Sarah Writes

under the influence

Way back in 2005, Design Observer had an interesting discussion that began with a post by Pentagram designer Michael Beirut.  He'd been interviewing a recent design school grad and

[the] best piece in her portfolio was a packaging program for an imaginary CD release: packaging, advertising, posters.  All of it was Futura Bold Italic, knocked out in white in bright red bands, set on top of black and white halftones. Naturally, it looked great.  Naturally, I asked, "So, why were you going for a Barbara Kruger kind of thing here?"

And she said: "Who's Barbara Kruger?"

Okay, let's begin.  My first response: "Um, Barbara Kruger is an artist who is...um, pretty well known for doing work that...well, looks exactly like this."

"Really? I've never heard of her."

Beyond the obvious questions of plagiarism, this discussion highlights questions about working in artistic traditions.  To what extent can or should a work be appreciated or judged solely on its own terms, in the sort of "close reading" advocated by The New Criticism of the '50s-60s?  To what extent is any work an answer to previous works by previous artists, musicians, or writers?  How might this vary across different media, or in the same media at different times? What if the reader/viewer/listener brings a different knowledge of the medium than the person who created the work in question?

Somewhere in American Fictions, just where escapes me right now, Elizabeth Hardwick wrote that traditional novels were no longer possible to write - this was in the 1970s - because the consequences of violating societal strictures no longer had force.  There could be no Tess of the D'Urbervilles in the era of free love. Conversely,

A novel such as Pynchon's V is unthinkable except as the composition of an American saturated in the 1950s and '60s.

With all the contention of critics and creators, it's remarkable how much we (meaning those who decide what's published/issued/shown and those who quite literally buy it or don't) actually agree on the artistic sensibilities of our times - not on what's good or bad, but on the kind of work that can be done now.  (Some might bemoan this; I might not disagree).

To return to Michael Beirut's design grad, it usually takes some time semi-consciously aping other people's version of what can be done now to internalize the medium and the moment enough to see what both have yet to be.  And no medium is static, so even if you get the zeitgeist, there's always catching up to do.

new neko case

At least, new to me.  Recorded at the State Theater, Ithaca NY, 26 January 2008.  The YouTube video has embedding disabled, so here's the link.

is that your axiom showing?

Increasingly over the past few years, some on the right have said that the problem with the Bush Administration and its apologists is that they aren't truly conservative.  The Bush tax cuts have not been accompanied by sufficient cuts in entitlement spending or reductions in the handouts  inflating legislation such as this year’s agriculture bill (which McCain, for what it's worth and to his credit, said he'd veto if president).  In this view, the solution to the GOP’s and the nation’s difficulties is not a Democratically led repudiation of Bush policies, but a return to rigorously Reaganite principles.

Whether John McCain is or wants to be such a true conservative is being hotly debated.  (And, what 'true conservative' or 'true liberal' entails are moving targets, identified as much by any given policy or belief's opponents as by its proponents).

In practice, in any organization, public or private, who you're on good terms with, who thinks that so-and-so is a good egg, and the competence of whoever comes to mind when you need someone to fill that vacancy in such-and-such department determine as much as ideology does, and there's often little space left between those influences for empirical data, and little patience for it, either.  And, that said, there are always startlingly smart, hardworking people attending to their business while prevailing opinions blow over.

It's safe to say that either a McCain or Obama presidency will result in some sharp turns.  Goodness knows we need some, but I hope greater respect than usual is accorded to the impact of unintended consequences.  Be not overly attached to ideas, both the ones that are only as good as the data and observations that went into them, and particularly the ones to which data seems irrelevant, or seems to neatly fit without re-evaluation.  We’ve ridden off too many cliffs on someone’s hobbyhorse.  Being certain doesn’t make one correct, and too many concepts define political positions without the concepts themselves being dissected.  “Pro-business,” "ecologically friendly,” “strong foreign policy…” such terms short-circuit discussion instead of enriching it.  Societies prosper by ideas freely exchanged, not by axioms.

I'm reminded of one of Hemingway's incantatory digressions in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro":

That was one of the things he had saved to write, with, in the morning at breakfast, looking out the window and seeing snow on the mountains in Bulgaria and Nansen's Secretary asking the old man if it were snow and the old man looking at it and saying, No, that's not snow.  It's too early for snow.  And the Secretary repeating to the other girls, No, you see.  It's not snow and them all saying, It's not snow we were mistaken.  But it was the snow all right and he sent them on into it when he evolved exchange of populations.  And it was snow they tramped along in until they died that winter.

The way the cadences build and the words repeat, circling one another, makes the official-sounding language of "when he evolved exchange of populations" all the more of a full-stop.  (The colloquial, somewhat masculine "all right" also serves as a brake on the run-on sentence preceding it, and its change in tone from a British-inflected neutrality to an American casualness underscores the implied reproof).  It can be read as a brilliant little object lesson against the disjunction between evidence and theory, left or right, however well evolved.

then i came to the end

William Hazlitt wrote that Samuel Taylor Coleridge always contrived to prefer authors and works that were the least well known.  I don't have the time to be so ostentatious, even if I wanted to.  It seems that I'm forever catching up on last year's New York Times' top 10 fiction recommendations or (re)discovering authors in the NYRB.

I just finished last year's much-lauded Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris.  Frequently funny, frequently moving, it made waves among Lit Worthies as much for its (mostly) first-person plural narration as for its wit.  Maybe the POV choice is a trick, but it's a good one that mostly works brilliantly, allowing simple observations to become mordant, deadpan, laugh-out-loud funny.  It wonderfully evokes the ridiculous ecstasy, borne out of relief, at belonging to the office fraternity/sorority: the illusion of having the same hopes and frustrations and exactly the same notions as the people you share far too many hours of the day but really very little in the way of eventual ambition with.  The ending, at an office reunion a few years later, is nearly perfect in its understated coast to a final hint of poignancy.

However, the first-person plural makes it sufficiently difficult to know who we're supposed to riding along with that the plot threads - and there are many - began to feel like exercises to pad out the time until the Major Sh** (as Ferris' characters might say) goes down.  And once it does, there's an "okay, time to go" sense about the way in which the main action is neatly resolved by the agency where the book is set going out of business.  Yes, it's 'organic,' arising from seeds Ferris plants early and that correspond to real events, but it's too orchestrated, too deus ex machina.  Impersonal market forces lack a certain dramatic force, at least as they're dealt with here, yet Ferris needs them.  The Major Sh** isn't enough to usher the characters off the stage, but with the plural POV he can't let subordinate characters wander off the stage; in this ensemble - and this seems part of the point - no-one is simply subordinate.

I think, with the distance at which the POV keeps us, the book is about a hundred pages too long.  (And I don't think I'm a particularly ADD reader: Gravity's Rainbow and Moby Dick were among my favorite novels in college and not because it was cool (in a lit geek way).)

That said, if you were in your twenties in the web 1.0 era, or, really if you've ever worked in any corporate office, there will be a lot of points in the novel that will leave you nodding, "yes - that's how it is," and glad that Ferris has put it the way he has.  And if you've been lucky enough to avoid corporate offices - well, this is how it is.

who ya gonna believe, me or your lyin' eyes?

Following conservative Democrat Travis Childers' victory in the Mississippi special election Tuesday, the Times reported on much consternation among Republicans in expectation of the fall.  Said Representative Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee at a private meeting on Wednesday:

"We need to, No. 1, prove that we are listening to the American people, and, No. 2, show that we have a plan of action to respond to what they are telling us."

Not have a plan of action, but show that they have a plan of action.  Not listen, but prove that they're listening: see here, American people; we're listening.

Picky?  Of course (you were expecting maybe something else?)  But sometimes spin is preferable to any actual plan that might be proposed.  As The New Yorker says, (via Paul Krugman's blog):

i was laughing until I stopped

Hillary Clinton's declaration that “I’m staying in this race until there is a nominee” is about as inspiring as her chance, at this point, of being that nominee.  But as much as it sounds like doubletalk, it is literally true.  As soon as she leaves the race, there will be a nominee.

better late to the party than never

Some clicks ago, never mind how many, I found myself looking at the odds and ends of literary blog posts...

...and happened to find Authors @ Google, which has been going merrily along for two years plus, and so by now has a delectable selection of readings and Q & A sessions at YouTube.  So far my favorites are the ones by Aimee Bender, Jim Shepard, Simon Schama, and the one below, by Jane Smiley (the series also includes all 3 presidential candidates and lots of political commentators, as well fiction writers).

Of the four I cited, I'm embedding Jane's because, on the surface, the selection she reads goes so much against what I've been trying to do in my own fiction.  One of the achievements that has delighted me most has been getting the knack of going in and out of dialog: giving just enough of characters' words so they come alive, but knowing when and how to pull out into summary before the scene bogs down.  It lets one skip around in time and conjure up the complexity of experience and memory without hitting the reader over the head, and with the compressed space of a short story it's a particularly useful technique.  But the excerpt below, from Ten Days in the Hills, is all about what we get bogged down in, and it's gloriously, digressively funny.

here he comes, here comes speed racer

We love The New Yorker's Anthony Lane.  His wit in demolishing the films he reviews is often the best thing about them, but part of what makes his sarcasm so good, and more than funny, is that it's motivated by serious aesthetic and moral standards, which it buffers from becoming didactic.  This week, in reviewing Speed Racer, he's quite plain:

There’s something about the ululating crowds who line the action in color-coördinated rows; the desperate skirting of ordinary feelings in favor of the trumped-up variety; the confidence in technology as a spectacle in itself; and, above all, the sense of master manipulators posing as champions of the little people.  What does that remind you of?  You could call it entertainment, and use it to wow your children for a couple of hours.  To me, it felt like Pop fascism, and I would keep them well away.

Unfortunately, the same could be said of much of what is sold as children's entertainment.  Not that everything should be all instructional, all the time, but the original Speed Racer belongs with Thunderbirds and The Banana Splits: best when parodied by/for gen-x-ers, as in this early '90s gem.  The vocals are lifted from the show and remixed by Alpha Team (not, as this YouTube video is labeled, Aphex Twin).

beware the jargonwonk

Last week the email newsletter that arrives every Wednesday from WNYC invited me to tune in and log on to their new morning news show, "The Takeaway."  “It’s America at the breakfast table,” the email said (so, that would be America groggy, grumpy, rushed and incoherent?).

The show draws on the BBC and The New York Times, a respectable pedigree.  (The Times’ inaugural commentary and review of "The Takeaway" notes some understandable roughness to the early broadcasts).

Early missteps can be forgiven and improved upon.  But I wish the show's producers had chosen a name that didn’t spring from corporate jargon. (Do its BBC contributors chuckle, thinking of ‘takeaway’s’ British connotations of fish ‘n’ chips, Tandoori chicken and other favorites from what we Yanks call take in/out?).

In the show's context, ‘takeaway’ is middlebrow for ‘news you can use,’ a 21st Century updating of ‘all the news that’s fit to print,’ sans Victorian tongue clucking.  Appropriately, given the concern for finding a format that will appeal to those web-savvy youngsters, ‘takeaway’ denotes more interest in the impression events make on listeners than in events themselves.

'Takeaway,' in its corporate native environment, is a word Suit #1 might use to introduce his or her Cliff's Notes version of a meeting that Suit #2 has missed: "My takeaway is that Bob wants to see more focus on product development."  Suit #2 didn't need to attend the three-hour meeting; all he or she needs is Suit #1's takeaway.  It's the quick version of a story, with what to think about it provided.  As Nancy Franklin wrote concerning "This American Life" in The New Yorker:

...no wonder my head is exploding—meaning is being forced into it. When it comes to meaning, I prefer to grow my own...

"The Takeaway’s" producers would no doubt rejoin by citing their invitation to log on and participate, but, like Franklin, I prefer to come up with my own ‘takeaway’ - from news undiluted by the comments of listeners who likely as not are as little qualified to speak on most subjects as I am; news broken by reporters following leads that may lead nowhere, withholding opinion, vetting facts, consulting multiple sources, consulting experts to make sense of statistics... that is to say, good old-fashioned, gritty, shoe-leather wearin' out reporting.

WNYC, of course, knows this - witness their generally superb "Brian Lehrer Show," local news, and magazines such as "On the Media" and  "Radiolab".  Using "takeaway" as a title has the whiff of trying to catch a trend, hoping to sum up something that's happening too quickly and generally to be fully discerned.  Professional journalists have every reason to be freaked out by blogs, by the prospects for newspapers' revenue models, and the incipient obsolescence of terrestrial radio, but as generally atrocious as our punditocracy has been, are we the pundits we’ve been waiting for?  Maybe we don’t need more amateurs, just better professionals.  How to make that economically sustainable, now there's a question.  But web comment threads and user input, far from answering Rodney King’s “can’t we all just get along” with a resounding yes, we can, all too often turn into a 'national conversation' for us to poop on.

a moment out for eight belles

With all the money and attention – and love - that goes into raising and training thoroughbreds, how dreadful that to this day the best we can do when a horse’s legs can’t support her weight is to euthanize her.

I follow horse racing so little that articles in the wake of Eight Belle’s death in Saturday's Kentucky Derby are the first I’ve heard of the push for synthetic racing surfaces and their reported safety advantage: 1.47 deaths per thousand starts versus 2.03 for dirt tracks.

Jane Smiley, who knows more than I do about horses and about this particular horse (and about writing), blames the dirt track and a temperament fatally ill-suited to Eight Belles' challenge in the race:

she was more resolute and competitive than was good for her.... When Eight Belles decided she wasn’t going to give up, she risked herself more than she would have [against] a lesser horse [than Big Brown].

Does learning any of this diminish the iconic horror of a public death?  (Yes, it's one horse, and horses die in races every year, and people are always dying and perhaps ideally the resources that go into sports should go to education and health care.)  The feminist in me joins with sympathy for a fellow creature and sees a promising filly pushed into too difficult a test, beating all the colts but one, and getting euthanized for her effort.  The reader of Greek and Shakespearean tragedies understands what Jane writes, that Eight Belles' death was "heroic":

stubborn and foolish, shocking and tragic, but not, in the end, an accident. I think the filly’s courage deserves respect, not pity.

Still, for all that almost any animal's death is sad, I wonder if I would have been so wrenched had Eight Belles not been a filly.

i second that emotion

Says Keith Gessen of All the Sad Young Literary Men, n+1, and this Times profile:

“The idea that you should not write about educated people in big cities.[...] That idea is crazy to me.”