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Wednesday, October 01, 2008
The idea of order and the problem of Stravinsky
(x-posted to The Kugelmass Episodes)
The heated, often deeply antagonistic exchange that has developed in the comments to my post on David Foster Wallace reminds me of something from the recent past of my graduate studies. Tom Mellers writes:
[Kugelmass] should possibly watch a little less television, though. I know that whenever I watch too much TV, my sense of order and logic suffers.
My response to his comment was focused on literary works that challenge order and logic, works like those produced by Antonin Artaud and Arthur Rimbaud. Meanwhile, his comment reminded me of something else: two periods of time when I tried to listen exclusively to music that reinforced my sentiments of order and my faith in the logical development of ideas.
Both of these moments came at the same point in the year: mid-Spring, which is a peculiar time for me every year. On the one hand, I am looking forward to teaching back East, at an academy hundreds of years old that was founded on humanistic principles of reason and service. On the other, it is a stressful period, since I have rarely accomplished everything I set out to do at the beginning of the year in terms of my own scholarship. It is usually the time of year when I sleep least and drink the most coffee, leaving me in a state of quivering anxiety interspersed with moments of intense exhilaration.
Out of this muddle-headed striving one idea emerged clearly: I needed to be supremely rational and brilliant to cope with the challenges ahead, and the way to do that was to create an environment that encouraged the furthest flights of intellect. Rather than getting stuck in the emotional, instinctual thrashings of pop music, I needed to climb up to the Olympian heights of classical purism: Mozart, Bach, some Beethoven, Vivaldi, Mendelssohn, Haydn, Scarlatti, and then other acceptable works by Dvorak et al. In Steppenwolf, hadn’t Hesse praised Mozart for his golden serenity, and Scarlatti likewise in The Glass Bead Game? At times, I sincerely believed that this would become most or all I would listen to, and I would even go surfing around on the Internet to find essays where the authors expounded helpfully on the “simplicity” of rock compared to the compositional virtuosity of the old masters. Of course, it was easy to find just these sorts of essays.
After about a month of this, though, I started to feel there was a problem. First of all, what was I going to do about Mozart’s <i>Requiem</i>? It was written by the master, and it was absolutely thrilling music, but I knew that a piece like the famous “Dies Irae” wasn’t really leading me towards enlightened calm, but rather leaving me abject and shattered. This paled, however, next to The Problem of Stravinsky (who will have to stand in for all his fellows, like Bartok or Shostakovich, notwithstanding the great differences between them). Right there, alongside all my wonderfully smooth quartets and concertos, was The Rite of Spring in its horrible, tempestuous majesty, sounding mostly unlike the other (especially the earlier) compositions I had, yet indisputably classical music by somebody familiar with his predecessors. It was even a classic, one of classical music’s greatest hits.
Of course I at first refused to listen to it, offering myself various lame excuses, including the idea that I would listen to Stravinsky when I was doing absolutely nothing but concentrating on the music, but Mozart or Bach when the music was partly ambiance. But at that point I started to feel suffocated. I had a whole music collection, and now I was cutting it down to perhaps 45 compositions that I felt were sufficiently ennobling to hear. Thanks to Stravinsky, the project imploded. I love the story of old St. Saens walking out of a performance of The Rite of Spring, complaining that Stravinsky was torturing the instruments. Well, he was right about the implications of the piece, its radical potential.
It is sort of amazing that during all this time I was even allowed to get near a classroom or a critical project, considering how oppressive my thinking about music had become, and how that might have distorted my responses to other media. Looking back on it now, the whole project seems very feeble and childish, and even a little nuts. Nonetheless I do not believe that it is very far removed from our uncomfortable response to the fact that most of the culture around us (regardless of medium) comes out of modernism and post-modernism, and so out of a tradition of uncompromising hostility towards the status quo and mistrust of the humanist tradition. It strands us in an emotional landscape permeated by alienation and despair. It is exhausting to continually face up to the agony contained in these works: to go, in the course of a single day, from listening to Not A Pretty Girl to reading Céline to watching, say, Amores Perros. Of course the culture of distinctive personal style ("hip") helps insulate us from the explicit meaning of these things by making them fashion accessories, but it’s not nearly enough to blunt the sharp edge.
The individual is right to feel that, in ostensibly seeking smart entertainments, he or she is in fact signing up for a weight of grief that fits in badly with the business of the day. It is natural to want to manage this exposure. It does not help us maintain logic and order within the private universe of our life. It is, however, a rite of spring. Ask anybody who lives at the snow line. The rivers turn white with fury when the thaw begins.
[Note: I have now closed comments, after deleting my final comment, as I feel the discussion has outlived its usefulness.]
Comments
There are a couple of problems with the way you set this all up. The implied argument that you seem to be trying to refute is: “Classical music makes the mind of the listener more logical and orderly therefore it is superior to contemporary popular music.” But the strongest argument on behalf of listening to classical music is not that it can provide the listen with an increased capacity for logic and order. Why would you conflate legitimate proponents of classical music with the con-men who brought you “Mozart for Your Fetus”? And just because listening to Mozart won’t increase your IQ doesn’t mean that Mozart isn’t in some way superior to Iggy Pop. (Not that I’m necessarily saying he is, but you get the point—this doesn’t prove anything about classical music, just about your own perceptions of it.)
There’s also this question of what, exactly,is defined as “classical music.” Chamber music, symphonies, opera, and liturgical music are all significantly different; more importantly, the individual periods of western art music are so distinct that it makes little sense to turn them into some sort of monolithic figure unless you’re pressed for time (or trying to bludgeon another person over the head with it). Again, just because there are infomercials out there grouping Stravinsky in with Bach in a single disc of “classical music’s greatest hits” doesn’t obscure the fact that this is an unwarranted and violent juxtaposition of extremely different types of music.
I admit that I am not entirely clear on the point of the blog entry, but it seems to me that you’re being unfair to “classical music” and unfair to yourself here. There’s no reason to expect that “classical music” will make your thoughts more orderly or logical—that has never been part of the legitimate appeal of such music. If you go about listening to it with that as your goal, you’re not only going to be disappointed, but you’re committing an error by trying to turn the music into some sort of personal pump-up mix. Your approach should go beyond “this is an appropriate music for this situation.” At that point it’s hard to imagine that you’re really even hearing the music.
CR,
This was absolutely intended as a minor piece, a companion to where the thread trailing after the other post had ended up—namely, mired in a weirdly pharmaceutical approach to the use of art, where television is “poison” and literature is “medicine,” at least where “order and logic” are concerned. Your comment articulates very well the kinds of problems I was trying to get at.
JK,
This reminds me very much of an experience I had in the early to mid ‘80s. When I started college in 1980, I had it in my mind to educate myself about literature. I stopped reading comics and science fiction and turned to “serious” literature, which for me, then, meant Sartre, Camus, Kierkegaard, Knut Hamsun, Pinter, O’Neil, Celine, and a host of others. The music I listened to was dark and dirgelike. I became—if not clinically—at least seriously depressed. The good stuff was bleak. Then, around 1985, I read Bellow’s _Humboldt’s Gift_—it was an eye opener, something serious but also joyous. Good literature could be life affirming. I can’t really exaggerate what a revelation that was. From then on I took more care. I still read “bleak” works, but balanced them with other works. The care of the self, I suppose.
I realize that JK is not making a logical argument, or that his or my attitudes about literature were/are “correct.” Today I understand that comics can be excellent (I returned to them during their renaissance in the mid-’80s), that genre fiction can also be good fiction, that “good” fiction can be fun, and that part of Bellow’s appeal is identification.
I’m not buying any of this high-cultural Stravinsky stuff, Joseph. I still think you watch too much TV. And your mp3 playlist is probably made up entirely of Fall Out Boy and Bright Eyes. (j/k)
Trent, cheers.
Krynoid, I’m not sure about the name “Krynoid,” but your comment had me laughing out loud.
Folks,
In a longer, otherwise sincere note to Joseph about something else entirely, I added a little practical, semi-friendly, semi-unfriendly advice: watch less TV and you might be able to argue in a straight line. I did not mean to submit my advice to the panel for serious consideration.
Now that it has been submitted, though, let me say: I do not have a pharmaceutical view of art. I do not think television is poison. I think (like most people) that 99% of what’s on TV is a waste of your only life, even if it gets you tenure. I think (like many people) that college professors spend way too much time discussing it, and take it way too seriously, which is not the same as saying that it should be ignored. The fact that the average American does something for four hours a day does not make that thing significant. American women spend two hours a day in the bathroom. There are no Professors of Bathroom Studies. I’d say that’s a good thing.
I don;’t think Joseph has been drugged by television. I think he may be addicted to dodging, but that’s another channel.
Tom
Hmm. This is just a guess, but I’d guess that more total academic words have been written about cosmetics, female body image, and the advertising that gets people to spend two hours a day in the bathroom than have been written about particular TV shows.
Rich,
OK, how about this: Americans spend more time asleep than they spend watching TV OR on the pot. I don’t think significance varies directly with time. Do you? One’s wedding is over in a day. A roadside ambush can last a few minutes and mean more to a soldier than six years spent watching Dawson’s Creek. Two minutes in the cancer ward… Shall I continue? I spent six hours last night playing poker, forty minutes before bed reading Proust. Guess which activity made an impression.
There’s such a thing as insignificant downtime, which Media Studies in its vanity (and insecurity) would rather not notice. You’d think this would be obvious to people who read blogs.
TM
If I wanted to be mean, I could say that more academic words have been written about people’s dreams, and interpretation thereof, than about either body image or TV.
But I understand your argument. I don’t agree with it. I think that humanist scholars have to view anything that humans take interest in as being worthy of study. If they’re spending two hours a day in the bathroom, then that by definition means that there’s something interesting going on there.
You could say that the number of people studying TV is too large relative to those who study, say, Proust. But I don’t know if that is actually the case. It’s my impression that Proust is very widely studied and taught and that professors who study TV are really not very numerous.
So mostly this seems like a classic high vs low culture dispute. Your TV is insignificant downtime; my Proust is the highest expression of the human spirit—that kind of thing. I think that everything about that to be said has probably been said.
Rich:
“I think that humanist scholars have to view anything that humans take interest in as being worthy of study.”
Which is not to say that the activity under anthropological scrutiny has any more aesthetic or intellectual or fine art merit, in and of itself, than any number of distractions (like, say, Olympic curling or porno) that humans indulge in. Further, just because a writer can achieve fine literary results using TV (or poker or porno or Olympic curling) as subject matter, it doesn’t mean that the subject matter is *literary* in essence… and so on.
The trick being that TV supports its self-proclaimed cultural omnipresence by simulating a reality in which it has absorbed everything (including Life, Death, Sex, Olympic curling and Literature); but nothing is “in” the TV but TV, and literary experiences (even in hybrid cases like illustrated Dickens) are *nothing* like televisual experiences; anyone who thinks that Flannery O’Connor’s description of a charging bull is not essentially different from an image of a charging bull on the television is clearly missing something.
I write all this not as a Lama who knows nothing of the entertainment technology in question, but as a child of the *actual Age of Television* (which kicked into gear sometime around Sid Caesar’s rise to fame and peaked with the Who-Shot-JR episode of Dallas; about a generation; after that, Video Games changed Everything): I was raised on the stuff. I know dozens of TV theme songs by heart; can identify any number of veteran character actors from the Golden Age; have had crushes on everyone from Donna Douglas to Louise Lasser to Danica McKellar.
In parallel, from an early age, I was an avid reader (starting with Sci Fi), which is why I can not only tell the technologies apart but have no problem placing them in a hierarchy (the best writing trumps the best TV every single time *as a plausible ersatz for waking dreams*). TV is not, structurally, the best medium for presenting complicated allusions/resonances/coded messages; it is not, by design, a vertically unlimited stack of puzzles and metaphors: it spools out at a fixed rate on a rectangular screen of fixed dimensions, rather than at one’s own pace in the universe-sized amphitheatre of the imagination. With the advent of the VCR, and, then, the DVD (et al), forensic “readings” of video material became more *possible*, but *commercial considerations*, which can never be discounted (even with “public” television), are a structural limit that TV-as-equal-to-literary-fiction-as-an-Art advocats understandably avoid discussing. DFW couldn’t have possibly expected, while writing IJ, that millions of people would read it; the pressure to hit that LCD sweetspot just isn’t there (the way it’s there for the makers of TV and Movies) for the writers of Literary Fiction, even when they’re hoping for a “hit” by their modest standards. The aesthetic difference is therefore comparable to that between Jack Kirby’s work (wonderful as it can be) and Egon Schiele’s. The differing results are not a matter of skewed levels of talent (or worthiness) but of dissimilar goals (and uses). At the heart of the TV-as-equal-to-literary-Art argument is a fairly consumerist conflation of Art and Entertainment that misses the point that professional Entertainment can’t even *afford* to be Art until such time that Art stops being a minority pursuit subsidized by the over-educated and the wealthy. Salvatore Dali came pretty close (with a poster in every pot head’s kitchen, c. 1975), but that was another time.
Yes, there is “elitism” present in the above sentiment… just as there is elitism at work when afficionados of early Public Enemy sneer at Soulja Boy, or Hi Fi fanatics sneer at Mp3s, or Foodies sneer at Arby’s. So? Would you claim that the Hi Fi fanatic is missing the point? People with serious ears can hear the diff; people without serious ears can have their 92kbps sound files: everyone’s happy.
As a grownup, I lean towards Lit (I chucked out my Sony Timekiller a decade ago), but my childhood was shaped (enriched, even) by television. In fact, because the early writers of Big TV (Serling, Chayefsky, Bloch, Ellison) were readers of Big Literature, TV was my first *interesting* exposure to higher literary tropes/Names when all I was reading was Asimov.
“Your TV is insignificant downtime; my Proust is the highest expression of the human spirit—that kind of thing.”
Pretty much so, Rich! It need not be Proust, specifically, of course.
I’m not going to address the high vs low culture thing, other than to say that I question the inheritance of modernism in this regard—literary classics, like Dickens, often used to be low culture. Also, a good deal of what you write appears to be a classic confusion of medium with genre—TV being displayed on a screen does not limit its content in the same way that the genre of network dramatic TV is limited.
But mostly I want to say that it’s not anthropological scrutiny that I meant. There’s not a hard boundary between humanist study and the social sciences, but insofar as there is one, I don’t think that humanists are chased out of the bathroom by the sociologists counting toothpaste brands used. There’s an essential sense of the human meaning in that situation that the sciences don’t really address.
"Also, a good deal of what you write appears to be a classic confusion of medium with genre—TV being displayed on a screen does not limit its content in the same way that the genre of network dramatic TV is limited.”
Ah, but in both cases (medium and genre) the limits imposed show the literary experience as being virtually limitless (finite-yet-unbound?) in comparison. Literature is such an advanced technology that there’s almost no technology involved. And to the question of genre, specifically: whether it’s “network dramatic” or “cable comedic” or “satellite news”, the chief limit (which is one I actually cited) is sellability. And the strictness of the sellability limit with mass media projects on the level of TV, Movies and Pop Music is massively greater than with the Literary Fiction Artifact; Sebald (for example) doesn’t/didn’t have to worry about the same LCD as Nolan or Spelling; Sebald was free to attempt ART in the most elitist sense of the word. *Needing* a guaranteed audience of tens of millions places severe restrictions on the subersive qualities/originality/challenge factor of the product. Literary Fiction engages as Art, on a deeper level, not just because more of the imagination comes into play and not because TV could never be brilliant (in Fine Art terms) but because it’s a super-whore. But, even with the gloves off, and as brilliant as it could (in another world) be, TV can’t compete (for reasons stated in my previous comment). Why is this hard to swallow, I wonder? Hysterical Relativism? Something about the Class War (between members of the same essential class)?
“I’m not going to address the high vs low culture thing, other than to say that I question the inheritance of modernism in this regard—literary classics, like Dickens, often used to be low culture.”
Not comparing Dickens to, erm, Chabon (that was a joke). Comparing Dickens to Dawson’s Creek.
Wait… did I write “Salvatore Dali”? (the dangers of late night commenting!)
Rich,
I’m not interested in having a high/low discussion either. I’m not saying that the makeup is utterly uninteresting, or that TV is utterly uninteresting. I was disputing Joseph’s unexamined notion that the significance of an activity can be gauged by the time the average American spends doing it.
As for your not-at-all mean comment…
“ I could say that more academic words have been written about people’s dreams, and interpretation thereof, than about either body image or TV”
I considered pre-rebutting it, but didn’t because I assumed you knew that we do not spend most of our sleep time dreaming. Six hours of dreamless sleep a night for every two spent dreaming, is one estimate. So my point stands. TV and dreamless sleep: they have a lot in common.
Tom
And yet ... who doubts that when future critics look back at 20th and 21st Century art, some of what they hold in high esteem will be television shows.
This discussion reminds me of Plato’s/Socrates’ complaint that the new-fangled technology of writing will dumb down everything.
Tom, let’s agree that most books are just as terrible as most television programs. I’m not out to defend the deep meaningfulness of Survivor. On the other hand, one cannot pretend that DeLillo (or Wallace) sells more copies than Danielle Steele, John Grisham, or the Twilight series.
There are, of course, occasions where it’s useful to analyze the cultural appeal of trash, whether that means a television program or a pulpy novel, but in general I prefer to spend my time on more complex art. If you are getting more out of Proust than you get out of poker, then it is hardly clear why poker is worth your time. You really need six hours of stressful betting before you can be sufficiently rested for your bedtime reading?
“American women” don’t all spend two hours doing their hair, but the art of beauty certainly does interest writers. It is in a writer’s nature to be curious, and to care about the events of human life rather than writing them off. Colette was certainly a Professor of Bathroom Studies.
Steven, you are setting up bad comparisons. I wouldn’t compare Dickens to Dawson’s Creek; I would compare Dickens to The Wire. It is absurd to pretend that commercial considerations do not influence writing fully as much as television, what with (for example) Dostoevsky writing serial novels to clear his gambling debts. Furthermore, the difference between Flannery O’Connor’s bull and the filmed bull is only meaningful if you recognize that a bull in Belle du Jour is nothing like a bull in Hud.
Finally, to call the book a non-technology is ridiculous. Apparently writers like Sebald were available to everybody in 1300 A.D.; you would just hop down to the Barnes & Noble and pick up a paperback copy.
"Finally, to call the book a non-technology is ridiculous.”
Joseph, when did I refer to books as a “non-technology”?
I wrote: “Literature is such an advanced technology that there’s almost no technology involved.”
"Finally, to call the book a non-technology is ridiculous. Apparently writers like Sebald were available to everybody in 1300 A.D.; you would just hop down to the Barnes & Noble and pick up a paperback copy.”
In any case, I was referring to the technology of print/writing (marks on a medium)/reading and you’re referring to the technology of reproduction (and distribution, I suppose). The technology I refer to could easily take the form of a note to one’s self on a post-it sticker.
“Furthermore, the difference between Flannery O’Connor’s bull and the filmed bull is only meaningful if you recognize that a bull in Belle du Jour is nothing like a bull in Hud.”
Disagree. Utterly. The difference between bulls number one and two is *profound* (systemic/categorical/ontological); the diff between bulls three and four is merely cosmetic (or a matter of intent) and wholly irrelevant to the problem of comparing the first two bulls (one of which was/is a physical object; the other a phantom even less substantial than a cartoon.)
Steven,
That’s fair enough, but surely you see that your formulation is a paradox. Maybe go ahead and explain it, because as somebody who teaches writing (including creative writing), what we call “craft” could very well be termed “learning the technology of writing.”
"That’s fair enough, but surely you see that your formulation is a paradox. Maybe go ahead and explain it, because as somebody who teaches writing (including creative writing), what we call “craft” could very well be termed “learning the technology of writing.”
Well, compare a book to the inside of a television camera, a production office and a satellite and you’ll see what I mean by that relativizing-technologies remark, I guess.
Hey, I’m totally prepared to agree to disagree…
The technology I refer to could easily take the form of a note to one’s self on a post-it sticker.
That’s precisely the point. Of course people have been writing notes to themselves for a long time, but not on Post-It stickers, which were only recently invented. The fact is that the technology of the Post-It note has influenced, to some small extent, the nature of our dialogue with ourselves, and it has done so as a piece of technology.
Furthermore, you can’t make writing into a transparent technology on the grounds that people write “Dentist tomorrow 8am.” That’s not a novel.
Compared to the book, it has taken an incredibly short time for videocameras and distribution technology to be democratized. It costs very little for me to buy (or even rent) a video camera, shoot a digital movie, and then make it available via the Web.
Of course, in theory somebody could buy a pen for sixteen cents and a stack of legal pads for sixteen dollars and write a novel that way, but that’s more a romantic fantasy than anything else. It doesn’t reflect how the world of writing operates now, and as soon as they tried for publication of any sort they would have solidly entered the world of the computer and word processing. And, for that matter, an aspiring filmmaker of equally little means could probably steal a digital camera or buy one at a pawnshop.
Ultimately, what you are doing by exaggerating the difference between print and film, or else reducing differences of directorial style to mere “cosmetics,” is reproducing an old Hegelian hierarchy that places the word above the image. That debate didn’t begin with television; it goes back to ancient debates about painting and sculpture and theater, and even (Trent is right) to Plato on the subject of spoken versus written language. Ultimately, though, a hostility to sensuous media has to also be hostility to the sensuous word: for Hegel, the real champion of this position, the goal of language was not fiction but philosophy.
So, I wrote:
“The technology I refer to could easily take the form of a note to one’s self on a post-it sticker.” (Meaning: that specific argument was about the *technology of words, or writing, in the raw*; not about reproduction-of-text technology).
You responded:
“That’s precisely the point. Of course people have been writing notes to themselves for a long time, but not on Post-It stickers, which were only recently invented. The fact is that the technology of the Post-It note has influenced, to some small extent, the nature of our dialogue with ourselves, and it has done so as a piece of technology.”
Joseph, I could just as easily have referred to scribbles with a bloody finger on the wrist of the opposite hand. *Post-it stickers?* This has relevance to *anything* in the debate? I must admit I find your counter-arguments bizarre (as you find mine, obviously).
I have to quit now, man. Maybe it’s just fascinating in itself that there’s no common ground for us to argue on, then.
So, if you don’t post anything *excessively* snarky (laugh) after this one, this is my fini for this thread.
Sure, Steven, you could have, but what would writing with a stick in the sand have to do with this debate about art? I get what you’re saying, and I wasn’t limiting my response to the fact that you happened to mention a Post-It note. That’s why I wrote that “Dentist tomorrow 8am,” written anywhere with any implement, is not art and does not prove that literature is non-technological as it exists in our world.
I’m just going to pretend that Joseph and I are having an orderly discussion, and that this thread hasn’t, like a nebula, oozed out in fifteen uneven directions.
So, Joseph,
Of course I agree that most books and TV shows are terrible. But we weren’t discussing that. I was contending with the peculiar quantitative rationale behind certain works of humanities scholarship. Time spent and (now that you mention it) books sold are lousy indicators of human significance and value. Many humanities professors, lately, overrate and therefore over-study certain activities simply because a lot of Americans do them a lot of the time. These professors think that their approach is democratic in spirit, but I would say they’re wrong. Their spirit owes much more to consumer capitalism and corporate management. They are like the bullheaded CEO who, when some underling insists on subtlety, shouts, Just give me the numbers!
Which brings us to Joseph’s latest logical fuzz-out. He writes:
“It is absurd to pretend that commercial considerations do not influence writing fully as much as television, what with (for example) Dostoevsky writing serial novels to clear his gambling debts.”
This conflates two different meanings of “commercial considerations.” Writing good books partly in order to make money is not the same thing as writing in a way calculated to please the lowest common denominator.
“Fully as much,” Joseph? I know a lot of novelists and I know a lot of TV writers and I can assure you: the TV writers would be first to approve this distinction.
TOM
Many humanities professors, lately, overrate and therefore over-study certain activities simply because a lot of Americans do them a lot of the time.
Well, considering the critical overlaps between sociology and various disciplines in the humanities, that somebody should be doing this work is unsurprising and good. But it’s not my reason for thinking that television is a legitimate medium for art.
This conflates two different meanings of “commercial considerations.” Writing good books partly in order to make money is not the same thing as writing in a way calculated to please the lowest common denominator.
“Fully as much,” Joseph? I know a lot of novelists and I know a lot of TV writers and I can assure you: the TV writers would be first to approve this distinction.
Tom, the sort of appeal to authority you make at the end—one that can be confirmed only by you—will not convince anyone who isn’t already convinced.
I take your point that if the present moment is our only concern, then certainly television writers are put under more commercial pressure than novelists. This is, however, because novelists sell to a relatively small audience that (somewhat) prizes experimentation. Look at poetry: there you have an even smaller audience and even more “freedom” to be experimental and/or highbrow. But with this freedom comes a corresponding lack of influence on society.
In theory, the most absolutely “free” writing would be found in personal notebooks/journals, which are under no commercial obligations at all and do not run any of the risks of a readership. In fact, most journals fall into easily recognizable clichés and conventions, and, as much as I admire the journals of Gide and Woolf, I like their intentional publications better.
It is tremendously exciting to command a wide audience—at one time that drew men to poetry (or Shakespeare to drama), and now it draws men and women to writing for television. Creative people take the constraints imposed upon them, commercial parameters as well as those derived from literary convention, and contextualize them such that they have meaning. Shakespeare would take royal writing assignments and stock characters and turn them into high art; Arrested Development takes the necessities of the 22-minute sitcom and turns them into reflections on superficiality.
"television writers are put under more commercial pressure than novelists...because novelists sell to a relatively small audience”
An exceedingly odd defense of TV! I mean: precisely what about that dynamic makes TV more rather than less appealing to you?
“It is tremendously exciting to command a wide audience”
Of all the cliches you might have used, COMMAND seems especially ill-chosen. You don’t command a wide audience when you write for TV. They command you.
And exciting?
Conformism is an excitement, I suppose: the excitement of the submerging oneself in the mass. I never find that so exciting myself, but I concede that others do. I concede also that the excitement extends to the audience. Though we don’t watch Dawson’s Creek with 8 million others in the room, our private enjoyment might be enhanced or even conditioned by the knowledge of so much company---if, that is, we lack what the shrinks call inner direction. I only ask that people who require so much company in their pleasures recognize this about themselves. It is a weakness, nothing to be proud of.
“I want whatever everyone wants.”
You didn’t say that. But you might as well have.
I forgot to comment on those poor poets who suffer, Joseph would have it, from a “lack of influence on society.”
It breaks my heart when graduate students in the humanities start admiring power and influence, and shunning the powerless and uninfluential. If power and influence are what you cherish, Joseph, you are REALLY in the wrong field.
An exceedingly odd defense of TV! I mean: precisely what about that dynamic makes TV more rather than less appealing to you?
Nothing; I was just stating a fact.
Of all the cliches you might have used, COMMAND seems especially ill-chosen. You don’t command a wide audience when you write for TV. They command you.
And exciting?
It’s not a cliché to “command a wide audience” any more than it is a cliché to “swim in a lake.”
It’s exciting for the author who aspires to write for TV. If it wasn’t, what would motivate them? There’s better money elsewhere, etc.
Small audiences can be just as dictatorial as large ones. Ask anybody who’s been cursed with a “cult following.” But yes, interaction with the audience is part of making art; you might just as well pout and fume about the fact that people take each other’s feelings and desires into account when considering what to say in private conversations.
Joyce wanted to be famous, and so have many (if not most) writers.
I forgot to comment on those poor poets who suffer, Joseph would have it, from a “lack of influence on society.”
It breaks my heart when graduate students in the humanities start admiring power and influence, and shunning the powerless and uninfluential.
Yeah, I’m really “shunning” poetry by writing dissertation chapters on it. I love how you try to set yourself up as the heartbroken champion of the “powerless and uninfluential” after making it perfectly clear how much you despise the “lowest common denominator.”
But again, I was stating a fact. If you want to claim that John Ashbery or Adrienne Rich had the same cultural impact as Pope, Milton, Dante, or Wordsworth, be my guest.
"Though we don’t watch Dawson’s Creek with 8 million others in the room, our private enjoyment might be enhanced or even conditioned by the knowledge of so much company”
Tom, in another thread here, you expressed amazement that Moby Dick wasn’t people’s first choice as a book for a particular purpose. That assumes that most of the people reading the thread had read that book—which seems to me to be a correct assumption. But what if you couldn’t make it?
Of course people enjoy, to some extent, experiencing popular works. It gives them something to talk about with other people.
Joseph,
You and I mean different things by “cultural impact.” I thought we had gone over this. You mean something that can be tallied in man-hours. I don’t think that sort of “impact” should be of more than passing interest to literary scholars.
But this is repetition. You have a talent for forgetting what we were arguing about.
I can add this: you are dead wrong about TV writers. They do it for the money, and a lot of money at that. Writers on network staffs earn from $200,000-$2,000,000 a year. No, they could not get that from writing novels, or (at the high end) even from making partner in an LA law firm. It is not my private anecdote but a commonplace of Hollywood that nearly all TV writers are eager to “make the jump” into movie screenwriting. Why? More freedom, more opportunity for personal expression, albeit not very much.
Rich,
You claim that the appeal of popular art is that it gives us common ground for discussion. I don’t think it’s that simple. Many people are impressed by numbers in such a way that it affects their enthusiasm. I think that lit grad students, with their pronounced fears of illegitimacy, are if anything more susceptible than the general reader, who may simply lack cultivation and/or exposure to better art.
"You claim that the appeal of popular art is that it gives us common ground for discussion. I don’t think it’s that simple.”
Further: the very appeal, and strength, of “popular art” is that it *isn’t* Art… “popular art” (versus popularized ART; different argument) is craft, with the chief goal being entertainment. Entertainment that forces us to think too long and hard *fails as entertainment* (I know because I earn a good living producing populist art; I read/write ART-inflected literature without a care for trends/charts/commerce; that is the pleasantly divided existence I speak from. My royalty cheques would dwindle to a trickle if I forgot the division). Polishing cliche to a fierce gleam is the gold standard of popular art; subverting or inverting cliche is a distinguishing feature of ART. Two very different goals with very different potential rewards.
The nutty eddies of Moebius logic this argument keeps getting sucked into very simply derives from the modern academic’s phobic animus towards the term “elitism”... towards its perceived presence as much as towards the terrifying possibility of being labelled “elistist” one’s self. But I think it’s more “elitist” to think that the hypothetical hoi polloi need protection from an intellectual cult of excellence, rather than expecting that the hoi polloi are just as likely to appreciate (or produce) Fine Art as their soi-disant Betters (or Sensibility Protectors), given the chance (or afforded this expectation). Elitism is not so much about “what”; it’s about “who” the “what” is excluded from (or restricted to).
Anyone who can’t perceive the deliberate (from both “sides") difference in complexity of allusion, metaphor, tone (and so forth) between even the best mass-media product (ie, engineered by committee and meant to appeal to metropolis-sized demographics) and the finely-wrought literary artifact (answering to its own weird metrics and *aimed* at the micro-minority of the literary within the literate) is either being A) disingenuous for the sake of argument, B) poorly educated or C) maneuvering for a good old fashioned PC BJ.
Well, we know it can’t be B).
Steve, it’s that complexity of allusion, metaphor, and tone are worthless contrivances for people who don’t have anything better to do with their time.
You and I mean different things by “cultural impact.” I thought we had gone over this. You mean something that can be tallied in man-hours. I don’t think that sort of “impact” should be of more than passing interest to literary scholars.
But this is repetition. You have a talent for forgetting what we were arguing about.
Tom, what is this, your own staging of some imaginary presidential debate? Are you going to call me a “flip-flopper” next? You have a talent for keeping to your fixed ideas, regardless of how I respond. I already wrote upthread:
Well, considering the critical overlaps between sociology and various disciplines in the humanities, that somebody should be doing this work is unsurprising and good. But it’s not my reason for thinking that television is a legitimate medium for art.
Then you tell Rich:
Many people are impressed by numbers in such a way that it affects their enthusiasm.
Yes; for example, snobs find that they lose enthusiasm for works of art the instant those works becomes popular. I’m sure that you, though, are floating comfortably in the empyrean, far above and beyond such influences.
Steven,
Polishing cliche to a fierce gleam is the gold standard of popular art; subverting or inverting cliche is a distinguishing feature of ART. Two very different goals with very different potential rewards.
Sadly, no. The goal of art is to reflect, in some profound way, the human condition. The tiny subgenre having to do with cliché is television all over; for example, the popular television show Buffy The Vampire Slayer and the film Scream ran themselves ragged subverting and inverting.
Not all writers, in any age, consider themselves to be writing for a “micro-minority” of the literate. The best we can do is forgive the ones who do think that way, if their writing earns our forgiveness.
"The goal of art is to reflect, in some profound way, the human condition.”
The definitive middlebrow battle cry (or put down), in my book, Joseph. If you can think of a human experience or creation that *doesn’t* “reflect, in some profound way, the human condition”, let me know. Until then, that’s a very poor definition of Art.
Steven,
Sure: Armageddon, neither reflective (in the sense of thoughtful) nor profound. It mirrors what is happening in the culture, but it doesn’t make sense of it.
A fairly (and not surprisingly, at this point in the discussion) surface-restricted reading, Joseph. It’s as “profound” a reflection of the human experience as a swimming lesson or an old shoe or a walk alone in the dark, depending on how much reflecting you’re prepared to do on the respective subjects.
Steven, give us a break. What you’re saying doesn’t even make sense. Reflecting at length on a crappy movie or an old shoe is irrelevant to the question of whether those things, in themselves, are insightful. A shoe is not “reflecting on the human condition,” regardless of who’s looking at the shoe and thinking about it. Van Gogh’s painting of a shoe, on the other hand, is reflective in this sense.
"Steven, give us a break. What you’re saying doesn’t even make sense.”
Really, Joseph. A TV-trained addiction/restriction to surfaces is shining through your comments. A think an ordinary old shoe is actually quite profound; maybe I’ve been reading too much literary fiction, dealing in abstractions with no commercial import...?
Really, Joseph. A TV-trained addiction/restriction to surfaces is shining through your comments. A think an ordinary old shoe is actually quite profound; maybe I’ve been reading too much literary fiction, dealing in abstractions with no commercial import...?
This has become an incredibly silly conversation. If, in your mind, a certain shoe is profound because it’s a human creation (i.e. fashion), I’m fine with that.
Ad hominem speculation is unwelcome on my threads. Please be advised that we moderate all comments, and if any more of this tiresome nonsense about my TV-addicted mind or what-have-you comes up, I’ll just delete the whole comment and seriously consider banning the commenter entirely from responding to my posts.
Delete and ban as you see fit, Joseph. Nothing’s riding on this.
I see an old shoe as an old shoe. But stick it on a pedestal in a museum of modern art. ... Actually, I would still see it as an old shoe, a fact that greatly annoys many of my friends. Duchamp always makes me want to take a leak. ...
When I see a leaf of grass sticking up over the rest of my manicured lawn, I don’t see eternity, I see a sloppy lawnmowing job.
When I see IKB 79, I see red.
When friends admire a sunset, I say, “It’s a journeyman work. But add a touch more violet. ...”
Just a bit of levity in a serious/silly thread. ...
Trent, Joseph:
All perceived Ad Hominems aside: is the mere fact that you don’t get a particular point enough to prove that the particular point is “silly”?
And yes, Trent: I *am* curious if “strange” or non-representational Art makes the grade as ART, given Joseph’s (and your?) apparently very down-to-earth paradigm.
Because where does that leave Rothko or Pollock if the “goal of art is to reflect, in some profound way, the human condition” and their resp. work is even more abstract than the poor old shoe?
Steven,
Perhaps when I talk about “thinking” it may seem as though what I mean are propositions, rather than (for example) a felt experience. I don’t mean that at all: a Rothko or a Pollock projects all kinds of values and impressions of life by engineering a particular experience for the viewer.
I really do take a shoe to be art—to say something, in the best cases, about what it means to be human. When I first responded, since you comparing a shoe to a solitary walk in the dark, I thought you were referring to it as an iteration of any object, anything at all. A human can experience an island of barking seals profoundly, but the nature of the experience is categorically different from an encounter with a Pollock painting.
Trent,
You may already know Oscar Wilde’s “Decay of Lying,” but on the off chance you don’t—you’d love it.
In any case: Joseph, I wasn’t trying to pick a fight. And I can’t see how my perceived Ad Hominem was stronger than several you’ve dispensed in this (or other) thread(s). But I apologize if it hit you too hard and I am more than ready to be at fault here.
My original point is that given the fact that anything from/in Life can be a focal point for a *profound* meditation on the human condition, the statement the “the goal of art is to reflect, in some profound way, the human condition” doesn’t establish a distinguishing condition for ART.
That old shoe, for example, is as good a symbol as any for mortality, poverty, vanity, hard work, time, memory…
... the crap film “Armageddon” as good a springboard as any for a study (not as “art” but as a communal effort or artifact of capitalism) of racial paranoia or corporate venality or millenneal fantasia and so forth.
The only way I can *distinguish* ART from the cited examples is on aesthetic grounds (as an intellectual pleasure of a certain intensity), not as a reflection of the human condition.
And that’s how I distinguish the experience of reading Literary Fiction from the experience of watching TV.
Steven,
I’m absolutely certain we discussed this elsewhere, but in brief: what you get out of Armageddon is what you bring to it. It won’t change your ideas, except insofar as it might alter your opinion about our culture (I don’t mean for better or worse—I mean about its obsessions, predispositions, etc). A conversation with a customer service representative might be interesting to analyze, but I hold a conversation with a perceptive friend to be more valuable, precisely because it pushes me past my own limitations. Likewise with art. The pleasure in it is its ability to provoke and evoke.
I’m reminded of an old chestnut: a first class soup is better than a second class painting. Some Coleridge is better than *Desparate Housewives*. Most Coleridge simply wants to be better than *Desparate Housewives*.
To do what you want to do with style and grace: that’s art. I’ve seen girls who can walk better than most Literary Fiction Writers can write. Hips are pure music, and all art aspires to the condition of music.
Steve,
Honestly, I was just joking. I really don’t like the IKB series, but I do like lots of other modern(ist) art. I have a print of “Yellow—Red—Blue” on my wall now.
I have no idea how to define art. “Aesthetic experience,” “human condition”—both determiners leave me a bit cold. The appreciations I have for, say, The Symposium, Othello, Jude the Obscure, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” strike me as very different. The first work astonishes and excites me by how the theme of love is developed through speeches, through the frame, and through the dialogue occurring after Alcibiades’ drunken arrival at the party. The second gives me a perverse delight in watching the machinations of Iago’s subtle mind. The third inspires a very visceral emotional reaction partially caused by identification—plus I have a serious crush on Sue Bridehead. The fourth is a neat mind game combined with delicious lyricism. I suppose all involve the “human condition,” but what about abstract patterns? Some of them, particularly if done by a famous artist, we don’t hesitate to call art. And calling my experiences aesthetic just seems to imply they are all of the same type. So I don’t know. I used to employ the language and taxonomy of the sublime to capture the essence of whatever lies beneath the various experiences I have when encountering art, but I’m not so sure about that, either—for one thing, it makes little distinction between manmade and natural objects or, for that matter, states produced by various situations.
Steve, you talk about aesthetic pleasure as an intellectual pleasure of a certain intensity. I know what you mean, and I assume that most of us here have those experiences. But many works succeed through emotional intensity—Jude is a good example. Kandinsky talks about using color in musical/emotional terms. Music—even the finest classical music stirs the emotions; intellectual appreciation is posterior, at least for me, a non-musician.
For now, I’m content that most of us can agree on what is or isn’t art (or good art), and I think it’s not too big a stretch to say that good art can be produced in any medium. I haven’t seen an episode of Mad Men until last night—the damn show gave me the chills. There is something very interesting going on beneath the surface blandness. Is it art? Why not?
. . . even the finest classical music stirs the emotions. . .
Such a very odd phrase, “even the finest,” as though escape from emotion is desired, but not possible.
Bill, yes, an odd phrase. It’s a slip. Too bad we can’t edit comments.
"snobs find that they lose enthusiasm for works of art the instant those works becomes popular” J. KUGELMASS
Joseph,
My beloved Proust has sold millions of copies. So has James Joyce. So has Nabokov. All three continue to sell quite well, even in the USA. They are all VERY popular artists, if not quite as popular as your favorite TV shows. I almost hesitate to tell you this, because I would hate for you to give Proust a special gold medal for “cultural impact.”
It’s partly because so many great works of art have been, and continue to be, popular, that he interest of literary scholars in bad art seems so gratutious. You would think a million copies of a book sold would be enough to earn it democratic cred, but no: certain professors and graduate students will continue to feel lonely and bereft unless they can join an audience of twenty-five million.
Where does it end, Joseph? In a global economy you could argue that a TV show with MERELY 25 million viewers lacks cultural impact. Only Bollywood films should be studied, and the Bible, and Mao’s Little Red Book.
In a global economy you could argue that a TV show with MERELY 25 million viewers lacks cultural impact. Only Bollywood films should be studied, and the Bible, and Mao’s Little Red Book.
Tom: No, but someone who snidely insisted that Bollywood films—or Mao or the Bible, for that matter—should not be studied, and that we all have much better things to do with our minds and brains, would be a pretty ridiculous figure.