The Compass Rose

Anecdote #11526G

2012-02-01T05:02:00.000-08:00

Then there was the story—apocryphal but supposedly true—of the British poet who’d had a fetish for nylon panties during the 1960’s, and later had published a limited edition of a book of his poems, each bound in a pair of the purloined lingerie of past conquests. This was the era, remember, of Peter Max and Milton Glaser, of the Flower Generation and the Psychedelic Age.

Janacek's 1.X.1905 Piano Sonata

2012-01-30T06:52:00.001-08:00

Leos Janáček

One of my favorite keyboard works is the opus 1.X.1905 1 Piano Sonata, by LeosJanáček[1854-1928]. Janacek was a Czech, better known perhaps for his operatic works, which established his fame later in his life. The 1905 Sonata is a stirring work, by turns stridently militant and suavely lyrical. It's impossible not to hear an undercurrent of longing, resignation and remorse. It's been interpreted as a reaction to the death of a young Czech during a university demonstration in 1905, so presumably it has a clear political context. Janáček'smajor piano works were written during a time of political and emotional strife. It was a decade filled with political suppression, multiple deaths, and a search for artistic validation. Sonata 1. X. 1905 is a musical representation of Janacek's staunch political views, connoting his frustrations as a provincial composer.

Usually, works inspired by political feeling fail aesthetically, since they're formally compromised by the desire to summon martial sentiments or simplistic partisan pretexts. National anthems or fighting songs may be inspiring to those who subscribe to the intended, preferred sentimental purpose. But serious classical works based on national or folk causes may fair better. Beethoven, or (especially) Chopin come to mind. In central or northern Europe there are the examples of Bartok, Kodaly, and Smetana.

The precise meaning to be assigned to any moving piece of "pure music" is difficult to establish conclusively. Many of the pieces written by Russian composers during the Soviet Era have ambiguous significance--either because they are felt to be superfluous to their initial impetus--or because they may be trivialized by the association. Prokofiev and Shostakovich both suffered at the alter of political correctness.

Janáček intended this composition to be a tribute to a worker named František Pavlík (1885–1905), who, on the date indicated by the title (1 October 1905), had been bayoneted during demonstrations calling for support for a Czech university in Brno. In the work, Janáček expresses his disapproval with the violent death of the young carpenter. He started to compose it immediately after the incident occurred and finished its composition in January 1906. The première took place on 27 January 1906 in Brno (Friends of the Arts Club), with Ludmila Tučková at the piano. Janáček also wrote a third movement, a funeral march, which he cut out and burned shortly before the first public performance of the piece in 1906.

Janáček was not satisfied with the rest of the composition either and later tossed out the manuscript of the two remaining movements into the river Vltava. He later commented with regret about his impulsive action: "And it floated along on the water that day, like white swans"--certainly a mournfully romantic image!

The composition remained lost until 1924 (the year of Janáček’s seventieth birthday), when Tučková announced that she owned a copy. The renewed premiere took place on 23 November 1924 in Prague, under the title 1. X. 1905. Janáček later accompanied the work with the following inscription: "The white marble of the steps of the Besední dům in Brno. The ordinary labourer František Pavlík falls, stained with blood. He came merely to champion higher learning and has been slain by cruel murderers." The first authorized printed edition of the work was published in 1924 by the Hudební matice in Prague. The Dutch composer Theo Verbey made an orchestral version of 1.X.1905, which received its premiere on 9 May 2008 in Utrecht, the Netherlands, with the Dutch Radio Filharmonisch Orkest.

The two movements of the sonata are Foreboding (con moto), and Death (adagio). 2 The first movement is filled with halting, staccato gestures which have a kind of adolescent, indignant passion about them, with an intermittent sostenuto figure going in the left hand, the theme emerging over and over in the right. The second movement is exquisitely lyrical, continuing the passionate figure of the first, but with meditative pauses and rhetorical questionings. As thematic material, it could as easily have served as a love song--which raises the issue of programmatic material versus "pure" musical content. Clearly, there are certain kinds of music which could not be easily mistaken for a "wrong" underlying meaning. A sprightly dance by Grieg could never be taken as a funeral march for a fallen comrade. But in the political context, there is usually an ambiguity.

1.X.1905 is definitely a young man's music (albeit when the composer was in his forties), filled with over-arching conviction and a fatal longing. But how do we splice the meanings inherent in the music? The fervency we associate with nativist or revolutionary political inspiration could as well stand for the intensity of immature sexual passion. When I was 19, I was as ready to be swept up in an all-encompassing cause as I was likely to be seduced by an attractive mate. These kinds of feelings are common to youth. The purposes to which such feelings may be put may be more about opportunity than clear distinction. Young revolutionaries may be coldly rational, or passionately affectionate. But Janáček's Sonata is about his indignation and protest for an innocent, not a soldier or a fully committed partisan.

And then there's the romantic acting-out of his depressive act to destroy the work, only to have it resurface a decade later. We love these kinds of romantic gestures, later imperiously rejected, but then saved from oblivion by fickle fate. The Sonata has a spontaneous quality which, for me, transcends questions about its ultimate instigation. Music like this may suggest many kinds of emotion--but it's the quality of the feeling, as Pound said, which is most convincing. We were all young once, subject to intensities of commitment, sudden shifts of engagement. In later age, our early convictions may be tempered, but the memory of those early passions doesn't evaporate. The desire to experience romantic longing may be as genuine and authentic as the longing itself. The Romantics are often accused of being in love with remorse and impossible commitments, since these facilitated the fashionable mournfulness they loved. Perhaps Janáček's initial despondency to reject the work has a symbolic theatricality about it. Nevertheless, it rings true--it's all in the quality of the work itself. For those susceptible to its charm, this will always be a sufficient pretext to appreciation.

________________

1. Performance, on YouTube, of the first movement ("From the Street").

2. Performance, on YouTube, of the second movement ("Death").

White Sands

2012-01-25T09:45:00.000-08:00

White Sands (1988) [8x10 Platinum-Palladium Print]

White Sands, New Mexico has been a pilgrimage destination for serious photographers for nearly a century. Brett Weston traveled there after leaving the service in the late 1940's, and created a portfolio which is among the wonders of post-war image-making. I first went there myself to photograph in the late 1980's, lugging my 8x10 Deardorff around the sandy bluffs. (The photograph above is one I made during my first visit, which I later contact printed in platinum-palladium emulsion.) White Sands is now a National Monument, and is run according to strict rules. Unfortunately, the park opens well after sunrise, and closes before sundown, making serious art photography difficult, since the best shots are only possible when the light is horizontal, creating shadows on the mercilessly white sheet of sand, which at midday provides almost no variation of tones. Nevertheless, it's still possible to make interesting compositions out of the desert flora, which hugs the slopes and depressions. This desert foliage is less common in other dune sites of the West, which is one of its attractions.

In the 1940's and 1950's, when Brett Weston was active there, I doubt he had to deal with any of these nuisances. The biggest problem then would have been the risks involved in wandering alone in the outback, since there would have been no one to rely on in the event of an accident or unexpected injury, unless one were accompanied. As civilization has spread relentlessly across the globe, many of the nicer places to photograph have become dearer, and harder to access. Brett made amazing compositions, as these samples attest:

Weston preferred very large format in those days, as I did when I first took up landscape photography seriously in 1985.

This could be me, in 1988, though of course it's Brett Weston, almost certainly somewhere among sand dunes--though this shot might have been taken in any of several sandy places.

Sand is a poetic substance, constantly shifting, sensual, restless, sleek. Our desire to capture its changing moods feels primordial. Before the advent of cameras, did people appreciate the dreamy abstractions created by the unidirectional light playing across the graceful slopes, the ribs and waves, contrary patterns of sand dunes? Or did they seem barren, meaningless humps of lifeless matter, whose consistency and fragile formations held no key to the purposes of life or the ulterior codes of universal meaning? We shall never know, since there are no recorded instances--at least that I am aware of--which document humankind's aesthetic regard for the shifting sands. The sands of time is a stale old chestnut, but like many such phrases, it carries a grain of truth. A grain of sand on the shore of time. Count their number, like unto the stars of heaven.

The One That Got Away - Elusive New Cocktail

2012-01-20T09:04:00.000-08:00

Have you ever tried to catch a rabbit? Darned hard, I'll say. They're not only extremely fast, but they move unpredictably from one direction to another, which makes them doubly elusive. That's a survival technique, honed into them over hundreds of thousands of years of running from predators.

Their other strategy, of course, is to rapidly reproduce. It's the old joke, rabbits copulating and filling up their ecological niche with despatch. Cute little buggers, and vegetarians too. But they can quickly get out of hand. And, as Mr. McGregor knew, a danger to your garden. Peter liked that lettuce and those juicy carrots!

The one that got away is every person's dream of the perfect match. When two people meet in the course of life, they may have a momentary recognition of possibility, but be distracted or pulled apart by forces that seem inevitable. Later, years later, they may shake their heads ruefully, imagining what might have been. Who you stay, or hook up, with goes a long way towards determining the kind of life you will have. Some people marry several times, or go through a series of dead-end, wrong-turn, relationships. I've been married for over 40 years, and have no regrets. But I've never caught a rabbit, or even a greased pig. Some things remain stubbornly elusive.

Here's a cocktail with a lovely elusive flavor--elusive because if you didn't know what was in it, you would never guess the ingredients. Which is a fun game--trying to guess what may be in a drink, if you don't know beforehand. Those taste-buds can be very unreliable reporters of flavor. Flavor, as I've remarked before here, is a very subtle sense. We know the usual individual segments--salt, sweet, bitter, sourness--with the addition, perhaps, of savoriness and piquancy. But enough of theory. Try this one on yourself, and then on a friend. But don't tell them what's in it. Make them guess. It's tantalizingly seductive.

The mixture, as always, by proportion--

4 parts Boodles gin

2 parts cocktail grapefruit

1 part maraschino liqueur

1 part créme de bananae

Shaken gently and served up in a chilled cocktail glass.

That tantalus!

Dismantling Romney

2012-01-20T06:40:00.000-08:00

The field of Republican hopefuls this cycle appears among the very worst in history. Mitt Romney, who failed in a nomination bid in 2008, this time looks like the odds-on bet to win the race to the ticket. The story this time has been the reluctance with which Republican party members have regarded him, thinking perhaps that his "moderate" stance on certain issues makes him unacceptably mild. The Republican sentiment has been drifting right for several years, but its failure to find a decent candidate may be a symptom of its political isolation. There are few politicians who will will admit publicly to the sort of radical policy positions the Tea Party movement supports.

But of course Romney's views, though not intended to be seen as far right, are in fact extremely conservative. His sole claim to suitability, aside from the fact that he's a devout Mormon (going several generations back), stems from his successful participation in the corporate buy-out firm Bain Capital, a firm he started and ran from 1984 to 1999. Romney has boasted about his success at Bain, and used that to promote himself as a business-savvy manager, as "America's CEO" able to husband the country through its current debt crisis and restore American prosperity and jobs. His business experience is offered as the proof and promise of this potential Presidential fulfillment.

Most Americans were unfamiliar with the kind of financial dealings Romney's firm engaged in. But the recent financial crisis on Wall Street, fueled by shady dealings and inflated salaries, has made it clear that regulation is needed in a number of areas, to prevent the irresponsible activity which led to the collapse. The traditional model for capitalist entrepreneurial spirit is to start new businesses, using investment capital to feed into expansion. But there is another side to capital investment, and that involves engineering declines and bankruptcies in areas which are under pressure or experiencing temporary periods of decline.

Americans have been given dramatizations of the negative side of capital investment in two very popular movies:

Pretty Woman, a 1990 "romantic comedy" starring Richard Gere as the corporate raider, and Julia Roberts, as the Los Angeles hooker he hooks up with. Gere plays Edward Lewis, who buys ailing companies, selling off their assets, and closing them down, leaving their employees out in the cold.

Wall Street [1987] was a dramatic portrayal of the involvement of young Bud Fox (Martin Sheen), a stock trader, with Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), a ruthless corporate shark. At first compliant with Gekko's fraudulent schemes and inside trading, eventually Bud rebels against his plan to buy Bud's father's (Charlie Sheen) airline company and break it up for cash, liquidating the employees' pension fund and leaving them unemployed.

Generally speaking Hollywood usually portrays making fast money as the sexiest fun of all, though there is a deep undercurrent of guilt and remorse in most get rich quick movies. Mitt Romney hardly looks the part of the unscrupulous corporate raider, seducing unsuspecting investors and company managements into unseemly alliances and risky schemes, but that's exactly what he did with Bain Capital during his tenure. He made millions and millions of dollars in profits and "compensation" there, and sent much of it to Caribbean havens to avoid American taxation.

For those who may still be unfamiliar with how private equity firms conduct leveraged buyouts and "ailing company acquisitions" it's roughly like this: the "investment" firm (such as Bain) drums up cash from ambitious (and unscrupulous) investors who want to make a fast buck, and don't care how it's done. The firm identifies ailing companies which are experiencing hard times, but which may have underlying assets which are "untapped." These assets may take the form of (real) properties, licenses and copyrights and exclusive patents, employee compensation funds, or manufacturing materiel (machinery etc.). When a firm is in trouble, its management may be under fire; if there's a board of directors, there may be conflict over what the best course of action may be; the company is vulnerable to influence. The "investment" firm (corporate raiders) comes in with cash and either begins to acquire an increasing stake in the firm's stock holdings, or makes an outright offer to take the firm over. Ostensibly, the purpose of such take-over is to reorganize and realign the company so that it prospers and finds new life in the marketplace. Doing it this way would be an honest attempt at saving something worth saving, and preserving the livelihood it gives to its employees (and investors).

But it seldom works that way, because there's little potential profit in coming in to save a company on purely altruistic grounds, because the risk isn't repaid by the potential. Smart, but unscrupulous, private equity raiders know that the quickest way to make a fast buck is to come in to a company, acquire control, cut expenses, and "streamline" its operation. Faking financial reports and gutting the underlying obligations and securing huge overhanging loans against the equity the company represents, are all tools in this process. The investors take out large allocations of cash as the company is being "turned around." Then, when things seem marginally viable, the investors get out, either dumping all their stock, or selling the company outright to some gullible patsy, leaving a huge debt load. Most companies which have been infected with the private equity virus, unable to pay off the debt, experience a bankruptcy within a few years, or are forced to downsize. In most cases, their temporary "prosperity" was a sham, designed to facilitate liquidation by the investors.

The potential profit to firms like Bain Capital is huge. Once in control of a board, they can allocate to themselves huge payouts in stock or cash--money, in effect, stolen from the company. This isn't "healthy capitalism"--it's legalized fraud and theft. A company with a valuable product or idea may have a real future life of decades of moderate productivity, supporting hundreds or thousands of people, while it serves its customer base loyally and reliably. That potential value--both to the people who make up the company, and to the customers who depend upon them--is what is wiped out for quick profits by corporate raiders.

Romney, a graduate of Harvard Business School, knew where the quick money was, and that's why he got into the "private equity" business in the first place. The interesting thing about Mormons is that no matter how devout and pious they may be inside the church, there's no secular or profane act they may not perform in the real world to support their religious piety. At least with Catholics, you get to confess and be absolved for your sins in the world. But with Mormons, you can be a corporate raider and there's no problem. You can lie, and cheat, and steal, and deceive--and it's all perfectly fine, you're still a good little Mormon after it's said and done.

Listening to Romney, I think to myself that he looks and sounds like a fool. But that's just an illusion of image. He's an ineffective public speaker, and maybe he has trouble keeping his categories straight. You have to lie to the right people at the right time, or you'll get your wires crossed. Who knows what he tells his supporters in private? When your whole modus operandi in business is to deceive everyone--your investors, your buyout targets, and everyone whom you come into contact with, who wants to believe you're honest and fair and above-board--with a straight face, lying may become so familiar, that you literally forget where you've left it. The truth, that is.

Hopefully, America will reject Romney the Corporate Raider. But I've said it many times before: Americans are stupid. Or maybe their credulity is so deep they can't help wanting to believe that people can be so evil that they will lie about anything to get ahead. The desire to believe--it's a religious tendency. But Romney's no saint. He's the wolf in sheep's clothing.

Baltz & Landscape Values

2012-01-15T12:33:00.001-08:00

From a purely technical point of view, there is nothing that separates any photographic image from another on simple subject matter grounds. All photographic images are configurations of light and dark, which record relationships and gradations of depth, mass, and intensity. A picture of a waterfall over a rock precipice is "the same" as a photo of smoke billowing out of a factor smokestack. How we feel about the distribution of possible subjects represented in a photographic plane tells us something which is separate from the range of effects possible within the frame of the image, and we'd do well always to remember that when judging the potentials and ultimate meanings of photographs, from a purely aesthetic point of view. The sentiment we feel in viewing an image is a thing apart from the scientific facts which pertain to the process by which the image is produced. 1

The work of Lewis Baltz challenges our sense of the limits of artistic license, through the brutal dryness of his subject matter, and the irony created by referring to the work as "landscape photography." "Landscape photography" historically implied or referred to the documentation of nature, particularly "wild" nature. The landscape vision implied or openly advocated in the work of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, among others, presumed a value to unspoiled natural settings, specifically those which suggested a heroic or comforting sense. Nature was powerful, or soothing, or seductive, but most of all it was beautiful. This beauty valuation tended to project a universe of welcome, a nurturing of human presence, or of a primordial order larger than man's. It was a notion derived from British and Continental European romanticism, beginning in the 19th Century, and fostered in the 20th by environmental values. Indeed, Adams and Weston were crucially involved in the glorification of the American wilderness landscape, in the campaign to idolize and preserve our landscape heritage, against the advance of settlement, exploitation and over-use inherent in the expansion of population and capital. They thought of their images--indeed, nearly everyone else did too--as propaganda in the crusade to save areas of unspoiled land and seaside and mountain regions threatened in one way or another by man. Adams himself was an important figure in the Sierra Club, and lobbied openly for preservation, using his reputation as an artist-photographer to further his political aims for wilderness landscape values.

Despite the glorification of prettiest and most impressive places in North America by landscape photographers during the first half of the 20th Century, it was obvious, by the end of the 1960's, that the campaign to defend the American wilderness against exploitation and over-population--despite a few notable famous exceptions like the National Parks--was being lost. The American West was being turned into a spreading network of urban and suburban sprawl. Post-War prosperity, in particular, was clearly having deleterious effects both on the quality of the life lived in the cities, and in the new burgeoning suburbs. The American landscape was being used up, covered over, and transformed by man, in the interests of growth and consumption, under a sea of spreading waste. The wholesale domination of nature, pursued to create artificial environments ordered around mechanization (travel, production) and growth, proved to be a much stronger force than any preservationist influences in society. Highways, airports, train-systems, tract developments, large-scale power and extraction concerns--all the familiar aspects of the post-War American landscape--were rapidly shrinking the American outback, and those parts "preserved" against this trend, were suffering from emphatic idealization, becoming clichés in the pantheon of vicarious destinations where people could visit and "experience" nature in a civilized setting.

The accuracy with which modern lenses were able to record detail within the breadth of the visual field was a technological advance, permitting pictures of the utmost clarity. This achievement was a technical fact, brought about by science and invention. Cameras are scientific instruments, just as microscopes and telescopes, and computers and vacuum cleaners and automobiles are. The power that sophisticated photographic processes had made possible insured that an accurate report of the visual landscape would be possible, for the first time in history. At first this clarity was not seen as desirable; soft focus image-making was originally regarded as the most "artistic" alternative. Then in the 1930's, art photographers "discovered" the power of sharp focus image making (the f64 Group, et al), and stunning pictures of all kinds of phenomena spread rapidly though the artistic community. In the 1940's, clear focus photographic images began to be accepted in the general art community (critically, and in the museum and gallery sphere) as a genuine expression of creativity and genius. During the Depression years, photography was used to document the social and landscape tragedy of the Dust Bowl.

It is natural perhaps to comprehend how the early art landscape photographers came to see "pretty" subject matter as the proper object of photographic endeavor. The citizen hobbyist, and amateur picture taker--they wanted to record things memorable to their lives, and beyond the family portraits, they wanted to capture the joy and inspiration of their recreations. Positive imagery of landscape was identified with vacations and trips to parks. As the park system grew in popularity, pictures of America's "wonderland" of beauty, tranquillity and dramatic backdrops reinforced the artistic piety of landscape as favored views of a preferred version of American life. This idealized concept of landscape was balanced against the uniformity and conformity of civilization, now seen as potentially demoralizing, or as threatening to a healthy existence. The transformation of landscape from a wild, dangerous, untamed "external" context, to a potentially harmonious system, balanced between use and preservation, was expressed in the landscape photography of the post-War period. Wild was good, wild was beautiful, wild was ethically necessary. Wild, scenic, picturesque imagery was the proper subject of landscape photography; its aim, the glorification of nature and the appreciation of the ecological interrelationship between man and his environment.

But the underlying truth which photography records doesn't stop at the overlook to a beautiful view. The truth is that most people in America live in neighborhoods and apartment buildings, in a landscape of concrete and roads and structures on the ground--the earth, the environment they see and work and play inside, is circumscribed, their landscape is covered over. The once riparian countryside of the past had been, or would soon be, covered over, obliterated to make way for mankind's expansions. Photographers who had grown up in a culture where landscape photography was building a record of places either lost to posterity, or increasingly at risk in the consumption of open space, realized that a larger truth about our environment was being ignored. Pretty pictures of the kind that Adams and Weston had made, though impressive and even heroic, did not address this larger tragedy of the degradation of the environment, at least not in the way that acknowledged the physical realities of the processes of destruction. The real challenge lay not in creating more images of pretty landscape, of forests and waterfalls and sand dunes and cloudy majestic peaks, but in recording the transformation of our wild heritage, at the cutting edge, where technological consumption was literally eating up space and covering it over with the products and settings of the machine age. 2

The process of artistic development isn't merely a repetition of past methods and approaches. Young photographers of the 1960's, 1970's and 1980's would probably have been content, had they been born a generation earlier, to treat landscape in the same way as their predecessors, shunning the harsh technological surfaces and uniformly ordered environments of the New West. But they were incapable of seeing the old pretty pictures in the same preferred manner. Pictures of Half Dome, or the Grand Tetons, or the dunes at Stovepipe Wells in Death Valley, were just as persuasive to them as they had been to earlier audiences--probably more so--but they no longer functioned within the same frame of meaning . They belonged to an earlier time, when Americans could look at such imagery with an unalloyed sense of awe, appreciation and gratitude; and, even later, as ecological shrines reminiscent of a past pre-civilized wonderland of wildness. Photography just a medium for creative idealizations of perfect places. And the new young landscape photographers of the 1970's, '80's and 90's no longer believed in the potential power of such imagery either to maintain man's better version of a balanced "partnership" with wild nature, or to persuade contemporary audiences that more pretty nature pictures were either necessary or desirable. And it had all been done before.

In the 1970's, Lewis Baltz, along with others including Robert Adams, the Bernds, Frank Gohlke, Stephen Shore, Joe Deal, Henry Wessel Jr., Ed Ruscha, broke free of the old tame landscape tradition and came to be associated as part of what would be called the New Topographics movement in landscape photography. Baltz's images, of this group, were probably the most uncompromisingly severe, and made a bold statement, a distinct impression of a new view of American landscape--dry, disinterested and cool. There was an intensity about it that challenged one's sensibility. It was clean and impersonal, and seemed to celebrate the autonomous, unself-conscious negligence of the new industrial spirit, claiming square footage as man's distinct prerogative in a limitless access. If it were to regarded as beautiful, it would require a complete redefinition of what landscape photography, as an art form, could mean.

You could say that much of the work of these New Topographics figures was not purely landscape work, since it devoted more attention to man's works on the land, than to "unspoiled" nature. Can architecture--even partially built, or "under construction"--be considered "landscape"? Is a poured concrete wall landscape? Is a lumber scaffolding landscape? Are overhead fluorescent lighting fixtures landscape? Obviously, the New Topographics artists weren't necessarily insisting that this kind of subject matter was landscape--or at least landscape in the earlier sense. What they seemed to be implying was that what our society had done to landscape was as pertinent as a study of what the landscape had been before it had been co-opted by artificial structures. When Baltz went to Colorado and photographed the construction-in-progress of tract developments, the implication was that this was a documentation of a tragedy.

But of course it became apparent that it was possible to make interesting pictures out of any kind of industrial "stuff"--including what might once have been considered the least inspiring and spiritually bereft phenomena imaginable. The pristine purity of artificial materials--metal, glass, sculpted concrete, insulation, siding, garage doors, the graded paving for a building footprint--could be interpreted both ways: As the material for a transparent appreciation of engineered spaces, or as the evidence of the devastating consequences of a dismissal of original nature. Both kinds of aesthetic values could co-exist within the frame of a single studied image, and Baltz's work enjoyed this ambiguity as much as any artist ever had.

Does the presence of man-made objects--the evidence of our effect on our environment--constitute as potentially meaningful a representation as their absence. Man's manipulation of his environment--of nature, after all--is the mark of civilization itself, for without our alterations upon the land, human life would be a bitter hardship. Ultimately, a balance between "development" and preservation cannot be negotiated by a purist approach alone.

American architectural history (along with city planning) is complex. A number of different urban and suburban residential and industrial design styles were employed throughout the American West in the post-War period, but for the most part, the way the built environment was created paid little respect to regional landscape factors where cities and towns grew. Much of it had a homogeneity of style in direct contradiction to any values derived from native materials, and without respect for the sustainable or available regional resource base. The great cities of the American West, particularly the Southwest, grew so fast that there wasn't any chance for the sort of variety which occurs when piecemeal, slower growth proceeds at a measured pace. This uniformity--the "instant" context of rapid, "uncontrolled" growth--brought about much harsh, ugly, dehumanizing landscape. You could pretend that this reality was uninspiring, and in direct contradiction to the natural landscape versions of the previous generation, but you couldn't deny that it was becoming more prevalent, and more virulent in its effects, and in its reach.

How might we regard the subject matter of the New Topographics, in light of the development of the technologies of the built environment, and taking into account the increasing sophistication of photographic technology as well? Baltz's images, sleekly produced monochrome gelatin silver prints, have a purist's intensity and accuracy of focus which is at one with the ruthless precision of their subjects--their straight lines, gritty continuous surfaces, unyielding material densities, and--most of all--their imposing alienating presence upon the land.

What Baltz is showing us is the raw edge of our own negligent disregard for the literal surroundings within which we live and breathe. Their flatness--a two-dimensional wall holding back all human variety and imaginative depth--perfectly captures the disembodied consciousness of our projected vanities and disturbing obliviousness, of what we insist on having, in taking from and dominating the context we occupy. Most of the time, we're barely aware of what's going on.

And yet, again, in purely aesthetic terms, the images are diverting. I began this essay by reminding myself that the breadth of possible subject matter should never be taken as a measure of the value of a two-dimension frame, or of the ultimate meaning of light-sensitive surfaces/impressions. Photography is about capturing variations of light, in patterns and varying intensities. But we're incapable of seeing anything in a completely a-moral way--and to try to do so is to submit to an arid anxiety.

Is it possible to tread the narrow edge of aesthetic regard in which an indignation for man's hopeless irresponsibility towards the earth, walks side by side with an idolatrous fascination with the synthetic contexts of advancing technology and civilized expansionism? If Baltz's images are seductive and elegant and eerily remote, they also resist deeper levels of apprehension. One thing that machine architecture suggests is a mastery over time, a repression of chance and fate. In our effort to push the untamed and unmanageable wildness of pre-historic or pre-civilized outer reality back and back, away from our immediate radius of control and knowing, we may fantasize an immortality, a sad sci-fi vision of a wholly reconfigured containment. Physicists tell us nowadays that there is no "here" and "there"--no separation between our sense of ourselves as distinct from the forces and vantages of the universe at large. Such entities are illusions. Baltz's testimonials to these illusions are compelling exactly because we sense the jeopardy they imply. As we continue to kill off the various forms of life on the planet, and quickly consume its stored energy and "raw material," fouling the air and water and ground beneath our feet, we set the stage for further elegies in the wake of our advance.

How pointless is a world in which our choices are narrowed to the pathways we alone have designed? How much control is advisable in a system of putative free will?

In the work of Robert Adams (below), we see this world from the inside out, and the recognition truly gives one pause.

Can we stop the merry-go-round once it's set into motion?

The beauty of the photography medium may transcend the ephemeral matter of its subjects, but we can feel the passage of time. What we have done can't be undone. The illusion of control is like a dream that continually unfolds. The imagination spawns false leads, dead ends and self-fulfilling artifacts. It's all in the choosing, and the recognition. It's always so easy to ignore what's right in front of you, but the camera tells another story.

___________

1. From an aesthetic vantage, one would have to remember that Frederick Sommer, about whom I have written previously, explored the theoretical relationship between the reproductive processes of photographic image generation, and phenomena in nature. His interest bordered on the scientific, though his meditations weren't mathematical formulae, but speculations about relationships. He saw photographic process as a metaphor for perception itself: The eye is a camera, images are stored in the brain, etc.

2. I suppose it would be possible to make a case that, at least in aesthetic terms, we've gone beyond the "machine age" into the web-consciousness age. But our manipulation of the environment is still taking place on a grand scale, ramping up to ever higher levels of exploitation.

Carson's Red - A Self-Interview: The Poet as Charlatan

2012-01-14T02:09:00.000-08:00

[What follows is the second part of a discussion on Anne Carson's "verse novel"Autobiography of Red. William Logan wrote this in a brief review from 2005: "Anne Carson . . . has for the past decade been the acceptable face of the avant garde. In Autobiography of Red . . . her poems promised that post-modernism might be a new dispensation, that if you stole, borrowed and begged enough, something interesting might come. Her love of the classics gave a gravitas to poetic experiments that otherwise would have been trivial."1 Ordinarily, I'm not likely to find myself on the same side of any argument as Logan, but in this instance, to my surprise, I do. It is in the form of a self-interview, a form which enables me to talk informally, dropping some of the formality of address which straight expository prose requires.]

Question: You've decided to continue this discussion with an interview?

Answer: Yes.

Question: But an interview can't be conducted with oneself . . .

Answer: Actually, there is precedent. Capote did it in Music For Chameleons.2 I found those self-interviews he did in that book quite diverting. Lots of interviews of literary figures end up being edited by the subject, so the answers can be scripted. That's not a bad thing. A dialogue is an interesting form in that it allows for directness, extemporaneous illumination. It also sets up a tension between what is expected, and what is divulged, between the indignation of surprise and objection, and the audacity of unplanned-for revelation. Things can quickly get out of hand in a dialogue, or a discussion, and that's the creative element at work. I beg the reader's indulgence.

Question: So the subject is Anne Carson, and what your reactions to her work are--or more specifically, her book Autobiography of Red [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998].

Answer: Yes. Though it will naturally be disputed, I always keep an open mind about what I expect from any writer's work, and have no prejudices against any faction, though I'm quickly thrown onto my guard whenever I recognize someone "using" their ethnic background or sexual identity or national affiliation or difficult childhood as a form of special pleading. But even then, transcendence is possible--look at Sylvia Plath, or Larry Eigner, who overcame mental illness and infernal tendencies on the one hand, and severe physical limitations on the other, to create great art. But the work has to be good enough in itself to accomplish this. That's what great art is, a victory over limitation of any kind. The very means of expression is itself often a kind of limitation.

Question: That seems like a long answer to a simple question. What does it have to do with Anne Carson's poetry?

Answer: Let me respond by offering a theory of literature. Let's call it the Art of Embarrassment. Imagine that in all art there is a dialogue, the dialogue between the artist, or creator, and his audience, or the person to whom the work is addressed. Imagine that there is a membrane between them, a kind of sensitized surface. Any artist reveals something about him/herself whenever he/she creates something. I would offer that the highest form of any art can be measured by the degree to which any artist reveals something about themselves. This divulging may be disguised as a fiction, or presented as bald autobiography. In literature, poetry is usually more direct than fiction, though the masks and formalities employed may be just as obviously methods to distance oneself from implication, to disguise disclosures. I don't mean embarrassment in the purely negative sense: The word embarrassment doesn't necessarily imply pain or loss; there is the embarrassment of riches, for instance. Rich people can be much more embarrassed about others discovering their true net worth, than they might be by the discovery of some personal fault. But embarrassment of riches can have a positive spin as well, a fullness or expansion of possibility or good luck; having too much advantage. Sylvia Plath, for instance, achieved most when she was revealing the worst side of her character, the side which reveled in gore, hatred, ghoulishness, vanity, infernal obsession. In other words, embarrassment was the key to her inspiration, she was best when she was revealing what was most private, most culpable, most awful. Her engagement with her art was on the grand scale, confronting the evil and terribleness of the human soul as she experienced it first-hand. That was her subject, and she mastered it. A brilliant artist, though terrifying to watch. Taking things to an absolute limit, right to the precipice. That kind of daredevil engagement is also potentially the most embarrassing, risking looking stupid, risking failure.

Question: Wow, that's a little eccentric! I don't know that that theory could be applied to Shakespeare, or Milton, or Blake.

Answer: Probably not. The greatest technicians of the art can seem to rise above the merely personal. In drama--which is what you have with Shakespeare and Milton--there's the context of representation. Personifications are represented as characters in a narrative action. But even with artists like these, there's a daring which carries their art to a higher level through the intensity of their focus. The writing in Shakespeare can accommodate the most extreme conditions and situations, and that's when it (the writing) attains to the sublime. Most of the best writers have minds--or a linguistic facility--which enables them to portray their preoccupations and obsessions with a familiarity which is well beyond most people's aptitudes. But what I mean by embarrassment is a quality of ultimate nakedness, in which one is concealing nothing, of holding nothing back. There's another school of thought which tells us that there are polite limits to art, and it's perfectly possible to function within such limits and still make very persuasive artifacts. I'm thinking of Marianne Moore, perhaps one of the most mannered artists who ever lived, but still capable of astonishing disclosures, though these are usually intellectual ones, grudging and petulant; with her, the pressure of her privacy is so great, that even the smallest disclosure is powerfully dramatic.3 Hemingway said that what makes art powerful is what is not directly stated, but only implied by what is said or shown--like an iceberg which is three-quarters under the surface of the water. Hemingway thought it was that hidden three-quarters portion which made what we do know and are allowed to see of something, potentially powerful and meaningful. It's a fascinating analytical proposal, and may not be true. Do artists deliberately withhold large parts of what they're feeling and thinking about something when they set out to evoke a sharp, moving response in the reader, viewer or listener? Or is it something they unconsciously do, without even meaning to? Conscious art is a principle of Western tradition, that we have a rational basis for any work. But since the advent of the consideration of the unconscious mind about a century ago, we tend to give greater and greater weight to the unintended directives of the hidden parts of our creative power.

Question: This sounds evasive. What does it have to do with Anne Carson, and her poem?

Answer: I guess I'm trying to set a frame of reference for what I'm going to say about her work. Because I'm pre-conceiving the kinds of objections that are likely to be raised, and I want to head those off at the pass, so to speak. I read a very diverting review of Carson's book Decreation by William Logan, who disdains "avant garde" "experimental poetry" and wants us to regard what Carson does as trivial and misguided, though well-intentioned and committed. I don't share most of Logan's pieties regarding the sort of proper, prim, decorous verse which he values--I don't, for instance, regard Alexander Pope as among the grandest poets of our language. But I'm skeptical and combative enough to share his frustration with half-baked experimentalism, especially when it's offered up as the best of what it is, and is as credulously defended and praised as Carson's has been over the last decade and a half. I read a good bit of expedient opportunism and critical indulgence into that welcoming reception. Someone wants awfully badly to believe in the possibility of a great experimental woman writer.

Question: My, that all sounds quite negative. Is this going to be some big put-down of women poets? It sounds mysogynistic and bitter.

Answer: I think if H.L. Mencken were alive today, he would be so much better at addressing the kind of cozy political correctness which governs the arenas of debate in our time. You have to train yourself to dissect and dismember preposterous pieties--what we would call deconstructing them, today--in order to maintain your ground in any discussion. Any woman writer who pretends to literary accomplishment must be cautious not to kid herself that what she's doing is effective or important simply because of her sexual nature. If there's a lack of a tradition upon which to fall back on, then the establishment of such a tradition isn't going to be accomplished in a couple of decades of effort; it's going to take centuries. There's Sappho and Anne Bradstreet and Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore and H.D. and Elizabeth Bishop and Rae Armantrout; but the tradition is weak. Part of the problem is obviously that women were prevented from pursuing art, and that prohibition was ethically corrupt, over centuries of lost opportunity. There's an elegy in that that is greater than some of our most tragic cultural verdicts. But it also means that there's a lot of work yet to do, and women are the ones who must do it. But at this point in time, in our milieu of cultural guilt and accusation and defiance and resentment, there's a clear danger of desperate insistence, that what women are doing right now is apt to be as good or as liberated or as impressive as we wish that it might be--as good as the best of what men have been continuously attempting for 2500 years. The mere fact of the apparent permission now given to women does not in itself guarantee that their efforts will attain the heights of the best literature in history on very short notice. In fact, it's quite likely that a sense of light-headed release will result in more false starts and misguided efforts than would otherwise occur. Women today feel a special sense of mission, but there's no reason to imagine that that sense of calling is more likely to produce masterpieces than we would expect of any civilization, at any time. Geniuses don't grow on trees, and great books of poetry are uncommon in any time.

Question: What I guess we're talking about here is standards, and that the standards we would apply to male writers over the history of literature, should be as rigorously applied to women writers and artists today, as they have been to men. That's easy enough to understand, but you need to be more specific. Is Anne Carson a good experimental writer, or not?

Answer: The simplest answer to your question is "no," but in order to earn the right to make that pronouncement, one has to go through a series of steps. The best place to begin is with a description of the poem in question. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse is ostensibly a narrative poem, but it could on no account be fairly be described as "verse" in the traditional sense. Formally, the poem as such is nothing more than a series of stepped, sequentially broken up sentences (and many run-on sentences), distributed into numbered (and titled) sections, and differentiated only by italic variation in type-face. As far as narrative setting and continuity are concerned, the "story" has little or no coherence, consisting as it does of glimpses of non-chronological "scenes" strung together with a weak underlying structural development. It's ostensibly the story of a boy named Geryon, who grows up in a single parent household (Mom), and has a long relationship with a slightly older man named Herakles. Autobiography of Red reinvents the story of a legend of Hercules--in which Hercules kills Geryon, a red-winged monster, stealing his red cattle--into a contemporary setting in which Geryon is a boy living somewhere in North America (probably Canada), enters into a homoerotic relationship with Herakles. Some years later, the two meet in South America, where Geryon and Herakles and the older man's current boyfriend Ancash become embroiled in a love triangle. The "novel" opens with a parodic "essay" on the ancient poet Stesichoros, from whose poetic fragments the story is derived, and ends with an "interview" with Stesichoros. The story really has nothing at all to do with ancient Greece, but is simply a peculiar fantasy-narrative with the characters taking the names of the referenced Greek poem. If this all sounds like an improbable bad literary joke, you'd not be far off the mark.

The initial framing device purports to be a kind of post-Modern adaptation of a narrative poem by the 7th Century BC Greek poet Stesichorus (or Stesichoros), the Geryoneis, which relates an episode from myth of the theft by Heracles of Geryon's cattle, with related fragments. Nearly all of Stesichoros's works were lost in antiquity, so most of what is known or deduced about him and his work is second- or third-hand, and thus conjectural, adding intrigue to any attempt to infer or interpret the meaning of anything he may have written or thought. Most of anything we think we know about writers and events of this period would not constitute what we regard as verifiable fact, thus anyone choosing to base secondary adaptations upon them has pretty much a free hand. In other words, as a trained classical scholar, Carson knows that her putative audience not only is unlikely to know anything much about the work of Stesichoros--or about Greek literature generally, for that matter--and that there is so little known about him and his work, that she can always claim artistic license for any inaccuracies or indulgent exaggerations she might choose to employ. Rather than setting out to create either an imaginative recreation of ancient Greek culture and society--what could be more boring?--or a persuasive modern reinterpretation of the purported model work itself, she gives the mythical names to otherwise mythically or historically uninflected modern characters, to create a nonsense tale sprinkled with plot non sequiturs, surrealist metaphors, in a lazy, dreamy, petulant outline which bears about as much validity to human drama (or ancient literature) as a Walt Disney cartoon does to Homer. But of course, nothing would please Carson more than to be taken as the ironic, camp creator of a bad Disneyland. She revels in it.

Autobiography of Red refers to the central character, Geryon, a boy born with wings, whose whole body is scarlet-colored (maybe this is a metaphor for some kind of weird skin disease?). That this fact goes unremarked by the narrator, and everyone else in the story, doesn't even qualify as a bad joke. That Geryon is mentally unstable, with huge funds of uncontrolled frustration and anger, and is as well (what else?) Gay to boot, what might we make of the other absurdities in the story? There's the putative fiction of a white North American male with mental problems growing up in a dysfunctional household (he's apparently "raped" by his older brother) and becoming a photographer, while maintaining an on-again, off-again relationship with an older man named Herakles (presumably a homo-sexual relationship), while on the other hand, there's a trivialized parallel analogue of a classical archetype, which seems like nothing more than an expedient framing device to give interest to an otherwise dreary, half-realized short (Gay coming-of-age) story.

Question: You say that the work can't be considered a poem in the traditional sense. If not a poem, then how would you describe its form?

Answer: Giving examples would be easy, since the writing is consistently slack, and formally disorganized. It's simply a sequence of sentences strung together without any syllabic or metrical regularity whatsoever. These aren't "line breaks"--they're simply sentences broken up randomly into alternating longer and shorter lines. There is no attempt at musical phrasing or dramatic measure. The joke of course is that a post-Modern "free verse" structure doesn't have a structure; but unlike the Modernists, there is also no attempt to derive a structural form out of the materials themselves, either as colloquial speech, or rhetorically inspired enunciation. Carson seems not to be "in" her language at all, which reads in places like a crib, and in others like the outline notes to a probable narrative. The poem is simply descriptive on the lowest possible level. In other words, formally it's completely flat, actually less inspired than the most ordinary kind of prose; so, one would deduce that the method is deliberate. Here's an example, chosen at random from page 54--

XVI. G R O O M I N G

As in childhood we live sweeping close to the sky and now, what dawn is this.

----------

Herakles lies like a piece of torn silk in the heat of the blue saying,

Geryon please. The break in his voice

made Geryon think for some reason of going into a barn

first thing in the morning

when sunlight strikes a bale of raw hay still wet from the night.

Put your mouth on it Geryon please.

Geryon did. It tasted sweet enough. I am learning a lot this year of my life,

thought Geryon. It tasted very young.

Geryon felt clear and powerful--not some wounded angel after all

but a magnetic person like Matisse

or Charlie Parker! Afterwards they lay kissing for a long time then

played gorillas. Got hungry.

Soon they were sitting in a booth at the Bus Depot waiting for food.

They had started to practice

their song ("Joy to the World") when Herakles pulled Geryon's head

into his lap and began grooming

for nits. Gorilla grunts mingled with breakfast sounds in the busy room.

The waitress arrived

holding two plates of eggs. Geryon gazed up at her from under Herakles' arm.

Newlyweds? she said.

My first impulse, reading stuff like this, is to imagine an audience of half-baked adolescent poet wannabes, rather like Bevis & Butthead, giggling agitatedly like nervous hyenas--imagining, in their ignorance, and straining after social correctness, that what they're hearing constitutes some new kind of camp humor, irreverent and witty. The story, naturally, has nothing to do with barnyards or bus-stops or gorillas or jazz or modern art. It obviously does have to do with Carson's fantasy about Gay public affectation; the irrelevant details are just window-dressing. It rarely works for me, though it might appeal to those for whom all literature is a kind of put-on, which is best appreciated in a state of sarcastic inebriation. If Carson believes that the suspension of disbelief can only occur under a condition of deadpan humor, then she probably thinks Autobiography of Red is a masterpiece of understatement.

XXIII. W A T E R

Water! Out from between two crouching masses of the world the word leapt.

_______

It was raining on his face. He forgot for a moment that he was a brokenheart

then he remembered. Sick lurch

downward to Geryon trapped in his own bad apple. Each morning a shock

to return to the cut soul.

Pulling himself onto the edge of the bed he stared at the dull amplitude of rain.

Buckets of water sloshed from sky

to roof to eave to windowsill. He watched it hit his feet and puddle on the floor.

He could hear bits of human voice

streaming down the drainpipe--I believe in being gracious--

He slammed the window shut.

Below in the living room everything was motionless. Drapes closed, chairs asleep.

Huge wads of silence stuffed the air.

He was staring around for the dog then realized they hadn't had a dog for years. Clock

in the kitchen said quarter to six.

He stood looking at it, willing himself not to blink until the big hand bumped over

to the next minute. Years passed

as his eyes ran water and a thousand ideas jumped his brain--If the world

ends now I am free and

If the world ends now no one will see my autobiography--finally it bumped.

He had a flash of Herakles' sleeping house

and put that away. Got out the coffee can, turned on the tap and started to cry.

Outside the natural world was enjoying

a moment of total strength. Wind rushed over the ground like a sea and battered up

into the corners of the buildings,

garbage cans went dashing down the alley after their souls.

Giant ribs of rain shifted

open on a flash of light and cracked together again, making the kitchen clock

bump crazily. Somewhere a door slammed.

Leaves tore past the window. Weak as a fly Geryon crouched against the sink

with his fist in his mouth

and his wings trailing over the drainboard. Ran lashing the kitchen window

sent another phrase

of Herakles' chasing across his mind. A photograph is just a bunch of light

hitting a plate. Geryon wiped his face

with his wings and went out to the living room to look for the camera.

When he stepped onto the back porch

rain was funnelling down off the roof in a morning as dark as night.

He had the camera wrapped

in a sweatshirt. The photograph is titled "If He Sleep He Shall Do Well."

It shows a fly floating in a pail of water--

drowned but with a strange agitation of light around its wings. Geryon used

a fifteen-minute exposure.

When he first opened the shutter the fly seemed to be still alive.

"Cut soul" "amplitude of rain" "human voice streaming down the drainpipe" "huge wads of silence" "jumped his brain" "garbage cans dashing down the alley for their souls" "ribs of rain" "a morning as dark as night" "strange agitation of light around its wings"--not only is this uninspired writing, it doesn't contribute to any overall unified effect. When Carson makes a metaphor, or a simile, it's as if she had simply pulled an extraneous verbal tag from a notebook she had kept. It is not a criticism of the best of her similes to suggest that her use of them is nearly always inappropriate. "New moon floating white as a rib at the edge of the sky" for instance, is original, and not bad, but this is followed by "from far down the freeway came a sound of fishhooks scraping the bottom of the world." These are thrown almost randomly into a sex initiation scene between Geryon and Herakles. It's as if Carson didn't understand the relationship between metaphorical evocation, and the subject of a given scene--she just thinks up the strangest, most bizarre comparison she can, apparently imagining that this makes the writing powerful and memorable. But it doesn't; it just sounds goofy.

If you thought that the post-Modern poem could challenge your sense of what inspired contemporary writing is supposed to sound like, you might consider looking elsewhere. One way of thinking about longer post-Modern poems is to imagine that they neither defend, nor attack the notion of narrative coherence, but create alternative universes of time and space, more suited to the way that people actually feel about the dislocations which have occurred in our sense of the universe, man and the immediate environment, over the last century and a half. Science fiction has explored such imaginative realms, and straight experimental fiction has done so as well. There are no absolutes in the world of art, and hardly anyone today would demand of Joyce's Ulysses, or Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, that they "make more sense" to the ordinary reader than they do. But any work of art's permission is established by the level of its achievement, not some limply ironic, half-silly, Dada-ist joke. You can make funny, crazy, comic prose-poems of the kind Franz Kafka, or Russell Edson or Mark Strand do, but to make full-length serial-narrative "poems" is quite another thing. Kenneth Koch was a master at that sort of writing (Ko, Or a Season on Earth), and he even pushed the notion of nonsensical variation over the edge with When the Sun Tries to Go On. But Carson isn't being a clown, or a maker of coquettishly bizarre translations (i.e. Zukofsky's Catullus). She's serious. She expects her poem to be treated and considered right alongside Eliot and Pound and Ashbery, as an example of clever, modish invention.

Question: Isn't what you're saying is that the poem's form doesn't adhere to any of the previously made models of what a "verse novel" could be? I mean, why can't a novel be written in a form which, for want of a better term, we could call verse? An expanded definition of "verse" could certainly be imagined for what Carson has done here, wouldn't you say?

Answer: I'm not what is known as a "formalist" in my taste; which is a way of saying that if I recognize a familiar, named, form, such as a sonnet, I immediately get suspicious. The first sonnet written in history was a moment of discovery, and the variations on the sonnet form were interesting elaborations (in the right hands). And certain forms may have a "universal" feel which is almost impossible to separate from our happy familiarity with them. But new forms are much more compelling. A William Carlos Williams poem is almost always made out of the materials of the rhetoric of its phrases and grammar, which makes his work feel so fresh and direct. But you can't go back and replicate his innovations, because they're one-of-a-kind objects--you end up trying to codify his style. We're convinced by the force of something made--whether it convinces you that what it is saying is necessary, and worthwhile, and interesting. If it's nothing but nonsense, it may delight us with its silliness, or its healthy sense of lightheadedness, but we instinctually recognize that as secondary entertainment. I'm not talking of great comedy, as in Shakespeare. I'm speaking of poems that push irony all the way over into put-on. When a reader (or an audience) gets the feeling it's being kidded, it wants the kidding to have some end in mind. A writer who thinks that a weakness in construction, or bad jokes, or poker-faced absurdities piled one upon the other, will be excused by some reference to classical literature, or by some atmosphere of camp irony, ultimately is wasting our time.

There's a school of thought which goes like this: If you speak in the accents of your time, you don't even need to think about how whether what you're saying is moving, or effective, or even clear, because no matter what you think to say, it will reflect your learning, your sensibility, your peculiar individual way of expressing yourself. In other words, anyone can write, even illiterates--they can speak it, even without writing it down. And there's no way to judge the validity of anything they do, because it's all precious creativity, on every level. The conversation of a lower class person, say, in the London of 1845, or of a soldier in the Roman provinces of 275 AD, or of a teenager in the Harlem of 2011, will all have interest. We could even call what they say, as the way they might think to say it, a kind of art (or artlessness, if you prefer, if artlessness is what you like best about entertainment). Which is another way of saying that you don't even need to be educated, because everyone is educated all the time. It's just the structural organization of their knowledge which differs from context to context. So that in the context of Anne Carson's world, half-understood concepts of what an ancient Greek poet mighthave written are a preoccupation. But we all have preoccupations. Having them doesn't make them the stuff of art, because art is about what we do with subject matter--works of art aren't daydreams written down by half-educated fools. If Anne Carson were a housewife, instead of a Canadian academic, her efforts in Autobiography of Red would have about as much interest to us as her knowledge of Stesichoros does to us. My point isn't that the housewife thinks less interestingly, or that Anne Carson isn't intelligent, or shrewd, or well-educated. It's that she's deluded herself into thinking that making a work as flaccid and negligently numb asAutobiography of Red is somehow a triumph over chaos, or an interesting version of a vague daydream she has had. Particularly since her daydreams (and most of the details she fills them with) are, as daydreams go, fairly dull.

Let's take an example. Antoine de St.-Exupery was a professional pilot, at a time in the history of aviation when airplanes were very risky machines. Tens of thousands--probably millions--of people have flown airplanes, but very, very few write about it, or write about it effectively. It takes imagination, and special knowledge and desire, to bring it off. He was one of the few who was able to do this. His experience informed his accounts, and he brought his keen perception of the drama of that enterprise directly into his work. On the evidence of Autobiography of Red, Carson possesses very little of any of these qualities. Aside from the special knowledge of Greek literature and custom, which is her claim to our attention, but which in my view counts for almost nothing in this case, despite the pretense of the mythical naming, this work feels completely unnecessary, as if she couldn't think of anything better to write about than the wan plight of a confused adolescent homosexual. St.-Exupery cares explicitly about the experience he wishes to convey, and there's a pressure in that intention which is communicated in the telling. His knowledge of his subject is intimate, immediate, and vivid. It isn't a series of bad dreams, or absurd theatrical dumb-shows. It doesn't appropriate a classical framework to bring a borrowed sense of authority to an otherwise quotidian soap-opera plot. You wonder, from the manner of presentation, whether or not Carson even realizes how puerile her effort is.

Question: You sound not only dismissive, but positively hostile!

Answer: That's a fair judgment.

Question: But why?

Answer: Because fakes and pretenders and charlatans are offensive people. They are counterfeits. They offer us something, offer it for our purchase, and they're either unaware of the false nature of their product, or they're aware of it and attempt to pass it off as genuine, with a straight face. In poker, this is known as bluffing. It's especially troublesome when women do it, because they demand, and expect, extra latitude because of their sex, and because of their right to sexual reparations. Actually, the politesse of gallantry is in direct contradiction to the historical claim of persecution, but no matter. The woman has no shame. She can ride the pale horse off into the sunset, sneering and giggling all the way.

Question: This all sounds sexist and bigoted.

Answer: None of it would matter except for the vanity and the promotion. Obscure failures have a certain dignity. You dreamed of success and fame, but it eluded you, because you didn't have the right stuff. But the promotion of the king's new invisible outfit is another matter altogether. In our present environment, our culture longs for female heroines. Almost anyone will do. Toni Morrison. Maya Angelou. Jorie Graham. Elizabeth Alexander. Margaret Atwood. Louise Gluck. Lisa Jarnot. Adrienne Rich. Lorine Niedecker. Alice Notley. Sharon Olds. Mary Oliver. Kay Ryan. Anne Waldman. But how many of these women can write with the power of Sylvia Plath?

In any given generation of writers, there may be no more than a handful--say, half a dozen, in any genre, whose work merits more than a passing glance. What happened to the thousands of poets who wrote and published work between 1900 and 1950? Their efforts are forgotten, not because they were the wrong color, or the wrong sex, or grew up in the wrong neighborhood, or lacked degrees from reputable institutions of learning. No, they were forgotten because their work didn't endure. There are writers who labor in obscurity and are later discovered, and then there are writers who are famous and celebrated in their time, but whose work on closer inspection proves unworthy. Anne Carson is almost certainly one of these, whose work follows a certain fashion, the sort of writer whom one reads, perhaps, 30 years later, with amusement and rueful dismay.

Multi-cultural textual relativism won't explain away the competing brands of mediocrity which our forgiving, politically correct culture excuses on behalf of our wishful thinking. We can'twish heroines and geniuses into existence. They have to be there, they have to do it, and ambition and good campaigning and a great press agent won't get it done. We can't cheer and laud our lady poets on to greatness; they have to do the work themselves.

Question: If Anne Carson's work is as bad as you say it is, what could account for her reputation?

Answer: I hesitate to frame it in this way, but I'm afraid she's the child of the misguided academic tastes of the last quarter century. Poetry, which once belonged to its publics, and to a lesser degree, to the publishing industry in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, now belongs to the academic establishment. When I was an undergraduate at Berkeley in the 1960's, the English department largely abhorred and ignored contemporary literature. As far as they were concerned, literature had ended with Henry James and W.B. Yeats. Modernism--Eliot, Joyce, Woolf, Williams, Stevens, Moore--these were strange peacocks too dangerous to contemplate. But in the succeeding decades, all that changed. A revolution took place across the spectrum of the liberal arts establishment, and by the end of the 1980's, a complete change had occurred. Modernism, which had been ignored for so long, became "the tradition" and post-Modernism became the in-think [sic]. The application of "scientific" principles to literature became the vogue, and most of the traditional curriculum was shouldered aside to make room for the previously excluded/suppressed constituencies: women, those of color, third worlders, and those whose work didn't otherwise belong to "The Tradition" with which we had been inculcated during my antiquated tenure. Were Maya Angelou and David Henderson and Gary Soto and Lawson Fusao Inada and Charles Bukowski as good as Dryden and Browning and Marianne Moore? That question didn't so much matter. What was important was that anyone who belonged to the old systematic establishment of male white dominance was now passé, and needed to be put in their place. British and French and German philosophical theory was imported to lend weight and authority to the in-think. Traditional writers hadn't been sufficiently self-conscious of their own unjust privileges. How could you be important if you weren't aware of your own ethnic and cultural limitations? or your insufficiently guilty conscience?

Carson sprang out of the Classics department at the University of Toronto. She found it tough going in the English department--Milton threw her for a loop and she dropped out for a while. She eventually ended up in ancient languages--pretty dry stuff. But she eventually figured out how to marry that interest with her own confused contemporary world view, and sad personal psychology. She might have been content to confine herself to updated translations of the classic Greek and Latin warhorses. Christopher Logue had a nice little cottage-franchise going with Homer's Iliad. But the zeitgeist was ripe for her particular brand of carpet-bagging, and what better back door entrée to swank notoriety than Sapphic adaptation? I don't know what it is about Canadian academics in American universities--they seem to get a free pass.

The fact that there is no valid relationship between what is known about Stesichoros's poem, and Carson's bizarre reverie, is not vindicated by anything original she offers by way of style, narrative interest, or content. An ironic nonsense fairy tale is not an expedient for pretending that a speculative fiction shadowed by an unreconstructed fragment from antiquity is somehow more interesting than a straight novella (or true verse novel) would be. If Carson wanted to write a long short story about a freak who grows up to become a Gay photographer, that might require of her greater skills than she's capable of; Autobiography in Red might be the only way she could tell it, but rather than an intriguing straight fiction (in the manner of Updike's The Centaur, or John Gardner's mythical analogues), we get a lazy outline of disorganized scenes, written in slack (occasionally coarse) vernacular. You get the uncomfortable feeling that Carson thinks this is somehow a superior alternative to whatever other structural options she might have chosen to make her case; that it's the clearest way to showcase what talent she does possess. What is the point of employing an historical frame if the narrative bears no relation to its putative model? In other words, what does her use of an ancient text, known only in fragmentary relation, tell us about Greek literature or civilization? Calling a contemporary American or Canadian boy Geryon (or his lover Herakles) grates on your nerves every time it pops up, because the pretense is empty--there's no interesting echo that banks off of some previously established (even if obscure) classical template--it's just annoyingly cute--like someone calling their child Sinbad or Rasputin.

But we ordinarily don't give prizes and grants and awards and praise for half-hearted attempts which end in failure. Carson's received a Lannan, a Guggenheim, and a MacArthur. Can theNobel be in the offing? On the evidence of this "novel in verse" someone is fooling someone, and the empress has seduced not just the whole court, her entourage, the servants, but theordinary legumes as well.

Why is it that we should impute some ingenious poetic ingenuity to the application of classic ancient myth to a dreary story of adolescent coming-of-age?--indeed an ancient myth for which nearly all the details are missing! Maybe Carson fantasizes her work as some fragile fragmentary papyri surviving into a remote future, and that its wildly disjunctive and disorganized template will prove as fascinating to it, as her imagination of ancient Greek verse seems to be to her. Rather than mastering a form, in Autobiography of Red, she relies on extemporaneous short-hand diversions, without formal control, order, or definition. Rather than seeing these failures for what they are, several critics have interpreted the resulting mess as the work of genius. What this means is that the very shortcomings which would constitute a fair criticism of her efforts, can be used, ironically, by some, as a basis for her deliberate, successful intentions. I would argue that this is the symptom of a malaise in our current aesthetically bankrupt humanist milieu--but that's a question for another time.

Question: In an immediate sense, what then is it that you feel when you confront a book like Carson's Red?

Answer: Well, I feel two thinks distinctly. First, I feel indignation--indignation that meretricious art is accepted as authentic creative work, when it isn't. Autobiography of Redis a preposterous fake. Which leads to a second reaction--that its "success" indicates a general lowering of standards. When people like Carson, or Jorie Graham, are able to pass off liberal doses of semi-automatic, or pretentiously camp fantasy, offered as coherent experimental efforts, everyone loses, especially those young writers coming up, looking to significant models for direction or tips. When I was first trying to write, the work of Olson and Zukofsky and Burroughs was just coming to be known and appreciated. Maximus, "A" andNaked Lunch were difficult, formally challenging works, but they repaid the interest and study one might put into them, and they weren't proposed, executed and sold on the strength of the inflated currency of a bankrupt aesthetic. They weren't supposed to be good because they were bad (i.e., simple-minded, formally bland and confused, and relentlessly insincere). They were just more diligently attentive and perspicacious than the second-rate crud that passed for "literature" in contemporary periodicals and publishing houses. Olson and Zukofsky and Burroughs had done their homework, and had something compelling and original to offer. One of the commonplaces of experimental writing is that whoever aspires to successful innovation has to have mastered--at least in principle--all the kinds of stylistic and formal variation--or at least have a familiarity with them--in order to render them all passé or irrelevant with a daring new example. In other words, you have to "know everything" first before presuming to improve in any meaningful way on the past. Simply being different because you're a new body born 30-50 years ago isn't, in and of itself, a qualification for the task. We may all be unique, but that uniqueness doesn't, by itself, produce innovative literary artifacts. Or, it's possible to be unique, but not luminous, if I may use that term. Every young rap artist who gets up on the podium and begins spewing out expletives may be unique, but it's a uniqueness that is pedestrian. It's like thinking that simply making a poem that rhymes, which Eddie Guest and Robert Service do, makes the work important and worthy. It's like reading bad literature as a kind of social engineering: "Oh, how wonderful that this poor ghetto boy who was formed in violence and deprivation and a complete lack of disciplined study, can even speak, much less make rhyme!" It's like nuns going off to the Congo and dressing leprosy wounds.

What you have with Carson and Graham, is work that aspires to experimentation as a career strategy--as if this could be accomplished in the same way one exploits any other kind of professional hierarchy. Carson and Graham aren't innovators, they're copyists or imitators, who, realizing that the contemporary premium is upon being considered experimental innovators, have set their sights on becoming such. But the sad fact is they're practical-minded, level-headed women who've never had an original thought in their lives. So it becomes about pretending, and getting oneself talked about as if one were a strange, new, ingenious innovator, without ever having written anything truly innovative at all. I suppose it may even be possible for intellectuals, like Carson or Graham, to convince themselves that their oddball concoctions really do constitute a revelation of form and content. In the world of art, there are no obdurate benchmarks of value; each work stands apart, and it has become one of the touchstones of modern criticism (esp. that devoted to "diversity" & "relativity" of value), that any work, judged on the basis of its own internal "logic" may indeed be an expression of unique genius. Darger is as great as Pollock--they just came from different places.

Contrary to expectation, having said that doesn't make me a formalist. In fact, I admire innovation much more than brilliant imitation. But sophomoric mimicry doesn't rise to the level of fraud that I see in Carson (and in Graham). These are mature, seasoned scholars and writers. They've been around the block a time or two. But when, as as serious writer, you sit down at the desk, alone, there's no one there to help you. Either you are inspired, or you aren't. It can't be faked. It isn't a matter of good intentions, or of trying harder, or of clever borrowing, or of tinkering with chance combinations or free association.

We try to separate the expression of taste from an objective standard of value. Different kinds of methodologies may be employed for different purposes, and experimental works of art may be proposed to challenge what is meant by coherent organization, or novel combinations of means. The problem with a work like Carson's Autobiography of Red, is that its personae are completely confused--separating these different voices in the text wouldn't have any use. The author's omniscient "I am thinking" is not separated from any character's "thinking" and the descriptive narration is not separated from the nightmare visions of the characters. Allowing the reader to imagine (or assume) that the plot could be a fantasy-invention of one of the delusional characters is a cynical cop-out, familiar to readers of fantasy-genre fiction--and yet this is exactly what's left, when you take away the stupid classical "frame" and the puerile teenage daydreams which constitute the "action" of the story. The "novel" is episodic, because there's no connection between the events as presented to us--they're neither convincingly chronological, nor thematically arranged: They could be reshuffled in any order, because there is no hierarchy of disclosure, nothing builds, it just accretes.

Rather than wanting to make clear one aspect from another, Carson counts on the blurring of these distinctions--in other words, she invites and welcomes this kind of expedient, unearned abstraction into the work, as if that were evidence of some high level of sensibility. Rather than showing control and insight, there is a confession of irresponsible play, like throwing chess pieces at the ceiling and imagining that how they fall onto the floor might tell us something about how to play the game of kings. It isn't just that this is easy to do; it's the cheek of presuming that someone will find this deliberately disruptive mischief interesting; or, even that, not finding it interesting, might actually be taken as a proof of its value!

Question: So is it the form or the subject matter you most object to? Or is that distinction of little use here . . . ?

Answer: I think both are problematic here. Carson says in an interview: "In surfaces, perfection is less interesting. For instance, a page with a poem on it is less attractive than a page with a poem on it and some tea stains. Because the tea stains add a bit of history. It’s a historical attitude. After all, texts of ancient Greeks come to us in wreckage and I admire that, the combination of layers of time that you have when looking at a papyrus that was produced in the third century BC and then copied and then wrapped around a mummy for a couple hundred years and then discovered and put in a museum and pieced together by nine different gentlemen and put back in the museum and brought out again and photographed and put in a book. All those layers add up to more and more life. You can approximate that in your own life. Stains on clothing." What she's telling us here is that the decay or fragmentation brought about unintentionally by the messiness of time produces something which is inherently more "interesting" than a mere scaffolding of formal intention. Intention versus the accidental vestiges of a ruined original. So what she sets about to do, is to recreate a deliberately flawed construct which will have some of the "interest"--or "the combination of layers of time" which she thinks is so fascinating about ancient texts. She's imagining a perfect text which is then manipulated into a fake fragmentary state of incompleteness, and calling that a brilliant work of "decreation" [her word]. Is decreation actually an interesting way of constructing texts? Is it possible to go backwards into imaginary time to make imagined reconstructions of some actual pre-existing text, which has been lost to posterity, and create a makeshift alternative version with a new setting and new characters?

Question: If we wanted to grant her the right to perform such experiments on fragmentary ancient texts . . . I mean, don't all translators perform this same function of imaginary recreation when they create new poems out of other ancient language texts? Aren't all translators imagining Sappho and Catullus and then making up poems that sound to them as if these poets might have written them? Isn't it just about dramatic voice writing? And isn't Carson just making up new characters to fill in the lost faces of the dramatic personae?

Answer: The point isn't that translations are inherently flawed, or that our only task is to "re-imagine" a fragmentary original in the language of our own time. Carson has translated Sappho, and performed the same kind of re-imagining that all translators must do. But in her own original work, she sidesteps the whole problem of invention and originality by building bogus structures (from classical literature) upon which to hang a few dangling diadems of her own. And it's a failure not just of intention, but of performance. She realized at some point that re-doing classical Greek theatre pieces would have little interest. (Robinson Jeffers believed that he could simply carry Euripides and Sophocles into a contemporary setting and the result would be as relevant as Dreiser and Steinbeck, that rhetoric and high-minded austere diction would carry the day, raising us up and over two thousand years of wasted aspiration and travail to the simple verities of 50 BC.) So she thought: post-Modern permission would enable her to use ancient texts--even substantially non-existent (or non-surviving) ones (for which there are only pieces and reports and rumors)--and simply parse together a kind of confused deck of possible scenes and statements; and her defense would be that she was trying out a new kind of "form." But in order to construct convincing new forms, you have to have a clear vision of what the new form might be. Her fake "verse" sections don't constitute anything like a controlled, compelling form--they're simply outline notes with sentence fragments and run-ons.

Gertrude Stein's primary weakness as a writer is that she has virtually no formal interest beyond the quality of her language. She doesn't think formally, so there is no narrative in her work beyond the percolating correspondences of her phrases and sentences. Nouns and verbs and eventualities and consequences are rendered completely irrelevant. Indeed, it might be true to say that there are no "things" in her work at all, just words and qualities and "senses" of things and feelings. But Anne Carson isn't a stylistic innovator. Her language--certainly the language of Autobiography of Red--is plain and unadorned. It has no force, and that (writing effectively) is obviously not something of which she appears capable (on the evidence of her published work), or it's something she decided to ignore completely--in which sense she is really not Modern at all, since the innovations of Modernism and Post-Modernism seem to have no interest to her. She basically has the mind of a shut-in who watches daytime soaps. I'm not being harsh or cutting here in the least. If you set out deliberately to make a story where the language is completely uninspired--is, that is to say, as flat as today's TV reality show, but based on "classical themes" and tropes, her work is very much what you would end up with.AOR is no more a novel than Stein's Ida: A Novel is a novel, so maybe I'm begging the question.

It isn't enough merely to make the claim that Greek and Roman poetry possesses a musical quality that doesn't "come through" directly into English, and then to use that as a buttress for a flat prose text demarcated into the supposed "lines" of a "verse novel." That would make great prose stylists, like William Maxwell, or Eudora Welty, into "poets" when that clearly is not the case. Cribs are not poems, and a story text broken up into varying line lengths isn't poetry just because you say it is. An inability to make a convincing musical line can't be legitimated by a claim of prosaic simplicity, which is what makes Autobiography of Red such a camp put-on. Carson's mystical notions of her own misapprehensions aside, no academic has a right to use dullness and a lack of wit and imagination as a proof of ingenious application. If you're going to break your prose text--a prose text that is musically uninspired and flat--into measured lines (though Carson's "measure" is pretty sloppy at best)--you'd better have some underlying motivation behind that choice, other than simply thinking that chopping up prose constitutes "verse." If "verse" is nothing more than the "setting" of lines of certain (varying or equivalent) lengths, without regard for syllables, musical rhythms, rhyme, or rhetorical correspondences, then what you're writing is not poetry, no matter what you call it.

Question: Must a writer always be responsible for every aspect of the reception of her text? Writing is a condition of the transformation of time.

Answer: It's like a mixture of passivity and alienation. Carson makes a point of describing her character--" I think that’s why sometimes I am spooky to people. Because this glare is mixed with an infantile charm that disarms, so they have to deal with both"--as if she were a strange phenomenon, the way people have been imagining Sylvia Plath for half a century. That mysterious aura is seen as an advantage in the interpretation of art--like Poe or Bram Stoker--a demonic side of one's nature. But, again, simply wanting to have this quality, and readingyour audience's confusion or mystification as the evidence of the existence of this demonic quality in oneself is cheap opportunism and self-delusion. People are so blown away by my weird poetry! Woo. Carson might wish to think of her work as papyri wrapped around a mummy for three thousand years, but she's at the wrong end of the process. Her work in the present isn't an ancient artifact, any more than a new Toyota coming off the tail end of the production line. Attempting to create an aura of meaning and importance to your work by referencing and framing from ancient texts is gratuitously selfish and vain. Pound believed that previously neglected traditions could reinvigorate contemporary literature, and he set about trying to carry that notion into his present by translating and imitating the effects he saw in those traditions (i.e., ancient Chinese or Renaissance Italian). That's a legitimate attempt at resuscitation. We respond to the power of his recreations. But this isn't what Carson is attempting to do in AOR. She wants to capitalize on the value of ancient literature by framing her narrative in the context of ancient mythical archetypes, without making any evident attempt to explain what the relationship between the ancient and the modern is. You can't have it both ways: Your work can't be a retelling unless it's a retelling. You can't change everything about a narrative and "keep" its original meaning. You can't shift plots and epochs and roles, the way Hollywood producers and writers do, and retain anything like the significance of an original conception. A cinematic version of an archetype story rarely makes any sense of its putative original, because the devices of successful movie-making follow different priorities. Carson's work tells us nothing--or nothing useful--about a distant Greek poet whose work is mostly lost. You don't have the feeling that the Greek poet (Stesichoros) would have any comprehension of what Carson is about, and even if he did, he'd regard it as trivial. What Carson admires about the Greek conceptions of life and feeling are locked inside history, but she thinks she can augment them and install them inside imagined contemporary individuals who share none of the qualities of their namesakes. It's a kind of cheating that will get you through the process, but it doesn't make interesting reading. It's fakery.

It's a little like my creating a narrative by calling my hero Oedipus, the CEO of a computer corporation who likes to drive racecars and shag lady boxers, who doesn't kill off his Mother but loses his eyesight in a crash after he realizes he's slept with his illegitimate sister. The part of the chorus could be played by a ragtag group of baying paparazzi. Doing so wouldn't be a comic burlesque, just an irritating soap opera along the lines of Harold Robbins or Jackie Collins. Any energy derived from naming the hero Oedipus and calling him that in a contemporary setting would just be bogus.

Question: Couldn't we think of her work the way we do about, for instance, Armand Schwerner's Tablets, about the imaginative "recreation" of a fragmentary fictional ancient text complete with footnotes and indecipherable passages?

Answer: Yes I'm sure that's precisely how Carson imagines her work to be seen, as the "filled-in" portion of lost, imagined, originals. But her "verse novel" isn't an effort in recreation, or a parody of an academic holographic specimen. It's an attempt to be seen as making something utterly clever and ingenious, a new invention.

Part of the confusion in this leap of faith inherent in Carson's AOR is the sense of sexual confusion which permeates most of her work. Some of the time she sounds just like a garden variety feminist, the rest of the time she seems to be emulating the male archetype of power and privilege. The authorial voice has a neutral quality in it that neither respects verisimilitude nor appears to comprehend it. Her projection of her confusion onto the characters in AORseems to me to have literally no bearing on the Greek model, it's just a personal hang-up she has that she obsesses over, and expects the reader to accept as an omniscient given. At one point, Carson says "then there’s been what people call a paradigm shift, which means now you can’t do anything wrong" which means, apparently, to Carson, that she can have anything she publishes be accepted as something unique and genuine, that that permission has entitled her to gloss over the issue of persuasive or convincing formal statement, and that simply writing anything down can suffice as a personal masterpiece. To me, this isn't a matter merely of personal taste, or changing fashion.

So the story of Geryon is the story of Carson's interior psychological daydream in which she wanders around in a state of confused grace, by turns infuriated, embarrassed, crushed, resentful, unresponsive, with a sort of rote determination not to perform the expected. In that sense "autobiography" is an apt title for what this work is, an analogous nightmare of Carson's dream of becoming a sexually ambiguous, conflicted artist. It doesn't even seem to matter much to the story she tells, whether Geryon is already a good photographer, or may become one at some point in the future--what matters is his sense of being monster, of being in a state of displacement, or exile from sanity, from the context of the normal--what happens in the outward lives of the characters is just window-dressing. She says "no matter what the thought would be if it were fully worked out, it wouldn’t be as good as the suggestion of a thought that the space gives you." Those are the words (sentiments) of someone who has so little respect for the truth that she believes her fantasy of someone else's lost work is superior to a presumed unknown model. She thinks she can write Sappho better than Sappho, or that her imagination of Sappho is better than yours, because she's so confused about her own psyche--as if that confusion were a badge of honor.

Question: There's this random quality of your rambling on about her that seems like a harangue, as if you were dumping your frustrations out as a purging . . . "

Answer: Actually, randomness is very much to the point. Carson says: "I'm happy to do things by accident . . . what's interesting to me is once the accident has happened, once I happen to have Simonides and Paul Celan on my desk together . . . it could be Simonides and celery, it doesn't matter . . . it matters in so far as I'm going to make a work of art out of it. It seems totally arbitrary on the one hand and on the other, totally careful about who I am as a thinker." The serene confidence of self-delusion! as if self-delusion were an aesthetic strategy! Walnuts and Proust! Metal filings and Wittgenstein! It's all good, it's all in, we don't have to worry, God will find a way, we'll all become loved and famous and wealthy and droll. The Greek idea of fate--that we are all just playthings of the gods--might lend Carson some credence for her aesthetic choices, as if one could pretend that she has merely taken dictation from the oracle(s) of her ambitious nature and then confused them with her shopping and to-do lists. Or perhaps the emperor got bad advice. The excuses are more interesting than the original sins.

[to be continued]

_____________

1. Quoted from Our Savage Art, Poetry and the Civil Tongue, New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

2. Capote, Truman. Music for Chameleons. New York: Random House, 1980. What Capote showed was the opportunity to treat one's own opinions as a dialectic in which one could, as the saying goes, hold two opposing views without losing control of one's identity (going mad).

3. The irony, of course, might be that Moore had so little going on in her life that she had almost nothing to hide. Her complicated sexuality, however, doesn't seem to have been ordinary at all, to judge by the pressure of its subtle presence in her work.

Anne Carson's Red - Part One

2012-01-13T08:16:00.000-08:00

Reading the Anne Carson Interview in Paris Review No. 171, Fall 2004 this last weekend, I was moved to wonder, as I had in the past, just why her work has received so much favorable attention, and why so many people who should know better have been praising her work, and lionizing her as the feminist's answer to John Ashbery.

Perhaps it is her grounding in classical Greek literature. Tradition-bound critics and poets invariably admire writing which bears the stamp of classical literary tropes, even if (or when) it may be so unlike its putative models that it's unrecognizable in that context as literature at all. Classical fall-back is always the salve for anxiety about the new, especially when the work is so resistant to comprehension or explanation that even its Author is at a loss to account for it. Leavened with liberal doses of straight "translation" doesn't hurt either, particularly when it's of Euripides, Aeschylus, or Sappho.

What is it about Canadians that makes them so bland--so vanilla and inert and obtuse? I've always liked Roderick Haig-Brown (though he was born in Great Britain), but I can't think of any other Canadians who do it for me. I tried to like Margaret Atwood's poetry. No luck. I don't think of Leonard Cohen as a poet, but a song-writer who strayed out of his metier. I once heard Michael Ondaatje read a couple of interesting poems. Wiki lists about 650 names, but I've only heard of about eight of them. This is going to irritate lots of people, but it's a fact that most American readers are completely unaware of the vast majority of Canadian poets. We seem separated by an invisible wall at the border. When I've traveled to Canada, I've sensed a strong undercurrent of distrust, even of contempt, for America and Americans. I would like to believe that that's a misapprehension based on bad publicity, our confused foreign policy, or what the world thinks of us based on the art we export abroad. But I think it's also a symptom of a huge inferiority complex, which is almost racial in its intensity. Canadians have a "clean" country, things have a superficial sense of order, there's a kind of cottage industry of presumptuous propriety which they do nothing to conceal. "We're superior," they seem to be saying, "and if you don't like it, that's tough." The evidence for this supposed superiority being their refusal to succumb to the chaotic tendencies and excesses of their big blustery neighbor to the south. Or perhaps it's a lingering vanity that having once been part of the British Commonwealth, they're a tad more sophisticated than us obstreperous Colonials.

Carson makes a case for herself as a maladjusted teen and young adult. She describes herself as a cold fish, sexually ambiguous--perhaps even a-sexual--who developed an obsession for the Greek language while still in middle school. Like many of her contemporary academics, she's spent much of her adult life teaching in America. And her American audience--the audience for her work--seems better suited to the kind of writing she's published in her life--than her native country-folk. She's in that sense more "American" than Canadian, though those aspects of her character which are revealed in her work, seem more deeply Canadian.

Occasionally, one encounters the work of a writer whose impulse to abstraction and discontinuity is so primordial that one is left without any kind of mooring or guidepost even to attempt to describe it. The first fact to comprehend about Carson's work is that nearly all of it is based on Greek models, or tropes. Her fascination with the Greek language has led her to a lifelong attempt to understand ancient Greek civilization--its ways of thinking, its imagery, its worldview and religious iconography. All of these she imagines for herself in an eccentric way, freely incorporating details (both real and imagined) from her life, as well as surrealistic events and imagery, in such a way as to produce hybrid prose cribs as of some larger formal structure. The inadequacy of these fragments and disorganized sequences is excused with the claim that she neither has the interest nor the skill to make them more organized than they are, and that this disorganization embodies a vision of a sort of archeological incunabula, as if we could read her as we read Sappho, with a full knowledge of her incompleteness and fragmentary status. In addition, her defensive position with respect to feminist projections of history and meaning leads her into many peculiar gendered thematic dilemmas.

Adopting classical models is a very traditional choice. Writers have been translating and "adapting" Greek dramatic works and poems for centuries. Robinson Jeffers spent a good deal of his career either re-writing Greek drama, or trying to write new kinds of poetic-dramatic works based on vaguely contemporary subject-matter. Countless writers try their hand at adapting Homer--Christopher Logue comes to mind. Pope did the whole of the Iliad, and a major part of the Odyssey. But Carson, in her own work, is quite at odds with any literal use of Greek literature. In her own work, Greek literature is like a fantasy world, which bears aresemblance to accepted historical research and surmise, but which exists primarily to furnish her with a context and a pretext for the presentation of very abstract and difficult speculative meta-fictions. Again, none of this is new territory. John Gardner, for instance, used classical literary prototypes in his fictions. But Carson's employment of it is different in that she feels no obligation to historical accuracy or to artistic truth: Her post-modern license permits her to excuse any kind of excess, as if the difficulty and confusion her work projects were self-evidently finished and perfect. This notion of disjunct artifice has become tiresomely familiar to readers of post-Modern verse--as if the casual failure to make sense were somehow a victory over power and fate. It certainly may be a victory over common sense, when critics who should know better praise work which they can't interpret, either because its referents are so obscure that the work becomes opaque, or because they simply can't figure it out. Put up a persiflage of disconnected event, obscure reference, and clever disorganization, and you have the makings of a post-Modernist blockbuster.

Ah, time's ravages!

Here are two recent Carson poems from The New Yorker, of all places.

Tag

this

Insatiable April, trees in place,

in their scraped-out place,

their standing.

Standing way.

Their red branch areas,

green shoot areas (shock),

river, that one.

I surprised a goose and she hissed.

I walk and walk with cold hands.

Back at the house it is filled with longing,

nothing to carry longing away.

I look back over my life.

I try to find analogies.

There are none.

I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.

Not like this.

It was not this.

Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

your

("unalterable")

Actually not. Feigned leap into--

river glimpsed through bare

[waiting]

[some noun] for how thought breaks up around you not here

your clothes not wet in this deep mirror--

what Holderlin calls die tageszeichen, signs scored into the soul by the god of each day

your answer scars, I still don't know--

years from now, these

notations in the address book, this frantic hand.

Alembic: The presentation of a series of notations which are the notes towards a possible poem, in its half-finished state, dull repetitions, unspecified emotional dilemmas, with incomplete gaps where words or phrases would later be supplied--these are cute tricks which do nothing either to demonstrate the wit or thought of the writer, or to move her beyond curiosity. The lacunae and brief parsings do nothing to further our appreciation of the emotion.

Ode to the Sublime by Monica Vitti

I want everything

Everything is a naked thought that strikes.

A foghorn sounding through fog makes the fog seem to

be everything.

Quail eggs eaten from the hand in fog make everything

aphrodisiac.

My husband shrugs when I say so, my husband shrugs at

everything.

The lakes where his factory has poisoned everything are as

beautiful as Bruegel.

I keep my shop, in order that I may sell everything there, empty

but I leave the light on.

Everything might spill.

Do you know that in the deepest part of the sea everything goes

transparent? asks my husband's friend

Corrado and I say Do you know how afraid I am?

Everything requires attention, I never relax my neck even when

kissing Corrado.

Kant says "everything" exists only in our mind, attended by a

motion of pleasure and

pain that throws itself back and forth in me when I lay on

Corrado's bed fighting with

everything with Corrado watching from across the room then he

came to the bed and

mounted me and this made no different except now I had to

fight everything through Corrado, which I did

"undaunted" (so Kant) on his freezing bed in its midnight glare.

What will you take? I ask Corrado who is leaving for Patagonia

and when he says 2 or 3

valises I say if I had to go away I would take with me everything

I see.

To this Corrado says nothing which is not I think the opposite of

everything.

Doesn't seem right is what my husband would say, he says this

about everything--

especially since I came out of the clinic, a clinic for people who

want everything, everything I see

everything I taste everything I touch everyday even the

ashtrays and at

the clinic I had only one question What shall I do with my eyes?

The first thing to remark is the complete lack of a formal control over materials. The progression of lines is completely lacking in rhetorical tension. The poem's structure is that of a soliloquy begun with a non-sequitur, and then sustained without rests. There is no music in the phrasing, and no suggestion of a relationship between the ostensible speaker, the poet, and the possible implications the dramatic situation proposes. Though the lines are centered, there seems no urgent purpose to its having been set this way, except perhaps to de-emphasize the lack of a formal setting.

Ostensibly, it's an adaptation of the film Red Desert [1964, which Michelangelo Atonioni wrote and directed], a classic art-house film from the heyday of the Italian New Wave. Carson's appropriation of the quasi-feminist content of the woman's mental instability, sexual vulnerability and blank animation is completely typical and opportunistic. In other words, there is nothing she brings to an interpretation of the film's bare outline that is not already in it. Adapting situations from other works is a routine technique. Traditional historical tropes pervade Western literature over the last 2000 years. The point has never been the mere evocation of the familiar emotion or situation of the model, but to capture it in something like a heightened state of dramatic intensity, or to offer new points of view about them. Carson writes her poem as if the recapitulation of the plot constituted an amazing feat, the whole business of the poem.

The story of the anxiety and disorientation of a fragile woman protagonist allows the film-maker (and Carson) the freedom to conceive of her as a victim, a personification which has reached the stage of cliché in our present cultural dialogue. It is well beyond cliché--it is a dumb idea. But writers like Carson have to get their ducks lined up. You could pick Joan of Arc, or Susan B. Anthony, or Florence Nightingale, but the important thing is the persecution of women. There have been, and there will be more, works based on the persecution of women, in literature. One looks forward to them. But the choice to adapt themes like this, without the merest effort to process the model beyond a simple report, or crib, is completely typical of Carson. One is left with the feeling of waiting for another shoe to drop. "Ode to the Sublime"?"I want everything." Well, what an astonishing idea. Do run-on sentences really qualify as an example of the elevation of style which Longinus posits as one of the sources of sublimity in language?

Carson may have arrived too late on the scene to benefit from the excesses of the Language School's approach to literary form. One might theorize that her work is an unconscious example of the decay of rhetoric arising from the corruption of spirit. But claiming territory by fiat isn't enough. Are these the daydreams of a translator who literally thinks in cribs? Nabokov constructed a "novel" out of the translation of a narrative poem and appended exegetical appurtenances [Pale Fire, 1962]. Lately we've been treated to the hybrid fiction as a cross-bred historical-academic fairy tale; there was French Lieutenant's Woman [1969], and then A.S. Byatt's Possession: A Romance [1990]--each balancing past and present linked dramatic situations played off against each other. These are each a carefully constructed fictions, in which reality and fantasy, dancing animatedly side by side, are kept separate and distinct. But Carson's post-Modern objects are not lenses placed between us and another time, clarifying our sense of our own reality, or making more vivid our knowledge of a distant situation. Hers are deliberate distortions (arising from obscure or fragmentary sources), designed to celebrate the failure of comprehension, and glorying in the ability to twist accounts into jealously selfish and fake preferred versions, the better to suit her unique set of prejudices and PC views. One possible exercise of this tendency would be to re-imagine primitive mythical prototypes, but that would throw the burden (and the responsibility) for interest and authenticity squarely on the author's shoulders, which Carson would be unlikely to want; established myths lend an air of genuine license to her animadversions, despite the fact that she pays them not the least duty of respect. For her, ancient Greek myths are a means to an end, an intention which is appropriated for the expedience of fake authority.

Scholars mourn the loss of ancient texts, and speculate about the meaning and purpose of surviving fragments. Our interest in such residual evidence does not, however, suggest that the resulting dilemma constitutes an aesthetic principle in itself. Carson's texts often rely on mysterious, fragmentary content, and broken-off assertions and incomplete situations, perhaps believing that these might be seen as metaphorical revisions, or as metaphors for a mental state of disarray. This is like trying to justify a crime by insisting on a lack of responsibility or awareness on the part of the perpetrator. We may understand that the failure of a writer to accomplish more than a fragmentary hodge-podge of statements could in itself be evidence of an inability to do better, but any writer's attempt to convince us that this failure is interesting and valuable because of its shortcomings, is simply a pathetic pleading. The notion of implying an abnormal psychological component to the voice of a poem or story is among the most tired, discredited ideas in Modernist and post-Modernist literature, since it is wholly gratuitous to the case.

[The text here breaks off in favor of an interview, which is continued in the next day's blog entry.]

The Leathern Cloak

2012-01-11T11:01:00.000-08:00

Purple

The orchid

unfurls

itself

in a

paroxysm

of ecstatic

self-immolation

Its

excruciating

slow

dance of

becoming

a putrid

exfolating

Decadence

Satin Sheen - Irresistable Concoction

2012-01-07T10:04:00.000-08:00

Satin is one of the sexiest of fabrics--has been since like forever. The stuff has been around since the Middle Ages, when it was originally made out of silk. Something to do with how the threads are woven--I don't have a clue about textiles. One of its most familiar adaptations is ballet shoes. Great flexibility, style, sophistication, chic. Gotta' love'em.

Cocktail dresses comprise a whole segment of the dress-making industry. Women supposedly wear them out to formal evening occasions, though most women wouldn't be caught dead trying to wear them. Either you're a candidate or you're not. Beauty is the least forgiving of qualities. Which is not to say our idea of it doesn't change. Bustles, anyone?

In any event, a cocktail can suggest different kinds of moods, various ambiences. A black tie affair might dictate a flamin' red mini, like that one above. Few men have the opportunity to accompany someone who looks that good. But in the event, it might be well to consider the following concoction. It's a smooth runway to a cool aura. The sheen on satin rustling in the mirrored spots, undulating reflections. Drag her kicking and screaming to the changing rooms.

As usual, by proportion--

3 parts Boodles gin

1 part St. Germain liqueur

1 part limoncello

1 part cherry brandy

2 parts freshly squeezed ocktail grapefruit

--swirled round and served up in a chilled cocktail glass.

You won't be sorry.

The French Country Cocktail

2011-12-23T13:25:00.000-08:00

This concoction doesn't have much recognizably French in it (unless you include the Violette), so it must be that what inspires me to call it French Country has something to do with the spirit of its flavor.

On an aesthetic level, the spirit of France has been a cultural inspiration throughout the world for at least four centuries. French was once the lingua franca--the chosen language of communication and diplomacy--as English has now become--and as Chinese may someday become.

In England and America, French culture has been held in such esteem partly as a result of its Mediterranean aspect--its taste in food, its liberality of indulgence--but also because it shares with the Anglo nations a tradition of revolutionary freedom and refined intellectualism. In the 19th and 20th Centuries, French art led the way, though that torch was passed to America after World War II.

Above all, the spirit of France is the spirit of light--Paris is often called the City of Light. A spectrum is a panoply of the colors of the spectrum, illuminated by the white light of day. We think of our insights and discoveries and inventions as illuminations, exposing dark areas to our view, revealing truth to the curious mind. The various flavors of this cocktail inspire a sense of lucid translucency.

Ingredients by proportion--

2 parts Tanqueray # 10 Gin

1/2 part cocktail grapefruit

1/2 part fresh lemon juice

1/2 part cinnamon liqueur

1/2 part maraschino liqueur

1/2 Créme de Violette liqueur

Shaken lightly and served up.

So, in the spirit of illumination, a toast to enlightenment!

Earthquakes & the Mirage of "Preparedness"

2011-12-22T07:09:00.000-08:00

Scientists are as vain as other people, they just tend to hide their vanity inside empirical corroborations and pompous notions of authority. Geologists are among the proudest researchers and theorists in all of science. They can point with confidence and pride to the advances made in their field, beginning with the discoveries and confirmations which begin in the 19th Century, and continue all the way down to our own moment, the era of plate tectonics. We all like plate tectonics, because it explains much of the seismic and volcanic activity which mankind has been experiencing since . . . well, the Beginning.

For those of you who don't know it, the earth is a very hot ball of matter. The interior of our planet is very hot. The crust, the part inhabited by living organic matter, is extremely thin. And it's comparatively fluid. That may seem counter-intuitive. Rocks, after all, we think of as brittle, hard. But the truth is the surface of the earth is more like jelly than granite. And it rests not on "bedrock" but on a bed of very hot stuff which is inherently unstable. Planets are made of star-matter, they're fragments of something very much larger which exploded. These were very hot, very energetic events. The fragments of the Big Bang are still smoldering. That fire, that energy, is comparatively long-lived, in human time. In fact, when we're considering what is referred to as "geologic time" we're generally speaking in terms of tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or tens of millions, or hundreds of millions of years. Segments of time of that extent tend to dwarf human time: for instance, the life of a single individual, or the length of a century, or of a millennium. In human terms 1000 years seems like a very long time, many generations. Most people lose track of their ancestors within a generation or two--those cultural memories gets lost in the distractions of the immediate present.

Geologists now know that geological events cause enormous changes on the earth's surface, and sudden, violent events (like large volcanic eruptions, or larger earthquakes) quickly get people's attention. But the intensity and effect of such events tends to be exaggerated in the public imagination. As man has acquired more control over his environment, we've become habituated to the notion that we can mitigate against such occurrences. We can use our fear and apprehension to motivate ourselves to make more concerted efforts to control our environment, or, failing that, to prepare for the predictable consequences of regularly occurring geologic events. It seems sensible to make reasonable mitigations that could save society from needless harm and destruction. But having said that, there are other considerations that complicate and undercut the optimistic slant that scientists put on the value of our knowledge of geology.

For one thing, geological events are so large, so powerful, that it's unreasonable to assume that mankind will ever command the energy and leverage required to have any significant effect upon, or control over, their progress. You can't "stop" a volcano, any more than you can influence the orbit of the moon. You can't hold back an earthquake fault. These are phenomena completely beyond our control. Man stands in awe of such natural forces. They are like gods. They rule our existence, albeit fitfully and unpredictably.

Geologists of course, would like to believe that science can eventually explain everything. That's what drives scientific inquiry. We've gone to the moon. We've figured out natural selection and the DNA code. We can measure the speed of light. We know about Black Holes. We've figured out relativity, partly. We should be able to study plate tectonics, to map the earth's crust, and to deduce from our measurements the frequency and likely times of geological events like eruptions and fault slips. And there's been considerable progress in our increasing knowledge of why earthquakes happen, and what their frequency seems to be, just by collating empirical observations made over time.

It's become fashionable over the last quarter century, for the media to encourage people to "get serious" about our awareness of the impacts of large geologic events. Every few months, they'll have a fear-mongering exposé, filled with dire warnings about the terrific dangers to society of earthquakes. Geology has provided us with reliable maps of all of the earth's fault lines, the margins of the plates which make up the shifting pieces of the earth's crust. We know where the faults lie, and we've begun to make time-lines of the rates of occurrence of slippage along the ones that are the most active. But here is where the contrast between geologic event times, and human event horizons, run parallel.

In human time, whole civilizations can be born, expand into great cultures, thrive and decay, within a couple or three hundred years. Cities can be built, the land brought under cultivation, and the population explode by millions upon millions. This happened in North America after the first European colonizations along the Eastern seaboard. Thirty generations of human time. Buildings and roads and reservoirs. Harbors and canals and power grids.

Volcanic eruptions and big earthquakes are frightening things. Not only because they happen unexpectedly, but because of their evident force. They upset people, and they can be destructive. Earthquakes can cause buildings to collapse, roadways to buckle, and can cause fires, and interruptions in vital services such as water, power, sewage. In developed areas, the amount of damage they cause can be staggering, especially where construction practices, and service systems are rudimentary and fragile. And humankind has shown little regard for the advisability of building in areas known to be at risk for such events.

But the larger question still arises: In what ways do geologic events challenge our ability to work around probable occurrences? Are there practical steps that can and should be taken to minimize or mitigate the dangers and damages associated with them? If, for instance, it is reckoned that a certain earthquake fault is known to slip or slide once every 100-250 years, does it behoove society to go to any lengths to prepare for the "next big one"? The popular view these days, is that we should be getting about preparing for earthquakes.

The comparative study of different kinds of risk is called risk management. There's a whole discipline devoted to calibrating the amount of distress that certain kinds of dangers pose to people or structures. On a scale of intensity, natural disasters--such as hailstorms, tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, mudslides, floods, fires, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions--all are empirically gauged on a curve of known effects. The more frequent such occurrences, the greater the likelihood that someone living in a high risk area will be affected. Degrees of severity also play a part. A small hailstorm in Nebraska may break a few automobile windshields, and penetrate a few cheap roof structures, but by and large it's more frightening, more curious, than devastating. A big hurricane, on the other hand, depending on its intensity, and where it reaches land, will always cause a lot of harm.

Nations and states and counties and towns all have to consider what the best policy should be, to protect their respective citizens from unnecessary risk. But how much preparation is practical, and how much merely speculative? Society tends to become preoccupied, at any given moment, with the death rates from disease, or from wars, or from terrorist acts, or from driving on the highway, or jumping from bridges or high buildings. The events of 9/11, for instance, were probably more destructive, in terms of human life, and in terms of structures, and in terms of ordinary peace of mind, than most earthquakes ever are--certainly in the U.S. Could 9/11 have been prevented? Could it have been mitigated by planning and emergency preparedness?

We're told over and over by "the authorities" these days, that all our building structures, our elevated freeways, our bridges, must be "retrofitted" to make them more stable, more secure against probable shaking in earthquakes. The costs involved in such "retrofits" is considerable. To retrofit a house, or an apartment building. or a city skyscraper--to make it more rigid and stable, to withstand greater degrees of eccentric movement--is very difficult.

Are such retrofits cost effective? In other words, is it in society's interest to expend large amounts of public and private money to prepare for an event that may be as far away from happening as a century or more?

As the world population continues to explode, the value of human life goes down. This may sound cold-bloodedly insane, but as a fact of life it's undeniable. Man's ability to over-run his environment has gotten completely out of hand. We hear of thousands and thousands dying of hunger and disease and civil unrest across the globe, and we hardly blink an eyelid. And as populations expand, more and more people are put "at risk" by inhabiting areas where the conditions exist for large events to claim the lives and work of millions. Global warming threatens to eliminate many of the largest port cities on the planet, as a result of rising sea-levels. And yet the nations of the earth are doing virtually nothing about this.

And yet, cities and counties and states are warned that if they don't retrofit all structures and services against the next big quake, armageddon will sweep thousands away, and wipe whole cities off the face of the map. What if all the money that we spend preparing for the next geologic event were spent instead on more immediate needs and purposes, based on the human time scale, instead of the geologic one? What is the price we're willing to pay for the fear we feel about imponderable geologic events such as earthquakes? Certainly there are sensible things we can do to "get ready" for probable dangers. Houses and buildings can be constructed with lateral bracing and lockdowns. Elevated passages can be built that will not fall down when shaken. Children can be taught to dive under desks. And you can put a jug of water, a few cans of pork and beans, and a good flashlight in the kitchen pantry. But in a practical human time sense, wasting society's resources to prepare for an event they may well not occur within our lifetime, or even that of our grandchildren, seems like a boondoggle for the contracting industry.

Let those geologists prognosticate and wave their hands in the air, presaging doom and gloom and the end of civilization as we know it. Great catastrophes which happen once or twice a century are interesting to contemplate, but common sense tells us that organizing our lives around such unlikely and infrequent events is silly. Some people aren't satisfied unless they've built a moat around themselves, and have a stock of weapons and emergency supplies handy at all times. They imagine a post-apocalyptic world where everyone or every family is on their own, living in a jungle of threat and competition. But this view is a fantasy. If society's history of response to crisis is any guide, disasters tend to bring out the best in people, and civilizations rebuild after great devastations. And what we do to each other in wars and disputes and neglect, far outweighs the harm done by nature. The pain and death and destruction we wrought on Iraq, for instance, is many times greater than any combination of natural disasters that could ever have happened there.

Framing as Meaning

2011-12-21T11:57:00.002-08:00

I made the above image in 1988, along the Oregon Coast. It's an 8x10 contact print, taken with a "normal" focal length lens (for this format). It's a shot taken at about early to mid-afternoon, facing West toward the ocean, and this little tide-pool is formed from the run-off rivulet of fresh water flowing from higher ground across the beach.

This is in my view a typical kind of tide-pool study. The attractions of such subject matter are obvious, in that it's easy to set up, and easy to conceptualize a number of different possible versions, no one of which is the correct one, no one of which can be considered final or comprehensive. When photographing in nature, there's always this riddle, of having to rely on some principle exterior to the phenomenon, since nature has no aesthetic boundaries; you have to decide for yourself what they should be, and your choice, though unpredictable, will be derived either from your previous experience or training, or upon some more unique personal view of things.

In terms of my own aesthetic, I see this as a study in circles, impingements, gratuitous structural expression, elaborate material states. Rock, sand, water; light, movement, reflection. What does such an image mean? To a scientist, it may be an expression of natural forces. Gravity, balance, inertia, stasis. Our relation to it is typical and opportunistic. Any slight movement to the left, the right, forward or back will alter the inherent arrangement of light, shadow, and the tensions set up between the contiguous parts. The frame is initially rectangular, but it could as well be circular, oval, or atypically trapezoidal or irregular. We ordinarily regard such departures from traditional framing as being a little gimmicky; though there's nothing visually inevitable about rectangular framing. The fact that it's a cliché actually releases our attention, allowing us to see into the image without being preoccupied with something as methodical as the shape of the frame.

If we can get beyond the initial rectangular frame, and examine the composition as an exercise in framing--a sort of interior framing--we can begin to think about its arrangements as a set of choices which all contribute to its overall effect(s). When discussing such choices, one must admit the limitations. In order to have put the sun's direct reflection on the surface of the water, in a position, say, more towards the center of the composition, would have been practically impossible, since it would have involved having the camera view at a point backwards and up and slightly to the right of the view--requiring having a platform allowing me and the camera to be something like 8 feet up in the air--obviously an impossibility under the circumstances. But would I have wanted the reflection to be in the middle of the pool? Probably not.

What initially attracted me to this was the neat curving edge of sand, the fact that it had not been disturbed by footprints (or paw-prints!), and its pristine purity, the delicacy of the ruffled edges of the sand, the hard dark edge of exposed igneous rock, and its aspect in relation to the sun's angle which lit up the wet margin. Again, in a practical sense, I had to take care not to let the tripod points get too close to the foreground of the picture, since the wet sand would show this as a disturbance--clearly, I wanted no evidence of human agency to impinge on the scene. It had to be natural--that is, it had to seem to have occurred as a consequence of purely physical forces, without any human (or other organic) interference.

The notion of the purity of nature sans any human manipulation is one of the great themes of 19th and 20th century landscape photography. Often an illusion, it nevertheless endures as a guiding principle of our concept of an unspoiled world, pre-human, pre-historical, pre-civilized, and pre-conceptual. But all art is conceptual, insofar as what we make of it involves, at least initially, a given frame. This little freshwater tide-pool is a part of the larger eco-system of which it's one minute element. In a whole (holistic) sense, it can't be considered apart from its surrounding context. And yet it is precisely the delineation of the whole that most often creates the sense of an aesthetic event, of a choosing and a making that derives from the aesthetically undelineated continuity of the natural world.

Photography takes in what comes through the lens. Once an image is saved, it may be manipulated in a number of ways. But initially, the data thus received, can't be refused. We can't prevent light from behaving in the way that it will. It's an adamant power of the universe, and follows laws we can't begin to fathom in their entirety. Working within the context of such a relationship one is apt to be subservient, since most of what we think we know about the world can't be altered.

For me, one of the driving motivations for making an image is a balance between the active and passive tendencies in one's own nature. You want to celebrate and share your vision, but you also want an image to speak for itself, as if it had a separate voice. And there is no question that nature can tell us, or confirm for us, all the things we come to deduce about it. Nature can be self-defining, in that its structure and flux and tactility and unpredictability occur with or without human permission and desire. Art is about making, is making. But in landscape photography, that will to form (or make) is limited first by what there is. A painter or a sculptor or an architect or a move-maker can manipulate their respective media, irrespective of such considerations. But their freedom implies a greater risk, too.

In terms of my act of framing in this photograph, I wanted the circular extent of the pool's edge to be "in" the picture. I could have used a wider lens to allow in more of the surrounding sand and rock and rivulet(s), but I had no desire to do so. I could have moved the camera around towards the right hand of the circle framed by the exigent "center" of the pool where the rock point lies in the water, but that would have put the sun's reflection at a point just above the water's surface--I wanted that white light near the top of the composition. There's the time element, too. If I had happened upon this scene at a point an hour earlier, or an hour later, I wouldn't have had the sun's reflection available to me at this vantage point. Circumstances can dictate what choices you have. Or I might not have had my camera with me--light and angle and shadow can change, from second to second, and the window of opportunity may be open for just a few minutes, or even a few seconds. People who think photography is easy don't always realize this.

This image has a quasi-spiritual quality for me. But I'm not a religious-minded person. Systems of ulterior belief generally bore me. But I am often moved emotionally, even on what is often called a "spiritual" level, by things I see in the world. I don't think, for instance, I've ever seen a designed landscape feature, anywhere in the world, which is as moving as this little pool. Nature wins hands down in contests like these. If you set out to create a pool as beautiful as this one is, by constructing one, it's doubtful the result would be as satisfying. The sense of satisfaction in nature's accidental arrangement is more moving that my sense of a "perfected" nature.

Oriental gardening is based on the proposition that nature in itself isn't perfect, that it requires the hand of man to make it "more perfect"--more, as it were, perfectly natural than nature itself. That, too, is a riddle. Human industry is no less natural than anything that occurs anywhere in the universe. But that's a philosophical fine point. There is a difference between naturally occurring phenomenon, and human design, and that difference is part of what makes taking photographs of nature intriguing. What's out there is itself first, not a second-hand stage-set meant to be seen just in a certain way. And that makes all the difference.

As in some kinds of oriental philosophy, the meaning of the universe can be implied by certain short-hand keys. Brief poems can do the trick. But any kind of art can serve. Photographs can be like koans, touchstones to the meaning of existence, or of the universe. They are everywhere, if you look hard enough. But just wanting to do it isn't enough. You have to let it happen, too. There must be a balance between wanting (desire), and waiting (passive awareness). Wanting and waiting. Dedication, and patience. Devotion, and intuition. Inspiration, and obedience. Determination, and chance.

End of the Iraq War - Permanent Devastation

2011-12-15T10:36:00.002-08:00

As the War in Iraq winds down, after eight and a half years of conflict and occupation, it's an opportune moment to take stock of this military adventure, to ask why we undertook it, and to estimate its cost in lives, materiel, cash, reputation, and future strategic advantage.

It is now well-established that Iraq was not a breeding-ground for Muslim terrorists. Even if it had been, it's doubtful that any direct military action would have resulted in its eradication, since Islamic terrorism knows no borders, and, as has become abundantly clear, Al Quaeda was not territorial--it was an ideological franchise, free-floating and transportable. Arguments made at the time by the Bush Administration that Iraq was linked to the 9/11 bombings were erroneous.

It is now well-established that Iraq did not possess nuclear weapons, and also that it was not secretly conducting research or attempting to construct nuclear devices or delivery systems for them. This was made abundantly clear by the failure to locate any such devices or substances, or other evidence of their existence, after the country had been military subdued and occupied. Arguments made at the time by the Bush Administration that Iraq was threatening to drop a nuclear device in America ("a mushroom cloud" as Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice put it) were proved to be erroneous.

It is now well-established that the Bush Administration had no clear idea about what a post-war Iraq would look like, or how it might go about creating a context in which a so-called Western style democratic government (friendly to the West) might take root there. Once the country had been subdued, and the Saddam government dismantled, the American military was suddenly in the position of attempting to figure out what it was supposed to be doing there, as it became clear that a protracted guerrilla war would develop in the succeeding years, which shows little signs, even now, of simply dying away.

Estimates of the true costs of the Iraq War to the United States are now $845 billions of dollars, with the total cost to the American economy of three trillion dollars, and given the future medical and support costs to wounded soldiers and their families, that figure will undoubtedly rise.

Though accounts differ, a reliable estimate of the number of Iraqi civilian deaths is put at or near 130,000, with an additional 500,000 collateral casualties. Coalition forces deaths 4800.

American money was thrown around with abandon. In one report, neat bundles of six billions in American hundred dollar bills were airlifted into Baghdad in C-130 cargo planes by the Bush Administration; all of the 12 billions of such infusions of "mad money" are now unaccounted for, amounting to what some have called "the largest theft of funds in our national history."

The nation of Iraq is now in a state of flux. Our puppet government, headed by Nouri al-Maliki, seems weak and vacillating in the face of widespread unrest and threats of ethnic, religious and regional factional conflict. Like our departure from South Vietnam, there are expectations of a general collapse of authority once the American military is no longer present to prop up our opportunistic fair-weather friends. There are those who believe the new Iraqi regime's days are strictly numbered. Privately, my own guess is that the nation will descend into general civil war within a matter of weeks, resulting in the reestablishment of a new military ruler (as Saddam had been), or a theocratic establishment, headed by an "Ayatollah" or ruling Muslim priest-class. The Iraqi populace has little or no loyalty to the ideals of America, or its interests in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, our relations with neighboring countries, including Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, the Emirates, and Kuwait are all seriously compromised. Military invasions and occupations are messy affairs. Despite all the best efforts of our soldiers and aids-people, we will be remembered as invaders by the Iraqis.

From a purely selfish point of view, the price of oil has quadrupled since 2003. The interruption of Iraqi oil production caused a world wide crisis in supply, which continues to some extent right through to the present. Much of the oil which was once earmarked for the West, will now be routed East to China and India.

Saddam Hussein had been America's ally during the years of Iraq's war with Iran. It suited our purpose to entertain his dictatorial regime when Iran was our enemy. But the Bush Administration had been planning an Iraq invasion even before 9/11; in fact, it was reported that Bush and his cronies met in Texas while his first (fraudulent) election was being decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, to firm up plans to mount a campaign for the invasion of Iraq, to "finish the job" his father had left undone in the Kuwait War.

The tidal wave of lies and false justifications perpetrated upon the American Congress and the American people to build support for the invasion was not without precedent in American history. But our preemptive military incursion, on this scale, amounted to a new level of corrupt exploitation of public opinion, and an unimaginable squandering of resource and man-power.

Bush II inherited a booming economy, and in six short years, turned our nation into a sad shadow of its former greatness. The Iraq war wasn't the only cause of this, but it was the centerpiece of Bush's presidency. He made Americans ashamed to be Americans.

President Obama has been doing the usual patriotic thing, welcoming our returning soldiers, and giving speeches about America's honorable service, our departure "with honor" from the distant Middle East battlefields. I remember the same speeches we heard by the Nixon Administration during the disengagement from Vietnam. They have a familiar ring.

The Iraq War was a totally unjustified adventure, expensive beyond measure, with catastrophic consequences which will continue for decades. It was fought in vain, and all of the sacrifices and casualties suffered for it will have been for nothing. Iraq will not become a democracy, and its people will not be better off. I was against the Iraq War from the beginning, and I have seen no reason to change that opinion at any point since.

The Old Poodle Dog - Sophisticated New Cocktail

2011-12-14T19:34:00.000-08:00

The Old Poodle Dog was once the toast of San Francisco restaurant scene. Among the earliest genuine French restaurants in the city, it opened its doors in 1849. Except for a decade (1922-1933) marking Prohibition, it continued until 1980. It was briefly reopened again inside the Crocker Galleria in 1984 but closed for good a year and a half later.

The name Old Poodle Dog seems to have come about because early customers couldn't pronounce its original name (in French), Le Poulet d'Or (the Golden Cock), and sounded out The Poodle Dog. By the turn of the last century, a white poodle, a rarity in those times, was employed as official mascot.

The place originally was located at the edge of Chinatown, and was constructed in the typical common French country style, with long tables, common serving dishes, salad towards the end of the meal, a house wine. Later the restaurant moved into larger quarters, and upgraded its fair, eventually vying for top spot among local French cuisine establishments.

Old San Francisco's reputation as a den of iniquity was not undeserved. For decades, the Old Poodle Dog maintained special upstairs dining suites complete with beds and private bathrooms, where the city's bigwigs and players could conduct their assignations in discreet privacy. Whether that was proof of the city's tolerance, or of its indulgent mischief, I let you decide.

I only ate at the Old Poodle Dog once, in its last brief incarnation in the Crocker Galleria, taking lunch with my real father, John Calef, whom I didn't meet until I was twenty. We only saw each other perhaps a half dozen times before he died in the mid-1990's. He was already retired then, but wore a suit for the occasion. It had been one of his favorite watering holes over the decades, and he wanted to share it with me. It wasn't the sort of establishment I could have afforded at the time. We had beef shanks, I seem to recall. Though a man in my thirties by then, I felt like a teenager at a prep school being visited by an absentee father-surrogate.

In any case, to commemorate that memory, as well as a once great San Francisco restaurant, I've used the name for a cool new cocktail concoction. I should warn anyone in advance that you'd be unlikely to get any bartenders to mix it for you, as it contains ingredients which are not common to taverns nowadays. For instance, cocktail grapefruit--an hybrid derived from a mixture of the Siamese Sweet pommelo and the Frua mandarin orange--fruits in the winter, and is not commonly sold in grocery stores. Unlike the pulpy, more bitter variety we're all familiar with in America, this one is rich in juice, and has a much sweeter flavor. It's about the size of a medium large Florida orange, and has a yellow tint tinged with green blurs.

St. Germaine liquor has rapidly come into favor as a piquant mixer in the last couple of years.

Though not particularly unusual, you'd be unlikely to find most barmasters with either sweet lime, or vanilla syrup, on the premises. Lillet is an old standby.

The recipe below is for a single cocktail, shaken gently, and served in chilled cocktail glasses, has a surpassing elegance and seductiveness which are miles above your typical festive drink. Women will enjoy it as much as men, even if they've never liked cocktails much. The combination of the two French aperitifs, with the slightly exotic fruits are what make it work.

2 parts Tanqueray #10

1/2 part St. Germaine Liquor

1/2 Part Lillet

1/4 part vanilla syrup

1/2 part sweet lime

1/2 part "cocktail" grapefruit

This one would work in mid-summer, or on a cold, rainy day such as today is in the Bay Area. But don't try asking your local bartender for it. He's likely to squint dismissively and demand to know where in hell you came up with that effete combination. But take my word, this one's worth searching out the ingredients.

Duchamp Dream

2011-12-14T11:07:00.001-08:00

In a dream, Duchamp and I are sitting at a café, playing chess--somewhere in the “bohemian” quarter. Duchamp has a familiar expression of secret amusement on his face. When he moves his hand toward a pawn, I see that the skin around his fingers is soft, almost translucent. “You know,” he observes, “it’s important to take what life gives, without struggling . . . how do you say, with futilité . . . against it.” I nod judiciously. I also see that the cashmere sweater he is wearing is worn threadbare at the elbows. I think to myself that this is a sign of sublime cultivation. Duchamp lights up his pipe and takes two slow draws, emitting curling blue exhalations which meander around his face in the still air. My eye wanders to the neighboring table, the café chairs with their slightly curving legs—readymades, I assume. They’re everywhere you look. Just then a tall, beautiful blonde strides by us, totally nude, except for a pearl necklace and trim sandals. Duchamp glances toward her for a second or two, then resumes his attention on the game board. “These gratuitous events are impossible to predict,” he offers, “but once they happen, there is no choice,"--waving his hand dismissively--"one must incorporate them into the flow of one's experience.”

49ers Future - the Horizon Recedes

2011-12-12T08:06:00.005-08:00

There is a tendency in America to favor the underdog, and to revel in the phenomenon of redemptive grace.

There is no story that is more heart-warming to Americans than the underachiever playing beyond his/her presumed capacity, and we embrace the unexpected phoenix rising from the ashes of mediocrity to shine with unexpected glory.

That narrative makes great copy, and it's hard not to be inspired by the example.

But reality seldom follows this heroic paradigm. We base our predictions and expectations on obvious qualities, tested and demonstrated skills. Superior past achievement is more likely than not to presage future excellence.

It's not unusual for a college star quarterback to fail in the National Football League. It's one of the stubbornly clear differences between college and professional football, that great success--even over-the-top record-breaking years--by a college quarterback--and even if playing for one of the nation's top schools--does not tend to prove his worth as a potential star quarterback in the NFL. This has been shown over and over again. On the other hand, it's almost as unlikely that a quarterback who didn't show much in college, could ever become a star as a pro. But it does happen. Still, when measuring odds, it's best to stick with past wisdom.

As I said before here, Alex Smith lacks a certain je-ne-sais-quoi which all successful pro quarterbacks possess. It isn't a single quality, but a difficult-to-define ingredient which is made up partly of character, partly of physical ability, partly of how one responds to pressure, and an elusive substance (elusiveness?). In order to rise to prominence as a pro QB, there must be consistency, consistency over a whole season, which is now 16 games. But along with that consistency, which is expressed through classic skills and ability, the secret attributes (or aptitudes) of focus and concentration must be present. It seldom happens that any team simply rolls over the competition a whole season long. And even when it does, there may be lapses in determination. Intensity is a crucial element. Holding to a high level intensity, through large or small contests, is not easy. Wins can make you complacent, can make you believe that your performances were easier than they really were.

With the coming of Harbaugh, the 49ers finally had a football mind which could unite the various components of the team together. Every NFL team has lots of talent. But like any team sport, that isn't nearly enough by itself. Teams need good coaches, and most of all, they need leaders, and the quarterback is the supreme leader-figure on every successful team.

When Smith was drafted--over Aaron Rodgers--it was because he seemed to have the potential to be a very disciplined player, one whose mental application would enhance what seemed to be his great natural ability. Smith is a smart guy, and he does have superior physical skills. And he's not a quitter. But these qualities alone don't make a winner in the NFL.

Thinking back over the last few weekends of play, I've asked myself whether I think Smith, at long last, deserves to be considered alongside the best quarterbacks playing in the league today. Ben Roethlisberger, Eli Manning, Drew Brees, Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers. And the conclusion I come to is that he doesn't. All of these quarterbacks have won Super Bowls--but that's less important than how they play the game generally.

The 49ers success in 2011 has been built on a great run defense--a great overall defense, really--and an offense which doesn't make big mistakes. The team leads the league in turnover ratio, and their special teams and kicking units are near the top. What that means in practical terms is that the offense isn't expected to put up big numbers, just put up enough points to win.

But an offense which habitually depends upon its defense to win games can fall into bad habits. Chronic complacency can creep into the play-calling book. As a defining character-trait, reliability is probably overrated in the NFL. Events on the field on game-day are chaotic, to say the least. It's the ability to improvise, to adjust, to adapt, which makes great players great, and great teams successful. A quarterback dropping back to pass has literally to make decisions in fractions of a second. Announcers attempting to define how a great quarterback functions correctly in these situations fall back on words like "athleticism" or "touch" or "magic"--words which don't capture the essence.

What the great quarterbacks possess is the ability to tune out distraction, to stay focused on the fewest necessary, crucial matters-at-hand. They enter a mental "zone" in which crowd noise, the snarling grunts, flailing rushers' limbs, and the rapidly unfolding patterns of men in movement resolve into an apprehensible design. Functioning under these conditions doesn't require great intelligence. It's a different quality. Soldiers sometimes possess it. People who habitually perform under pressure may even become accustomed to it, and yet still be unable to overcome their native weakness under stress.

Smith's ability to improvise, to focus, to tune out distraction simply does not rise to the level of these other contemporary figures. When the game's on the line, and the play is unfolding, Smith doesn't "see" and "execute" at the same level. It may be a kind of desperation which impairs his thinking or perception, it may be a subtle sense of premonition of failure, a sense of inadequacy exacerbated by the reinforcement of repeated shortcomings over the last 7 years, or a breakdown in the belief in his own substance. Whatever it is--and I'm aware I'm confronting the same descriptive failure I mentioned earlier--it's a quality which I saw yesterday in Tony Romo and Eli Manning during the Dallas-New York game. Both players conducted dramatic come-from-behind drives in the last five minutes of play. Watching this, I realized that Smith would never have been able to bring anything like that off. All the intelligence, the discipline, the study and practice, wouldn't have helped him. Neither Romo, nor Manning, nor, for that matter, Brees or Rodgers or Brady, have Smith's keen intelligence.

Which is why, despite whatever season record the 49ers put up between now and the end of week 16, they will not advance in the play-offs. The coach, the team, and the fans all know this, whatever their official position. Given a serious opponent, the 49ers don't have the same driver behind the wheel as the best teams do. With Smith at the helm, the 49ers will never be a first tier competitor. Great teams begin with great quarterbacks.

Between 2008 and 2010, under Peyton Manning, the Indianapolis Colts were 61-19. This year, with Manning out injured, they're 0-13. With a great quarterback, a star performer, the 49ers might well be 13-0 at this point in the season, and their points scored versus points allowed ratio would be astronomical.

The sad truth is that the 49ers will not be truly competitive until they admit that Smith, despite his gifts, lacks the essential ingredients for greatness in the NFL. Every "little victory" which they secure now, postpones the inevitable quest for a better talent at that position. Smith was accorded a sort of stay of execution by the inter-season lock-out, which prevented teams from planning their upcoming seasons. Harbaugh, hired as the new commander, had little choice in his quarterback. He couldn't draft a new one, and there were no impressive names on the free agency list. He had to dance with the guy he had. All of which is small consolation to 49er faithful.

From the moment Mike Nolan drafted Smith, the 49ers--though they couldn't have known it at the time--have been in a rebuilding mode. Smith defeated the efforts of two talented coaches--Nolan, and Singletary. Harbaugh, despite this season's surprise performance, could be next to go. Not that he doesn't realize that in his nightmares. The worst thing is, as the 49ers build up this year's won-lost record (they're presently 10-3) their position in the draft pushes their future further and further away. Every year that a pro NFL team fails to acquire a superior quarterback, makes their immediate future possible success-horizon appear more distant. Great teams come and go, and teams go into funks in the standings. But good teams use those opportunities to remedy problems, and to plan for a better future. Smith's tenure as the 49ers "quarterback of the future" has been a bust. The team is still living on a dead dream. Despite this year's record.

Arthur Szyk - Art as Propaganda

2011-12-08T10:39:00.000-08:00

Arthur Szyk (pronounced "shick") was one of the premier illustrator/illuminators of the 20th Century. The name doesn't ring a bell nowadays with the general public, because our cultural memory is about as short as the attention span of most people holding a TV clicker. I.e., about 15 seconds or less. I wouldn't have known about him myself if I hadn't happened upon a book at a library book sale, The New Order [New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1941]. Just a quick glance through the book, which is comprised primarily of color and black and white "cartoon" illustrations, told me it was anti-fascist propaganda, devoted to harsh caricatures of German, Italian, Japanese and Russian political and military figures.

Political newspaper caricature is a dying art, perhaps because our periodical media are dying. Newspapers, magazines, posters--all the paper texts are giving way to electronic media--television, internet and movies. Cartoon art as such appears to be thriving, though in different formats: Manga and graphic narratives have wide appeal, apparently, though those seem to be concentrated within a slim segment of the youth market.

But political cartoons are a dying breed. Once upon a time, they exerted a powerful influence on the public consciousness, and artists could make respectable livings from them, mixed in with their other commercial work. Occasionally, a cartoonist might bridge the gap between commercial illustration, and pure art, or serious art. The former Abstract Expressionist Philip Guston, for instance, turned to crude symbolic cartoon imagery in the latter part of his career, and even was sometimes savagely political.

The cartoon artist/illustrator Arthur Szyk was born a Polish Jew in Lodz, Poland in 1894. An artistic prodigy, he got into trouble in school for his political views (anti-Czarist, pro-Zionist, pro-Polish sketches (my kind of guy!)). He was already studying art in Paris at age 15. As a Pole, Szyk was a Russian subject, and he was conscripted into the Russian Army during WWI, and served on the front lines, but managed to escape in 1915. In the Polish-Soviet war (1919-20), he served as artistic director of the Propaganda Department of the Polish army, and fought as a guerilla to defend Jews in his homeland.

Artistically, Szyk was drawn to Medieval manuscript illumination, a style which influenced much of his later work. Intellectually, he had a rebellious turn of mind, and drew political caricatures while still a child. He was also committed to his Jewish identity, and even visited Palestine in 1914.

Szyk married and moved to Paris in 1921, where he was to live and work for the next 16 years, during which time, aside from his commercial work, he produced illustrations for Jewish Holy Books, and Jewish cultural exposés; and also remained devoted to Polish nationalist causes as well. He was even commissioned to create a series of 38 watercolor pictures about George Washington for the Library of Congress in 1930, for which he received a medal from the U.S. Government. It was during this time, as well, that he produced his magnum opus, an illuminated Haggadah, a familiar Jewish text that sets forth the order of the Passover Seder. It was published in London in 1940. In 1939, a selection of Szyk's paintings, illustrating the contribution of Poles to American history, was shown at the New York World's Fair.

Szyk had produced anti-fascist cartoons and drawings in the 1930's, but these were not particularly well-received, as Britain had an official policy of appeasement at that point. It wasn't until after the outbreak of hostilities in 1939 in Europe that his work began to be used as anti-Axis propaganda in American periodicals. The book I've referenced, The New Order, was published just after Szyk arrived in America, in 1941. Szyk spent the war years in New York, turning out florid--or what some might call inflammatory--political propaganda against the German, Italian and Japanese fascist governments. These caricatures appeared throughout the American media, in magazines, newspapers, postcards, stamps, in religious and military publications, on posters. He also produced commercial illustration for Coca Cola and U.S. Steel, while showing his work in art galleries as well. Szyk was a one-man propaganda machine. Hitler even put a price on his head.

Looking at examples of these highly charged, and very politically incorrect images today, one is reminded of how partisan war propaganda can be. Nations typically build up negative sentiment about a political or military enemy as a prelude or rallying-cry to participation in armed conflict or to create support for hostile actions. It's much more difficult to engage in open warfare with another people or nation, unless you've already decided in your mind beforehand that they somehow "deserve" to suffer and die.

This is one of the ironies of the modern world--that we must summon up the most primitive emotions and sentiments to justify actions or policies which really have rational pretexts, even when it is precisely those emotional caricatures (or characterizations) of feelings about people that drive our pursuit of a better world. It has been expressed in many ways by many thinkers, that hatred and distrust are the obverse of mutual understanding and tolerance, but where hatred becomes institutionalized or hardens into folk myth and tradition, it's nearly impossible to deconstruct. After the war, Americans went to considerable lengths to resuscitate the devastated nations of Europe (the Marshall Plan). Germans and Italians and Austrians, who had once been our bitter enemies, now would be regarded as our partners in a new world of cooperation and reconstruction.

Szyk's style of illustration seems to belong to another time and place. But political cartooning is still a powerful tool, as the controversies in the Dutch media over anti-Muslim and anti-Zionist cartoons have shown. During the late 1940's, he continued his work of book illumination, and religious book illustration, and spent his last years in New Canaan, Connecticut, where he died in 1951. Ironically, Szyk was interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, for his supposed left-leaning participation in anti-faschist organizations.

Szyk's reputation fell into decline for 40 years, but has recently been revived with a series of exhibitions in the United States. And there were even shows in Germany and Poland. Goodness knows what citizens of those countries today think of them. The changing tides of ideology and political convenience make strange bedfellows of us all. The world of Szyk's childhood was erased forever by the events of WWI, the suppression not just of Poland, but of all ethnic Jews, the rise of fascism, WWII, and then the early years of the Cold War. Szyk's political work had a political purpose. When that purpose was altered, he moved on. He was loyal to his commitments as he saw them, and gained great success and fame in his time as a result. He is honored today as an avatar of justice and freedom, but the means he employed was a pure skill, applicable to a range of motives. Nazi cartoonists undoubtedly had a field day with Churchill and Roosevelt and de Gaulle, and the images they made, however effective, or biased and bigoted, we don't appreciate today. Art and politics is a queer mixture, the fruits of which may swing both ways.

In my post of May 14th, 2011, I made the point that government has no business in supporting forms of art. "In fascistic, or monarchical, or communistic societies, artistic control is from the top down. In a democracy, in which the arts (and religion, and business) are intended to be separate from governance, there can be no official patronage." The question raised by the art of Arthur Szyk is pertinent to this issue. Can the purpose to which any political art is put be separated from the raw skill and ability of the artist's talent? Szyk apparently felt that art and politics are united in a common thread: "Art is not my aim, it is my means . . . I am but a Jew praying in art." Our tendency now is to regard such assertions as expedient. Certainly Szyk understood that how any artist chooses to employ his skills and abilities is a matter of context, not of pure ideology. If that were not so, then the underlying meaning of all art would dissolve in a hodge-podge of ephemeral distraction. We can look at great religious art of the Middle Ages today and appreciate its beauty and truth without accepting any of the precepts upon which its depiction of subject matter rests. The same criteria must be applied to all art.

Torsion in Marc

2011-12-07T11:59:00.003-08:00

Today we tend not to appreciate how powerfully WWI affected the generation of 1917. Gertrude Stein called it The Lost Generation, and the moniker stuck, because it was true. The tragedy of WWI has been overshadowed in our consciousness by the horrors of WWII, and The Holocaust, but for mass killing and suffering on a grand scale, World War I was perhaps the most devastating event, certainly, up to that time, in European history. The means of efficient firepower had overtaken the theory and practice of war--of battles carried out as if the military strategies of the Napoleonic Era still applied--and the young men who surged onto the field of contention in France were mowed down with incredible despatch. Ten millions of soldiers lost their lives.

It was inevitable that "the flower of its [Europe's] youth" would be included in that number, depriving the world of untold resources of knowledge, talent, energy and invention on an unimaginable scale. It would be, in sheer numbers, if there were to be a war today involving the nations of Europe and the United States, as if 40 million young men between the ages of 17 and 40 were to lose their lives. We tend to see casualties in our time as including more civilians, because battles are no longer fought gallantly between armies arrayed against each other in discretely defined precincts; we live in a world of "total war" in which everyone in a "zone" is at risk.

But in World War I, the ultimate "war game" was played out on barren agricultural and forested country, and armies contended over muddy, pock-marked wastes strewn with barbed wire and clouded with poison gas and cordite. Mounted cavalry was still the order of transport, though early tanks and fighter-planes participated. Huge forces faced each other across a "no-man's land" between long crudely constructed trenches. Men died by the bushel. A company might be ordered "over the top" for a charge, and a half or three-quarters of its number be mowed down by machine-gun fire within 45 seconds. That loyal, honorable men did so is a tribute either to their fortitude or their naiveté.

The German painter Franz Marc [1880-1916] was among those who lost their lives in that conflict. Though born in the late Victorian Age, by the end of the first decade of the 20th Century he had already produced an impressive body of work for which he's been remembered and studied. Looking at it now, through the retrospective lens of aesthetic regard, it's easy to see how his work relates to the development of early Cubism and German Expressionism. Comparing and contrasting such trendy aspects, however, may cause one to overlook more original qualities in an artist's work, than those he may share with his contemporaries.

Marc's most famous canvas, the "Fate of the Animals" (above) apparently was a nightmarish vision of the coming conflagration of the war. Its jagged, razor-sharp daggers and fiery projectiles seem to come from all directions at once. Studies of animals were a predominant theme in Marc's canvases, and you can make out horses, dogs (or wolves), and deer in this picture, along with the cannon, exploding fragments and spilled blood. Cubism has been seen traditionally in art history as a means of expressing a novel, ingenious aspect of multiple angles of view, or of creating linear or massed tensions within the confines of a composition. But here, the searing geometric diagonals and vectors have a clearly metaphorical meaning which is at one with their implication.

In Guernica, Picasso used a simplified, pictorial cartoon out of his own late Cubist style, to memorialize the tragic events in Spain (his native country). But he was clearly not the first artist to use abstraction in this way. The absence of human bodies in most of Marc's pictures does not vacate the power of his vision. The idea of evoking pain and suffering through the use of animal casualty seems much more original in Marc, than it does in Picasso's large, somewhat self-consciously pictorial canvas.

But the significance of any artist's work is not limited to how immediately or powerfully he may react to catastrophic events in the real world. Within a five or six year period prior to World War I, Marc created a series of color nature studies which look as revolutionary, to our eyes, as anything being produced anywhere, at that time, in France, England, or Germany. New developments in the use of spatial manipulation, color and form were being proposed and shared rapidly in those years; and Marc's compositions seem to fit right in with our understanding of the developments of that time.

What, then, if anything, makes them different or unique?

What are the significant differences, for instance, between this forest study of Marc, say, and

this pastoral by Braque (from 1908)? What I see in Marc's canvases, generally, is a powerful formal torsion, or con-torsion which binds all of the elements of the scene into a powerful vortical, inertial whole. While the individual objects--trees, sky, shadows, animals, rocks, foliage--may still retain their integrity as objective forms, they're all linked in to an interlocking atypical grid of centripetal force--as straight or curving lines of force--which pass across textures and space, sometimes coincident with the natural edges of separation between things, or cutting right through them.

Marc's festive panorama of spectral variation can seem merely decorative, until you begin to piece together the integral relationships. The geometric torsion of arcs, triangles, spheres, and parallels dominates the elaboration of forms, drawing them into a deliberate fantasy-narrative of meaning, augmented with sharp, pure intensities of color.

This kind of seeing may obliterate the subject matter by insisting upon its conformity to a ruling principle of design, and this may be one of the dangers of abstraction generally, that it manipulates the subject in ways which may ignore, or disrespect its inherent values--either visually or by eccentric association.

Such distortions may be pleasingly playful (as the above landscape is), or amusing, like the syncopated jumble of percolating variations across the graph of space in the picture below. What state of mind, one might wonder, would one be in to see a natural or agricultural landscape populated with animals in this way? And what, other than its dazzling decorative potential, might it suggest?

Is aesthetic space superior to the reality we experience in the ordinary world of our five senses? We know that under no circumstance can we occupy a space in which red and yellow nudes recline in a landscape of charged primary colors and organized wild forms. So the justifications for distortion and augmentation of otherwise "familiar" objects must come from desire and capricious will.

Meaning in Marc's canvases occupies a place about equidistant from reality and playful folly. The world he creates is one where the principles he perceives about things, or things in a space, are allowed to unfold and dominate, interact and bleed into one another, sharing color, line, by mere proximity. A green bird may of course have a scarlet beak (perhaps in Nicaragua or Brazil), and his tail feathers may meld in with the tropical foliage of his native habitat. But the tropical metaphor may only be an expedient pretext for such liberties with simulation. Germany doesn't have tropical jungles.

Any artist must accept the consequences of any extremity of exaggeration. Indulging in distortions for purely artistic purposes (as with extreme degrees of abstraction) may summon up the indignations of impatience.

Marc's famous purple horses are among his most canonical images, and are usually offered as the clearest example of his art. Their sensual rumps, flanks, necks, arched backs offer plentiful ground for the delightful curves and ovals and flexible bends which he sought to express.

As Abstraction--as an approach to the purely decorative arrangements of two-dimensional space--progressed through the 20th Century, many artists dropped the pretense of interlocking object-arrays and treated form and color as if they were neutral principles, without reference to any specific, separate thing.

The canvas below, painted before World War I, seems to me every bit as joyous and unfettered and nonrepresentational as anything done during the 1950's, the 1960's, or the 1970's. Pure forms cavort across a mixed puzzle of disconformity, a kind of unreconstructed animadversion. Had Marc not been rubbed out in 1916, what wondrous forms and arrangements might he have made? Alas, such speculations lead nowhere. We have only what we see and can deduce from the evidence he left.

Rothenberg's White Sun Black Sun

2011-11-30T12:04:00.002-08:00

Jerome Rothenberg [1931- ] has accomplished a good deal in his lifetime. Aside from being a unique and interesting poet himself, he's edited a series of anthologies highlighting not only the American avant garde, but the literatures of cultures around the world, linking the common efforts of writers from diverse backgrounds, over long stretches of time, and facilitating the cross-fertilization of ideas and forms across borders and barriers. But his beginnings were relatively humble, if, in retrospect, auspicious.

One of my favorite poems from the post-War period is the lead (or "title") poem from his first, self-published, pamphlet, White Sun Black Sun [New York: Hawk's Well Press, 1960]. Published in the same year as the Allen Anthology, New American Poetry 1945-1960 [New York: Grove Press], it's only 30 pages long, and has a certain Germanic cast, with echoes of, for instance, the work of Paul Celan. A symbolic, deep imagery predominates. Ikonic "universals" are manipulated in dream-like sequences. There is no overt evidence here of the explorations of Jewish identity [Poland/1931, Unicorn Press, 1970], or the explorations of form [Conversations, Black Sparrow Press, 1968], or the interest in primitive/tribal cultural artifacts [The 17 Horse Songs of Frank Mitchell, Tetrad Press, 1969], which would characterize much of the work of his earlier period. Again, the driving influence seems to point to those German poets Rothenberg had translated [Young German Poets, City Lights Books, 1959]--Celan, Grass, Enzenberger--for Ferlinghetti's Pocket Poets Series.

Poets' debut books often present either as ironic counterparts to their later careers, or as perfectly consistent prefigurements. Consider William Carlos Williams's first self-published book Poems [Rutherford, NJ, 1909], which, had you read it contemporaneously, would have held no clues whatever to his later accomplishments. Or Wallace Stevens's Harmonium [Knopf, 1923], published when he was in his early forties, which already feels triumphant in its mature command of materials--of which his later books seem almost an elaboration.

Had Rothenberg not been the impatient, curious explorer, his career might have developed along fairly predictable lines. But the Sixties exploded a number of traditional modes of professional literary presumption. What kind of poet might Robert Bly have become, for instance, if he had not confronted militarism, the counterculture preoccupation with sexual identities, and the poetries of South America and the Middle East and Scandanavia? Silence in the Snowy Fields [Wesleyan, 1962] shares a number of concerns with Rothenberg's White Sun, though the divergent paths of their respective careers tells us not only how fragmented the poetry culture would become in America over the succeeding decades, but also how similar (and cohesive) the poetry scene had been at their mutual beginnings [circa 1955-59]. The careers of both these poets benefited from a wide exploration of different literatures, as well as investigations into personal history and psychology.

But in 1960, this was all to come.

The pre-face to Rothenberg's pamphlet comes directly from William Blake (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1793]--one of his prophetic books--

By degrees we beheld the infinite

abyss, fiery as the smoke of a burning

city; beneath us at an immense dis-

tance was the sun, black but shining;

round it were fiery tracks on which

revolved vast spiders, crawling after

their prey, which flew, or rather

swum, in the infinite deep, in the most

terrific shapes of animals spring from

corruption; and the air was full of

them, and seemed composed of them.

These are Devils, and are called powers

of the air. I now asked my com-

panion which was my eternal lot.

He said: "Between the black and

white spiders."

Blake's appreciation of the rhythms and literary styles of the King James Bible [1611] is reflected in his own quasi-prophetic linguistic expression. Indeed, the Biblical qualities in subsequent epochs of literary production is a whole field unto itself, and far beyond the range of my interest here. Suffice it to say that I see in Rothenberg's poem, a lineage of phraseology which though secular in content and purpose, employs rhythms and rhetorical turns which derive from that tradition. Rothenberg's poem is taken directly from the title of a Blake poem, but it may be unclear which poem/or poems Rothenberg's piece refers to. There is Blake's poem A Little Boy Lost (quoted below)--

A Little Boy Lost

"Nought loves another as itself,

Nor venerates another so,

Nor is it possible to thought

A greater than itself to know.

"And, father, how can I love you

Or any of my brothers more?

I love you like the little bird

That picks up crumbs around the door."

The Priest sat by and heard the child;

In trembling zeal he seized his hair,

He led him by his little coat,

And all admired the priestly care.

And standing on the altar high,

"Lo what a fiend is here! said he:

"One who sets reason up for judge

Of our most holy mystery."

The weeping child could not be heard,

The weeping parents wept in vain:

They stripped him to his little shirt,

And bound him in an iron chain,

And burned him in a holy place

Where many had been burned before;

The weeping parents wept in vain.

Are such things done on Albion's shore?

--then there are the two poems The Little Boy Lost, and The Little Boy Found--

The Little Boy Lost

"Father, father, where are you going?

O do not walk so fast.

Speak, father, speak to your little boy,

Or else I shall be lost."

The night was dark, no father was there,

The child was wet with dew;

The mire was deep, and the child did weep,

And away the vapour flew.

The Little Boy Found

The little boy lost in the lonely fen,

Led by the wandering light,

Began to cry, but God, ever nigh,

Appeared like his father, in white.

He kissed the child, and by the hand led,

And to his mother brought,

Who in sorrow pale, through the lonely dale,

The little boy weeping sought.

And here is Rotheberg's poem:

"A Little Boy Lost"

They took me from the white sun and they

left me in the black sun, left

me to sleep among long rows of overcoats:

I was a city boy lost in the country, a

wound in my hand was all I knew about willows

Can you understand, do you hear the wide

sound of the wind against the cow's

side, and the crickets that run down my

sleeve, crickets full of the night, with

bodies like little black suns? try as I will

there is only this cry in my heart, this cry:

They took me from the white sun, and they

left me in the black sun, and I

have no way of turning now, no door

The poem's rhythms have a nursery rhyme jingle to them, an obsessive beat--

They TOOK me from the WHITE sun and they

LEFT me in the BLACK sun

This is emphatic dactylics--Dah da-da--or even a stressed syllable followed by three unstressed syllables--Dah-da-da-da / Dah-da-da-da. The Blake poems are in tetrameter, but Rothenberg's poem feels like much longer lines broken for perceptual effect--

They took me from the white sun and they / left me in the black sun

left / me to sleep among long rows of overcoats

I was a city boy lost in the country,

a / wound in my hand was all I knew about willows

Can you understand /

do you hear the wide / sound of the wind against the cow's / side

and the crickets that run down my / sleeve

crickets full of the night, with / bodies like little black suns /

try as I will / there is only this cry in my heart, this cry

They took me from the white sun, and they / left me in the black sun

and I have no way of turning now, no door

Nevertheless, the poem's rhythmic structure carries considerable force. Its chanting insistence in the repeated phrase at beginning and end, frames the imagery of overcoats, willows, cows and crickets. In terms of theme, Rothenberg's poem appears to play off of Blake's antinomy of innocence and experience in terms of dark and light/birth and death/city and country-- as if the speaker were trying to come to terms with the wildness of experience. If the city is represented as "white" light, and the country as "dark"-ness, or dark light, it may also signify evil or chaos, much as, in Blake's poems, the "mire," in the "lonely dale." Rothenberg's poem seems also to recall or evoke a childhood dilemma, a feeling of being lost in the wilderness, not just the literal universal wilderness but the wilderness or chaos of mind, entangled in transgressive or confusing nets. Though the poem doesn't strike me as a religious dialectic, it could be interpreted, in that context, in a number of possible ways.

If I had to choose an example of a poet whose annunciation of his life-task was as clear and persuasive as this one is, Rothenberg's would be near the top--as indicative, and convincing, in its way, as Eliot's Prufrock. A great beginning isn't crucial to the career of a writer, but it can be critically important, especially if it rings true. The final "no door" suggests a trap, a closed off space or room from which the poet cannot escape. But the poem, especially as the annunciatory entry into the clearing (Duncan) of verse, suggests a birthing as poet. The poem could be a metaphor for the sense of historical enjambment which Rothenberg feels as a Jew following the horrors of the Holocaust, the door a symbolic escape hatch from the fate of persecutions of race and ethnicity. As an American Jew, Rothenberg was in the crucial position of empathizing with the suppressed poetries (and peoples) of the Third World, and the many worlds (or rooms) he would explore in the ensuing years. Each door leads to the outer world, and each door to another room. An igloo is a teepee is a mud hut. Though the poem says "no door" it's actually the door--the road beyond. The poem is a door to the poet's future.

The Rosetta Stone

2011-11-25T09:41:00.000-08:00

HTML is the language for internet web pages. As such, it is not unlike the ancient Rosetta Stone, in that it provides an intermediary coded "text" which "translates" into a readable format (a "common tongue" language) as opposed to a jargon. Of course, without the technology of a "browser" such a translation doesn't happen. Could someone from an earlier culture--or, from one which had no knowledge of computer technology, untangle this code and make any kind of sense of it? Perhaps. Code-breaking can accomplish amazing feats.

(The image above is a digital photograph I took of part of a page display of HTML language which popped up when I was attempting to load a page from someone's web-site. Apparently my browser got confused and called up this gobbledygook as a PDF instead of the text version it's intended to display.)

Perhaps one would need both the HTML and the corresponding readable portion of any given text to be able to "decipher" it. Perhaps the "browser" is a kind of code breaker. Being able to interpolate from one language to another is in fact a kind of translation. Translators of known languages face precisely this problem: How to know the corresponding underlying meanings of the signifiers, and then transfer this precipitate or alembic into an equivalent language.

Indeed, though, referring to an underlying "code" as the metaphor for the "gist" of any written text, implies a third thing, i.e., the mental sense which thinkers/speakers have of something, through the screen of any given language. Can physicists "see" phenomena in terms of mathematical language? When Pasternak or Neruda or Szymborska or Rilke call a spade a spade, is it ever the same spade which English speakers like you and I perceive? We tend to think there are large or subtle differences in the way languages describe things, even if those languages are related (as with romance languages). As Frost said, poetry is that which cannot be translated, i.e., that which is "lost in translation."

Is poetry a quality which develops with the immature mind, a process during which complex interrelationships and a deep familiarity are built up, a process which perhaps is difficult, at best, to replicate later in life, or in other ways? It may be possible for children to be raised as bi-lingual, but this process may be possible to certain individuals who retain the ability to acquire new language with great facility, throughout their lives--an aptitude that is not common at all. But is it possible to replicate the intimate familiarity which is acquired during the formative childhood years? It's a ponderable quandary.

The relationship between what is not known about the way language is experienced as a cognitive process, and the significance of symbolic/linguistic representation as only a partially reliable basis for apprehension, comprises the mediated no-man's land which is poetry's specific precinct. Any poetry which does not enter into or partake of this interzone of flux and shifting apprehension, risks being prosaic and doesn't deserve the name. It's the area of dreams and suppositions and irrationality and the unknown, and it's also where words undergo transformation and evolve into newer shades of meaning, where language undergoes mutation and recombinant change, becomes, in effect, new avatars of signification.

It may be, too, that the rebellious child or adolescent mind resists the given cultural paradigms by deliberately (or unconsciously) reconfiguring the language as a way of adopting it as his own, or as a statement of individuality (or alienation). Abstraction in language could be described, in some cases, as a bastion against received sense, or the imposed "wisdom of the past." Attempting to valorize such private (or hermetic) abstracts of language is one way to legitimize one's idiosyncratic separateness or eccentric outlook. The investigations or discoveries in artistic media may be regarded thus as part of a campaign against the collectivization of thought or behavior.

The language of the computer age could be seen, ironically, as part of a process of homogenization or regimentation of human thought and inquiry, or one unintended consequence of the globalization of discourse. Is this to be regarded as a favorable influence, of the democratization of peoples and cultures around the globe, or as an harbinger of a new authoritarianism spawned by technocrats looking to integrate communities into willing customer-bases or to manipulate them for purely political ends?

Are we, as participants in the HTML-based media world of the internet, being subsumed into a global system of organization designed to align us into manageable constituents of the new world order? And if so, what would that order look like?