THROUGH THE YEARS, 4

25 years ago: Feb. 1982
By 1982, musical artists born in the '50s were coming into their own, creating what I referred to as the second Golden Age (or Silver Age?) of New Wave. Some of those who were a bit older than me I took to right away: David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer. Others took awhile to overwhelm my resistence; eventually I would accept them in their own rights, but at the time there was still -- to my mind at least -- a lingering feel of "wanna-be" status to those who came too late to be part of the real Golden Age. Belated in more ways than one.

XTC is a good case in point. English Settlement was their fifth album; in those days when four albums in four years was not uncommon, fourth albums had a way of being the end of the initial impetus or the transition to the fully empowered status of veterans. English Settlement indicates full empowerment (and was a double album). But I didn't get around to listening seriously to Andy Partridge and company until their seventh album in 1984. Maybe I was finally convinced by the fact that they had staying power that some of their contemporaries -- like The Jam and The Clash and others who crapped out before mid-decade -- didn't have. But my early avoidance stemmed from my sense that, unlike the Heads, The Clash and Costello, XTC seemed predicated too readily on "the aesthetic regime" that had come to be passé. Partridge still strikes me as a combination of Lennon and McCartney in one person: his lyrics tend to the acerbic, at times preachy, bent of John Ono, while his musical imagination is as delightfully irrepressible as Sir Paul at his most inventive. In other words, Partridge was so hepped to be the Second Coming that it struck my early 20s self as too willful, too mannered. It took me awhile to overcome this prejudice.

But it's also a fact that XTC never achieved much stature in the US of A, and, given the band's status, musically, as a New Wave Beatles (they even stopped touring the way the Fab Four did after Revolver) it's somewhat curious. One way to explain it is that the effects of disco and punk and their aftershocks had dissipated any mainstream rock/pop consensus such as the bands of the initial British invasion and the subsequent era of arena rock had commanded. By the early '80s arena rock was for the dinosaurs and for head-banger balls. Bands with New Wave savvy were aimed at a smaller, more ironic coterie. And the underground begat alternative.

XTC, with songs like "Melt the Guns," which singled out the US as the main brokers of the arms race, and "Nearly Africa," which gave a boost to non-white superiority, and "Down in the Cockpit," which waved the flag for female autonomy, and "No Thugs in Our House," which satirized bourgeois complacency and youthful Nazi-wanna-bes, was always ready to comment on the inequities and chicanery of the day in ways that the up-and-coming young conservatives couldn't dance to, and which the old-time hippies turned yuppies found naive or irrelevant. And the songs were way too tuneful for the punks' scorn of musicianship and professional standards.

Thus XTC, like much of New Wave, remains barely a blip on the big radar screen of what was happening in this era of music. These days when I listen to English Settlement I can't help thinking of the friends from that era who were hipper than I was and who sussed that Partridge was God's gift to English pop. The songs have all the crisp, sonic newness of the Heads at their best, but also feature the kinds of melodies British popsters are rightly famous for. And Partridge and the much less prolific Colin Moulding are nothing if not clever -- not quite with the sneering aggression of Elvis Costello's amazing wordplay, nor with the storytelling pathos of someone like Ray Davies; songs like "Senses Working Overtime" (which saw a smidgen of airplay in the first year of MTV), "Jason and the Argonauts," "Snowman," "Fly on the Wall," "Leisure," and "(All of a Sudden) It's too Late" are idiosyncratic, musically complex, observant and emotionally candid in ways that few others could be so exuberantly. Partridge and Moulding are simply brilliant and this is probably their best album -- at least until, ten years later, 1992's glorious Nonsuch.

Life's like a jig-saw,
You get the straight bits,
But there's something missing in the middle.
--Andy Partridge, "(All of a Sudden) It's Too Late" (1982)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 3

30 years ago: Jan. 1977
In the suburban wastelands I hail from, the affront of punk was slow to light a spark, but late in 1977 came the export (and exploitation) of The Sex Pistols. At this point in the story, though, the dinosaurs of Rock were unshakeable in their stature.

I graduated from high school in 1977 and at that time there were three veteran bands that dominated what the kids were listening to: Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, and, of course, Led Zeppelin. The other mainstay was The Beatles but they were no longer a going concern, so to speak. Pink Floyd was generally regarded as the band from that "Golden Age" era that remained true to its dominant ethos -- which had something to do with grass, psychedelics, inner visions, and a vaguely anti-establishment program that translated into not becoming your parents. But Pink Floyd's reach, after the grand cash cow that was Dark Side of the Moon (1973), expanded beyond almost everyone's grasp: they simply were Rock, and if you cared about that, however dimly, you found the Floyd acceptable.

One way of saying it is that the "aesthetic regime" of Rock was the one fostered by the greats of the Golden Age, that what we had come to expect from the Floyd -- lyrical guitar solos, ambient keyboards, trenchant lyrics and vocals strident or eerily sedate -- could be supplied indefinitely. But what started with Dark Side was Roger Waters' emergence as a man with an ax (careful, eugene) to grind, and that had something to do with the true ahrtist being appalled by the commercialization of music and the egregious "gravy-train riding" of its sycophants and PR men (a tune going back to The Kinks' "Mr Reporter" and The Stones' "Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Man").

On Animals, Waters returned with a vengeance, letting everyone have it. The album is notable for the glee of Waters' delivery, the harder edge to the music, and the acerbic clichés of its mini-portraits, recalling George Harrison's "Piggies" and some of Lennon's more pointed barbs, of all the Dogs, Pigs, and Sheep out there, "house-proud," censorious, smug, climbing the ladder no matter what, or piously not getting ahead so as to show their moral superiority, "fucked up" in one way or another, a rogue's gallery of the self-satisfied Seventies culture of "making it." The cover shot -- a beautiful photo of a "dark satanic mill" hovered over by a flying pig, the mascot of every enterprise -- told the story: Big Business is our culture's salvation and curse. Serving the machines that serve us is the best humanity can hope for in the 20th century. Sandwiching the vitriol of the three long songs on the album (still maintaining allegiance to the standards of prog-rock's epic sweep) were matching little acoustic ditties on which Waters, heart on his sleeve, claims that he cares and that genuine friends are the only hope against those sinister Pigs on the Wing.

A baleful album in a lot of ways, but a nice kick in the ass after the more elegiac tone of Wish You Were Here. Only occasionally did Rock ever register with the intelligentsia; more often than not, it's the happy stomping-ground of working-class heroes, and Animals tips its hat in that direction. The legions of jobless or stuck in dead-end jobs can't say enough, negatively, about The System that robs their dignity. What are the chances the Sheep will rise up "and make the bastards eyes water," Waters wonders, leaving it to the up-and-coming Clash to agitate for "revolution rock." Such a drag, too many snags...

Bleating and babbling, we fell on his neck with a scream
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream
--Roger Waters, "Sheep" (1977)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 2

35 years ago: Feb. 1972

Harvest was a milestone for Neil Young because it marked his entry into mainstream radio play, which was what brought him to the attention of my Top-40-listening ears at that time. In 1972 I was 13 and as yet knew only AM radio. Harvest boasted two Top 40 hits: "Heart of Gold" and "Old Man," both of which marked a confluence of two strains of pop music then prevalent. One was rock's turn toward a country sound that had begun under the influence of Gram Parsons (reaching its apogee in two songs on The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers of the year before); the other was the sensitive singer-songwriter sensibility that hit its Grammy-winning stride the previous year as well with James Taylor's Sweet Baby James. Young joined those trends after time spent with Crosby, Stills and Nash -- a supergroup that had played its part in both of those trends already. Indeed, Young's contribution to CSNY's Déjà Vu, "Helpless," was one of my favorite songs in 1970, and his topical "Ohio" (written immediately after the Kent State killings) had cemented my admiration for the moody dude of the foursome.

Harvest was later complained of by Young for its mainstream accessibility, but that's hindsight speaking. At the time, the album simply fulfilled expectations that albums like Déjà Vu and Young's solo LP After the Gold Rush had raised: that someone could make mature, grown-up countryfied rock without becoming sappy or hokey. What kept the latter two epithets from rearing their head on this venture were songs like "Alabama," a revisit of the scathing "Southern Man" that registered again -- in the year when Wallace, pre-assassination attempt, was making noises that would again worry the ailing Democrats -- how backward was the South (in other words this was "country" without the reactionary conservative BS), and "Words (Between the Lines of Age)" in which Young gives his guitar an elegant and tasty workout while the lyrics provide a sense of creative ups and downs that is more positive than despairing (Young had already demonstrated his penchant for darkly neurotic narratives in "Last Trip to Tulsa" and "Don't Let It Bring You Down").

The hits on the album still deliver after all these years as eminently hummable ditties about facing the aging (Young was 26 when the album was released) that signals a hiatus in the rock troubadour lifestyle. Dylan's retreat for country's gentler rhythms had also occurred in his late '20s, so the precedent had been set. Young, unlike Dylan, didn't go for the settled family man version of things in his songs: "A Man Needs a Maid" and "Out on the Weekend" both signal, with bittersweet lyricism, a resolute singleness in search of some way of maintaining solitary allegiances without simply becoming an old child. Tales of lost innocence can be found in the title track -- which seems to promise a lover "a man," not only as a promise of sex but also in the sense of mature companion -- and in "The Needle and the Damage Done" which states emphatically that, in Dylan's words, "too many people have died" due to the depredations of the demon poppy. It's time to grow up on many fronts -- and as "Are You Ready for the Country" (which was a country hit for Waylon Jennings, one of the original Nashville rebels) proclaims: "you've got to tell your story, boy, before it's time to go."

The centrality of this album in the Young canon was signaled by his very successful revisiting of its terrain twenty years later with Harvest Moon in 1992. Telling his story is what Young does best -- that and play the guitar. Neither "harvest" album is predominatly guitar-driven (those occasions were left to outings with Crazy Horse), but both are warm, homey, comfortable albums easy to live with and in. Easy listening? Yes, and in 1972 that easiness had not a little to do with rock's ascension to major market with its heroes all getting along quite comfortably, posing no threat whatsoever to the Silent Majority's man of the hour -- Tricky Dick Nixon whose landslide re-election was only nine months away. There are worse places to sit out the shitstorm than a ranch in Topanga Canyon. As Keats says, "the squirrel's granary is full, and the harvest's done."

Will I see you give more than I can take?/ Will I only harvest some?
As the days fly past, will we lose our grasp/ or fuse it in the sun?
--Neil Young, "Harvest" (1972)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 1

Spread at five year intervals from 40 years ago to 25 (the era of my childhood and youth), I've selected albums for each month to cover the years that, for me, trace the Golden Age of Rock (not rock'n'roll per se -- whose Golden Age was arguably the '50s, early '60s) to the debut of my age group. The Golden Age of Rock is essentially the era in which The Beatles and The Stones (aka, The British Invasion) came to maturity. The Beatles broke up and The Stones -- like all the great bands of that era -- went into decline, but that decline was in some ways delayed by the second Golden Age: the era of punk and New Wave that surfaced in the late '70s and played itself out in the early '80s. By the mid to late '80s the decline of that initial rock impetus was complete and the New Wave had, in most instances, been subsumed into the slick digital processed rock of the era. Grunge and lo-fi and a few notable mavericks kept the game alive into the '90s at which time many of papa's heroes enjoyed a resurgence. But that tale is best left to those who were college age at the time.

40 years ago: Jan. 1967
This is a landmark year for several reasons, not least of which is the appearance of this record: Andy Warhol presents The Velvet Underground with Nico (aka Peel Slowly and See). I was eight in 1967 so I can't claim that I experienced this album in its own time. Ten years later, toward the end of high school, this album offered itself to me as a discovery of where two mavericks, Lou Reed and John Cale, got their start in collaboration.

It took me ages to warm to Nico's vocals -- and I use the word "warm" for its appositeness to the feeling her voice creates in its resolute unwillingness to register any emotion. These days I can get as misty as anyone when I hear her icy Teutonic tones on the soundtrack to The Royal Tenenbaums because in the interim the woman died (but not before I saw her live in New Jersey opening for Cale), but also because, more importantly, the sound of the songs on which she sings ("Femme Fatale," "All Tomorrow's Parties," "I'll Be Your Mirror" -- the latter two trademark Lou meditations on "the girl" with nothing to wear and nothing to say and so no identity, who, as mirror, can only reflect what the others want her to be, but which is also a kind of ars poetica for the singer who will reflect only what he sees: what Cohen called "beautiful losers" losing the best way they can) define the late '60s ambiance of this album for me. It's all about trying to warm cold water flats in Chelsea with a colorful parade of personalities poised to be famous in the Underground . . . or in Warhol's Factory. How can you not feel nostalgic for a time, place and style you never got to experience but which left its aura on virtually everything hip bohemia would pine for ever after?

The Underground, that amorphous concept of the '60s, could breed so many self-styled creations that would later be called "alternatives" and yet maintain a kind of checklist of what's de rigueur, at least in NYC. And Lou checks 'em off: alienation, promiscuity, decadence for its own sake, hard drug use (definitely NOT psychedelic!), cross-dressing, homosexuality, S/M, a cult of beauty, a cult of death ("death is the mother of beauty"), intellectual and creative pretensions -- at a time when, as he says in a later song, "poets studied rules of verse and the ladies roll their eyes," his lyrics for "Black Angel's Death Song" retain a touch of Dada, while Cale's sonic contribution -- like the smashed glass in "European Son" -- adds elements of the actual avant-garde, rubbing shoulders for the first time with rock'n'roll.

Lou began his songwriting career as a doo-wopper and those roots are audible here, especially in the tracks Nico sings on, so that the album at times showcases a kind of Brill building apocalypse: like theater pieces that end-up off Off-Broadway, these songs would never make it with the masses and can only find their place in the Underground, where they gain immeasurably by maintaining allegiance to a brittle innocence on the edge.

My two favorites are "Sunday Morning" and "Waiting for My Man" -- one of the greatest A/B pairings imaginable -- think of it as the underground version of "Strawberry Fields Forever"/"Penny Lane": "Sunday Morning" gives us the angst (a big buzz-word après le guerre) of "the wasted year so close behind" while "all those streets you crossed not so long ago" signal not only the changes of the identity parade but also the Heraclitean flux of time's stream. Like Sisyphus' stone (in Camus' account), Sunday morning always comes 'round again and the crushing weight of the past resurfaces. The feeling is not so much "it's nothing to get hung about" as: what a bittersweet and wonderfully melancholic feel it is to get hung about it: "we must imagine Sisyphus happy" though "I got a feeling I don't want to know": a feeling that hangs over the day, precipitating the hard drug use that will recommence the cycle.

"Waiting" is much more upbeat because, like "Penny Lane," it's a story of the street, but in this case it isn't the whimsy of how surreal psychedelics make the quotidian as in McCartney's tune, but rather how anxiously the addict waits for his fix, while still presenting the danger ("hey white boy, what you doin' up town?") and the distress ("the first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait") as a kind of adrenalin rush that precedes the heroin rush ("he's got the works/gives you sweet taste") and then "you're feelin' fine/until tomorrow, but that's just some other time" -- the "tomorrow" that will surface sooner or later as "Sunday morning."

And of course there's "Heroin," one of the best songs Lou ever wrote, implying that drug addiction is expressive -- in part ego-assertion, in part escapist fantasy, in part social protest, in part an inner quest -- and, on this album, accompanied by Cale's electric viola pyrotechnics. As they say, "a must!"

When I'm rushing on my run/ and I feel just like Jesus' son
And I guess that I just don't know/ oh, and I guess I just don't know
--Lou Reed, "Heroin" (1967)

RENOIR REVOIR

Tonight the Whitney Cinema Series kicked off the new semester with a showing of Jean Renoir's 1939 masterpiece The Rules of the Game to a packed, appreciative house. It was good to see classic cinema pack 'em in. The film is one that I'm a bit ashamed to say I didn't get around to seeing till my 5th decade on earth -- in fact I didn't watch it till after the Criterion Collection came out with the restored DVD. Viewing a pristine 35mm print was worth it, even if it meant being shunted to the balcony.

The film is a classic for several reasons. It's release "on the eve of World War II" establishes it as a film that chronicles a world of landed gentry, old world bourgeoisie, devoted servants, and the incipient cultural nomads from both above and below stairs that would soon be overwhelmed by the relentless march of modernity. So it's classic as a moment in the history of cinema when it comes of age as the form able to do most effectively what the theater and the novel did for earlier periods: chronicle for the bourgeoisie how the game was being played.

The artistry of the film is in its brilliant mise en scène, its ability to orchestrate complex action in three areas -- foreground, middleground and background -- simultaneously, but also in its ability to combine romantic farce, romantic melodrama, slapstick and "tragedy." Whereas everything might have worked out charmingly -- as in a Woody Allen film like Hannah and Her Sisters -- instead it turns lethal, with the one who can't play the game (the lovelorn and resolute "hero") being violently removed in what would be deus ex machina fashion except that the "god" in this case is a certain intuition of "the right thing" combined with a fatal sequence of wrong moves. The seeming chaos of the film's busy choreography points up, in the end, how we've in fact been watching an intricate ballet become a danse macabre.

But the film is also classic in the sense of drawing upon classcisism. In his opening remarks, Dudley Andrew asserted that this film was Renoir's effort to go back to an even earlier sensibility, to recall a sense of French dramatic classicism (a servant is named Corneille and delivers what may be the film's funniest line: when the Marquis says "put an end to this farce, Corneille," the able servant replies, "which one, sir?"); what Andrew alluded to is what I would call the ethos of the film: it upholds a sense of human agency as ultimately determined by the ability to play the social game. The sense that all levels of society are akin in their acceptance of given roles and codes and moeurs is the driving idea that, in the classic period, hadn't yet been tested by democratic upheaval. For Renoir to harken back to the clarity of that world as the actual world was about to undergo the closest it would come to utter Götterdammerung is instructive. Much like Proust in the wake of World War I striving to delineate a world the war would change utterly, Renoir is giving us a version of a world that has held on to old privileges while adapting to the slippery ethos of a world in which the ancient verities are no longer iron-clad. As Octave (played memorably by Renoir himself) says, "everyone lies -- the radio, the newspapers -- so why shouldn't we?" In such a world "the game" will ultimately be self-invention, and the older pieties and stabilities -- including marriage, family, love and friendship -- will suffer.

Renoir's achievement in the film is to give all the characters almost equal dignity -- even those who are largely there for laughs, or to be the simple-minded means of destruction (the groundskeeper Schumacher) -- and to make them all likeable figures in a self-evident social milieu. Octave and Marceau, as two wildcards whose actions help to precipitate (albeit somewhat inadvertently) the demise of the world-record aviator, are given more than usual interest by their sympathetic portrayals -- including Renoir/Octave cavorting in a bear costume -- but the character whose performance is most synonymous with the film for me is the actor playing the Marquis. Chaplinesque at times in his diminutive stature and flamboyant gestures and Valentino-like in his eyes and expressions, the marquis has, as the General remarks at the end, "class" -- with all its associations with amour propre, noblesse oblige, savoir faire, and je ne sais quoi -- combined with a sense of cinematic aristocracy, the ability to "play" in a wildly erratic way against type.

Once you learn the name of the game
You can never play enough
--Bryan Ferry, "The Name of the Game" (1987)

POINT OF VIEW

This semester I'm tutoring for Daily Themes again -- a course in which students are assigned 300 words a day in response to prompts that ask them to exercise a variety of prose-writing skills. Some have to do with aspects of fiction writing, such as characters and dialogue, others simply with a greater awareness of the resources of diction and sentence rhythms, still others involve special forms -- like fable or critique. The lectures -- particularly as taught by Bill Deresiewicz, the instructor the last two times I've taught for the course -- combine exhortations and provocations about writing with mini-meditations on selected passages, pointing out how writers, such as Joyce, Dickens, Austen, Hemingway, Updike, and the like, achieve their effects. It's a heady class because on any given day -- in discussion with a student (I talk with each one for 30 minutes a week -- often more like 40) -- I'm forced to talk about what makes a piece of writing interesting, and about topics that are intrinsic to the art of writing.

This week's topic was Point of View. Point of view, which is always implied in every kind of writing, is only discussed as a technique in fiction writing. In other words, fiction manipulates point of view so as to make it part of its arsenal of effects. The reason, it seems, is that point of view as orientation is assumed to be static in non-fiction writing, and consistency is its ideal. In fiction, shifts in point of view -- because of characters and different levels of discourse driven by the point of view's spin on its material -- are common and can be exploited to immense effect. Point of view, however distinctive it may be (no two person's point of view can ever be identical), is only intelligible to the reader through changes in language, or in focalization, but the latter, as a change -- like taking a picture from two different angles -- simply alters our focus or attention. Changes in disposition -- signaled linguistically -- are much more telling and constitute the really remarkable aspect of fiction writing. So much so that one way of judging students in this initial week is on how comfortable they are with the problem of point of view. In other words, those who know how to manipulate and signal significant changes in point of view have the makings of fiction writers. As opposed, say, to someone for whom exposition or dialogue is the main controlling technique.

Point of view is implicated in how a piece holds together and, ultimately, in what it means. This is because point of view inflects every sentence; the reader's grasp not only of who is seeing and saying but of what is shown and said relies upon a coherent point of view. Students like to use third person to avoid the problem of "who" -- but for this to work, the "omniscient" voice must be free of the pitfalls of inexact wording, clichéd phrases, and inappropriate diction (not easy to achieve!), otherwise the loss in believability severely curtails our willingness to accept the point of view as a "window" on an actual world. First person point of view is actually safer since it is inherently performative and so can be allowed a host of idiosyncrasies and unexpected variations. Third person is probably inherently more conservative than first person, but it is also potentially far more extensive in its reach and able to register experience more subtly.

We always did feel the same
We just saw it from a different point of view
Tangled up in blue -- Bob Dylan, "Tangled Up in Blue," (1975)

AESTHETIC REGIMES

The idea that stays with me most from my recent reading of Rancière is that of "aesthetic regimes" -- because the idea, as I assess it, jells with my own approach to what I will euphemistically call "my intellectual and creative life." Put another way, I read Rancière, as I read anyone who reflects on aesthetics, in order to think further about my own relation to "the aesthetic" as a way of life. When philosophers remark that the era we're living through is more mediated than earlier eras they point out, perhaps, something in the nature of experience as we live now, but that seems to me to raise the question of what our aesthetic experiences amount to: does what we read, watch, and listen to create, for each of us, a kind of aesthetic context; and are our responses to all the various inputs and signals and works and texts and images based on selections and emphases that derive from certain aesthetic determinations -- like a predilection for certain flavors and not others?  And, if we chose to create work of our own, are we not making some effort to place that work within a given aesthetic regime, one we have determined by what is deemed successful and influential, but also by -- and here's a bit of my own Bloomian regard -- a struggle of sorts with whatever we have determined a work of art to be?

Put schematically (and in my favorite ruse of the tripartite division), there are three components here: 1) aesthetic context, or the sum total of all our aesthetic experiences. In some senses, art history is, empirically, the study of the aesthetic context for any work of art; it is the ground of the endeavor, if you will; whatever happens was able to happen, but in retrospect we try to piece together why something happened at a particular time and place. One way of saying this is: what made something not simply possible, but inevitable? 2) aesthetic emphases or responses, or the individualized element -- from that sum total any artist or work of art will be a selection, a response, a combination, a rejection and so forth; the context is a given, the emphasis is a response -- which in turn becomes a given or a part of the given. The interplay between given and response, which then informs new given and subsequent response, is the actual "history" of art history, which is formally the way all successions of taste or manner are classically treated from the time of Hegel onward; 3) the aesthetic regime: a philosophical supposition, arguing that the context and the emphasis have meaning or content, that they determine to a certain extent, as Rancière argues, the visible itself. In other words, we can only see or say or hear as we do within an aesthetic regime. This means that what we recognize as context, what we offer as response, are already under "a given": what has already been deemed intelligible qua art.

From this view, every major challenge to the statement "what is art?" is an effort to rethink the aesthetic regime, to call it into question. Art history then is also the record of these "breaks" or ruptures, these occasions when art -- whether as practice, as object, as intention, as value -- is under critique. But it's also the case that the aesthetic regime of modernism is one that presupposes such breaks without ever dismantling the aesthetic regime itself. In that, the aesthetic regime is much like liberalism in America: sometimes it's more conservative, sometimes a little less so, but it largely functions as "a condition of freedom," or of liberties that can be taken with its driving ideal: individual self-determination through consensus. In the arts, the self-determination takes the form of a response to the aesthetic context that in some way enlarges or expands the regime by allowing "art" to inhabit a new territory or entertain a new conception of itself. The vaunted "self-reflexivity" of art is the playing out of this presupposition: the artist's response, by reflecting yet another aspect of the aesthetic regime, permits the aesthetic regime to remain vital -- but at the same time art ceases to be something the object simply is and becomes something the object does.

On the personal, critical level, I'd like to give more thought to what particular works of art, or bodies of work, do for me -- at the levels of context, response and regime.

I'm not a flasher in a raincoat
I'm not a dirty old man
I'm not gonna snatch you from your mother
I'm an art lover. Come to daddy.--Ray Davies, "Art Lover" (1981)

LABOR OF LOVE

"The aesthetic state is a pure instance of suspension, a moment when form is experienced for itself. Moreover, it is the moment of the formation and education of a specific type of humanity."
--Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics

Reading this helps clarify what I said about "limbo" as a between state, a point of suspension, necessary for artistic creation: what Rancière is talking about is the idea, from Schiller, that the aesthetic is a means to experience form for its own sake -- whether in the contemplation of art or in the making of a work of art. Schiller believed that a particular kind of humanity would arise from "aesthetic education": one capable of a more "free-play" idea of social construction. Rather than a neat divide between those who simply "are" their labor (what they do), and those who can be varied in their interests because they don't have to labor, the aesthetic promoted the idea that we all might "play" sometimes with what we are, say, and do.

Rancière's point is that what he calls "the aesthetic regime" that emerges from such education is one that eventually makes no differentiation between art and work, between fiction and history, between things in the world and the meanings determined for them by what he calls a phantasmagoria of interpretation -- in other words, the task of cultural criticism engaged in reading the allegory suggested by the things we do and watch, wear, eat, see, say, and buy.

Rancière's distrust of the spread of the aesthetic into a general purpose approach to all aspects of life (i.e., everything is mediated) is instructive -- but also familiar since it takes its main points from a tradition of thinking about things and the imitation of things that goes back to Plato and Aristotle. As if it were enough to think back through the progressive claims that Romanticism and modernism had tried to stage: if everything is the stuff of representation, then representation is of the essence of reality, and so reality -- in all its historical manifestations -- is always already represented. The wonderful ironies possible from this standpoint are what make modernist writing so comradely, helping us all to participate in a wonderful esprit de corps in which "the world itself" is being remade by art. And the greats from that era were the ones able to construct a fictional or allegorical world with its own rules, a logic of selection and combination that gave us not simply new ways to think about art, but new ways to think.

Taken into our day ("the world itself has been remade by the processes of communication"), this generalized aesthetic regime tends to demote the work of art because of art's effort to play by rules of artifice or fictionality, or to start from aesthetic principles conceived as willed and not simply "the way things are." In the postmodern, according to Rancière responding to Lyotard, the condition of mourning becomes inevitable as the recognition that no work of art can really contain, much less remake, a world that operates under various aesthetic regimes of its own.

Rancière's comments help to recognize the level at which we approach everything we do through some sense of the aesthetic. As he says: "Man is a political animal because he is a literary animal who lets himself be diverted from his 'natural' purpose by the power of words." This power is the great seduction of the aesthetic dream -- offered to us from Romanticism onward -- of the artist as the willful creator and inhabiter of "his own world," suspended above the give and take of historical reality as he picks and chooses "what will suffice" from the endless play of variety in the world at large. This is no longer the artist as the hero of our time (as it was, perhaps, for modernism). Rather, in our time, the ultra creative manipulator is one who can play with the intangible tangibilities of stocks and assets and liabilities, of liquid commodities, of economic equivalencies of unlike markets -- like the main figure in Gaddis' JR. Or maybe a manipulator of media.

But to write is to "get back" to an artisan frame of mind. It is retrograde, going back to doing things daily by hand like any peasant -- and in opposition to 'writing at the speed of thought' as in the internet communications of computer jockies. As Rancière says: "the Flaubertian aesthete is a pebble breaker." The writer is a laborer in a field with only so much time to get the harvest in.

I'm setting these stones
And cutting this hay
And breaking these rocks
It was my price to pay--Tom Verlaine, "('Til the) Kingdom Comes" (1979)

LIMBO OMEN

"If Limbo is a sort of suburbs of Hell, then it is perhaps exactly the place for me. Between fire and outer darkness, enjoying the equipoise. Until I receive another omen anyway."
--Yashmeen Halfcourt in Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day

Limbo was the term I chose to describe my status while working on Between Days. In that stretch from 2000 to 2005, when many terrible things happened -- Bush elected twice, 9/11, the Iraq invasion, Katrina, and more -- I was buoyed by the fact that my real work was about getting down a different period entirely: 1966, or so, to 1978. But more than the imaginative energy required to revisit the past, "limbo" referred to the fact that constant work on a long term writing project detached me from the times we were all living through to an even more than usual extent. And this I appreciated, perhaps for obvious reasons. The "equipoise" was between the "fire" of the shit going down in the present, and "the outer darkness" of the past one ceases to recall. Yashmeen gives it the right spin. You know you are suspended somehow, and that "suspense" is the space of writing, it's a tightrope over the abyss of what you otherwise will never say or get down.

The idea of an omen that might end the time in limbo is attractive too. This would be a jolt from "the real world" that puts to an end that "neither here nor there" quality of life. Something definitive. A sign! I'm sure that could take many forms, but, not ironically, the limbo omen for me might well be a sign to go back into the limbo of creation again, for however long it takes. I'm referring to a sudden hearing problem that, like all sudden problems, suggests something ain't right, but also that time is passing, the body's slipping, and, as my doctor told me after observing changes in my brain detailed by an MRI, "you're not 18 any more." Well, hell, doc, give it to me straight: am I still 40 at least? No, alas, and so...

The doc's remark had meaning in another way too. In Between Days, my alter ego is about to turn 19. In the next novel, he is 19 ("not 18 any more"). Nice to have some scientific corroboration on that... a good omen? Amen.

ACADEMIC DYSFUNCTION

The other novel read, though not entirely, during my waiting room adventures was Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man (1975), mentioned to me by a colleague at the department Christmas party when I'd mentioned my plot for a story of a student's involvement with an academic couple. Having now read Bradbury's book, I can safely say, "that is not it at all. That is not what I meant, at all."

Bradbury is a literary humanist looking askance at the rise of sociology and the sociological (i.e., political) approach to teaching as it was fostered in the period the book dates from. He's got it right, and is rather more bemused than snide. Not a Mr. Jones who knows something is happening but doesn't know what it is, Bradbury does know and is able to archly show us by presenting one semester at the University of Watermouth in Britain. Nothing much happens except that the main character, Howard Kirk, gets laid a lot, and gets into a scuffle with administration due to one "fascist" student who refuses to produce the kinds of papers Kirk wants his students to write.

The characters in the book don't really interest Bradbury and so he spends little time trying to make them interest us. What he does seem to be trying to do can best be assessed by a little moment in which Kirk seems to meet his author:

"The face has a vague familiarity; Howard recalls that this depressed-looking figure is a lecturer in the English department, a man who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern. Since then there has been silence, as if, under the pressure of contemporary change, there was no more moral scruple and concern, no new substance to be spun. The man alone persists; he passes nervously through the campus, he teaches, sadly, he avoids strangers."

This brief portrait, of Bradbury or someone like him, lets us know why the book has no concern -- it's not the writer's fault, it says, he tried, but that's not the way it's done any longer. Perhaps not, but to do something more than vaguely entertaining with the situation the novel is addressing would require more resources than Bradbury brings to bear. It reads like the literary equivalent of a pro forma reader response to a lackluster dissertation: in other words, fatigue with academia and its tempestuous teapots is rife in the book, but with an ironic joust, a slight demur: of course the sociologically relevant, Marxian, Freudian hotshots will get all the great (academic) women!

And will probably both cause and experience grief as a kind of historical inevitability -- which is what it's all about anyway. He who writes history, changes it. But this is only fiction, and fiction changes nothing. And since "moral scruple and concern" have likewise become fictions....

WAITING ROOM READING

This week I had much occasion to sit and wait. First, for attention from the medical profession; then, for attention from the legal profession. In the first instance it was attention sought due to an unexplained loss of hearing in my right ear -- very dismal for a non-stop music listener such as myself and making this new year unusually tuneless thus far. In the second, it was attention required by a jury selection process -- which relinquished me from duty when they heard the trial would conflict with start-up day at Yale (indicating, perhaps, a professional courtesy I was glad to take advantage of).

During both waiting processes I read Patrick McCabe's Breakfast on Pluto (1998), a book ideally suited for such settings. The "novel" consists of a series of vignettes, almost "black-outs" in the comic tradition, shorter than short stories, ostensibly penned by a cross-dressing Irish ragamuffin turned prostitute named Patrick Braden, but happier to answer to Paddy Pussy, who finds himself unwittingly suspected of being an IRA bomber during his stay in London in the mid '70s. The book breezes by because Pussy is so brazen and so cheeky and so in-your-face entertaining. Only occasionally does McCabe rub our noses in unpalatable acts of violence -- to add gravitas to what would otherwise be nowt but flashy fluff -- while generally allowing Pussy to put the glibbest spin on the gut-wrenching world he lives in and the depressing as hell world he comes from. Aptly called "grimly amusing" by one reviewer, the book's fascination relies on the balancing act between the random and pitiless violence and the effervescent zing with which Pussy recounts the details of his sordid lifestyle, a hand-to-mouth existence dressed-up, as Pussy is herself, in the best glam-camp available.

The realities of the story are contrasted to two fantasy lenses: 1) the dastardly doings of his alleged father -- a Catholic priest who raped Pussy's mother while she served temporarily as scullion in the randy cleric's home; fantasy, because Pussy recreates the story as he conceives it to have occurred, not having gotten it from any witness or participant. McCabe lets the zest of Pussy's gleeful ire soar in his renditions of this terrible blow to his innocent mum's sanctity, the cause of the consequent lack of any real home for the abandoned-as-a-child Patrick, which leads us to: 2) the saintly visions of the mummy-machree-that-got-away, if only she could be reunited with her own palpitating Pussy, er, I mean, find and love her bonvivant baby boy-girl.

McCabe is good at keeping the voice alive, but Pussy's preeminent tic is to invert sentence structure and to wield a slang vocabulary in inflated terms that at times treads upon the fascistic boots of our Alex, O my brothers. Deliberate as the day, I'm sure (of course Kubrick's film gets a mention in setting up the cultural referents for young Pussy's apprenticeship to the boutique fashions of the early '70s), and indicative of the more cunning intent of the enterprise which seems to be -- perhaps -- to suggest that the blither-than-thou world of '70s pop glam is -- as the headbands and facepaint of the Flower Power era were to Vietnam and the racial riot realities of the '60s -- simply a screamingly extreme "acting up" reaction to the "old Ultraviolence" of bombings, killings, and guerilla tactics known as The Troubles. Holding the two visions together at once in the institutionalized (for a time) ravings of one daft mick is McCabe's achievement, giving Pussy just enough soul to make us trust her.

The problem with seeing everything from Pussy's view and in her language is that no other characters are able to rise above caricature, though in our brief acquaintance with them -- such as a John Fogarty-lookalike who meets a horrible end amidst comic deflation, or Pussy's one friend, a girl called Charlie, who lives a more traditional life parallel to Pussy's -- the details are sharply illuminated, like television. Fitting, since the book runs by like the nightly news: graphic misfortune amidst slickly fascinating allure.

They put you down, they say I'm wrong
Your fancy things, you put them on,
You're a rebel rebel . . .--David Bowie, "Rebel Rebel" (1974)

OUR VIETNAMS

Ted Kennedy recently called the Iraq War, "Bush's Vietnam." The tendency to such analogies seems rampant, but what do they really mean? What Ted was supposedly trying to say is that Bush, like those unwitting prezzes who got us into the Vietnam debacle (including his older bro JFK), has entered an unwinnable war and so it's time to pull out. But if there's a history lesson from Vietnam it's: "don't enter unwinnable wars." Too late for that! And since most of those on Capitol Hill approved of "the war plan" way back when....  

The point of comparison is that a war is unwinnable when there is no final realizable goal. In Vietnam it was: to demoralize North Vietnam so that they would surrender any claim to South Vietnam, or to drive them to the table to agree to our terms. Never quite happened. The other point was to prevent "the spread of Communism," which was just the trumped-up rhetorical version of the WMD: the ostensible causus belli. Neither really panned-out in the long run, but it didn't matter since their strategic purpose was to create the "launch" mentality. LBJ did that with just the Tonkin incident to (fudge and) drum up support; GB2 had the World Trade Center attack. So, yes, we must rush to war. Oh shit, it's not going our way (after years). Now what? 

The other point of the Vietnam analogy is: just when everyone thought the war was being won, they decided, after the Tet offensive, it was really lost. It wasn't either. But that was enough to turn everyone against an effort that shouldn't have been made in the first place but that, once committed, had to be seen through. In that sense I find myself in the ridiculous position of actually agreeing with Bush! (inasmuch as the "I am in blood steeped so far that returning were as tedious as go o'er" mentality of Macbeth applies -- in other words, if you can't be ruthless, why go to war?). The point at which to pull-the-plug was before GB2 got started, not now (so why was there no serious opposition then?). 

Could Nixon have "won" the war he inherited? Doubtful, but he at least was working toward diplomacy with China so that the vast "communist threat" argument was weakened and the question of what to do about North Vietnam might've become a more general geopolitical question, not just an effort by the U.S. to set up an unpopular regime in the South and call it the ruler of both Vietnams. 

Is there any hope of attaining an actual goal in Iraq? I have no idea because I don't think anyone really knows what the goal was to begin with. To get Saddam, yes. Did that. But then what? Uh... watch democracy take root. Er, build-up more economic dependence on the U.S. and install government friendly to our interests in the area? Um, try not to get killed too much while trying to stop others from killing each other as they wrestle for power and attack the U.S. simply for being there at all? But the point about "winning" is that, for civilians, it seems to mean that we send in the military with "a job to do," and they do it and come back home and the place is now all the better after our "intervention" (invasion). But, historically, if you invade, you take over (which means constant military presence), but no, we don't really want to do that! (Of course not, that would be imperialist). 

BUT, for the military, being "in action" is the entire point. To be a presence -- policing, subduing, invading -- is its purpose and the military "wins" when it is allowed to press on into such a situation. Thus the doublethink of our news reports with their sentimental "support our boys and girls at the front" -- because these are real lives being risked and lost -- must avoid any recognition of what the U.S. military is as a purposeful entity in the world. The general view seems to be: it's "ours" and so "we" support "it." But we don't want it doing what it trains itself to do if too many lives or too much money is lost. Thus any checks upon it come only from "public opinion" exerted upon politicians, which has little grasp of the strategy or the purpose of taking a military action. 

The analogy between Vietnam and Iraq stands because in both cases Prezzes following their own agendas committed the U.S. in situations that were much more complex and vexed than they realized, depending on military know-how to bring the situation to order. In both cases, the military went about its actions according to its lights, with no end in sight (unless some diplomatic coup occurred). The political purpose of the engagement was left to the politicians, but there was no real consensus on what that should be, so the engagement simply ran on and on, until everyone at home got so tired of it, they pulled the plug on the venture, pulled out the military, and let hell come down. Hey, we tried. Now let's find somebody to blame.

WHY READ PYNCHON, 4

7. Tweaking genres. Pynchon -- more than any other serious writer that comes to mind (i.e., one we have to take seriously) -- is able to manipulate and re-imagine any number of popular literary genres. Most of those genres I have a nodding acquaintance with, but one accepts that Pynchon reads or has read the kinds of books that rarely make their way onto any college syllabus, but which sell well and are translated all over the world. Romance novels; spy novels (he's spoken highly of Le Carré and one suspects he's spent amused hours in Ian Fleming's world, and who knows how many others of that type); gumshoe novels (late in the novel he brings back Lew Basnight seemingly for no other reason than to have a go at that type of story); boys' adventure novels (though I didn't read Tom Swift novels, which The Chums of Chance draw upon most obviously, my older brother had some around, and I'm sure I glanced through them, but I did read a series called The Three Investigators, published by Alfred Hitchcock, and I was amused to find in AtD phrases I recall from those tales of three boys sleuthing in southern California); tales of war (in which the Germans are evil incarnate) and espionage (especially the Cold War variety with those pesky Russians up to no good); sci-fi (H.G. Wells seems to be the main precursor here, but echoes of Dune can be found, and a reference to Star Trek); westerns of the Louis L'Amour variety, filtered through the kinds of westerns I'm more familiar with: the films of John Ford, Sergio Leone, Sam Peckinpah, but also with winks toward that terrain so obsessively inhabited by Cormac McCarthy; the bildungsroman, here presented as a kind of sexual odyssey for the character Cyprian Latewood -- not exactly a "coming-out" story, but certainly playing upon the givens of such narratives; tales of showbiz impresarios and young Trilbies; any number of popular works that don't have much purpose other than to delineate the particulars of some ethnic group or other, sprinkled with plenty of italicized words to add an air of authenticity to what the characters say; this applies also to any number of subcultural tales in which the oppressed of some particular locality are in struggle against those who oppress them (Pynchon always pauses in his epic narratives to take a look at how "the preterite" are faring in any given time and place); and of course that genre made huge recently by The Da Vinci Code, in which "ancient clues" must be interpreted in order to elucidate a current crisis, as well as the genre getting its due in the novels of Richard Powers, in which new scientific developments change not only the course of life, but have explanatory power in terms of what the characters say and do.

This is to say that Pynchon's universe does not dwell in some literary absolute in which masterpieces read other masterpieces forever, but also it's to say that, in my experience, it's rare for anyone working in any of these genres to attempt or achieve what he does. Which is to say that everyone I've mentioned, and that whole host whose names I don't know, write such tales earnestly, even if only as entertainment, which is why they don't mix the signals. Pynchon mixes all the signals, thus achieving not only that genre (also popular, but usually for a smaller subset of the readership) known as satire (i.e., any work which does not necessarily take its premises or the world it depicts seriously), but also attaining a prose that is, at times, an end in itself. Often one comes upon passages in which the narrator (and the tuned-in reader) seem to say: who cares about the plot, who cares about the characters, just write!

8. The prose. Fans of Pynchon are mainly fans of how Pynchon writes. "No one does it better," as the old Bond song puts it, or to use a phrase from a song that was playing one day while I was reading, and which suddenly seemed to be commenting on whatever inexplicable event was occurring: "no one mystifies me like you do." This is not a question so much of following "the plot," but of being willing to surrender to what this kind of writing requires. (Granted, in its 1085 pages, there are some effects that become redundant, and there are a few similes that an editor should've caught -- having been used once, they shouldn't be used again; the most egregious thing the editor (assuming there is one) didn't catch: when Reef, Yashmeen and their daughter finally meet up with Frank, Stray (Reef's former wife) and Jesse, the son of Reef and Stray, the text tells us Stray (and not Yash) is the female in the first group. Whoops! More evidence that all TP's characters are interchangeable, or that Yash and Stray are the same person in different times and places? heh heh).

Reviewers who have found AtD wanting in comparison to GR (and one sympathizes with their having to read the book quickly) seem to have forgotten how hard it is to make any sense of the narrative of GR at first, how much it requires a steady forward push and gradual loosening of the expectations founded upon the works of much lesser writers. But GR trained many of us to inhabit Pynchon's universe -- but then Vineland and M&D, which don't inhabit that world in quite the same way, moved us away, again, from the kinds of assumptions GR worked with and AtD returns to. Those who read AtD without ever being enthralled by its prose, by the simple flex and flow and stretch of the characteristic Pynchon sentence, should maybe take up some other art to consider -- or, granted, perhaps they love fiction but not prose, the way some people who love movies get uneasy when one speaks of film or cinema -- i.e., an attempt to consider what the work manifests as an artifact of a certain medium, conceived in a certain time and place.

Those who find AtD wanting as "what the world needs now" are sanctimonious poseurs who assume to speak for what that might be; AtD at times suggests what is needed is a revolution; at times, a götterdammerung; at times, more faith in what knowledge of the world can bring to light (with the narrator fostering a kind of sentimental fondness for mystical or non-rational forms of knowledge, with, perhaps better than most venturers into the occult, a working idea of how "irrational" our world of physics, chemistry and biology really is). As to the "post-9/11" world which we live in (in some influential minds), Pynchon adds a few items to the table: acts of terrorism against huge resource-controlling entities have been common since the birth of explosives; throughout the world there have ever been those -- disenfranchised, persecuted, rebellious, or simply murderous -- who work to achieve concrete goals as "a blow" against the status quo (and at times they present much to be in sympathy with); the world we take for granted in our newshows and glib commentary, or even in our thought-provoking studies, is not "all that is the case." Those who find AtD wanting in not providing a definite enough vision of the Us vs. Them game afoot in its pages (as GR was able to do more effectively -- though perhaps reductively) might have to reflect on why that might be, and what one of the first major English language literary works of the 21st century is trying to tell them about that.

You say my kisses are not like his
Yeah, but this time I'm not gonna tell you why that is
I'm just gonna let you pass
And I'll go last
Then time will tell just who fell
And who's been left behind
When you go your way and I go mine.--Dylan "(Most Likely) You'll Go Your Way and I'll Go Mine" (1966)

WHY READ PYNCHON, 3

4. Sex and humor. In Pynchon's world, sex in all its manifestations -- ribald, comic, grotesque, lyrical, perverse, sentimental, erotic, and so on -- is an ongoing narrative effect. That is to say, that not only do characters have sex, but the sex they have is tied, like the narrator's sense of humor, to the imaginative possibilities of any given situation. When, for instance, a character begins to contemplate a woman's dog as an object of desire, it's as "natural" to the fictional context as having a huge hot air balloon and gondola journey beneath the desert sands and find a city there which, like all Pynchon cities, has a bar where colorful characters cross paths.

Humor is a part of sex and vice versa in many instances. Only when a major character feels a major passion -- which generally is of the nature of an obsession that can't be gainsaid -- does the narrator adopt a tone of respect about, even of sympathy with, what primal forces can make us do. But never does he drop the tongue-in-cheek tone that naturally intrudes when discussing someone else's delusions, no matter how heartfelt. The variation on this is when he strikes up the band big time to let the prose equivalent of flowers and bon bons descend upon some happy couple he is for the moment giving a literary fête. In other words, the corollaries and nuances of sex -- often "kinky" -- and humor -- often collegiate -- are a given. Few authors are able to be so arch about their characters' sex lives -- Joyce and Nabokov spring to mind as heading the list, but neither of them is at the same time so enthusiastic about every new wrinkle or fetish. Pynchon's narrator actually seems at times enamored of the erotic obsessions his characters experience even as he exploits them for dramatic or comic effect.

Saying the humor is "collegiate" is to say that it partakes of what has been common parlance to students since the '50s: drug humor -- at first filtered through jazz (and the hipsters Mailer discusses in "The White Negro"), then through the "sex, drugs, rock'n'roll revolution" of the college-age masses of the '60s. Pynchon's humor harkens back to those times, with perhaps a bit more of the inspired goofiness that found its anarchist heroes in the Marx Brothers, and its hip counter-cultural sensibility in The Firesign Theater. Neither of which were about drugs, per se, but which were so much more "meaningful" when stoned. But another meaning for "collegiate" is "sophomoric" and Pynchon seems to pride himself on the kinds of puns and verbal jokes that old English teachers liked to use to make the class groan -- just to make sure we were all paying attention.

5. Arcana, anyone? GR was the Pynchon novel that got tagged with the term "encyclopedic," but AtD is the only Pynchon novel that at times sounds that way. The passages on rocket aerodynamics in GR, or on the statistical Poisson distrbution, or on Pavlovian experiments, were part of the activity being presented. In AtD, the mathematical discussions have some of that feeling: we're listening to math-heads talk, so, sure this is what they have to say. The parts that sound less "motivated" by the story, and also way less metaphorical, are the passages that give us a quick precis of political developments, say, in Mexico, or which want to bring us up to speed on what's happening in the Balkans when one of our heroes stumbles into it.

Such passages aren't abundant, but I mention the tendency because it does demonstrate the extent to which Pynchon, for all his audacity, relies upon certain basic assumptions of intelligibility, such as those of any historical record. At one point one character says to another, "you really only believe what you were taught," or something to that effect, and it's a moment that illuminates something that underpins much of TP's method: the stories he tells are not the stories They tell or that We were already told. He's the poet of crypto-history, the teller who wants to reimagine the world via the cast-off arcana, the forgotten bits of pseudo-historical dream and theory and surmise. It's a daunting task. Most works of fiction either imaginatively recreate things which actually happened, or entirely fantasize a world only tangentially a part of ours. Pynchon does both those things, and so much more, but he still has to rely, at times, on basic accounts of the who, what, where and why.

6. Apocalypse then. The notion of apocalypse as revelation, a showing of what is to come (or of what has always lurked latent in the way things are or were) is a major working interest of TP's narrators and many of his characters, but the more popular meaning of apocalypse, as a revelation about the ultimate end or destruction of what is, is also intrinsic to both narrators and characters, though generally it's the characters that want to see what's coming before it gets here and it's the narrators that like to intimate that, whatever it will be, it's going to wipe what is, now, off the map. No one exploits so well, or so often, this tone of meanings just out of reach, of changes poised to occur that need only a certain catalyst or participant to become manifest.

Those who have compared Pynchon's works to pre-novelistic romance or allegory tend to focus on this aspect: a sense that meaning inheres in the things themselves and that the quest is to find that meaning, to bring it out, to rescue history from darker subtexts that are just as possible, perhaps even more likely. Indeed, as we go on in AtD we get the sense that hopes for the future keep diminishing. And, since the future of the book (on at least the standard timeline), is our time, well, good reason for the pessimism. To counter that, it seems, Pynchon provides glimpses of other possibilities -- aspects of "our" past which might still be recovered in "our" future, if we can manage it. I think this, more than anything, is the reasoning behind what the novel calls "bilocations": the notion that we live always with one foot in the past we want to claim as ours and one foot in the future we want that past to be the origins of. Apocalypse, as revelation, was all about a moment -- now in the past -- when what was revealed was a future that the present wholly ignored and which only a tradition -- religious, mystical, allegorical -- could maintain as still germane in the present. For TP, all secret societies, to say nothing of every new school or system of study, owe their provenance and their relevance to some such vision, insight or relevation.

WHY READ PYNCHON, 2

3. The world is everything that is the case.
This line from Wittgenstein is played as a joke in Pynchon's first novel, but its implications extend throughout his fiction: the world of any of his novels is everything that he deems germane. AtD is more sprawling than any previous Pynchon novel (and that's saying something) because it moves about among more stories and "follows" more characters. GR, while more imaginatively sprawling perhaps in that each wild metaphor might at any time take on a life of its own, restricted its main narrative line to Slothrop, with some notable digressions -- Pökler, Mexico, Enzian, Prentice -- that were all tangential to that narrative. In AtD, the narratives of the four Traverse siblings -- Reef, Frank, Lake and Kit -- each takes center stage for a time but also gives way to various "spin-offs" or subplots that can for a time take on as much importance as the main game -- the adventures of Cyprian Latewood, of Dally Rideout, of Lew Basnight, and of the Chums of Chance being the most vivid examples. One of the mentally fatiguing aspects of AtD is just how spread out "the story" chooses to be. V. set the bar with the wide reach of enterprises in which lady V. (or someone like her) was, at least in Stencil's reconstruction, involved. But, again, the reconstruction of V.'s past was, ostensibly, of a single character by a single character.

In AtD, as with M&D, I get the feeling sometimes that TP, having decided to chart an itinerary for his picaresque characters, pursues it sometimes doggedly rather than inspiredly, which means at times sketching in backgrounds in the broad tones of the encyclopedia (not known for really opening up time and place). In M&D the decision to follow closely the duo's actual peregrinations, I felt, reined in TP's imagination too much -- though this is what perhaps makes the novel more accessible to those that find it so. In AtD there isn't so determinate a reason for where characters go (though I think it has to do with a global map that TP laid out and chose to follow) and what they get up to (so long as it involves some type of anarchist shenanigans). Colorado, Venice, the Balkans, and Mexico become the dominant locales, though Chicago, London, New York, Trieste, Geneva, L.A., finally Paris, and hosts of other places move in and out like soundstages in the old Hollywood.

Where we are and what's happening seem at times arbitrary -- also a point often delivered or perceived as a criticism -- an effect that, I would argue, is justified by the narrator's world view which I would describe as Manichaean: the two poles are the utterly random and the fated (i.e., controlled by forces unseen). Because the characters must themselves experience both sides of this pole, their adventures have to be such as to dismantle standard versions of cause and effect, probability, even self-identity. Such crutches must be thrown over by the reader as well and it seems that a deliberative wearing-down of our expectations of sequential and consistent events can only occur in a narrative of sufficient magnitude, like those paintings that only "work" on a colossal scale.

To be continued...

WHY READ PYNCHON

This weekend I read through the final parts of Against the Day and I found myself contemplating -- as one will when reading from page 697 to page 1085 of a book one has somewhat lost the thread of -- what it is that makes Pynchon worth reading. The question comes to mind because books of such size naturally try one's fixed concentration, but also because what happens in Pynchon novels is quite unlike what happens in any other fiction I'm familiar with.

1. Imaginative audacity. There is seemingly no end to the expansion of the tale simply because there is seemingly no end to what Pynchon is willing to imagine. The events that befall his characters are sometimes tied to actual events, sometimes not, but the version of history that Pynchon employs is, first and foremost, the one that is congruent with the world he imagines. And the world he imagines is loony, loopy, absurd, chaotic -- or organized according to a logic that, like the Quaternion mathematics that keep cropping up, is based on alternatives of space and time that, if possible in theoretical physics, are not generally observed to be functional in the biosphere. This means that "the Pynchon universe" is not really "biocentric." It's not about biographical lives which, for the most part, is all that most fiction is able to delineate. Even so-called science fiction rarely (I'm not up on the genre really) attempts to tell its story as though the tiresome creaturely "laws" of our planet are suspended in the narration itself.

2. Cinematic characters. This imaginative departure from the time-bound world we and most of our literary characters exist in means that Pynchon's characters don't function with the same degree of gravitas that most readers of "serious literature" come to expect. It's often said that Pynchon characters are cartoonish -- generally this is said with a certain degree of deprecation, or simply from a wish to be accurate, or as a means to suggest amusement. But one thing that has remained a constant of Pynchon's fiction is that his characters are not so much cartoonish as cinematic. They all live lives that occur in the vast film that is their narrator's imagination. In this film, all the female characters are played by charming starlettes, all the male characters are played by any number of character actors from the great age of cinema (up to the '50s let's say), but they are given to us by a narrator who knows that psychological nuance, in cinema, is simply a trick of the light, or, more interestingly, is a different "reading" or enactment breaking through the initial one. A world rendered in such a way entails a rather different fictional sleight of hand. One could say, somewhat facilely, that Pynchon gives us Warhols, not Rembrandts, with the implication that the nuance of a Rembrandt is only possible before light has been seized and frozen in photography. The patina in Pynchon is old movie patina, and it resonates for all who -- as the voice at the end of GR says "have always been at the movies -- haven't we?"

to be continued...

GETTING SERIOUS / HAVING FUN

Today I received a rejection of my essay on Molly Bloom. The letter enclosed what seemed to be a cut-up version of one reader's report. Most of the specific objections to the argument don't amount to anything more than cavils: matters that could easily be downplayed, or statements that could be altered in revision. But for two points:

My effort to sustain a workable version of what polysemous reading is -- based on three different systematic approaches to fourfold interpretation (Dante's, Frye's, Jameson's) is dismissed by "wow, what a Melvillian crew that is!!" -- an interesting figure that suggests that all three are "aboard" at once, rather than recognizing that each of the systemizers captures a certain cultural nexus, each providing a way of discussing what it means to interpret a truly polysemous work like Ulysses. Which is to say it requires holding, for my purposes, four different fourfold schemes in mind at once to see how they interrelate (the first being the Bible which is always at the back of this kind of exegesis). I'm told the argument "begins to read like a personal hobby horse." And there I plead guilty, bearing in mind dear Uncle Toby, and conceding that this material is part of a longer argument that got shoe-horned into the Molly paper. Though I contend that literary criticism is nothing if not a hobby horse anyway, I can accept that my particular version isn't worth riding.

But this brings me to the most insightful bit of criticism in the whole harangue: The lead-off comment that this is "a thoughtful and sometimes penetrating essay. It is also at times a wild and infuriating one, and the writer has to get serious now about his/her problems in getting ideas into prose."

The hobby horse of the thing, really, is something in the tone of the essay itself, I surmise, a sense that it isn't "serious," that, in fact, it is ironic toward its own effort to enunciate this interpretation and that quality is "infuriating" to this reader. I can accept that, though I had aimed at entertaining the reader, albeit a reader who would appreciate its irony.

Later, I was reading Andrew Shields' blog about a Robert Frost poem which contains this line: "all the fun's in how you say a thing." Andrew argued that this "fun" is the basis of poetry, which is true and which is at least part of what Frost is saying, but what do we mean by poetry? To my mind, some aspect of poetry entails "saying what is not." In other words, poetry is the supreme fiction, it is speaking "as if" what is being said is true of a world outside the poem, when in fact the poem only "applies" to the world of the poem. The poem is a world configured in its own terms, and so "the fun" of how you say a thing is the whole purpose of writing poetry.

But to admit that "fun" into other forms of writing is to create irony. An irony toward both the world "as in itself it is" (whatever that may be) and toward any world language constructs. To say that what I say of Ulysses is true of Ulysses is to me insipid, because it fails to do justice to what is simply too slippery about the relation of any reader to Joyce's language. Anything I can say is only true "in a manner of speaking" about Molly's manner of "speaking." My Melvillian crew steps in to help delineate what has happened at various times in the ongoing allegory that is literary interpretation, and that may be too much for the essay to sustain, but I think what ultimately tabled the argument is some sense that irony is being brought to bear on the argument itself, or on the venture of literary interpretation in general. Infuriating.

And I take that criticism to heart because its insight that I don't take the venture seriously -- or put another way, that so much of literary criticism forgoes any "fun" -- says a lot about why it's such a chore to write and read the stuff in the first place.

But, by'r Lady, 'a must build churches then, or else shall 'a suffer not thinking on, with the hobby-horse, whose epitaph is "For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot!"--Hamlet

2006 RECALLED

It seems a common blog thing to list the openings of blogs for each month of the year as a quick recap, but since I didn't begin a blog till Sept. that wouldn't work for me. Instead, to mark the end of one year and start of another, I'll list something I recall from each month.

Jan: an accident on the 15th claimed the life of my trusted 1995 Honda Accord. The tape deck had met its demise several months earlier while crossing the Delaware Memorial Bridge. The car was whacked in the back driver's side while executing a not-very well-considered left-hand turn, getting clipped by a car going too fast in the opposite direction -- on an icy road that made breaking and steering more difficult than it might have been for both drivers. The car is mourned; replaced by a 2006 Honda Accord LX which I do not drive for several months.

Feb.: There was a record snow fall in NYC on the 11th/12th, just as my daughter Kajsa commenced her lease on a place in Brooklyn, thus bringing to an end our nine months (gee, what a significant number!) as housemates.

March: I saw my god-daughter, Anna Livia Scuderi (16), act in a play for the first time -- it was a dynamic role as a forceful lawyer berating a witness. I also finally made it through Saul Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, which convinced me that the major novelists of the '50s were about creating a narrative persona -- they make us invest in their fictive reality by providing us with a speaker equal to the world they show us.

April: My wife Mary went to TX and got sick there, had to go to a doctor and take a later flight. Meanwhile, I got through teaching Gravity's Rainbow for the third time, while also beginning to attend weekly meetings of a group reading Finnegans Wake together. Kajsa and I view the Munch retrospective at MoMA. "Sick Child" is one of the most awe-inspiring masterpieces I've ever had the good fortune to stand before.

May: Saw Tom Verlaine at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC (see blog of Sept. 7).

June: At the shore in Maryland; first week, with my older sister, Kathy, watched some movies from my childhood: Cleopatra (seeing Elizabeth Taylor in this role was very arousing to me around the age of twelve); The Dirty Dozen (John Cassavetes as Victor Franco, 'nuff said ... ok, Sutherland and Savalas too . . . a-and that Lee Marvin...); second week, my younger brother Eric and I manage to play all the Old Pro miniature golf courses in Ocean City (7 of them) in one day. Such is a life of leisure!

July: Manage to make it through Mailer's The Naked and the Dead (what an over-rated, bloated spectacle that is!) and Gaddis' The Recognitions (see blog of Sept. 28); also, the month is memorable for r'n'r in New Haven in the worst heatwave since I've been living in CT....

August: Get a gig teaching a writing seminar at Yale, and turn 47. Gee. Print Between Days for binding and to distribute select copies. Dylan's latest is well-received.

Sept.: Blogocentrism begins, mainly so I have a place to comment on music I listen to, movies I see, and books I read. But my favorite blog of the month turns out to be about a trip south to my old haunts, posted 9/18, which begins: "Trains in the rain are poetic enough; you feel like you're in the heart of some hard-bitten novel about life on the rails, bumming with the nomad people...or maybe you're just awake too early, sitting on Amtrak near a family bound for New York."

Oct.: My favorite blog of the month, in response to an old Kurosawa and a new Scorsese film, begins: "The real basis of art, I've decided, is delight" (10/22).

Nov.: First blog of the month, in honor of what is awful and what sublime about November, begins: "We're into the new month of November and those unfortunate enough to have TVs turned on regularly -- or even phones -- know this time as the pre-election glut" (11/6). Pynchon's latest is met with varied responses, including clueless commentary by some who just don't get it.

Dec.: Finally finish Anti-Oedipus. My favorite blog commemorates two heroes of the '60s: "On this day, December 8th, in 1943 Jim Morrison was born, and, in 1980, John Lennon died." The 10th anniversary of my father's death also came around in December -- the 14th -- another downer to attribute to the "pre-Christmas vagaries," but the holidays themselves were fun, though I had no reason to travel to Philadelphia... I receive an iPod for Christmas, more on that anon, I'm sure; I also receive a packet of 5 CDs of The Beach Boys which I've been listening to today with, for the most part, delight and amusement.

And that's the year that was, around here anyway...