A few weeks back Jessica and I were watching the old boob tube. Flipping around, we (she) eventually landed on the Oprah Winfrey Network, which was airing an interview with Maya Angelou. I heard a very powerful thing then, though I don't have the quote verbatim. Angelou was saying that no matter what she sees another human doing, she must accept the fact that she herself is capable of doing that.
Whoa.
This is something like total empathy. It's much different from saying "I can understand where that guy was coming from when he embezzled a million dollars from needy orphans." It's saying "I am entirely capable of embezzling a million dollars from needy orphans." In essence, she's saying we're all human — all this depravity, violence, greed, etc. in the world is shared completely by everyone on the planet. She didn't go into much more detail on this, but this small bit is enough on its own. Because it's easy enough to vilify someone — it happens every day. If we vilify someone, it creates a distance between us and them and it comforts us to know that their "evil" is unique to their being and so we're safe. This is a psychological safeguard.
While logging on this morning to compose this post, I noticed a quote on Facebook that someone attributed to the Dalai Lama:
Each one of us is responsible for the whole of humankind. We need to think of each other really as brothers and sisters and to be concerned for each other’s welfare. Rather than working solely to acquire wealth, we need to do something meaningful, something directed seriously towards the welfare of humanity as a whole.
-The Dalai Lama's facebook post today.
A good tie-in, no?
I suppose I started thinking about Angelou's quote again this morning after (1) viewing Blue Velvet this past weekend and (2) reading David Foster Wallace's take on David Lynch in his (DFW's) essay entitled "David Lynch Keeps His Head" (the link is to the Premiere magazine article version; I had read the extended version in Wallace's book A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again).
On viewing Blue Velvet: It was a movie I didn't really connect with emotionally. I felt the cliché-like atmosphere, the campy old timey detective stuff, mixed in with the starkly portrayed sexual depravity and violence to be, in short, disturbing. I didn't feel like the movie said much to me — I felt it was awkwardly paced and trying to hard too be symbolic.
Wallace argues that the disturbing nature of the movie is what makes it so great. Lynch doesn't vilify Frank Booth. He gets the audience to see the sexual depravity through a naive, young man's (Jeffrey's) eyes, and then Lynch shows that this young man is also capable of this depravity and violence. And since Jeffrey is the main "eyes" of the film, this means the audience is implicitly capable of this depravity and violence.
Wallace is particularly focused on his own emotional involvement with Jeffrey's participation in sexual battery and in the scene where Frank Booth sits in the front seat of the car, turns towards the camera (AKA Jeffrey AKA the audience) and says "You're just like me." There is much more analysis in Wallace's essay, if you're interested in that kind of thing.
Wallace argues that the disturbing nature of the film goes against the typical Western narrative of "bad" bubbling up from underneath some dark dank orifice and "good" rising to the occasion to defeat it. He's saying "bad" and "good" work in tandem in the film, even after (spoiler alert) Frank Booth is shot in the head and Jeffrey gets the (good) girl in the end.
So maybe the disturbing stuff I felt during the movie was more of a need to vilify and distance the evil from myself. I felt a similar depravity throughout Funny Games which, I think, was more depraved and more meta and less artistic than Blue Velvet. I wonder what Wallace would have thought of that movie.
In the end, I think it comes down to what you experienced during the art. I'm very interested in the experience of art and what people like and why and why people continue to go see certain types of movies (books/plays/etc.) and not other types of movies (books/plays/etc.). Kanye West, at one time or another, more or less yelled out "Well, did you like the song or not?!" (Which, I think, is [justifiably] every artist's basic response to professional critics.)
You can judge the effectiveness (and maybe even the "goodness") of a piece of art based solely on your emotional/visceral experience. But be reminded that intellectualism is also part of what it means to be human — this is why Maya Angelou must constantly remind herself that she is capable of doing anything that any human does. She must tell herself this because she doesn't naturally feel this (but she knows it).
What I mean is that you might think a movie is trash, which is fine. But then if you read about the movie and see what other people got out of it... it complicates things. And maybe it changes the way you respond to art. And I suppose this is why professional critics exist — to give the intellectual side of the art, however pompous and ineffectual that is (compared to the art itself) in order to deepen the experience of the art.
I'm an artist and a critic myself and I've been wondering for years what role critics play in everything and why criticism is needed. And I didn't know it when I started writing this post, but I think I just figured out a little answer to that.
Showing posts with label David Foster Wallace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label David Foster Wallace. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 01, 2011
Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Historical Prejudice.
I had my first Shakespeare class on Tuesday night, and nearly the entire time was devoted to historicizing Shakespeare -- what sort of culture and society was he from? What was happening at the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th century?
The class is split unevenly between undergraduate students (the overwhelming majority) and graduate students (a handful). Nearly the entire time, a burly graduate student sitting directly behind me was scoffing. The professor would describe how people during Shakespeare's time were led to believe that the king or queen was chosen by God, ruled by divine right, and could not be challenged. *Chuckle*
We see a diagram of the world from that time period.
*Chortle*
Our professor mentions how the church maintained the geocentric model against Copernicus and Galileo. This guy behind me erupts in laughter. Nevermind all the laughs he puts out when we start talking about the sonnets, and Shakespeare's "Young Man" and "Dark Lady."
Naturally, I was distracted by all of these laughs, and I began to think about how people nowadays always assume that modern societies are so much smarter and better than past societies. Look at their religion! Their concepts of sexuality! They didn't even know about the sun!
Our basis for this sort of Historical Prejudice is our modern science, our technologies, our growing knowledge of the world around us. But, in fact, our modern science is just as much a system of beliefs as religion. It's just as much a human fabrication as language, as art, as morality, ethics, justice, hope, love, desire, any emotions. Why do Christians believe in the Bible, in Jesus as the savior, in the Christian God as the lord, whereas people in other parts of the world might believe in other entities, texts, saviors? It's the way we're raised.
Why does modern man believe the sun is the center of our solar system? Because everyone we've ever known has told us that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. Parents, teachers, scientists, strangers. They all tell us this constantly as we're growing up.
Assume you could take a man without any scientific or historical knowledge and place him in a field for a day. You ask him about the large, bright object above him. Perhaps he looks around and sees an ant moving around a tree trunk, or sees a bird fly across the sky, or a lion walk across the field. The man will naturally respond that "The large, bright object in the sky is going across the sky." And he would be correct. In fact, he would be deemed insane to think otherwise.
The heliocentric model of our solar system helps scientists explain other phenomena and helps them build theories on top of theories. It's the same as basic math. If you can't add or subtract, you can't do anything in Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus. If you can't place the sun at the center of our solar system, you can't explain certain phenomena on Earth or elsewhere in our solar system, galaxy, or universe.
Notice that I am not going into more details. Because I don't know them. Ask me to rationally explain to someone why the sun is the center of our solar system, why I know that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and I can't come up with any evidence. I don't know science that well. I assume that thousands of people are not pulling the wool over my eyes. (Ask people on the street, and I'm guessing that maybe 1 in 100 people would be able to come up with the science for this.)
Which brings me to another, somewhat related point. I recently read a magnificent essay by David Foster Wallace. He wrote the introductory essay for the Best American Essays 2007 collection that he "edited" (he prefers the term "Decider" to "Editor," since he didn't change anything so much as pick out the essays that he liked). In the essay, he explains how every word on the cover of the book is false or misleading, how he and the series editor and the series itself is biased, and how society at large is very dependent on people making decisions for them. He refers to a "Total Noise," all of the junk out there, all of the possible options we have to choose from, all the sheer amounts of information, and how normal people need to rely on experts to deduce things for them. No one can handle all of this information without going crazy.
He also somehow manages to effectively lambaste the Bush administration and artfully introduce the essays in the book without it sounding like the ramblings of a madman. I haven't even read a single main essay out of the collection yet (he also mentions how the editor's essay is rarely read, and is read last if ever), but Wallace's essay just blew me away. It comes highly recommended. Here's an except, and I'm guessing the full text of the essay was posted on Houghton-Mifflin's website before, but was taken down.
My whole point is, like the discipline of anthropology tries to do, we should not assume that our society is the apex of evolution, that everything is getting better all the time, that people are getting smarter throughout the ages. We should not assume that other cultures and older cultures were inherently dumber than we are. Remember that much of Greek philosophy, science, and art was lost for a long, long time. People would start coming up with these scientific and philosophical ideas and then, when materials were rediscovered, they would realize that the Greeks had already explored those ideas hundreds of years before. Collectively, considering the entire history of human life on the planet, we've lost the majority of information from past societies. For example, the Spanish burned all but three of the Maya written texts because they were seen as being too polytheistic. Then everyone assumed that their written language only kept track of the stars or something stupid like that, until someone came along and cracked the code and started reading the Maya history. (I saw an excellent special the other night on Nova called Cracking the Maya Code.)
So give Shakespeare and his contemporaries the benefit of the doubt, and stop waving your damn iPhone around like you're the cock of the walk, moron.
The class is split unevenly between undergraduate students (the overwhelming majority) and graduate students (a handful). Nearly the entire time, a burly graduate student sitting directly behind me was scoffing. The professor would describe how people during Shakespeare's time were led to believe that the king or queen was chosen by God, ruled by divine right, and could not be challenged. *Chuckle*
We see a diagram of the world from that time period.
*Chortle*
Our professor mentions how the church maintained the geocentric model against Copernicus and Galileo. This guy behind me erupts in laughter. Nevermind all the laughs he puts out when we start talking about the sonnets, and Shakespeare's "Young Man" and "Dark Lady."
Naturally, I was distracted by all of these laughs, and I began to think about how people nowadays always assume that modern societies are so much smarter and better than past societies. Look at their religion! Their concepts of sexuality! They didn't even know about the sun!
Our basis for this sort of Historical Prejudice is our modern science, our technologies, our growing knowledge of the world around us. But, in fact, our modern science is just as much a system of beliefs as religion. It's just as much a human fabrication as language, as art, as morality, ethics, justice, hope, love, desire, any emotions. Why do Christians believe in the Bible, in Jesus as the savior, in the Christian God as the lord, whereas people in other parts of the world might believe in other entities, texts, saviors? It's the way we're raised.
Why does modern man believe the sun is the center of our solar system? Because everyone we've ever known has told us that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not the other way around. Parents, teachers, scientists, strangers. They all tell us this constantly as we're growing up.
Assume you could take a man without any scientific or historical knowledge and place him in a field for a day. You ask him about the large, bright object above him. Perhaps he looks around and sees an ant moving around a tree trunk, or sees a bird fly across the sky, or a lion walk across the field. The man will naturally respond that "The large, bright object in the sky is going across the sky." And he would be correct. In fact, he would be deemed insane to think otherwise.
The heliocentric model of our solar system helps scientists explain other phenomena and helps them build theories on top of theories. It's the same as basic math. If you can't add or subtract, you can't do anything in Algebra, Trigonometry, Calculus. If you can't place the sun at the center of our solar system, you can't explain certain phenomena on Earth or elsewhere in our solar system, galaxy, or universe.
Notice that I am not going into more details. Because I don't know them. Ask me to rationally explain to someone why the sun is the center of our solar system, why I know that the Earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around, and I can't come up with any evidence. I don't know science that well. I assume that thousands of people are not pulling the wool over my eyes. (Ask people on the street, and I'm guessing that maybe 1 in 100 people would be able to come up with the science for this.)
Which brings me to another, somewhat related point. I recently read a magnificent essay by David Foster Wallace. He wrote the introductory essay for the Best American Essays 2007 collection that he "edited" (he prefers the term "Decider" to "Editor," since he didn't change anything so much as pick out the essays that he liked). In the essay, he explains how every word on the cover of the book is false or misleading, how he and the series editor and the series itself is biased, and how society at large is very dependent on people making decisions for them. He refers to a "Total Noise," all of the junk out there, all of the possible options we have to choose from, all the sheer amounts of information, and how normal people need to rely on experts to deduce things for them. No one can handle all of this information without going crazy.
He also somehow manages to effectively lambaste the Bush administration and artfully introduce the essays in the book without it sounding like the ramblings of a madman. I haven't even read a single main essay out of the collection yet (he also mentions how the editor's essay is rarely read, and is read last if ever), but Wallace's essay just blew me away. It comes highly recommended. Here's an except, and I'm guessing the full text of the essay was posted on Houghton-Mifflin's website before, but was taken down.
My whole point is, like the discipline of anthropology tries to do, we should not assume that our society is the apex of evolution, that everything is getting better all the time, that people are getting smarter throughout the ages. We should not assume that other cultures and older cultures were inherently dumber than we are. Remember that much of Greek philosophy, science, and art was lost for a long, long time. People would start coming up with these scientific and philosophical ideas and then, when materials were rediscovered, they would realize that the Greeks had already explored those ideas hundreds of years before. Collectively, considering the entire history of human life on the planet, we've lost the majority of information from past societies. For example, the Spanish burned all but three of the Maya written texts because they were seen as being too polytheistic. Then everyone assumed that their written language only kept track of the stars or something stupid like that, until someone came along and cracked the code and started reading the Maya history. (I saw an excellent special the other night on Nova called Cracking the Maya Code.)
So give Shakespeare and his contemporaries the benefit of the doubt, and stop waving your damn iPhone around like you're the cock of the walk, moron.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
This Is Capitalism.
I just had the unique experience of being excited, inspired, and disgusted all at the same time.
On my lunch hour, I meandered over to the campus bookstore. I was looking at a section of books that were a mixture of new releases and current bestsellers when I spotted a tiny white hardcover book near the bottom. Upon closer inspection I saw:
This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
By: David Foster Wallace
Luckily, Amazon.com has the short author bio that I saw on the back bookflap:
Next, I checked the description of the book:
They should have added: "And now, Little, Brown is trying to turn a profit from it." (The bookstore's price was $14.99.)
This commencement speech, prominently displayed in a university bookstore, is supposed to dole out little nuggets of wisdom to graduating seniors. I wonder if any of the parents who end up buying their children this book will read it. I wonder if any of them knew who David Foster Wallace was.
I'll admit that I don't know too much about the man, but I've read a few essays by him --- enough to convince me that he would not take kindly to this sort of release. Why not hold off until a collection of his unpublished work comes out and add it to that? Or add it to a biography of him that comes out?
This seems like a sick attempt to cut a profit from Wallace, who was a great writer. I was excited to see another piece of his work getting published, but I was disgusted when I realized that I could have easily found this online. In fact, it was the first link delivered from a simple Google search.
So how does anyone besides the publisher profit from this? The book was no bigger than my hand. The publisher literally spaced out every sentence onto a separate page, making the small book 137 pages. I was able to read it in 20 minutes. ($14.99???)
The saddest part is that Wallace mentions suicide in his speech, and there is no mention anywhere in or on the book that he himself eventually succumbed to it. Wallace was expanding on the claim that college is supposed to "teach you how to think." He mentioned the mundane existence of day-to-day adult life driving around in traffic and going to the grocery store. He said that college really just tries to teach you what to think about, and how to control your own thoughts about things to stop you from going crazy.
I think the publisher owed it to the audience to mention that Wallace committed suicide after a long struggle with depression. It's grotesque, yes, and it may be uncouth to mention in the author bio, but it's an important aspect of him that gives more meaning to his words. The publisher is trying to get away with a gimmicky release. They're trying to trick helicopter moms into buying this famous graduation speech from this famous writer.
How could anyone have thought this was a good idea?
(Now, I don't know the particulars of the publication. I suppose the family or estate must have cleared it, and maybe all of the proceeds are going to a charity for depression awareness. And, in fact, some of what this book/speech is getting at is thinking about the alternatives to your gut reaction. My default setting was to despise the publisher for cranking out this tiny piece of crap book, when maybe it's doing the Wallace family justice by donating proceeds. It's certainly getting his name out a little bit more.)
David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.
A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.
("David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46"
Edit:
I want to point out the following sentence in the book's description:
"The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER."
This is somewhat deceptive. It means literally "This is the first time this essay has been released as a standalone book," which could also mean "This is the first edition of the reprint of this essay." Could you imagine the first time that a book was released where it said "This is the first time anyone ever published this as a book. It existed as manuscripts for a long time, but we were first!!!"
I only bring this up because between the time I posted and now, I discovered that this commencement speech was included in the Best American Nonrequired Reading for 2006. The Best American series is a massively available series. This just adds to the idea that Little, Brown is trying to cash in big time on this little book --- this essay was already printed in a book.
In case you're interested, here is the reprint of this essay in the Wall Street Journal.
On my lunch hour, I meandered over to the campus bookstore. I was looking at a section of books that were a mixture of new releases and current bestsellers when I spotted a tiny white hardcover book near the bottom. Upon closer inspection I saw:
Luckily, Amazon.com has the short author bio that I saw on the back bookflap:
David Foster Wallace is the author of the novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More. He died in 2008.
Next, I checked the description of the book:
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.
They should have added: "And now, Little, Brown is trying to turn a profit from it." (The bookstore's price was $14.99.)
This commencement speech, prominently displayed in a university bookstore, is supposed to dole out little nuggets of wisdom to graduating seniors. I wonder if any of the parents who end up buying their children this book will read it. I wonder if any of them knew who David Foster Wallace was.
I'll admit that I don't know too much about the man, but I've read a few essays by him --- enough to convince me that he would not take kindly to this sort of release. Why not hold off until a collection of his unpublished work comes out and add it to that? Or add it to a biography of him that comes out?
This seems like a sick attempt to cut a profit from Wallace, who was a great writer. I was excited to see another piece of his work getting published, but I was disgusted when I realized that I could have easily found this online. In fact, it was the first link delivered from a simple Google search.
So how does anyone besides the publisher profit from this? The book was no bigger than my hand. The publisher literally spaced out every sentence onto a separate page, making the small book 137 pages. I was able to read it in 20 minutes. ($14.99???)
The saddest part is that Wallace mentions suicide in his speech, and there is no mention anywhere in or on the book that he himself eventually succumbed to it. Wallace was expanding on the claim that college is supposed to "teach you how to think." He mentioned the mundane existence of day-to-day adult life driving around in traffic and going to the grocery store. He said that college really just tries to teach you what to think about, and how to control your own thoughts about things to stop you from going crazy.
I think the publisher owed it to the audience to mention that Wallace committed suicide after a long struggle with depression. It's grotesque, yes, and it may be uncouth to mention in the author bio, but it's an important aspect of him that gives more meaning to his words. The publisher is trying to get away with a gimmicky release. They're trying to trick helicopter moms into buying this famous graduation speech from this famous writer.
How could anyone have thought this was a good idea?
(Now, I don't know the particulars of the publication. I suppose the family or estate must have cleared it, and maybe all of the proceeds are going to a charity for depression awareness. And, in fact, some of what this book/speech is getting at is thinking about the alternatives to your gut reaction. My default setting was to despise the publisher for cranking out this tiny piece of crap book, when maybe it's doing the Wallace family justice by donating proceeds. It's certainly getting his name out a little bit more.)
David Foster Wallace, whose prodigiously observant, exuberantly plotted, grammatically and etymologically challenging, philosophically probing and culturally hyper-contemporary novels, stories and essays made him an heir to modern virtuosos like Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, an experimental contemporary of William T. Vollmann, Mark Leyner and Nicholson Baker and a clear influence on younger tour-de-force stylists like Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer, died on Friday at his home in Claremont, Calif. He was 46.
A spokeswoman for the Claremont police said Mr. Wallace’s wife, Karen Green, returned home to find that her husband had hanged himself. Mr. Wallace’s father, James Donald Wallace, said in an interview on Sunday that his son had been severely depressed for a number of months.
("David Foster Wallace, Influential Writer, Dies at 46"
Edit:
I want to point out the following sentence in the book's description:
"The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER."
This is somewhat deceptive. It means literally "This is the first time this essay has been released as a standalone book," which could also mean "This is the first edition of the reprint of this essay." Could you imagine the first time that a book was released where it said "This is the first time anyone ever published this as a book. It existed as manuscripts for a long time, but we were first!!!"
I only bring this up because between the time I posted and now, I discovered that this commencement speech was included in the Best American Nonrequired Reading for 2006. The Best American series is a massively available series. This just adds to the idea that Little, Brown is trying to cash in big time on this little book --- this essay was already printed in a book.
In case you're interested, here is the reprint of this essay in the Wall Street Journal.
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