Monday, March 26, 2007
The Sorrows of Young Werther
I don't know why I bothered, since I hate Romanticism (with a big R or a little r), but at least it was very short.
What I principally can't stand, above and beyond the extreme self-absorption that seems to constitute the contemplative imaginings of self-style Romantics, is the extremely tight vocabulary one finds in their work. This is largely the case with the English poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron--who comprise virtually the entire mini-canon of the period and are almost always listed exactly in that order), but Goethe, at least in the translation I read, could be included. They employ a tiny battery of words, and always use them in superlatives. Lightning is always terrifying. A hideous peasant will invariably overheat some 'tremulous excitations of the soul.' Someone is generally imprison'd in a bower, or espying a glen. It reminds me of the playlist to a classic rock radio station. How many times can you turn on Q104.3 and think, "All right! 'Layla'!"? Yet Romantic literature presumes that everyone who came before them never fully appreciated just how beautiful a sunset is, even though they allow themselves recourse only to a small group of adjectives.
Moreover, while the emotions that the sublime inspires in these poets might have been almost new then, in hindsight they enjoy a surprisingly narrow emotional range. Werther, in self-imposed exile, falls in love with a woman who is engaged to one of his friends. His delirious emotional highs and despondent abysses are only complemented by noting how easily he can shift from one extreme to another. I don't think the literary merit of a text dissolves in diagnosing its author with bipolar disorder, but neither do I think it bespeaks some sort of genius. Mozart's The Magic Flute, for example, was written almost contemporaneously, and contains a love plot with very little in the way of reasons-why, but it's a much more beautiful story. Such truncated foreplay, as it were, is more of a convention of the time than a hallmark of love's purity or true essence.
As for purity--in that we have a real locus of pseudo-Christian body hatred. Werther exclaims that his love for Charlotte and his intentions are of the purest, as if that's supposed to win her over. I assume he means his desire is sexless, and therefore holy? This is why I can never get behind even the most watered-down religious ethic, because even a gentle pantheism that appears inimical to the crude, crusading violence of Christianity carries these strong metaphysical holdovers of body hatred masquerading as profundity, as an eternal truth. Werther/Goethe speak as if the epistolary text chronicles some raw emotional revelation. In reality, it's a series of cliches that aspire to a sort of middlebrow "poetricity." It's proto-emo.
Susan Sontag's essay "Piety Without Content" discusses the trend (which was in full force in the ecumenical mid-20th century and has subsided amid evangelical fervor and the proliferation of religions that don't fall within Western monotheism) toward making "religiousness" some kind of personal or artistic virtue. "For a believer the concept of 'religion'...makes no sense as a category," she writes, because people don't ascribe to "religion" when they accept the specific tenets of a particular faith. Catholics don't abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent because it's "religious," they do it because it's part of Catholicism. "To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition."
She further criticizes the idea that all "serious" ideas contain some sort of religious valence, or that all major thinkers (including atheists like Marx and Freud) can be subsumed under the smug heading of "religious teachers" because the content of their writings overlaps with what religious traditions speak to. I think Goethe's book exemplifies an identical tendency with respect to poetry and what it does. There is a strong tendency to emphasize content at the expense of form. In a religious context, it's the insistence that everything important is somehow, some way religious. With poetry (or, better, Poetry), it's the idea that the only way to express these important or eternal verities is through a lofty style that's full of shibboleths so that everyone who hears or reads it knows perfectly well that the speaker has switched to the proper mode befitting the awesomeness of the ideas. The advent of free verse produced some of the best poetry in English (Stevens, Pound, Moore, Bishop) and then sort of declined into an excessive democratization and reduction of standards that, while maybe even necessary, totally sacrificed form and allowed the teenagers of divorced parents to whine their way closer to the canon. If there's any avant-garde left, it's going to be found in revolutions of form.
For the Romantics, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the ability not to live a life of abject suffering, to maybe travel a little or spend most of your days in reflective contemplation was starting to trickle down to the haute bourgeoisie. That led to new art. But Adorno is right when he says that art is temporary. Frescoes fade, plays are lost, statuary corrodes, buildings burn down. And the relevance of a given piece or text for one time period will become muted--until, if it enters the pantheon, it's simply a commodity, something reprinted in textbooks and stored in the Louvre that you know all about way before you actually travel to see it.
People fall back upon Poetry for the same reason. They're terrified of the impermanence that is their fate and want some undemanding, unambitious absolutes to navigate by, and the enduring popularity of Romanticism is largely because it's a repository of post-Christian dictates about Life. There's always this impulse to install a certain swath of Art as an eternal set of texts or pieces that establish some absolute truths, and that seems to be to be a knee-jerk reaction based on fear. It probably terrifies many people to imagine a future where nobody reads Shakespeare, but I don't know if that would be so bad. It wouldn't be necessarily a dumbed-down dystopia. Even today, the most that non-scholars care about "the Bard" (eww!) is virtually lip service. I haven't seen one of his plays performed since college. Theater itself seems to be trapped in perpetual crisis mode. Nothing has unlimited staying power. Romanticism isn't just "unfashionable," or something you could breezily dismiss, but it's just not as interesting as more recent genres/styles. There's a sense of being dazzled that I don't even care to recapture. One could argue that we've been poisoned by our own acute self-consciousness, but that's just what characterizes this era and there's nothing we can do about it unless we're born as, say, Forrest Gump.
Goethe completely sacrifices form for dubiously Eternal content about 'the soul,' which, since it doesn't exist at all, can hardly be called words to live by. If I were a Stalinist, I would say "Burn this bourgeois crap." Instead, just don't read it.
What I principally can't stand, above and beyond the extreme self-absorption that seems to constitute the contemplative imaginings of self-style Romantics, is the extremely tight vocabulary one finds in their work. This is largely the case with the English poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Shelley, Byron--who comprise virtually the entire mini-canon of the period and are almost always listed exactly in that order), but Goethe, at least in the translation I read, could be included. They employ a tiny battery of words, and always use them in superlatives. Lightning is always terrifying. A hideous peasant will invariably overheat some 'tremulous excitations of the soul.' Someone is generally imprison'd in a bower, or espying a glen. It reminds me of the playlist to a classic rock radio station. How many times can you turn on Q104.3 and think, "All right! 'Layla'!"? Yet Romantic literature presumes that everyone who came before them never fully appreciated just how beautiful a sunset is, even though they allow themselves recourse only to a small group of adjectives.
Moreover, while the emotions that the sublime inspires in these poets might have been almost new then, in hindsight they enjoy a surprisingly narrow emotional range. Werther, in self-imposed exile, falls in love with a woman who is engaged to one of his friends. His delirious emotional highs and despondent abysses are only complemented by noting how easily he can shift from one extreme to another. I don't think the literary merit of a text dissolves in diagnosing its author with bipolar disorder, but neither do I think it bespeaks some sort of genius. Mozart's The Magic Flute, for example, was written almost contemporaneously, and contains a love plot with very little in the way of reasons-why, but it's a much more beautiful story. Such truncated foreplay, as it were, is more of a convention of the time than a hallmark of love's purity or true essence.
As for purity--in that we have a real locus of pseudo-Christian body hatred. Werther exclaims that his love for Charlotte and his intentions are of the purest, as if that's supposed to win her over. I assume he means his desire is sexless, and therefore holy? This is why I can never get behind even the most watered-down religious ethic, because even a gentle pantheism that appears inimical to the crude, crusading violence of Christianity carries these strong metaphysical holdovers of body hatred masquerading as profundity, as an eternal truth. Werther/Goethe speak as if the epistolary text chronicles some raw emotional revelation. In reality, it's a series of cliches that aspire to a sort of middlebrow "poetricity." It's proto-emo.
Susan Sontag's essay "Piety Without Content" discusses the trend (which was in full force in the ecumenical mid-20th century and has subsided amid evangelical fervor and the proliferation of religions that don't fall within Western monotheism) toward making "religiousness" some kind of personal or artistic virtue. "For a believer the concept of 'religion'...makes no sense as a category," she writes, because people don't ascribe to "religion" when they accept the specific tenets of a particular faith. Catholics don't abstain from meat on Fridays during Lent because it's "religious," they do it because it's part of Catholicism. "To be religious is always to be in some sense an adherent (even as a heretic) to a specific symbolism and a specific historical community the believer may adopt. It is to be involved in specific beliefs and practices, not just to give assent to the philosophical assertions that a being whom we may call God exists, that life has meaning, etc. Religion is not equivalent to the theistic proposition."
She further criticizes the idea that all "serious" ideas contain some sort of religious valence, or that all major thinkers (including atheists like Marx and Freud) can be subsumed under the smug heading of "religious teachers" because the content of their writings overlaps with what religious traditions speak to. I think Goethe's book exemplifies an identical tendency with respect to poetry and what it does. There is a strong tendency to emphasize content at the expense of form. In a religious context, it's the insistence that everything important is somehow, some way religious. With poetry (or, better, Poetry), it's the idea that the only way to express these important or eternal verities is through a lofty style that's full of shibboleths so that everyone who hears or reads it knows perfectly well that the speaker has switched to the proper mode befitting the awesomeness of the ideas. The advent of free verse produced some of the best poetry in English (Stevens, Pound, Moore, Bishop) and then sort of declined into an excessive democratization and reduction of standards that, while maybe even necessary, totally sacrificed form and allowed the teenagers of divorced parents to whine their way closer to the canon. If there's any avant-garde left, it's going to be found in revolutions of form.
For the Romantics, at the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution, the ability not to live a life of abject suffering, to maybe travel a little or spend most of your days in reflective contemplation was starting to trickle down to the haute bourgeoisie. That led to new art. But Adorno is right when he says that art is temporary. Frescoes fade, plays are lost, statuary corrodes, buildings burn down. And the relevance of a given piece or text for one time period will become muted--until, if it enters the pantheon, it's simply a commodity, something reprinted in textbooks and stored in the Louvre that you know all about way before you actually travel to see it.
People fall back upon Poetry for the same reason. They're terrified of the impermanence that is their fate and want some undemanding, unambitious absolutes to navigate by, and the enduring popularity of Romanticism is largely because it's a repository of post-Christian dictates about Life. There's always this impulse to install a certain swath of Art as an eternal set of texts or pieces that establish some absolute truths, and that seems to be to be a knee-jerk reaction based on fear. It probably terrifies many people to imagine a future where nobody reads Shakespeare, but I don't know if that would be so bad. It wouldn't be necessarily a dumbed-down dystopia. Even today, the most that non-scholars care about "the Bard" (eww!) is virtually lip service. I haven't seen one of his plays performed since college. Theater itself seems to be trapped in perpetual crisis mode. Nothing has unlimited staying power. Romanticism isn't just "unfashionable," or something you could breezily dismiss, but it's just not as interesting as more recent genres/styles. There's a sense of being dazzled that I don't even care to recapture. One could argue that we've been poisoned by our own acute self-consciousness, but that's just what characterizes this era and there's nothing we can do about it unless we're born as, say, Forrest Gump.
Goethe completely sacrifices form for dubiously Eternal content about 'the soul,' which, since it doesn't exist at all, can hardly be called words to live by. If I were a Stalinist, I would say "Burn this bourgeois crap." Instead, just don't read it.
Sunday, March 25, 2007
NYPD Has Come Totally Unhinged
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/nyregion/25infiltrate.html?pagewanted=1&hp
It's not the least bit surprising that they were spying on activists, but the sheer breadth of the program is pretty astounding. Where does the NYPD get the resources to encamp detectives in Europe and the Middle East, or send them around the country? (Charmingly, the list of places where anti-Republican groups probably congregated and where those detectives went to infiltrate their meetings probably mirrors an indie rock national tour).
We are seeing the expansion of a new category of non-crime crime, wherein the State diverts resources to creating dossiers on an ever-wider spectrum of groups or individuals deemed inimical to a very broad conception of "government." I guess, in a sense, that's just not news. Isn't it funny, though, the way some of the activists are quoted as saying they knew they were being infiltrated: "Young men aged 25-32 asking 'first name, last name.'" While the article ends with hearty self-congratulations by the cops, you have to wonder if the program was worth it at all, or if, as I suspect, the cops basically blew their own cover everywhere. Imagine a few college-age artists being dogged by an earnest, clean-cut guy with shiny shoes and a real entitlement problem who has no idea about any of the music they listen to, let alone, um, art. Cops are so lame! And they don't even know it.
At a Critical Mass ride, I once heard an officer yelling down at a girl, "Who is the leader of this organization?!" It's all-too-common to roll your eyes at some stoner who gets excited at the thought that the government has a file on him, but the NYPD has also gone way overboard in the jouissance they get out of their own paranoia. They really want there to be some kind of pyramidal organization to any and all kinds of public, demonstrative speech. They want all behaviors they deem anti-social to emanate from a hive mind. It almost seems like they develop an instinct, that the very form of protest--irrespective of content or political valence--triggers a certain reaction.
What would happen if Critical Mass occurred at the same time as a rowdy anti-abortion protest? Would the NYPD regard it as some kind of two-pronged strategy? Would they make sure to separate the "criminals" from each event and interrogate them against one another's statements, trying to "fool" them into a Prisoner's Dilemma situation? I always wonder if the cops have a tough time keeping an eye on what's going on in Chinatown, because of a dearth of Chinese officers. I honestly can't believe they sent people to the Middle East. Who in the Academy is qualified to train people in the arts of international espionage? It's ridiculous enough that they're so clueless as to waste all that time looking for assassins at Parsons and then pat themselves on the back for having thwarted any would-be Lee Harvey Oswalds.
I think September 11 inculcated in the NYPD a perverse identity crisis where they now view themselves as the single greatest power keeping civilization safe from terrorists, terrorists who have already struck at New York twice. A report chronicling their adventures in the fabulous Orient--there are some serious delusions of grandeur going on there.
But that's what happens when you give assholes unlimited power.
It's not the least bit surprising that they were spying on activists, but the sheer breadth of the program is pretty astounding. Where does the NYPD get the resources to encamp detectives in Europe and the Middle East, or send them around the country? (Charmingly, the list of places where anti-Republican groups probably congregated and where those detectives went to infiltrate their meetings probably mirrors an indie rock national tour).
We are seeing the expansion of a new category of non-crime crime, wherein the State diverts resources to creating dossiers on an ever-wider spectrum of groups or individuals deemed inimical to a very broad conception of "government." I guess, in a sense, that's just not news. Isn't it funny, though, the way some of the activists are quoted as saying they knew they were being infiltrated: "Young men aged 25-32 asking 'first name, last name.'" While the article ends with hearty self-congratulations by the cops, you have to wonder if the program was worth it at all, or if, as I suspect, the cops basically blew their own cover everywhere. Imagine a few college-age artists being dogged by an earnest, clean-cut guy with shiny shoes and a real entitlement problem who has no idea about any of the music they listen to, let alone, um, art. Cops are so lame! And they don't even know it.
At a Critical Mass ride, I once heard an officer yelling down at a girl, "Who is the leader of this organization?!" It's all-too-common to roll your eyes at some stoner who gets excited at the thought that the government has a file on him, but the NYPD has also gone way overboard in the jouissance they get out of their own paranoia. They really want there to be some kind of pyramidal organization to any and all kinds of public, demonstrative speech. They want all behaviors they deem anti-social to emanate from a hive mind. It almost seems like they develop an instinct, that the very form of protest--irrespective of content or political valence--triggers a certain reaction.
What would happen if Critical Mass occurred at the same time as a rowdy anti-abortion protest? Would the NYPD regard it as some kind of two-pronged strategy? Would they make sure to separate the "criminals" from each event and interrogate them against one another's statements, trying to "fool" them into a Prisoner's Dilemma situation? I always wonder if the cops have a tough time keeping an eye on what's going on in Chinatown, because of a dearth of Chinese officers. I honestly can't believe they sent people to the Middle East. Who in the Academy is qualified to train people in the arts of international espionage? It's ridiculous enough that they're so clueless as to waste all that time looking for assassins at Parsons and then pat themselves on the back for having thwarted any would-be Lee Harvey Oswalds.
I think September 11 inculcated in the NYPD a perverse identity crisis where they now view themselves as the single greatest power keeping civilization safe from terrorists, terrorists who have already struck at New York twice. A report chronicling their adventures in the fabulous Orient--there are some serious delusions of grandeur going on there.
But that's what happens when you give assholes unlimited power.
Wednesday, March 07, 2007
Ann Coulter
I admit it: I like her. I enjoy reading her books, because they're hilarious artifacts of the ways stupid people are prodded to think, and unlike Bill O'Reilly's, they're not all about her. You can argue that I'm contributing to a degenerate spectacle by buying them, but I don't think individual consumer choices can save or destroy the world, and although I do refrain from Wal-Mart, Nike, fast food and other liberal hobgoblins, I think it's important to avoid a certain self-righteousness by an ironic purchase here and there. Plus it would behoove the left to study the right rather than ignore them, hoping their salient retardation will make them go away.
That said, it's no surprise that Ann Coulter finds herself in, as she put it, "the 17th career-ending situation of my life." Referring to John Edwards as a 'faggot' at a conservative feeding frenzy, she has proven that in the future, political outrage will have fifteen minutes of fame. I don't care at all that she used a word that I also use to refer to myself every day. You don't stamp out the negative connotation from a term by censoring it, or policing it as a forbidden object. That only makes it tantalizing, and bestows upon any jokes involving it an electrifying thrill.
But there are still a number of frustrating aspects to this episode. First, there is a resilient idea that the liberal blogosphere is a playground of juvenile insults and bad language, so nothing conservatives do or say can be taken as 'out of line' if the comments page on any given lefty blog has the word 'fuck' on it. Therefore a crazy person like Ann Coulter, who is absolutely a fixture of the right and who will never be uninvited from Fox News or any other media outlet no matter what she does, gets equated with anonymous citizens who possess no real sway, but who can somehow taint an entire hemisphere of political discourse with an ineradicable moral stain.
Second, didn't that whole Tim Hardaway thing just happen? I mean, weren't we here just days ago? (I like the Onion's apology: "Sorry, faggots.") And that guy from 'Grey's Anatomy'? For the rest of my faggoty life, am I supposed to endure an increasing acceptance of faggots punctuated by the occasional consequence-free outburst from a pro athlete/actor/pro right-winger? What a fucking bore. Ann Coulter was aiming for a sound-byte, but it's the media at large that got one. These bits of micro-outrage, these fagsploitative blurbs that bubble up from time to time--what's the point? Eventually there will be another episode in an unbroken chain of homophobic incidents. Sooner or later, Mel Gibson will say something. Or maybe Mitt Romney. Until people's careers actually suffer from being hateful and stupid--the way they are (justifiably) castigated for being racist or anti-Semitic--I can't bring myself to care about anymore of these utterly ephemeral news-crawl flareups.
Finally, John Edwards is not gay. Also, Hillary Clinton is also not a lesbian. Prominent Democrats are not gender-benders and don't come anywhere near representing the needs and interests of people who are. Left Behind posits gender normativity as the primary axis by which your soul is saved or damned. Dykes go to hell while wives go to heaven. Heroic men get saved while the insecure sign on with the Antichrist. It doesn't even have to be in the conservative media; Maureen Dowd, who never wrote a column about an issue in her life, will eventually meow her way into slandering every Democrat running for president on the basis of how they deviate from their supposed gender norms.
The cult of contrived masculinity, wherein a rich-bitch daddy's boy from Connecticut who skips out of a cushy alternative to Vietnam and makes monosyllabic pronouncements on battleships--we all know what that's about. It's frustratingly easy to conclude that conservatives are stupid, simply outrageously stupid. But they're so fucking good at it, it makes me nauseous. Case in point: Michael Savage, talk radio host, said he's not "homophobic" per se because lesbian moms don't fill him with fear, they fill him with contempt. Great. Now academia needs to embark on a project of renaming the concept because an idiot found an almost lawyerly loophole around self-incrimination. But before that happens, Ann Coulter will almost certainly taken a swipe at Hillary Clinton for being too mannish, yet of course not manly enough to lead.
That said, it's no surprise that Ann Coulter finds herself in, as she put it, "the 17th career-ending situation of my life." Referring to John Edwards as a 'faggot' at a conservative feeding frenzy, she has proven that in the future, political outrage will have fifteen minutes of fame. I don't care at all that she used a word that I also use to refer to myself every day. You don't stamp out the negative connotation from a term by censoring it, or policing it as a forbidden object. That only makes it tantalizing, and bestows upon any jokes involving it an electrifying thrill.
But there are still a number of frustrating aspects to this episode. First, there is a resilient idea that the liberal blogosphere is a playground of juvenile insults and bad language, so nothing conservatives do or say can be taken as 'out of line' if the comments page on any given lefty blog has the word 'fuck' on it. Therefore a crazy person like Ann Coulter, who is absolutely a fixture of the right and who will never be uninvited from Fox News or any other media outlet no matter what she does, gets equated with anonymous citizens who possess no real sway, but who can somehow taint an entire hemisphere of political discourse with an ineradicable moral stain.
Second, didn't that whole Tim Hardaway thing just happen? I mean, weren't we here just days ago? (I like the Onion's apology: "Sorry, faggots.") And that guy from 'Grey's Anatomy'? For the rest of my faggoty life, am I supposed to endure an increasing acceptance of faggots punctuated by the occasional consequence-free outburst from a pro athlete/actor/pro right-winger? What a fucking bore. Ann Coulter was aiming for a sound-byte, but it's the media at large that got one. These bits of micro-outrage, these fagsploitative blurbs that bubble up from time to time--what's the point? Eventually there will be another episode in an unbroken chain of homophobic incidents. Sooner or later, Mel Gibson will say something. Or maybe Mitt Romney. Until people's careers actually suffer from being hateful and stupid--the way they are (justifiably) castigated for being racist or anti-Semitic--I can't bring myself to care about anymore of these utterly ephemeral news-crawl flareups.
Finally, John Edwards is not gay. Also, Hillary Clinton is also not a lesbian. Prominent Democrats are not gender-benders and don't come anywhere near representing the needs and interests of people who are. Left Behind posits gender normativity as the primary axis by which your soul is saved or damned. Dykes go to hell while wives go to heaven. Heroic men get saved while the insecure sign on with the Antichrist. It doesn't even have to be in the conservative media; Maureen Dowd, who never wrote a column about an issue in her life, will eventually meow her way into slandering every Democrat running for president on the basis of how they deviate from their supposed gender norms.
The cult of contrived masculinity, wherein a rich-bitch daddy's boy from Connecticut who skips out of a cushy alternative to Vietnam and makes monosyllabic pronouncements on battleships--we all know what that's about. It's frustratingly easy to conclude that conservatives are stupid, simply outrageously stupid. But they're so fucking good at it, it makes me nauseous. Case in point: Michael Savage, talk radio host, said he's not "homophobic" per se because lesbian moms don't fill him with fear, they fill him with contempt. Great. Now academia needs to embark on a project of renaming the concept because an idiot found an almost lawyerly loophole around self-incrimination. But before that happens, Ann Coulter will almost certainly taken a swipe at Hillary Clinton for being too mannish, yet of course not manly enough to lead.
