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Monday, November 19, 2007
Contingency, Irony, Solidity
Josh Glenn has a little book out, Taking Things Seriously
UPDATE: Little rubber pig.
Lindsay Waters, in his entry, relates a personal anecdote: what if you had a technicolor dreamcoat and, frankly, no one cared all that much? (Not that he has a technicolor dreamcoat, per se. More of a lamp.) Best line: “It’s not funny for the turtle!” (You can probably think of numerous values of ‘turtle’ for which that is true.) My 6-year old daughter gives the palm to the porcelain whippets. (Well, of course.) David Scher presents the sawed-off couch arm his mom smoked and smoked on. Which his brother brought to New York “where it is screwed to a wall once in a while.” Because: somebody has to think of the kids?
Josh has gotten quite a bit of good attention for the book, but - a little bird told me: namely, Josh - he didn’t much care for reviewers calling it ‘wacky’. So I decided to do something scientifistic. I composed a little matrix and reread the book, making little technical-seeming checkmarks as I went. Each object + essay was allowed as many checks as seemed like major ‘values’. But I generally limited them to three or four. So here it is. I am not going to explain my categories to the likes of you. I take a very ‘no retreat, no surrender’ approach to pie charts. It turns out not to be a terribly wacky book, on the whole.
Also, I will have you know this post was composed in the shadow of a deerhead painted blue, with silvertipped horns. Courtesy of my wife, before she left. (She’s coming back. She didn’t LEAVE leave. The head is still here, and so freshly painted.) Its presence is very minatory. Pardon me (I sneezed): minotaury. The labyrinth of things.
Comments
Wow, a close read from Holbo! What more can an author (editor, really) ask for? Many thanks.
Is there a reason why your ‘irony’ is essentially the same colour as your ‘relationship memorabilia’? Are you trying to suggest there’s something intrinsically ironic about relationship memorabilia?
Hmmm, I made the pie using Excel. I don’t really know how to use Excel. I trusted it to make wise decisions. Possibly that was unwise of me.
I have no right to be cranky, having not read the book, but I’ve been hearing rumbles from my friends who still attend lit conferences that “thing theory” is really taking off. Bill Brown’s book was interesting, but Christ, do we really need a new theory?
Then I went out and bought Chris Ware’s *Best American Comics of 2007*, where I learned that to be an “art comic,” you just need to write diaries and draw illustrations for them. Bechedel’s art is gorgeous, but in the end, is it anything more than the elevation of autobiographical peculiarity to the status of objet d’art? A million little pieces indeed.
The navel-gazing and the thing-gazing all seem, literally, narcissistic: enchanted by self, turn into a flower.
It’s modernism-ad-absurdum, where the Proustian elevation of the life-story to art meets the Pound-Williamsian attempt to make the poem a thing. But where Pound and Williams tried to erase the self, and Proust dissolved the self into everything around it, now we have the self-on-display, the self as pure immanence, the self as widget. Or the widget as self. We are, proudly, the crap around us. I think Marx said something about this. But I remember he was sort of sad about it. Thank god all that’s changed.
That was very well put, Luther.
However: I don’t think that was fair to Bechdel or Ware. (I was just reading “Best American Comics of 2007” myself, by odd coincidence.) Ware, in particular, is a formalist antipode away from ‘just writing diaries and illustrating them’. And Bechdel, it seems to me, just wrote a damn fine autobiography. I think, if anything, her approach is (God save me from the anvil of irony about to descend on my poor head) straight, and certainly not mannered in its artificial cultivation of ‘peculiarity’.
John, I find Bechedel’s artwork beautiful. And when she shifted to a broader perspective—the images of the Allegheny Valley juxtaposed with a map from *The Wind in the Willows*—I found the move brilliant.
But in the context of the volume—which may speak more to Ware’s aesthetics than any real trend in comix—the navel-gazing “quirkiness” of Bechedel’s work stands out more. Given that Kyle Baker published parts of his stunning *Nat Turner* comix this past year, I’m concerned that Ware’s pushing an identity between “art comics” and “real life.” So far, the collection feels mannered, much like reading a collection of poems from recent MFA graduates. You can hear the advice of comic art instructors behind the work: draw what you know, keep it concrete, keep it local, restrict yourself to minor domestic epiphanies. There are exceptions, of course.
Hmmm, I have to say so far I’m not loving the parts of BEC of 2007 that I didn’t own already. But I owned about 20% of it already, and I think those bits are pretty great. I should probably do a review. (It is a bit of a coincidence. It arrived from Amazon two days ago.)
I think you should read the whole Bechdel book, in any case.
Pardon Moi: BAC - Best American Comics.
Yes, well put! But I hope you don’t think that “Taking Things Seriously” is advancing a new theory of objects. In fact, although I got quite a bit out of Bill Brown’s “Things” collection, in my (lightweight, not entirely coherent) introduction to “Taking Things Seriously” I go out of my way to criticize Material Culture Studies practitioners. (Although I praise their precursors: Kracauer, Adorno, Lefebvre, and so forth.) If you’re suggesting that I’m proposing a new theory, about how studying objects reveals something about the self, that wouldn’t be anything new, and I certainly didn’t intend to do that. The book is a show-and-tell: Show us your ordinary object, tell us about the process by which you invested it with extraordinary significance. I, for one, never get tired of listening to this sort of story, but I don’t have a theory about it. However, if the reader insists on theorizing, I’d listen to that, too.