To relax, I keep going back to a big paperback anthology I bought a few months back titled, The New Space Opera 2. (Earlier post on this book here.) The gem I found found this time is a story by John Barnes, called "The Lost Princess Man."
One of the things I love about the science fiction genre is that, through its allegorical tales, it offers real insight into contemporary social attitudes and ideology -- often via satire. In keeping with this Swiftian agenda, "The Lost Princess Man" captures a key aspect of our contemporary structure of feeling.
It tells the tale of an interplanetary con man who navigates his way through a vast and incredibly dangerous totalitarian empire by working a specific scam. And it's a particularly heartless one.
He preys on destitute young women. He picks out a victim, and then attempts to convince her that he's been sent from on high because he has evidence that she's of a royal bloodline, and may be the "lost princess" for whom the Imperial government has been searching (to perpetuate its lineage and reign).
Once his prospect agrees to travel with him (to claim what's hers), she is drugged, turned over to plastic surgeons who make her irresistible (according to current fashion), and installed as a high-class prostitute in a ritzy bordello. "The Lost Princess Man" collects a bounty for every "recruit" he delivers.
But then, we find out something surprising. He says this of his marks:
"They're blunt, not easily fooled, and hate authority. After listening [to his con] for a while, the girl says, 'I think you are working the lost princess con, and the minute you have me off the planet, you will pump me full of drugs, and I will wake up chained to a bed with a large number of Imperial troops lined up and waiting to have a turn on me.' At which point, I say, 'Well, of course.'"
Asked by his interlocutor why he actually admits he's pulling a scam, the "Lost Princess Man" replies that, on balance, what he has to offer is a big improvement over the impoverished lives these young women lead. Further, they don't get "gang banged", but instead, are considered "luxury goods" -- and (according to "sumptuary laws") their service can only be sold to a limited number of very well off individuals.
As part of the deal, they recieve an education, their artistic and intellectual talents are developed, and they become fluent in multi-planetary cultural manners. This is why many of those he approaches agree to go along with him voluntarily.
Cynicism or Realism?
The story continues to take wild twists and turns after this (especially after we find out that the Empire really is looking for a "lost princess"), but I'll stop at this passage, because for me it rings all sorts of ideological bells.
The first thing it reminds me of is the way cultural critics such as Peter Sloterdijk and Slavoj Zizek characterize the ideology of our moment.
In the old days (according to their writings), when our glitzy, consumer culture promised us it held the key to our self-realization (in the form of eveything from cool clothes, to tech devices, to self-help schemes, to designer drugs, etc.), we sometimes believed that such enhancements would help us find our inner lost princess or prince.
Now, we're supposedly too hip for all that. Yet, we continue to use such props anyway -- and in this sense, "go along with the pitch", but now, with a sort of cynicism. "I know very well," we think, "that this won't help me find the well-being I want, but, what the hell, you gotta have something."
As Zizek puts it: "Cynical reason is no longer naive, but is a paradox of an enlightened false consciousness: one knows the falsehood very well, one is aware of a particular interest hidden behind an ideological universality, but still one does not renounce it."
On the other hand, you could argue that the "marks" in this story, rather than cynics are realists about their actual prospects. I'm thinking here about a remark the philosopher Jacques Ranciere made on contemporary exploitation. As he put it:
"The dominated do not remain in subordination because they misunderstand the existing state of affairs but because they lack confidence in their capacity to transform it." He adds, though, that getting such confidence depends upon there being a credible politics that offers a way out.
In the absence of that (or, say, some trustworthy form of inner transformation), perhaps the compliant folks in this story are merely being (wisely) strategic.
Nevertheless, such a tale raises a provocative question. In our "seen-it-all-before" time, when we make our own Faustian bargains, are we being cynics or realists? Thoughts?
Books
09/20/2011
04/11/2011
Now Available: "Prom Night" - a Collaboration from Artist Tamara Gonzales and Poet Jerome Sala
It was great to collaborate with artist Tamara Gonzales on this chapbook. We were amazed at how well the poems, inspired by some of my favorite horror stories and movies, and Tamara's goth images, fit together. But rather than hype you on this book myself, here's from Jeffrey Wright's review in the Brooklyn Rail:
"Prom Night is a slick date: a poetry/collage collaboration by Jerome Sala and Tamara Gonzales. With echoes of Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, the camp and sultry verses are paired with eye-dazzling images of equally camp and sultry sirens in full color. Sala, like one of Gonzales's blackbirds, is listening to the 'ruler of an underworld' in 'Lost Planet.' Pluto's demotion and its attendant emotion are dissected in Sala's tight style.
"The Goth undertones are reflected in Gonzales's punk-glam shades of Frida Kahlo and Kiki Smith. A stiletto combo in a pop package: 'a psychic feedback loop that celebrates our universal damnation.'"
Michael Lally, at Lally's Alley adds, "Underneath the campy subject matter is a profound subtext articulated with lyrical panache." (Read Lally's review in full here.)
Here's the title poem, with just one of the images that interweave with it in the book. (Btw: the book has extensive notes at the end that provide a key to its pop references...)
Prom Night
The Gingiss Tux kingdom has fallen
Prom Season is haunted by a Slasher
Every salacious kiss calls forth a hatchet from the void
And Anger's accusatory finger points forth with menace
The Graduates call in sick
Their carnations rot, unwanted in their un-watered garbage cans
The football team remains unlettered
A blank sweater goes better with this illiterate State of Fear
Ruled by the Prom's forsaken crown
Empty kingdom!
Forced entries inspired by roofies forgotten
Fast exits demanded by fright in their place!
The back seats of drunken cars abandoned --
No vomit touches the fuzzy upholstery
No hand squeezes the absent thighs
Meanwhile, the Slasher proposes negotiations
With the United Federation of Potential Victims
Without a contract signed in the blood of sacrifice
The film cannot go on
Retribution for awkward adolescent indiscretion
Cannot rain down its severed limbs and sex organs
On dark rows of hissing cynics
On the other side of the dream's silver walls
Milk Duds will go unsold,
Waiting in vain under their hot glass counters
Chemical popcorn will stop twirling in its iron cradle
The Slasher speaks but no one listens
He whispers into the celluloid night
But on the other side of his screed and his screen
Only his absence applauds in the empty seats
Order Here:
You can order Prom Night from the link below. It's just $13.00. Enjoy!
http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/prom-night/13000569
03/04/2011
It's Out! Here's a Sample From Elaine Equi's New Poetry Book "Click and Clone"
Elaine Equi (my wife!) has a new book of poems that's just out now from the very cool Coffee House Press. It's called Click and Clone. Since I'm obviously biased in its favor, here's what two distinguished poets have to say about it:
"Elaine Equi seems to know all our foibles and, instead of edging toward the door, reports the latest developments with precise, loving equanimity. Her voice is unique: poised, witty, intimate, and somehow interstellar. It's as if she's visiting from a future where we all appear transparent. Click and Clone is an electrified pleasure field." -- Aram Saroyan
"Spick and span, cut and dry, shake and bake, and now Elaine Equi introduces Click and Clone. These poetically altered texts punch wholes into the multiverses of pop and splendor, short and longing, prose and dreams. Equi says that art can no longer imitate life, it just needs to keep up. As they might say at the racetrack, she leads by a verse." -- Charles Bernstein
And now, for a sampler from the book itself. Here are four of its "interstellar" poems. Enjoy!
Role Reversal
Stendahl claimed he held a mirror to nature.
Like Flaubert, many readers of Madame Bovary exclaimed: "C'est Moi!"
Once reality was dumb and brutish --
in need of art for elevation.
But it's changed --
grown baroque and multifaceted.
Today we can no longer take reality for granted.
Now art is the simpleton.
____________________________________
Led Zeppelin Revision
That stairway only leads halfway to heaven.
_____________________________________
Everybody Has Dreams
Last night, the cook dreamt a giant mouth dribbling blood
or ketchup. He has trouble relating to women.
The woman in the beige pantsuit dreamt of a computer that
transports objects into the future.
The woman by the window was a little girl holding her mother's
hand.
The guy near the door followed a melody into a forest.
The busboy was driving a sports car fast.
The skinny girl was a military general in a country ruled by a giant
inflatable cat.
The waitress murdered somebody. Even now, she looks guiltily
over her shoulder as she wipes the silverware clean.
___________________________________
Pyrokinesis
Cast of Characters
Jerome, a poet with light brown hair and glasses
Elaine, a poet with medium brown hair and contact lenses
Martine, a poet with dark brown hair and glasses
Jerome: Pyrokinesis is when you look at a person and
they burst into flames.
Elaine: I'm the opposite. I look at a person and I burst
into flames.
Martine: When I look at a person, they turn into water.
Jerome: I try to avoid looking at people.
11/29/2010
What's So Funny About Hermann Goering? Or, Why I'm Afraid of (Political) Clowns
Reading Roberto Bolano's Nazi Literature in the Americas, a satirical encyclopedia of the lives of fictional poets and prose writers, I came across one faux biography I found especially amusing.
Under an entry labeled "Franz Zwickau, Caracas, 1946 - Caracas, 1971", we get the tale of a "son of German immigrants", once called "Venezuela's best schoolboy poet". Here is part of Bolano's "review" of a "badly written" volume titled The War Criminals' Son:
"A number of poems are noteworthy:
--'A Dialogue with Hermann Goering in Hell,' in which the poet, astride the black motorcycle of his early sonnets, arrives at an abandoned airfield, in a place known as Hell, near Maracaibo on the Venezuelan coast, and meets the shade of the Reichsmarschall, with whom he discusses various subjects: aviation, vertigo, destiny, uninhabited houses, courage, justice and death." (p. 90)
Why, I wondered, was this passage, in a book full of fascist camp, particularly funny to me? Of course, such a description is part of a long line of literary and media images of goofy Nazis, stretching from Chaplin's The Great Dictator, all the way to Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds. If, as Susan Sontag first wrote, there's something kinky about fascists, there's something laughable about them too.
This is because as losers, their inflated claims about superiority seem, in retrospect, silly and pompous. And who looks more boorish than the pudgy Goering? In his day, he must have been a terror -- but to us, he seems a clown.
You could even say that satiric portrayals of such figures have created a modern archetype: the puffed-up, anti-intellectual authoritarian who invites our derision as soon as he (or now she) appears in the news. By now, in fact, this sort of portrayal is so common that figures who embody it have become almost endearing (because of their very familiarity, if nothing else).
But I wonder sometimes if we fail to fully grasp the dangers of modern authoritarianism, precisely because it seems difficult to take our own political buffoons completely seriously...
The Postmodern Political Clown
Back in 2009, the philosopher Zizek began commenting on the parade of puffed-up leaders who now inhabited the world stage. Blustery figures such as Berlusconi of Italy, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Putin of Russia, he noted, shared certain personality traits.
All were rather clownish, tending to make flubs, off-color remarks and generally outrageous verbal mistakes in public. They were also given to emotional outbursts, sometimes containing threats.
And though he never compares them to Nazis, I couldn't help seeing one rhetorical connection: what makes these figures seem silly is similar to what makes our media images of fascists funny: their almost self-conscious, ironic courting of pomposity, braggadocio and a sort of knowing ignorance- -- as if each were acting the fool for our entertainment.
Further, as Zizek pointed out, it's not only humor that makes these figures popular:
"The wager behind Berlusconi's vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian ... Even his grandiose enactment of the role of the noble politician, il cavaliere, is more like an operatic poor man's dream greatness. Yet we shouldn't be fooled: behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game."
Those Lovable Mavericks and Populists
Recent U.S. politics has been nearly overpopulated with these sorts of figures -- from the Perots of the 90s to contemporary innovations such as the Palladinos and Mama Grizzlies. They too invite laughter mixed with identification through the screwed up, but "earnest" ways they talk (not to mention their "authentic" emotional outbursts and tweets).
But you have to wonder, in light of all this, if the many parodies these figures inspire might not be helping to normalize their politics -- by integrating them into a "lively and diverse American Scene." Such joking around might even imply that it would be fun (and harmless) to live under their entertaining rhetoric full-time. They appear on Saturday Night Live after all!
And there's another factor that makes them appealing. The political theorist Gramsci described (back in the 1930s, under Mussolini) something he called Caesarism. Gramsci theorized that when large segments of the public perceived conventional politics to be "gridlocked", people longed for an authoritarian figure from outside the system to intervene.
No doubt this is part of the appeal of our own "mavericks." The more they signal through word, deed and emotional display that they are not part of "regular" politics (despite their corporate backing), the more they they are not only loved -- but seen as a possible solution.
11/04/2010
Return of the Communist Menace! Recent Political Rhetoric and Steven Johnson's New Book
There's a specter haunting political discourse. And yes, it's the specter of communism. Again. But not plain old materialist communism -- but communism of a virtual kind. Exaggeration? Check this out:
Actually, even in all its xenophobic glory, that TV spot is rather subtle. If you listen to Glen Beck and crew, you'll find out that the hated liberals aren't only selling out to the Red Hordes -- they are the commies themselves.
Of course, by now, this sort of propaganda is so familiar it's hard not to be numb to it. But what surprises me is that even in indie movies nowadays you see a blurring of the concepts of socialist, communist and liberal. The other night, I was watching Southland Tales (2006), a film by one of my favorite directors, Richard Kelly (who made Donnie Darko and The Box, two films I love).
The film's premise is that because of nuclear terrorist attacks (this time in L.A.) the U.S. lurches further to the Right -- with increasingly draconian enforcement of the Patriot Act. There are, we are told, however, pockets of liberal resistance. The main one is called the Neo-Marxists.
Not since the Cold War, it seems, have incompatible terms like liberal and Marxist experienced this sort of force fitting. And on the face of it, it is ridiculous.
But, at the same time, over the last few years I've become a believer in the maxim that "the unconscious is on the outside"; i.e., that the secret fears and desires of people and cultures are often presented so blatantly, it's hard to see them. (They're "hiding in the daylight", so to speak.)
So I began to wonder if this "Return of the Reds" (as in "commies" not red states!) into that public dream we call popular culture might not be expressing something deeper than just propaganda and confusion.
One candidate for the source of these anxieties is played out loudly and clearly by the commercial. As our economy lags and China's apparently races ahead, there are no doubt fears that our style of capitalism ain't what it used to be.
Add the double trauma of the Crash and continuing unemployment to the mix, and you start to wonder if this fear of communism is not masking a nostalgia for the Cold War era itself, when things were more prosperous (thanks in part to the very Keynesian economics the TV spot criticizes).
But recently I came across a set of ideas that led me to wilder speculations about this latest version of commie phobia.
If You Have a Good Idea, Does It Mean You're a Communist?
A buzz-worthy read on the popular non-fiction scene right now is Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From. In a piece last week in the NY Times in which Johnson wrote about his ideas, he starts by relating how a member of the audience, during his book tour, asked jokingly if he were a communist. Johnson's article is about why the joke would arise in the first place.
He feels this is because his book makes the case that, since 1800, the majority of new scientific and cultural discoveries arose in non-market environments (i.e. from Universities to individual artists, hobbyists and inventors -- people making things for the sake of making things, without thinking if these these things would make them a buck). And many of these innovations were the result of collaboration, rather than individual genius.
Of course, he assures us, there are numerous examples of market-driven discoveries. Interestingly though, of these the majority are also of the collaborative, "networked" type. So, on balance, he's speaking a heresy. Though the market drives innovation -- other forces and sources drive it more. And even in for-profit situations, a collective rather than individual effort most often comes up with the best stuff.
A case in point: Johnson's own method for studying all this derives in part from the brilliant literary scholar, Franco Moretti (who's been discussed in this blog here) -- whose own ground-breaking theories arose out of his (collaborative) academic research and were published early on in New Left Review.
Add to this the fact that the internet economy Johnson writes about, that place where huge collectives "liberate" formerly pricey products and share them for free, does tend to act like a big, subversive, electronic commune.
The problem with all these new collectivities is that, as Johnson points out, there's really no name as yet for them or the symbiotic economies to which they sometimes seem to be on the verge of giving birth. Maybe this is why old names for collaboration, like communism, keep coming up.
So perhaps, as far as communism itself goes, it may be most accurate to say it's still dead on earth, but alive and well in the heaven of our virtual life -- on the web, at the movies, in televisual space. Not to mention our imaginations -- paranoid or utopian.
10/18/2010
It's Good to Be Good for Nothing: Thoughts on AI, an Anselm Hollo Poem and the film Never Let Me Go
Just starting Anselm Hollo's fascinating Guests of Space, I came across a poem that captures, with admirable concision, an experience uniquely common to our era:
My first computer:
Poor old workhorse machine
Just an advanced version of the clay tablet
Archaic box, you still work
Humming that hum I found so irritating
22 years ago
(used to say "this thing's
no smarter than an amoeba")
Waiting for me to write
A word and then another
And another
But I shouldn't have said what I said just then
Because only a few days later
It went from hum to loud groan And died
As I read it, the poet here starts out by viewing his old machine with bemused affection -- as a projection he is no more able to really empathize with than a microorganism. And yet, in the end, he finds himself -- by a mildly superstitious reflex if nothing else -- almost thinking twice about such a judgement.
What adds a humorous touch to Hollo's poem for me is the degree of identification I feel with this thought pattern. According to Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality, the "thinking twice" I noticed is a bit of a trend.
He tells us that ever since IBM's Deep Blue beat chess champ Gary Kasparov -- and fueled popular fantasies about Artificial Intelligence -- it's become increasingly difficult to avoid psychologically projecting intellectual and emotional traits onto computers.
The possibility of now or future AI, Lanier argues, forces us to wonder about how wide to "draw our circle of empathy" -- because we increasingly wonder what separates persons from non-persons. As in the case of debates about when life begins, "the borders of personhood remain variegated and fuzzy." (p. 39)
Hollo's poem suggests, indirectly, one of the many possible answers to such questions. What separates the poet from the computer is the simple fact that he, not it, is writing the poem.
Coincidentally, the ability to make art as proof of selfhood is an idea explored directly, if in a much less playful way, in a movie I saw last week: Never Let Me Go.
Arty Clones
The film version of Ishiguro's novel (which I haven't read) portrays a society that "manufactures" clones, as it were, in order to harvest their organs (in early adulthood). Of course, it seems odd that clones wouldn't be considered fully human -- they're the equivalent of identical twins, after all. But what's even weirder is that, during their schooling (in special boarding schools) these supposedly not-fully- human clones are encouraged to be creative; they make art (which is collected and shown in a gallery).
As they mature, some wonder what purpose their art served. A sort of urban legend springs up among them that there is a chance for clone couples "truly in love" to defer their (organ) "donations" (as they're euphemistically called) for a few years (and enjoy each other).
The clones believe the reason they are told to create is that such artworks allow their wardens to see into their souls -- and to judge whether they are truly in love, or just faking it to escape their unpleasant fates.
What one clone couple discovers, though, is that the art was not to "read" their souls, but to determine if they even had souls or personhood in the first place. And that no "donation deferrals" were ever granted.
Why Does Making Art Make You Human?
The idea of art-making as proof of humanity is common enough. But why is this? I think here again of a point made in Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." As Daniel Pinchbeck puts it:
"Technology...is based on an ordering of reality that turns everything -- including people -- into a 'standing reserve,' a resource to be utilized for rationalized ends." (p. 105)
To be "standing reserves" (for fresh organs) is exactly the fate of the clones in the movie. And this is due not only to (genetic) technology, but to a society so in love with its own rationalizations that it can deny personhood to a segment of its people.
Heidegger saw the arts as a sort of antidote to such tendencies. He reasoned that paintings and poems valued things and people not only for their uses, but for themselves. According to this logic, the ability to make things for their own sake, and that are relatively useless for practical ends, is a key trait that separates mere machines from intelligent beings.
This is why when people debate the possibility of AI, they sometimes present examples of computer art. It may also have something to do with the fact that Hollo's own computer inspires a poem precisely when it breaks down -- and is good for nothing.
08/12/2010
The Ultimate Narrative on the Decline and Fall of Narrative: Michael Gottlieb's "Memoir and Essay"
Quoting Hume, Eagleton writes, "The liveliest of all objects, Hume remarks in his A Treatise of Human Nature, is 'a rational and thinking being like ourselves, who communicates to us all the actions of his mind; makes us privy to his inmost sentiments and affections; and lets us see, in the very instant of their production, all the emotions, which are caus'd by any object." (p. 45)
By that definition, Gottlieb's book is a very lively one indeed. What he makes us "privy" to in his Memoir
I suppose it's mildly ironic that this absorbing narration is about the creation of a resolutely anti-narrative style. And that Gottlieb's creative discoveries take the form of aesthetic epiphanies -- through which he discovers a mode suspicious precisely of the personal epiphany.
But the dude tells such a compelling tale that all that theory, all those contradictions, seem like so much yaddah, yaddah, yaddah in the back of the mind, as your inner dialogue says "ok, sure, but what happens next?"
And the Story Goes Like This...
Gottlieb charts his aesthetic beginnings to Bennington, where he developed a thesis of poetry written in the style of "small...precisely observed lyrics." (p.24) Simultaneously, throughout the writing process, he found himself noodling with words in the margins -- weighing, playing, sounding -- listening to what they had to say in their own right. Of course, the ruling assumption of the time was that none of this "doodling" was relevant to the actual "Poem."
But like Pollock remarked somewhere about the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton, such schooling turned out to be important as something to react against -- but not just yet. After his degree, disillusioned by its doctrines, he stops writing for a few years. Then, in the back room of the old Gotham Bookstore, he comes across a few magazines (edited by Alan Davies and Barrett Watten) -- and the experience is "like being struck by lightning":
"It was clear to me from that moment on: you didn't need to tell stupid stories any more. A poem could be about what it was supposed to be about -- the indigestible, irreducible, unredeemable words that flung themselves at us every day, the language that, in its infuriating, inexhaustible, immeasurable confusion, yet limitless precision, lived, teeming, out there, outside our door. There could be no subject, or at least no subject greater than this." (p. 29)
A few pages later, the money shot of the book arrives: that moment when Gottlieb achieves his first writing in this new mode.
It begins: "I finally gave in to that impulse which had stirred first in me years ago back at Bennington. The words just arrived. They weren't just literary words, they came from all around -- from the Daily News and the street and the radio and the TV and the flyers blowing down the sidewalk. Just being attentive to the words was enough. I made the lists then I sat back and looked at them. It was a Saturday." (p. 34)
Even such bare lists though, he feels, contain "too much residual narrativism." To release their "innate discrete power or gnomic identity", he reorders them systematically, according to a method he devises. And then:
"I sat back and looked at it and read it out loud and I realized that for the first time I had made something that reached back down and tapped that sense I'd had years ago -- that to the extent the world is made up of words, and that there is contained a world in every word, it is the poet's job to take the world apart and give it back to us in a way that we've never seen it before. For the first time in my life I had succeeded in making a real poem. It made sense -- its own sense." (p.35)
Gottlieb's narrative is punctuated by moments like these. They're so strong that, for me, they make the book's other notable themes (NYC in the 70s, the formation of avant-garde scenes, the lifestyles of poets) fade into the contextual background. You come away enthused about reading not just the experimental mode he champions -- but anything you think might be valuable.
For in a book that sometimes creates a landscape of disillusion; one about the fall of everything from the boho lifestyle, to the wildness of a city, to standard-issue political assumptions, Gottlieb somehow makes you excited about words again.
Note: To find Elizabeth Fodaski's excellent review of this book, go here.
08/05/2010
Are We Having Fun Yet? "Mad Men" and the Happiness Industry.
"The phenomenal success of the show relies at least in part" Roiphe wrote, "on the thrill of casual vice, on the glamour of spectacularly messy, self-destructive behavior to our relatively staid and enlightened times. As a culture we have moved in the direction of the gym, of the enriching, wholesome pursuit, of the embrace of responsibility, and the furthering of goals, and away from lounging around in the middle of the afternoon with a drink."
Just as the early 60s "smoldered" against 50s repression, so Roiphe sees our own attraction to the "world of excess" in "Mad Men" as a symptom of our own irritation with "the wilier and subtler repression of our own undoubtedly healthier, more upstanding times."
Be Happy Now!
If Roiphe is right, and at least some viewers look with a sort of nostalgic longing on glamorously bad behavior, you have to ask why. Aren't we better off now? Especially when there's never been so much attention paid to happiness?
After all, as Savoj Zizek reminds us, "...over the last decade, the study of happiness has emerged as a scientific discipline of its own: there are now 'professors of happiness' at universities, 'quality of life' institutes attached to them, and numerous research papers; there is even the Journal of Happiness Studies..." (p.44)
If we're not perpetually overjoyed after all this, it may be there are tactical errors in happiness literature. For example, happiness manuals like The Secret (not to mention countless other Positive Mental Attitude books) tend to offer strategies for raising your expectations. Yet, when Danes, reportedly the "happiest people in the world," were studied for their secret, researchers concluded that it was their "modest expectations" (leading to fewer disappointments).
In any case, this sort of happiness scrutiny is a symptom, according to Zizek, of a new social imperative: "happiness as the supreme duty." (44) Hyperbole?
Maybe not. Barbara Ehrenreich's recent Bright-Sided studies U.S. culture's "relentless promotion of positive thinking" and its practices. One of the darker aspects of such thought (aside from the apparently disastrous effects it had on investment strategy) is its application in some types of business management.
"Except in clear cut cases of racial, gender, age, or religious discrimination," Ehrenreich writes, "Americans can be fired for anything, such as failing to generate positive vibes. A computer technician in Minneapolis told me he lost one job for uttering a stray remark that was never identified for him but taken as evidence of sarcasm and a 'negative attitude.' " (54)
The "subtler repression" Roiphe alludes to may be the result of these cultural currents. If our "New Age" happiness is a "duty", it becomes a job like any other. You end up working too hard to have a good time.
And if it comes at the the expense of critical thought, the result may be a sense that there's something missing from this brand of joy. What? The wildness of a little freedom.
A Narcissistic Act
I wrote a poem a few years back that plays with these ideas. And though I'm hesitant to present my own work, happiness therapists the world over tell me I must fight this embarrassment to achieve self-realization. So in the interest of my happiness, the sales of my book Look Slimmer Instantly, and, I hope, your personal enjoyment and self-fulfillment, here it is:
It Was the Night Before Monday
and a good thing too
because if the weekend went on any longer
the populace was in danger of the overwork
it took to have a good time
you could feel the relief in the night air
in every restaurant
around every TV screen
among the crowds pouring out of the Sunday night features
leaving the parks
or in the minds of those obstinate individuals
visiting a last site at their keyboards
you could hear the chatter
arising into the atmosphere like a swarm
people excitedly planning
how they would spend their morning
relaxing in front of a column of figures
or obeying the kind machines that urged them forward
at a more human pace
than the cruel bosses
of the leisure industry
and among those who were tired
(and there were many)
of risking their lives
in order to enjoy them
voices began to cry out
and demand revolutionary action--
some called for a longer work week
supported by a leisure strike
so that the oppression known as entertainment
could be retired forever
07/30/2010
The Critic as Artist and Vice Versa. Thoughts on Oscar Wilde, Wallace Stevens, and Nick Piombino
Rereading Oscar Wilde's The Critic as Artist, I came across a favorite passage. Wilde describes how his pleasure in viewing the Mona Lisa is enhanced when he remembers what the great critic Walter Pater wrote about it:
"Who ... cares whether Mr. Pater has put into the portrait of the Mona Lisa something Lionardo (sic) never dreamed of? The painter may have been merely the slave of an archaic smile, as some have fancied, but whenever I pass into the cool galleries of the Palace of the Louvre, and stand before that strange figure 'set in its marble chair in that cirque of fantastic rocks, as if in some faint light under the sea,' I murmur to myself, 'She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in the deep seas and keeps their fallen day about her; and trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants..." (pp. 44-5)
For Wilde, Pater's mildly extravagant vision is a lot more exciting than the plain old Mona Lisa. And making that sort of appreciation possible, he proposes, is the job of the critic -- even if this involves disregarding the intentions of the artist. "And so the picture becomes more wonderful to us than it really is," he adds, "and reveals to us a secret of which, in truth, it knows nothing..." (p 45)
In an act of provocation, Wilde ranks the imaginative critic higher than the artist. For, if artists/poets enhance life, the critic enhances their enhancement. In fact, Wilde insists that all great moments of creativity are deeply informed by the critical spirit.
The Artist as Critic
Echoing Matthew Arnold, Wilde sees art as a criticism of life. If the poverty of our conventional perceptions, to paraphrase Orwell, is boring, one solution some poets have offered to this problem is to willfully turn what they perceive into art. Here is Wallace Stevens, transforming what could be a standard natural scene into something resembling an abstract painting:
He walked with his year-old boy on his shoulder.
The sun shone and the dog barked and the baby slept.
The leaves, even of the locust, the green locust.
He wanted and looked for a final refuge,
From the bombastic intimations of winter
And the martyrs a la mode. He walked toward
An abstract, of which the sun, the dog, the boy
Were contours. Cold was chilling the wide moving-swans.
The leaves were falling like notes from a piano.
The abstract was suddenly there and gone again. (p. 270, lines: 4-13)
Is the Best Poem the One that Got Away?
There is a whole poetic tradition that agrees with Wilde about the imagined work being better than the realized one. Shelley wrote that "...when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet." (504)
But this makes you ask, why then even try to write a poem? Why not just imagine one?
One of the wittiest takes I've come across on such questions is a series of prose poems that ends Nick Piombino's Theoretical Objects. Titled "Explications", it offers something Wilde might have enjoyed: commentary on poems (I assume) that never existed.
Piombino starts this sequence off on exactly the right note. The second piece in the series offers an explication of an imagined poem on the utter impossibility of poetry:
Failure to Exist
The poet's implication here is that it is probably no longer possible to create a poem. This is made clear in the opening passage which depicts the impossibility of describing the most beautiful and touching aspects of what it means to feel. Speaking of an "ironic sun" and a "black hole of comprehension" the poet here dwells on a series of infinite parallels, digressions and reflections. "Passion evaporates into transparent calm" is a line which may refer to the exaltation implied in a poet's silence. "This isn't reality -- it feels too good" may be ironic or sincere. "Hatred follows hard on joy" may signal the poet's despair toward anything that can be said too directly. "Mostly movie stills," "false memories" "tiny sights" all refer to frustrating aspects of communication via images. "Life has been replaced by words, only silence moves me." Here the poet encounters chaos in the heart of the most meaningful aspects of private satisfactions." (163-4)
Getting It Wrong in Order to Get It Right
Now, of course, I may be absolutely wrong about this piece. It's possible Piombino has an actual poem (or something altogether different) in mind here. But even if I'm wrong, according to Wilde, I should be proud of my mistake.
For it would mean that in getting this poem wrong, I got the goal of poetry and criticism exactly right.
Note: Nick Piombino's always provocative blog, Fait Accompli, is here.
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07/19/2010
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