal entries from high school; footnotes to those journal entries; excerpts from emails and chatroom posts; way out-of-control social and cultural generalizations; fake fan letters to Ornette Coleman and Sherilyn Fenn; and occasional engagements with more "academic" thinkers, like Derrida, Wittgenstein and Thomas Kuhn. Almost all of it is "questionable" in the best sense of the word: Kogan, I'm sure, would encourage questions, would consider the book a failure if it didn't generate them. In other words, if you need a book that shows you a bunch of new and exciting things that criticism can do — not that it necessarily should — this is the ticket.

Practical question

Hey guys. I'm wondering what, in a perfect world, your preferred day of reading is like, what the ratio of primary literature to theory to non-theoretical criticism would be. I'm reading kind of a lot of critical writing at the moment — an occupational hazard if you're writing a thesis on poet-critics, I guess — and I'm a bit worried about getting burnt out. I feel as though the argument-assessment part of my brain is getting hypertrophied while the aesthetic-assessment part starts to wither.

Anyway, thoughts welcome.

Scared Straight

William Empson to Charles Madge, upon receipt of (in Madge's words) a "long and probably half-baked and undigested manuscript about Chaucer, Spenser, and Milton":

"The shape of the book I think is bloody insolent. The idea that one must write very esoteric stuff because nobody will read [it] anyway seems to me nonsense — you get plenty of readers if you give anybody a chance. Surely even a communist can have a reasonable amount of democratic feeling; the point about writing as plainly as you can is that you are testing your ideas against somebody who is not a specialist and just knows about life in general. Really subjective writing seems to me nasty to touch, gluey on the outside like David Gascoyne. I feel I have some right to be rude about this because [I am] so much open to the same faults. You had much better imagine before you write anything that England has long been a settled communist state, and that the only difficulties before you are (a) making the comrades hear what you want to say (b) convincing them you are not talking nonsense; assuming the future to have arrived is a piece of symbolism quite in your manner; you will find it works much better both as making you write better and making people buy your books. Actual chapters of quotation without confessing what you quote for, actual articles in quotation without confessing who they are quoted from, all that kind of thing, is merely indulging yourself in madness without the excuse of being mad. Of course there isn't much money in the kind of criticism we write anyway; but the kind of thing one needs in the way of sales and success, enough recognition and criticism to go on doing one's stuff without the insanity of isolation, you can get in presentday [1936] England at once, but only if you don't pretend to be mad. You must expect me to take you seriously if you left the MS to ask my view of it, and I advise you very heartily not to publish this as it stands. Better make it several books and put in a great deal of your political opinions; I don't see that you lose anything by putting them in, it will make the thing far more human, and you may become sufficiently interested to find the main things you wanted to say. I myself generally find what I was trying to talk about while I am re-writing so as to try to be intelligible …

"I smack this out in a state of moderate beer assuming that you are not appallingly sensitive. The difficult thing would be to say it tactfully, but I don't believe you are as neurotic as your piece of writing. As to a public, of course there is a real muddle; the recent events have kept on showing a public opinion I find I agree with, its muddle is my own, and I feel I can write decent (of course unselling) books with a notion that it is part of the country that provides the language. A man who doesn't feel that at all has of course a different situation, and I should have thought the straight way out was to bring in the politics firm and clear … Anyway, just as a point of theory, literary symbolism demands a public for symbolism; by all means imagine a public, and as a matter of fact you will imagine a real one; but those who write for no public are ever unconscious of their asylum.

"Love to you and Kathleen

"Bill Empson"

Nerd Alert (Notes on Twee #0)

Carl Wilson, another of my favorite living critics (and not to be confused with one of my favorite dead singers), has a great piece on Slate about the cultural politics of contemporary indie rock, written in response to Sasha Frere-Jones' provocative but less convincing New Yorker article about race and the current lack of "miscegenation" in same. The whole thing is worth reading (as is SFJ's), but here are two of the most intriguing bits, which incidentally suggest a point of departure for a socioeconomic analysis of "twee," as well as the even more visible public hegemony of "nerd" culture (watch this space):

"With its true spiritual center in Richard Florida-lauded 'creative' college towns such as Portland, Ore., [indie rock] is the music of young 'knowledge workers' in training, and that has sonic consequences: Rather than body-centered, it is bookish and nerdy; rather than being instrumentally or vocally virtuosic, it shows off its chops via its range of allusions and high concepts with the kind of fluency both postmodern pop culture and higher education teach its listeners to admire … This doesn't make coffeehouse-indie shallow, but it can result in something more akin to the 1960s folk revival, with fretful collegiate intellectuals in a Cuban Missile Crisis mood, seeking purity and depth in antiquarian music and escapist spirituality. Not exactly a recipe for a booty-shaking party …

"The profile of this university demographic often includes a sojourn in extended adolescence, comprising graduate degrees, internships, foreign jaunts, and so on, which easily can last until their early 30s. Unlike in the early 1990s, when this was perceived as a form of generational exclusion and protested in 'slacker'/grunge music, it's now been normalized as a passage to later-life career success. Its musical consequences might include an open but less urgent expression of sexuality, or else a leaning to the twee, sexless, childhood nostalgia that many older critics … find puzzling and irritating. Female and queer artists still have pressing sexual issues and identities to explore and celebrate, but the straight boys often seem to fall back on performing their haplessness and hyper-sensitivity. (Pity the indie-rock girlfriend.)"

I have a few problems with the last paragraph: the too-easy, meaningless side-taking with anonymous "female and queer artists" (not any female or queer artists in particular) against equally hypostasized "straight boys," and the related leap from aesthetic self-representation to social practice embodied here by "the indie-rock girlfriend." But on the whole I find it kind of a fascinating idea: that the powerlessness and smallness that twee (and, these days, indie more generally) connotes can be seen as a function of, and response to, the knowledge/power conferred on its target audience by years of academic legitimation.

And, before anybody says anything, glass houses, stones, yeah I know.

Reading Reading Comics

My first post-/non-generals book is Douglas Wolk's Reading Comics, which Emily bought a while ago and I've been saving for a treat. It's a really great overview of the past quarter century or so of comics/graphic novels/"sequential pictorial narrative art"/what-have-you, written by one of the best contemporary critics of same. I care only a little about comics, but I love Wolk: he has the wonderful, and rare, critical ability to make me feel excited even about work that I already know I don't really respond to (Grant Morrison, for instance) just because his own response is so energetic and intelligent. This puts him in a class with people like Pauline Kael, Robert Christgau, Stanley Cavell, etc. Anyway, highly recommended. (Yes, I realize it's a little funny that I'm "relaxing" with a book of criticism — but I suppose, if I'm honest with myself, I love really good criticism almost more than anything else.)

And it reminds me of something you might want to look at, Greg, for your local Modernism project: Alan Moore's only prose novel, Voice of the Fire, which sounds like it's squarely in the tradition of Paterson and Briggflats. Amazon says: "In a story full of lust, madness, and ecstasy, we meet twelve distinctive characters that lived in the same region of central England over a span of six thousand years. Each interconnected tale traces a path in a journey of discovery of the secrets of the land. In the tradition of Kipling's Puck of Pook's Hill, Schwob's Imaginary Lives and Borges' A Universal History of Infamy, Moore travels through history blending truth and conjecture, in a novel that is dazzling, moving, sometimes tragic, but always mesmerizing." It's also, according to Wolk at least, bordering on unreadable. But don't you kind of want to find out for yourself?