An interesting and unexpected part of becoming a professor is the new ring of authority it gives one.. I was recently called by our local newspaper to comment about the Muslim holidat Eid al-Adha. You can see the article here.
Cloth Diapers and Big-Box Laws:
A Critique of Libertarian Ideals
December 31, 2006
I read a review of a book today that angered me.. but first let me tell you about our diapering dilemma. Baby is on the way and for the first part of December the big question around here was diapering method. We would prefer to use cloth diapers, but Emily could locate no diaper service in the area. I figured she must be looking in the wrong places, since the Fox Valley must be large enough to support a diaper service. Then we were at a Christmas party and somebody mentioned that Kimberly-Clark, the major corporation in these parts, had pushed out cloth diaper services. It was an a-ha moment.. of course! Look on the back of a package of Huggies diapers and sure enough you see that they are manufactured by Kimberly-Clark.
Here is a paragraph from the review that angered me, which was on the topic of the recent book Modern Liberty and the Limits of Government by the libertarian Charles Fried:
Fried's most valuable contribution is to highlight the abiding tension between personal liberty and the "welfare administrative state." Though he exaggerates in suggesting that policies like Quebec's enforced egalitarianism in health care or Vermont's small-town zoning preferences amount to full-blown regimes of oppression, "crammed down the throats" of dissenters, they are real infringements on individuals and cannot be dismissed simply by invoking the will of the majority.
So people in Vermont who don't get to shop at a Wal-Mart or Home Depot are having their liberty infringed upon? That is absurd as it assumes that the placement of a Wal-Mart in a small town is some kind of neutral fact.. that the people who don't want to shop at a Wal-Mart will simply continue not to shop there, while the people who do want to shop at Wal-Mart are finally free from the oppressive liberal regime. But a Wal-Mart is not a neutral fact, it fundamentally changes the economic playing field of the small town. Those people who enjoyed their small town will not have the same small town once the Wal-Mart arrives.. Why should a majority of people who want to preserve the character of their own town not be able to protect it?
Back to the diapers. I have no idea the extent to which Kimberly-Clark actively pushed out cloth diapering in this area.. but it strikes me as the kind of thing that corporations often do. It serves as an example of the way our lifestyle is often chosen for us by corporations. Let New York City ban trans-fats and the Appleton newspaper is filled with people complaining about silly government interference, but let a corporation directly determine and limit our choices in the name of profit.. and it is just the American way.
I am not crazy about a local government banning trans-fat, and I don't know about the specifics of the case in New York, but let's try to think about what could bring about this situation. The food and drinks served in schools has for a long time been influenced by corporations who establish a foothold by doing something nice like paying for the uniforms of a sports team. Only in the past few years has there been an effort to scale back this advance of junk-food and sugar drinks into the diet of students. These students have no real choice.. right? They are given poor food choices to begin with.. and develop a taste for bad foods thanks to this forced introduction. How is that not a loss of individual liberty? And why should a local government not step in and lay down some health rules for these corporations that bully students around and don't give them any real choices?
This kind of indirect corporate bullying is everywhere in our world. Yesterday we received in the mail a small box of baby formula from a large corporation. It is well known that babies do better with breast feeding.. so one would think that all effort should be centered on getting more mothers to breast feed.. but no, better to try and win us over as consumers of their product. It is true that no one is forced to choose baby formula over breast feeding.. but this relies on too nice a definition of advertising, which actively works to cognitively push people into buying products. A clearer sense of the cognitive force of corporate advertising for a large percentage of the population would open the way for more and stronger government push-backs.
I want to maximize individual freedom.. and keep government out of private decisions. I have no issue with that. The problem with modern conservatism is that as they sweep back government control in the economic and environmental areas of our life, corporate interests quickly move into the gap. The result is not gain for individual freedom, but the loss of individual freedom to a new foe: corporations. A new liberalism must have the strength to stand up to all these people who in the name of profit want to make our decisions for us.. about what we eat and where we shop. Legal limitation on these corporations is all about us taking back the control of our lives.. we should be the ones deciding how our landscape will look and what we want our children to eat.
Translating the Classics:
Orson Welles on Shakespeare
December 30, 2006
In classical music there is tension between those who want to hear a piece of music as it would have originally sounded.. with softer period instruments. and those who are perfectly content to listen to music with the benefit modern setting and souped-up instruments. One can go even further and transform Bach into a modern tune with percussion and electronic sounds. I remember one guy named Sal that I knew at Carls Jr. tell me with deep seriousness: "A lot of people don't know this, but Bach has bass." From then on I had an image of him driving around in his low-rider truck, behind tinted windows, with Bach's base rocking the vehicle.
It is an underrated question: to what extent should a work from the past be updated? I probably fall onto the conservative side of those who would venture an answer, since I very much enjoy hearing something the way it would have sounded to the first people to hear it. Faced with a choice of a classical recording on period instruments or a modern version of some work adapted for an exciting performance by Yo Yo Ma.. I confess I would choose the period piece version. It is just deeply ingrained in my intellectual frame that every cultural product is produced for a specific audience and for a particular setting.. and all those particulars absorb my interest to no end.
If there was one constant in the career of Orson Welles it was his abiding love for the classics in general and Shakespeare in particular. Othello, Chimes at Midnight, and Macbeth were three of his important films.. and one can add an incomplete Merchant of Venice to that small group. His early stage productions included the famous voodoo Macbeth, performed in Harlem with a black cast, and the electrifying Caesar. If we include his radio dramas the list grows even longer.
This engagement with Shakespeare began early for Welles. It is pulse-raising to read his confidence in the validity of the experience of Shakespeare:
ON STUDYING SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS: Don't! Read them. Enjoy them. Act them. ...he wrote plays to amuse audiences in the theatre and he never bothered to have them printed... Internally or externally, however taken, the plays of Shakespeare are among the wide world's major joys; in the theatre, in the library, even in the schoolroom. [Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 178]
That reminds me of Frank O'Hara and his comparison of good poetry to tight pants.. it is something you just like, not something you think about. Taken by itself Welles' program could be interpreted as a return to the past. The unshackling of Shakespeare from the high seriousness of the Shakespeare culture machine is bound to get you a little closer to the Elizabethan theater.
Orson pushes a good deal beyond that. His actual productions tended to be assaults on the audience. Here is Simon Callow's summary of the voodoo Macbeth:
Whatever the original intention, Orson Welles had staged a highly original and exciting event, an integration of light, sound, movement and decor which had an overwhelming sensuous and visceral impact, a barbaric cabaret. [241]
That is not quite the St. Martin of the Fields version of Macbeth. The play is now something quite different.. no longer a return to Elizabethan aesthetics. Callow rightly brings up Wagner's idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art. This is Bach with electronic bass.
I recoil a little bit here.. and although I would not insist on seeing Shakespeare only in a Globe-like setting.. I prefer the play heading in that direction. My reasoning is that Shakespeare inevitably gets narrower as he is made to fit into a frame. Better to listen and get the multiple voices of an untidy text..
But where the sail of my interest receives a new gust of wind is when it comes to the idea of translating a classic such as Shakespeare into another medium. How does one take a play by Shakespeare and make it into a 60 minute radio drama? Or into a movie? The easiest thing is to do nothing.. just to pretend its a theater drama with only voices.. or one that just happens to be filmed. Welles, however, had an intuitive grasp of the way changes in medium demanded real changes in style.
Callow writes about this approach to radio:
[Welles] wanted to make it very clear that there was no question of simply transferring the Mercury's repertory to the radio. 'I think it is time that radio came to realize the fact that no matter how wonderful a play may be for the stage, it cannot be as wonderful for the air.' [372]
Welles thus seems to accept for himself the challenge of translating a classic.. not simply receiving and performing it. For myself it is right here, in the willingness of Welles to take a play or novel and translate it into a new medium, that I find myself most fascinated by him. It reminds me of the reception of the epic tradition by the dramatic poets of Athens.. and their re-casting of those stories into what we know as Greek dramas. The artistic constant of the last century has been a rapid succession of new mediums.. movies to television to YouTube. Someday looking back at this period it may well be evident that these new mediums forced a recasting of our culture's important narratives.. There simply had to be a translation process. Orson Welles may come to be seen as the avatar of this process.. a voice calling out for creative transformation of our cultural past into formats that are contemporary..
What is an "Old Roads Artist"?
December 29, 2006
Tonight I have been putting together the new PopLife page.. which will pull together the blogs on popular music and movies. In one column I organize the blogs under the heading "Old Roads artists." I would like to think that the phrase means more than simply recognition of the fact that an artist has gotten significant attention in this blog. So what is the principle behind the designation?
Let me start to answer that question by pointing out some figures who do not count as Old Roads artists. Britney Spears is not one.. monster publicity does not impress us, quite the opposite in fact. Bono is not an Old Roads artist.. no matter if we have some respect for the music of U2. There is just nothing of the odd and eccentric in his work for us to grab hold of. Mel Gibson is not an Old Roads artist.. despite his interest in re-creating distant times, he shows no real feeling for the deeper differences between people.. and has the instincts of a literalist. Andy Warhol is not an Old Roads artist.. gazing raptly on the packaged modern world and mimicking it, ironically or not.
Here are some of the positive qualities that define the Old Roads artist:
- antiquarian interests. A deep feeling for the world of the past.. This is interest in the past not as a simple prop for conservative values.. the way the world never was.. but with a sense of the strangenesss of the past. Artists with an antiquarian interest use their knowledge to challenge the homogenizing contemporary world.
- eccentric projects. The artists we enjoy are apt to forget about popular applause.. seeking fulfillment instead through immersion in a personal vision. They also exhibit a spirit of combinatoriness when it comes to generic expectations.
- passionate expression. Passion covers a multiplicity of artistic sins. I mean by that a focused striving for an artistic goal. This may involve constructing an arabesque of colorful towers in your backyard.. but it is obvious to everyone that this is something he or she must do.. is driven to do.
- ethical challenge. These artists are not characterized by irony. Underneath their projects one can glimpse not just a creative spark, but a desire to understand something about how best to live. There is a seeking for a higher life.
So far the list of Old Roads artists is limited.. but the number will expand as time passes and blogs accumulate. Right now we have concentrations of blogs centering on Bob Dylan, Orson Welles, and Nirvana. One can add Neil Young, the Kinks, and Saul Bellow. More will be added.. but our principles will stay the same.
Orson Welles the Showman
December 28, 2006
The most recent New Yorker has the Nobel Prize lecture delivered this year by the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk. At one point he mentions that his father had recommended Montaigne, and this leads to an insightful passage on how he experiences the writing life:
I would like to see myself as belonging to the tradition of writers who—wherever they are in the world, East or West—cut themselves off from society and shut themselves up in their rooms with their books; this is the starting point of true literature.
That is the tenderly claustrophobic feel that pervades the whole of the lecture. Writers retreat into a lonely zone.. and after years in that zone they produce something lovely.. an image of the world that is rich and layered. There are no hints of a shortcut.
Returning to the biography Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu by Simon Callow, I was reminded of how differently Welles lived and created. There was no lonely zone.. no habitual place of quiet for Welles. He worked at a white heat, running from project to project and collaboration to collaboration. A person who worked with him in his early theater days wrote:
Even during those early years he was driven to being overbusy. When he was not busy he was lonely and miserable.. He would start at ten in the morning and not leave the theater. He might dismiss his cast at four the next morning but when he would return at noon, we would find Orson sleeping in a theater seat.. [293]
I'm not criticizing this manic creativity.. but it does have its consequences. Callow notes that in 1936 Welles performed a radio adaptation of Hamlet.. and then he asks in parentheses: "is there a character in the whole of dramatic literature for which he was less suited?" (304). A man who lived at his pace was unlikely to have a real feeling for the inwardness that is the chief characteristic of Hamlet. There is a golden ratio of reflection to creative output.. and to bypass this ratio is to bring on some sort of judgment.
Callow mines a similar vein when it comes to Welles as an actor:
His relationship to acting was paradoxical: he was immersed in its lore and unusually well equipped, physically, to practice it, but he never allowed himself to discover its deep rewards. [284]
That is a comment from an author who has presumably experienced something of those deep rewards.. and it is in passages like this that I most appreciate Callow's insight. Yes, Welles had great acting in him.. but in his major roles a deep emotional commitment to his characters is lacking. Think Citizen Kane or Mr. Arkadin. His movie version of Macbeth is also weak when it comes to a portrayal of interior evil, but strong when it comes to the construction of a dark foreboding atmosphere. Callow again is helpful:
His lack of communion both with himself and with the character he was playing made this [lack] inevitable. His idea of acting was purely cerebral; when that is the case, the god can never enter in. [284]
Yes, Orhan Pamuk and Orson Welles are different characters.. duh! One is a writer and one is an actor.. and the difference of lifestyle between those two professions has been noted for ages. But getting past that, Orson Welles was also a creator. This need for a lonely room.. a place for quiet reflection and free interior wandering.. is imperative for every creator. It is imperative not just for some psychological ideal of mental health.. but also for the long term nourishment of the creative force. The careful story told by Callow in his first volume of the biography of Orson Welles is that of a man with hurricane force creative energy who somehow neglects to know himself.. and the creative loss that flows from that interior neglect.
Paleolithic Art, pt. 3
December 27, 2006
The opening of chapter three contains an interesting specimen of academic poetry. It will not be anthologized by poetry editors.. but it is nevertheless refreshing to read these rhyming lines.. adding as they do an element of play and creativity to the practice of scholarship. It is this attention to play and unseriousness that allows Guthrie to see something new in these wall scratches from thousands of years ago. The conclusion to this poetic opening goes as follows:
We see—and know—these marks alright,
Fun, now accounted by today's reason
Fossils of a developing imagination,
Hints of a young brain's configuration.
Recognize—and reach—gently thus,
Our hand to theirs, in humanness. [114]
I was particularly taken by the line about "Fossils of a developing imagination.." One can imagine Coleridge perking up and finding reason in that to study paleolithic art. The poet who spent so much time thinking about the development of the imagination could not fail to be interested in these first surviving relics of the human imagination.
The chapter later returns and expands upon this idea of the imagination as the role of improvisation is pointed out. There are many examples in paleolithic art of figures that were not drawn upon a simple blank surface, but incorporated the natural shapes which were suggestive of some animal or human feature. That may not seem a major point, but it is a strong piece of evidence that these ancient drawings were not made according to some master plan, but were rather the result of the growing human mind's fascination with shapes and contours that mimic something from life. A paleolithic cave is not some chamber of mysteries, but a place for expressive experiment.. for connecting the dots.
If these images were created in a spirit of improvisation, then they are also good evidence for what was actively on the minds of our ancestors. Guthrie compares these improvised images to a Rorschach test. Faced with indeterminate and random natural marks, these early artists time and time again saw large mammals and women. Accordingly, Guthrie will spend two central chapters examining these two aspects of paleolithic culture: hunting large mammals and sexual fantasy.
I should clarify that these fixations were not shared by everyone in paleolithic culture.. the women and young girls undoubtedly expressed themselves in their own ways, through their own crafts. It just happens that these were not preserved very well, often being in softer materials. What we see drawn on cave walls and carved onto shafts of bone was the art of young men.. and their fascinations happen to parallel the fascinations of young men in our own day.
The age and sex of the cave drawers is reasonably clear from the handprints and footprints left in the caves by these artists. Guthrie is pretty certain that these artists were mostly male adolescents and children. This means we need to update that common mental cartoon of our ancient ancestors.. a band of men and women sitting around a fire in a cave. First of all our ancestors did not use deep caves for living.. but more importantly, we should imagine somewhere nearby a gaggle of kids.
This identification of children and adolescents as the culprits for much cave art is probably the most controversial aspect of this work. Guthrie supplies a possible reason for the academic disinterest in children as producers of this art:
I suspect that the older magico-religious paradigm has played a hand, mesmerizing attention toward what it deems serious and significant—and weighting children very lightly. In the old dichotomy of sacred and profane, children simply weigh in as lightweights compared to the many other, more officially important or spiritual concerns of adults. [116]
Being willing to call these drawings non-serious and playful allows Guthrie to make some fundamental and concrete comments about human nature and the early human lifestyle.. where the magico-religious viewpoint would cover the drawings in possible symbolic interpretations.
Not least important of the comments is his attention to the imagination. The drawings become firmly situated within a lifestyle.. and thereby get dragged away from airy notions of unpolished geniuses. These images are those that occur to growing human beings as they scan the contours of the cave walls.. much as my mind used to roam as I stared at the ceiling while lying on my bed.. and the images leaped out at me. This simple fact also goes some distance to proving that the imagination is not some modern luxury, but is a central part of who we are as human beings. It was a part of who these strange people were.. and therefore it is also a part of who we are.. or should be.
A Tour of Downtown Appleton, Wisconsin
December 25, 2006
Meaning and Pleasure:
What We Get Out of Texts
December 23, 2006
Imitation gives pleasure. This means laughter when it involves a Saturday Night Live skit in which some well known figure is imitated. We know that sense of tickled recognition when we think: Yes, that is exactly how so-and-so acts and talks! Comics find imitation useful because they do not even have to say anything funny; they imitate somebody successfully and the audience is in stitches. The pleasure of imitation can also be less overtly comic.. as in the experience of watching, say, a movie that catches the language and experience of some place we know well: Yes, that is exactly what grad school is like! Exactly what going to church is like! In this case we don't laugh, but we are pleased.. another way of saying that we feel pleasure.
Narrative arts (as opposed to the lyrical) are engaged in the effort of imitating something about the world. The novel, plays, movies.. all are engaged in imitation. Even when the work imitates a world completely foreign to me.. an array of small details can build authenticity and draw my interest with the promise that this is a genuine representation. In this case I leave the theater or put down the book having enjoyed a closely observed world. (note: this can be true even of a work that takes a fantasy world as its setting.. since I take fantasy genres as cloaked or exaggerated versions of the present world.. in which case what we get is the pleasure of caricature.)
If imitation was all there was to it, then directors would throw real life up onto the screen.. unadulterated experience. But we would get bored. There is the need for narrative to keep our attention. Narrative is the product of our own cognitive processes.. and not something that is really out there in the world to be imitated. Let me try that again.. Our minds take in countless details and select out of them a linear version of events that is used to make sense of experience. This is the way we process the world. Movies and books approximate that cognitive process of selection.. and present us with an edited possible version of life which are mind intuitively grasps.
Narrative is obviously responsible for the interest generated by a plot.. but I think it is also important to recognize the power of narrative to give meaning to a work. The details of a work may give flashes of pleasure as we see a world reflected.. but the meaning of a work is determined by its ability to plug-in to a cultural script. Movies as different as Narnia and Superman Returns work to evoke the story of Christ's death and resurrection.. which I find endlessly annoying. But that must do something for a lot of people.. it must give them a new version of an important cultural script.. and therefore feel meaningful. It must cause pleasure to see the same story worked out in a different time and place.
This last week Emily and I went to see the new Will Smith movie The Pursuit of Happyness.. mostly forgettable. Afterwards Emily commented that it reminded her of business success narratives she has heard from people connected to Primerica. There the stories all have a certain arc of hardship overcome and success through hard work. It is not a biblical story, but a separate cultural script.. which we find recognizable. Part of the appeal of this movie will be for people who have already internalized that narrative.
The last thing I want is to be mistaken for some crazed follower of Joseph Campbell with these musings. The narratives I am talking about are not floating out there in space.. neither archetypes nor supracultural scripts. I find that unsupportable. These narratives are generated by cultures.. and that is exactly why it is so interesting to think about texts moving from culture to culture.. and to speculate about how the meaning changes. Try watching Superman Returns in Cairo! Try watching a French noir film!
Meaning can perhaps be called a basic-level narrative. If we interviewed people walking out of a theater and asked them to summarize what they saw, they would say: character X runs away, then struggles, then comes back. Those highly stripped down versions of a narrative, I would argue, are the places where we find the meaning of a work.. but the immediate pleasure of the film is more connected with the imitation of multiple details. My tendency.. which I might as well admit.. is to love films and books that are very high in details.. thick with another world. But that does not mean I don't appreciate the ways that narrative coalesces those details into something bigger than I could have anticipated.
Patterns of Biography, or Reading about
Katharine Hepburn
December 22, 2006
In biographies a sort of kick start is often employed. The author begins the story with some colorful incident drawn from a point well into the career of the subject. In the case of Kate we begin with Hepburn boarding a boat for Europe with a female friend. The incident manages to highlight several themes that will recur throughout the biography: female companionship, arms-length relationship with fans, caginess with respect to private life, and an elite New York background. The kick start here and in other biographies is evidently designed to pull the reader into the biography.. and thus avoid the chronological demand to start at the dreary beginning when so-and-so's father was born in such-and-such a far away place. I am not sure how long this kick start has been common practice for biographers, but it is certainly well entrenched now.
William Mann, the author of Kate, goes one step further and begins each chapter with a miniature kick start. That is to say, he does not simply proceed through a designated period in chronological order, but selects a colorful incident and leads off each chapter with the incident.. and then settles into a straightforward recounting of events.
Mann is a sharp biographer, and his strength continues to be his ability to make sense of the various kinds of relationships, social and sexual, in which people are involved. He is always skeptical about public and normalizing versions of these relationships. It is interesting to watch him develop his themes and push them relentlessly.. this relentlessness is in fact my only quibble with the book. The following passage is an example:
Scotty's recollections allow for a deeper understanding of Tracy's story. Indeed, they show that Spencer fits the profile of Kate's other significant male relationships. Like Putnam and Ford, he found particular fulfillment from impassioned friendships with men, from his college years through adult life... Like Kate's other men, Spencer drank himself unconscious because she said he was "oversensitive" to life... [338]
It is easy to see there the pull toward a settled pattern. We find reference to a "profile" of Kate's men. Then two direct comparisons begun with "like." I often (but not always) buy what Mann is proposing.. but it is important to realize what is going on here. We are being offered several overarching patterns into which the particular details of Hepburn's experience can be fit. Once those patterns become set in our imagination then Mann has a handy tool for explaining relationships.. the details of which are largely unknown.
One can perhaps make a general statement about biographers in general: they are pulled between two extremes. The one side involves taking every detail as it comes and making sense of it without recourse to the other events.. this leads to an atomistic approach to biography. The other side is content to draw on patterns and repetitions that allow the details of a life to be drawn together.. this leads to a more interpretive biography. It strikes me that this is not simply an issue for biographers, but something that confronts all of us as we try to make sense of life. If we know ourselves well, then we recognize that we respond to life in well-trodden ways. We also know that sometimes we come to understand those past choices and head out in a new direction. A trap for the biographer who studies a life is to mistake the new direction for a well-trodden path..
A Chart of Academic Specializations
December 20, 2006
Many divisions within the academy are not immediately evident to the observer.. not everything is as easy as department divisions! The following is an attempt to sketch out the relationships between different kinds of scholarly mentalities.
I am here defining the philologists as experts in technical issues surrounding the interpretation of languages and texts. The archeologist is someone equally immersed in technical issues, but whose concerns are centered on physical evidence of some kind or other. These two are on the bottom of the chart because they are foundational to all other study.. without edited texts and the interpretation of physical evidence no one would have any basis for arguing anything.
In the center of the chart is the period expert.. and this person could also be termed a subject expert. The Ph.D. process pushes the majority of scholars to this zone. Dissertations with titles such as "Catholicism in Spain 1400-1600 AD" are the markers of this scholar. This sort of specialization is also smart given the academic job market.. which is dominated by time periods.. i.e. "we are looking for someone who works on early modern European history." The period expert is able to step up and fill this kind of position.
At the top come two distinct sorts of scholar. There is the synthesizer and the theoretician. The synthesizer is what the period expert will sometimes grow into.. and it is always a pleasure to read the work of a synthesizer because it identifies surprising parallels and weaves them into a whole. The theoretician, by contrast, is a scholar not so interested in a historical "whole" as in plugging individual facts into a useful frame. This frame will be an interpretive tool that informs the way other texts are read.. something not sought by the synthesizer.
I have also tried to show in my chart the continuities of these different scholarly mentalities. These are often surprising.. Philologists and archeologists are split.. each bringing very different priorities to their work and not terribly interested in what the other has. Yet both are comfortable with the period expert, who draws heavily on the detailed work of both. On top of the chart, the synthesizer and the theoretician are rarely comfortable with each other.. bringing a different agenda to their material. Yet both will use the work of the period expert.
It's humorous how scholars often look down on scholars of a different mentality. This is most obvious when it comes to the distant relation between the theoretician and the philogian. But such hostility is ridiculous, because the entire academic project depends on all these levels functioning at the same time. Facts and points of knowledge are continually getting thrown upwards, and if we are to avoid a great mass of indistinguishable information crowding our libraries then we must posit the work of scholars who can digest and pull together all that information. The period expert who writes "Catholicism in Spain from 1400-1600" may think he has said all that needs to be said, but there is surely a need for the synthesizer to come along and write her book The Rise and Fall of Christianity in Europe.
So where do I fall on this chart? I would say that I am a theoretician who works hard at being a period expert. I have always had envy of those lower down the chart.. standing in awe of philologists in particular. By mentality, though, I am someone who sits at the top right of the scholarly chain.
Paleolithic Art, pt. 2
December 18, 2006
The second chapter of R. Dale Guthrie's The Nature of Paleolithic Art enquires into the ability of these people to depict the world around them. Were they naturalists? The chapter then extends into numerous small natural details that were depicted. Guthrie even claims: "These hunter-artists of Eurasia documented mammalian behaviors that were not studied and illustrated so well again until the twentieth century..." (53).
I caught myself wondering why Guthrie pushed all this material to the very front of his book.. but I think it has to do with his intent to right away knock some holes in the prevailing idea that this ancient art is full of elusive symbols.. and therefore unknowable. As it becomes evident that detailed natural observations from everyday life are making their way into the representations, the harder it becomes to claim that these images represent something too esoteric to understand. Along with this comes the point that much paleolithic art is amateurish.. bad drawers making the same mistakes that bad drawers today would. By the end of the chapter the conclusion seems clear enough: these were average people drawing what they saw around them.. sometimes beautifully but sometimes badly.
Average people? No.. that was not quite right. These were highly skilled professionals. Life was keyed to the natural world and survival meant honing a set of specialized skills. These were people with all the mental skills of you and I, but who expended their energies on figuring out the animals on which they depended. Guthrie eloquently writes:
Year after year, lifetime after lifetime, lore of animals accumulated. Animals were the Pleistocene libraries, newspapers, comics and videos, classrooms, shop floors, soccer matches, and churches. One mastered reindeer and horses the way a surgeon or diamond cutter learns a craft. When hunters closed their eyes, we know that they could see muscle and tendon in their proper positions and articulations. Yet such an inner vision was no instant gift but was accumulated and honed by observation and experience, and the spoor of that learning is visible in Paleolithic art. [91]
For me that is a new way of thinking about these ancient human beings.. as professionals of the natural world.
How then can one understand these people and their artistic remnants? If we wanted to understand, say, the fragmentary journal of an 18th century navigator. what would we do? We would try to understand everything about the profession of navigator. and the physical context of the job. After assembling all those details, elements in the journal would start to make sense. Guthrie's point is that to get inside the head of these earlier people, one has to figure out their world.. which was dominated by the hunting of large mammals. The problem is that so few people have real familiarity with the world as it existed on the Mammoth Steppe.
This second chapter serves the added purpose of giving Guthrie the chance to show how sharp his own natural observations can be.. going some way toward convincing us that he can get inside the head of these people. Which is actually an important principle for hunters, pointed out by Guthrie in a sidebar entitled "living inside the animals you are drawing" (92). And although this is used to illumine the practices of lifetime hunters, it also seems to point to Guthrie's own intellectual goal: learning to think the thoughts of these paleolithic people.
Positive and Negative Versions of Liberalism
December 17, 2006
If there is any single word associated now with liberalism, I think it would be tolerance. It is a point of pride among self-identified liberals, who likely enjoy visiting the Museum of Tolerance. The word also is a finger on the crux of many hot issues. This is most obvious when it comes to the tolerance of varying lifestyles and identities.. The importance of tolerance is less obvious, but still important, when it comes to the question of abortion.. which is about tolerance for people who make a different moral decision, based on different values. The principle of tolerance will also tend to make one look carefully at another person's position.. and to then ask "What is motivating that person?" Inherent in that question is the conviction that this person is not simply "evil".. but should be given a chance to explain itself. Tolerance is a better word than "doubt" because tolerance does not betray anything about one's own convictions. What could possibly be a clearer and stronger virtue for a vibrant democracy than tolerance?
Since so many of the culture wars are fought on turf covered by tolerance, it is natural that liberals should elevate this value to a place of central importance. But tolerance is essentially a negative value.. it is a passionate allowance for others.. but not a positive program for living. In the midst of the continuing skirmishes of the culture wars, this negative liberalism is constantly reinforced.. while any positive program is pushed to the side.
What would a positive program look like? When I was young.. attending a private Christian grade school.. we had to memorize Bible verses for the different Christian virtues. There was patience, love, kindness, self-control.. You would be surprised how long the list went and how many colorful little banners I could bring home. If one is looking for a positive program of life.. one with actual recommendations for lifestyle choices and personal habits.. then one is mostly stuck with religious groups. That is not right.
Needed in America is a liberal movement that sets out a positive way of living. It would be open and inclusive to different lifestyles.. i.e. still tolerant.. but build a positive vision of life.. sketch out the values of a good life. As it is, it sometimes feels to me that liberals have given up the solid ground necessary for a critique of mainstream American culture. A liberal might excuse Britney Spears by saying: "that is simply another life choice.." Right there is where the principle of tolerance gets in the way of hewing a true life path.. We must speak out about what the good life is and is not.
Please don't imagine by this that I intend to limit the choices of Britney Spears or any other dedicated partier.. the liberal that I am imagining will have no impulse to control others. What I am getting at is a liberalism that works something like an ancient philosophical school.. the Stoics.. who were dedicated to living right in the midst of the Roman Empire. They had no qualms about discussing life choices and positive values. The point should be to work to define a common healthy lifestyle.. and eventually to find a way to build a community of such people.
Books Ill Served by Penguin Editions
December 16, 2006
There is an important and not often recognized bias at play when it comes to publishing works from the past. Classic works are great, but they need to fit into a small paperback edition that would be convenient for use in a classroom. The general public is willing to read a classic, but we have certain expectations when it comes to length. We expect a book to be good reading for a trip.. and not to be interminable. These social demands create a sieve that lets through a certain kind of work.. and I would argue that this work could be defined as a short book that is able to fulfill some of the expectations of a novel.
The problem is that our current reading expectations are not a direct match with many great texts. I find this particularly telling when it comes to Arabic classics, which are only rarely short and narrative-driven. Take, al-Maqrizi, the 15th century Egyptian historian. His major work is the Khitat which in its recent Arabic publication comes in five large volumes. It is a work that is important and fascinating, but which will likely never find its way into a Penguin paperback edition.. it is just too large. In addition to size, there is also the matter of illustrations.. to make sense of al-Maqrizi's close topographical descriptions it is helpful to have a map and historical photos. With that you can palpably imagine the complete loss of interest on the part of most publishers. The Khitat is a work that is large and costly to print.. and whose audience is naturally limited.
I am not out to force al-Maqrizi on the mass of Americans.. really, I'm not. I don't think his audience is large, and I readily understand why a publisher would not be interested in a multi-volume illustrated edition. I just don't want us to confuse the those modern market- and reader-driven preferences for a judgment of quality. Many important and interesting works don't get read simply because of historical shifts.. and connected to that is the fact that many books which are not interesting and which were not terribly important in their time make their way to the top of college reading lists simply because of their size and their convenience to contemporary publishers.
Enter the internet. A small readership does not matter because an internet text costs little to produce. It also does not need to be given a costly new printing evey few years.. it can just sit there online with little cost to anyone. The high cost of printing pictures is no problem on the internet, as anyone who glances at this page can see.. I can put up all the photos I want, and it costs me almost nothing. All of a sudden those illustrations and maps become easy to manage.. with a little tech know-how.
When one sits back and thinks about it, it is unavoidable that major changes will come to academic publishing. As I understand it, most academic books make very little money.. and their publication is driven more by prestige than by actual demand. What is the logic of expensive new editions of old texts when they can be given a permanent home on-line? These are all developments that I anticipate noting as the years pass..
But this is no jeremiad about losing books. It is a celebration of our new freedom from the publishing biases of our time. Some of the encyclopedic and daring works of the past.. works too long and obscure to make their way into our modern consciousness.. not have a shot at doing just that. And who knows, perhaps all these new forms will help create a new readerly sensibility.. an appreciation for eccentric life-consuming projects.. like the Khitat by al-Maqrizi.
Christian Video Games and
Turning the Other Cheek
December 14, 2006
With the general level of violence in video games, I am hardly going to get bent out of shape by a violent Christian video game.. but it is nevertheless curious to read about the game "Left Behind: Eternal Forces." Just to sidestep for a moment the issue of Christian violence, I think the game is broadly indicative of a Christian community whose general tactic in combating the secular world has been to propose mirror alternatives. Don't listen to secular rock.. listen to Christian rock! Don't watch those bad cartoons.. watch Christian cartoons! And now we get: Don't play those video games.. play a Christian video game! You will excuse me for observing that for an outsider it is tough to see how in the end this strategy does not simply affirm the general lifestyle and demands of our mainstream culture..
The company website makes a curious statement about violence and Christianity:
Christians are quite clearly taught to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. It is equally true that no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death.
That sounds so reasonable.. as if there were two competing Christian truths to be balanced. But while the first statement about turning the other cheek is drawn from the Gospels, the second statement about how no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor is just made up out of thin air. I challenge anyone to find a passage in the Bible where that idea is presented. Yet the statement is presented as something obviously true!
Seeing something like that I can't help ranging back to the early centuries of Christianity and thinking about the cult of martyrdom that developed among Christians. Just read the Martyrdom of Polycarp. Now there is much that is off-putting in that early Christian cult of death.. but it is hard to imagine any early Christian figure accepting the obviousness of the claim that "no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death." That happens to describe pretty accurately the situation of early Christianity.
So how would someone smuggle violence into Christianity? One effective way seems to be emphasis of the book of Revelation. Moving these apocalyptic visions into the center of Christian experience.. which is a central thrust of modern Evangelicalism if one tallies what is being bought.. opens the way for an embrace of global conflict and derring-do on the part of resistors to the world order. We are obviously paying dearly for these fantasies today in our engagement with the Middle East.
In the long term the most dangerous aspect of the video game is the continuing demonization of a viable global system. We.. i.e. the population of the world.. are confronted with challenges that boggle the mind, environmental and political. Any sane person must admit that greater global cooperation would be a great good.. But here the video game (and I am sure the Left Behind series of books as well) is sending young people off to virtually fight the "Global Community Peacekeepers", There is a bunch of bad guys with a frightening name! They are of course led by the Antichrist. Could it be any clearer how fascination with apocalyptic imagery plays into the hands of the most extreme versions of American patriotism?
A Series of Dreams:
The Recent Videos of Bob Dylan
December 13, 2006
This past weekend Slate premiered the new Dylan video for "Thunder on the Mountain." It was a poor man's video, drawing clips from an archive of Dylan footage, linked together to give the illusion that in all these different stages he is singing the same song. It is hard to know the extent to which these videos stem from Dylan's imagination.. but duly noting that cuidado, it is curious to reflect on the disjunction between the portrayal of Dylan's career in this video, and the way it must actually exist in his memory.
That may seem like an odd thing to speculate about.. but here's what I mean: the new video gathers together clips that are all generally recognizable to Dylan fans.. they sum up the public visual history of the man. But what does Dylan see when he closes his eyes and thinks about the past? Like everyone he thinks about friends and family.. children.. personal moments.. all those details or private life. But in essence, the new video asks us to see Dylan as a unified figure whose past and present is aligned and whose life is summed up by the public visual history.
These thoughts started skipping around in my head a month or two ago when I first saw the video for "Series of Dreams".. now viewable on YouTube (see below). This time the public images accompany a song that is genuinely reflective on the past.. a rarity for Dylan.. as if his private dreams were somehow indexed to public views of his career. I always thought that the whole point of entitling a song "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream" was that we had to assume 114 that were not recorded.. and that is where we could locate private life. In recent videos that imagined space is gone.
Add one more element into this mix of public and private memories: his recent video for "When the Deal Goes Down".. starring Scarlett Johansson. The video manufactures a private world of memory. The fiction is that we are back in the 50s with a super-eight camera, getting clips of the fleeting personal moments that two lovers share. It is a nostalgic and beautiful video, in its way.. and if nothing else it is interesting for its fuzzy and warm version of private memories. Indeed, this is the way private memories work.. these are the kinds of things a person sees when thinking back on the past.
Private memories are things over which Dylan exercises the most stringent protection.. He assures someone on Modern Times: "I won't betray your love or any other thing.." and it may as well be a promise to keep private things private. He has two strategies for dealing with private memory: 1) to offer fictional versions of it, or 2) to present public images of his career as if they really did encapsulate his private world. But the actual series of private dreams remain a mystery, and Dylan is not about to dip into his personal stash of memories for the sake of a video.
A Series of Dreams:
Borges in Context: A Review of The Writer and the World by V.S. Naipaul
December 11, 2006
A favorite passage of mine from the essay "Argentina and the Ghost of Eva Perón":
The military like clean walls; and the walls of Buenos Aires are now whitewashed and bare. But here and there the ghostly political graffiti of old times show through the whitewash: the "Evita Vive"... friend mysteriously turned to enemy, now an unimportant part of dead Argentine history, the ghost of a ghost: all that dead history faint below the military whitewash. [397]
I like the sense here that history is something physically present. For all the odd idealism and fantasy behind Peronism.. which verged on the spiritualistic.. the marks of this political philosophy still found there way onto physical walls, and when a new regime came in, those walls were painted over, and undoubtedly new words—representing a new fantasy—found their way onto those walls.
Although Argentina is a surprising country in which to find Naipaul.. neither a Caribbean island nor an African country.. he once again explores the connection of abstract values to concrete life. A host of abstractions get interrogated and found wanting, from Peronism to machismo to heroic versions of history. Such abstractions inevitably mark society:
But politics have to do with the nature of human association, the contract of men with men. The politics of a country can only be an expression of its idea of human relationships. [391]
That should not be swallowed to quickly, for it expressly leaves out any external factors.. placing the success and failure of a society squarely on its own shoulders. But to the extent one would like to pursue this line of thinking (which surely cannot be wholly denied), Naipaul is a pleasing guide.
Borges tends to get a free pass when it comes to political context. The stories for which he is best known encourage that dissociation, concentrating on mental puzzles like endless libraries or books never written. Naipaul casts a cold eye on these stories:
Borges's puzzle and jokes can be addictive. But they have to be recognized for what they are; they cannot always support the metaphysical interpretations they receive. There is, though, much to attract the academic critic. [364]
That last line casts a bit of aspersion on the academics who enjoy getting lost in mind games. In their resolute cognitive abstraction the stories allow us to forget the context that surrounded Borges.
Naipaul's service to Borges (for whom he expresses admiration) is to place him in the middle of Argentina.. and to remind us that a large percentage of his work dwells on a questionable romantic past.. giving life to the city he loves. His great theme, on this reading, can be summarized:
Argentina as a simple mythical land, a complete epic world, of "republics, cavalry and mornings..." of battles fought, the fatherland established, the great city created and the "streets with names recurring from the past in my blood." [370-1]
That is a world which Naipaul slowly dismantles and dismisses.. another edition of historical fantasy.
But hold on.. what can we say about those fantastic stories? In this essay, those stories appear right alongside the tale of the man who bought a house in 1953 with a 6 percent loan from a bank, and in 1968, after currency devaluations, was paying only 12 cents a month to the bank. Then there is the tale of Eva Perón and her saint-like image.. and the return of her husband to power after 17 years in exile. And how about the tales of torture and the disappeared.. along with Naipaul's own surreal run-in with security men. Suddenly those tales acquire the context that they seem to so resist. They are another path of fantasy. Not that this makes them uninteresting, but perhaps they remain interesting for reasons that are hardly acknowledged by the academic cult of Borges. The intellectual fantasy of the stories mirrors the political fantasy that came to dominate Argentina.. that intellectual fantasy being as culpable as any other for the loss of realism.
Reading and Interpreting Scripture
December 10, 2006
Consider this as one more installation in the recent spate of blogs on the topic of Islam and violence. I continue to be bothered by the idea that somehow a religion is doomed to fall into the extremism of its scripture. If anyone can locate exhortations to violence in the Qur'an, then that is exactly what will characterize followers of Islam 1400 years later.. if they are serious about their religion.
Right now my counter example is Mormonism and its allowance of polygamy back in the day of Joseph Smith and Brigham Young. I could come up with pages of text demonstrating that these leaders justified and engaged in polygamy, so could I not draw the conclusion that Mormonism is anti-"family values"? That would be rubbish, we all know. Whatever the strength of that teaching in the past, it has been replaced by a veneration for marriage.
When I asked a class to explain this change, someone piped up that the American government forced the Mormon Church to give up polygamy.. which may be partially true.. but that is still a terribly concrete and unimaginative way to cast the issue. Staring us in the face is the fact that religions do have the ability to change and transform themselves. Problematic scriptures and doctrines have a way of being left behind.. or interpreted in new ways. Mormons today are obviously not resisting polygamy out of fear of the government, but because elements of their traditions have been selected and strengthened, while others elements were explained away by historical circumstances.
With respect to violence and religion, there is another example to think about.. Homer's Iliad and Odyssey functioned as the scripture for Greek civilization. Early on a form of inspiration was ascribed to Homer.. and throughout antiquity these two books remained a source for Greek writers of all stripes.. historical analogies and morals were drawn from these works.
Could there possibly be a more violent scripture lodged at the base of a civilization? Hard to imagine that. So obviously the Greeks were violent and terrible. Well, yes they were at times. But the literal reading of these texts gave way to readings that were much more amenable to philosophic ways of thinking. New thinkers rarely felt the need to trash Homer (Plato being the major exception), but found ways to make Homer work for their own purposes. This would be the pattern especially with the Stoics and then the Neo-Platonists.
I am hardly arguing that
the modes of thought and system of values in Homer had nothing to do with Classical culture.. they helped to form that culture. But at the same time that culture could push back and re-shape its sacred texts. To understand classical culture one cannot simply cite pages of violent battles from Homer and claim to have some kind of clear window on the culture.. that would be a shortcut to the hard work of understanding a culture that is changing through time.
So now back to Islam. Yes, the Qur'an is a violent book, being revealed to Muhammad in the midst of a tribal setting that recognized the legitimacy of force and raids. Remember, this was well before Beowulf and the Icelandic sagas.. (one can imagine what it would have looked like if God sent a messenger to the Vikings!) It was a violent world, no doubt about that. At issue, though, is whether once we have recognized that fact we have cornered all future Muslims into a single view of violence and faith.
I believe the answer to that is no. Like all sacred books the Qur'an was impressed into issues that could never have been guessed at by Muhammad. In effect, the Qur'an was expanded to meet the needs of later generations. Various reading strategies are employed in expanding sacred texts.. and this is not the place for me to define those strategies.. I will just note that I am amazed at how literal-minded all sides are these days when it comes to scripture, both critics and adherents of religions.
Paleolithic Art, pt. 1
December 8, 2006
Teaching religion ultimately means a commitment to thinking about how human beings create meaning in this world. Ideally, it should also involve a certain level of fascination with that process. One perk in studying religion is in the possibility of a wide-angle view of human beings and their interaction with the world. That is to say, I can read a book like The Nature of Paleolithic Art and feel like I am still reasonably within my academic discipline.
The subject for the book is the sizeable number of prehistoric drawings and carvings that have come down to us.. such as the paintings in the cave of Lascaux in France. Here is an image of what I am talking about:
How do we relate to such images? My first response is to throw up my hands.. these people are so far removed from my world and experience that the images, though striking, are impenetrable. Reading through Guthrie's book, I see that several generations of interpreters have more or less encouraged that view.
Essential to Guthrie's argument is the unity of human experience:
There is a human nature, and the main contours of that nature emerged in the Pleistocene. I'll make the case that this nature, which we still exhibit, formed as a result of adaptations to a fundamental human ecological niche, that Paleolithic people experienced their lives and earth similarly enough to the way you and I do that we can make numerous assumptions about their behavior based on cross-cultural studies of modern peoples and careful consideration if the evolutionary themes of our behavior as a human animal. [12]
He then goes on to note that it is difficult to imagine existence as a warrior ant or brooding raven, "but sit at any human's campfire and you are with your own" (12). That fundamental faith that human beings share important traits and needs underlies many of the conclusions in this work. It also happens to be inspiring to come across the traces of art made 10,000 to 40,000 years ago.. and then to see that this could be me! This is similar to how I might have responded.
Guthrie proposes what at first seems a rather stripped down and de-mystified view of these images. They emphatically do not carry ritualistic or shamanistic meanings. These beautiful images are not keyed to some lost otherworldly viewpoint, but generated by the landscape and ecological demands of these early human beings. Instead of seeing the images from the viewpoint of art history or religion, he interprets them as virtual fossils.. evidence of a past way of life and evidence for the a natural landscape—the "Mammoth Steppe"—that is now largely gone.
I am going to blog about this book some more, but let me end by noting that this book is a model for the kind of life-work scholarship I most admire. There is an obvious intersection between Guthrie the human and Guthrie the scholar.. his commentary on these images stemming from deep knowledge of animals and ecologies. Then there are the hundreds and hundreds of his own drawings throughout the work, which testify to his skill as an artist as well as a writer. This multi-dimensionality is sadly rare. Then there is the distinct sense that this is a book that came from scholarly obsession, and not something cooked up to get a publication out there. This book gets toward the zone in which scholarship becomes something that will not be lapped by the next generation, but will become a lasting testimony to a life spent in pursuit of knowing what it means to be human.. a work of literature.
No Profit, Lots of Fun
December 7, 2006
The following paragraph by Matthew Yglesias caught my eye:
To me, at least, this is the real moral of the story. Peer-production of digital media probably will produce a fair quantity of awesome popular stuff lurking amidst the vast pool of dreck. And well-designed services will let the awesome stuff rise to the top and the dreck fade to the background, rendering those services awesome and popular. But -- and here's the rub -- having something awesome and popular just may not prove to be especially lucrative. In the past, a popular television show or a popular album or a popular film or a popular distribution channel guaranteed you vast sums of money. In the future, that just may not be the case. The very most popular things will generate some income, enough to live off of and continue financing new projects, but not the sort of gigantic windfalls associated with 20th century media hits. And lots of other things -- including reasonably popular ones -- will only generate trivial levels of income. And they'll continue to be made. Made by people who think its fun, or who derive some benefit from their work other than direct monetary income.
I can't imagine anything more healthy than the scenario sketched at the end of this paragraph. If it came about it would represent nothing less than the liberation of the imagination from the machine of celebrity.
When we talk about cultural accomplishment, we are assuming the Michael Jordanization of creativity. It is so ingrained that it is difficult to get a fast break and rearrange our thinking. I mean we assume that in a world of millions there will be a rare individual who is head and shoulders above the crowd of other excellent competitors. The intent in our reading and viewing is to locate the Michael Jordan's of these different creative endeavors.. these will be the nobel prize winners and geniuses.
But as the population of the world grows, and we become more interlinked, this model will come to seem more and more ridiculous. There are too many creative people out there, able to produce too many interesting things. There is no best.. no Michael Jordan.. out there. Or rather, there are millions of them.. people whose creative energies are worthwhile and engaging.
In a world where we cannot read or view the work of all these people, what should one do? As I see it, what we are looking for are communities of creativity. Networks in which people can exchange their work and not worry about getting thrown up to the top of the pop charts.. or any sort of chart. And that brings us back to Yglesias' point that with peer-production of digital media there may be lots of people doing interesting things, but the profit level will fall considerably from the levels seen previously.
There has never been anything less helpful to the playing of sports than the idea of the superstar. There must be a direct relationship between the professionalization of a sport and the number of people who actually go out and play for fun.. (although video games offer the chance of playing like a superstar). In the creative world the same holds true. The great American novels and must-see movies tend to monopolize our attention.. and ultimately take away our get-up-and-go creative energies. We need new forms that are not out to dominate the horizons and suck our creative air. While we're at it, let's make some changes to the academic world, which also operates with the superstar model.. You'd almost think that interesting thoughts were owned by people who knew how to footnote and attend the right conferences.
The only thing we would lose is the dangled dream of instant superstardom and money to burn.. but we can do without that, I should think.
The Queen: A Review
December 6, 2006
My mental image of the Queen of England was dominated by that odd "talking hat" incident in which she addresses the cameras, but all the cameras can pick up is a gently bobbing hat. I never could have imagined her driving around by herself in a four-wheel drive jeep. The Queen was worth the money just for the way it handed me a humanized version of the Queen and the royal family.
The director Stephen Frears enters a strange genre which so far as I know has no real name. So let's call it the Re-life genre.. characterized by the exact reproduction of recent events. United 93 was another example.. and then think of the last couple of films by Gus Van Sant, Last Days about the death of Kurt Cobain, and Elephant about the Columbine killings. The films gain authority by hewing so closely to known facts and details that they amount to a re-living of events. As little fiction as possible makes its way into these films.. although at crucial moments they are apt to incorporate events that are wildly improbable.
This may sound like the standard operating procedure for all historic films, but there is a difference: when an actor elects to play a real historical figure—such as Queen Victoria—she may do a lot of research, but at the end of the day she must invent a character, adding the tiny details of behavior that make a character believable. The historical figures treated by the Re-life genre are of a different order. These figures have lived through our video saturated age, and therefore the details of their behavior are not to be invented, but to be mimicked. Helen Mirren had to study the walk, the look, and the voice of the Queen. Ditto the Kurt Cobain played by Michael Pitt. Other films of the genre do not center on celebrities, but the focus of the actor is still not to create unique characters, but to mold themselves into some specific position: air-traffic controller or high school teacher.
What does the audience get out of these films that try to re-live an event? I get this question after each viewing of a film in this genre.. since my viewing partner is always falling asleep! Clearly, not every event in life is worthy of this close detailed production. But these films get traction through their ability to treat cultural issues that are difficult to see clearly in the glare of media blitzes.
In the case of The Queen we come across a crux of modern life: the difference between the world of the image and the world of private life. The death of Princess Diana left the world mourning for a person they had seen on television; the royal family had to deal with the death of a real person. The easy thing for a filmmaker to do would have been to demonize one side or the other.. the petty formalities of the royal family or the petty demands of the image obsessed public and the tabloids. Mediating this conflict is the newly elected Tony Blair, with a natural sense of what the public needs, but also a keen feeling for the Queen's traditional manner of meeting the challenge. It is through his eyes that the audience comes to see the conflict.. he functions as our guide.
Throughout the film we feel the gravitational pull of the radiant personality, Princess Diana.. the "people's princess." By the end we have begun to doubt that beautiful image.. buried with stars in attendance.. and we have gained a dose of respect for the curmudgeonly and quiet values of the Queen. That respect is built scene by scene as a private life is built in our imaginations by the picky accuracy of the Re-life genre. It is not a respect that any other genre could have so neatly constructed.
Experiencing the Malls of
Appleton, Wisconsin
December 5, 2006
Seeing the Whole Katharine Hepburn
December 2, 2006
Emily and I have been reading through this biography of Katharine Hepburn. We have enjoyed a number of her films, but our decision to read about her was driven more by the strong reviews of this biography than by a long-standing fascination with Hepburn.
There is much about Hepburn that I find off-putting— especially coming after our biography of Woody Guthrie, who was born just five years later. Hepburn grew up privileged, and although it may have taken her father a few years to really establish himself in his medical practice, there seems to have been a steady upward climb in regards to their financial position. In college and afterwards, she was able to land among a group of leisured and extraordinarily wealthy peers. In the chapter we just read, the stock market crash of 1930 arrives, but these are people who will hardly be hitting any hard travelin'.
The biography reveals just how well contemporary thinking about gender and sexuality can translate into a perceptive account of life. The author of this biography, William Mann, approaches his subject with a deep and seemingly intuitive grasp of the multiple shades of human sexuality and attachment. Instead of forcing Hepburn into the standardized boxes of relationships, he constructs a complex portrait. Information about Hepburn's life is augmented by what we might call an archeology of sexuality. As we learn to see the categories of relationships that existed among her elite group of peers, we better understand the patterns of her relationships.
The relationship with her husband is a case in point. I remember watching the documentary All About Me and learning about her early marriage. There was nothing too notable about any of that and it was easy to settle her into the common position of someone who married early and then drifted apart as her career opened up. That is to say, I plugged her experience into a common social template. But how much richer it all appears once Mann is done describing the situation!
Her husband, Ludlow Ogden Smith, was likely gay, and marriage was convenient for him in that it satisfied his family's expectations. In their marriage both lived separate lives, spending time with close companions of both sexes. During this time Hepburn began a close relationship with the wealthy and young Laura Harding, and the following is what Mann has to say about this relationship:
If not "out" in the modern sense, the theatrical lesbians of the period lived within the fluid borders of the "open secret." Hepburn told the writer Helen Sheehy that she knew Le Gallienne (with whom she'd later share Constance Collier as a mentor) was "queer" but never thought "it queer that she was." Sophisticated circles knew and understood such things, but the rest of the world was oblivious, due to the fact that many of these women had husbands who, like Luddy, provided a degree of social currency while intersecting only occasionally in their lives. Yet for all intents and purposes, these women did not see themselves as creatures apart from the culture; private sexual behavior was not yet a determinant of one's identity. [156]
That is an example of what I mean by an archeology of sexuality. The drama in Hepburn's life becomes visible as one gets to understand the unspoken values of her surrounding world. It was not a secret life, but it was often motivated by drives that were not directly stated, even if they were understood implicitly by many.
Needless to say this kind of archeology has not generally been the way to write a popular biography of a film star. It is incomprehensible to imagine this subtle treatment of sexuality and gender just 20 or 30 years ago. But it is heartening to see how much about an individual life can be fleshed out with some care for the details of human sexuality. More than public opinion polls or political commentary, this book points to the inevitable triumph of those working to establish the rights and dignity of gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered persons in our culture. I simply observe that the other side of this argument does not have the ability to make sense of a life such as Hepburn's. By the time a James Dobson got done telling this story, it would have lost its richness.. it would be flat.. and that goes some ways toward showing the bankruptcy of those arguments.
