WHAN THAT APRILLE...

'April, come she will,' the old nursery rhyme says, and who can forget the wistful rendition by Simon and Garfunkel on the soundtrack to The Graduate (1967)? The month, so famously called 'the cruellest,' has been wet, at times windy, at times humid, occasionally halcyon, and finally downright summery before switching back to an early spring feel. All things to all people I guess you could say.

Not only the weather has been slippery, but the ways I’ve been spending my time have been something of a mixed bag, as I’ve felt myself blown here and there, hither and yon, by whatever vague winds of change seem to be in the offing. It’s 'National Poetry Month,' y’know, so, in-keeping with that sudden spike in national awareness of the value of the poetic word (yeah), I attended, late in March, a poetry reading by D. A. Powell, and a bilingual reading by Jacques Roubaud, then, in April, a reading by Mark Strand, from his New Selected Poems (2007; Knopf); Strand shared the stage with Chang-Rae Lee, who read from his forthcoming novel. I also had a poem posted on the online magazine nthposition, thanks to Todd Swift, and read a few new poems at a gathering of writers local to New Haven, sponsored by The New Haven Review and by Yale’s McDougal Center for Graduate Student Life, where the participants reading poetry outnumbered those reading prose by 8 to 3. And earlier in the month I met some fellow OpenSalon bloggers at a comradely party to celebrate the first anniversary of the hottest forum for bloggers.

On the day of the OpenSalon celebration, I visited the Met to see the Pierre Bonnard show again before it closed -- for the express purpose of writing a poem in situ. I managed to write two, even though there was quite a milling crowd. Foolish me (it’s April, after all) was unaware that kids would be off from school that day and had picked a Thursday thinking it might be more relaxed, solitary, less given to the crowds of a weekend. No such luck.

Powell’s reading, at St. Anthony’s Hall at Yale, was subdued, offering the stringent lyricism of his poems in a quiet, undemonstrative manner. The week before, we had kicked around a selection of his poems in a poetry reading group; from that brief exposure, it seemed to me that the poems in Chronic (2009; Graywolf) were the best of his career thus far. After the reading, while getting a copy of the book signed, I mentioned that to Powell and asked if the book was well-received; a little bemused he said it had gotten some unfavorable reviews -- later, I came across the review on Poetry Magazine’s website where Jason Guriel takes Powell to task as a kind of epitome of the tiresome tricks of contemporary verse. The enumerated failings that Guriel finds in Powell’s verse might well apply to an entire cohort of poets of our times, but I can’t see the reason in laying that at Powell’s door. I assume it must have to do with praise, deemed unmerited, Powell has received in other quarters. I suppose there is some purpose in the ‘set the record straight’ sort of review that wants to make clear that the views of other reviewers simply don’t hold water. About Powell’s reading (I haven’t gotten through the entirety of the book yet, so will hold off any more extensive comment), I’ll just say that I don’t think he presented the best of the book. My feeling was that the poems we read for the group were better chosen than those he elected to read. Where there was agreement was in the excellent paired poems 'Corydon & Alexis' and 'Corydon & Alexis, Redux' -- Powell ended his reading with them, and I wished we’d given them due discussion in our meeting, but so it goes.

'oh, you who are young, consider how quickly the body deranges itself
how time, the cruel banker, forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs'

One might believe the Eliot 'Waste Land' crib is uncalled for (Consider Phlebis), that time personified as a banker foreclosing on us is a bit obvious, even if effective, and that the choice of a verb phrase like 'deranges itself' is deliberate poeticizing. In fact, what I like about Powell is his willingness to poeticize in this register: allusions, apt similes, somewhat off-putting word choice. I found myself having to listen pretty intently, while reading his poems to myself, to catch, again and again, a very deliberate music that, in his reading, was easy to miss: 'forecloses us to snowdrifts white as god’s own ribs' -- the course of the 'o' sound in the entire line, set-off nicely against short and long 'i.' At his best, Powell’s mastery of such music is woven easily into his poems so that it constantly teases the ear while reading.

Mark Strand’s reading was delightful; he presented himself as a very affable, unpretentious poet, and his poems are at times mysterious, at times amusing, and at times both. In response to a student’s questions about trying to integrate the creative and the everyday lives, he said something to the effect that he has no problem keeping them separate; that the outer life keeps him busy, while the inner life keeps him amused. I hope to pick up the Selected soon.

Jacques Roubaud was also extremely affable, discussing his compositional methods, seminar-style, earlier in the day, than reading in the rather unkind to poetry ambiance of a Barnes and Noble (aka Yale Bookstore). Roubaud read from an amusing text entitled The Form of a City Changes, Alas, Faster Than the Human Heart (2006; Dalkey Archive) which was very exacting in its treatment of the streets of Paris, and also read 'Genesis in Reverse,' a poem not to be missed.

Chang-Rae Lee read of American soldiers during the Korean war mistreating a prisoner (blowing out his eardrum with a bugle, for instance), which, apropos of the recent spate of torture talk, seemed topical if a bit uncomfortably grim for a springlike afternoon amidst Yale writing students; Denis, a graduate student acquaintance, offered his take: well, he’s going gray and he seems like a simple family man and teacher -- what can he do to come off like a badass? Perhaps. Of course the style of the writing and the reading were in that unencumbered, almost inflexionless prose that seems to be Lee’s only mode.

My favorite bits at the New Haven writers reading: Jim Berger’s hilarious poem trying to imagine the lives of the authors of Best American verse, Pang-Mei Natasha Chang’s nonfiction piece about being mistaken for Sandra Oh, and Brian Slattery’s 150 word stories on the theme, Las Vegas.

About my poem, 'Gold and Gloom,' I'll say only: it was written in 1996 during a particularly glum autumn, but reads to me now as quite apropos for last November when the economy's precipitate plunge became the stuff of daily reports: 'I toil not, neither do I spin' might describe a lot more people in the great attrition of jobs in the current economic scene.

TORTUROUS THOUGHT

I happened to be reading Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee's excellent and bracing and clarifying novel Diary of a Bad Year (2007) just as news stories began to arrive about the 'torture memos.' What struck me so forcefully about Coetzee’s novel, in which a writer produces a series of 'opinions' about the modern world, while also becoming infatuated with a young woman in his building whom he hires to do secretarial work, and subsequently having an effect on the woman and her relation to her boyfriend, was the evenness of the essayistic opinions. Matters such as terrorism and democracy and the slaughter of animals are the stuff of Op-Ed writing and blogs, and Coetzee enters this territory, within the freedom provided by an authorial voice, without the kinds of cant and breast- or brow-beating so common in the press.

So consider how applicable, two years after their publication, such comments, under "On Machiavelli," are:

"The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation.

"Machiavelli does not deny that the claims morality makes on us are absolute. At the same time he asserts that in the interest of the state the ruler is 'often obliged [necessitato] to act without loyalty, without mercy, without humanity, and without religion.'"

The pointedness of this quotation from Machiavelli is obvious. Torture is the very sort of practice that rulers may undertake 'in the interest of the state,' and be sanctioned in doing so by Machiavelli’s logic about what ruling entails and requires. Coetzee gives us food for thought by citing Machiavelli because the clarity of the latter’s approach to power has never been equaled and because it is a statement that comes to us from so far in the past that it can’t smack of any kind of partisanship. What Machiavelli assumes is that any ruler, once in power, becomes the state, and thus will make use of whatever means necessary to maintain that power.

But Coetzee doesn’t want to leave it there; he’s after the kind of support such 'abuse of power' may often find in the general populace.

"The typical reaction of liberal intellectuals is to seize on the contradiction here: how can something be both wrong and right, or at least both wrong and OK, at the same time? What liberal intellectuals fail to see is that this so-called contradiction expresses the quintessence of the Machiavellian and therefore the modern, a quintessence that has been thoroughly absorbed by the man in the street. The world is ruled by necessity, says the man in the street, not by some abstract moral code. We have to do what we have to do.

"If you wish to counter the man in the street," Coetzee’s author continues, "it cannot be by appeal to moral principles, much less by demanding that people should run their lives in such a way that there are no contradictions . . . . Rather, you must attack the metaphysical, supra-empirical status of necessità and show that to be fradulent."

Fair enough, but it seems to me that the argument here, in becoming ‘metaphysical, supra-empirical,’ moves away from the tangible world of power. The necessity is not an over-arching concept that can be shown to be fraudulent, I would argue; it is in the very nature of power itself: to be exerted. Upon whom? Whichever subjects are deemed to be its proper targets. Because power says 'this is so, therefore I am obliged to do such and such,' there is no recourse to a demonstration that 'this is not so,' for power has already decreed it to be so. This was nakedly the manner of rule of the Bush administration, and what is mind-boggling to me, personally, is that anyone could seriously think there would be some other result from the fact of giving power to Bush and his crew. But even if the enormity was unthinkable when he first ran for office, it should’ve been abundantly clear when he seized power in the 2000 election. The intentions of the administration to wield the power it had taken I would say were manifest -- which would’ve included an invasion of Iraq and whatever means were deemed necessary to wage that war. The attack on 9/11 was the outrage that allowed the ends of the Bush administration to be pursued with more or less the sanction and backing of anyone who might have been able to object in a more than negligible way.

Coetzee’s author, in discussing democracy, also makes some salient points: however a ruler is chosen or determined, it "is not a formula for identifying the best ruler, it is a formula for conferring legitimacy on someone or other and thus forestalling civil conflict." In that sense, and in that sense only, the legitimacy of Bush’s initial election could not be contested. But those who -- like a blogger on OpenSalon, Dennis Loo, who brings serious charges against Obama’s administration -- expect some momentous redress of the situation that pertained under Bush might consider a few other grim points Coetzee’s author offers:

"Democracy does not allow for politics outside the democratic system. In this sense, democracy is totalitarian." In other words, whoever becomes the ruler of the U.S., by whatever means, becomes legitimate so long as civil conflict is prevented, and, what’s more, will prevent all such conflicts by whatever means deemed necessary. In this sense, if you like, power corrupts, but, from another point of view, power simply protects its claim to power, and demonstrates power through its exercise.

"If you take issue with democracy in times when everyone claims to be heart and soul a democrat, you run the risk of losing touch with reality. To regain touch, you must at every moment remind yourself of what it is like to come face to face with the state -- the democratic state or any other -- in the person of the state official. Then ask yourself: Who serves whom? Who is the servant, who the master?"

Ask the naked guy tasered at the Coachella Festival.

RECENT STUFF

1. 'Vacate the personae.'
Having made it finally through Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift (1975), I breathe an immense sigh of relief. The book was almost as exhausting as The Adventures of Augie March (1953) and that’s saying something. Bellow is the kind of writer, I now know for sure, that can lay it on with a trowel. Charles Citrine, the first person narrator, like all Bellow narrators, is a pretty interesting guy to be around; Bellow makes him a literary celebrity in the Chicago area, and is endlessly fascinated with the kinds of wheelings and dealings such a guy (like Bellow himself) has to get involved with to keep the money flowing, no matter how many prizes he may have won and whose good graces he may be in at the moment.

I knew of the novel as the one with the character, Von Humboldt Fleisher, based on the poet Delmore Schwartz, but I really had the impression, going in, that we were going to be treated to Bellow’s fictionalized version of Schwartz’s story. Sorta, not quite. Humboldt never really has center stage: he gets his due early on with some great scenes of how rapturously wonderful he was in Charlie’s eyes early on and how much bad blood came into the relationship due to Humboldt’s later instability, but the novel -- complete with a rather unpredictable and even deus ex machina-like smalltime mafioso named Cantabile, and a femme moyen sensuelle (and quite sensual) who ditches Charlie late in the book, for a mortician no less, and an ex-wife who is mostly offstage but who is a sinkhole of monetary demands, and an old flame, and the daughter of said flame, and a brother about to undergo heart-bypass surgery (one of the best encounters in the book) -- rambles all over and is in no hurry to get anywhere particularly. Add to all that the fact that Charlie is sorta, maybe, kinda converting his thinking to the ideas of Rudolph Steiner, and you get an odd double vision in the latter stages of the book. For all the narrative’s endless interest in whatever is happening and whoever is making it happen, the narrator is ostensibly trying to divest himself of his passionate regard for those things he cannot change. He’s searching for wisdom; again: maybe. Citrine is too canny, too much embroiled in the quotidian and all its quirks to be believable as sage-on-the-mountain material, but Bellow does have some of the goods on show. There is a sense that all this earnest investigation of everything is meant to show that, wherever it may rest, the heart is deluding itself if it thinks its attachments can ever be a raison d’être for actual existence. There’s more to things than meets the eye. But it’s not as if Citrine is a seeker 'against a backdrop' of literary fortunes, mafia threats, and a sudden reinstatement of fortune via an improbable filmscript cooked up long ago with Humboldt, for Citrine is always swallowed up by the demands the world -- and all the people in it -- make on him. Like I said, exhausting.

2. Ah, ma patrie

The final screening of the semester for Cinema at the Whitney was a double feature of films by Jean-Pierre Melville, The Silence of the Sea (1947) and Army of Shadows (1969), both engaged by the situation of the Nazi occupation of France in WWII. The first is an extremely static tale that unfolds like an old French conte -- the arrival of a foreigner and how he became a part of our provincial lives -- but with the difference that the foreigner is a Nazi officer staying at the rural home of an old Frenchman, the narrator, and his young niece. Plenty of fireside monologues during which the Nazi officer -- with cultivated, genteel aplomb -- holds forth on his love for France. Though, as unwilling hosts, the man and his niece never speak to and barely acknowledge the presence of the officer, all hearts soften toward this well-meaning conqueror who speaks not of how Germany will alter France but rather how the civilizing influence of France will transform the Huns into . . . well, not Nazis, apparently, but something that history would be proud of, defined by even. Boy, is he in for a surprise when he finally realizes the intentions of his Nazi brethern! And so he goes back to the front rather than take part in the further humiliation of la belle France. Beautifully shot, composed, with a steady pacing that is almost hypnotic, the film amounts essentially to a sentimental ‘my country, ’tis of thee’ paen, understandable, given the palpable anger against the Occupation, but still weak in anything like a nuanced rendering of the situation. Beautiful clichés of both countries are presented, but with much less affecting emotional bond than is found in Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), so much more telling in its depiction of the code of officers being undermined by the realities of war.

Army of Shadows presents us with a more ostensibly realistic depiction of a cell of resisters to the Occupation, and has many memorable scenes, most gripping of which is the determination to put to death a traitor who the resistance group has abducted. They aren’t prepared for suddenly having neighbors on the other side of the wall who will hear everything -- so no guns, and no knives. And so the man must be strangled to death while all participate in holding him motionless. In Melville’s hands, the scene is almost humorous, at least in the initial failure to be properly prepared and in being so incompetent in their fell purpose, but it finally becomes definitive of what makes for solidarity: the necessity of dealing death to the enemy. The film does run on, though, and Melville’s pacing is at times truly strange, as though he has no particular interest in getting the tale told. The film has a rather flabby feel to it, rather than a taut arc that will take us to the ultimate fate of the cell -- some dead by capture, some dead as traitors, the majority left to those ‘after the film’ summaries of their ultimate fates that are always so unsatisfying.

And that’s part of the problem: one finally asks: what is this film the story of? Is it meant to show some gradual moral change or crisis in the group? Some kind of self-questioning? That does happen when the one female in the group, Mathilde, played with haughty calm by Simone Signoret, betrays the group, after capture, to save her daughter from a fate worse than death as a whore to a Polish regiment, and the group has to overcome the protests of one of their number that he won’t stand for her execution. They shoot her dead on the street and then the film quickly ends. But to get to that moment, if that is meant to be defining, we have to wander though many scenes that seem much looser than need be (including one failed attempt to rescue a comrade who is near death anyway, that simply seems comical in its incompetence, again), and a rescue of Philippe Gerbier, the figure we’ve been following since the beginning, that is almost outrageously successful.

My feeling watching the film was that I’d be watching it for the rest of my life since its pacing was so much like life: things happen, and then something else does, or doesn’t. Even so, the film was fascinating if only because I loved seeing the locations, the people, the actors who weren’t trying to be charming stars, but at the same time I couldn’t stop myself from conjuring images of much more exciting, Hollywood versions of fateful missions (The Dirty Dozen, 1967) and risky escapes (The Great Escape, 1963). Released in 1969, Army of Shadows is perhaps far enough away from the events of the Resistance to be able to take some liberties for entertainment purposes?

3. Calvino Revisited

Just for fun I re-read Italo Calvino’s If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler (1979), which I first read some time in the early ‘80s and was enchanted by. What’s more, my memory of the novel has always been a reference point whenever anyone discusses fictional sleight-of-hand, as with Borges, or Cortázar, or Barth, or what-have-you. Calvino’s version of fictions that fold in on themselves provides a send-up of the reader’s dependence on a text -- a text that is never simply an object -- while at the same time conjuring the extent to which people become the texts they read or write.

One could say it’s a novel that treats the status of being ‘a reader’ as a certain kind of identity, a defining characteristic, and Calvino is charming in his evocation of the oddly personal communality of that status. What’s more he’s willing to put that very relation -- his interaction with his own readers -- at stake by treating us as hopelessly hooked on whatever he chooses to do with his narrative, which involves several ‘short stories,’ or tales within the tale, that comprise the opening pages of the novel we (or rather, ‘you,’ dear reader) are attempting to read. In other words, we read with a second-person character who is reading a series of openings to novels we never get to finish because something always happens to the text. These proferred novels are of a variety of types and are almost equally interesting, as far as they go, but they are also meant to be page-turners of a sort, things we won’t put down till we see how it all comes out. And we won’t ever know. The story of what keeps happening to interrupt our reading is the story that ‘you’ are engaged in: involving another reader (an attractive and arguably more knowledgeable female counterpart to the masculine ‘you’ of the story), the other reader’s sister, an Ian Fleming-like novelist, and a novelistic forger. It all ends with our happy couple -- you, the reader, and your female counterpart, the Other Reader -- settled in bed together as you finish If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.

Fictional closure is where real life begins, but what Calvino grasps so well, and perpetrates his fiction on the premise of, is that the Reader only wants fictions to go on and on. Maybe so, but he wisely brings his to a close before the proliferation of openings becomes tiring, and before the characters, who never really are characters, seem too lacking in particularity to interest us. Why I loved the novel is that he maintains its pace well and builds up its comedy through a readerly frustration it expects us to enjoy. But also because it seemed to me that at the heart of such fiction is a clear-eyed appraisal of the ruse of fiction, of how it applies conventions to give us ‘the reality effect’ it aims for, and how, mutatis mutandis, all such details can easily be something else, if only we are reading a different kind of story with different conventions. The reality is all in the eye, so to speak, or, even more to the point, all in the terms, the language, the conventions of depiction that we trust to render what we find ourselves in the midst of. Without that, we have only opposing subjective ‘takes’ -- otherwise known as politics -- and Calvino archly sees that ultimately politics in art is a blow against the art, or artifice, itself. A refusal to be led, to be told, to suspend disbelief, or, worse, skeptical engagement with any world other than the one one knows to be the case. I saw Calvino’s approach as a great joke -- but without malice -- on all those who want to lose reality in a fiction, but also all those who can’t abide a fiction that doesn’t correspond to ‘reality.’ Bravo, Calvino!

MIDLIFE CRISIS LIT

2. The Obsolete Humanist

What I retained of Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964) from my first reading -- about twenty-three and reading while on night duty as security at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts -- were the scenes of Moses Herzog -- a fiftysomething recently divorced father and professor of history -- ensconced in his crumbling Massachusetts farmhouse, mentally composing letters to old acquaintances, famous people, and historical figures. It gave me at the time a feeling of a certain longed-for removal from ‘the world,’ as though Herzog were -- if you subtracted the angsty Jewish intellectualism and supplanted-male rage against his former wife -- a kind of Thoreau of the early ‘60s. Reading it again, I was surprised at how little of the novel takes place in MA; most of it, as with most Bellow fiction, is set in Chicago, and much of it, too much of it, takes its tone from what Herzog has suffered at the hands of his ex-wife who has taken up part-time with a friend of them both, parttime because the friend remains married to a woman who denies what’s going on. As ever with Bellow, the best bits are simply observations of the world and the kinds of people who people it.

Bellow was schooled in the old Russian novelistic tradition (Dostoevky particularly), in which characters lead lives of suffering that seem to be waiting for exposure in long, breathless paragraphs of frenetic detail; Bellow gives us speeches of nervous energy that divulge the anxieties at the heart of everyone: the anxieties that come from not enough money, not enough power, not enough outlets for sex, growing old, death -- in other words the perennials. Let’s call them the intangibles, those misgivings and dissatisfactions that never quite become violent but which could, if only events push us that way. When Herzog finally arms himself, with a gun from his late father’s desk, we might expect, given the kind of sickness-unto-death trembling just below his consciousness, that he’s going to do himself in, but no, he’s got more moxie than that. He wants to kill that happy couple that has supplanted his unhappy marriage -- what stops him? A very affecting scene, potentially bathetic or creepy, but really rendered with full awareness of how site specific it is: Herzog stares through the bathroom window and sees his ex-wife’s lover giving Herzog’s little daughter a bath. We might say that if insane rage was ever going to break out it would do so here. But instead, the scene, in its mundanity, shows Herzog something about himself: he doesn’t really want to be the man in that bathroom, he doesn’t want to be dedicating his life to the comforts of a wife and their child. He’s free -- which is to say, in a different register, he’s his own problem, and only his. But he doesn’t get off that easy -- he still must experience indignities with the police, because of that unlicensed gun found on him in a car accident. In other words, Herzog must come to the brink, but not go over it; the world is ordered and he lets that sustain him. And it should be noted that Bellow is at his best when inhabiting mundane actions -- travel, for instance, waiting one’s turn for a court hearing -- moments when one can simply observe humanity doing the things humans do, never mind the reason.

Such is Bellow’s forte because he is one of the great humanists, one of the believers in common humanity, so called. Reading him now, one finds the usual fissures in that ‘common’: Bellow’s women are always the women of a man. If that sounds like a slur, that simply indicates the extent to which times have changed; for Bellow wants men to join him in regarding women, and wants his female readers to see what it’s like in the middle-aged male consciousness -- he’s not particularly interested in the female consciousness; he may well believe there isn’t such a thing, in the same sense at least. And that attitude spills over to other minorities as well: Bellow is always aware of Jews as the minority that matters, as the outsiders par excellence (because of Europe) -- and that awareness takes place in a world run by WASPS. Everyone else is on the periphery of that judgment, and it is a judgment in an old biblical sense. As a Jew, Bellow creates characters who are always wondering, deep down, what God means -- what does He intend by making things happen as they do. And so civilization matters because somehow it belongs to God, and therefore we must defend it.

I’ve gotten off the point, if I ever had one. I wanted to say that one element of Herzog, my reason for re-reading it, had to do with the midlife crisis as, if you will, a literary mode. What Bellow conveys effectively is that sense of being closed off from things which once gave joy -- but, one concedes, not enough joy -- so where shall joy be found before it’s too late? And every person who does not point in the direction of a greater rapport with oneself, with one’s own life as one will have to accept it from here on out, is an enemy, or at least an obstacle. And the novel relays how such an attitude leaves its hero grasping at straws, trying to make right the story for the record, dictating endless letters to all those to whom Herzog wants to explain himself while he has the time. In free fall, certain matters become clearer. Strange that at twenty-three I wanted the pressure of crisis, of seeing beyond everything ‘the unexamined life’ gives you to take up your time, the freedom of rotting away in the New England wilds if only to examine one’s embattled defense against the modern world.

Herzog, writing to a colleague who succeeded where he had failed:

. . . people of powerful imagination, given to dreaming deeply and to raising up marvelous and self-sufficient fictions, turn to suffering sometimes to cut into their bliss, as people pinch themselves to feel awake. I know that my suffering, if I may speak of it, has often been like that, a more extended form of life, a striving for true wakefulness and an antidote to illusion, and therefore I can take no moral credit for it. I am willing without further exercise in pain to open my heart. And this needs no doctrine or theology of suffering. We love apocalypses too much, and crisis ethics and florid extremism with its thrilling language. Excuse me, no. I’ve had all the monstrosity I want. We’ve reached an age in the history of mankind when we can ask about certain persons, “What is this Thing?” No more of that for me -- no, no! I am simply a human being, more or less. I am even willing to leave the more or less in your hands. You may decide about me. You have a taste for metaphors.

SEARCH ME

'Of course the company founded by Sergey Brin and Larry Page in 1998 - now reckoned to be the world's most powerful brand - does not offer any substitute for the originators of content nor does it allow this to touch its corporate conscience. That is probably because one detects in Google something that is delinquent and sociopathic, perhaps the character of a nightmarish 11-year-old.

This particular 11-year-old has known nothing but success and does not understand the risks, skill and failure involved in the creation of original content, nor the delicate relationships that exist outside its own desires and experience. There is a brattish, clever amorality about Google that allows it to censor the pages on its Chinese service without the slightest self doubt, store vast quantities of unnecessary information about every Google search, and menace the delicate instruments of democratic scrutiny. And, naturally, it did not exercise Google executives that Street View not only invaded the privacy of millions and made the job of burglars easier but somehow laid claim to Britain's civic spaces. How gratifying to hear of the villagers of Broughton, Bucks, who prevented the Google van from taking pictures of their homes.

We could do worse than follow their example for this brat needs to be stopped in its tracks and taught about the responsibilities it owes to content providers and copyright holders.'
--Henry Porter, "Google is Just an Amoral Menace," The Observer, 5 April 2009

This article, which I found because two Facebook friends linked to it, resonates very tellingly after attending a symposium, 'Library 2.0,' held at Yale Law School on Saturday.

After an intro that featured much 'lifted' content and a bright, buzzword laden welcome that urged us to Tweet and Blog and upload photographs from our cellphones, etc., and a paper from Josh Greenberg at the New York Public Library that promoted the idea that librarians need to be "digitized," we finally got to a presentation, by Michael Zimmer at Univ of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, that offered a few caveats to the collective zeitgeist of online über alles with the notion, picked up from Neil Postman, of technology as always offering a Faustian bargain.

Given the need for the internet in contemporary communications, we might think Zimmer was simply playing devil's advocate or was a Luddite at heart, a throwback to the ancient days before we all went online. But not so, what Zimmer was really cautioning us about was all the unexamined consequences of our lemming-like acceptance of internet interaction. As librarians have had to at times stand up for civil liberties, like the right to privacy about one's intellectual inquiries and sources of information, Zimmer had reason to wonder if 'Library 2.0' -- the library as modeled on Google, essentially -- will continue to provide a 'safe harbor for anonymous inquiry.' Not simply 'who owns the content' of what we post -- but who owns the documentation, who gets to data-mine, and so forth? Ted Striphas, from Indiana Univ., extended this 'Big Brother is Watching' concern into Amazon's Kindle system which relays its users' annotations, bookmarks, notes, and highlights back to the mothership.

In the course of the day, there were several references to 'the Death Star': the four huge publishing conglomerates that now exist where twice that many major publishers existed a decade before. But the real 'Death Star' emerged when the topic of Google's digitization plans for all those out of print books was on the table in the day's last panel. Already we had heard, in an excellent presentation by John Palfrey of Harvard Law School, how 100% of a focus group of what he called 'digital natives' (those hitting 13-22 since the major internet wave of the late '90s) used Google to search for information and all went to the wikipedia entry on the subject first. Though Palfrey didn't elaborate on this at the time, the point became clear in the Google discussion when Frank Pasquale, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, spoke of the possible consequences of putting all our searches for information in the hands of 'proprietary black box algorithms subject to manipulation.' Wikipedia is always the first or second entry in any Google search. The first ten are apparently all anyone looks at. Everything that gets buried by the algorithm is as good as not there. This is not how research is conducted.

Then there's the thorny matter of those out of print books. Obviously it would be to the public good to have them searchable and accessible online if only because anything not online or available through Kindle (in other words, anything not part of the Death Star of Google and Amazon) falls into the 'here be monsters' of off-the-map ignorance. Already Jonathan Band, a lawyer, had told us that 'fair use' was becoming more conducive for technological and creative appropriation, and Denise Covey of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries and Ann Wolpert of MIT Libraries had spoken about faculties pursuing an open access policy in which anything they publish can be searched and referenced online -- a blow to academic publishers, but a victory for the notion that research on the internet should not be hampered by commercial considerations.

In other words, the notion of open access to all information, via the internet, of complete 'transparency' of provider and user, was more or less the mantra of the day. But what the Faustian bargain came to seem finally was not with the technology itself, but with giants such as Google or Amazon as the Big Brothers playing Mephistopheles, offering us the interconnected, easy access world of our dreams, but a world where we sacrifice something of our own intellectual curiosity, restlessness, and desire to see outside or beyond that black box algorithm that makes things so easily manageable for us.

Think about how Wolpert pointed out that what made the MIT professors move for Open Access was their realization that, in the world of electronic text, libraries only 'lease' access to online work, rather than owning it like all those printed copies they store in perpetuity. If something happens to the provider or to the lease, all that material is no longer available. And now the publishing world seems poised to turn over all electronic control of out of print materials to Google to broker for us, and to disseminate to us according to its lights. As Brewster Kahle, co-founder of the Internet Archive, urged us to consider, there are alternatives. But as Ann Okerson, of Yale Libraries, said at the end of the final panel with a kind of 'fait accompli' finality: if Google accomplishes this digitization, the students and users of libraries at Yale will simply want access to it, and her job will be to work with it, not fight it.

But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
--George Orwell, 1984

SALUTE TO STANLEY

'How did he do it, how did he become Stanley Kubrick?' I found myself wondering that last Friday night as I watched The Killing (1956), a film directed by Kubrick early in his career, screened as part of a mini retrospect at Yale’s Cinema at the Whitney, to honor the director at the tenth anniversary of his death. A B-movie all the way, it’s got minor character actors (Sterling Hayden and Elisha Cook, Jr. are the biggest names in the cast); it’s got that low budget 'hard-bitten' look to it, and it suffers from the bane of the ‘50s film, the need to have some corny resolution that stops Hayden’s character from getting away with it. Enter poodle to make suitcase full of money fall onto the airport tarmac, open, and cause bucks to blow away. I kid you not. Treasure of the Sierra Madre it ain’t.

Seeing The Killing on the big screen at Yale sorta made it seem important and of course if it is it’s because it’s early Kubrick. And what exactly is the claim to fame of Kubrick? In other words, asking how Kubrick became Kubrick also presupposes the question of who or what Kubrick is. And the answer becomes clearer when you see some of the early work. Kubrick is the American film director who managed somehow to make masterpieces of genre films, films that fit into categories overrun by numerous B-level productions.

Kubrick was not an 'arthouse film maker'; he had no interest in creating films that would only be appreciated by intellectuals and cineastes and aesthetes. And one way to avoid that fate is to make films in popular genres: The Killing is a heist film; 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968; shown on Saturday night with the film’s star Keir Dullea on hand to talk about the experience) is a sci-fi movie; Full Metal Jacket (1987) is a Vietnam War movie; The Shining (1980) is a horror film. Others -- like Lolita (1962) and A Clockwork Orange (1971) -- are film adaptations of notorious novels; Barry Lyndon is a period film; Dr. Strangelove (1964) is a slapstick black comedy; Eyes Wide Shut (1999) is, I believe, Kubrick’s version of a romantic comedy.

The other film screened Friday night -- Paths of Glory (1957) -- is a bit more mixed in its genre: a war film that becomes a trial film, while at the same time being an even more devastating critique of the military than Strangelove. It’s the film where certain trademark elements of the Kubrick visual style begin to manifest themselves: like tracking shots through corridors, or, in this case, trenches; like important moments depicted in long shot; like close ups as moments of truth; but, even so, we’re not yet at the breakthrough that was and is 2001.

That film is a film like no other. Unforgettable, influential, breathtaking, mind-bending, yes, but also classical. The pacing of the film -- its epic unfolding -- must be something Kubrick learned from making Spartacus (1960; what used to be called 'the swords and sandals' genre), even though he disowned the film because he wasn’t given final cut. 2001 moves even more slowly than Spartacus if such a thing is possible, but the difference is that every frame of 2001 is loaded with portent, is a meditation on shapes and space. It’s pop art minimalism come to the big screen, and the story – featuring certain well-worn sci fi cliches like the machine that runs amok, and the secret mission that is more fearsome than expected, and the alien life form that causes us to question 'life as we know it' -- veers off into space age psychedelia with the trappings of Nietzschean metaphysics. Wow, man. Some on hand Saturday referred to viewers of the film who claimed a religious experience while watching it.

But is the film dated? Only in its late ‘60s attempt to imagine the 21st century -- in terms of style and in terms of a geopolitics where Russia and the U.S. are still the big guns in space exploration as they were in the ‘60s. But in some ways the film is wonderfully prescient: the computer HAL (acronym for ‘heuristic’ and ‘algorithmic’) would no doubt get along wonderfully with today’s counterpart CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity). But what makes the film magnificent is its direction -- the way that Kubrick’s eye and ear (amazing cinematography and soundtrack) dominates a world he largely constructed himself. It’s an essay in cinematic make-believe and sleight-of-hand with no computer-generated effects and with still the most convincing evocation of space travel ever presented.

After Friday night’s screening I watched on DVD the first part of Barry Lyndon (1975) and on Saturday night, part two. At various times in watching that film -- both on its release and in subsequent screenings and on the small screen -- I have felt that its distinctive distancing from the pacing and editing of other ‘70s films could be said to work to its disadvantage. In other words, I tended to be sympathetic to those who find the film 'too slow,' or 'too minimal in dialogue and action,' which most accept in 2001, because of its manifest originality, but not for a tale of an 18th century Irish upstart and ne’er-do-well. But watching it this time I felt it might be in a sense Kubrick’s most personal film.

Barry Lyndon is a timeless rendering of the early modern period that, unlike the future of 2001 or Clockwork Orange, never dates, and, unlike the settings of his other films, doesn’t suffer from the imagery that makes a film contemporaneous with its era. Barry Lyndon recreates the 18th century as represented by master painters of that era; it is the closest any film comes to inhabiting a world that existed long ago. The films that were its contemporaries, with rare exceptions, seem like effects of their time while Barry Lyndon remains closed in a time capsule, a living museum. That effect has been criticized (every era likes to believe its daily anxieties and joys are ignored by art at its peril), but the film stands now as a singular achievement. Which, as a phrase, sums up Kubrick’s career as well as anything I can think of.