Jan 31, 2012
Television Music for Plants
Airplane makes amazing sample synchronizations of children's TV shows and old commercials. Check him out.
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Jan 30, 2012
Jan 24, 2012
Alfred E. Neuman
"Most people are so lazy, they don't even exercise good judgement!" -- Alfred E. Neuman
Jan 19, 2012
Aesthetic Thursday: Models Reading
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| Charlie France, Models Reading |
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Jan 12, 2012
Jan 9, 2012
45 Street Station Sunset Park, Brooklyn
I live along the BMT Fourth Avenue line in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, three blocks from the Forty-Fifth Street Station. That's how I've decided to introduce myself. Where do you live? I say I live along the BMT Fourth Avenue line in the Sunset Park neighborhood of Brooklyn, just steps from the Forty-Fifth Street Station.
To walk along Fifth avenue it is necessary to walk up from Fourth Avenue. Fifth Avenue is what they call the B.I.D. I think this means Business Industry District. I dated a guy once who made signs for the Sunset Park B.I.D. He didn't like it when I joked he worked for Fifth Avenue -- then I'd pause -- and say, "not in Manhattan!" Never been good with jokes, me. I always say I will live in one of those quaint brownstones that line Thirty-Sixth street to like Fiftieth street. Fuck yeah. I want a brownstone so I can place a "no solicitation" sign on my stoop and adorn the molding of my door with festive papier-maché effigies of Jesus (ain't no matter if it's raining or freezing). The building I live in sits atop a grocery store. The best way to get a nice view of the structure is to stand on the opposite side of the street and look at it on the southwest corner. Architectural urns, like eight of them, sit atop the cornice, which in the case of this building is a drab vanilla decoration that one only appreciates if you happen to look up, see my building, and say hey, that building sits atop a grocery store, and lookie, there is a bland vanilla cornice with an urn-like thing along it; wow. I imagine only the guys who play checkers in the summer and smoke marijuana have ever happened upon the architectural subtlety of the building. I know. Because one told me when I was primed up for a dinner party and bought a six pack from those blokes. Hey man, look at the vanilla cornice and urn-like things that adorn the top of that apartment building. Rad. Yeah. It's a nice looking cornice, that. A green turreted building sits on the corner of Forty-Ninth and Fourth Avenue, while smoking a cigeratte it is amusing to watch the B11 bus come along the avenue, especially when it is out of service.
The Forty-Fifth Street Station has only one exit for straphangers at the far northern terminus of the platform. On street level it is easy to discern another entrance (or exit, however you shake it) on Forty-Seventh Street. I am not certain about the use of this entrance, but at night the hatch that leads down into the station is open and I have seen MTA employees coming in and out of it. My hunch is that it is a substation for the Transit Authority's electrical system. Not having the courage to walk down into the entrance myself, I must resort to speculation as to its purpose. Sometimes tourists end up at Forty-Fifth Street Station. I surmise it is because they ended up here after meandering the verdant hillocks of Greenwood Cemetery and happily came upon the Forty-Fifth Street Station after feasting at a Peruvian restaurant. One never finds tourists on the Ninety-Fifth Street bound side of the station; always on the Manhattan bound side. Forty Fifth Street Station is serviced during the day by the Fourth Avenue local train, labeled R and late at night the R becomes a shuttle between Ninety-Fifth Street in Bay Ridge to Thirty-Sixth Street in Sunset Park. The N stops here late at night too and on odd days, because of a service change, or due to the impending rapture, the D train will stop here. But normally Forty-Fifth Street is a nondescript station stop. It's most active moments are rush hours -- an unbelievable amount of people stream out of the rolling stock when I come home in the evenings. In the mornings Fourth Avenue is a domestic maelstrom -- watch out for the families with baby carriages.
The station shell at Forty-Fifth street is vertical and has nothing attractive about it: no murals of Lenin (Diego Rivera should have done a fresco called La Resistance here), no interesting tile work, nothing promoting Transit Art in the least. They only imaginative aspect of this station is the Station Attendant who nods at me in quiescent antagonism when I exit via the emergency door instead of using the turnstile. Watch out on the staircases. One afternoon a hipster tripped and sprung an ankle. They brought her back to Billyburg in an ambulance. Since hip Park Slope lies like forty blocks to the North and Greenwood abuts it along Thirty-Sixth Street, and Bay Ridge (where you can live in a single family dwelling!) dominates the bottom cup of Brooklyn, Sunset is a mostly quiet, domestic enclave.
The night the Sunset Park rapist was on the prowl, I walked the streets at night hoping I could run into him -- just before he was about to strike -- so I could do a citizen arrest kind of thing. I am really into that shit. I have a wizard costume in my closet that I am half-way thinking it'll will do fine as my vigilante costume. BUT -- this night -- no such luck. Actually I was out on the streets at like two thirty in the morning, not because I was looking to justify wrongs, but rather, someone had found my cell phone in Sunset Park.
The park that the neighborhood is named after sits high and mighty. Fabulous views of Lower Manhattan and Lady Liberty (and no, she is not pregnant, go to MoMa's current Sweet Violence exhibition for that).
Two guys had found my phone, texted Lonnie, the last recipient of an incipient text, "come to dinner!" Lonnie texted me. See. I got it. See. Because I have this contraption on my computer that sends me texts to my goddamn e-mail. Dude, the text said, some dude texted me, they saw my text and your text saying come to dinner, and they are saying come to Sunset Park to pick up your mother fucking phone. Nice guys too. I said, I lost my phone? No I didn't lose my phone. Yeah you did man. Must have slid out your pocket when we were looking for Cassiopeia. Oh. Sure enough Lonnie was right. Yeah, Lonnie, lost my phone. And yeah, let's go watch the Korean dancers do that Korean dance thing on the basketball courts again. Yeah, he said, next time I will be sure to bring my copy of Catcher in the Rye in case I get bored. Meet them at the taco truck, dude. OK. I said. Peace, man. See ya round like a doughnut. Hah hah. So funny.The taco truck on Fifth Avenue is one I have written about before in my subway diary. Good tasting tacos el pastor.The two dudes were waiting for me, energetic to hand over my phone. Altruism always feels better when it is someone else doing the good deed.Smiling and happy they had helped me out, they went back into the inky darkness along the park -- they said they live near Fort Hamilton Parkway. Such a nice thing to do, I thought -- and to think I had no idea I had lost my phone.I swear I can hear the sound of the R train rumble along Fourth avenue, one avenue block away -- the Borough of Brooklyn seems quiet for a narrow celestial moment. Almost tripping over an empty six pack of Stella Artois, I perambulate myself home, wishing the R had a local stop next to Tacos El Broncos.
Jan 2, 2012
What Happens When I Read Novels
When I read novels I do not see images when I read. I may see an image emerge in my mind’s eye after the reading has been done, but during the reading itself I read in black and white without images. What I conjure in my mind's eye of Marcel dipping a madeleine cake into a cup of tea anticipate images. Novels do not generate images. What we do when we read novels is similar to what happens to us when we dream. Freud calls the dream image a rebus (p. 276); in this way, I think he is correct. If there is an image in the novel it is more akin to a rebus, an hallucination of loosely strung together spectral thoughts. We free associate when we read a novel; what comes before our mind’s eye are parts and pieces that do not form an entirely thought together whole. In the novel's image, like the dream, parts stand for wholes. Novels are constituted by their love for particularities. Epics and grand eloquent drama are the stuff of another art form; they form archetypical images. Novels are a unique art form in that they work similarly to the way our minds work. Novels arose as the predominant art form because they privilege individual experience over grand narrative; the mundane and the banal are championed in the novel over the hero trope and archetype. It is not the photographic image that is desired in the novel, but rather, what we see in the novel is the recognition that the mirror is broken; we see in the novel a skewed mirror and we call it real.
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Jan 1, 2012
Books I Remember Reading in 2011
Didn't keep an official list for 2011, but here is what I recalled from my fragmentary mental database. Also listed is my best and honorable mention in three categories: novels, philosophy, and history and culture. I am thinking I need to read more science related books in 2012!
Novels
The best novel I read in 2011 is Home by Marilynne Robinson. Honorable mention goes to Remainder by Tom McCarthy.
Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman
- Apart of the American Gods series, this one retells the story of the spider god Anansi. Expect charming Gaiman prose! B+
The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
- His Master's thesis turned novel, Wallace goes all Wittgenstein and ponders the limits of language in novel form. A-
The Fortress of Solitude by Jonathan Lethem
- Read this book only because I felt like I need a fictional introduction to Brooklyn. While the novel centers on two boys' friendship in and around the Boerum Hill neighborhood, I found the novel to be evocative of the borrough as a whole. Wasn't too much into the invisibility theme, however. B
The Guermantes Way by Marcel Proust
- Volume Three of Proust's Recherche corpus exudes with haute-bourgeoise shenanigans -- will Marcel just get a boyfriend already! The more mature of the volumes, in my opinion -- but equally as funny. A
Home by Marilynne Robinson
- The most beautiful and tragic novel I read this year. Shame I never read Gilead. I am working backwards. Agreeing with a critic (I forget who), Robinson creates a classic American tragic hero with Jack. A+
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
- First saw the BBC version. Loved it. London's Tube never seemed more inviting. And scary. One thing I love about Gaiman is the way he tells a story and his attention to quirky details. C+
Remainder by Tom McCarthy
- Reminded me of Synecdoche, New York. Wonderful book nonetheless. Think: what if I could externalize my inner thoughts? This is the book's philosphical premise. A
Something Missing by Matthew Dicks
- Dicks wanted to write a great American novel but he failed. Or. It's just a nice romp into benign criminality. You decide. C-
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust
- The Combray section all by itself is justification enough to read this book. Kisses, memory, and a sweet piece of cake ... ahhhhh. A+
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust
- If Swann's Way is about Marcel as a child, WBG is about blooming adolescence -- I guess. A-
Philosophy
The best philosophy book I read in 2011 was Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell. Honorable mention goes to Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida.
Essays by Michel de Montaigne
- Didn't read every one of the essays, but I recommend the Apology for Raymond Sebond. My favorite quote: "How do I know I am not playing with my cat but in fact it is my cat playing with me?" A+
Francis Bacon: the Logic of Sensation by Gilles Deleuze
- A readable Deleuze. In fact all of his "art" books are more readable than Anti-Oedipus, etc. You have to read this book with Google Images handy (or a monograph of Bacon's paintings) or the book does not make as much sense. B-
Learning to Live Finally: The Last Interview by Jacques Derrida
- Derrida speaks eloquently about legacy and mortality. Nicely done interview. The Last Interview is to Derrida what the Phadeo is to Socrates. A+
Must We Mean What We Say?: A Collection of Essays by Stanley Cavell
- The best essay is the one on modernity and art. Cavell writes as if every sentence is its own stand alone work. He is said to be our new Emerson. Hmmm? I am thinking of giving him serious consideration for 2012. A
Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage by Stanley Cavell
- Writing a paper on this book linking it with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Should be fun. This books does serious philosophy with classic American comedies from the 1930s - 1950s. A+
The Republic by Plato
- Never actually sat and read this from Socrates's first words to the end in order -- mainly because when I did read it as an undergraduate it was cut up in pieces. Bad beginning made right. Now I done read it. Check out the last book. A+
Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality by Sigfried Kracauer
- Classic book on film theory. B+
The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film by Stanley Cavell
- Unusual book. I think I need to read it again to fully understand. The section on silence and film is brilliant as well as his meditation on Joan of Arc. A
History and Culture
The best in History and Culture goes to Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester. Honorable Mention goes to Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson.
Are You Considering Psychoanalysis? by Karen Horney
- Usually I avoid book titles that double as questions, but Horney's classic introduction text helped me to conceptualize psychoanalysis from the point of view of an analysand. Perhaps a bit dated, but helpful nonetheless. B+
Who Was Jacques Derrida?: An Intellectual Biography by Jason E. Powell
- Not a straight forward bio, but rather serves both as a survey of his work interwoven into a sort of love song about a life. Written from the perspective of a disciple rather than a distanced critic. A-
The Painter of Modern Life by Charles-Pierre Baudelaire
- This book is a gem. A must read for anyone seriously interested in aesthetics. Baudelaire does a reflection on painting that I feel corresponds to how we can think about film. A+
The Rise of the Novel: Studies in DeFoe, Richardson and Fielding by Ian Watt
- The first chapter is a bit of philosophizing about the novel and its relationship (or lack thereof) with realism, while the rest of the book positions the novel form historically within the context of the mass production of books and the emergence of a reading middle class. B+
Seductions of Psychoanalysis: Freud, Lacan, and Derrida by John Forrester
- To write a book on psychoanalysis is difficult enough, but Forrester rises to the occasion by linking together seemingly effortlessly Lacan, Derrida, and Freud into a cohesive structure that makes this book a pleasure to read. Forrester's chapter on Freud, Breuer and Anna O. is exceptional criticism. I love how he interweaves the theme of gossip and psychoanalysis throughout the text. A+
Sh*t My Dad Says by Justin Halpern
- Got hooked on Halpern's twitter feed and anticipated the book. Not as funny as the twitter posts that started the whole thing, mainly because the books attempts a cohesion that loses the ephemeral nature of tweeting. Good effort though! C-
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson
- Wow. What can I say? I loved every page of this book. Besides the reason why Jobs is famous -- Apple, Pixar, iPads, and whatnot -- the book reveals a man who is certainly binary, both impassioned and cruel, visionary, but pig-headed. Now when Jobs's wife comes out of mourning, the world will come to know the other half of Steve. A+
We Boys in Love: Teenagers in Love Before Girl-Craziness by Jefferey P. Dennis
- Thought this book would be more of a literary criticism, but rather I found Dennis frames the adolescents in the films too rigidly through this idea that homosociality is more real when divorced from sexual desire. The book writes about homosociality in these great films, which by themselves are ripe for cultural criticism, but at the end of the day Dennis says nothing substantial. C
Shout Out:
I would like to say thank you to the Brooklyn Pubic Library and the New York Public Library for providing me with access to most of these books, both in print and Kindle editions, when available! Go Public Libraries!
Proust, the Photograph, and Chance in Literature
For Proust, time stands still, ”As though there had been no time there but seven o'clock at night” (p. 59). A memory like this is not a memory of the intellect, for Proust, a voluntary memory -- a memory likes this preserves nothing of the past. To capture an involuntary memory is a chance happening precipitated by an object. Proust likens it to reincarnation, of souls lost in some inferior being -- does a touch, a taste bring them out to play? I think for Proust the soul is a prison yearning to reach out beyond its own limits -- this desire for transcendence is a desire of the human soul but the sheer will is not enough. Proust adores the material world; he has faith in the world because it offers a promise. The past is hidden beyond the realm of the intellect. The material world promises a portal to that hidden realm. But the key is not readily accessible. Proust's heaven is in the immanent reality of the material world. Proust's object is a material signifier -- something like the effects of literature, “of which we have no inkling” (p. 60) -- only chance. I come back to this passage: “it depends on chance whether or not we come upon this object before we ourselves die" (v. 1, p. 61). What Proust calls “chance” Barthes call the punctum. Art depends largely on chance -- this is what Proust means by involuntary memory. Every photograph is an imprint of the world. But not every photograph evokes something akin to what the madeleine cake did for Marcel. Why? It is not the cup, the cake, the photograph itself that constitutes the structure of the involuntary memory -- it is the self's response to the world, both hidden and open, governed by chance, in which we hope to light upon something called truth before we die. The experience of an involuntary memory is an "unremembered state" (v.1, p. 61). Neither the novel nor the photograph hold the memory inside of itself; the memory is "unremembered" by a chance encounter.
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What Barthes calls the "unary" image," Proust would call habituation. What Barthes thinks of as the prick, the punctum, of the photograph is not far from how the Recherche confronts the problem of photography. Why does Swann prefer the daguerreotype of Odette? But Marcel disparages the Kodak snapshot? Why does Marcel study the photograph of Berma in bed, but is disconcerted by a photograph of Gilberte? Marcel cannot stand the vanity of his grandmother in wanting to have her likeness taken, but he concedes that his feelings are complicit with his own fantasy of a good night's kiss. The photograph promises a "supplementary prolonged encounter" (v. 3, p. 99). What is troubling about the photograph is the way it unsettles us.
In a "cruel trick of chance," Marcel sees his dead grandmother as a photograph (v. 3, pp.183-185). In this scene the theme of the photograph is introduced without the actual presence of a photographic object. The grandmother appears "as a photograph." The grandmother is not there; she is absent, but Marcel perceives her similarly to a photograph, a spectral object, however, something akin to an hallucination or to a dream. The nodal point of the novel and the photographic image is the anticipation of an image not fully seen; for as Proust says, "We never see people dear to us except in the animated system, in the perpetual motion of our love for them, which, before allowing the images that faces present to reach us, seizes them in its vortex and flings them back upon the idea we have always had of them, makes them adhere to it, coincide with it" (v. 3, p. 183). What is striking here is that Marcel curses "the cruel trick of chance" that conjures up the image of his grandmother, as if his eyes were a photographic plate. Even in the moment that he sees his grandmother, a spectral image of her, sitting on the sofa -- it lasts only a moment -- he does not know her. "I who had never seen her save in my own soul, always in the same place in the past, through the transparency of contiguous and overlapping memories .... I saw [the spectral image of my dead grandmother] sitting on the sofa beneath the lamp, red-faced, heavy and vulgar, sick, day-dreaming ... an overburdened woman I did not know" (v. 3, p. 184).
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Dec 31, 2011
Christmas Letter from New Orleans
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| Ignatius Reilly Float, Mardi Gras |
― Ignatius J. Reilly
Anthony sits at a wooden table at the Balcony Bar, a place that looks regal during the daytime, but becomes the center of brouhaha at night. Having had a few cocktails, we sit together eating bar food. Anthony feeds me a French Fry. Carrying a tray with hamburgers, Andrew almost runs into a cadre of revelers who are talking so loudly the entire building seems to close in on itself with the noise. We sit and attempt conversation. This is our city every night.It has been a year and a half since leaving New Orleans. Having returned home for eight days I leave again with renewed something for the Crescent City. Martin says Nola (as locals call it) is the best city. He's right.
New Orleans is a gem of a town. People sip beer on Friday at noon in a pub facing Magazine Street, a street named for its shops (not its magazines!). Coffee shops garner a lazy anarchist feel -- kombucha and hipster zines sold by the dozen. Club Ms. Mae's, a local dive, was recently damaged by a pregnant woman who ran her car into its front doors. She barreled her car head-on into the building. The customers at the video poker slots did not lift up their heads from their poker machine, no concentration thwarted, and the woman stumbled out of her destroyed car demanding, "where's my drink?" If New Orleans is the city that care forgot, it seems someone has been recently paying attention. The Saints, the city's historically underachieving football team, has come out of Katrina oblivion with superstar wins. The Saints quarterback beat Dan Marino's record of most passing yards in a season. The Superdome looks spiffy and is emblazoned with a Mercedes Benz insignia, sign that big business is willing to support this recuperating town. New Orleans is a town more than a city. The city is enclosed within the civil parish of Orleans making it the smallest parish in the state.
On my visit in the city I stayed in the Irish Channel, walking distance to Annunciation and Magazine streets. Since the populace is rather small, I felt like a local again just after a few days. No matter what 'nabe you happen to be in: Bywater, Ninth Ward, New Orleans East, Bucktown, or wherever, this city is damn genuine friendly.
The same people are milling about Slim Goodies diner on Louisiana avenue and Magazine Street the two times I stopped by for a cup of coffee. New Orleans is a city built upon the concept of laissez faire. The city repudiates progress for the sake of efficiency but glories in immanent transcendence. A boy skips down Laurel street in the Garden District; A homeless bloke calls me a "bitch ass faggot" because I did not give him a dollar and twenty five cents for a bus fare, but his invective was jocund, even though my friend Anthony was scared shitless. It is true the city of New Orleans is plagued with woeful violent crime. The NOPD notoriously incarcerates more criminals than it actually tries in criminal court which means criminals go to jail for a few weeks and end up right back on the streets.
I did notice the New Orleans Regional Transit Authority, Norta for short, hired a French firm to revamp the system. Signs glisten and adorn each bus stop, color coded, replete with bus stop number, route number, and terminating stop! The buses proudly display the same information on a front digital panel. When I lived in the city, it was a guess and a prayer to board a bus -- now there is a semblance in the normal commuter's mind of the system lay out. A robust transit system is crucial for the city's rebirth.Artists have returned to the city in droves.
My buddy Martin is finishing his dissertation in Nola; my friends Anthony and Andrew are just one of my many friends my age who have bought houses in the city proper, thae opposite of what our parents did, which was to raise us in the 'burbs and preach to us that living in Orleans would get us and our children shot. I feel our parents did not know New Orleans -- most of my friend's parents, my parents included, did not group up in the city. They grew up in the surrounding Caucasian enclaves. In my high school in Mandeville, the same high school Ian Somerhalder went to school (the dead guy on Lost), it was considered an anomaly to be anything but white and own a car by the time you were a Junior.
Growing up, the city was said to be dangerous. Still today there are people who won't set foot in Nola. I remember getting my brake tag in Metairie, the city adjacent to New Orleans to the northwest, and the attendant, upon finding out that I lived in New Orleans, looked at me aghast and said, "with dem ni*&ers?"
Racism is palpable in the city that care forgot. In the restaurant I used to work as a teen there are still three doors for the bathrooms. Go figure. But, I feel, it is a form of racism that must necessarily go.The racism is shallow. It does not bespeak potential progress. People are racist because it is convenient.
One of the best neighborhoods in the city, the Ninth Ward, a center of Black American culture, was destroyed by Hurricane city. Racism keeps its doors shuttered. Caucasian old-timers are afraid of the area. On Foursquare I checked into the Ninth Ward after a dinner in the Bywater at Elizabeth's. A kid who I taught wrote on Foursquare about the neighborhood.
Used to be one of the prime areas of residence among African Americans, a very well off part of town with a bad connotation due to racism and the high percentage of blacks. Is ruined because of 2005
A white guy posted a blurb, "be careful." That's it. To be careful is not the correct mantra to hold.
Being careful leads to being too careful. The city is at a point in her development where the violence can stop, people can come together, and the city can continue to resurrect herself from the ashes. I felt it in the air. Instead of the Balcony Bar, a place where we can drink ourselves blind, we should erect Resurrection Bar.
I think a few things must happen in New Orleans if change is going to occur. First, we must stop scapegoating violent crime on poor blacks in the city. What the city needs to do is to crack down on petty crime in every 'nabe, and actually adjudicate and stop acting the part of a nanny state and incarcerating just for the sake of incarcerating. Second, Jefferson Parish and Orleans ought to be connected via light rail, beginning at Louis Armstrong Aiport through Airline, to Tulane, terminating at Canal Street. Monies need to be earmarked to extend the new Loyola extension of the streetcar (to be opened Summer 2012) to Rampart street creating a French Quarter loop. Fourth, the Ninth Ward needs to be restored ASAP to its status as a viable, sustainable home to its now scattered diaspora. Not green space. Not empty space. New Orleanians were wrong to criticize Brad Pitt's restoration projects. Fifth, a food co-op needs to open in the Marigny. Both the Marigny and the Bywater are home to a plethora of artists and musicians. They city needs to connect this part of Orleans by making it an attractive place to live. Sixth, a fortune five hundred company needs to be lured into the city. We lost a few in the preceding years. Houston and Atlanta cannot be the only lucrative cities in the region. Seventh, keep on building back our lost public libraries. I just read a library that had been destroyed by Katrina has finally reopened. In Madisonville, where my family lives, the library still has yet to be rebuilt. Eight, keep up with the Charter schools. I am not sure if Charter schools are the best option, but the city cannot be monopolized solely by Catholic and private schools. Nine, the city needs to open more specialized high schools like Nocca, and include a diverse student population. A public high school for Jazz and the Performing Arts, for example. Or a public high school for arts and sciences. Nine, now that Saints are on fire this season, let's bring back formerly defunct organizations: McKenzies, K&B, Ignatius Reilly.
The reason why Ignatius Reilly sold hot dogs in the French Quarter is not because he was a loser, but because he needed a place to get the pulse of the city heartbeat. To know the city is to sit on the corner of Decatur, near Café du Monde and eat an Ignatius Reilly sanctioned hot dog -- feel the pulse of the city. Make the French Quarter into a money generator and rebuild, continue to rebuild, New Orleans. When I return for my next visit, hopefully my friends and I will reconvene at the Resurrection Bar. This is my Christmas wish.
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Dec 30, 2011
Disparagement of the Photograph in Proust
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| Man Ray |
Photographs are not treated kindly in Proust’s Recherche. In the “Mother’s Kiss” episode in Combray section of Swann's Way, there is a humorous account of why photographs ought not to adorn the walls of Marcel’s room for his mother found in them “vulgarity and utility” (v.1, p. 53). The sheer fact that a photograph is reproducible, that another child could have the same photograph hanging in his or her room seems scandalous to Marcel’s mother’s aesthetic taste. A photograph is “common” since it can be reproduced mechanically. The photograph is vulgar since it “captures” objects in the world only to reproduce them as commercial banalities. The photograph does not get under the skin of everydayness. Photographs reveal nothing more than the banal surfaces of things and do not penetrate any deeper. To put it another way: the novel is concerned with animating reality, not the banal apprehension of reality.
Proust also links photography to vanity. Saint-Loup takes a photograph of Marcel’s grandmother. Noticing she puts on her best dress for the occasion, Marcel reports he feels annoyed at his grandmother’s childishness in wanting to appear her best, a fact that surprises him for he had always imagined her to be freed from vanity (v. 2, p. 500). Proust is echoing the idea that “having one’s likeness taken” is offensive to a pure concept of beauty that ought to look deeper than surface appearances. However, Proust’s aversion to photograph goes deeper than a moralistic stance against vanity. It is not an ethical deprivation which is at stake in the photograph, but rather, what Proust seems to deride is the distraction the photograph promotes and the aura of unreality it promotes. Marcel is annoyed that his grandmother will sit for Saint-Loup to have her likeness taken but she will not spend time with him, a theme that can retrace itself back to the young Marcel in Combray waiting for his mother to arrive with the long-awaited kiss. The photograph gives a false promise, one of deferral, the promise of halting time, anticipation in the guise of distraction.
Take for example the magic lantern: an analogue for the disparaged photograph which is linked to the mother’s kiss episode in Combray. It is important to note the unsettling feeling aroused by the magic lantern at the start of Proust’s masterwork for it serves as a prelude to the disparagement of the plastic arts throughout the work along with a distanced awe and astonishment. Where Proust disparages he also obsesses. Where photographs are mentioned in Proust, even in passing phrases, metaphors, or allusion to photography, there is often the anticipation of themes we are more familiar with in Proust, the anticipation of a kiss, questions of real and unreal, the sensory world and the world of ideas, insight versus mere appearance.
Placed over his bedside lamp, the magic lantern entertains the boy Marcel by a show of several points of multi-colored light creating a luminous kaleidoscopic effect which evokes both the camera and the cinema, appearance and reality, dark and light, all of which make Marcel uneasy. The iridescence is too much. Like light pouring through stained glass, the child’s magic lantern creates a “supernatural phenomenon of many colours,” causing an unreal effect to superimpose itself on the familiarity of Marcel’s childhood bedroom in Combray. Marcel is both awed and discomfited by the parade of lights the magic lantern produces, as it illuminates a story outside of Marcel’s own experience, thus limiting access to an inside inner experience. The magic lantern produces an unreal effect that shakes Marcel, the budding writer, and puts into question his desire to create uniquely and inwardly. “But my sorrows were only increased thereby, because this mere change of lighting was enough to destroy the familiar impression I had of my room …” (v. 1, p. 10). Proust’s point is to show how the luminous photographic and kaleidoscopic effects of the magic lantern discomfit and unrest the artist’s -- the novelist’s -- ability to capture reality. The magic lantern, and by extension, the play of light that is the photograph, an inscription of light on paper, is set against what novels can do, viz., what Proust feels he can do as a young artist, as a novelist.
As opposed to what books can do, and by this I imagine Proust to imply novels, literature can go deeper than the superficial feint of the photograph. A book is an object like a photograph, but for Marcel, books “were a unique person, absolutely self-contained” (v.1, p. 53). Proust argues that books have the ability to go “beneath everyday incidents”; “ordinary objects” and “common words” (ibid). Books have an advantage over photographs. Books can be unique persons with unique tonalities and individual dispositions. Novels anticipate things. Novels can describe an inner life. When Marcel tells us that "For a long time I would go to bed early," he announces the theme of the novel: anticipation (v.1, p. 1). For Proust photography is unable to anticipate. Photographs can present reality the way it is. The novel is to nudity what the photograph is to nakedness. In essence photographs are a scandalous "laying bare" whereas the novel is "art." While Proust is fascinated by the photograph, I think he sees it as mere surfacing of the real.
When Robert who has never met Albertine sees a photograph of her after hearing Marcel speak of his love for her, he is surprised that Marcel could have “worked himself into such a state”(v. 5, p.590). We are led to the believe that the surface appearance of what Albertine looks like can never reveal the stirring of Marcel's heart. Robert sees nothing remarkable in her appearance because it is not through appearances that love stirs. Upon watching Berma perfom in a theater production of Phédre, Marcel goes back and forth viewing her through a viewfinder and then back to viewing her with his own eyes. And in bed at night he studies the photograph of Berma, rhapsodized at first by her image, and then, gradually disappointed (v.2, p. 81). In another example, the memories of his dead grandmother, Marcel feels, can only be conjured through pain, and he remarks rather proudly that he did not succumb to a photograph to assuage his pain, to erroneously address to a photograph someone who is absent and separated, "but retaining his personality, knows us and remains bound to us by an indissoluble harmony” (v. 4, p. 214). The photograph provides no such access.
Proust disparages photography for it captures objects mechanically and presents reality as if the past can be recaptured as it once was. Proust wants to evoke in the novel a sense of the past that cannot be entirely recaptured but rather anticipated. Photographs make objects present to the viewer in a way a painting or a novel cannot. Novels do evoke the past. Photographs act like memory, bringing the past into the present, but the photograph does not restore the past to the viewer. The photograph acts as a memento mori, a mark of mortality, what once was at a certain point of time. As a pathetic reminder of the futility of photography to recapture the past, Proust describes Swann studying a photograph of Odette. Having lost interest in the present Odette: put-upon, heavier, a more sorrowful Odette, Swann attempts to locate in her the "chrysalis" of who she once was, the younger, more beautiful Odette, what “he had once seen in her” but cannot find. So he turns to studying photographs of a younger Odette to remind him of what she once was, “how exquisite she had been. And that would console him a little ...” (v.1, p. 414).
The audacity of the photograph is it purports to present the present in the photographic image itself, which leads Sontag to remark that the photograph goes against Proust’s claim that only the past can be evoked in art (p. 143). Sontag writes that Proust misconstrues photography. She says that photographs make images accessible, not reality (p. 143). Swann’s photograph of a younger Odette merely presents an image of Odette, not access to the Odette Swann once loved. For Proust, it seems, photography is linked to disappointment. And by extension, art too is linked to disappointment.
Where Proust is interested in non-iterable events, the longed for mother's kiss episode, or the Madeleine cake dipped in tea, he evokes photography in tension with the novel. To take a photograph of a mother kissing her child before he goes to bed would not satisfy Proust. Why? Because the event as presented in the photograph supposes the moment is repeatable. When Marcel writes, "I knew that such a night could not be repeated" (v.1, p.57) he is referring to an event in the past, in this case, a gentle kiss from his mother when he was a boy, as a non-repeatable event, an event of non-iterability. Marcel brings a photograph of Gilberte to his lips in the hopes of recapturing something of the sensory aspect of love. Or, when Marcel in Within a Budding Grove returns to see Berma perform in Phédre to recapture the pleasure of the first event recorded in Swann’s Way. Even if the moment were captured by a photograph, Proust is saying, the photograph cheats and shortcuts to a false past -- or the novel’s claim to the past would be repudiated. Proust sees photography as undermining what novels can do rather than seeing photography as commensurable and coextensive with the novel’s expression of reality.
Photographs Recapture What No Longer Exists
For Proust the photograph can only recapture dead objects. The novel, by contrast, animates life. Photographs record what once was. Photographs mummify. The photograph archives the past, or in the words of Bazin, “photographs embalm time” (p. 162). For Proust, in the words of Charlus, the dignity of the photography is when it ceases “to be a reproduction of reality and shows us things that no longer exist” (v.2, p. 470). For example, when I see a photograph of the house I was born in I am seeing the house as it once was not how it possibly could be relived through my remembering of the house. Proust tolerates the distortion of memory -- something he does not see inherent in the photograph. The photograph presents the house I grew up in as totally clear to me, whereas the house I grew up in that I can conjure up in my mind is not related to images at all but curiously more allied with reality than the image. In conjuring up memories of the house I grew up in I am able to capture associations that are not necessarily the realistic recasting of the photograph the camera mimics. Photographs are like voluntary memory, what Proust calls intellectual memory. Photographs bring up residues of the past. The photograph is a residual of the past, so in all cases, it is dead. Proust has no interest in voluntary memory or in photography’s voluntary capture of things; he has no wish "to ponder over this residue .... To me it was in reality all dead" (v.1, p.59).
Photographs can give a false impression of a person. Where appearance and reality is concerned, Proust argues that the photograph gives us appearances, which for him are unsatisfactory and can only lead to disappointment. Reflecting on a photograph he took of Gilberte with a Kodak, Marcel says of the picture that, “For one thing, she’s not a beauty, and besides she always takes badly. They're only some snapshots that I took myself with my Kodak; they would give you a false impression of her" (v.2, p. 496). The gaze of the human eye is superior to Marcel's Kodak camera. The human gaze can penetrate appearance and reveals true beauty. There are many instances of the eye and the gaze of the eyes as befalling beauty. Proust privileges what the eyes can do: (v. 1, p.184-185). Or here: "I gazed inexhaustibly at her large face" (v.2, p. 335).
Very seldom, if at at all, does Proust remark on the beauty of the photographed object as an object of beauty in of itself. Even though Marcel buys a photograph of Berma to look upon, the face of the actress does not appear intrinsically beautiful, but gives him “the idea and consequently the desire to kiss it…” (v. 2, p.80-81). The photograph evokes desire but also disappointment: “I lighted my candle again, to look at her face once more …. I felt an emotion more cruel than voluptuous …. Our desires cut across one another, and in this confused existence it is rare for happiness to coincide with the desire that clamored for it” (v.2, p. 83). Proust is not interested in appearances because he is not interested in how people appear, for no one is really worthy of interest unless he can get inside their heads. The scandal of photography is that everything would seem interesting just because one can take a snapshot. The sudden undeliberated gaze of the photographic eye for Proust erases the ineffable and makes plain what ought to be indissoluble mystery. The photograph makes a habit out of humanity's experiences. As if remarking on the photograph, Proust writes, “No one is really worthy of interest; but some people appear interesting” (v. 2, p. 721). The novel allows us to enter into the mind of Proust’s created characters in a way that is foreclosed to us otherwise.
The photograph is banal; it does not reveal depth. Compare the super-saturation of lipstick placed on the lips of a girl (v.2, p.3-4). “A streak too much” and it can be revealed -- “all the paint that had hitherto passed unperceived now crystallised” (v.2, p.4). Marcel’s mother does not notice the lipstick until “too much” is painted, creating excess of paint, making it more visible, breaking through the familiar everydayness. The novel has a structure of chance and supplementarity built into it that for Proust photographs do not. A photograph cannot exude excess and supplementarity. The privilege of the novel is its ability to be excessive, to supplement, to overflow appearance. Novels crystallise human experience whereas photographs freeze moments in time.
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Dec 19, 2011
Marcel Proust On the Advantage of Books
"... a new book was not one of similar objects but, as it were a unique person, absolutely self-contained .... Beneath the everyday incidents, the ordinary objects and common words, I sensed a strange and individual tone of voice" (v.1, p.55-56). While photographs capture objects in the world, they are vulgar since they find what they happen to capture at the moment and so remain in quality a "commercial banality" (v. 1, p. 53).
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
Dec 11, 2011
Why I Don't Write 500 Words A Day
I read once that a writer should write at least 500 words a day before any real writing occurs. To encourage writing one must write. Even if the words evoke nothing. Write. The idea is if you coax the axles of your tired mind, give it a little shake, deeper thoughts will issue forth. To me it is an innate theory of mind that touts the philosophy that the writer must write.
I say only write when you feel compelled to write. Even if it is a short thought, if it compels you to put onto paper, then write it down. Type it out. I refuse to submit to the notion that there is a well spring of creativity deep inside of us and the only way to unleash it is to write a bucket load of crap first.
To write is to continue upon a notion. Upon a trigger. Upon an idea. To write means to follow up on a nagging thought that doesn't go away with a nap or a dream.
To say I write 500 words a day would be to lie to you. But I am not a writer who believes I must write into exhaustion.
Once you get the idea. Write.
Until then, do other things.
Oberserve.
Read. The best advice I can give to writers is to read. A lot. I don't just mean blogs and newspaper articles. To be a good writer read the best of what you wish to write. Not so as to emulate. It is a fable to think that to read others will rub off on you in a bad way. The anxiety of influence is there, of course. But one reads because one realizes that it has already been said, written, done before.
The only hope we have as writers is to say something about what has already been said.
The most freeing experience is to read a writer who puts into words a thought you've already had at some point. This revelation conjoins you with the world of ideas. The best writers enter into the history of thought by reading the history of thought.
And read with a pencil. Underline. Strikethrough. Spit on. Spill coffee on it. The book. If it is an ebook or a library book buy yourself a reading notebook.
If you are a young person you will never write anything that amounts to "good" for a long time. I have not written anything good yet.
But I feel that I am close to writing something good.
It has taken at least thirty one years to even begin to think I could write something pitch perfect.
I have yet to stumble upon my topic. What compels me to write. Which is why I repudiate the inner writer thesis. It is not so much that what I must write is within me but more that what I want to write about has not been found yet.
So, here ends my five hundred words for today. I did it for spite.
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