[Remember the victims of Katrina, and help. We have so few readers we need not start some link marathon; we just remind you. There are plenty of places to go. So. Go do what you can do, then come back and read. Thanks.]
In the beginning was Nature.
--Camille Paglia, first sentence, Sexual Personae, 1990.
We are stardust
(million-year-old carbon)
We are golden
(caught in the devil's bargain)
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden.
--Joni Mitchell, last refrain, "Woodstock," 1969.
by Jerome du Bois
A recent interview with Camille Paglia includes, in part, her critical summaries of the quality of the teachers and administrators in academia, especially literature and the arts. Her remarks support arguments we have made in our series on Rebarbarization in the Academy, but also among many of the pieces in our Pride Of Phoenix Series, and most of our single-artist reviews. The basic riff: drones create drones, and little fascists create little fascists, and the lone individual talent is long gone by then, toward obscurity or toward making their own strong mark, free from the quicksand suck of the postmodern muck. (See the piece on The Zombie Dispositions.) Dr. Paglia's thirty years as a classroom teacher of adults, and her own native brilliance, lend authority to her statements.
I've always taken this woman's ideas seriously. Our proposed semi-public art project, The Antidote, was based on her recent essay "The Magic of Images." A video-screen truck, parked on Roosevelt Row, would slideshow hundreds of classic art images, and selected aphorisms, couplets, and memes, while huge speakers blasted classical music for two hours. The essay ends on a key sentence:
The only antidote to the magic of images is the magic of words.
Which reminds me of Oscar Wilde's dialectic:
Only the soul can cure the senses, just as only the senses can cure the soul.
I suggest that local readers of this blog read the whole interview, especially those readers who purport to be writers and poets --who supposedly live by the word. For example, there's a passage that reminds me of the Phoenix coterie Writers Bloc:
CP: The thing is there is an up- and downside to those things. On the one hand it’s producing a kind of antiseptic writing, a certain kind of polished professional writing, and on the other hand people who are interested in writing in this period of media and the web and so on, they find it very sustaining to go to a place to meet other people who are similarly interested in it. That’s the upside but the downside is that to be a good writer you can’t just study writing. You have to live, OK? That’s the problem. The best writers have drawn from actual experience, have had some experience. What experiences do people have any more?
RB: [laughs] Shopping.
CP: Yeah, shopping. This is why I think literature, post-Plath, has drifted into a compulsive telling of any trauma that you can find in your life. Prozac—“I’m taking Prozac” or divorce or diseases or whatever. Endless kvetching. It’s a style of telling of woes and the potential range of literature is being neglected and part of my crusade now is—
RB: Crusading?
CP: I’m on a crusade—it’s to say to the poets and the artists, “Stop talking to each other. Stop talking to coteries. I despise coteries in any form. You are speaking to a coterie, OK. Stop the snide references to the rest of the world who didn’t vote with you in the last election.” This is big. Because we have all separated again. After 9/11, everyone was united. We are separated again thanks to what has happened in politics. People in the art world are full of sanctimonious sense of superiority to most of America. But they must address America, learn to address America. Yes, have your friends, have the people who support what you are doing in the art world, but you have to recover a sense of the general audience and the same thing I am saying to the far right, get over the sneering at art, the stereotyping—
The latest project by the Phoenix Writers Bloc debuted First Friday night at the main library. The subject: urban legends. I will let them describe it themselves:
Our modern folklore is important in explaining the world around us. We name our fears by forming compelling tales out of them. Telling stories is a great tradition. From our ancestors and family stories; the scary stories at sleepovers; the guy on the street that stops you to just tell his story; stories that we make up to amuse, entertain or compel. We all have a story, we hear them and tell them. Generally speaking, an urban legend is any modern, fictional story, told as truth, that reaches a wide audience by being passed from person to person. Urban legends are often false, but not always. A few turn out to be largely true, and a lot of them were inspired by an actual event but evolved into something different in their passage from person to person. More often than not, it isn’t possible to trace an urban legend back to its original source -–they seem to come from nowhere.
Art tells the story, in different styles, mediums, which can be interpreted by the viewer into their own story. The viewer’s interpretation is sometimes different than the artist’s intent. That is the beauty of art.
In this exhibit, eighteen (18) printmakers worked with a writer who composed a legend that interprets their art and it will be displayed in a format that complements their prints. It can be one that stretches beyond the art, takes the reader/viewer on a different journey. We feel that combining art and legends would be a compatible exhibit for the library.
A few points: Urban legends, like jokes, are unoriginal. That is, they have no real, or single, author. And they're mostly about horror stories and O.Henry suprises. Also, consider that both the audience and creators of this project have been brought up on Steven King and Scream Ad Nauseum and other popcorn nightmares. This twenty-year cushion of pop history, I believe, comforts the new writers, who may personally have little to draw from, since they've gone from school to school to college to grad school to workshop, with a lot of movies and a little life squoze in between those cloistered, predictable, regulated, dependable, and reassuringly collective experiences.
[I wrote the above before we went to see the exhibition yesterday afternoon. And behold, we were right:
Cindy Dach's "Snake Bite" is a very very pale reflection of, say, an X-Files episode in which the snake-handler is the good guy, the prissy preacher is the real demon, and a young woman gives birth to a nest of rattlesnakes. You remember it.
Greg Esser had some zoo administrator --geek-bureaucrats rule!-- as hero in a tired story about ecological niches in urban environments --frogs, which don't even go Biblical in his limp tale. In real life, amazing creatures live near the 500° vents in undersea trenches deeper than the Devil's feet embedded in the Ninth Circle of Hell. Besides, if you want an urban tale of transformation, and with pop culture to boot, think no further than Altered States. Do you see how easy it is to trump these so-called 21st-Century artists? And by the way, Greg, the word is "ceased," not "seized," in your narrative. All those writers and readers all night Friday and all day Saturday didn't bring that to your attention. You didn't catch it. And your crew wants to teach people how to write and edit, no?
Third and final example in mini-review: Kevin Vaughan-Brubaker manages to take some of our oldest and most difficult art --incising rock with hypnotic glyptic devotion to show something serious-- and turn it into a soiled sociopathic grin. He imagines some teenager killing his buddy out by the rock carvings, with his carving tool, no less, hiding his victim, and then coming back repeatedly to watch, in the one vivid phrase KV-B can muster, "the creeping smile of decay."
"Geiny," Catherine said with a grimace, referring to Ed Gein, who dressed in the dressed-out skins of his female victims. The woman can say a paragraph with a word. And I was reminded of "River's Edge," a movie from the the Eighties, I think, in which a bunch of zoned-out high-schoolers keep parading each other out to the eponymous location to see a dead body, slowly decaying. In other words, it's horrible, every time it happens in reality, but as regards this show --It's been done, people; in a phrase, done to death.
Catherine also pointed out two more deficiencies: the poems in the exhibition violate the notion of the legend, which is a tale, a narrative of sentences, as in someone's testimony. People don't normally speak in broken scans and occasional rhymes. So those pieces were more about the author than the subject, she pointed out. And besides, if you must make a poem of legend, why not use the ballad form, as in "Pancho and Lefty"? Second, she asked, and this floored me because I had forgotten the obvious --she asked, "Where's the Chupacabra?" Every one of these people missed out on a recent, and vivid, Southwestern urban legend, which has faded just enough for a lurid reminder. The Chupacabra's natural habitat is being shrunk, and, like coyotes, they are driven to the city. Why, we ourselves can confirm three actual sightings in our Central Phoenix neighborhood alone! If we're lyin' we're flyin'! We're still trying to digitally capture one. When we do, we'll post it. Now, back to the press release on the website.]
Second: the first two paragraphs thud like duds. "Telling stories is a great tradition." "We all tell stories . . ." "That is the beauty of art." Dull coins all. No sentence rings with authority, or dances, or bends, or zings, or seems happy to exist. They all just plod along, getting the job done. As illustrated above, my wife Catherine King, in ordinary conversation over breakfast or riffing off the television, half the time makes me want to take notes or record her comments, because she has such a distinctive style, a delicately-wired mind which makes the words "fresh" and "unique" stale and pale, which finds buzzing connections fetched from afar, and which always seems unsatisfied with convention, with the given, with the beige, with the frayed.
Third: I found the written description of the exhibit unclear. I had to examine the enlarged image of the poster to see that eighteen printmakers each paired with eighteen writers to create eighteen paired prints and stories. But it's still unclear. Which came first, the print or the legend? And who came up with it, the printmaker or the writer? Or did they collaborate? Unclear. (But you may now sign up for workshops at Writers Bloc on many types of professional writing, from $45 to $100 per seminar.) And what a wonderul image: a woman (of course!) bowed back into a painful position, possessed á la Linda Blair.
Finally, the whole collective thing creaks like crutches. Eighteen people. The clubhouse, which houses the crew, who direct the flock, who show up on the front doorstep with the slumped shoulders of the verbally uncertain. With the stuff that's green and folds. All of this continues junior-high writing club and the college lit mag crew, only writ larger and sometimes even with public money (beyond the $100/month the Bloc members pony up for Greg and Cindy Kaching-D'Escher, as well call them. Money on the sheeplehoof). They would feel very insecure out there on their own without their friends, so they hide behind each other's skirts --and, by doing so, they retard each other's progress, and do each other a disservice, especially about that most painful discovery:
Talent is an individual gift. Either you have it or you don't. This dog won't hunt for you, no matter how much you feed it. You have to cross that lonesome valley all by yourself.
What's that music?
You never understood that it ain't no good; you shouldn't let other people get your kicks for you.
Live with it.
All those educated and even post-educated minds pooling and mulling and brooding and exchanging notions, and this is what they come up with: urban legends --just like two kids under a blanket with a flashlight. Why, I remember the Woman With No Face At The Drive-In . . . Hey, whereya goin?
[And don't think these people monopolize the thematic clichés, because --okay, I guess these are some of the same people-- @Central Gallery plans to show the never-before-thunk-of themes of . . . wait for it . . .
Text: The Art of Words [my own specialty]
Pop Art
Dry Heat (works relating to or inspired by summer in Arizona), and
Artist's Books.
And MADE Art Boutique (!?) will show "Out Of The Box," Artist-Made Boxes, the parody to which I am already working on. I guess they're still not thinking outside of them, unless one or more of them is working on a non-box box.
In a word? AAARRRGGGHHH!
To the artists and writers: you need to dig deeper within yourselves. If you don't know how, you need to change your ways. Talking to other writers of your demographic profile won't help one iota. A rut is only a grave that is open at both ends.]
All right, now everybody take a deep breath.
The interview with Camille Paglia led me back to its original subject, her latest book, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World's Best Poems. I had read it cover to cover as soon as I discovered it a couple of months ago. She still has all her chops, though I can't stand some of her later choices. Here, though, I want to quote from the introduction, which contains remarks expanding on those in the interview, about academia, it teachers and its graduates, and about poetry and the power of the word, which seems to be a nascent subject floating in the electrons around The Tears Of Things in the last few days.
Here is Camille Paglia on (literary) poststructuralism, the Tweedledum to (visual arts) postmodernism's Tweedledee:
But the New Criticism, attuned to paradox and ambiguity, was a sophisticated system of interpretation that has never been surpassed as a pedagogical tool for helping novice as well as veteran readers to understand poetry. Its destruction by the influx of European postrstructuralism into American universities in the 1970s was a cultural disaster from which higher education has yet to recover. With its clotted jargon, circular reasoning, and smug, debunking cynicism, postrstructuralism works only on narrative --on the longer genres of story and novel. It is helpless with lyric poems, where the individual word has enormous power and mystery and where the senses are played upon by rhythm, mood, and dreamlike metaphors.
I think the argument applies at least as much to visual art, where individual colors, shapes, and their psychological associations can have enormous power. This makes postmodernism's pervasive influence over contemporary art all the more disgraceful: these artists --twenty years' worth and counting-- got mugged by the boneless.
Poststructuralism and crusading identity politics led to the gradual sinking in reputation of the premiere literature departments, so that by the turn of the millennium, they were no longer seen even by the undergraduates themselves to be where the excitement was on campus. One result of this triumph of ideology over art is that, on the basis of their publications, few literature professors know how to "read" anymore --and thus can scarcely be trusted to teach that skill to their students. Cultural studies, for example, despite its auspicious name, has been undone by its programmatic Marxism and is a morass of misreadings or overreadings. During the past quarter century, humanistic principles and honest practical criticism could more reliably be found among low-paid adjuncts faithfully teaching service courses at community colleges than in the vain, showy professoriat of the elite schools.
Let's repeat that last:
During the past quarter century, humanistic principles and honest practical criticism could more reliably be found among low-paid adjuncts faithfully teaching service courses at community colleges [think of Thomas Klocek at DePaul in Chicago, who stood up to Palestinian anti-Semites, and got fired] than in the vain, showy professoriat of the elite schools [think, of course, of Ward "Tell Me About The Teeth, Ward" Churchill, still biting].
We see the results all around us. When we started this blog, an early entry made fun of boring local artists' talk. Not much has changed, except many more bare their teeth these days, but since they're only milk teeth from adult babies, their threat diminishes to toy-sized dimensions.
Anyway --we told you so.
On to poetry and the power of the word. Camille Paglia again, from the introduction:
What fascinated me about English was what I later recognized as its hybrid etymology: blunt Anglo-Saxon concreteness, sleek Norman French urbanity, and polysyllabic Greco-Roman abstraction. . . . The dazzling multiplicity of sounds and word choices in English makes it brilliantly suited to be a language of poetry.
She took five years to write this book, and spent two of those years just reading thousands and thousands of poems, so I take the following characterizations based on that knowledge:
In gathering material for this book, I was shocked at how weak individual poems have become over the past forty years. Our most honored poets are gifted and prolific, but we have come to respect them for their intelligence, commitement, and the body of their work. They ceased focusing long ago on production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem. They have lost ambition and no longer believe they can or should speak for their era. Elevating process over form, they treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page. . . . Rote formulas are rampant --a lugubrious victimology of accident, disease, and depression or a simplistic, ranting politics (people good, government bad) that looks naive next to the incisive writing about politics on today's op-ed pages.
She endorses song lyrics as poetry, as I do, and makes this interesting distinction between the spoken and the seen, the heard and the beheld:
In the 1990s, poetry as performance art revived among young people in slams recalling the hipster clubs of the Beat era. As always, the return of oral tradition had folk roots --in this case the incantatory rhyming of African-American urban hip-hop. But it's poetry on the page --a visual construct-- that lasts. The eye too is involved. The shapeliness and symmetry of the four-line ballad stanza (descending from medieval England and Scotland and carried by seventeenth-century émigrés to the American South and Appalachia) once structured the best lyrics of rhythm and blues, gospel, country and western music, and rock 'n' roll. But with the immense commercial success of rock music, those folk roots have receded, and popular songwriting has gotten weaker and weaker. In a course I created on song lyrics at the University of the Arts, I encourage aspiring songwriters to look at their lyrics on the page and to evaluate them for visual balance. Hence this book ends with a great lyric, Joni Mitchell's "Woodstock," which became an anthem for my conflicted generation.
As usual, Dr. Paglia's commentary on "Woodstock" is lucid and detailed. Most importantly, she refers to not just the written lyrics but Joni Mitchell's own rendition of the song, with a single electric piano and a few vocal scat-singing overdubs, not the more familiar, raucous CSN&Y rock version.
Keep that in mind when you read the lyrics. The opening of that song is as blunt and direct as a news report, but its directness is as old as The Book of J.
I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him, where are you going
And this he told me
I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
And try and get my soul free.
Note the repetition of "I'm going, I'm going, I'm going" --quintessentially American, yearning and learning.
Oh, don't get me going on song lyrics --Leonard Cohen alone!-- "Democracy," "The Future," "Everybody Knows"-- but let me close with some brief stanzas and couplets, to show the power of compression.
Remember "Pancho and Lefty," by Townes van Zandt? (Sung, of course, by Emmylou Harris):
Lefty doesn't sing the blues
All night long like he used to
The dust that Pancho bit down South
Ended up in Lefty's mouth.
George Jones:
I say you're nothing but a liar
And I'm the cold hard truth.
John Hiatt:
I will try, I will stumble
But I will fly, He told me so
Proud and high or low and humble
Many miles before I go
Many miles before I go.
And finally, in the aftermath of Katrina, Stephen Foster:
Let us pause in life's pleasures
To count its many tears
While we all sop sorrow with the poor
There's a song that will linger
Forever in our ears
Oh! Hard Times, come again no more.
Maybe words alone --no matter how strong, clear, and unambiguous-- can't save us, but without them we're lost. We deserve better custodians of them these days. Look what we're faced with, just this week --Nature raw in tooth and claw. In the beginning was Nature. In the end is Nature. We need strong poets for these times. Where are they?
Posted by Jerome at September 4, 2005 10:15 AM | TrackBack