(c) Written by DG, 2002
1.
“There are some things that are certain—not only death and taxes, but also fucking, eating, and shitting, greed, exhaustion, and poverty,” said the managing editor, an overweight, ruddy-faced bore who imagined himself a wit. James smiled tightly at him, hoping this little lecture had a point that had something to do with his own work. As far as James knew, the editor seemed to imagine that these epigrams were to be taken in by James and remembered and would someday become one with the very structure of James’s mind—but James knew this would not happen.
“With the way things are in the economy, businesses closing, people being laid off, dire predictions, the homeless shelters and food pantries and soup kitchens are crowded. I’d like you to do a story on this,” said the managing editor.
I really do not want to do this, thought James. Give me an executive who has lost his job, or someone trying to keep a company going, or a labor union leader or secretary struggling to pay her bills—somebody with hope. I don’t want to visit a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen. What is there to say? People are suffering. People are always suffering. Why pretend this is new, and why pretend to care? Give people education and opportunities to work and reduce the reasons for their suffering, and give me a political scandal, a fashion show, an innovative computer, an alcoholic sports star, a literary masterpiece, a film premiere, a historical discovery, or a new building going up: those are my subjects.
James returned to his desk, wondering where to start. He logged onto the internet to do a quick search of resources—institutions, experts, books, and articles. He called the office librarian to tell her what he was working on, what he’d found, what he thought he needed, and his deadlines for research, active interviewing, and various drafts. James then called his friend Pete and asked him if he wanted to have dinner later, but Pete said, No, that he had to work late. When James looked up again, he saw Calvin at his desk putting things in a box, looking angry, determined, and sad.
James stood and walked over to Calvin. James was apprehensive, fearful.
“What’s going on?” asked James.
“I’ve just been fired,” said Calvin.
“Why?”
“Because I didn’t turn in my expense reports on time. Because I yelled at the receptionist for mixing up my messages. Because I took a too adversarial stance toward corruption in my reporting. Those are some of the things the Redface told me. They’ve wanted to fire me for a while—I’m not acquiescent enough for their taste; so they just wracked their brains to come up with a bunch of junk to accuse me of,” said Calvin.
“I can’t believe it,” said James, though he knew there was a clique of people in the office who were always trying to make everything as simple as their own minds. “The idiots.”
The two looked at each other; they’d miss working together.
“Do you want to have lunch? I can walk out with you,” said James.
“Would you do that? It’s not a very politic thing to do,” said Calvin.
“I want to—and I’m hungry,” said James.
Calvin laughed.
When Calvin had gathered his things, and the two men walked out, all eyes were on them; and when James looked back at the looking eyes, the eyes looked down or looked away. The Redface was the only one who held James’s gaze.
James and Calvin ate at a small sushi bar. Calvin liked sushi, and that was why they chose the place, but once they began to eat—standing, hunched over their food, people all around them in the small place—they realized that they had made a mistake. If they’d gone to a larger, quieter place, they both would have been more comfortable. Yet, neither said anything about the place; they talked to each other beyond their discomfort about the work they had hoped to do in the office, about trying to deal with the pettiness there, and about what Calvin was going to do now. “It’s amazing how quickly a man’s life can change,” said Calvin, who said he thought he would try freelance writing and editing. “As long as I’m working, you can use me as a reference, and if you need money, let me know, and if I have it, it’s yours,” said James. Calvin was glad to hear that, and a smile crossed his face, banishing for a moment his more intense feelings.“What are you going to do?” asked Calvin.
“I’m going to try to do my job,” said James, both of them knowing this would not be easy, as James’s sense of mission was not entirely that of his editor’s, and his editor’s mission was not entirely that of James. But then, what drove James was not simple—news, truth, pleasure, meaning, a critique of power, history, prophecy—and what drove his editor—beating the competition in being the first to deliver the news, surprising the reader, raising the number of subscribers and newsstand sales, impressing the publisher—was also not entirely simple, though it was possibly much more obvious.
“I know Sharon will be glad that I’m not there anymore,” said Calvin.
“Her only goal is to try to make the office safe for her unquestioned inadequacies,” said James.
James laughed, and said, “I don’t know how people like that get so far and stay so long. She delegates most of her work to others and spends most of her time on the phone,” said Calvin.
When they said goodbye, neither James nor Calvin was happy, neither was relieved.
James made an appointment to interview the executive director of a homeless organization, and after work he stopped by a poetry and music event organized for attendants of a mental health program that worked to get people off the streets and into homes and jobs. He thought the music was good—very rhythmic—and the poetry plain and dull, but he liked the sense of camaraderie between the attendants. He didn’t introduce himself or take notes; he knew he would be back. Leaving the building, located on the edge of Manhattan’s East Village, above the bowery, James thought about the tickets he’d bought for a music concert for the coming weekend. His friend Pete had backed out because of work, and James hadn’t found anyone else yet to go with. He couldn’t ask Gail without asking her husband, and he didn’t have a ticket for her husband, nor was he fond of the ill-informed, blunt man. Too often, when you had a married friend, you were forced to deal with the spouse as well despite lack of rapport.
On his way into his office the next day, he stopped by a couple of churches to ask about their soup kitchens, coat drives, and food pantries. Most of the church offices were closed and he left notes, but one church office was open, and the woman there was direct: “We see all kinds of people—high school dropouts and college graduates, different ethnicities, married couples, singles, whatever. People are hungry, and we feed them,” she said. “They need clothes and we give them the clothes our parishioners leave with us. We shouldn’t have to do this, and they shouldn’t need to come here, but that is the way the world is, that’s the way it’s been, and maybe that’s the way it will always be.”
With that summarizing impulse she’d get on with the Redface, thought James. Yet, he could not say she was wrong. She was trying to be clear, and she was; and James realized once more that we’re all trying to produce knowledge or wisdom and it might be too late. If a child hasn’t learned wise and generous ways, he may not be able to adapt to them when he’s a man—his bad habits may be his very own nature: this may be why it’s so hard to change anyone, why it’s so hard to change the world.
Leaving the office, he reconsidered this conclusion. He thought that children were sometimes limited in their perspectives because of lack of experience, and because information was kept from them, but that men and women had the perspective and freedom to change—to change themselves and others.
James waited in the open air on a square marble bench near a bulbous sculpture in a cement park surrounded by seven office towers, one out of which he had come after leaving his desk and its work, and another his friend Gail would leave to join him. James was pleased the sun was shining, as the breeze off the nearby water was cool. He wondered what kind of mood Gail would be in. She had been up for a job at a small television station committed to social issues, but had not been given the job. A personnel committee made up of two managers and two support staffers had reviewed her work, resume, and colleagues’ response to her, and they recommended Gail for the job. The executive director in her office had not agreed, and so she did not get the job. Gail and the executive director had disagreed before, disagreements that were matters of policy, procedure, and personality. Instead the job Gail wanted had gone to someone who had been eliminated earlier in the process, someone the committee had decided was not even one of their top three choices, a man Gail had not considered a friend but a friendly colleague. Yet when Gail arrived, she smiled and said, “How is my friend, the misanthropic humanist?”
James laughed. “I’m well, though you seem, amazingly, in a much better mood than I am.”“It’s their loss,” said Gail. “I applied, I was found gifted and worthy, and I was not appointed, so it’s the organization’s loss. I still have my televised nightly discussion program and I’m going to continue to do my work.”
James listened and thought about what she said. She was in a better mood than he was. He was still thinking about Calvin, still thinking about the injustice of that, of how Calvin’s good work had meant nothing, and now Gail was giving him further evidence of injustice. Where would they eat?
James was having a salad at his desk. The salad was full of chunks of chicken, croutons, thin slivers of carrots and other vegetables, olives, and a thick dark oriental dressing—delicious. He was thinking about his lunch date with Gail the day before, about Calvin, about the office he himself continued to work in and the exaggerated exclamations of pleasure and outraged complaints over minutiae there, the indifference to genuinely important matters, the jockeying not so much for relationships with the powerful but for appearances of relationships with the powerful—no one really wanted to know the publisher, but they wanted to seem to be in his favor. Once James and the man were in an elevator together, and, James, incapable of thinking of anything to say after briefly describing the story he’d been working on, went on to describe an Italian film retrospective he was attending, having seen four of twelve scheduled films. The two of them spent the remainder of the elevator ride talking about the difference in the mood of Italian films compared to American films. James knew he had squandered an opportunity to advance a professional goal, but he was pleased that he had the kind of conversation with the publisher that he might have had with a friendly acquaintance. James smiled upon thinking that it was not the kind of conversation he could tell most of his coworkers about; they wouldn’t understand why it pleased him. He smiled; and then the grimaced, for this was another example of how and why he was something of a misfit. He finished his salad, and then went to work on his afternoon story, the retiring of a French designer after thirty years of big business and bigger headlines, headlines about nervous breakdowns, drugs, ill-chosen lovers, and great clothes.
James called his friend Pete, whom he had been invited to see the Italian films, and who had said he’d try to see something, but Pete had managed not to see a single film. James doubted Pete would be interested in going to the Whitney for a free exhibit, but James would ask him anyway, and when he did, Pete said “No, I have to work.”
James asked, “Do you have to work, or do you choose to work late?”
Pete said, “I have to—I have a project I have to finish and there aren’t enough hours in the day for me to do it.”
“Do other people there work such long hours?” asked James.
“Some people do,” said Pete.
Pete said they’d get together soon, and told James to stay in touch.
James left several messages for Calvin, and when they finally talked, Calvin explained that he hadn’t been seeing anyone, that he was trying to assess where he was, and what he wanted to do. He found it painful to talk about being fired, even to someone who respected him and understood that he hadn’t done anything wrong of significance. He also said that he didn’t see any available job that he really wanted and felt as if he had to choose between getting an important job he didn’t like that might be overwhelming or getting an unimportant job he didn’t like but could easily manage. He decided to try to get work proofreading, but wanted to avoid temporary office clerical assignments. He said, “I’m not that desperate yet. Some people think any job is better than none, but I disagree: some jobs undermine who you are.”
When James and Pete got together, they went to a comedy club, where women comedians insulted men in general and those in the audience in particular, and the two men, drinking and making comments between the comedy sets, had a great time, honest, intimate, and thoughtful.
James had begun publishing a series of articles on the unemployed, the hungry, and the homeless. James thought the best piece was on a mother’s attempts to keep her children in school with good grades despite the family’s living in a homeless shelter. He was still interviewing people for the series. Reading over the interview transcripts of a man who had come out of jail and was depending on soup kitchens for daily sustenance, James sat in the company cafeteria not far from Sharon, a managing editor, and her staff, two young women and a man. It was supposed to be a casual editorial meeting they were having but sounded like a gossip session, with professional evaluations mixed with ignorant perceptions. At one disturbing articulation, James looked at the group and they looked at him, seeing his disapproval. He soon left the table, and on his way back to this desk stopped by the mailroom to get express mail envelopes and overheard the mailroom supervisor’s comments to his staff. The supervisor was tall and slim with thinning blond hair and a pimple near his mouth, and James thought he looked like photographs of Paul Verlaine, the poet who left his wife for another poet, Rimbaud. It was obvious to James that the African American assistant, Jerome, was being given menial tasks while the Irish American, Michael, was being given tasks requiring more thought and management skill. James knew both men had begun working there around the same time, and he’d had conversations with them, and he knew the African American was ambitious to move up in the company. Jerome was confident but not a braggart; he was boyish and quick, with sensitive eyes, and James imagined he could be easily disappointed—wasn’t I easily disappointed at his age? James asked the supervisor if Jerome might help Michael, suggesting this would cut the time it took to get the assigned work done. He knew this suggestion might be seen as intrusive but thought what it entailed possibly had not been imagined and might be helpful. Jerome looked hopeful, while Michael merely waited. The supervisor looked offended, and said, “I’ve made my assignments, but I’ll consider more task-sharing in the future. In the meantime, I’ll think up a list of story ideas you might want to pursue.” James smiled and left. Well, that didn’t help, James thought.
James took a cab ride from Greenwich Village to the Metropolitan Museum. He never grew tired of observing the city and its people.
His thoughts drifted from the city to a conversation he’d had with the Redface, a conversation that could only worry him.
The Redface had said, “I’ve tried to influence you, to point you in a direction that complements me and serves this office, but you seem sometimes to resist that. It’s as if you’re determined to be independent.”
James, hearing the complaint, had smiled without joy.
“When I hired you, you seemed so grateful for the job,” said the Redface.
“I was glad that you hired me and excited about the work,” said James.
“Aren’t you grateful now?” asked the Redface.
“I’m still glad that you hired me and I still feel I have something to contribute,” said James.
“We’ve gotten good responses to a lot of my stories, even a couple of award nominations—and you had no complaints of significance at the time of my last performance evaluation three months ago.”
“I’m always re-evaluating everyone,” said the Redface with a smile.What a stupid face, thought James, who watched the man’s face show in quick succession surprise, alarm, and a sense of accomplishment in response to what he’d seen in James’s face. He wants to alienate me now, thought James. Why do I know enough to know that, and not enough to change my responses?
James heard the taxi driver say something. “What?” asked James. The man repeated his pleasantly empty question. James answered, and they rode on to the museum.
There were a lot of people outside the Metropolitan Museum, some of them invited guests who were just arriving but many of them simply there to watch the celebrities arrive. James disliked making his way through crowds, but he had been looking forward to this event for months. He had on a new black suit, new white shirt, new black tie, new shoes, and new cologne.
Inside, he saw faces he had seen on movie screens and in magazines, some he’d seen walking in Soho or entering the stage door of a Broadway show, a few he had interviewed, and some he had worked with who had gone on to bigger things. James saw statesman Henry Kissinger and journalist Christopher Hitchens sharing cigars together in one part of the large hall, laughing and puffing away, and he saw former vice president Al Gore and activist Ralph Nader in another corner, with Gore patting Nader’s shoulder affectionately as he spoke. James saw the model and businesswoman Iman talking with her husband David Bowie, a musician James had liked since he was a boy, and James hoped he could think of something smart to say later to Bowie. James heard someone say that he’d had a 1958 Cabernet Sauvignon at dinner the previous night. James saw one of New York’s grand ladies, Brooke Astor, elderly and frail, but with an utterly joyous look on her face, and he vaguely remembered reading something about her foundation’s plan to give away its remaining assets. When had he read that—a year ago, two, five? Walking past another society lady, Nan Kempner, he heard part of actress Catherine Deneuve comments and realized she was talking with film director Andrew Techine, whose work he liked. James saw singer Diana Ross talking with the model Naomi Campbell, their faces excited, and he wondered what they were talking about—war in Africa, poetry, cosmetics? Or perfume? The place was full of scents. James saw waiters passing by with trays of champagne, which they brought to the famous faces first. He was curious as to whether they were also serving wine, which he would prefer. “I loved Pamela Todd’s book, Celebrating the Impressionist Table—great paintings, very good recipes,” someone said. James looked around and saw someone with a glass of red wine, asked him where he got it, and went in that direction. Not far from tables filled with glasses, he saw novelist Toni Morrison and the essayists Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates Jr. huddled together. He said hello to them, and Gates nodded. James understood that violinist Joshua Bell would perform and he wondered where and when that would be. Walking away form the wine table, James saw Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter and one of his writers, David Kamp. James sipped his Chianti. He saw the painter Ross Bleckner and music executive David Geffen talking with singers Natalie Merchant and Michael Stipe. What was that thing Stipe was wearing? James saw the journalists Utrice Leid and Clayton Riley and stopped to ask them about their latest projects, sipping as he listened. Golfer Tiger Woods was talking with boxer Muhammad Ali—how Calvin would like that, as he was wild about golf—wild about golf? Sounds like a perversion, but Calvin had become an enthusiast of the sport. That was Marisa Berenson! Were those two the Hilton sisters? James recognized in the crowd Bill Gates, Alan Greenspan, Richard Parsons, Donna Karan, Calvin Klein, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Caryl Phillips, Wynton Marsalis, Cassandra Wilson, Valerie Simpson and her husband Nick Ashford, Jude Law, Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Giovanni Ribisi. On James’s way to a table to pick up grilled slices of chicken, which he wanted to couple with bits of blue cheese, James saw and avoided Percival Everett, who hadn’t liked the profile James had done of him a couple of years ago. The piece was something James had thought would please the writer but Everett had said it was more concerned with his personal life than his work. When James reached the food table, he forgot about the chicken and put on his plate scallops glazed and topped with almonds and shallots, and a small serving of a gratin of peas, tarragon, and pistachios. Before the night was over, James would see and hear Rudolf Guiliani, David Dinkins, and Ed Koch, New York mayors, break into an aria from Tosca, seeing who could hit the highest note.
2.
Weeks after the museum gala, James entered the Redface’s office, thinking about the previous night’s celebration of Calvin’s new job and wondering what this meeting with the Redface would be about, barely noticing the sound of Frank Sinatra singing “That’s Life” that was playing low on the stereo behind the man’s chair. James hated surprises.
James sat down and opened his notebook, poised to write. The Redface affected seriousness but James could see he was pleased with himself, fatuous; he almost hoped that James would share the enthusiasm he felt for what he would say. The man was quick, direct, and he said, “James, you’re being here is no longer working. I’ve been trying to put together a team here and you aren’t a team player and your work has suffered because of it—it expresses you more than it expresses this institution. We have to let you go.”
“You have to?” asked James.
“Yes,” said the man, disliking the editorial implications of the question as much as the logical correction it suggestion. He went on. “I’ve asked the personnel office to extend your insurance benefits for three months and to give you whatever reasonable support you might need upon your separation from this office, which will be effective in one hour. A security guard can help you gather your things, if you like.”
“No, I don’t like,” said James, standing up. “I’ll gather my own things.”
James put resumes in the mail, and he made phone calls; his life was now not about work but about seduction—trying to interest employers in what he had to offer as a worker. He spent his days following up on job possibilities he found in newspapers and on the internet; and he sometimes went to films or museums for the distractions and took long walks at the end of the day to use up his extra energy and to think.
One day James found himself being extraordinarily polite to everyone he met, a newspaper vendor, a waitress in a breakfast diner, and a subway booth clerk. James realized this was a false benevolence that had come out of his own sense of injury; he was offering care to others when he wanted it for himself. He restrained himself.
James was in a bookstore one night, browsing, his friend Pete having backed out of a plan to meet for a drink. James bumped into a woman he hadn’t seen in years. They went to a bar for drinks, a bar full of Polish-American locals, and he told her what had happened to him, and she told him about her own disappointments and frustrations. She had been hired for what seemed a dream job, but the company went through a sudden downturn and she was reassigned to the kind of job she’d had when she first began her career. The newspapers were full of similar stories—of innovations that undermined traditional sectors of the economy, of new companies begun in good times that didn’t produce enough of a profit when things went bad, and of dwindling consumer confidence that affected consumerism that then affected staffing levels. The woman’s face, pale, with baby fat at her cheeks but tiny lines at the corner of her eyes, was well intentioned, sensitive, and hopeless; she had not thought of how to change her life. They talked past midnight, and he woke up the next morning in her bed, remembering everything, miserable. He thought about sex more often now, and when he pursued it, it brought a sense of adventure and a quick sharp pleasure, but it solved nothing.
After putting two hundred resumes in the mail at the post office, James went back to the clerk’s window to get a money order check for a telephone bill he wanted to pay. Soon after handing over a fifty-dollar bill, a man in a wheelchair asked James to move back so the man could pass, but James hadn’t received his change yet and was afraid of a mix-up if he moved away from his money or out of the clerk’s line of vision. The man in the wheelchair—middle age, bearded, short, with a somewhat thick though not fat body—looked at James, who had only moved a little, and said, “Some people are so rude.” James looked down at the man as he rolled away—should James swallow the presumption and the shock of pain he felt? James called out loudly, “You crippled idiot.” A woman near James looked disapproving, while a man nearby laughed.
James often used a copy center downtown to reproduce his portfolio, and the first time there he argued with a young woman behind the counter. She didn’t seem in the mood to be helpful, and he wasn’t in the mood to tolerate the slightest disrespect. Their argument was short and ugly and they repeated it on two or three of his visits. Once he heard her say to her supervisor, “We’re going to have trouble with that one.” Weeks passed and James didn’t say anything at all to her and finally he tried ordinary greetings and she returned them. One day he’d been working quietly, collating materials, and felt something and looked up and saw she was staring at him and he smiled. She blushed. She was a small pretty woman, Venezuelan, with a slight accent; and, to him, her face was sensual and surly—passionate. James began talking to her when he was done with collating, and he asked her when her break was, and if she’d like to go out for a coffee, and she said yes. He was surprised at how easy they found their way to bed, but realized that because his mind was full of so many things—culture, philosophy, and politics—sex was usually not the first thing he thought of; but for his generation and those younger, many of whom were concerned with a lot less than he was, sex was one of the few things they thought about. In bed, she was like a woman both begging for and fighting her own pleasure, afraid and demanding, and James found this very exciting, though a part of him observed it from a distance, as if for later consideration.
Before his friend Gail had called him with the news, James had heard it over a local arts radio station he listened to. The program director and the executive director of the television station she worked for had been fired, along with several of their assistants, and Gail had been appointed interim program director. James was pleased for her, but not as happy as he would have been if his own life had been as he wanted; and so he saw her ascension also as if from a distance. The appointment had been made not by an executive director or a personnel committee, as was customary, but by the chairman of the board of the corporation that owned the station. There were already protests outside the station’s offices of people who feared corporate intervention would weaken the station’s programs. The station had been known for its independence—for its coverage of the arts, progressive politics, eccentric personalities, obscure news, and advocacy of free speech rights. Gail had gone on the air to reassure the public that the station’s mission would continue undisturbed, but though she was a known journalist, and someone who had covered issues important in various communities, her words did not placate the demonstrators. When Gail called him, she said, “I have the job I was entitled to, and now I have the chance to do some good work for the station.”
James hadn’t eaten in two weeks, and his energy had diminished, his face was drawn, his body was learner, and he suffered headaches, when he got a tiny check for an article he did for a local giveaway paper on a recent special community board election. He cashed the check at a storefront check-cashing service and went to a local Chinese restaurant for chicken in garlic sauce. Hours later at home, in the bathroom, he read from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil—“A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary resting place. His characteristic high-grade graciousness toward his fellow man becomes possible only once he has attained his height and rules. Impatience and his consciousness that until then he is always condemned to comedy—for even war is a comedy and conceals, just as every means conceals the end—spoil all of his relations to others; this type of man knows solitude and what is poisonous in it”; and James pushed out of his bowels tiny rabbit-like pellets. James thought of what he wanted—individuality, self-expression, the pursuit and exploration of an intellectual mission with a social purpose and appropriate rewards—and he thought of his own anger, distrust, and impatience when faced with obstacles and these feelings had made him sometimes, too often, politically clumsy: he had paid the people he disliked the tribute of honesty when he might have been a hypocrite, but hypocrisy would not have caused them to question themselves, their values, or their sense of reality. A human being who strives for something great considers everyone he meets on his way either as a means or as a delay and obstacle—or as a temporary resting place.Having read his fill of the book, taken a walk outside, and had a little something to eat, James called his friend Pete and asked him if he had time to get together during the weekend—maybe they could meet in a park and talk for an hour, or have a cup of tea somewhere. Pete said, No, he was busy with work, and as James put away the phone, he knew that he and Pete were not friends and had not been friends for years.
3.
James had applied for jobs in person and through letters, faxes, and electronic mail. He had sought reporting jobs and work in the various industries he’d previously worked in, but he found nothing.
James had drunk glasses of water to fill his belly and had taken aspirins for the headaches, but he was ravenous; he thought he was going mad with hunger.
It had been months since James had spoken to Pete, longer than that. He had not spoken to Calvin recently. James realized that he’d left several messages for Calvin that Calvin had not responded to—queries, invitations. James’s friend Gail, who was still enduring protests outside her office, and slanderous reports in the press—in which she was accused of egocentricity, professional favoritism, and political shortsidedness, in addition to being a corporate pawn—had loaned him money for rent, and he didn’t feel comfortable calling to ask for more.
The first time James entered a soup kitchen, one run by a national charity group with local offices, he felt lucky. Being served was roasted chicken, with potato salad, gravy, and string beans, and it all looked good and tasted good. He, dressed simply but neatly and carrying a canvas bag with his notebook and a magazine, took a seat across from a man seated alone, and James began to eat, glad he’d come even after the man opposite him started mumbling irrationally to himself. In time, James would see the range of food offered: food that was surprisingly good or quite bad, with little in between, with the worst being a tasteless stew of stringy chicken rumps over unsalted pasta.
Many of the people who came here were what he expected: homeless men and women, old people, toothless people who had been drug addicts, women whose salaries were not enough to sustain a life, and young men whose families abandoned them after they had lost jobs or gone into crime or jail. But there were also people who seemed ordinary, able, clean, and sane; they simply were hungry and wanted to eat.
Some of the people were quiet, and kept to themselves; and others acted as if this were a great social occasion, a chance to see and speak with good friends. James was not interested in them, in their oddly plump, weary, indistinct middle-age faces, nor in their comments—“I hate to throw food away, I hate to see food wasted, I won’t have any more food as I’m watching my weight, The powdered milk is so useful.” They were smart about pretending that frugality was chosen, or that if they didn’t get what they wanted here there remained options at home. James sat and ate, his attention entirely on the food, and when he wanted a second plate of food he asked for it. He would not pretend he was here for any other reason. Their friendliness, as he’d seen, might be followed suddenly by suspicion, fear, unsolicited self-defense, or even mockery.
One man had misplaced a bag and immediately thought it was stolen by one of the other people in the dining hall; but it was only on a chair underneath his coat. James thought, Paranoid people are worried about injury but they don’t realize that the injury they’re worried about is actually in the past, not the future; the wound is already there, misunderstood, unhealed. The man has already lost something and that is why he is here.
James couldn’t stand these conversations; he preferred silence to banality. He sat at a table, and took out a magazine, and was happy to see that the three people seated there whom had already eaten get up and leave, but then three more took their place. A chatty woman among them talked about having twins with a man who worked in a local beauty shop, something that surprised one of her tablemates.
James was surprised to find that the magazine he read carried an article about Gail, in which she was said to have fired people who questioned her authority—questioned her authority? A couple of them had called her a bitch on the air—and in the article she was also chided for being overweight: what does being overweight have to do with anything? James saw also that the co-anchor on one of her programs was being demonized as well, discussed as if he were bordering on the violent and insane simply because he was angry at being constantly insulted—he had talked about simply trying to do good journalism despite the surrounding controversies and had received nasty calls and letters and even threats.
At one point the chatty woman turned to James and asked if he’d been here a few weeks ago for a particularly good meal and he simply nodded yes. As soon as he had eaten, he folded close his magazine, wished them a good day, and walked outside into the gray, cold day.
At home, James put on a John Lee Hooker album, liking the wit of the blues, and he liked the drama, but when he heard the song “House Rent Blues,” with its story of a lost job, late rent, a disapproving landlady, homelessness, and an undependable friend, he turned it off. He took out a manuscript an editor had sent him to proofread, a small job.
He was having trouble concentrating after two hours and was glad to get Gail’s call. She laughed when he asked how she was. “Well, I’m not sure who on staff is for me, or who is against me. Someone will offer me a word of support and then I’ll turn into his program and hear him attack corporate puppets and women who put knives into men’s backs in order to advance and then conclude with how these words refer to situations near and far.” She laughed again. “I’d find this more acceptable if someone would say exactly what it is I’m doing that they object to, but instead they offer generalities and rhetoric.” James wondered if she was being ingenuous—if she was resisting seeing herself as part of institutional power, the appointment, the face, the tool, of a corporate board, as some of her colleagues claimed. Maybe she saw further—that all of them, and most people, worked for a large company. Toward the end of their talk, she did sound weary, and he realized she was surprised and confused by what had happened. How could people have once supported the idea of her becoming program director, and now that she was director not give her the chance to actually perform the job without obstruction?
James was late getting to lunch. He had spent the morning revising his resume, one of countless versions. After revising his resume, he had done some internet searches, using as key words names of past acquaintances; and he found that some of the people he had known had gone on to advanced degrees, television anchor positions, book contracts, prestigious teaching jobs; and he was depressed further. What had he been doing with his life? What had he to show for the years besides some published clippings and more free-floating worries and bad memories?
James passed a woman with two suitcases in tow, her everyday baggage, and he walked into the building, hoping that there was a decent lunch served. The woman, an office worker in the reception area, who usually told the men entering the building to take off their hats, was at the entrance. Thin, almost old, pious and tough, she stood at the door barring latecomers, and said in an angry burst, “No, no more. It’s over with—lunch is done.” James turned away, and began to think of where he would eat for the rest of the week, planning each day.
James decided to walk to the local library. James remembered a recent interview in which he had been asked whether he had journalism experience, a weird question in light of the fact that the ad requested an experienced journalist. Why else would he have been called for the interview? The interviewer was clearly surprised to see someone who looked like him apply, a fact that both amused and angered James. Inside the library James saw a man working on a craft project involving beads—he seemed to be making some kind of mat. James recognized the man from a soup kitchen he’d eaten in. James looked through some new magazines, then thought of borrowing some music, something different, and he walked to the music section and was suddenly overtaken by the smell of excrement, he looked around and saw an old man in layers of filthy clothes. To confirm this as the source, he walked near the man—yes, confirmed. James borrowed some Brazilian music, and thought he’d stop for a minute to look at some essay collections and hours passed before he left the library. James saw a guard tell a man he could not sleep in the library. The man, with piercing green eyes, tanned skin, light brown hair with a little white in it, was thin, obviously malnourished, and in dirty blue jeans; he stood up and left but returned about ten minutes later; and he saw James, sat across from him, and asked him where he was from. James told him, and the man said he thought he was from somewhere else—and then the man opened a book in front of himself, closed his eyes, and slept. When the man awoke, James took out of his bag a list of soup kitchens and gave it to the man. “This might be helpful to you. Sometimes it’s been helpful to me.” The man looked at it and said, “Thank you.”
James was using a reference computer in the library one afternoon, trying to gather together some books he thought he’d use in a proposal for a writing grant. He thought he might try to write a book on an Ohio-born writer who wrote about rather mad families caught between ambition and circumstance. Next to him sat a tall, tanned young man. James looked twice at him. James had seen him before, but didn’t know his name. He hung around with another man James thought crazy. James looked at him twice as the man had dyed his hair—what color is that? A light orange? The man sensed James looking and returned his gaze. They smiled. They worked silently next to each other, but a tension was in the air. James wondered if he should say something, either about what he was working on or ask the man bout his own concerns. James had become reticent to say anything about himself since losing his job, so he said, “Working on anything interesting?”
“I’m just printing some Japanese anime,” said the man, turning his computer screen toward James, who saw illustrations of half-nude women.
“Interesting,” said James.
The man laughed.
The tension, however, was not dispelled. Each attended to his concerns, but there was something remaining to be said. What could James say to this man, a stranger, someone he did not know, and someone he suspected he had little in common with? Every once in a while he felt this kind of thing—a connection having nothing to do with reason, nothing to do with will—and he dismissed it, but now that he was idle, now that his emotions were so obviously unfocused and unresolved in so many ways, he found these impulses harder to dismiss. James looked over at the young man, and then down into the man’s lap where he saw the man was aroused. After a brief exchange of looks, comments, and gestures, they went back to the apartment the man, Santiago, shared with his girlfriend, who was at work, and amid low laughter and high-spirited lust they drank liquor and fucked. James was charmed by the man’s energy and joy; and he felt as if he were lying down with an affectionate but dangerous animal.
“Does your girlfriend know about this side of you?” asked James.
“What’s there to know? It’s not like I’m going to fall in love with any guy,” said Santiago. “I don’t give guys flowers or taken them out to candlelit dinners. I hang out with guys sometimes and sometimes we play basketball and sometimes we fuck,” he said.
James looked out of one of the windows, onto the streets he’d be entering soon.
“You’re intelligent, sensitive, free. What do you want to do?” asked Santiago.
James was startled. He hadn’t expected that perception or the honesty, and he stumbled, “I don’t know. I just want to get a job that doesn’t involve too much humiliation.”
Walking in the neighborhood, James came face to face with a boy he had been seeing in the area for years. James had first seen the boy when he was about ten, chubby, and carrying a football, and now he was twenty-five, dressed all in black with longish hair, affecting a Manhattan style that was not entirely current. It was odd to have seen someone grow older without having any connection to him. When the boy was young, he had seemed open, pleasant-natured, and now he seemed a little closed, private, moody. James had seen this transformation in other boys. It might have been the narrowing of the focus of their energies that had led to this—they went from being interested in each other and everything to being interested principally in work, sports, women. James himself had not changed very much since he had first seen the boy—a fact he attributed to not being married or having kids, things that exhausted a man—and it was obvious that the boy recognized him. James said hello to the boy and asked about what he was doing and they talked about the weather, rock music, Manhattan, the too dull neighborhood. An hour later, when James kissed the back of the boy’s neck, after ruffling his thick dark hair, as James’s cock smoothly pushed in and out of the boy’s freckled pink ass in the boy’s bedroom, which still seemed the room of an adolescent, James felt a terrific sense of conquest. James was happy to substitute this sexual conquest for professional conquest, at least for a few minutes, but then he wondered if such a feeling—so small, so conscious—wouldn’t make the experience bitter to him later, and he knew then what he would do. When he whispered in a rush of words in the boy’s ear that he wanted the boy to fuck him, the boy seemed surprised, then disturbed, and finally he grinned.
When James spoke with Gail on the phone, they inevitably discussed what had been happening to her, but James tried to remind her about other things—about restaurants she might try, about films that were opening, about books to read, about places she might travel, about other jobs she might consider. He wanted her to remember that there was a wider world.
So they talked about different things, then Gail said, “I think Susan Sunshine”—and they laughed again at the name, which Gail had mocked in the past—“I think Susan Sunshine is behind a lot of the protests.” Sunshine was a reporter with a cult following—she presented herself as the girl next door but was known for aggressive reporting and had grilled the U.S. president so thoroughly several newspaper columnists had wondered if she had disrespected his office. “She wants to control this station—she used to, through the former program director,” said Gail.
James wasn’t sure he believed in human puppetry. Sunshine might have had indirect influence, but indirect control?
A mutual colleague of Gail’s and the woman claimed that Gail was jealous of Sunshine. James thought Sunshine self-consciously good, sweet, smart, but her audience read her eager grin as warmth and her plain hairstyle and clothes as integrity and read Gail’s precise diction as artificiality, her confidence as imperiousness, her girth as transgression, and her knowledge as foreign ideology. Gail’s proper Trinidadian upbringing was working against her in their eyes.
The protests against the television station where Gail worked, surprisingly well financed and well organized, had continued so long that newspapers were no longer even pretending to try to get the other side of the story. They had been bombarded with calls and e-mails and printed material from the protesters for so long, they were saturated with their version and simply reproduced it in their stories. Gail had even been recast in her own life story as someone incompetent and power-driven, somehow both clueless and so thoroughly calculating she had fooled many of her current coworkers and the public.
The harassment of board members by the protesters—calls at home and office, protests outside their children’s schools—had led some board members to resign and others to consider firing Gail but as yet there wasn’t enough board support for removing her from her position.
“I think our work is to report the news—yes, critically, intelligently—but to report it, not to be it or to make it, but Susan wants to make news. She thinks reporters are inevitably part of their stories and should advocate a position,” said Gail.
“Well, you’ve done advocacy journalism too,” said James.
“Sometimes it’s appropriate,” said Gail.
The truth was that power had changed her—or, if not power, the circumstances of power. She had gone from being hopeful though chastened, to trying to articulate a vision staff and viewers could rally around, to being defensive, to being controlling about what was said on the air by her staff about the controversies, to being unable to tolerate dissent. The atmosphere inside the television station had become calm but fearful, professional but without intimacies or the honesty that comes with intimacy. Gail had been treated unfairly; and that became the foundation from which she thought and acted.
Gail said, “You tell me I’m brilliant and strong—we agree about that—but you’re even more pleased by the fact that I’m not afraid to be tough or difficult.”
James laughed. It was true.
“You think many of us are complex, and that when that complexity is revealed it creates difficulty, and that’s why people are afraid to reveal complexity. They don’t want the difficulty or the punishment that might come with it,” she said.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” said James.
They both laughed.
It was the middle of the morning, and there were snow flurries. In yesterday’s mail there had been a telephone bill, which remained on James’s mind—how would he pay it? How would he pay to get his clothes cleaned? How would he pay his taxes? James gritted his teeth as he walked, wondering if his shoes would soon be soaked.
James saw a puppy take a bone under a car, where the dog huddled near the front right tire. James stopped to watch, thinking about the smallness of the dog and its obvious hunger. He walked on and a woman, who had seen him watching said, “I don’t know whose dog that is. He’s just eating those chicken bones.” James smiled at her. He thought about the dog’s tenacious gnawing at the bone, about his huddling against the tire, and felt sympathy. This is pathetic—I’m projecting myself onto a puppy, he thought.
A man was milling outside of the small trailer that operated as a food pantry, and James walked in his direction. James had seen the man before, inside, but this was the first time he noticed the man had a scar on his left lower cheek. A knife wound? The man had dark, intense eyes. He looked at James’s face, then at his coat, his scarf about his check, his pressed pants, his shining shoes; he looked skeptical. James saw the look and wanted to say, not everyone in need or trouble looks or sounds broken. But this is what they seemed to want, to see your need abject. James had been handing out his resume to businesses in the area, and so he was clean, shaven, and dressed very presentably but not especially well by his usual standards. He had sat down earlier in a real estate office to discuss the possibility of selling real estate, but had been told it would be about three months before he would be likely to make money he could live on. He would have to be able to afford training, licenses, a desk, and he would not get a salary but would make commissions. That was another dead end.
James asked the scarred man if the pantry was opened and the man said, No.On his way home, James stopped at a supermarket. He had no money on him, but it had become his habit to tour the aisles of food and clothing stores he couldn’t now afford, seeing the things he hoped to be able to afford again one day in the future. These were tours akin to brothel or museum visits, with most of the pleasure taking place in his mind, not on his lips or tongue. James realized he had a headache, remembered he was out of aspirin at home, and was almost surprised when he found himself picking up a a bottle of aspirin and slipping it into his coat pocket. A block away from the store, he smiled, pleased. I’ll have to do that again, he thought. He retrieved the bottle from his pocket, broke the plastic seal, and put the two white bitter tablets on his tongue.
The radiator in James’s bedroom kicked on; it was as if the house were breathing. James thought the heat was less than in previous years, and he knew that was because he was behind in his rent. He thought of this as he heard Gail say, “Two people can have the same strengths, do the same kind of work, but if they belong to different social groups, they’ll get a different reception, different rewards. We are individuals but we’re not appreciated as individuals.”James said, “No, we’re not.”
Gail had told him about finding herself, thirsty, at her office approaching a water fountain as Susan Sunshine neared the same fountain to drink. Gail had gestured, deferring to Susan, who drank first. As Susan was bent drinking, Gail couldn’t resist adding, “You think you’re entitled to public recognition and admiration.”
Susan had straightened, a look of surprise on her face, and said, “People recognize my work. Do you resent that?”
Gail said, “You’re not the only one who does relevant work. Do you feel at all guilty about the unequal attention you get?”
Susan said, “Would you?”
Gail had not answered. She had moved passed Susan, drank water, and then walked away.Gail said, “She’s oblivious—she assumes power is her right.” She paused, and asked, “How are you James?”
“I’m tired,” he said. “I’m very tired. The life I’m living is not the life I planned,” said James. He laughed sadly. “I’m no longer the hero in my own story—I’m more of a case study, a statistic. I guess not everyone’s allowed to be a hero.”
Gail said, “We’re individuals but we’re not appreciated as individuals.” She was quiet a moment. “You’re still a hero to me.”
“And you are to me,” he said.
The corporate board of the company Gail worked for had elected new members, many of them whom were either sympathetic to the protesters or who simply wanted the protest to end and were willing to make a sacrifice for that. Gail could see that when the new board had its first meeting in two weeks, she’d likely be the ritual’s sacrifice. She announced that she was resigning to write a book and consider other professional opportunities. James read a report of the board election and resignation in the morning paper and intuited the rest.
James saw a man alone making karate gestures and mouthing words, clearly crazy. The man crossed the street, and though a bus was coming he stood in the middle of the street, unzipped his pants and took out his prick and began to urinate.
When James entered the soup kitchen in the church basement, a nervous young man was speaking with someone. James assumed this nervousness was because he was new to such spare accommodations, but in the midst of James’ meal—spicy chicken wings, buttery whipped potatoes, string beans with other vegetables—the young man sat down next to him and began talking the social service program he was with and about health benefits James might qualify for. James asked him if he had a card, and after the man handed over a card and pamphlet, James said, “I’ll review these and if I need anything, I’ll call you.” The young man tried to continue talking. James asked, “Have you eaten the lunch? The young man said, No. James said, “Well, you should eat. This is really good, and I’m going to finish my delicious meal, which is why I’m here, and if I need anything I’ll call you.” The young man then tried to shake James’s hand, and James said, “I can’t—my hands aren’t clean: I’m eating.” The man kept his hand out as if it was okay, he didn’t mind James’s hand but James repeated his words. Would the man shake someone’s greasy hand in other circumstances? He must be new to his job, James thought. With his small build, light brown skin, small mobile eyes, cheekbones, short-cropped hair, and quiet manner, there was a resemblance to James, but the man saw in himself no resemblance to James or anyone else here. He’s so uncomfortable he’s dangerous, thought James. You can destroy someone with disappointment and pity, James thought. If I had been weaker. If I had been having a very bad day.
James received a small check for a proofreading job he did, and decided to go to a party. It had been months since he’d gone to a party. He’d had a bleak spring and a terrible summer—he had not known that a summer could be terrible.
James walked into the party and saw people smoking marijuana and doing powdered cocaine. He had rarely smoked the first and had never tried the second but he knew that tonight he would do both; and he did.
The noise in the party was no longer aggravating; it seemed far away. James no longer felt as if he would cry if someone asked him where he worked. James imagined the hands of a nearby clock spinning quickly, an acceleration of time. He noticed a man watching him and thought the man looked hostile and wondered if the man, whom he did not know, wanted to kill him. James suddenly imagined himself in a closed coffin, face up, the lid a few inches from his eyes, the coffin filled with cobwebs and dirt. Could he be feeling afraid and sleepy and sexually aroused at once?
Every day for a week, James thought of calling the party’s host to ask about getting more of the drug. He went to bed late one night having decided that he would do that the very next day.
James woke up the next day and turned on the television to find the towers where he and Gail used to work on fire. Two planes had flown into them. James smiled: there was justice on earth.James lay across his bed, reading Simone DeBeauvoir’s interview in a Paris Review anthology: “When one has an existentialist view of the world, like mine, the paradox of human life is precisely that one tries to be and, in the long run, merely exists. It’s because of this discrepancy that when you’ve laid your stake on being—and, in a way you always do when you make plans, even if you actually know that you can’t succeed in being—when you turn around and look back on your life, you see that you’ve simply existed. In other words, life isn’t behind you like a solid thing, like the life of a god (as it is conceived, that is, as something impossible). Your life is simply a human life.” He suddenly felt pressure in his stomach, and went to the bathroom; and moments later, after realizing he was almost out of toilet paper, he gazed down, seeing the thick snake-like turd in the white bowl, and bent to flush the toilet.
James stood in the food pantry line. After James was given a small bag of canned vegetables, a box of raisins, and some apples, he thought, So much humiliation for so little in return.
This world is too small for me, thought James.
(April 2002)(c) DG
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Dark Side of the World
“My future lies in back of me...”
--Ashford & Simpson’s “Dark Side of the World,” as sung by Diana Ross
“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
--Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”
My own thoughts:
Certain cultures are able to encourage our ambitions, and fulfill out hopes; and other cultures frustrate them, make them improbable if not impossible.
Sometimes we are encouraged to substitute principles for our preferences, which could be a form of discipline or self-betrayal.
The desire for self-protection can lead to self-marginalization. The unhealthiness of isolation is something that becomes more pronounced with time. It really affects one’s perspective and spirit. It affects what seems important and urgent. One can begin to mistake the personal for the universal, the trivial for the significant. Self-marginalization leads to self-destruction.
I have thought of different kinds of writing as useful, valuable, but the fact is that certain kinds of writing are privileged and other kinds are taken for granted. Often essays and reviews are ways of claiming aspects of the world, of culture, but it is fiction and poetry that are more often (and, more deeply) claimed by the world, by culture, and even that literature does not have the power it held in the past. It’s painful to do work that you value but come to find has little or no presence in the life of others and yields no practical rewards.
--Ashford & Simpson’s “Dark Side of the World,” as sung by Diana Ross
“I can't go on, I'll go on.”
--Samuel Beckett’s “The Unnamable”
My own thoughts:
Certain cultures are able to encourage our ambitions, and fulfill out hopes; and other cultures frustrate them, make them improbable if not impossible.
Sometimes we are encouraged to substitute principles for our preferences, which could be a form of discipline or self-betrayal.
The desire for self-protection can lead to self-marginalization. The unhealthiness of isolation is something that becomes more pronounced with time. It really affects one’s perspective and spirit. It affects what seems important and urgent. One can begin to mistake the personal for the universal, the trivial for the significant. Self-marginalization leads to self-destruction.
I have thought of different kinds of writing as useful, valuable, but the fact is that certain kinds of writing are privileged and other kinds are taken for granted. Often essays and reviews are ways of claiming aspects of the world, of culture, but it is fiction and poetry that are more often (and, more deeply) claimed by the world, by culture, and even that literature does not have the power it held in the past. It’s painful to do work that you value but come to find has little or no presence in the life of others and yields no practical rewards.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Art, Politics, Life
It’s a beautiful day here in the south, warm, though there are some clouds. I am anxious about the things I am always anxious about, even as I find moments of pleasure in the things that usually give me pleasure (and I don’t, now, amazingly find a conflict between the two: it’ just the nature of my existence today)…I received and have begun reading Phillip Lopate’s book on Susan Sontag, Notes on Sontag, and my response is thus far mixed (His favorable comments about Sontag’s intellect and unique commitment I appreciate, but some of his negative arguments are shallow, especially regarding personal matters and certain intellectual judgments; and there is a certain stupidity and vulgarity in trying to look at an artist and intellectual’s behavior as if it were on the same level as her work—artists control their work but that control does not extend to other people and the larger world). It’s sad that Sontag seems to have inspired as much resentment as admiration; and each says a lot about the person who feels it. I don’t know how far I will go with reading this or if I will try to develop a thorough response. As well, I have been listening to singer-songwriter’s Marshall Crenshaw’s Jaggedland with some fascination, as his is a name I have heard for years (he released his first album in 1982), without my having a good sense of his work, which, with this album, has a certain subtle sensuality.
Many people were concerned about Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s proposed cuts to the state’s art budget. (I sent in a written call for arts supports to various public officials, as did others.) The journalist Walter Pierce reports for Louisiana’s Independent Weekly (“Lawmakers Undo Jindal Arts Cuts”): “Arts councils, arts presenters and artists statewide are breathing a sigh of relief and keeping their collective fingers crossed after the state House Appropriations Committee this week restored $3.3 million to Decentralized Arts Funding, the state’s principal means of distributing grant funding to artistic and cultural endeavors administered by both public and private entities. The restoration is the full 83 percent of funding the Jindal administration cut from the budget. It came through an amendment by Rep. John Schroder, a Covington Republican, to House Bill 1, the massive appropriations bill that funds state government for the next fiscal year” (May 1, 2009).
In Louisiana, there is a lot of emphasis on sports and other physical things, such as hunting and fishing. It is nice to have some attention paid to the arts, and the introduction of the arts to young people and what they manage to do. “Skyler Pham, a senior at Magnet Academy for the Cultural Arts in Opelousas, has been named the grand prize winner of the 2009 River of Words Poetry Contest sponsored by the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book. It is the world’s largest competition for youth poetry and art. Pham’s poem, ‘Sisyphean,’ addresses the theme of watersheds. The Opelousas native’s poem was selected for the prize by Robert Haas, former U.S. poet laureate and winner of a 2008 Pulitzer Prize,” reports the Independent Weekly in Louisiana (“Acadiana Teen Wins National Poetry Award, May 1, 2009). As well, elsewhere, William Farley, an 18 year-old, won the 2009 Poetry Out Loud recitation contest sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Arts Endowment, with a reading of “Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams, about a middle-age man.
David Hudson at IFC’s online digest The Daily notes some of the new films that are opening now: The Limits of Control, Revanche, Three Monkeys, The Merry Gentlemen, Eldorado, Wolverine, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, however adding that there seems to be more quantity than quality (May 1, 2009).
According to ArtDaily.org,…in Australia, in the town of Paddington, the country’s most important photography awards were distributed: The winners included a critic’s choice award for Gary Heery’s photograph of actress Cate Blanchett. Other winners at Paddington’s Australian Centre for Photography were “Katerina Mantelos for her image ‘Athina, 98 years of life’, Vincent Long for his image ‘Generation Y’ and Janyon Boschoff for his image ‘Urban Camouflage.’”
On May 26th and May 27th (Tues. and Wed.), a free film festival featuring student documentaries, the Truth Be Told Documentary Film Festival, will be held in Tishman auditorium at The New School in Manhattan (66 West 12th Street). This summer, there will be a free film festival focusing on environmental and nature protection: Films on the Green, taking place in New York parks. In Louisiana, at the Robinson Film Center there will be filmmaking summer camps (at a cost).
“Culture, especially in its rarefied incarnations, has never been a high priority for the mainstream press. Criticism is a strange bird in an enterprise devoted to ‘objectivity’ and mass readership,” says Andras Szanto in the article titled “With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?” (The Art Newspaper, available online April 29, 2009; print, May 2009, Issue 202). Szanto acknowledges, “More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.” He speculates on how to sustain this, how to fund it, regarding the participations of institutions and writers and advertisers.
Following the American Society of Magazine Editors awards, the New York Times Stephanie Clifford reported that, “The winners of the general excellence award were Reader’s Digest, Field & Stream, Wired, Texas Monthly, Foreign Policy and Print. The general excellence awards are categorized by circulation, from the more than two million (Reader’s Digest) to the under 100,000 (Print)” (April 30, 2009).
Scheduled for Friday, May 15 at 8 pm, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street (south of Houston), in Manhattan, according to a notice from the New York Institute for the Humanities, the humanities institute at NYU “teams up with those young twinned musical powerhouses, The Knights, a dynamic NYC-based orchestra, and Brooklyn Rider, the borough’s premier string quartet, for an evening circling around the theme of Schubert and Solitude. That theme receives an achingly sublime evocation in Argentine-Lithuanian/Jewish MacArthur-Award winning composer Osvaldo Golijov’s recent “She Was Here,” an orchestral re-envisioning of four Schubert songs, to be performed by the Knights, with Tehila Nini Goldstein, soprano. Golijov, who will be present, will discuss the taproots of this recent project, his debt to and sense of Schubert’s singular genius, with Fred Child, host of NPR’s Performance Today.” The themes and performances of other pieces will be discussed as well, including Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture,” Schubert’s own “Death and the Maiden,” Philip Glass’s “Company,” Charles Ives’s “Unanswered Question,” and Golijov’s “Night of the Flying Horses.”
Mark Goldenson started an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe, and things didn’t go well: “Producing quality content every day is a herculean task, especially live. The idea of creating both the content and technology for PlayCafe seemed achievable, but TV networks focus on distribution and studios on production for good reason: both are hard,” says Mark Goldenson in “10 Lessons from a Failed Startup,” for the web site Venture Beat (April 29th, 2009).
Everyone has been concerned about the flu epidemic, which we were told first began in Mexico but more information is beginning to come out. “Mexico’s top government epidemiologist said Wednesday that it is ‘highly improbable’ that a farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz operated by Smithfield Foods Inc. is responsible for the nation’s swine-flu outbreak. Miguel Angel Lezana, the government’s chief epidemiologist, said in an interview that pigs at the farm are from North America, while the genetic material in the virus is from Europe and Asia,” write Ana Campoy and Lauren Etter, “Expert Says Farm Isn’t Flu Origin,” The Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2009). I heard one report this morning that said it should not even be referred to as swine flu as pigs do not have this flu although some of the genetic makeup of the flu does contain pig genetic material as well as that of other creatures.
In an “African Gene-map Findings” post at the web site African Loft, it is stated that “A ten-year study by scientists has found Africa to be the most genetically diverse continent in the world. The team of international scientists believes that modern humans evolved in south-western Africa, near the coastal border of Namibia and Angola. They also took samples from four African-American populations, and found that most of them were of West African ancestry. The team led by Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania studied genetic material from 121 African populations” (May 1, 2009).
How translatable is knowledge, how translatable are standards? How central is literacy? “In countless American communities, flyers are routinely full of major misspellings, more than a few people are only fitfully comfortable with e-mail, and few read newspapers above the tabloid level. Life is fundamentally oral. People from places like this (which include Appalachia and the rural white South, as much as black and brown inner cities) get next to no reinforcement from home life in acquiring comfort with the written word beyond the utilitarian,” declares the usually conservative John McWhorter in “Moving Beyond Bias,” a piece I want to read more of on African-Americans and standardized tests (The New Republic, online April 22, 2009). After invoking scholar-activist W.E.B. DuBois, John McWhorter says, “People like Du Bois did not dedicate their lives to paving the way for black people to be exempt from tests. Sure, the tests may not correlate perfectly with firefighters’ duties. But which falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?”
Someone who is a man of excellence by almost any intelligent, sensible standard is Barack Obama; and this week marked his first one-hundred days in office—and I watched the press conference he gave on Wednesday, the night of the one-hundredth day. He spoke about a new generation facing challenges, a new generation with the power to make different decisions. It often doesn’t pay to bet against youth and he has that on his side. “To a greater extent than among older voters, support for Obama among voters under the age of 30 was based on issues and ideology. The main reason so many young people were attracted to Barack Obama’s candidacy was because of his ideas,” writes Alan Abromowitz in “The Obama Generation,” from Rasmussen Reports (May 1, 2009). Alan Abromowitz offers statistics and observations regarding the liberal attitudes of young people and affirms, “The primary reason for the distinctive political behavior of younger Americans today is that their political attitudes differ significantly from those of their elders.”
The Cato Institute has given diverse analyses of President Obama’s first one-hundred days in office, a mixed response, depending on the issues involved. However, earlier in the week, April 27th, 2009, in a “Public Opinion Snapshot,” the Center for American Progress’s Ruy Teixeira reported that “In a just-released Pew Research Center poll, the president’s favorability rating stands at 73 percent, with just 24 percent viewing him unfavorably.”
Many people were concerned about Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal’s proposed cuts to the state’s art budget. (I sent in a written call for arts supports to various public officials, as did others.) The journalist Walter Pierce reports for Louisiana’s Independent Weekly (“Lawmakers Undo Jindal Arts Cuts”): “Arts councils, arts presenters and artists statewide are breathing a sigh of relief and keeping their collective fingers crossed after the state House Appropriations Committee this week restored $3.3 million to Decentralized Arts Funding, the state’s principal means of distributing grant funding to artistic and cultural endeavors administered by both public and private entities. The restoration is the full 83 percent of funding the Jindal administration cut from the budget. It came through an amendment by Rep. John Schroder, a Covington Republican, to House Bill 1, the massive appropriations bill that funds state government for the next fiscal year” (May 1, 2009).
In Louisiana, there is a lot of emphasis on sports and other physical things, such as hunting and fishing. It is nice to have some attention paid to the arts, and the introduction of the arts to young people and what they manage to do. “Skyler Pham, a senior at Magnet Academy for the Cultural Arts in Opelousas, has been named the grand prize winner of the 2009 River of Words Poetry Contest sponsored by the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book. It is the world’s largest competition for youth poetry and art. Pham’s poem, ‘Sisyphean,’ addresses the theme of watersheds. The Opelousas native’s poem was selected for the prize by Robert Haas, former U.S. poet laureate and winner of a 2008 Pulitzer Prize,” reports the Independent Weekly in Louisiana (“Acadiana Teen Wins National Poetry Award, May 1, 2009). As well, elsewhere, William Farley, an 18 year-old, won the 2009 Poetry Out Loud recitation contest sponsored by the Poetry Foundation and the National Arts Endowment, with a reading of “Danse Russe” by William Carlos Williams, about a middle-age man.
David Hudson at IFC’s online digest The Daily notes some of the new films that are opening now: The Limits of Control, Revanche, Three Monkeys, The Merry Gentlemen, Eldorado, Wolverine, and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, however adding that there seems to be more quantity than quality (May 1, 2009).
According to ArtDaily.org,…in Australia, in the town of Paddington, the country’s most important photography awards were distributed: The winners included a critic’s choice award for Gary Heery’s photograph of actress Cate Blanchett. Other winners at Paddington’s Australian Centre for Photography were “Katerina Mantelos for her image ‘Athina, 98 years of life’, Vincent Long for his image ‘Generation Y’ and Janyon Boschoff for his image ‘Urban Camouflage.’”
On May 26th and May 27th (Tues. and Wed.), a free film festival featuring student documentaries, the Truth Be Told Documentary Film Festival, will be held in Tishman auditorium at The New School in Manhattan (66 West 12th Street). This summer, there will be a free film festival focusing on environmental and nature protection: Films on the Green, taking place in New York parks. In Louisiana, at the Robinson Film Center there will be filmmaking summer camps (at a cost).
“Culture, especially in its rarefied incarnations, has never been a high priority for the mainstream press. Criticism is a strange bird in an enterprise devoted to ‘objectivity’ and mass readership,” says Andras Szanto in the article titled “With newspapers in terminal decline, what future for arts journalism?” (The Art Newspaper, available online April 29, 2009; print, May 2009, Issue 202). Szanto acknowledges, “More people than ever are reading and writing about art, thanks to the web.” He speculates on how to sustain this, how to fund it, regarding the participations of institutions and writers and advertisers.
Following the American Society of Magazine Editors awards, the New York Times Stephanie Clifford reported that, “The winners of the general excellence award were Reader’s Digest, Field & Stream, Wired, Texas Monthly, Foreign Policy and Print. The general excellence awards are categorized by circulation, from the more than two million (Reader’s Digest) to the under 100,000 (Print)” (April 30, 2009).
Scheduled for Friday, May 15 at 8 pm, at the Angel Orensanz Foundation, 172 Norfolk Street (south of Houston), in Manhattan, according to a notice from the New York Institute for the Humanities, the humanities institute at NYU “teams up with those young twinned musical powerhouses, The Knights, a dynamic NYC-based orchestra, and Brooklyn Rider, the borough’s premier string quartet, for an evening circling around the theme of Schubert and Solitude. That theme receives an achingly sublime evocation in Argentine-Lithuanian/Jewish MacArthur-Award winning composer Osvaldo Golijov’s recent “She Was Here,” an orchestral re-envisioning of four Schubert songs, to be performed by the Knights, with Tehila Nini Goldstein, soprano. Golijov, who will be present, will discuss the taproots of this recent project, his debt to and sense of Schubert’s singular genius, with Fred Child, host of NPR’s Performance Today.” The themes and performances of other pieces will be discussed as well, including Beethoven’s “Coriolan Overture,” Schubert’s own “Death and the Maiden,” Philip Glass’s “Company,” Charles Ives’s “Unanswered Question,” and Golijov’s “Night of the Flying Horses.”
Mark Goldenson started an internet TV network for games called PlayCafe, and things didn’t go well: “Producing quality content every day is a herculean task, especially live. The idea of creating both the content and technology for PlayCafe seemed achievable, but TV networks focus on distribution and studios on production for good reason: both are hard,” says Mark Goldenson in “10 Lessons from a Failed Startup,” for the web site Venture Beat (April 29th, 2009).
Everyone has been concerned about the flu epidemic, which we were told first began in Mexico but more information is beginning to come out. “Mexico’s top government epidemiologist said Wednesday that it is ‘highly improbable’ that a farm in the Mexican state of Veracruz operated by Smithfield Foods Inc. is responsible for the nation’s swine-flu outbreak. Miguel Angel Lezana, the government’s chief epidemiologist, said in an interview that pigs at the farm are from North America, while the genetic material in the virus is from Europe and Asia,” write Ana Campoy and Lauren Etter, “Expert Says Farm Isn’t Flu Origin,” The Wall Street Journal (April 30, 2009). I heard one report this morning that said it should not even be referred to as swine flu as pigs do not have this flu although some of the genetic makeup of the flu does contain pig genetic material as well as that of other creatures.
In an “African Gene-map Findings” post at the web site African Loft, it is stated that “A ten-year study by scientists has found Africa to be the most genetically diverse continent in the world. The team of international scientists believes that modern humans evolved in south-western Africa, near the coastal border of Namibia and Angola. They also took samples from four African-American populations, and found that most of them were of West African ancestry. The team led by Sarah Tishkoff from the University of Pennsylvania studied genetic material from 121 African populations” (May 1, 2009).
How translatable is knowledge, how translatable are standards? How central is literacy? “In countless American communities, flyers are routinely full of major misspellings, more than a few people are only fitfully comfortable with e-mail, and few read newspapers above the tabloid level. Life is fundamentally oral. People from places like this (which include Appalachia and the rural white South, as much as black and brown inner cities) get next to no reinforcement from home life in acquiring comfort with the written word beyond the utilitarian,” declares the usually conservative John McWhorter in “Moving Beyond Bias,” a piece I want to read more of on African-Americans and standardized tests (The New Republic, online April 22, 2009). After invoking scholar-activist W.E.B. DuBois, John McWhorter says, “People like Du Bois did not dedicate their lives to paving the way for black people to be exempt from tests. Sure, the tests may not correlate perfectly with firefighters’ duties. But which falls more into the spirit of black uplift that you could explain to a foreigner in less than three minutes: teaching black candidates how to show what they are made of despite obstacles, or banning a test of mental agility as inappropriate to impose on black candidates?”
Someone who is a man of excellence by almost any intelligent, sensible standard is Barack Obama; and this week marked his first one-hundred days in office—and I watched the press conference he gave on Wednesday, the night of the one-hundredth day. He spoke about a new generation facing challenges, a new generation with the power to make different decisions. It often doesn’t pay to bet against youth and he has that on his side. “To a greater extent than among older voters, support for Obama among voters under the age of 30 was based on issues and ideology. The main reason so many young people were attracted to Barack Obama’s candidacy was because of his ideas,” writes Alan Abromowitz in “The Obama Generation,” from Rasmussen Reports (May 1, 2009). Alan Abromowitz offers statistics and observations regarding the liberal attitudes of young people and affirms, “The primary reason for the distinctive political behavior of younger Americans today is that their political attitudes differ significantly from those of their elders.”
The Cato Institute has given diverse analyses of President Obama’s first one-hundred days in office, a mixed response, depending on the issues involved. However, earlier in the week, April 27th, 2009, in a “Public Opinion Snapshot,” the Center for American Progress’s Ruy Teixeira reported that “In a just-released Pew Research Center poll, the president’s favorability rating stands at 73 percent, with just 24 percent viewing him unfavorably.”
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
What Makes A Writer Necessary?
I think of writing as the creation of beauty and the cultivation of craft in language, as self-expression and social communication and political practice, and I also think of it as a form of spiritual sustenance--but what makes a writer necessary? I would have said honesty, intelligence, sensitivity, eloquence and imagination when I was much younger; and I would have added range and mastery of subject matter and philosophical heft a few years ago, but now I am not so sure. Are writers and their work necessary to most people?
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
100 Hundred Days, 100 Nights
“The world, which is the private property of a few, suffers from amnesia. It is not an innocent amnesia. The owners prefer not to remember that the world was born yearning to be a home for everyone,” says the writer Eduardo Galeano in an interview (“Through the Looking Glass”) with Parul Sehgal, online at Publishers Weekly (April 27, 2009).
This week marks President Barack Hussein Obama’s first one-hundred days in office, during which the Democratic president has made or supported a wide range of initiatives (one tally has the count at more than one-hundred), initiatives involving the economy, education, health care, international relations and more. Meanwhile, the longtime Republican senator from Pennysylvania Arlen Specter has become a Democrat, reports The New York Times (April 28, 2009); and that seems as symbolic an event as any.
The Journal of the History of Philosophy, a quarterly publication from Johns Hopkins University Press that is focused on the history of western philosophy, is looking for a new editor to serve a five-year renewable term, beginning July 1, 2010. The contact is Prof. Al Martinich, search committee chair (Professor Martinich is located at the University of Texas in Austin).
The web allows everyone to be a curator, claims Jim Richardson, a scheduled speaker at a June conference in Malaga on “communicating the museum” (The Art Newspaper, online April 32, 2009; Issue 202, May 2009).
Festival International took place this past weekend in Louisiana, beginning April 22nd and ending April 26, a very impressive event featuring musicians from around the world, particularly from Francophone countries. Next year’s Festival International is scheduled for April 21-25, 2010.
I am looking forward to listening to new music by Marshall Crenshaw and Jill Sobule, among others; and am still enjoying Andrew Bird and Death Cab for Cutie.
This Tuesday afternoon, today at 3 p.m., the poet C.K. Williams is reading his poetry in Alexander Hall, the Richardson auditorium (Princeton University) in New Jersey. Kevin Young follows in the same place at 5 p.m. As well the legendary (and incendiary) Jayne Cortez is reading her poetry tonight at Dixon Place, 161 Christie Street, in New York, 7 p.m., part of a program featuring Anne Waldman and Cara Benson.
This morning I watched a television news program and topics included film and music and there were even a few books mentioned but there was not literature, not fiction. I was trying to remember the last time I heard a discussion of literature as part of mainstream television. Didn't such books used to be discussed? Literature has become more marginal to our lives.
Is Anybody There?, a film starring Michael Caine, opens on Friday, May 1st, as does X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with Hugh Jackson. Atom Egoyan’s film Adoration opens a week later, May 8th, as does Carlos Cuaron’s soccer film Rudo Y Corsi featuring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna; and Ron Howards Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks, will play beginning May 15th. (Source: Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel, April 28, giving release dates through August 2009)
The African Film Festival is held in New York in April and May; and there are film screenings scheduled for Columbia University for May 22nd through 25th, 2009: including screenings of the acclaimed film Shoot the Messenger. It is true that African films are shown at other times of the year and some of those dates can be seen with a visit to the AFF calendar at the web site of African Film Festival New York.
This week marks President Barack Hussein Obama’s first one-hundred days in office, during which the Democratic president has made or supported a wide range of initiatives (one tally has the count at more than one-hundred), initiatives involving the economy, education, health care, international relations and more. Meanwhile, the longtime Republican senator from Pennysylvania Arlen Specter has become a Democrat, reports The New York Times (April 28, 2009); and that seems as symbolic an event as any.
The Journal of the History of Philosophy, a quarterly publication from Johns Hopkins University Press that is focused on the history of western philosophy, is looking for a new editor to serve a five-year renewable term, beginning July 1, 2010. The contact is Prof. Al Martinich, search committee chair (Professor Martinich is located at the University of Texas in Austin).
The web allows everyone to be a curator, claims Jim Richardson, a scheduled speaker at a June conference in Malaga on “communicating the museum” (The Art Newspaper, online April 32, 2009; Issue 202, May 2009).
Festival International took place this past weekend in Louisiana, beginning April 22nd and ending April 26, a very impressive event featuring musicians from around the world, particularly from Francophone countries. Next year’s Festival International is scheduled for April 21-25, 2010.
I am looking forward to listening to new music by Marshall Crenshaw and Jill Sobule, among others; and am still enjoying Andrew Bird and Death Cab for Cutie.
This Tuesday afternoon, today at 3 p.m., the poet C.K. Williams is reading his poetry in Alexander Hall, the Richardson auditorium (Princeton University) in New Jersey. Kevin Young follows in the same place at 5 p.m. As well the legendary (and incendiary) Jayne Cortez is reading her poetry tonight at Dixon Place, 161 Christie Street, in New York, 7 p.m., part of a program featuring Anne Waldman and Cara Benson.
This morning I watched a television news program and topics included film and music and there were even a few books mentioned but there was not literature, not fiction. I was trying to remember the last time I heard a discussion of literature as part of mainstream television. Didn't such books used to be discussed? Literature has become more marginal to our lives.
Is Anybody There?, a film starring Michael Caine, opens on Friday, May 1st, as does X-Men Origins: Wolverine, with Hugh Jackson. Atom Egoyan’s film Adoration opens a week later, May 8th, as does Carlos Cuaron’s soccer film Rudo Y Corsi featuring Gael Garcia Bernal and Diego Luna; and Ron Howards Angels & Demons, starring Tom Hanks, will play beginning May 15th. (Source: Roger Moore, Orlando Sentinel, April 28, giving release dates through August 2009)
The African Film Festival is held in New York in April and May; and there are film screenings scheduled for Columbia University for May 22nd through 25th, 2009: including screenings of the acclaimed film Shoot the Messenger. It is true that African films are shown at other times of the year and some of those dates can be seen with a visit to the AFF calendar at the web site of African Film Festival New York.
Enemies
Sometimes we have good intentions but make enemies anyway. Sometimes just wanting to achieve independence and integrity in our own lives frustrates those who want to control and exploit us; and they develop a great dislike for us and our activities.
Monday, April 27, 2009
Male Sensitivity
I think that it is hard, still, for many people to tolerate male sensitivity. Men are expected to be active, to do something, or to be stoic, silent and strong, rather than to be articulate and expressive about difficult matters that concern and trouble them. It is one reason why men become loners; and one reason why some men become artists--to have a place in which to put their feelings. It is hard for some people to accept that a man is not simply cursed with sensitivity (too weak to be anything else) but that he chooses to be sensitive; and that does not include a desire for suffering but it can include an acceptance that suffering may come--and suffering is to be lived through and lived through honestly, with acknowledgement, with candor, with intelligent pragmatism as well as the belief that things can, should be, and will be different, that suffering will end.
Art in Movies: Incognito; and Mona Lisa Smile
I saw on the small screen two films that took place in the art world this past weekend, a nice bit of film programming from the CW network: John Badham’s Incognito, starring Jason Patric as an art forger and Irene Jacob as an art expert; and Mike Newell’s Mona Lisa Smile, with Julia Roberts as a college art teacher and Kirsten Dunst, Maggie Gyllenhaal and Julia Stiles as her students. Each film managed to ask some good questions about art--what is it, why is it made, how is it understood and evaluated, and what is its ultimate worth?
The first film, Incognito, was a late 1990s crime thriller with some romance, and the second was a "teacher-who-inspired-me" story with feminist themes and some romance. Love is the universal subject, so those uninterested in the subject of art had something that might engage. Art is such a special subject and as I began to watch Incognito, I thought about how rare it is to hear sustained discussion of art in a popular medium and how hard it must be for a film director to know what tone to take (I wasn't sure that the tone at the beginning of the film wasn't off--but that may have been me just becoming acclimated to the subject, a subject I think about often but do not expect to hear spoken of by many others). I thought that Incognito seemed like an update of the kind of suspense film that Cary Grant used to make (Jason Patric is a good-looking man but he doesn't have the charm or spirit of Cary Grant, or even of Hugh Grant, whose movie Four Wedings and A Funeral was screened as well on Sunday; and there could have been more of, and more to, Irene Jacob). Incognito looked good, it was intelligent, and there was nothing "wrong" with the acting (I look forward to seeing the film again, at some point), but the film lacked that extra something--a bit of spirit and style that can make a competent film into a good film or a good film into a great one.
In Mona Lisa Smile, a film from a few years ago, Julia Roberts supplies the idiosyncratic spirit and style that makes an entrancing film object, a movie star. She understands what a film requires and she gives it. Her performance as the art teacher balanced wanting to be liked in a new place, wanting to do a good job, wanting to be true to rigorous intellectual standards, and also being subject to insecurities and physical attraction. She brings a liberal sensibility to a place that is conservate in old-fashion terms (marriage and bland conformity are respected goals). The circumstances and issues that both films present are the kinds of things that recur in different generations, in different cultures: the battles are won or lost but the war goes on. I think both films handled the issues involving art very intelligently (appropriate care was taken), possibly handling the subject of art better than they handled other matters touched on. Both films have their predictable aspects (in some instances, predictability might be another word for form or logic). I enjoyed both films, and am glad I saw them.
The first film, Incognito, was a late 1990s crime thriller with some romance, and the second was a "teacher-who-inspired-me" story with feminist themes and some romance. Love is the universal subject, so those uninterested in the subject of art had something that might engage. Art is such a special subject and as I began to watch Incognito, I thought about how rare it is to hear sustained discussion of art in a popular medium and how hard it must be for a film director to know what tone to take (I wasn't sure that the tone at the beginning of the film wasn't off--but that may have been me just becoming acclimated to the subject, a subject I think about often but do not expect to hear spoken of by many others). I thought that Incognito seemed like an update of the kind of suspense film that Cary Grant used to make (Jason Patric is a good-looking man but he doesn't have the charm or spirit of Cary Grant, or even of Hugh Grant, whose movie Four Wedings and A Funeral was screened as well on Sunday; and there could have been more of, and more to, Irene Jacob). Incognito looked good, it was intelligent, and there was nothing "wrong" with the acting (I look forward to seeing the film again, at some point), but the film lacked that extra something--a bit of spirit and style that can make a competent film into a good film or a good film into a great one.
In Mona Lisa Smile, a film from a few years ago, Julia Roberts supplies the idiosyncratic spirit and style that makes an entrancing film object, a movie star. She understands what a film requires and she gives it. Her performance as the art teacher balanced wanting to be liked in a new place, wanting to do a good job, wanting to be true to rigorous intellectual standards, and also being subject to insecurities and physical attraction. She brings a liberal sensibility to a place that is conservate in old-fashion terms (marriage and bland conformity are respected goals). The circumstances and issues that both films present are the kinds of things that recur in different generations, in different cultures: the battles are won or lost but the war goes on. I think both films handled the issues involving art very intelligently (appropriate care was taken), possibly handling the subject of art better than they handled other matters touched on. Both films have their predictable aspects (in some instances, predictability might be another word for form or logic). I enjoyed both films, and am glad I saw them.
Criticism, As An Establishment Tool
It may be less so today than it is has been in the past, thanks to the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s and the cultural and theoretical leaps of the 1970s and 1980s, but criticism can be an establishment tool: a way to reaffirm conservative traditions and values. Criticism can be a way of solidifying the status quo, of policing works, things, and people who are different. Sometimes those people who are different are people who belong to traditional minorities--but sometimes they are people whose cultural interests are different: people who prefer Rembrandt to installation art or video; people who prefer European classical music and jazz to indie rock and hip-hop. Criticism can be used to mock, to shame. It can be used to disseminate prejudice. It can express malice and resentment toward figures of mastery, toward what is perceived as safety and security in a society that is impressed by hedonism and riot. Criticism can be a way for the mediocre to join together against excellence. It can be a form of laziness, a rebellion against having to recognize the abundant, diverse talent in the world. It can be an establishment tool simply by encouraging things as they are, the prevalence of the lowest common denominator in much of popular culture.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Earth Day, etcetera
Today, April 22, is Earth Day, a commemoration that began as an environmental education day in 1970 at the behest of Gaylord Nelson, a United States senator: an estimated twenty million people participated in the first Earth Day and it is sometimes called the beginning of the modern environmental movement.
Wendy Weinstein at Film Journal International has given the film The Soloist, directed by Joe Wright and starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr, about the friendship between a journalist and a homeless musician, a very mixed review.
The Los Angeles Times, in association with UCLA, is sponsoring the Festival of Books, scheduled for this coming weekend, April 25th and 26th.
The Ford Foundation is providing ten-million dollars for the establishment of a new foundation to support indigenous American artists, according to the April 21 New York Times. (It is nice to have that news during a time when is watching the new documentary on PBS about the brutal historical treatment of native Americans.)
Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report titled Under Siege that focuses on poor Latino workers in the American south, based on surveys conducted with 500 low-income Latinos, legal residents and those not recognized by law, in Nashville, Charlotte, New Orleans, rural southern Georgia, and towns in northern Alabama. According to the Center’s web site, “The survey findings, coupled with accounts from in-depth interviews, depict a region where Latinos are routinely cheated out of wages by employers and denied basic health and safety protections. They are racially profiled by overzealous law enforcement agents and victimized by criminals who know they are reluctant to report crime to these same authorities. Even legal residents and U.S. citizens of Latino descent said racial profiling, bigotry and other forms of discrimination are staples of their daily lives.”
Wendy Weinstein at Film Journal International has given the film The Soloist, directed by Joe Wright and starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr, about the friendship between a journalist and a homeless musician, a very mixed review.
The Los Angeles Times, in association with UCLA, is sponsoring the Festival of Books, scheduled for this coming weekend, April 25th and 26th.
The Ford Foundation is providing ten-million dollars for the establishment of a new foundation to support indigenous American artists, according to the April 21 New York Times. (It is nice to have that news during a time when is watching the new documentary on PBS about the brutal historical treatment of native Americans.)
Yesterday, the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report titled Under Siege that focuses on poor Latino workers in the American south, based on surveys conducted with 500 low-income Latinos, legal residents and those not recognized by law, in Nashville, Charlotte, New Orleans, rural southern Georgia, and towns in northern Alabama. According to the Center’s web site, “The survey findings, coupled with accounts from in-depth interviews, depict a region where Latinos are routinely cheated out of wages by employers and denied basic health and safety protections. They are racially profiled by overzealous law enforcement agents and victimized by criminals who know they are reluctant to report crime to these same authorities. Even legal residents and U.S. citizens of Latino descent said racial profiling, bigotry and other forms of discrimination are staples of their daily lives.”
Personal Notes, Southern Blues
I am not happy to be in Louisiana today. I was in New Iberia yesterday, leaving the library and riding my bike on the sidewalk as the street was too crowded with cars, and a oldish—in her 50s? early 60s?—blonde, extremely pale woman in white shorts was coming toward me and she clutched her purse, which was on the farthest side of her body away from me already. After I passed her, I turned and looked at her go down the street and saw that she was no longer clutching the purse. The mental illness of too many “white” people continues. It does not help that in news reports criminals are identified by race, rather than age, height, and distinguishing marks or dress. (How helpful is it to say only that a black male or white male committed a crime, if there are more than two of either in any locale?) I must say, the purse-clutching is not as prominent here as in New York but it is annoying as it often is just so impractical, such nonsense (it is always contextually inappropriate: there is always some physical detail that makes theft unlikely or impossible even if one wanted to steal—such as purse-clutching in an elevator: where is one to go with the purse in a closed elevator, inside a building with other people around?).
According to the Associated Press (April 22, 2009), “The Tangipahoa Parish School Board will vote Monday on the final version of its multi-million-dollar school desegregation plan.” A school desegregation plan in year 2009—still? The plan is due April 30 in New Orleans, and will likely include school construction and renovation, and is motivated by a 1965 school desegregation case.
I was on the bike two days ago, and someone called out to me: a man doing work on a large agricultural truck (his job, a blue-collar job). He said my name and asked if I remembered him—I did not recognize him, and he gave his nickname, which I vaguely recalled, and then he gave me his full name and I knew who it was, though he, of course, did not look at all the way he did when I last saw him, when we were both very young men. (I am slim, so am more recognizable.) He told me that not much is going on in Louisiana. He made a comment about my riding the bike (rather than driving a car), and added that I’d been one of the smartest people. I told him that I had been here for only a couple of months, that I had been living in New York, and that I didn’t drive. (I did not say: I had not planned to come back to Louisiana without significant money or power—but, as Frank Sinatra used to sing, “That’s Life.”)
Blueprint Louisiana advocates a knowledge-based economy for Louisiana and states the problem as this: “Louisiana’s economy is driven mostly by ‘old’ industry sectors that, while they remain essential to our economy, are not growing sectors. In fact, more recent trends in these industries have been toward fewer full-time employees, either through improved efficiencies, a reduction of fixed costs or a shift of capital investment overseas. While many other states have increased their focus on knowledge-based industry sectors that will grow substantially in the coming decades, Louisiana has lagged in this pursuit. As a result, Louisiana now has little internal capacity to grow jobs in these ‘new economy’ sectors. This is confirmed by our low rankings in the numerous indexes that measure and assess states’ readiness for and participation in the new economy.”
According to the Associated Press (April 22), Louisiana lawmakers will be reconsidering film industry tax incentives: “If the Legislature takes no action in its session opening Monday, the current 25 percent tax credit for movie and TV show makers will drop to 20 percent next year and 15 percent in 2012. That’s a scenario those heavily invested in the industry say would be disastrous.”
The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR) published the Guide to the 2009 Louisiana Legislature, a pocket-sized that includes biographical information and photographs of Louisiana’s legislators, statewide elected officials and congressional delegation, with committee assignments and contact information. Copies are $10 each plus tax and shipping, from: PAR at P.O. Box 14776, Baton Rouge, LA 70898-4776. Order forms can also be faxed to (225) 926-8417, or requests can be sent by e-mail to connie@la-par.org.
New Orleans City Business (April 22) reports that a couple of Louisiana towns have been included in Relocate America’s “Top 100 Places to Live” list: Metairie and Mandeville and Bossier City.
In March 2009, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities gave its Humanities Book of the Year Award to writer Ned Sublette for his book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
I have been listening to the new recordings of two Louisiana musicians, Allen Toussaint (The Bright Mississippi, a very elegant recording of some jazz standards) and Buckwheat Zydeco (the smart, fun Lay Your Burden Down, featuring zydeco and popular music songs, even a Springsteen song!).
There is a crawfish festival scheduled for the Louisiana town of Breaux Bridge at Parc Hardy in early May 2009, and, in May also, a Bunk Johnson jazz festival in New Iberia, with an artwalk in downtown Lafayette May 9th, a Juneteenth celebration in Opelousas at the Farmer’s Market for June 20th, and a July 4th parade in New Iberia. There is a bluegrass music event planned for August 8th at the Rice Theatre in Crowley. A cultural festival, featuring reggae music, is slated for August 29th and 30th in Carencro’s Pelican Park, with a zydeco festival parade scheduled for Opelousas’s South Park in early September, and an arts and crafts show at Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, October 3rd. The Festivals Acadiens et Creoles is to take place October 9th through 11th in Lafayette.
According to the Associated Press (April 22, 2009), “The Tangipahoa Parish School Board will vote Monday on the final version of its multi-million-dollar school desegregation plan.” A school desegregation plan in year 2009—still? The plan is due April 30 in New Orleans, and will likely include school construction and renovation, and is motivated by a 1965 school desegregation case.
I was on the bike two days ago, and someone called out to me: a man doing work on a large agricultural truck (his job, a blue-collar job). He said my name and asked if I remembered him—I did not recognize him, and he gave his nickname, which I vaguely recalled, and then he gave me his full name and I knew who it was, though he, of course, did not look at all the way he did when I last saw him, when we were both very young men. (I am slim, so am more recognizable.) He told me that not much is going on in Louisiana. He made a comment about my riding the bike (rather than driving a car), and added that I’d been one of the smartest people. I told him that I had been here for only a couple of months, that I had been living in New York, and that I didn’t drive. (I did not say: I had not planned to come back to Louisiana without significant money or power—but, as Frank Sinatra used to sing, “That’s Life.”)
Blueprint Louisiana advocates a knowledge-based economy for Louisiana and states the problem as this: “Louisiana’s economy is driven mostly by ‘old’ industry sectors that, while they remain essential to our economy, are not growing sectors. In fact, more recent trends in these industries have been toward fewer full-time employees, either through improved efficiencies, a reduction of fixed costs or a shift of capital investment overseas. While many other states have increased their focus on knowledge-based industry sectors that will grow substantially in the coming decades, Louisiana has lagged in this pursuit. As a result, Louisiana now has little internal capacity to grow jobs in these ‘new economy’ sectors. This is confirmed by our low rankings in the numerous indexes that measure and assess states’ readiness for and participation in the new economy.”
According to the Associated Press (April 22), Louisiana lawmakers will be reconsidering film industry tax incentives: “If the Legislature takes no action in its session opening Monday, the current 25 percent tax credit for movie and TV show makers will drop to 20 percent next year and 15 percent in 2012. That’s a scenario those heavily invested in the industry say would be disastrous.”
The Public Affairs Research Council of Louisiana (PAR) published the Guide to the 2009 Louisiana Legislature, a pocket-sized that includes biographical information and photographs of Louisiana’s legislators, statewide elected officials and congressional delegation, with committee assignments and contact information. Copies are $10 each plus tax and shipping, from: PAR at P.O. Box 14776, Baton Rouge, LA 70898-4776. Order forms can also be faxed to (225) 926-8417, or requests can be sent by e-mail to connie@la-par.org.
New Orleans City Business (April 22) reports that a couple of Louisiana towns have been included in Relocate America’s “Top 100 Places to Live” list: Metairie and Mandeville and Bossier City.
In March 2009, the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities gave its Humanities Book of the Year Award to writer Ned Sublette for his book The World That Made New Orleans: From Spanish Silver to Congo Square.
I have been listening to the new recordings of two Louisiana musicians, Allen Toussaint (The Bright Mississippi, a very elegant recording of some jazz standards) and Buckwheat Zydeco (the smart, fun Lay Your Burden Down, featuring zydeco and popular music songs, even a Springsteen song!).
There is a crawfish festival scheduled for the Louisiana town of Breaux Bridge at Parc Hardy in early May 2009, and, in May also, a Bunk Johnson jazz festival in New Iberia, with an artwalk in downtown Lafayette May 9th, a Juneteenth celebration in Opelousas at the Farmer’s Market for June 20th, and a July 4th parade in New Iberia. There is a bluegrass music event planned for August 8th at the Rice Theatre in Crowley. A cultural festival, featuring reggae music, is slated for August 29th and 30th in Carencro’s Pelican Park, with a zydeco festival parade scheduled for Opelousas’s South Park in early September, and an arts and crafts show at Shadows-on-the-Teche in New Iberia, October 3rd. The Festivals Acadiens et Creoles is to take place October 9th through 11th in Lafayette.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Criticism, As Companion to Art
I have thought of art as a necessity; and I have thought of criticism as a companion to art, and it has become a necessity as well.
I see a film and read a review of it--before seeing or after; and sometimes, if I find the film interesting enough I write a review of it. I listen to music and try to imagine how I would describe it to a friend or a disinterested acquaintance. The content I discover in a work of art or entertainment, and the pleasure I find, is deepened and extended by a review--or a bunch of reviews.
Criticism is the recovery, in language and thought, of objects from the near and distant past; and it provides context, an explanation of genre, and a disclosure of artistic strategies that are social as much as they are aesthetic. Critics can help us to understand the current work of an artist in light of standards established by the artist's own work as well as the tradition or traditions to which he or she belongs; and criticism can celebrate the highest manifestations of craft, as it introduces us to new talent or reminds us of the existence of neglected or obscure artists: describing the rare qualities of each artist.
There is little more valuable culturally than the reinterpretation of misunderstood or maligned artists, sometimes offering retrospective summaries of artists' careers: that reinterpretation can tell us as much about ourselves, our society, and our values as anything, illuminating the politics of art.
We can learn about the nature of experimental art (what is to be gleaned from it); and about false radicalism, when experiment exists merely to impress and not to express or teach. We can be reminded that art has a spirituality, that it is infused, always, with the human spirit. We can learn about each other--through folk art, international art, expanding knowledge. Criticism can help us to understand how artists express themselves in ancillary words (in books, speeches, interviews) and how that complements or contradicts their works? And criticism can help us to appreciate, to sympathize with, to tolerate, how practical matters--money and power--affect the artistic world. Criticism can be a companion to art, to us.
I see a film and read a review of it--before seeing or after; and sometimes, if I find the film interesting enough I write a review of it. I listen to music and try to imagine how I would describe it to a friend or a disinterested acquaintance. The content I discover in a work of art or entertainment, and the pleasure I find, is deepened and extended by a review--or a bunch of reviews.
Criticism is the recovery, in language and thought, of objects from the near and distant past; and it provides context, an explanation of genre, and a disclosure of artistic strategies that are social as much as they are aesthetic. Critics can help us to understand the current work of an artist in light of standards established by the artist's own work as well as the tradition or traditions to which he or she belongs; and criticism can celebrate the highest manifestations of craft, as it introduces us to new talent or reminds us of the existence of neglected or obscure artists: describing the rare qualities of each artist.
There is little more valuable culturally than the reinterpretation of misunderstood or maligned artists, sometimes offering retrospective summaries of artists' careers: that reinterpretation can tell us as much about ourselves, our society, and our values as anything, illuminating the politics of art.
We can learn about the nature of experimental art (what is to be gleaned from it); and about false radicalism, when experiment exists merely to impress and not to express or teach. We can be reminded that art has a spirituality, that it is infused, always, with the human spirit. We can learn about each other--through folk art, international art, expanding knowledge. Criticism can help us to understand how artists express themselves in ancillary words (in books, speeches, interviews) and how that complements or contradicts their works? And criticism can help us to appreciate, to sympathize with, to tolerate, how practical matters--money and power--affect the artistic world. Criticism can be a companion to art, to us.
Friday, April 17, 2009
Seeing Things
“I think my basic job as a critic is to get people out of the house, to get them interested, energized, inspired, or riled enough to just go see what I’m talking about,’ says New York Times art critic Roberta Smith to Irving Sandler in The Brooklyn Rail (April 2009). Smith talks about her early career and influences (including Sanford Schwartz, Pauline Kael, and Edmund Wilson). Smith also says, “I believe in individual taste, but taste-making is a kind of fiction. It’s just a way to organize things that as time passes are going to fall apart again.” There are more, and more complex, comments in the worthwhile interview, available online.
In an interview with Eliane Raheb, a Lebanese filmmaker and a founder of an Arab film festival called “Ayyam Beruit,” the journalist Mona Sarkis of Qantara.de asks Raheb about new Arab films. The "Ayyam Beruit" festival yields thousands of attendees every two years. Eliane Raheb speaks about a film category referred to as author cinema; and Raheb says, “We have noticed that author cinema is one of the true and rare mirrors of our identity. The truly authentic films are being made by filmmakers who express their individual vision of human beings with stories and experiences that seem unique to them and through which they question ‘reality’. This is, for example, the case in The One Man Village by Simon al Habre or low-budget fiction films like Ein Shams by Ibrahim Battout.”
David Hudson, formerly of the web log Greencine Daily, is now presenting his film commentaries and notes and assorted links, through The Daily at IFC (Independent Film Channel); and as of today he’s got items on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest; Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop and Eran Riklis’s Lemon Tree and more…
Isn't it interesting, and good, to learn something we did not know?
In an interview with Eliane Raheb, a Lebanese filmmaker and a founder of an Arab film festival called “Ayyam Beruit,” the journalist Mona Sarkis of Qantara.de asks Raheb about new Arab films. The "Ayyam Beruit" festival yields thousands of attendees every two years. Eliane Raheb speaks about a film category referred to as author cinema; and Raheb says, “We have noticed that author cinema is one of the true and rare mirrors of our identity. The truly authentic films are being made by filmmakers who express their individual vision of human beings with stories and experiences that seem unique to them and through which they question ‘reality’. This is, for example, the case in The One Man Village by Simon al Habre or low-budget fiction films like Ein Shams by Ibrahim Battout.”
David Hudson, formerly of the web log Greencine Daily, is now presenting his film commentaries and notes and assorted links, through The Daily at IFC (Independent Film Channel); and as of today he’s got items on Jean-Pierre Melville’s Leon Morin, Priest; Armando Iannucci’s In the Loop and Eran Riklis’s Lemon Tree and more…
Isn't it interesting, and good, to learn something we did not know?
Marc Broussard, musician, with writer Cody Daigle
Cody Daigle is a south Louisiana writer, and I have been reading his diverse, intelligent, lively work in The Times of Acadiana and sometimes in The Daily Advertiser; and I was impressed, just yesterday, with a piece he did on the musician Marc Broussard, whom he interviewed (Times, April 16). In the interview article, Broussard talked about his work, the music business and its single-minded search for "hits," and the peculiar reception Broussard's work gets in Louisiana: "I've grown up around this scene all my life, so I've seen bits and pieces of the irreverence to what's going on on stage but I'm not sure why it goes on." Yet, the balance of the piece is about Broussard pleasure with the state of his career and his life in Louisiana. It's worth reading for its candor.
Unanswered Questions
Greg Kot of “Sound Opinons,” What developments would you like to see in how music is reported and evaluated?
Gerald Early, essayist and Washington University professor, Do you think that the essays and reviews published by African American writers in established publications demonstrate intellectual, literary, political, and temperamental range; and what developments would you like to see?
Cecil Doyle of KRVS, How long have you been producing radio programs, and what have been some of the high points and frustrations?
Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle president, What kinds of things can writers, editors, and publishers do to make literary criticism more significant for others?
Wilson Savoy of the Pine Leaf Boys, How do you see your work, and the work of other Louisiana artists, in relation to the larger world?
Eddie Glaude author of In a Shade of Blue, What do you imagine political activism and political writing will look like, following the election of Barack Obama, in the years to come?
Frank Wilderson, author of Incognegro, What is the focus of your forthcoming book, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms?
Manthia Diawara, NYU Africana Studies chairman, In what ways would you like to see African culture integrated in the lives of African-Americans?
Jesse Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto, What are some of the similarities and differences between poetry and film; and how did you approach these disciplines in your own work?
Irene Vandever of the Arts and Humanities Council of Southwest Louisiana, What are the principal arts of Louisiana and what might be their appeal to the larger world?
A. Deniz Balgamis, co-editor of Turkish Migration to the United States, What are the complexities—contradictions and possibilities—within Turkish modernity?
Lucious Fontenot of Valcour Records, What are some of the similarities and differences between Creole and Cajun music in Louisiana?
Gerald Early, essayist and Washington University professor, Do you think that the essays and reviews published by African American writers in established publications demonstrate intellectual, literary, political, and temperamental range; and what developments would you like to see?
Cecil Doyle of KRVS, How long have you been producing radio programs, and what have been some of the high points and frustrations?
Jane Ciabattari, National Book Critics Circle president, What kinds of things can writers, editors, and publishers do to make literary criticism more significant for others?
Wilson Savoy of the Pine Leaf Boys, How do you see your work, and the work of other Louisiana artists, in relation to the larger world?
Eddie Glaude author of In a Shade of Blue, What do you imagine political activism and political writing will look like, following the election of Barack Obama, in the years to come?
Frank Wilderson, author of Incognegro, What is the focus of your forthcoming book, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms?
Manthia Diawara, NYU Africana Studies chairman, In what ways would you like to see African culture integrated in the lives of African-Americans?
Jesse Kercheval, author of Cinema Muto, What are some of the similarities and differences between poetry and film; and how did you approach these disciplines in your own work?
Irene Vandever of the Arts and Humanities Council of Southwest Louisiana, What are the principal arts of Louisiana and what might be their appeal to the larger world?
A. Deniz Balgamis, co-editor of Turkish Migration to the United States, What are the complexities—contradictions and possibilities—within Turkish modernity?
Lucious Fontenot of Valcour Records, What are some of the similarities and differences between Creole and Cajun music in Louisiana?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Alain Locke, scholar
Ross Posnock, on Alain Locke in the article "Black Is Brilliant," in The New Republic, posted online yesterday, April 15:
"Locke regarded his iron confidence as his birthright as a proper and proud member of an old free black family of educators. The son and grandson of highly cultivated people on both sides, Locke was nearly blase about entering Harvard in 1904. His letters home from college bear little evidence of anxiety. By 1912 he was a professor of philosophy at Howard, where he would teach for four decades."
Posnock's article is a review-essay in response to the new Harris/Molesworth biography of Alain Locke. I have admired Locke for years, and am hoping to read the rest of Posnock's article on the man soon. For the last two weeks, I have been doing a little writing on music and film, and trying to imagine the future...Locke remains an inspiring figure.
"Locke regarded his iron confidence as his birthright as a proper and proud member of an old free black family of educators. The son and grandson of highly cultivated people on both sides, Locke was nearly blase about entering Harvard in 1904. His letters home from college bear little evidence of anxiety. By 1912 he was a professor of philosophy at Howard, where he would teach for four decades."
Posnock's article is a review-essay in response to the new Harris/Molesworth biography of Alain Locke. I have admired Locke for years, and am hoping to read the rest of Posnock's article on the man soon. For the last two weeks, I have been doing a little writing on music and film, and trying to imagine the future...Locke remains an inspiring figure.
Friday, April 3, 2009
Elizabeth Alexander, Poet
Elizabeth Alexander published her first book of poetry, The Venus Hottentot, in 1990, followed by the poetry collections Body of Life (1996), Antebellum Dream Book (2001), American Sublime (2005), and, with co-author Marilyn Nelson, Miss Crandall’s School for Young Ladies and Little Misses of Color (2008), a book for young adults. In her poetry Elizabeth Alexander captures the ideas, the moments, the perceptions, and the sensations, that are missed, usually, in the first and second drafts of history, the real stories of human lives. I found her American Sublime a particularly beautiful book and was surprised that her essays in The Black Interior were as interesting, as impressive. Alexander, who teaches in Yale’s African American Studies department, has a second, more recent, book of essays, Power and Possibility. She is a writer to watch, and to listen to, as much of America learned when she participated in the inauguration of President Barack Obama; but, more significantly, she will be, for a very long time, a poet whose work is to be read. There have been appreciative and critical comments made about the poem she wrote for that historic day in January, and I was curious to know what Elizabeth Alexander herself had learned from the experience (I sent her an e-mail query at the end of March and she quickly responded).
Daniel:
What did you learn about public poetry as a result of your inauguration experience?
Elizabeth Alexander:
"From the literally thousands of letter and emails I have received form strangers, I learned that so many people are open and receptive to public poetry. They meet it as it comes to them and respond with their own words, feelings, stories. That has been very powerful and affirming of the ability of art to have a place in the everyday lives of Americans."
Daniel:
What did you learn about public poetry as a result of your inauguration experience?
Elizabeth Alexander:
"From the literally thousands of letter and emails I have received form strangers, I learned that so many people are open and receptive to public poetry. They meet it as it comes to them and respond with their own words, feelings, stories. That has been very powerful and affirming of the ability of art to have a place in the everyday lives of Americans."
April, National Poetry Month
April has been National Poetry Month, established by the Academy of American Poets, since 1996, an opportunity to read and celebrate poetry and learn more about the nation’s historic literature and the work being made now. Poets Out Loud is a web site featuring poets reading poetry, sponsored by the publisher W.W. Norton, which published Robert Pinsky’s anthology on poems to read out loud. There are, also, recommendations for teachers in how to present poetry at Scholastic’s online page and that of TeacherVision.
Poets Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, and Rose Styron participated in the Academy of American Poets April 1st event at New York's Lincoln Center, “Poetry and the Creative Mind,” reciting poetry, as did trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (reading Sterling Brown’s “Riverbank Blues”), actress Maggie Gyllenhaal (reading Akhmatova), scientist Harold Varmus (reading John Donne) and others, an official beginning to April as poetry month.
Poets Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, and Rose Styron participated in the Academy of American Poets April 1st event at New York's Lincoln Center, “Poetry and the Creative Mind,” reciting poetry, as did trumpeter Wynton Marsalis (reading Sterling Brown’s “Riverbank Blues”), actress Maggie Gyllenhaal (reading Akhmatova), scientist Harold Varmus (reading John Donne) and others, an official beginning to April as poetry month.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Foolishness
I awake today in Louisiana, rather than New York. It is April Fool’s Day. Apparently, the top internet searches for the day, thus far, regard fashion model Heidi Klum’s pretending to be an ordinary worker for the television special “I Get That A Lot”; the story of a woman who starved her son for refusing to say “Amen” at mealtime; Sarah Palin’s replacement by Newt Gingrich for a scheduled Republican dinner; the retirement of automaker General Motors’ chief executive officer; and the death, as a result of heart disease, of actor-singer Andy Hallett (“Angel”). Several of these topics suggest mediocrity of mind—but, then, it is April Fool’s Day.
Yesterday, was Arts Advocacy Day. I have thought often that troubled people require more art not less; and Morris Dickstein’s article on culture during the great economic depression of the 1920 argues that. In today’s Los Angeles Times, cultural critic Morris Dickstein recalls, “The engine of the arts in the ‘30s was not escapism, as we sometimes imagine, but speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise. When Warner Bros. -- which avoided bankruptcy with its lively and topical gangster films, backstage musicals and Depression melodramas -- promised a 'New Deal in Entertainment,' it was offering the cultural equivalent of the New Deal, a psychological stimulus package that might energize a shaken public” (“How song, dance and movies bailed us out of the Depression,” April 1, 2009).
Of course, money itself makes up for a lot (if it cannot buy friends, it can help you forget you do not have any). New Scientist, Issue 2700: “In a study to be published soon in the journal Psychological Science, [Kathleen] Vohs and psychologists Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, Tallahassee, found that people who felt rejected by others, or were subjected to physical pain, were subsequently less likely to give a monetary gift in a game situation. The researchers then went on to show that just handling paper money could reduce the distress associated with social exclusion, and also diminish the physical pain caused by touching very hot water” (Mark Buchanan, “Why Money Messes with Your Mind,” March 18, 2009).
Louisiana has a unique cultural heritage (it has been multicultural always), and is known especially for its food, language, and music; and it is a culture that gets a lot of enthusiasm but not always adequate financial support: and, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is proposing a budget that makes severe cuts in the state’s arts funding for the coming year; and the Louisiana Partnership for the Arts is asking concerned citizens to write state legislators and ask them to restore arts funding and support the arts.
According to ArtDaily.org: “This spring, from now through May 24, the New Orleans Museum of Art presents ‘A Discourse in Abstraction: Jennifer Odem and NOMA’s Permanent Collection,’ an exhibition of new sculpture by the New Orleans-based artist juxtaposed with modern and contemporary works from the permanent collection.
‘A Discourse in Abstraction’ is the first in a series of exhibitions dedicated to highlighting Louisiana contemporary art. Situated in dialogue with abstract paintings from NOMA’s permanent collection, Odem’s works position themselves at the crossroads between monumentality and playfulness. Combining materials such as Hydro-stone with flocking fiber, Odem’s sculptures walk the line between extreme contrasts.”
The Hollywood Reporter has announced the many of the big media companies are experiencing a decline in the value of their stock. As well, Bloomberg says that Time Warner is no longer the largest media company, in terms of financial returns (that would be Disney, followed by News Corps). And, it is said that Conde Nast is letting a bunch of receptionists go and Forbes is planning staff cuts. It is always sad when hard-working people lose their jobs—it’s less so when billionaires lose a few dollars.
Blender, the music publication, is going out of business. I was not a fan. Its sensibility was relentlessly superficial. The “consumer guide” approach, so affixed to current taste expressed as snark, is part of the reason for the diminishment and disrespect of popular music criticism. Hardley remembered is the tradition of thoughtful criticism and cultural intrepretation—lengthy and logical, explanatory and exploratory.
Even some of the better publications do not serve us well. I think of how the New York Review of Books ignored Barack Obama for months and months and then, when Obama was winning in the presidential campaign, the publication used writer Daryl Pinckney (his books: High Cotton, Out There) to play catch-up and introduce its audience to the man and his ideas. Meanwhile, now, President Obama is in England, meeting with the world’s top foreign leaders (there’s a nice photograph of him and his wife with the queen of England, following his meeting with the British prime minister). In England, there are mass demonstrations against capitalism, against things as they are.
Yesterday, was Arts Advocacy Day. I have thought often that troubled people require more art not less; and Morris Dickstein’s article on culture during the great economic depression of the 1920 argues that. In today’s Los Angeles Times, cultural critic Morris Dickstein recalls, “The engine of the arts in the ‘30s was not escapism, as we sometimes imagine, but speed, energy and movement at a time of economic stagnation and social malaise. When Warner Bros. -- which avoided bankruptcy with its lively and topical gangster films, backstage musicals and Depression melodramas -- promised a 'New Deal in Entertainment,' it was offering the cultural equivalent of the New Deal, a psychological stimulus package that might energize a shaken public” (“How song, dance and movies bailed us out of the Depression,” April 1, 2009).
Of course, money itself makes up for a lot (if it cannot buy friends, it can help you forget you do not have any). New Scientist, Issue 2700: “In a study to be published soon in the journal Psychological Science, [Kathleen] Vohs and psychologists Xinyue Zhou of Sun Yat-Sen University in Guangzhou, China, and Roy Baumeister of Florida State University, Tallahassee, found that people who felt rejected by others, or were subjected to physical pain, were subsequently less likely to give a monetary gift in a game situation. The researchers then went on to show that just handling paper money could reduce the distress associated with social exclusion, and also diminish the physical pain caused by touching very hot water” (Mark Buchanan, “Why Money Messes with Your Mind,” March 18, 2009).
Louisiana has a unique cultural heritage (it has been multicultural always), and is known especially for its food, language, and music; and it is a culture that gets a lot of enthusiasm but not always adequate financial support: and, Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal is proposing a budget that makes severe cuts in the state’s arts funding for the coming year; and the Louisiana Partnership for the Arts is asking concerned citizens to write state legislators and ask them to restore arts funding and support the arts.
According to ArtDaily.org: “This spring, from now through May 24, the New Orleans Museum of Art presents ‘A Discourse in Abstraction: Jennifer Odem and NOMA’s Permanent Collection,’ an exhibition of new sculpture by the New Orleans-based artist juxtaposed with modern and contemporary works from the permanent collection.
‘A Discourse in Abstraction’ is the first in a series of exhibitions dedicated to highlighting Louisiana contemporary art. Situated in dialogue with abstract paintings from NOMA’s permanent collection, Odem’s works position themselves at the crossroads between monumentality and playfulness. Combining materials such as Hydro-stone with flocking fiber, Odem’s sculptures walk the line between extreme contrasts.”
The Hollywood Reporter has announced the many of the big media companies are experiencing a decline in the value of their stock. As well, Bloomberg says that Time Warner is no longer the largest media company, in terms of financial returns (that would be Disney, followed by News Corps). And, it is said that Conde Nast is letting a bunch of receptionists go and Forbes is planning staff cuts. It is always sad when hard-working people lose their jobs—it’s less so when billionaires lose a few dollars.
Blender, the music publication, is going out of business. I was not a fan. Its sensibility was relentlessly superficial. The “consumer guide” approach, so affixed to current taste expressed as snark, is part of the reason for the diminishment and disrespect of popular music criticism. Hardley remembered is the tradition of thoughtful criticism and cultural intrepretation—lengthy and logical, explanatory and exploratory.
Even some of the better publications do not serve us well. I think of how the New York Review of Books ignored Barack Obama for months and months and then, when Obama was winning in the presidential campaign, the publication used writer Daryl Pinckney (his books: High Cotton, Out There) to play catch-up and introduce its audience to the man and his ideas. Meanwhile, now, President Obama is in England, meeting with the world’s top foreign leaders (there’s a nice photograph of him and his wife with the queen of England, following his meeting with the British prime minister). In England, there are mass demonstrations against capitalism, against things as they are.
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