Stutters

An Impossible Situation

2009-07-17T06:55:00.001-07:00

There's a short story by the late William Styron in this week's New Yorker. It's called "Rat Beach," and it's the story of a young academic who enlists in the Marine Corps during World War II. I don't know how others read this story, but I read it as a metaphor for depression.

The narrator is a seventeen year old student, and he enlists for reasons of "bravado mingled with what must have been a death wish." He hasn't actually confronted the reality of the combat; everything about it is romanticized. He's too young to fight at Iwo Jima, but he sees what's ahead for him in the near future in the fates of the men coming back: either a gruesome death, or living with the physical and emotional repercussions of survival. Neither outcome is a possibility the narrator has the bravery or emotional resources to deal with. He respects those who do have those emotional resources and realizes he will never have them himself. He is stuck in an impossible situation.

I don't want to give away too much more of the story, but it's a vivid, hallucinogenic piece of writing that's subverts several conventions of the short story, and is effective on every level. I've never read Styron before, so I'm glad I came across this story. I plan on picking up one of his books soon.

Books of the Times

2009-07-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

It's funny: the last post I wrote ended with the declaration that I would write the next day on the difference between writing on a computer, writing on a typewriter and writing by hand. That was over a week ago. What happened? Where did I go?

The truth is I had a crisis of conscience over the worth of blogging. What's the point of talking to oneself in cyberspace? I'm not a news blogger, exposing coverups that the New York Times orchestrated; I'm not a well-known blogger associated with a traditional old-media publication, and I'm not writing about some arcane, niche topic - there are plenty of literary blogs out there. I'm just another writer out here in the void trying to feel my way through this changing media environment, experimenting with it, and playing with the form. I'd rather be focusing on my fiction.

And yet, here I am again. So what brought me back?

To answer that, let me begin by picking up where I left off.

When I was young, like most people who grew up when I did, (early 80's) I did all my writing by hand. I still have notebooks filled with stories I wrote as a child. Writing by hand is a slow process, and even up through the early 2000's I insisted on doing all my first drafts by hand. Other writers I knew couldn't understand that; they thought more quickly than they could write by hand, they would argue. Well, that's true. Thoughts do travel faster than one writes, but there's a filtering process that happens when you write by hand that doesn't exist when you type. The writing is also more sparse; for some reason it seems like it takes me less words to say the same thing when I write by hand. This still surprises me when I write letters to my friend in jail; they never seem to be as long as they would be if I'd typed them. I wonder why that is?

I learned to type on a typewriter. I remember I used to dream of the day when I'd be able to afford those old electronic typewriters that let you edit a line first electronically before printing the line on the page. It was always such an arduous, slow-going process writing on the typewriter. Every typo was a minor tragedy. A first draft on a typewriter was almost unthinkable. So, I'm not sure what the writing would have been like if I had. I'd be interested to hear what others have to say.

Writing on a computer is an entirely different game altogether. You can almost fall into a trance doing it, the way pianists seem to fall into a trance at the keyboard. This can be great, but it can also lead to a lot of sloppy writing. Sloppy writing can easily be edited and cleaned up later, but the damage is done; and if you're not the best editor of your own work, then the computer has a lot of pitfalls for the writer. Sometimes it's not such a good thing to write as quickly as you think. Writing requires the filtering and arranging of thoughts.

New media has brought a proliferation of amateur writers and bloggers (what's the difference between the two, I wonder?) to the scene. News media sources now seriously compete with new media writers. In all the noise it's hard to know what sources we should pay attention to, and which ones we shouldn't. The music business has changed radically in the last ten years because of new media, and it looks like publishing is next. The idea of the literary superstar, championed mostly by the increasingly myopic hit minded publishers, is being challenged. It's an unsustainable model, and they know it. They're biding their time, watching to see what happens, trying to make the most money as possible in the process, and trying to stay relevant at the same time.

In an age where we're more conscious of the environment, and where 200,000 books are published a year and most of the copies of those books end up being destroyed because the book only hit the mid-list, I don't think the day is long off when print on demand will become the norm. How publishers will integrate their businesses into this model is still unclear. Chances are they'll just wait to see which print on demand books make it big, and then go about getting in touch with those authors. But what will they be able to offer these authors, who have already proved successful on their own? It's unclear.

What is clear is that writers have to manage their own careers these days. So, I'm looking at this blog as a portfolio of sorts; it's also good writing practice, while I'm inbetween books. Which is why I'm back. And while I may not post something every day, I do plan to post here on a fairly regular basis.

Nostalgic, My Dear, For Thee

2009-07-07T06:34:00.000-07:00

Now that we’ve launched full speed into the world of digital communication, there seems to be a resurgence of nostalgia for the good old fashioned personal letter. The recent publication of Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop’s correspondence, “Words in Air,” inspired a rush of gushing reviews from the New York Times, Harper’s, The New Yorker, the Nation and the New York Review of Books, to name a few of the more well-known publications. There was also a recent release of Samuel Beckett’s early letters, supposedly to be followed my more; last autumn Farrar published the Letters of Ted Hughes; and Susan Sontag’s early notebooks have just been released, to mixed, but breathless reviews.

I wonder why this is. The July/August issue of Poetry Magazine has some of Yvor Winters’ letters to a young poet – a student who showed a lot of promise. The tone is these letters is startling. Winters is straight-forward with his opinions, no mincing words:

“This note is to inform you—unofficially—that you will receive a fellowship in poetry. You will receive your official notification some time after April 1. Meantime you are not supposed to know. Stegner said that you were among the first nine or ten in fiction, but not among the best three.”

The candid tone is refreshing at first, but overbearing after a while. In a second letter addressed to the poet’s father, Winters sounds like a pompous ass, too sure of himself, too much of a product of his time and philosophy for poetry:

“If I may speak frankly and without seeming to boast, I would like to say that I can teach more about the art of writing in verse and about the history of this art than anyone in the country save perhaps Cunningham. But I would like to add that my department is certainly of the half dozen best in the country as regards scholarly achievement and may well be the best of the half dozen in general critical intelligence. It is, in any event, an extremely fine department, and I know its virtues and limitations very thoroughly. This department is one of my principal tools in training my poets: I superintend their use of the department with some care, and they invariably get a great deal from the department, and what they get I utilize in my training. I do not know what you think of departments of English, but the good ones are not random collections of tedious pedants, but are rather carefully selected groups of historical scholars who work in fairly close collaboration with each other. Such a group, in two or three years of instruction, can save a student like Cal (no matter what his genius) fifteen years of labor, simply by giving him a succinct outline of their own work in background materials and in historical outlines. And without these background materials and historical outlines, he will misunderstand at least in some measure, and often in a large measure, almost anything he may read; and if he is a poet, his development may be irremediably retarded. A great poet is a sport of nature, but he is not merely that: he is a thoroughly intelligent man, and intelligence is not easily come by; any man is a fool who does not pick up as much as he can get, wherever he can get it, and as rapidly as possible. The best place to pick up the elements is a good graduate school.”

Winters does go on. It’s a way of writing we almost never see anymore. It’s strange how staged it feels, how formally addressed. It wasn’t all that long ago when we still wrote friends and family and lovers letters by hand. I did it all the way through college; even now, I have a friend who’s locked up that I write back and forth with by hand. But the sending of letters is more or less a dead practice; who wouldn’t rather email?

The method of communication changes, and so the results are different. Winters could write an email like the letter above today, but it would probably receive a quick return email that either slavishly agreed, deconstructed the email point by point or just said fuck off.

Winters’ letter is stagey; it’s a performance. Well, so are our more modern means of communication. In fact, they take the performance aspect of all writing (communication in general, really) to its logical extreme. So if we’re nostalgic for the art of letter writing, it seems we’re nostalgic for an older form of performance art. Why don’t we have the time or patience for this kind of writing – hell, thinking, to judge by Winters’ letter – anymore? I’m not sure. Tomorrow I want to consider the differences between writing by hand, writing on a typewriter and writing on a computer.

The Opportunities of History

2009-07-02T09:17:00.000-07:00

It's an off phrase. What opportunity does history afford writers, other than the specifics of the time and place in which they live? Several of the previous posts on this blog have been influenced by my reading of "Quarrel & Quandary by Cynthia Ozick. Much of this book is concerned with the responsibility of both writer and reader: the writer's responsibility: being intellectually and morally faithful to history, even if not factually faithful; the reader's: not to distort an author's work in interpretation, so that the original manuscript loses its force. The dangers of misinterpretation are fully fleshed out in "Who Owns Anne Frank" - a daring and interesting article, as provocative as it is readable.

Then we have Hans Fallada. Fallada's concerns as a writer were mostly personal - it seems marriage, personal struggle and the hustle were his preoccupations. The trap Fallada falls into is that his hustle comes before his writing, instead of the other way around. Benjamin Lytal writes in the Nation:

"But the story about the kid living in the rubble sounds so much better suited to Fallada's interests and talents--not resistance but a little hustling, a struggle to put together a life. It's a pity he had to hustle so much to live his own."

Then James Wood brings up the old argument in the New Yorker that opposition makes for the best literature:

"Sometimes, the soft literary citizens of liberal democracy long for prohibition. Coming up with anything to write about can be difficult when you are allowed to write about anything. A day in which the most arduous choice has been between “grande” and “tall” does not conduce to literary strenuousness. And what do we know about life? Our grand tour was only through the gently borderless continent of Google. Nothing constrains us. Perhaps we look enviously at those who have the misfortune to live in countries where literature is taken seriously enough to be censored, and writers venerated with imprisonment. What if writing were made a bit more exigent for us? What if we had less of everything? It might make our literary culture more “serious,” certainly more creatively ingenious. Instead of drowning in choice, we would have to be inventive around our thirst. Tyranny is the mother of metaphor, and all that."

It's just a device Wood uses to launch an article about Shahriar Mandanipour’s novel "Censoring an Iranian Love Story," but it's a familiar enough argument that it might deserve our attention.

And Cary Tennis in Salon remarks on the irony of living in some of the most interesting times in history, and having nothing to say about it:

"And then, with the irony that cloaks us against utter nihilism, we think, if only we were living in more interesting times! And that is the confounding thing about it, isn't it? That we stand on the nodal point of a great, creaking, crunching change in historical direction, at the beginning of cataclysmic planetary collapse, at the dying of civilization, at the rising of new empires, at our own meltdown, as a million stories bloom out of the earth like wildflowers in the spring and we think, gee, uh, if only there were some good stories to tell. "

The novel itself is a history in its way. A novel is about a self-contained world, which has to operate according to its own logic - and because of this, it is by its nature a historical, political narrative, even if the writer is trying to write apolitically or ahistorically. After all, to echo Orwell, these themselves are political and historical choices.

This is a problem black writers, Jewish writers, writers of many ethnic minorities face, when fearing being pigeonholed as a particular type of ethnic-champion writer. Writing a non-ethnic book is a political statement in itself. History affords writers opportunities, and it takes them away.

Two Writers

2009-07-01T09:39:00.000-07:00

There's an interesting article in this week's Nation about the German writer Hans Fallada.

"Hans Fallada is the romantic nom de plume invented by a man who lived through some of the most difficult episodes in his country's history and came out indifferently, neither a hero nor a villain. "Hans" recalls the Grimms' Lucky Hans, a fairy-tale fool who smiles even as he is cheated; and "Falada" is the talking horse in another Grimm tale who, though slaughtered by his mistress's treacherous chambermaid, continues to speak truth to power as a taxidermied trophy. Fallada the man avoided the fate of Falada the horse. "I do not like grand gestures," he said, "being slaughtered before the tyrant's throne, senselessly, to the benefit of no one and to the detriment of my children, that is not my way." He made this excuse, rather grand itself, in 1938, after accepting edits of his latest novel, Iron Gustav. The book was part of a Nazi film project, and Joseph Goebbels wielded the blue pencil. Iron Gustav tells the story of a coachman whose authoritarian parenting ruins most of his children but who becomes a national hero after he refuses to relinquish his horse and carriage for an automotive taxi. Taking up his editor's suggestions, Fallada extended his narrative's endpoint from 1928 to 1933, twisted Gustav's one decent son into becoming a Nazi storm trooper and made the other, criminal son a member of the Communist Party."

Fallada, born in 1893, is quick to use the rise of the Nazis for his own professional promotion, even though he " hated the strutting arrogance of the Third Reich." All the while he complains about how his work is being butchered and misused; and yet he never does anything about it, but complain. He remains, in his way, the consummate Romantic writer, all ego and contradiction, even as he - a common peril for Romantics - becomes more hustler than writer.

Two generations later, born in 1944 of all years, we have W.G. Sebald. I've been reading Cynthia Ozick lately, and I'm finding it interesting comparing the two writers, and their relative feelings towards the opportunities of history:

"So, in language sublime, Sebald is haunted by Jewish ghosts - Europe's phantoms: the absent Jews, the deported, the gassed, the suffering, the hidden, the fled. There is a not-to-be-overlooked irony (a fossilized irony, my professor-critic might call it) in Sebald's having been awarded the Berlin Literature Prize - Berlin, the native city of Gershom (né Gerhardt) Scholem, who wrote definitively about the one-sided infatuation of Jews in love with high German culture and with the Vaterland itself. The Jewish passion for Germany was never reciprocated - until now. Sebald returns that Jewish attachment, although tragically: he is too late for reciprocity. The Jews he searches for are either stricken escapees or smoke. Like all ghosts, they need to be conjured."

More on this tomorrow.

Myth and Meaning in Stephen O'Connor's Ziggurat

2009-06-30T07:39:00.000-07:00

Certain themes run through most mythologies - themes that transcend culture, country and religion. From the story of the Tower of Babel to the hubris of Oedipus; from the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur, to the myth of Beowulf and Grendel, we seem to like stories about people confronting forces that are greater than they are.

Recurring anxieties underlie many of our mythologies: how can we answer unanswerable questions if we are the most powerful and intelligent agents in our world? And if we're not the most powerful and intelligent agents in our world, then what, if anything, is greater than us; and if such an entity exists - how do we conquer, confront or understand it?

Stephen O'Connor has just published a story In the June 29, 2009 issue of The New Yorker called Ziggurat. The ziggurat is a Mesopotamian pyramid with steps leading upwards to the pinnacle and steps leading downward on all sides; the structure of O'Connor's story seems to be based on just this type of architecture.

The story begins with an unnamed girl sitting in a rec room playing video games while a Minotaur watches her by the pool table. Everything in the first paragraph has the aspect of gaming: there are the video games on the computer (a world of its own), the pool table, and finally the Labyrinth where the Minotaur encounters the girl. The reader isn't sure immediately what's game and what's setting.

This is the first act of the story, where Minotaur and girl play a zero-sum game - a game where each dances curiously around the other. The girl doesn't understand why the Minotaur doesn't eat her; she's been resignedly expecting him to do just that; the Minotaur, for his part, hasn't encountered a victim quite as resigned as this girl before, which is why he's hesitant to eat her; the only option remaining for them is to form a friendship.

When the Minotaur asks her about the video games she's playing, she describes them as "disappointment games." Even her favorite, "Ziggurat," a game re-enacting the building of Babel, is a disappointment game:

"You're supposed to build the Tower of Babel up before God knocks it down."

This is essentially the game she's playing with the Minotaur. The Minotaur believes he is the largest and most powerful agent in his environment; by the end of the story he will be almost minuscule, but he will also be profoundly changed by his relationship with this girl.

O'Connor's story borrows freely from familiar myths to construct this highly unusual (especially for The New Yorker) story about learning humility and empathy. Before the girl's appearance Minotaur's murders have no moral resonance with him one way or the next. He gets hungry and so he eats; simple as that. (Except for the fact that he's "the agent of his own appetite") But after she disappears his vocabulary expands. He begins to understand loss, shame, joylessness and regret. The Minotaur is becoming more and more like the humans he used to disdain. This is when the Minotaur attempts to build his own Tower of Babel. Does this desire to know more of his world come from the girl's suggestion that there is a possibility of escape? Who is the blue-faced man, and why does he seem to have power over the Minotaur? Is there some force beyond the Minotaur more powerful than he is? This mythological possibility of another world becomes the apex of the story; he builds a ziggurat, only to find himself in a world of plaster - everything from here on out will only serve to prove just how small he is.

O'Connor's a very effective writer, although sometimes his prose comes across as a little quaint and cutesy, especially his repetitive use of onomatopoeia:

"She didn’t even glance away from the screen. Just: twitch, twitch, twitch, clickity-clackity-click, click-click-click. “Oof !” she would say. “Oh, my God!”

To me, this kind of prose is highly distracting, though I suppose another reader might find it fun and charming - disarming, even, which I assume is how O'Connor intends it. There are also moments where O'Connor's choppy sentences and his odd insistence on beginning sentences with conjunctions also distract. These are small issues, however, with an otherwise engaging and thought provoking story, that I'm sure I'll be thinking about for a while.

Glee Club Blues

2009-06-29T09:09:00.000-07:00

There's no shortage of artists proclaiming the death of their art form. Only a few weeks ago, a friend of mine who works in the theater bemoaned its current state: "It's not relevant anymore," he said. "The only reason people go to theater these days is so they have someplace they can take a date and get laid." He was being facetious, of course, but the statement reveals the anxiety many people in the theater have about the relevance of the work they do, especially in this increasingly digital/video driven age. The irony is that critics are declaring 2009 as the most vital year for theater in years. Of course this is in reference to the big Broadway and Off-Broadway productions, like Beckett's "Waiting For Godot" starring Nathan Lane and Bill Irwin and "Twelfth Night" at the Delacorte.

Where are the vital, engaging, new and edgy Off-Off Broadway productions, and what place do they play in our society today?

This weekend I saw the final performance of Blue Coyote Group's "Glee Club." (Written by Matthew Freeman,and Directed by Kyle Ancowitz) It was the first theater production I've seen this year -unusual for me, because in the past three years not only have I seen a lot of theater, but I worked in the theater, and reviewed theater productions as well. The play was a part of The Anti-Depressant Festival at the Brick Theater in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. In the interests of full disclosure, I should say that I have worked with Blue Coyote before, and the director of "Glee Club," is an old friend of mine. That said, I found this production to be a vital, fun, interesting and even important play, and beneath its fun, it underscores the anxiety and ambivalence a lot of artists feel about the work they're doing today.

The play is about a group of singers - the Romeo, Vermont Glee Club - practicing for a performance coming up that Saturday at an old folks home. The play casts a colorful cast of oddballs and ne'er-do-wells: Greg, whose cancer has been in remission for fifteen years, and who insists all the same he's liable to die from it any day; Paul, a psychopath who occasionally quips in with creepy non-sequitors; Stan, the moralist of the play - an alcoholic who is awaiting his rock-bottom moment; and the star of the Glee Club, their best singer Hank, an alcoholic who actually has hit rock bottom and managed to get off the sauce and get himself to AA meetings. The group is run by Ben, a petulant perfectionist who eerily reminded me of the group leader of the Chevy Chase children's choir, when I used to sing for them in performances with the Paul Hill Chorale. Every single one of the actors does a stellar and completely convincing job; moreover they keep us delighted and entertained throughout, even as we shake our heads at their moral fiber - or lack thereof.

The great dilemma of the play centers around Hank's recovery. Ever since he stopped drinking, his voice hasn't been the same. Most of the members of the Glee Club either state outright they want him to start drinking again, or skirt around the suggestion, in hopes that he eventually will; it's a tension that translates to the audience: the song they are to perform(music and lyrics written by Stephen Speights) is constantly interrupted throughout the performance by Ben's impatience with the singers, leaving the audience anxious to hear the entirety of it - an impossibility, we soon realize, if Hank does not start drinking again.

For these singers, everything is at stake, and nothing is at stake. What matter if a completely unknown Glee Club in Romeo, Vermont gives a mediocre performance? Then again, the very existence of the Glee Club may depend upon a successful performance. (their sole sponsor will be part of the audience Saturday)The relationship between the singers is caustic at its worst, and superficial at its best - and yet it's all any of them have. Is this performance really worth the life of one of its members? Is successful art and questionable camaraderie really worth the levels of moral degradation these singers subject themselves to?

The answer, of course, is no; and yet it's not a question the audience is really at liberty to ask. The play is a play of relationships and decisions - and each of the singers must make his own decision about what the work, the team and their relationships to each other mean, and what worth they have, if any. Suffice it to say, when the ensemble finally finished performing the song at the end of the show, the audience greeted it with ecstatic applause.

A Few Words for Michael

2009-06-26T09:12:00.001-07:00

Not much today, as the world mourns the passing of pop icon Michael Jackson. Michael didn't mean to me what he meant to some people, but growing up as a kid in the eighties he was ubiquitous. I remember, as an awkward black kid in a mostly-white school, wearing a black and red "Beat It" shirt, and the jibes that come with that kind of thing when you're young: "Hey, Timothy, do like your shirt says, and beat it."

So, in some ways I identified with his weird outsider status, even though he was the King of Pop.

That got harder to reconcile as I got older. The accusations of pedophilia, the lightening of his skin, and his bizarre obsessions made him difficult to sympathize with. At the same time, there were his rebuffs: he wasn't a pedophile, he was being exploited for his wealth, fame and strangeness; he wasn't lightening his skin to be more white, he suffered from vitiligo. For someone just watching the media bounce the accusations and rebuffs back and forth, it was hard to hold judgement. Anyone who's a little strange knows that others will be quick to take advantage of that strangeness to turn others against you. On the other hand, who knew what to think? Just because one strange person is victimized, doesn't mean another strange person can't victimize others.

Michael Jackson lived a very unusual life, to say the least, and as sad as his death is, he was never the one to grow into an old man. One can only hope he didn't victimize other children the way his father, the media and the institution that is the music industry victimized him as a child. "Man hands misery onto man," Philip Larkin tells us, and yes, that's true; on the other hand, for the short time we're here on this planet, the most we can strive for is to hand down something of our greater lights as well.

I grew up in the hip-hop era, a black kid who unselfconsciously listened to punk and goth. Michael struggled with his racial identity all his life; but he broke black music into MTV; he was a crossover artist who made it easier for the rest of us not to have to same identity struggles he went through. At the end of the day all we have or know of an artist (unless we know them personally) is the work, and our relationship to it. Michael may not mean as much to me as he means to others, but at the same time, he may mean more to me than I realize.

On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America Part II

2009-06-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

Last night, reading through Cynthia Ozick's book of essays, "Quarrel & Quandary" I came across the following passage in her essay on "Public Intellectuals:"

"Thinkers... are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence. "I have seen the enemy and he is us" is not always and everywhere true; and self-blame can be the highest form of self-congratulation. People who are thinkers are obliged to respect exigency and to admit to crisis."

This is what I was getting at yesterday when I argued that understanding often leads us to accept compromises as unreasonable as the compromises Booker T. Washington asks of the freed blacks. It has become politically correct recently for us to reject the idea of absolute evil; and yet absolute evil exists, and has always existed; and coming to "an understanding" of evil is nothing less than making a deal with the devil.

Before this is taken in a strictly religious way, I think it's necessary for us to establish a definition of evil. The problem with doing that involves setting up moral absolutes, and any time someone goes about the task of setting up moral absolutes, they find themselves in a quandary: how do you establish a moral absolute when so many previous attempts to do so have only been the misunderstandings between cultures? Christianity found evil in the heathen religious and spiritual practices of the first African slaves; no doubt the African slaves found evil in the colonists who enslaved them. Who was the more evil, absolutely? Pederasty is an absolute evil, no doubt; and yet, the Ancients Greeks - the first lights of our culture - practiced it openly and joyously. Were they as a society evil - and only those, like Plato, who practiced chaste pederasty absolved from this evil? Is it really possible to completely understand both points of view? The moment we begin talking about absolutes, it seems the conversation ceases, and there's only anger, misunderstanding and resentment left in its place.

And yet, we have to talk about absolutes, because we are social creatures, and have to live within societies of others, and live within the absolute rules of those societies.

When African slaves were dragged into the American colonies, we have to wonder about the mindset of the slave masters: On the one hand, DuBois informs us, these slave masters were only too happy to introduce Christianity to these pagans; but if they were happy to do this, then they must have been open to the fact that these were human beings with souls that could be saved like any European soul.

For these Christian colonists, submitting to the pagan religions of their slaves would have been an absolute evil; and yet isn't it more evil for these Christians to introduce these pagans to a religion that so brazenly touts its own hypocrisy? It would have been better had the pagans never had to come to an understanding of these Christians at all, because the Christians, trapped in their culture of institutions, had built up a society that requires hypocrisy to function, and every one among them understood that, even if subconsciously. This to me, is evil: to (understandably) submit to a social system that forces one to act against one's principles; and since institutions are living things, but not human things, they demand individuals make sacrifices for them in order that they (the institutions)may survive; and yet they have no moral conscience.

Understanding between individual and individual is never an evil thing. DuBois gets at this when he writes:

"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars."

It is when man becomes involved in institutions that he becomes evil. DuBois writes of his own text in 1953, fifty years after it was first published: "But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort, even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men."

To my mind, institutions carry the germ of evil, and the larger they grow, the more they estrange man from man; and the more we come to accept and understand them, and others as agents of them, the more evil we grow. It's true that an individual can be truly evil on his own - but this is rare - and generally only true of the sociopath. Institutions, by their very design, are sociopathic entities.

On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America

2009-06-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

Political essays are generally written for a writer's contemporaries. First and foremost, they are meant as urgent and pressing arguments. Well, suppose a political essay is successful, and a generation later, the general population has come to accept the author's point of view as self-evident? What are future readers to make of the work? Is it meant to have an afterlife?

Reading W.E.B. DuBois' "The Souls of Black Folk," more than a hundred years after it was written, and in light of the current Obama Administration, the book has a curious resonance for the modern reader. DuBois' beautifully written series of essays reads, on the surface, as an impassioned call for the higher education of blacks, a call for political participation in the American democratic process by the race, and a rebuttal of the teachings of Booker T. Washington. For today's reader, these arguments feel, at first, definitively settled; but on close examination, there are other arguments hinted at in the book that feel startlingly contemporary and urgent; and as the book progresses through autobiography, social history, logical deconstruction, observation of contemporary life, fable and finally artistic analysis, interesting philosophical questions arise: for example, what is progress? How do we define the difference between progress and regress, and do societies actually progress at all, or is progress simply defined by the more powerful of two clashing societies?

The most urgent question for DuBois is that of education; for DuBois higher education is the means by which blacks lift "the Veil" – DuBois’ term for the mental and psychological block that keeps blacks from seeing themselves as truly free independent agents in an America where they have as much to offer as they have to learn. In this he disagrees strongly with Booker T. Washington, whose philosophy is summed up by the "Atlanta Compromise:" ("In all things purely social, we can be separate as the five fingers, and yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.") Booker T. Washington is willing to concede three things to white America in exchange for the opportunity for economic independence and growth:

“First, political power,
Second, insistence on civil rights,
Third, higher education of Negro youth,—"

These concessions are meant to allow blacks to "concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.”

Washington’s argument is strange to the contemporary reader. In fact, it’s downright nonsensical, and DuBois easily points out why: “Is it possible, and probable, that nine millions of men can make effective progress in economic lines if they are deprived of political rights, made a servile caste, and allowed only the most meagre chance for developing their exceptional men? If history and reason give any distinct answer to these questions, it is an emphatic No."

Obviously, if blacks are to survive in America, they must be allowed the same political, educational and civil opportunities afforded everyone else. Separate is inherently unequal. The question for the contemporary reader, then becomes, why would a free person want to integrate into American society? Certainly, for a race to survive in America, that race must have equality, but is Western High Culture or even the American Experiment something worth integrating into? It is a system which has had a long and brutal history of exploitation, hypocrisy and crime. Why would an American black want to become a part of this whitewashed world, except that at the moment there may be no other option?

“My log schoolhouse was gone. In its place stood Progress; and Progress, I understand, is necessarily ugly.” DuBois says in the chapter titled, “The Meaning of Progess.” Because progress, as DuBois recognizes, means assimilating into a culture that is often hostile, hypocritical and given to rewarding the most cunning and deceptive individuals:

“To-day the young Negro of the South who would succeed cannot be frank and outspoken, honest and self-assertive, but rather he is daily tempted to be silent and wary, politic and sly; he must flatter and be pleasant, endure petty insults with a smile, shut his eyes to wrong; in too many cases he sees positive personal advantage in deception and lying. His real thoughts, his real aspirations, must be guarded in whispers; he must not criticise, he must not complain. Patience, humility, and adroitness must, in these growing black youth, replace impulse, manliness, and courage. With this sacrifice there is an economic opening, and perhaps peace and some prosperity. Without this there is riot, migration, or crime. Nor is this situation peculiar to the Southern United States,—is it not rather the only method by which undeveloped races have gained the right to share modern culture? The price of culture is a Lie.”

But if the price of culture is a Lie, then what is gained from it? A person can’t live life behind a lie and be content; and here DuBois argues that the black soul is divided in two ways: the southern, more patient and pleasant temperament, and the angry, radical temperament found in the North:

“On the other hand, in the North the tendency is to emphasize the radicalism of the Negro. Driven from his birthright in the South by a situation at which every fibre of his more outspoken and assertive nature revolts, he finds himself in a land where he can scarcely earn a decent living amid the harsh competition and the color discrimination. At the same time, through schools and periodicals, discussions and lectures, he is intellectually quickened and awakened. The soul, long pent up and dwarfed, suddenly expands in new-found freedom. What wonder that every tendency is to excess,—radical complaint, radical remedies, bitter denunciation or angry silence. Some sink, some rise. The criminal and the sensualist leave the church for the gambling-hell and the brothel, and fill the slums of Chicago and Baltimore; the better classes segregate themselves from the group-life of both white and black, and form an aristocracy, cultured but pessimistic, whose bitter criticism stings while it points out no way of escape. They despise the submission and subserviency of the Southern Negroes, but offer no other means by which a poor and oppressed minority can exist side by side with its masters.”

This ultimately, is what DuBois, is attempting to do with his book, and it is his answer to the Lie of culture. DuBois wants to offer a means by which the races can live together harmoniously, honestly and with dignity, and for DuBois, that answer is through understanding and communication. When we look at how far we’ve come as a country, it’s easy to believe he was onto something. DuBois’ book has a mishmash of references to southern blues, European poetry, Greek theater, and then the lush descriptive passages of his own beautiful prose, which is so unique, personal, and born of both worlds that he could get one reviewer in 1903 from the New York Times to say: “To a Southerner who knows the negro race as it exists in the South, it is plain that this negro of Northern education is, after all, as he says, "bone of the bone and flesh of the flesh" of the African race,” whereas another reviewer says in The American Review of Reviews: “Of the literary quality of the essays too much cannot be said. No book of similar character has been printed in recent years that equals this little volume in power or grace of expression.”

So this is what the American people should aspire to; where we are already headed, in fact, according to DuBois: we have already become something of each other through our unique history, and that’s only become more obvious over the last century. The sorrow songs DuBois discusses in the last chapter later gave way to blues, to jazz, to rock, and pretty much every other manifestation of modern American music; the parable of the two Johns in the chapter "Of the Coming of John," feels distinctly American, and even reappears in different form in Cormac McCarthy’s novel, “Blood Meridian”; and of course, our common history of push and pull, of being neighbors and strangers, each other’s lovers and executioners within the same hour, has worked to make the contemporary American, here in what pundits now like to call our “post-racial” era, what he is.

With the election of President Barack Obama, half-black and half-white, a man who has been all over the world, known many cultures, and declares empathy is an important factor in deciding his supreme court nominee, haven’t we finally awakened to a world where we are no longer burdened by DuBois' “tragedy of the age: not that men are poor,—all men know something of poverty; not that men are wicked,—who is good? not that men are ignorant,—what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men”?

If a country with as blemished a history of racial division as ours can elect a black man to the highest office in the land, can’t we say we now know more of each other than ever? And that although progress is indeed an ugly process, it’s a necessary one, with ultimately beautiful results? And that progress definitely exists, just as the man who’s lifted the Veil goes through a trial by fire (Hate, Despair and Doubt, as DuBois beautifully illustrates in the story of Alexander Crummel) but comes out on the other side of it enlightened? “Life begins on the other side of despair,” according to Sartre, and isn’t this as true for the individual as it is for the society?

I’m not convinced. Understanding is a high virtue, and certainly some people come out on the other side of suffering better off; but just as often, understanding demands sacrifices every bit as unreasonable as the sacrifices Booker T. Washington asks of the freed slaves; because understanding often asks us to accept things as they are and not as they should be - and as much as we think we understand each other better the more our world globalizes, we should realize that the more our world globalizes, the larger our institutions grow; and the larger our institutions grow, the more disenfranchised man becomes from his fellow man. These are trials by fire which for some have no other side. In tomorrow's post I will attempt to explore the problems I see in DuBois' philosophy in the context of our modern world.

Requisite Manifesto-esque First Post

2009-06-23T11:49:00.000-07:00

Video may have killed the radio star, and new media may be replacing old media, but the media as a social engine is alive and well, and more concerned with itself than ever. Sometime during the last decade or two, the focus of the media increasingly became - well - the media. We can see this trend in shows like NPR's "On the Media," popular television shows like, "Ugly Betty" and in recent Hollywood films like "Good Night and Good Luck" and "The Hoax." Is this new trend the result of the Internet – blogging, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook and the like? It very well may be. In what has been dubbed, "The Age of the Amateur," anyone with an IP address can set up shop, and become a media outlet unto themselves. And why not? From the man on the soapbox in the town square, to the pamphleteer, to the graffiti artist, people have always had a desire to make themselves heard or seen by the masses; especially when they feel their ideas, opinions or culture are being ignored by the media at large.

But what is the media at large? Most of us talk about "the media" like we talk about "the government." It occupies some nebulous space somewhere out there that feeds the rest of us soundbites, articles, entertainment, and information; and until recently, it has mostly been disseminated by professionals. Of course the term professional is itself misleading, and arguably a construction of the old media. If by professional, we mean someone who is being paid to work in the media arts, then we have to admit, that before the age of the amateur, there was a direct correlation between professional media and commerce; and when information and commerce are inextricably linked, especially in a society like ours, where money exchange dictates worth, suddenly we're in danger of losing a lot of thoughtful readers. Or, as the case may be, thoughtful readers may decide to create their own media, which is exactly what has happened.

The immediacy and wide availability of Internet media has changed the way that our world operates. From the way that politics is run (case in point Obama's grassroots Internet presidential campaign or the YouTube debates this past primary season) to the way we handle our money (online banking, bill paying, PayPal accounts, eBay) to the way we consume our entertainment (between The Smoking Gun and Oprah, James Frey's memoir "A Million Little Pieces" was judged more on the media surrounding it than on the book itself), it is almost impossible to discuss anything relevant to current affairs without including a discussion of the role the media, professional and amateur, is playing in the whole thing.

Well, they say hindsight is 20/20 and we should have seen this coming. It wasn't until the 1920's, notably the era of radio, that people started talking about "the media" in the pluralistic way we're so accustomed to now. The term media comes from the Latin word medius, and Merriam Webster breaks the definition down like this:

"The singular media and its plural medias seem to have originated in the field of advertising over 70 years ago; they are apparently still so used without stigma in that specialized field. In most other applications media is used as a plural of medium. The great popularity of the word in references to the agencies of mass communication is leading to the formation of a mass noun, construed as a singular."

With radio, in a way never before possible, people were suddenly exposed to the same information through the same medium at the same time. I don't think it's any coincidence that the advent of the radio in the first half of the 20th century coincides with the increasing interest in the use and the study of propaganda, and the coinage (by William H. Whyte in the March 1952 issue of Fortune Magazine) of the term "groupthink." When we're raised in a society where everyone gets their information on local, national and world events in politics, culture and the arts from corporate enterprises that have an interest in keeping the flood of information going in one direction – from the professionals to the people – it's no surprise that we end up creating a society in which "Groupthink is becoming a national philosophy," to quote Whyte's article.

Internet media, then, is in one sense a revolution against Groupthink. On the other I'd like to take it a bit further and suggest that Internet media and the rise of the amateur, while being on a very basic level a revolution against Groupthink philosophy, is actually being integrated into it in a way so subtle as to bamboozle us into thinking we're capable of moving beyond it, when actually we're buying into more than ever. Because, as we all know, the Internet can be its own hangman. Instead of detracting from the authority of the professionals, the Internet, with its endless labyrinths of wacky websites, half baked conspiracies, and outright disinformation, lends credence to the basic Groupthink philosophical premise that the distribution of information is best left in the hands of the professionals. Like an old history teacher used to tell me, whenever societies swing too far to the right or the left, they inevitably end up meeting in the middle.

The argument offered by old media apologists is that, especially with political reporting, resources are needed to do comprehensive coverage, and only corporate media has the resources to fund this kind of reporting. This argument strangely overlooks the fact that increasingly, more and more people can do amateur media from all over the world, and do a more informed, thorough job of it. The attacks in Mumbai and the current upheaval in Iran have shown us that amateurs in these regions often have more subtle and informed ideas about what’s going on than the professionals who fly in, do a little investigative reporting, and then fly back out.

In 1939, Orson Welles' radio drama, "War of the Worlds" set off a nationwide panic. Of course, the panic already existed in the form of the Second World War. Welles' radio broadcast just shed light on Americans’ already boiling anxieties. Even with a disclaimer preceding the show, the new medium of radio had the power to inspire widespread belief and panic because it already had people on edge with news of Germany's advances throughout Europe.

We'd like to think that by now we've gotten to the point where we understand our media; that “War of the Worlds” couldn’t happen again. But the media outpaces us. It evolves as quickly and effectively as we do. Every new trend redefines the media, from the suspect possibility of objectivity in journalism to the false dichotomy of the professional and the amateur. When Gil Scott Heron recorded "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised," he was expressing the distrust many people had for the media in the sixties, and still have today. What he didn't know back then, and what we should know, but seem not to, is that the revolution doesn't need to be televised to be turned into just another media hype machine.