JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

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.

Charlie Rose repeated a March 2011 interview with David Brooks last night. Brooks was promoting his book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement. The book, as Brooks described it, is an allegory. Two fictional characters illustrate ideas. The ideas are drawn from psychological and sociological academic studies.

Some reviews indicate Brooks did not inhabit the characters, did not bring them to life, and the science might not be fully explored either. However, you don’t read such books for depth, but to get a feel for the landscape: a bright man trying to open a curtain so you can see what is being thought about in the realm of human behavior.

Brooks’ sensibility is quite appealing. He is someone who is “nice” without seeming weak. Brooks gives nice a good name. Brooks has underlying beliefs but sees no reason why arguments have to ensue. This is somewhat quixotic, as many people just want to argue, which often seems more the point for them, and so ideas are put aside no matter what someone like Brooks might wish. But to a remarkable degree, in the adversarial left-wing environment of the NYT, as it is now constituted, Brooks appears to be accepted and liked by the partisan community. Brooks has been damned as the conservative that liberals like. It isn’t really a condemnation at all, but rather a tribute to the man that he can force focus on ideas in the roiling emotional pit of public life.

I have to admit, and this is a bit unfair to Brooks as I have not read his book, but the ideas he discussed on Rose sound very like a New Age Benjamin Franklin redux. Work hard, care, come from or find a good environment, and you too can make it. Making it, prestige seeking, is one of the most off putting things about the NYT actually. The NYT and MSM in general have a conformist, career centered focus — rather than a values based or true achievement focus. Too often achievement is measured by salary (even, weird as it seems, inherited wealth), truly slimed by fame or popularity metrics, or simply defined as rising in the chosen bureaucracy — without questioning the cohort’s nature. I often have the same doubts about Brooks — a conventional, unquestioned deference to honorifics you could call it.

Brooks draws a larger circle than most commentators, seeing that the mysteries surrounding us can’t be easily formularized. Things are complicated, which is obvious, but in a meme loving, consensus culture, it is salutary to hear that things might not be so easy to understand or fix. Lopping off the ambiguities to fit the purity of idea doesn’t work in art, in life, or in serious thinking. At least Brooks gives complexity a try.

NYT book editor Tanenhaus has a brief, interesting conversation with the impressive Harold Bloom. Bloom’s stated idea in the interview is that writers who came after the classics were in a state of internal disarray (“Anxiety of Influence”), feeling in essence that everything had been said.

So Bloom places Whitman between Emerson and the King James Bible. This is a critics’s trope, where influence explains or places artists. It is a false approach I feel, because the process of influence is, as Matisse said, a kind of wrestling. Taking out of what you admire something you need for yourself; wrestling, again and again, until self emerges. But no doubt much more than two encounters were required for Whitman to become the great poet he was, and much circumspection was necessary for the poet’s voice to coalesce.

This formulation, that influence is struggle rather than adjusting to predecessors, does agree with Bloom’s formulation in one way: artists like Joyce or Kafka, as Bloom says, are part of an ongoing tradition and not “modernists”. Anymore than the human spirit is more modern now than it was 400 years ago. Art can’t be created in awe of anything or anyone other than life and experience.

Bloom’s impressive memory is in evidence at the beginning of the interview as he recites a magical Crane poem — Bloom called it incantatory. He felt that committing great works to memory meant a lot in his life. Helen Vendler, the great critic of poetry as well felt that her early memorization was crucial to her love of poetry. This is in contrast to the idea that memorization is a mind numbing and useless activity. But Vendler and Bloom are robust corrections to that idea.

Bloom also mentions his discomfort with the identity politics cohort trying to impose on great literature; he justly feels that the outward descriptions of creators have nothing to do with what they have mined in their work. It is actually a racist and prissy, reductive pronouncement — saying an artist is their sexual orientation, skin color or gender. Schools of critical thinking have become schools of indoctrination.

Tanenhaus was a student of Bloom’s at Yale. His review of his teacher’s work is fairly convoluted — it never really clarified for me. Bloom, in the quotations provided, is himself at times obscure. Tanenhaus does however have embedded in the noise a good number of subtle insights.

Bill Keller of the Kingdom of the NYT makes a point that he knows will be labeled as Luddite, but he persists admirably. Keller despairs of new media and its illusion: virtual connection.

Keller says,

My mistrust of social media is intensified by the ephemeral nature of these communications. They are the epitome of in-one-ear-and-out-the-other, which was my mother’s trope for a failure to connect…

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

The subtleties of human connection, all our sense data aggregating to patterns of connection, will unlikely be communicated with a digital filter in the near future, if ever.

Just finished listening to the audiobook of Lawrence Krauss’ biography of Richard Feyman, Quantum Man. The book is read by Krauss, who is a distinguished physicist himself — the insider knowledge helps,  as the quantum world is not intuitive. Krauss knew Feynman and admired him enormously. Feynman is such an interesting character, both in the scope and depth of his mind and richness of his personality.

Although the science is obscure in its details, the fundamental nature of the subject expands quickly — much of the subject matter spins off into philosophy. No surprise that after Newton determinism became a dominant influence in the mental framework of the West; Spinoza and Kant among many others. The idea of causation in the West spiked after Newton.

Bill Gates has put online Feynman’s “Messenger” lectures at Cornell (You will need Silverlight). This is a legendary series of seven lectures that inspired many physicists. Feynman worked hard on these lectures; the agreement was that he would only give these lectures once.

In addition, there are a number of clips from various biographical documentaries on youtube — so this also filled out the charismatic (overused but accurate word in this case) man for me.

Some random notes / thoughts:

I had not realized the crucial part the young Freeman Dyson had played in Feynman’s recognition. Dyson is an unusually modest man; he seems immune to the sci-careerism in his field. When asked about his being passed over for honors due, Krauss reports that Dyson simply expressed gratitude to have had such an excellent life, in such wonderful surroundings, and to be able to do the work he cares about. Dyson is at the Institute for Advanced Studies, if I remember correctly.

(Changing gears for a moment, I ran across this fascinating paper by Dyson, “TIME WITHOUT END: PHYSICS AND BIOLOGY IN AN OPEN UNIVERSE,” a speculation about the heat death of the universe. The first part is philosophical and for the general public.)

Feynman’s intuitive way of working, not building up from formalisms, as did Dirac, had a particularly energetic, American character. Feynman’s impatience, unpretentious grounding, and exploratory nature are noteworthy — you can see how those traits combined with a focused mind might yield great results.

The second lecture was particularly exciting: Feynman, a brilliant mathematician, describes the relation of physics and mathematics. The mysterious connection between mathematics and the physical world has long been noted. No second hand knowledge in Feynman’s lecture, but rather he explains the process of thinking a scientific genius uses to understand Nature with the tools of math. Feynman elucidated three principal ways of explaining the actions of the real world in numbers: Newton’s mathematics, action at a distance, and a minimal model for a mathematical explanation of the world. Feynman explains how Newton’s math, useful in the quotidian domain, is not of much use in the quantum realm; also, he explained that he felt the other two models will someday have to be united as a tool to explain the world.

Feynman notes — and this is truly a lifting of the curtain — the mysteries he perceives. He notes such things as the oddity that there are so many ways to describe the same actions in nature. That every instance in Nature is always that, unique, and never a general case. That it is impossible to extrapolate action from the micro world of the quanta to the macro world of physical reality. Feynman explains that physics uses not axioms, but modes of thinking; for example, Riemannian geometry might be exactly the tool needed by Einstein, even though it was formulated 75 years before Einstein worked on his theories. Mathematics is the generality and physics the specific, and so axioms don’t work in physics. Feynman explained that Einstein and Dirac made guesses as to how the physical world worked, and then used tools available (these mathematical models) that seemed most likely to help in the explanation.

I should add that I checked out Feynman’s paintings and drawings. They are competent but never got to expressing a true voice. He was a talented amateur. It was interesting to note that early on he was dismissive of the arts, but clearly, as time went on, began to realize there was something there. In one lecture he was dismissive of CP Snow’s Two Cultures, but in his trying to learn to draw and paint reflected a counter tendency — deeper and wiser — that there was something in art that is parallel to the complexity and beauty of the physical world, but which exists in the individual human soul and in the imagination. He would recoil hearing that, but I feel eventually he would admit it, if he had had the time to evolve that side of himself.

Feynman’s love for and gratitude to his father were beautifully expressed in a youtube video. He explained the way his father helped him understand in a deeper sense. People may know the name of a bird, and there are many names in different cultures of course, but that tells you nothing about the bird, said Feynman’s father. The difference between a name and knowledge.

His father was distrustful of the honorifics and uniforms of status. His father pointed out that the costumes of life are just that, and underneath, we all share a common humanity. People bowing before others, because of their uniform, or societal status, repelled Feynman and his father. A useful skepticism implanted early on. Following on this, Feynman did not even trust established laws of science, but derived them himself. This is parallel to the development of many artists, who, with their own individual emphasis, recapitulate in their work the history of art.

Feynman spent a long time trying to return to the bestower an honor many in science would lust for: membership in the National Academy of Sciences. Feynman even considered refusing the Nobel Prize, but felt that people would think he felt too good for such an honor, when really, he simply saw it a decision amongst people and of no real importance. The important thing was the knowledge he had gained of Nature. He remembered seeing scientists in one field trying to keep honors from chemists because they  did not want to sully their grandiose clique with mere chemists. He mentioned Arista, an honorary society of his early schooling, where all they talked about was who they would let in. He laughed at the idea of IQ scores. A truly egalitarian American spirit was Richard Feynman — all from the seed of his father’s character and evolved in his son Richard.

To be continued…