Yearly Archives: 2010

the marvelous city of the future

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“I hope better of the goodness of God. Perhaps we are approaching the predicted time when science, having completed its cycle of analysis and synthesis, of belief and negation, will be able to purify itself and raise up the marvelous city of the future out of the confused ruins . . . We must not hold human reason so cheap as to believe it gains by complete self-humiliation, for that would be to impeach its divine origin . . . God will no doubt appreciate purity of intention; and what father would like to see his son give up all reason and pride in front of him? The apostle who had to touch to believe was not cursed for his doubt!”

(Gérard de Nerval, “Aurélia,” trans. Geoffrey Wagner, p. 36 in the Exact Change Aurélia & Other Writings.)

naming

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“The premium on conciseness and concreteness made proper names a great value – so they came flying at you as if out of a tennis-ball machine: Julia, Juliet, Viola, Violet, Rusty, Lefty, Carl, Carla, Carleton, Mamie, Sharee, Sharon, Rose of Sharon (a Native American), Hassan. Each name betrayed a secret calculation, a weighing of plausibility against precision: On the one hand, the cat called King Spanky; on the other, the cat called Cat. In either case, the result somehow seemed false, contrived – unlike Tolstoy’s double Alexeis, and unlike Chekhov’s characters, many of whom didn’t have names at all. In ‘Lady With Lapdog,’ Gurov’s wife, Anna’s husband, Gurov’s crony at the club, even the lapdog, are all nameless. No contemporary American short-story writer would have had the stamina not to name that lapdog. They were too caught up in trying to bootstrap from a proper name to a meaningful individual essence – like the ‘compassionate’ TV doctor who informs her colleagues: ‘She has a name.&rlquo; ”

(Elif Batuman, from “Confessions of an Accidental Literary Scholar”.)

february 16–20

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Books

Films

  • Dont Look Back, directed by D. A. Pennebaker
  • The Tenant, dir. Roman Polanski
  • Tierische Liebe (Animal Love), dir. Ulrich Seidl
  • Cronos, dir. Guillermo del Toro
  • La niña santa (The Holy Girl), dir. Lucrecia Martel
  • Na srebrnym globie (On the Silver Globe), dir. Andrzej Żuławski

Exhibits

  • “Banks Violette,” Barbara Gladstone
  • “Markus Schinwald,” Yvon Lambert
  • “Koo Jeong-a: Koo Jeong A ~ Z,” Yvon Lambert

february 11–february 15

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Books

Exhibits

  • “Dalla tradizione gotica al primo Rinascimento,” Moretti Art Gallery
  • “Félix Vallotton: Paintings,” Michael Werner Gallery
  • “Demons and Devotion: The Hours of Catherine of Cleves,” Morgan Library
  • “Rome After Raphael,” Morgan Library
  • “Alias Man Ray: The Art of Reinvention,” Jewish Museum

geoff dyer, “yoga for people who can’t be bothered to do it”

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Geoff Dyer
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It
(Vintage, 2003)

There are plenty of reasons that I should not like this book by Geoff Dyer: the name of this book, for one; the horrifying blurb on the back suggesting that it was a combination of “Hunter S. Thompson, Roland Barthes, Paul Theroux and Sylvia Plath”; the promise of reading anything about Burning Man. The horrible grunge-y display type used inside for chapter openers, presumably reused from the poorly designed hardcover edition. The copyright page promises that an excerpt from Auden’s “September 1, 1939” is used in a book published in 2003. The prospect of British people writing about the United States. And worst of all, the marketing designation “Travel/Memoir” on the same back cover: a stint in the travel writing business still keeps me filled with horror at the thought of most travel writing and the people associated with it, and it doesn’t need to be said that no one needs another memoir.

And yet I make an exception for Geoff Dyer: somehow, I allow him to get away with things that I find deeply objectionable in most other writers. Part of this is context: I picked this book up at the bookstore in Fort Greene after a disheartening show at BAM, in need of something to pick me up for the subway home. Dyer’s writing works for me in that way as few others can reliably. (Also in this category, off the top of my head: Gertrude Stein, Ashbery’s Three Poems, some of Donald Barthelme, The Man without Qualities. Others exist, I’m sure, but it’s a vanishingly small group.) A lot of this has to do with style: Dyer’s a good enough writer that he can entertainingly talk about nothing will giving off the impression of effortlessness. Closer scrutiny, however, reveals that it’s an effortlessness that’s taken a great deal of work: everything functions. In this book, as in Out of Sheer Rage, Geoff Dyer has the flâneur down to perfection: he pretends to be doing nothing, but there’s a great deal of thought involved in that doing nothing. It helps as well that there’s a sense that Dyer’s using writers to think through the world: Auden and Rilke come up repeatedly in this book (“September 1, 1939,” for what it’s worth, does not come up with respect to 9/11) as do Brodsky and Henry James; epigraphs from the Goncourts and Nietzsche lead off the book. The way he’s using these writers is interesting: not so much name-dropping or academic reference so much as finding people whose thought can be usefully applied to his life. There’s the feeling you’re in the hands of someone who can be trusted, a trust that comes because of these shared points of recognition.

This is a book that’s ostensibly a collection of travel essays: eleven essays about particular places. The copyright page suggests that it’s a compilation, as much of the material has previously been published. It is, to a certain extent; but when read closely, one notes threads connecting the various pieces in the book. A pair of Tevas is bought in the first essay, on New Orleans; these Tevas thread their way through the later essays, just as Rilke and Auden do and a concern with the idea of a “Zone,” found first in Apollinaire and later in Tarkovsky. It’s difficult, however, to ascribe a chronology to these pieces: there are a handful of dates which suggest that these essays take place across the 1990s, but it’s difficult to order them. Girlfriends come and go; there are occasional references to things that came before. One has the sense of a writer who’s constantly traveling: but one can’t sense an overriding narrative in the traveling, the frequent problem with travel writing. (Kenneth Gangemi’s The Volcanoes from Puebla, one of the handful of travel books I like, also escapes the temptation of a narrative arc by the formal device of presenting its short essays in alphabetically.) An introduction to the last essay in the book suggests that it was written in 2000 and describing events of the year before, a decade after the first 1991; however, one is hard-pressed to find a clear sense of growth. Rather, one finds a document of a period in time: how Dyer lived in the 1990s, and how, in a sense, travel worked in that decade. While intended as a document of places, it’s become a document of a time. Travel doesn’t function in quite the same way any more.

Dyer wanders the world: he presents himself as an aimless wanderer, but this is something of a ruse: in the decade he covers, he published at least six books. These books aren’t really mentioned here: the reader familiar with Out of Sheer Rage will be able to place his Roman adventures within that context, and one suspects that his essay on New Orleans has something to do with his book on jazz. Dyer presents himself to the people he meets as a writer: but because he doesn’t mention his books in the text, he seems willing to come across as being without portfolio. Dyer’s presentation of himself contains a weird mix of humility and artifice: he presents his flaws and his frequent disinterest – there’s a certain sense in which this book is an apologia for an extended youth  – but there’s the sense that he’s holding something back. We know what he likes and doesn’t like, but the reader is left with a certain sense of distance after finishing the book: there’s a certain lack of autobiography. We’re not over-familiar. I like this.

The essays themselves vary. The pieces on Detroit, Miami, and New Orleans are better than one might expect, as they don’t overreach. Dyer isn’t trying to draw grand conclusions about American civilization from a city; rather, he records specific interactions and impressions. His descriptions of south-east Asian travels make him out to be one of those terrible tourists that one meets on the road, uninterested in anything around them but the next party: but again, one suspects this isn’t quite the case. The final essay, on Burning Man, shows its age: written at the height of San Francisco Internet boom hubris, there’s talk of Hakim Bey, who seems to have mostly been forgotten now, for better or for worse. Descriptions of drug experiences are almost invariably uninteresting. Here, though, he integrates it into larger experience: telescoping out from his local context to past experiences of travel, to Freud’s discussion of the ruins of Rome as metaphor for the mind in Civilization and Its Discontents, to Francesca Woodman’s photography, to Stalker. It works, though it shouldn’t.

chris diken, “some people” / stan mir, “flight patterns”

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Chris Diken, Some People
Stan Mir, Flight Patterns
(JR Vansant, 2009)

The number of people, I assume, who would buy books sight unseen from a press calling itself “JR Vansant” simply because it’s called that must be rather small; but I am in that number. Scott Bryan Wilson started publishing chapbooks under that name at the end of last year; my copies arrived last month. Production is straight-forward: silver type on heavy paper covers stapled around laser-printed interiors. The interior printing isn’t quite as nice as one might hope, and because of the long measure in Flight Patterns, the type is a bit small, but these are minor quibbles: this are very nice little books, better than I’d hoped for.

*     *     *     *     *

Chris Diken’s Some People is a short story, 18 pages long, and its plot is quickly related: a young man and woman visits an art museum, and the man uses the restroom. One is immediately caught by the style: the Gertrude Stein rhythm in the repetition of the fourth sentence:

They had hit a stride and each room in the museum seemed to reflect this overall greatening, each led them into a new age of new orientation of new medium of new dimension of new lender of new time of new overwhelming sense of standing before something ununderstandable yet still personally affecting.

Calling out Stein is something of a red herring. The dialogue in the story uses the Joycean dash; the voice is that of Gaddis, but more the Gaddis of The Recognitions than J R. There’s a little intrusion of Thomas Bernhard’s style if not his attitude: the long paragraphs, explanation piled on explanation; and maybe some David Foster Wallace. Another sentence, when the protagonist has found his way into the restroom, which he first wonders might be another exhibit:

As he went he though that while one arm had worked the flusher he’d used the other to undo himself with his free hand, thinking of himself in this situation as explicitly not free, that no one was free, that everyone was enchained by their urges, thinking of his free hand unjiggering his bebuttoned arrangement and of a three-dimensional model of the phrase free hand rotating like the precursor to human utterance in his mind, thinking how he used to be a mildly accomplished freehand sketcher before he gave it up for another pastime that too had passed, thinking that if only he didn’t find self-voiding the most horrendously outrageously horrible most distasteful and disgusting enterprise in the gamut of human activities that he could possibly take this opportunity to revisit his talent and how if he wasn’t in such a hurry to get it out and over with he could in a sense draw with his own acridity, employ self in lieu of stylus, practice here and then taken the honed skill to some more prominent canvas.

I like this sentence. It’s the italics that make me think of Wallace, but maybe the twisting baroque sentences of William Gass would be the best comparison. So much current fiction, especially fiction by young writers, tends to fall back on short, overly dramatic sentences: I feel like I don’t see long, wandering sentences like this enough: this is a sentence that’s trying to do something, and succeeding.

The protagonist of this story wanders into the bathroom wondering whether he’s left the art or whether he’s entering another exhibit; while at the urinal, a voice starts talking to him, engaging him in a conversation more philosophical than that of the typical bathroom voyeur. The possessor of the voice isn’t seen (and it’s unclear in the end whether he exists or not); the protagonist remains unsure whether he’s in the midst of some kind of performance. There’s an American suspicion of the visual arts: the fear that the crafty artist, probably European, might just be trying to trick us: it’s certainly at play in most of the descriptions of modern art in The Recognitions, for example. That’s certainly at play here. But there’s also a willingness to play along, to enter into a shared illusion, and I think that works here. It’s a good story: I’d like to see more from Chris Diken. 

*     *     *     *     *

Stan Mir’s Flight Patterns couldn’t be more different: a long poem (32 pages of small type) identified on the website as the first part of an even longer poem, another section of which is scheduled to be printed in the future by JR Vansant. The subtitle identifies it as a “Poem Beginning with a Line from Lax,” the line (“Birds dart over us, pulling shadows through us“) presumably from Robert Lax, though I have to admit not knowing his work and I’m not sure about the attribution. This is a meandering, meditative piece: carried out to full length, it feels very much like it could have been a Jargon Society book. An excerpt of an earlier version appeared online in the oddly presented GutCult: this is approximately the first sixth of what’s in the book, with some differences: italics have been added, and a phrase deleted (“a bird ripped apart” in the third line of the first stanza of the second section). 

The first section of this begins with a succession of thoughts, separated by colons, starting with birds and necessarily spreading onwards: the bird is a tremendously rich image, signifying an infinite number of different things. In the second section, the speaker’s voice appears: “I don’t / know where I belong nor where the pattern is”. From flocks of birds in the sky, the speaker takes his subject apart: “if change did occur // it did so long ago from the 3-fingered avian hand / flight’s feathers met modern birds’ basic form”. And then back to specifics: a warbler calling. Finally, a statement of purpose: “More things take flight / than we can count. I began with birds / to realize it’s more than birds.” 

The style loosens up after this introduction and becomes more conversational. Sections of prose and quotations are placed in the text; there’s a loose narrative, a trip to a farm in Vermont. The speaker is writing Flight Patterns (perhaps in this metafictional nod, we see what unifies JR Vansant); his companion plays Chopin and he reads Robert Duncan. A stanza lists the proper names of birds, all evocative. The speaker’s mother and father are introduced; the history of the land comes in, an enduring concern of the poem. In an extended prose section, the scene changes to Arizona: and there’s more digging into the familial past. Current events intrude: the death of Saddam Hussein, when “an Airbus’ engines / ingested Geese over the Hudson.” We move back and forth: to Philadelphia, back to Vermont, into the recounted past, to Arizona. A bit of what seems to be Mormon history intrudes, as does the mystic Johannes Kelpius who settled in Germantown, Philadelphia. Birds glue everything together:

When my father handed me many things he handed me
my mother. At various times she has been a Mimic
Thrush or a Thrasher. Hardly ever has she been
a Laughing Thrush or a Babbler.

Since 1960 my father has hung like late autumn
Starlings in Rome, omnipresent & not quite
despised. Each November the Starlings come
in from the countryside & fly about
sometimes in the shape of lungs
sometimes in the shape of a fist.

It is impossible to get them to do
otherwise – this is their pattern.

The image of starlings in Rome strikes me as exactly perfect: that’s how I remember them there. This is a rambling work, and it’s hard to come to a judgment of it knowing that there’s more to come; but this section is self-contained, coming, finally, to a conclusion:

Poetry is not
the third eye
It is an eye

Word & voice
Voice may
not remain

The word a
recast image
in ruin

The bird’s
image darts
through us

The cicada
a shadow
pulling through

I like this; I suspect I’ll be coming back to this, and I’m interested in Mir’s other forthcoming books. 

noted

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detail

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(Giovanni di Marco, called Giovanni dal Ponte, Madonna and Child enthroned between Saints Lawrence and Anastasia (detail), private collection; on show at Moretti’s “Dalla tradizione gotica al primo Rinascimento”.)

the baffler #9: an injury to all

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The Baffler #9: An Injury to All
ed. Thomas Frank 

Still working my way through old Bafflers: this one’s from 1997. I might be reaching my saturation point: this one took me a while to get through, in no small part because of what the editorial note describes as this issue’s “particularly unhappy tone”. This issue is unusually focused; most articles are on the sorry state of the labor movement in this country in the mid-1990s. Chris Lehmann looks at labor in the academy; Peter Rachleff looks at strikes against Hormel in Minnesota; David Moberg looks at attempts at organizing hotel workers in Los Angeles; Bob Fitch inspects the current state of the AFL/CIO. There’s some history as well: Frances Reed looks back at textile worker strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts; Hunter Kennedy looks at the forgotten history of cotton strikes in Mississippi; an illustrated piece by Jessica Abel looks at the legacy of labor unrest in Decatur, Illinois, and Jim McNeill talks about his time as a labor editor in Racine, Wisconsin. It’s hard to read now: if anything, things are worse, and one senses that a lot of concerned people have simply thrown up their hands.

But: it’s good for you. And: there’s a lot here that’s useful. Tom Frank’s lead-off essay, a survey of labor writing through the ages is still relevant:

As a rule, advertising, the highest form of information-age cultural production, intentionally avoids discussing where products come from. In a time in which, we are told, style and image transcend all – both for corporate marketers and ourselves as consumers – essays like Edmund Wilson’s long description of the brutal facts of automobile production in “Detroit Motors” come across as nothing short of revelation. For a writer in the 1990s to produce such a piece – insisting on the inherently local, inherently material facts of work in an age when the only journalistic game in town is to wax blissful about the cyber-universe is eclipsing the analog world – would be almost willfully contrary. (p. 11.)

Change the date and it still works. Tom Vanderbilt’s “The Gaudy and the Damned” seems to have discovered a source for Mad Men, reading Chicken Soup for the Soul at Work (still in print, in turns out):

One story, titled “Santa comes to Joan,” caught my eye: “Every office has a Joan, or should have. She’s the one everyone looks to when the workload gets too heavy. She’s the one with the good story and the ready laugh. For our Christmas party, she’s the one who transforms our sterile corporate conference room, Christmas after Christmas, with tiny white lights, real teacups, teapots and plates she had brought from home.” (p. 15.)

And reading Josh Mason’s “Three Scenes from the Bull Market” now, one is surprised to discover that Jim Cramer of Mad Money and the real estate bubble got his start at the New Republic, where he suggested that laid-off workers could be quieted with stock options. Still hilarious, and available online at the SEC, is Wired‘s first, failed IPO, excerpted by Doug Henwood; they had operated at increasing loses for their first four years, but they were hopeful about making a lot of money off of suck.com in the future. Another prospectus, from Vans, touts how they’ll be more profitable as they’ve moved all their shoe manufacturing to South Korea.

As its title suggests, Jim Frederick’s “Intern Camp: The Intern Economy and the Culture Trust” looks at the culture of interning, then in a relative infancy. Obviously interning for for-profit corporations is a terrible thing, and there have been any number of pieces written about that. But Frederick’s piece is notable in that it examines the legal basis for internships:

There is, however, another exemption in the FLSA [the Fair Labor Standards Act, passed in 1988 (!)]. Vaguely worded, it concerns “trainees,” or the oddly redundant “student learners.” It allows for-profit institutions to pay short-term employees less than the minimum wage if they are there in an educational capacity. The Department of Labor requires that six criteria be met before it considers someone not an “employee” but a “trainee” exempt from the FLSA: The training is similar to that one would get in school; the training is for the benefit of the trainees, not the employer; the trainees do not displace regular workers; the employer derives no immediate advantage from the activities of the trainees, and may even incur some loss; the trainees understand that they are not entitled to a job at the conclusion of the training; and the trainees understand that they are not entitled to wages for the time spent in training. (p. 53.)

Frederick points out that some industries (banks, law firms, tech companies, engineering companies, and federal agencies) generally follow this; it’s abused by the glamor industries, fashion, architecture, and publishing, which use internships as a source of free labor. There’s a distinct class-based element to intern labor: it’s only relatively affluent young people who can move to New York and work for free in the hopes of getting a job down the road. (David Foster Wallace, more attuned to class differences than one might expect, would get this exactly right in “The Suffering Channel” where he describes a hierarchy of extremely well-dressed interns and the discomfort of his protagonist, working class reporter’s discomfort, with them.) One wonders how much the publishing industry has been hollowed out by two decades of reliance on interns: somebody should be looking at this.

At the end of the book, Robert Nedelkoff’s “Remainder Table” takes a look at the two books of the novelist Alan Kapelner, still neglected. I don’t know Kapelner’s work; LibraryThing reports that All the Naked Heroes was in the libraries of Carl Sandburg and Marilyn Monroe and Lonely Boy Blues was owned by Hemingway. I’d love a compilation of Nedelkoff’s “Remainder Table” columns; the books in them that I’ve tracked down have been worth the time.

And finally, Damon Krukowski had taken on the job of poetry editor with this issue: the selection here focused on poems about labor. Two poems, by Lizinka Campbell Turner (“Distinguo,” poorly scanned but in its original context here) and Edwin Rolfe (“Asbestos”), were rescued from The Liberator (1918) and The Daily Worker (1928); there’s also Kenneth Fearing’s “X Minus X” from 1934 plus Muriel Rukeyser’s “Metaphor to Action” from 1935. It’s an interesting selection, not least because it works well with the rest of the issue: one forgets that there was a sustained tradition of poems about labor, and that labor magazines published poetry. Somebody must have made a good anthology of this by now; I’m impressed that all four can now be found online.

february 6–february 10

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Books

Films

  • Possession, directed by Andrzej Żuławski
  • Depeche Mode 101, dir. D. A. Pennebaker, Chris Hegedus & David Dawkins
  • L’enfant, dir. Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne

Exhibits

  • “Hélio Oiticica: Drawings 1954–58,” Galerie Lelong
  • “Primary Atmospheres: Works from California 1960–1970,” David Zwirner
  • “Jack Tworkov: True and False: Paintings 1960–1975,” Mitchell-Innes & Nash
  • “David Maisel: Library of Dust,” Von Lintel Gallery”
  • “Carlos Ginzburg: Fractalizations and Other Works,” Susan Berko-Conde Gallery