I am obsessed with the kuroko, the black-clad stagehands of Japanese theatre. They are, by stage convention, invisible both to the actors and to the audience. And yet -- how deft their movements! How quick, how clever they must be! How difficult to not watch the skillful kuroko, who makes the actor possible ...
In my repertoire of occasional poems, I have two suitable for reciting at debates or while watching election returns. The first is Ginsberg's Amerika. The second is Whitman's To the States (To Identify the 16th, 17th, or 18th Presidentiad), which I will reproduce here in its entirety.
Why reclining, interrogating? why myself and all drowsing?
What deepening twilight-scum floating atop of the waters,
Who are they as bats and night-dogs askant in the capitol?
What a filthy Presidentiad! (O South, your torrid suns! O North, your arctic freezings!)
Are those really Congressmen? are those the great Judges? is that the President?
Then I will sleep awhile yet, for I see that these States sleep, for reasons;
(With gathering murk, with muttering thunder and lambent shoots we all duly awake,
South, North, East, West, inland and seaboard, we will surely awake.)
Last time around, it was the "bats and night-dogs" that really got me. This time, it's the awakening.
He wasn't content to diagnose evil and despair, as so many modern writers have done; he was audacious enough to want to find, and give us, answers. In several of his essays he set forth a bold new artistic challenge for himself and his cohort of American fictionists. "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" foresaw the aesthetic and humanistic dead end of postmodern irony and speculated that the next revolutionary literary movement might be fiction that risked sentimentality and melodrama and "advocated single-entendre values." In "Joseph Frank's Dostoyevsky" he explicitly set himself the daunting goal of following great 19th-century novelists' example of writing "morally passionate, passionately moral fiction [that] was also ingenious and radiantly human fiction." One got the sense that he was readying himself, like a great athlete in that last quiet moment of concentration and blankness before the crucial moment at the Olympics, for a feat of such artistic hubris it would demand everything he had, and more.
One of my favorite cartoonists, Tim Kreider, writes about David Foster Wallace (read the essay here).
Before last week, I'd never read any of Wallace's work. I once flipped through Infinite Jest at the bookstore and decided that I didn't care to steep myself in his style (I told myself I'd read too many copycat stories in writing workshops). And I'd also read James Woods's elegant assassination, in which he accuses Wallace of being swamped by the ugly language of the world.
Last week, I read his Kenyon commencement address. That, with the loving words of strangers, has made me want to try him again. But it's not until I read Kreider's essay that I realized what made me recoil from his writing. It's too exposing, too raw. It shows its flaws. How terrifying! -- to show the world your early errors for the sake of the wiser work to come. And now that wiser work will never arrive to justify its making -- we'll have to resign ourselves to looking for its traces in the partial drafts he left behind.
... If ideas are no longer capable of improvement, if a real theoretical impasse has been reached, as I believe it has, then there is no good reason not to return to the good old prose of Marx and Engels. I don't want to. And I think the key to solving this problem lies in an analogy to space, not to time. Wittgenstein writes, famously, in the Philosophical Investigations:Though I bristle a bit at his polemic, Nasreddin has (as usual) been an excellent curator of metaphors. His post is worth a full and careful read. Here's the Sokal hoax discussion he refers to, and here's a related and fascinating post on the anti-humanism of Modern architecture.Our language can be seen as an ancient city: a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight regular streets and uniform houses.The "new boroughs," of course, are the great new developments of technical language that have emerged over the last century. Where does the tangled skein of poststructuralist prose fit in this city? Is it its own new borough, or is it a gleaming ugly glass Libeskind skyscraper in the midst of the medieval town?
Participating in the current financial markets is like eating junk food — an act of profound faith, or at least of willful ignorance ... Take the mortgage-backed securities at the center of this crisis — in which thousands of mortgages were blended together, sliced into pieces, and then sold to millions of investors. Compared to the traditional mortgage lent out by a single bank to a single investor, these are the pizza-flavored low-fat Pringles to a baked potato. (via)
This is my new favorite metaphor for the market meltdown. It opens up vast econo-tropes. What's the financial equivalent of eating local organic? Are we struggling with a financial obesity epidemic? And this makes Suze Orman and Jack LaLanne roughly the same person, right?
