JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A number of great thoughts pop up in Adam Kirsch’s review of a book by William Gass, Life Sentences.

Gass insists that “neither story (which can be told in many media and in many ways) nor meaning (which can be expressed with similar flexibility) are active elements in literary work.
…
“What works of art testify to is the presence in this world of consciousness, consciousness of many extraordinary kinds,” …

… “not that of the artists themselves, for theirs are often much the same as any other person’s.…It is not the writer’s awareness I am speaking of but the awareness he or she makes. For that is what fine writing does: it creates a unique verbal consciousness.”

I’m quoting this because I agree with it. Not quite in the way Kirsch describes it in summary, but close enough; I spot on agree as far as the way Gass says it and would expand the idea to all the arts.

Art is about consciousness. Art is an expression of the cloud of identity which is what an individual really is, expressed at a moment in time. It is not a lecture, nor affirmation, nor negation of concept, nor political statement, nor craft decoration to impress, but an opening up of the spirit, mind and heart. Those elements of Being coalesce hopefully, and return the work, which the viewer can better sense than describe.

Art becomes something other than a single person, as the process affects the outcome, like a quantum experiment. That is what persists in art; art which succeeds. A unique voice, not of the ego, as the pop culture often portrays it, but of the sense of living; of a single life, speaking to others at the most fundamental, and trusting (because that is what civilization is) the audience to engage — sharing a brief portal of time.

I once asked an old man in art school what he regretted. He said he wished he had traveled more.

This piece, recorded at tumblr by Kelly Oxford, was written by a nurse who cared for those in the last stages of life — in palliative care — and records the caregiver’s conclusions.

Common themes from those who had gone home to die:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.
3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.
4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Sometimes we don’t allow ourselves to remember the full context — the reasons we made the choices we did, and are wishing rather that life were different. Whether facing death really does clear the fog from our eyes, or is yet another delusion of clarity in our lives, is not for us to know, I suppose.

It was immensely fascinating listening to David Brooks on Charlie Rose the other night. Brooks instantiates the standards he espouses. You don’t feel he is thrusting his ego at you when he talks about ideas. He isn’t trying to prove he is smart and has all the answers. He sorts things out and provides some nuance. “Nuance,” there’s a quality that long ago evaporated into the ether.

It was a wide ranging discussion that seemed to be generated by a roundtable Obama has yearly as Obama sorts out what direction he wants to take. Brooks gave his own take, presumably what he told Obama:

He feels that Obama sees himself as an FDR progressive; that the Democrats tend toward parsing policy to install that agenda. Brooks feels the times are too different to apply the FDR model. The vaunted “vision thing,” as they used to say about Bush, or Bush said about himself, is not Obama’s strength. Brooks felt it should be.

Brooks feels that the country needs to feel hope which comes from a clearly defined destination for the society. He feels the sense of motivation has been lost as the sense of unfairness has grown. Whether on the Right, who despise entitlements as vitiating motivation, or the Left, who despise Wall Street, it amounts to the same thing finally. The country is enraged. It’s a Howard Beale world these days. People are mad as hell and they won’t take it anymore. More plainly: people who play by the rules don’t see the results of their hard work pay off fairly; or see others get the same or better without effort, or with unfair connections to power.

Along the way he touched on the toxic effect of the popular culture (although he didn’t feel it had any decisive effect — I disagree — it is primary). He mentioned an idea Mickey Kaus had some time ago, — that the status, or respectability as Brooks calls it, of middle class attainment is the real goal for many rather than great wealth, as junk culture would suggest.

Brooks also engaged in some goofy theorizing: he felt “creativity comes from networks”— his examples were Steve Jobs and Picasso. I won’t go into the Steve Jobs reference, but as to art: Brooks thinks Picasso brought the defaults of African Art into the mainstream of western art. By this estimate Picasso networked African Art. Hmmm.

Cultural issues are more complex than politics. Picasso’s work could as easily, in its cubist manifestation, be thought of as an absorption of scientific ideas of the time, as a Newtonian, logical universe, became the probabilistic chaos of quantum physics. Such scientific and philosophical ideas do enter art, even if artists don’t realize it themselves. The surface absorption of African Art, and it was a shallow, undigested inclusion, is a surface manifestation of the groundbreaking work of Picasso. But even with the drifting analysis of creativity, Brooks said many insightful things.

The takeaway: Brooks feels that entitlements, tax reform, and the culture of the family (family values — Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s emphasis) are the principal issues in reviving America. He didn’t say it with any cogency, but he clearly doesn’t think Obama has the chops to deliver on either a vision for the future of America, or an insight into the essential issues facing the country. In other words, Obama would be a disaster if re-elected. This has been plain for a long time.

Brooks never did address his complete failure to see Obama as the media construction he is; Brooks’ failure to identify early on Obama’s dissociated self-absorption, his dubious affiliations, and cynical center, are discrediting for a commentator. Brooks said Obama is more liberal than he understood. But what he still doesn’t understand is that Obama is just going with the flow —just another cynical politician who wants to be elected but has no idea what he wants to do, and is liberal when he wants hoots of approval from the crowd. No core values, just career. This is probably just as true of Romney.

Brooks’ ideas could be summarized as a renewal of Isaiah Berlin, where the emphasis is on having many ideas, with flexibility being the primary value, rather than a single “feel-good” delusion that will inevitably fall apart or turn dangerously sour. And has.

Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, an organization which advocates more taxes on those earning a million bucks or more, had its advocate on the Newshour today. It is a fascinating subject. I’ll meander a bit…

The individual doing the advocacy on the Newshour had started many businesses in California. He seemed an admirable man. Not like that ingratiating rich guy who in a public meeting with Obama said, “Please raise my taxes.” Obama himself seemed slightly disgusted by this deferential showboating.

But the Newshour millionaire had more substance. It’s difficult to disagree. Since at least Clinton, America has been drifting into a banana republic. It is hard to have a political democracy and such a level of economic inequality. (But to be clear, the tax raise on the rich is purely symbolic, a cup of money in an ocean of debt. Symbolism though, has its value here.)

This is pretty much what the Tea Party and the Occupy movements are protesting. Lawrence Lessig said that the mistake these movements made was letting themselves be co-opted by the political parties, because those parties are both vitiated with advocacy for privilege. At the beginning, the Tea Party said it was not allied with any party, but the media made sure that was suppressed until partisanship tainted the point the Tea Party was making: we are spending more than we have.

And then there is the exacerbation of the current system: the rich can afford advocates, and those advocates install themselves as counselors and advisors and politicians. And politics is money. So the balance gets further tilted to the advantage of the rich, and of large corporate entities. (Obama’s principal issue in Congress was campaign finance law, which he eschewed as he went off to raise close to a billion bucks. He is doing it again right now. So much for principle.)

The media is all for the tax the millionaire slogans. And, of course, Brian Williams and crew, as a particularly annoying example, are enormously wealthy. But it makes them look good…until you look at their own behavior:

Chelsea Clinton is now at NBC News, playing journalist. NBC is giving her a feel-good role; so it doesn’t seem they have hired someone on the basis of wealth and fame and connections. That’s democracy at NBC, with Brian Williams, Rockstar NewsReader @Rock Center.

Noblesse oblige — the responsibilities of inherited privilege — does not exist as a value for the wealthy anymore. Anonymously given good works have morphed into high visibility public work for charities and photo-ops — more publicity than substance. That is, the very same advantages given to the very very wealthy in the tax codes, is also installed in the popular culture.

Walter Russell Mead:

… the increasing sense that this country is run by a hereditary celebrity class is one of the most corrosive and dangerous forces eating away at our common life.

It is a sorry picture: self-anointed journalist mandarins, bringing us self-replicating privilege rather than rewarding ability or having any discernible set of objective standards; in some cases, joining the very movement they are charged with covering.

My own take: tax the millionaires. Japan, at least at one time, was at a salary comparative of about a 3X ratio of CEO to factory worker. America needs to move toward a psychologically balanced approach to wealth, without destroying incentive. The millionaire on Newshour seemed to indicate such balance would cause no decline in motivation.

But there should be more: inherited wealth should be taxed substantially. Obama, and this organization of rich “folk,” should say, most honorably, my money does not go to my children. My money goes to an organization helping children. Isn’t that what Warren Buffet is doing in his stated intention about the dispensation of his wealth? Wouldn’t that get Americans out of the starting gate at least on the same racetrack? Didn’t Bill Gates state such an intention himself?

…and don’t forget campaign finance laws to keep the system about more than money.

Charlie Rose’s wonderful lunges at understanding Shakespeare and Hamlet was so provocative it had me noting things to myself:

I had often thought of Hamlet as a representation of a stepson’s possibly delusional, murderous rage – but the rage of a child, not an adult.

Hamlet is about being human because it confronts the dilemma of being human; our deep emotions and sense of right, our sense of unfairness and frustration at the conventions of society; Hamlet is about emotion choking action rather than generating it.

Hamlet can be thought an argument against revenge: about the futility of revenge, as the target seldom suffers as much as the enraged.

Although there was much tortured effort at understanding why Shakespeare persists with an almost biblical weight, his work, like the Bible itself, would only persist if the language and insight were of equal density.

The performances that were intercut revealed clearly that there is no barrier between the brilliance of the writing and the audience — the route of true art; this despite the compactness and arcane nature of the language; it still connects.

What was woefully left out – the English stain of anti-Semitism in Merchant of Venice, a clear marker that Shakespeare too was deeply flawed.

The best commentators were Greenblatt and Harold Bloom. Those who deal with the mechanics of the theater can never get it right, and don’t have the insight.

Of the performances:
Captain Picard and Richard Burton seemed Jon Lovitz Great Thespians – drawing attention to acting rather than character.

Olivier and Branagh clearly the best, most brilliant of actors. Astonishing in the revelatory power of their performances.

Rose’s brilliant question: Is Hamlet a sympathetic character?

Shakespeare evokes a truth academic scrutiny alone cannot parse; the meaningless question, asked of his plays, of life, and by Charlie Rose: What does it mean? It means, Shakespeare wisely answers, that there are no pat answers; that the human estate is ambiguous and can be noble.

Someone at metafilter was looking for the long loping rhythms of the 19th century in contemporary writing. There was accord that there is no one who writes like that anymore. Probably true.

One commenter noted an essay by William James, to show the style at its masterly peak.

But the subject of the essay is what most interested me: that of bling, reputation, and the evidence of one’s own eyes. This is an issue that keeps recurring to me as I look at the “expert” classes and their pronunciamentos as dribbled by the media. If you haven’t figured out that the process of gaining a reputation is filled with holes by the time you are nineteen you might never. But some people are predisposed to confusing the uniform with the wearer, the degree with the intelligence, the rhetoric for the character.

This essay by James, besides its beautiful winding prose and brilliant intelligence, makes a point about such badge seekers and their lapdogs. Things have not changed much from the 1903 essay to contemporary times. Maybe it is just that Americans tend to seek consensus, as Tocqueville noted, so degrees are a quick and easy way to rate, without thinking, or testing your own judgment.

An overqualified candidate rejected by a college solely for lack of a Ph.D. Or rather, first accepted, and then rejected when the horror of his three letter nakedness was revealed.

William James and colleagues wrote to the college which rejected the candidate:

… informing his new President that this signified nothing as to his merits, that he was of ultra-Ph.D. quality, and one of the strongest men with whom we had ever had to deal.

But the truth was stated more coarsely by the other institution:

To our surprise we were given to understand in reply that the quality per se of the man signified nothing in this connection, and that the three magical letters were the thing seriously required. The College had always gloried in a list of faculty members who bore the doctor’s title, and to make a gap in the galaxy, and admit a common fox without a tail, would be a degradation impossible to be thought of. We wrote again, pointing out that a Ph.D. in philosophy would prove little anyhow as to one’s ability to teach literature; we sent separate letters in which we outdid each other in eulogy of our candidate’s powers, for indeed they were great…

The scholars at Harvard prevailed and the candidate was accepted.

James notes:

America is thus a nation rapidly drifting towards a state of things in which no man of science or letters will be accounted respectable unless some kind of badge or diploma is stamped upon him, and in which bare personality will be a mark of outcast estate. It seems to me high time to rouse ourselves to consciousness, and to cast a critical eye upon this decidedly grotesque tendency. Other nations suffer terribly from the Mandarin disease. Are we doomed to suffer like the rest?

The enormous response to the death of Steve Jobs is remarkable. For a public figure, a man who ran a corporation, to have entered the emotional life of so many is an affirmation of Jobs beyond his industry. People are grateful for the tools he made. For the enjoyment and possibility those tools have brought. The tools he made, or made possible, have opened so many possibilities for me in my work.

He was more identified with his multi-billion dollar corporation than people who run small businesses who have their name on the door. He didn’t push himself forward to gain fame; he was up front making presentations because he loved the products he was so involved in creating. He never felt a salesman — always an enthusiast who shared his audience’s pleasure. He had an aesthetic response to objects and tools. He was proud of what he did.

His signature quote: He didn’t give people what they wanted, he gave them what they didn’t know they wanted. That quality of breaking the mold and believing you can accomplish your self-set task is an essential of true creativity.

It also seems likely that the outpouring of sadness over the death of Steve Jobs has to do with his personality and the times. His body frail, but his spirit vigorous, even at the end; he had an optimism and belief in the future. A vibrant, creative individual at a time where there seem no leaders, no easy answers.

PBS broadcast a talk David Brooks gave at the Miller Center last night. It was not a recent broadcast – Brooks was speaking about our social selves and by indirection promoting his book, The Social Animal, as part of the project. The book had been published back in March. I don’t mean it was a cynical presentation, but it shows how discussion is framed in contemporary society.

I’d never watched Brooks in an extended presentation so it was interesting to see more of his character, beyond his gnomic assessments of politics. The generosity of his presentation struck me. Brooks wasn’t, as is the default, laboriously making a few points — the ideas spilled out of him — he wanted to give the audience an understanding about the ideas which excited him; he showed admirable wit and a warm, if a sometimes uncomfortably ingratiating side. This ingratiating side of Brooks is always in evidence, actually. Since he is a man of opinions, the self-deprecating demeanor can border on passive aggressive understatement.

The ideas he discussed circled the preeminence of intuition, emotion and what Hume called sentiment. Brooks quoted many studies as evidence of the primacy of our intuitive selves. All that we are grows out of that core of our intuitive life.

This is not a new premise, but in the current religio-science environment, that is, where science is seen as a religion, where people equate science and Truth, it had a cathartic quality. Science describes our best understanding about physical reality at the moment. It presents a small subset of human consciousness, or better, of being human. It provides no moral context nor meaningful insight about how to live a life. It simply helps set the stage for serious thinking. It does scare off the completely wacky, but too often welcomes the over wrought estimate it receives in a world where ideology vitiates the air. Unfortunately, science itself is subject to the same ideological bias (plate tectonics, “big bang” theory), and is not really meant to be the last word at any rate.

I’ve always thought we are principally emotional beings. Brooks’ tactic, of using reason to convince the audience that emotion is preeminent, and feeling the need to quote scientific studies to prove his point, can be seen to contradict the argument itself. The truth is that many studies about the more complex aspects of human nature are incredibly shallow and misleading. Sometimes they are cynically tendentious. The credulity Brooks ascribes to these studies speaks to media shallowness — the pool in which Brooks swims.

Brooks is a very decent individual, who values demeanor a bit too much, and puts way too much store in status markers. If you really want to understand the human enterprise read Shakespeare.

We’ve been listening to singer songwriter ladies’ man Leonard Cohen. A mention somewhere and we started listening via Spotify. Spotify seems it could establish a new standard for online listening. The prices seem high, but it is a nifty idea.

Who By Fire is our favorite song by Cohen. This piece, after some background checking, is based on the Unetanneh Tokef, an ancient Hebrew piyyut or hymn. Who shall live, and who shall die, the subtext. The excellent lyrics, as always with Cohen, performed with deep melancholy, truly resonate. His voice is not his strong point; it is the intelligence and poetic yearning that wins you over finally.

Cohen needs accompaniment, a good group of musicians behind him, and even some more subtle orchestration — something to give the work shape. The purity argument seldom works. We’re not talking Las Vegas glitz-ification here, although just such SNL satirical treatment springs to mind. Listen to Who By Fire in solo and accompanied version; the latter much rounder and more effective.

I wasn’t surprised to read Cohen is depressive. I was surprised to find he is a cult figure. Like Dylan, who has so much more range, Cohen gives pop music an honorable hook into traditional strains in human culture — both in poetry and music.

Cohen about the writing process:

…like a bear stumbling into a beehive or a honey cache: I’m stumbling right into it and getting stuck, and it’s delicious and it’s horrible and I’m in it and it’s not very graceful and it’s very awkward and it’s very painful and yet there’s something inevitable about it.

In 1998 Cohen said:

I feel that we’re in a very shabby moment, and neither the literary nor the musical experience really has its finger on the pulse of our crisis. From my point of view, we’re in the midst of a Flood of biblical proportions. It’s both exterior and interior. At this point it’s more devastating on the interior level, but it’s leaking into the real world. I see everybody holding on in their individual way to an orange crate, to a piece of wood, and we’re passing each other in this swollen river that has pretty well taken down all the landmarks, and pretty well overturned everything we’ve got. And people insist, under the circumstances, on describing themselves as ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’ It seems to me completely mad.”

Ahead of his time, was Cohen in that insight.

Since we are quoting: listening to that sensitive soul Anne Lamott, she quoted John Gardner about writing — about creative work as creating a dream,

Gardner said:

…the dream must be vivid and continuous.

All art shares that dream well spoken quality, because life has that quality.

Lamott also mentions Blake’s reminder, that we are here:

…to endure the beams of love.

This lively NYT book review considers the “addiction” of contemporary art to violence.

I admire the passion of the commentators in rebuking art conventions, author and reviewer alike, and the many points well-made, but I differ in some respects, and in emphasis.

I’ve thought about this issue of violence depicted in art over the years. It sticks out like a sore thumb among the many conformist defaults of contemporary art. But I wanted to meander a bit; to also briefly discuss some other things…first some disagreements with ideas in the article itself…

Kipnis, the NYT book reviewer, says:

The art of cruelty aestheticizes violence, in not necessarily scrupulous ways. It can be reckless and scattershot, provoked by the desire to make others feel as bad as the sufferers of injustice and trauma whose experiences are vicariously borrowed by artists shopping for shocks. It bludgeons audiences into getting the point.

This is all wrong. The motives of contemporary art as it pertains to violence has a simple etiology: it is expressing a transparent need for attention and desire for relevance. The audience is viewed as shallow and jaded, so their work, such artists figure, has to be like the pop culture. Such violence focused work is an act of self-flattery: “we are not like that”. The formula of the pop culture and that of the work under discussion is the same: titillate and deplore.

Also, a calculation about criticism:

Such grandiose condemnations about the horrors of life, or the exfoliations of injustice, often seek to insulate the artist. A cynical tactic, designed to make it seem that criticizing the work reflects insensitivity to the subject of injustice.

The art being discussed by Kipnis has given up on the audience and lusts now for the attention derived from cheap thrills. Museums and galleries often enable: they show and thus validate such work, themselves trying to compete with popular culture, rather than providing a context of understanding. The art bureaucracy does not realize that people go to museums to get away from the junk. Part of the problem are the gatekeepers lack of insight, part the cynical artists looking for market share.

When Pauline Kael wrote about the “poetry of violence” in Peckinpah’s movies she was trying to connect to and understand the audience’s need for catharsis and the artist’s conundrum when surrounded by popular culture; but in her effort to reject the snobby decorousness some think of as art, she enabled something worse.

It is not the depiction of violence that is deplorable. It is when violence is divorced in presentation from suffering and pain that it is immoral. Still worse, many works of art ask you to identify with the criminals, as if that is an act of solidarity in retribution against an unjust society. Robin Hood is transformed into a liberal fascist. What this NYT article misses is that sense of how successfully (or not) the art accomplishes the transformative experience, yielding empathy as the central metric, where before there was only sensationalism.

The author under review wants to change this aesthetic of violence,

[she] imagines [it] “might deliver us . . . to a more sensitive, perceptive, insightful, enlivened, collaborative and just way of inhabiting the earth.”

Oy. Here comes Al Gore. But, to be fair, the reviewer gives the author her due:

…[the author is] wonderfully fearless when it comes to belittling the well meaning, as critical of the “idiot compassion” of social justice seekers (too often patronizing and ineffectual) as she is of the misogynist gore in exploitation films. She suspects that the human condition is suffering.

I think Zen Buddhism might, in that last suspicion, have beaten her to the punch. So to speak.

Sometimes you feel there is a built in craving for conflict, like a craving for sweets. The audience for public debates and WrestleMania crowds aren’t that different in their emotional needs. If boredom or depression loom, those internecine venues can issue a siren call. No one is immune to the occasional shot of adrenaline.

The value of public political debates has devolved to vitriol. The left loves bigotry accusations, the right loves socialist accusations. Tough dads become the focus, saying respectively, you have to have compassion or be practical.This article says there actually is some grudging respect for each other in the political activism sphere. The article indicates it is more the mechanics of activism that is admired in their adversary, rather than a respect for commitment:

“We’re trying to compete with ActBlue but they’re way, way ahead of us. We’re playing catch-up,” said John Hawkins of Right Wing News. “Their panels are for advanced activism. This is basic, for getting into activism.” A sign in the hallway of RightOnline advertised “proven technology used by millions of Democrats.”

Speaking of this, David Carr’s NYT media blog did an excellent job nailing the Keith Olbermann phenomenon.

Olbermann is the left’s answer to Glenn Beck. I haven’t listened to Beck, but my guess is that Olbermann is funnier, more clever, but more deeply neurotic. Some of his former colleagues say the estimate of Olbermann’s difficult personality is overstated, but they miss the point; it is not as colleague, but as demagogue that Olbermann vitiates the debate.

Olbermann, like many fanatics, projects his own problems onto his opponents. He politicizes his emotional problems, and luckily, at least for the deplorable Charlie-Sheen-break-down-in-public MSM spectacle machine, Olbermann has no self-correcting mechanism. The frontal lobe has stopped filtering, if it ever did. That is key to Olbermann’s success in the mob culture.

“Each time [Olbermann] came into conflict at a job, he managed, through skill and a bottomless appetite for payback, to advance his career,” says David Carr @WaPo.

With MSNBC…

[Olbermann]…left [MSNBC] with no fanfare and no notice to his staff — he spent months nursing grudges on Twitter and plotting his return. …[Olbermann's] knack for forming toxic workplace relationships has followed him wherever he goes…Charley Steiner, who worked at ESPN with Olbermann, is quoted as saying that he might have been a genius, but “socially, he was, well, a special-needs student.”

Carr says that Olbermann is, “The one who likes the camera,” — more than the audience. Carr gets it. He understands that it is not about ideas with Olbermann types, but rather an infantile need for attention. Olbermann has contempt for the audience, as do all narcissists, except as the audience willingly plays the role of anonymous sycophants. The conventions of celebrity culture have troubling consequences when political activists form around narcissists but significant issues are being discussed. When politics adopts those pop culture defaults of hagiographic cults, values are traded-in for ego.