Essay Daily: Not Really So Daily

Re-building a brain

2012-01-05T10:21:00.000-08:00

or for a high-res pdf, click [here]

Airplane Reading

2011-12-28T16:34:00.000-08:00

After my neighbors put away their pair of insane inflatable Christmas displays—or after one of them did; the other persists and surely will until the New Year, after which point sanctions might be in order, I've been enjoying two books of essays, reading the first slowly, as I do, being Lia Purpura's Rough Likeness, which just came out from Sarabande Books. Her prose is a slow prose, a way of seeing, that knotty, highly amusing, that takes a good perambulation to digest. I'll surely write something here about it once I've finished it.

The other is a quicker, less gnarly (in a good way) read, a small book, sized for the hand and the seat back pocket, really a pair of essays, each about half the book. Checking In/Checking Out is a two-headed beast, written by Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich, ordered alphabetically (I don't know whether Checking In should happen before Checking Out, and the book is designed so that it works either way, with two covers, two ISBN codes cleverly designed into the covers so that I didn't even notice them. Even the spine could read either way. An object like a codex is hard to baffle like this, but they've done it nicely here:

Both essays are about air travel and the workings of airplanes/airports, in some ways like Alain de Botton's A Week in the Airport, at least in subject and in the meditative mode they each periodically assume. Each takes a different tack at the subject: Yakich's is the more narrative and personal, centering primarily around the passenger experience, his own fear of flying, but meandering, as essays do, to a number of other subjects including his marriage, attempts at meditation and tooling around Belgium in search of love, air crashes and air statistics, and the film Fearless. I started with Yakich since I know him better. He's the author of a recent novel and a couple kickass books of poetry and a highly amusing website which is as of this linking kind of impenetrable, not to say unentertaining.

Schaberg's is the insider view, having worked for Skywest as a "cross-utilized agent," a catch-all title for most things that need doing in airports, cleaning, baggage handling, checking people in, and so on. Schaberg's essay is setup as a collection of small anecdotes than anything else, subtitled "Seatback Pockets," "Meal Kits," "Tetris," and so on, so perhaps it's better thought of as a collection of little essays with some linkages rather than one essay. He's also the author of The Textual Life of Airports, a book of cultural criticism/literary analysis of airports as texts and the ways in which airports have registered in literature, which should give you a sense of the vision he brings to the essay. There's some memoir content in his essay/s too, though much of the real pop of it is in the descriptions of working behind the counter and in the nonpublic areas of airports, a subject fascinating to this reader at least, given the way that air travel has become mythologized in my mind in the last decade.

Much of Schaberg's essay is guided by his experience working for Skywest, and that experience is one of an initial thrill that gives way to exhaustion with repetition, all the spectacle of crawling underneath a just-landed jet squeezed out by rote. The more interesting stories become the human ones such as his odd collection of coworkers: Vicki, who slowly warms to him and starts bringing him Mountain Dew Code Reds which the two of them guzzle in secrecy, even though she is later fired for what appears to be no fault of her own; and hulking Montana cowboy Tom, who says "There are only two times when I wear a hat like that [backwards]: when I'm riding my bike, or when I'm sucking somebody off." Nice.

The essays pair in many ways, some obvious, given the subject matter, and some not (Jeff Bridges makes an appearance toward the end of both, for instance, and Yakich shows up in the end of Schaberg's essay). This is some of Yakich's best writing that I've read (though I like much of his work), and though I haven't read Schaberg's Textual Life this suggests its promise. Since it's selling for $100 at Amazon, it's meant for academic libraries rather than end-users, but don't let that dissuade you from checking out Checking In/Checking Out.

I've always been interested in airports more as liminal spaces, barely spaces at all (my first chapbook, Safety Features, was set all in airports or on airplanes), and I love to write in them. They're transitional, public but anonymous, at least for the passengers, though they do have a dearth of outlets (as, among others, Patrick Smith, who writes a column for Slate called Ask the Pilot, has noted on multiple occasions). These transitional, liminal spaces are ideal for the kind of essay thinking that de Botton does, and that Schaberg and Yakich do in this book. I'd love to have seen more of their brains on display here, see them each sprawl out a bit more (Yakich sprawls more successfully than Schaberg to my mind, though his domain is more relentlessly personal). Perhaps to suit that direction they've started a website (journal? I guess) called Airplane Reading which I'd encourage you to check out and send work to: it too is a home for some essaying (or perhaps memoiring or storying). Try flipping back and forth between each of their halves of the book and the website, and then insert some Lia Purpura for an ideal cross-training regimen. And take down your holiday decorations before you're an embarrassment to your neighbors, please. Okay, I'll give you until New Year's Day, or the 2nd if you're hungover on the 1st. I can hear the tinkling of the music still emanating from your yard.

Author Joni Tevis Fights Jon Krakauer, Wins

2011-11-02T10:44:00.000-07:00

This is a short rant on descriptive lameness v. greatness, and yes, Tevis' debut, The Wet Collection, came out awhile ago (Milkweed Editions 2007), so this post isn't particularly timely, but, you know, whatever. Better said late than never:

Literary descriptions of the desert plant Fouquieria splendens (aka: ocotillo, desert coral, coachwhip, Jacob’s staff), were, for me, somewhat ruined by Jon Krakauer. In 1988 he published an article in Outside about canyoneering in Arizona, including a day-trip traveling down the Salome Creek, east of Phoenix. En route to the canyon, he gives a perfunctory nod to the desert landscape visible from the old road they’re strolling along, “an abandoned jeep road lined with a thousand towering saguaro and flame-tipped ocotillo…”—and because I read this just as I was moving to southern Arizona, and it was fresh on my mind the first time I ever laid eyes on this crazy plant, I have never since been able (and this surely reflects a personal failure of imagination as well) to separate this incredibly pedestrian—though perfectly accurate—description from the actual thing itself: I see an ocotillo in bloom and I cannot help but think flame-tipped.

I see an ocotillo in bloom and I cannot help but think flame-tipped, that is, until now. Joni Tevis, author of The Wet Collection, and the included essay, “Jeremiad of a Bad Drought Year,” has officially cracked my metaphorical cloister, and the possibilities of language, of ways to loop words and meanings through and around each other, seem once again boundless. Tevis has taken Krakauer's 2-D description to the anvil and hammered the shit out of it, worked it over, refashioned it, reimagined it into a thing more akin to a Calabi-Yau manifold—a many-dimensioned thing of wonder. She writes:

"In a faithless time I have gone to the desert and seen there ocotillo, devil’s buggy whip, naked canes rising from the stony ground. Gray, stippled with thorns, it rattled in the wind, and no plant has ever looked so dead to me. But I’ve seen, too, the desert after rain, when the ocotillo’s tips force out petals red as any cosseted rose. The ocotillo plays at death, crying a song to the cold desert wind; the ocotillo in bloom is a god’s hair ablaze with fire, or blood."

To be fair, nuancing words isn’t really Krakauer’s forte. He’s a mountain man, an adventurer, these days more of a journalist, and maybe that’s okay. Here, he’s a travel writer moving through a landscape—see an ocotillo, describe an ocotillo, traverse a canyon, narrate that activity—while Tevis seems to be something categorically different, that is an essayist, embedded and invested in place, and as such, language is part and parcel of her game. I suppose at the end of the day, I don’t really expect Krakauer’s imageries to knock me out, and I don’t expect Tevis to scale Everest. They’re just different personalities, different voices, and as lame as his adjectives here are compared to her metaphors, we read different writers for different reasons, and I’m glad they’re both on my bookshelf. Who, after all, wants to listen to The Decemberists when you’re in the mood for The Stooges? Or Tori Amos when you’re in the mood for Le Tigre? Or Morrissey when you’re in the mood for Dylan? Or…maybe you’ve had enough of this mixed metaphor. But you get the idea, I hope.

Krakauer has given us some great writing, but he’s no virtuoso when it comes to wordplay, and I herewith renounce flame-tipped, and all such depthless adjectives. Tevis is a boss wordsmith, and she has, for me, rescued the ocotillo from being typified by two blah words and a hyphen. And her book, The Wet Collection, is like a butter churn. Her language is like cream. An ocotillo in bloom is God’s hair ablaze.

Best American Essays 2011

2011-10-19T09:03:00.000-07:00

Just got my hands on a copy today. Haven't had a chance to read through it yet (except for Robert Atwan's foreword, which is actually pretty great). I'll probably try and put together a more comprehensive look at the anthology, but I wanted to put this post in as a chance for some preliminary conversation: Does BAE give us an accurate representation of the Essay? Will the "Notable Essays" section continue to be more interesting? Will magazines outside of New York get more recognition? Let me know what y'all are thinking and I can try to talk about it more in an upcoming review.

The Economics of the Zone 3 Press CNF Award

2011-10-09T14:35:00.001-07:00

Thanks, Ander, for the invitation to make public the accounting of Zone 3 Press's recent book prize. I am just home from a movement to support economic transparency of corporations, so it makes sense to at least make this process as clear as I can.

I occupy the same position as most contemporary small press publisher/editors in that I am also a writer. I also submit to press contests. The buoyant optimism I felt after reading about Lewis Hyde's gift economy faded when my first vigilant round of entries netted no prize winner--causing me to recognize that whatever I told myself when I licked those envelopes, I had expected something for my effort and fees, not to mention the dedication that keeps me at my desk writing in the first place. I'll leave aside the obvious question of whether transaction mindset is healthy or useful, just to note that, justified or not, it results in a sense of entitlement.

Which is to say, it helps me to know how at least one press spends their fees.

At Zone 3 Press we were lucky enough to receive 69 entries for our first Creative Nonfiction Book Award, after being a poetry press since 2006, and I am grateful for every submission--though as much for the attention as the $25 fees. The $1725 it totals--and that assumes all payments went through, and we had several issues with check payments--is not even enough to cover printing, which is approximately $2500 for 1000 books and postcards. Other expenses are the finalist judge's honorarium, an honorarium for the semi-finalist judges (who all read off-site and are unaffiliated with our institution), advertisements announcing the original contest and the contest winner, travel expenses and promotion of the winner's reading, and fees for book tables at festivals. There are also time donations by faculty and staff at Austin Peay State University who oversee the process--including making the books available on Small Press Distribution and responding to queries from contest entrants, and managing information as it passes through multiple hands. We are fortunate at our institution to have the Center of Creative Excellence, which provides compensatory funding, without which we would not be able to publish.

I hope my post demonstrates more than anything that I believe in the value of small presses, which are operating on well-monitored accounts--at the very least if the accounts are smaller they are also more closely examined--and that neither I nor my colleagues are milking cash cows when we are coming into the office on weekends and nights and summer days to help another manuscript into the world.

A short follow-up pending something longer

2011-10-07T08:19:00.000-07:00

I invited Kristen Iversen, editor (or maybe co-editor) of Orphan Press, to post a fuller response if/when she's moved to (or has the time among her other projects--so many of us have so many projects), but in the meantime I thought I would excerpt (with her permission) a quick email she sent me and some of the other editors at Orphan:

For one thing, to the best of my knowledge many of the presses you mention in your email are funded, at least partially, by universities, foundations, grants, etc. Orphan Press is basically me and Greg, a writer and an artist with a lot of passion, some good ideas (we hope), and very small pockets. We're working to develop other sources of funding, but it's tough and it takes time...

the short answer is that we put a great deal of research into contest fees and the literary market in general, as well as the type of book we want to produce. We feel that this fee is fair and in line with the market, particularly given our emphasis on high quality overall. We are a very small press, completely self-funded. Everyone is on a strictly volunteer basis. Every penny raised from the contest will go to pay our winner and to cover print and production costs--and we still will likely fall short. There's no profit here, except for the satisfaction that we hope to experience when we discover a unique and compelling piece of work, and we can bring it forth into the world in a beautiful way. As the press grows and we perhaps become the fortunate recipients of grants, donations, or other forms of support, we may be able to change our fee structure or offer other ways for our writers to get their work out into the world.

I've also invited Amy Wright, from Zone 3 Press, to post about the experience of running a cnf book contest for the first time at that press. I also invited her to talk a bit about the economics of the press and contest. They'd run contests in other genres previously, I think, but this was the first year of their cnf book contest (the great Lia Purpura picked a manuscript by Essay Daily's own Nicole Walker, Quench Your Thirst with Salt, as the winner; it'll be out in Spring 2013).

My hope is that we can have some frank and open conversation about the contest system and how it does or might work in the world of the essay, creative nonfiction, literary nonfiction, and so on.

Yo Orphan Press

2011-10-05T14:58:00.000-07:00

So we got your cnf book contest info forwarded on the twitter (thanks Brevity), which was exciting. I'm super happy to hear of another press "Seeking engaging, innovative, or experimental creative nonfiction writing in the lyric essay, memoir, graphic memoir, meditative essay, personal essay, flash essay, literary journalism, nature meditation, or hybrid forms." All to the good. But what's up with the $45 entry fee for said contest?

I get that the economics of writing contests are tricky, especially so in prose, even more especially so in nonfiction (I wonder what the economics are of, say, the Bakeless contest in nonfiction; I know the AWP economics loosely*), and super especially so in any sort of vaguely experimental prose. And for a startup press a contest is a tricky beast indeed. But a $45 entry fee is quite a lot for a $1000 honorarium + publication. That's on the border of the golden 1:20 ratio between entry fee and possible prize money that I usually use to determine whether a contest is exploitative of its entrants.

It seems to me really likely to limit your entries (though I suppose you probably only need 22-23 entrants to break even if you're not factoring in administrative overhead and any judge's honorarium).

I'd be interested in hearing back from y'all about the thinking behind this. (I'd be happy to setup an account to post back here if you like.)

I post this in the spirit of open and frank discussion, not in the spirit of discouraging what looks like an exciting new press for the essay.

Ander

__

* As the preliminary judge for the AWP Book Prize in Nonfiction a few years back, I think I read about 120 book submissions, and forwarded ten to the final judge. As I remember, it was a $25 entry at the time (now it's $30 for nonmembers and $15 for members). So you can do the math on that. There's some administrative overhead, as any contest coordinators can tell you. I think it was still a $1000 prize + publication, though now it's up to $2500 (nice work, AWP). Which is pretty reasonable.

Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-first Century

2011-07-28T04:49:00.000-07:00

Like my friend and co-editor, Sheryl St. Germain, I’m very pleased Ander asked us to write something about our anthology, Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century, because it gives me a chance to write about me. (I’m not entirely kidding, but please continue reading anyway.)

As a recent MFA graduate I brought a student’s perspective to the challenge of editing our collection. I wanted the essays selected to nurture my own writing by challenging my ideas about the form and encouraging experimentation. In short, I wanted teachers from whom I could learn. Think of the anthology as a kind of portable writing workshop on the craft of the contemporary essay.

We chose to use the word essays in our title instead of the term creative nonfiction because we felt the word essay, from the Old French essai, (meaning a trial or an attempt) best reflected the kind of adventurous spirit readers will find celebrated in the anthology. And it is that sense of possibility that most attracts me to the genre. The essay’s malleability allows a writer to shape the form as she wishes.

Ander suggested that Sheryl and I each comment on our favorite essays. What a great idea, and yet I find it difficult to do, because each essay in the collection moves me in some way. Nevertheless, I have chosen a few I wish to highlight: Joy Castro’s “Grip,” Linda Hogan’s “The Bats,” BK Loren’s “Trends of Nature,” Dinty W. Moore’s “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged,” and the three very brief essays we included from Lawrence Sutin’s A Postcard Memoir. I focus on these pieces, not necessarily because I love them best, but because in each I find something interesting to learn and qualities I wish to emulate in my own work.

In “Grip” Joy Castro opens her essay with a description of the torn “bullet-holed paper target” hanging over her son’s crib. The object is both tangible and symbolic and serves as the departure point for Castro’s exploration of the lengths to which a mother will go to protect her child. She organizes her essay into five discrete sections separated by white spaces. Her choice creates a kind of staccato rhythm for the piece, reminiscent of the sharp sound a gun makes. The essay’s power resides in its brevity and restraint, and the lyricism of her language.

Linda Hogan brings a poet’s sensibility and a naturalist’s appreciation to her beautiful essay, “The Bats.” Her title strikes one immediately because of her choice of article; “The” makes a difference. She conveys in her first words that her interest in these creatures that “live in double worlds of many kinds,” is specific and personal. Her essay moves between a narrative about two encounters with bats, one in a park in frigid Minneapolis and another in a cave in Germany, and the lyric. In the end, it is the beauty of her language I find so compelling. Imagine perceiving the world through sound, as bats do. Imagine a world where “Everything answers, the corner of a house, the shaking of leaves on a wind-blown tree, the solid voice of bricks.”

BK Loren’s poignant narrative “Trends of Nature” is published for the first time in our anthology. I find much to admire in this piece, but most of all, I appreciate what is true of the best personal essays: the writer’s honesty and the bravery such candor frequently requires. We trust Loren’s observations of coyotes, because she is willing to scrutinize her own behavior with the same degree of insight.

I keep returning to Dinty W. Moore’s “Son of Mr. Green Jeans: An Essay on Fatherhood, Alphabetically Arranged,” in part because I’m fascinated by the way his capacious mind works. Moore uses the alphabet as the organizing principle for his essay. His ingenious choice creates a framework in which he is free to consider a range of apparently unrelated subjects without losing sight of the essay’s central theme. His exploration of fatherhood is humorous, touching, and surprisingly informative.

From Lawrence Sutin’s A Postcard Memoir, we included three flash essays, each of which is paired with an image: “Pissed Off at Three Years and Four Months,” “Tower of Silence,” and “Young Man with Rifle, Black Dog and Dead Ducks.” Each essay is but a paragraph long, its shape on the page mirroring that of the related image. Sutin’s choice to use postcards as writing prompts creates a unifying structure for his memoir, while allowing each entry to stand alone. The pairing of photograph and prose serves to enhance our appreciation of each and provides Sutin with the necessary distance he needs to explore his complex past.

I believe our anthology tells a compelling story about the wealth of experimentation and multi-faceted character of the contemporary essay. I encourage you to read that story yourselves. I trust you will be challenged, inspired, and entertained.

Margaret L. Whitford

Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century

2011-07-28T04:11:00.000-07:00

I’m delighted Ander asked us to write something about our new anthology of essays, just out from Autumn House Press. It’s called Between Song and Story: Essays for the 21st Century. We (co-editor Margaret Lehr Whitford and myself) showcase the work of 46 mostly American contemporary essayists (see the whole list here: http://www.autumnhouse.org/between-song-and-story-essays-for-the-twenty-first-century-edited-by-shery-st-germain-and-margaret-l-whitford/). The anthology offers a selection of essays that will serve as models for creative writing students at the undergraduate and graduate level. We’re interested in the form of the essay, specifically the play between lyricism and narrative, and believe our anthology is the first to highlight the ways in which both story (narrative) and song (poetry) inform the essay, thus the title, Between Song and Story.

As a teacher and director of an MFA program, I wanted a collection adaptable to multiple teaching situations, in courses, for example, not only devoted to the craft of the essay, but more specifically to explorations of the lyric essay, the formally adventurous (or as some might call it, the “experimental”) essay, as well as those focused on nature writing, travel writing, or more nuanced explorations of place, since those are subjects that interest me. Several of the pieces in the anthology are pieces I’ve used in both graduate and undergraduate courses for many years with great success; others are from new writers who are helping redefine the genre.

I love every essay in this collection, but if I had to pick the top five, I’d pick John Haines’ “Snow,” Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Ugly Tourist,” Michelle Morano’s “Grammar Lessons: the Subjunctive Mood,” Joyce Carol Oates’ “Against Nature,” and Tom Varisco’s “Let’s Pretend.” I’d pick them not because they’re necessarily the best, whatever that means, but because each offers something provocative with respect to the formal elements of the essay. They’re all great essays to teach, a lot of fun to read, and almost all of them explore deeply serious subjects with a sometimes wickedly funny voice.

Three of the writers are older, and I think it’s important to remember that writers from earlier generations have been experimenting with form for quite a while—it's not something totally new. Writers like Oates and Kincaid, for example, were playing around with form while John D’Agata and David Shields were still in short pants.

Oates “Against Nature,” which we reprint in our anthology, is a tour-de-force in what Ander might call “hacking” the essay: broken segments slide into historical reflection and personal narrative; she uses collage and rapid changes of voice and tone to juxtapose cultural narrative, quotes from other writers, and even a bit of mock literary criticism. Nature writing, Oates claims, "inspires a painfully limited set of responses in ‘nature writers’ . . . reverence, awe, piety, mystical oneness” ; she proceeds to show, on every page of this essay, why it need not. Full of allusion, irony and sass, the piece radiates energy.

Jamaica Kincaid’s “The Ugly Tourist,” is both mean and hilarious, a rant written wholly in second person, a powerful diatribe against a thoughtless kind of tourism. “The thing you have always suspected about yourself the minute you become a tourist,” she writes, “ is true: A tourist is an ugly human being. You are not an ugly person all the time; you are not an ugly person ordinarily; you are not an ugly person day to day.” But we feel a bit like an ugly person reading Kincaid, an ugly person able to laugh at her own ugliness. The piece both invites us in as readers and mocks us for our ignorance. We can’t get pissed off at her, though, because her voice is so mesmerizing and disturbingly funny. It’s quite difficult to sustain second person for any length of time in an essay, but Kincaid’s use of it is so compelling I never want it to end.

John Haines died early this year, and while he may be best known as a poet, he was also a fine essayist. His small essay, “Snow,” is a lyric piece built simply on the act of looking at snow as if it were a page to be read. In an essay of eight paragraphs, the first of which lingers on the metaphor of snow as book, Haines evokes the whole of the Alaskan landscape, its muscular, foreign beauty that must be discovered through mindfulness and deep attention, the skills of hunter and poet. The story of the tracking of a wolverine, follows, and after a lyric pause another story, writ in the snow, of a battle between a moose and three wolves. “What might have been silence, an unwritten page, an absence,” he writes, “spoke to me as clearly as if I had been there to see it,” and here he’s speaking not only of the ability to translate a narrative from the snow, but of what is required of us to find meaning in our lives, the intimate seeing necessary to discover the pattern of a story or poem in whatever whiteness we find before us, snow, paper or screen. I began to fall in love for the first time with the lyric essay form, reading this essay many years ago; I experienced for the first time with the exquisite sense I would later come to cherish, that I was reading a poem disguised as an essay, a poem that had changed into comfortable clothes and invited me in for a drink.

Tom Varisco is not known as an essay writer; he’s the head of a design/branding studio in New Orleans and has two self-published books, Spoiled, about refrigerators left out after Hurricane Katrina and Signs of New Orleans, a design and photo book that serves as a record of the city’s “sign language.” The piece we published of his, called “Let’s Pretend” is just one paragraph long. The paragraph uses graphics—words that melt, fade, morph into waves—as it purports to give directions to Café du Monde, a well-known coffee shop in New Orleans. At a certain point the words themselves get as shadowy and wavy as the city became after Katrina, then finally right themselves when the reader has found that cup of coffee. The piece ends with suggesting, having found Café du Monde, we can now “pretend nothing ever happened,” the text fading at that point so that it is almost unreadable. Maybe I’m prejudiced because I’m from New Orleans, but I’ve read just about every heavy tome written about Katrina, and I find that this piece, this one paragraph, gets to the heart of the issue more than anything else I’ve read on the subject.

Michelle Morano’s “Grammar Lessons” uses grammar rules regarding the use of the subjunctive, specifically in Spanish, to explore a situation involving a boyfriend who tried to kill himself. It’s a brilliant, serous, and darkly humorous essay that evokes the doubt, guilt and anxiety one feels when someone close to you decides to try to kill himself. The essay is organized according to various rules of grammar, but the examples are anything but boring. Clarifying the difference between indicative and subjunctive, she points out that you’d use the indicative to say

I was in love.
Or, the man I loved tried to kill himself.
Or, I moved to Spain because the man I loved, the man
who tried to kill himself, was driving me insane.

The rules for using the subjunctive serve as section headers from the rest of the essay. As everyone knows, the subjunctive can illustrate a wish or desire, as in

I would love to continue singing the praises of the writers in this anthology but I am already over the word limit.

If you are a teacher and think you might want to use this anthology for a course please email me at sstgermain@chatham.edu. I’d be happy to send you a sample copy.

The 2011 Essay Prize Winner & Forthcoming Conversation

2011-07-25T09:49:00.000-07:00

Well after the fact, I realize that none of us every posted an official capstone on the conversations that the two graduate craft seminars had last spring on the nominations and finalists for the Essay Prize 2011. Apologies for the oversight. This is just a short note to announce that the winner of the prize is Judith Schalansky's Atlas of Remote Islands. Thanks to John D'Agata for inviting the University of Arizona to participate in the conversation and selection process this year.

In the next few weeks in this space I've asked the editors of a couple new and forthcoming anthologies of essays to guest post about their favorite selections from the anthologies, what case their anthologies make about the state and range of the contemporary essay, and their motivations in assembling these anthologies. I've more or less been using one of five anthologies to teach my undergraduate courses over the last few years, and am happy to see some new and perhaps more interesting options come up. Of course I'm a fan of John's The Next American Essay and the case that it starts to make (especially in concert with the second collection, The Lost Origins of the Essay), but I get a bit bored with the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Creative Nonfiction, though it's got some excellent essays. And the Best American Essays series is usually an interesting choice, as are Lee Gutkind's The Best Creative Nonfiction 1, 2, and 3. The Best American Essays of the Century is excellent, but it feels dusty, and I feel dusty, and I just want to get clean after that. I eschew textbooks in general: I've never liked the paratexts surrounding the actual essays with the helpful writing tips and instructional whatnot, and prefer the essays themselves without all the crap. Really I might as well make a packet for myself and just use that, but then I feel like I'm limiting my inputs, not forcing myself to reckon with anything new, like living in a gated community, which you know is a model home for our future death.

Sheryl St. Germain and Margaret L. Whitford will be guest blogging about Between Song and Story: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (Autumn House Press, out now) an anthology that's clearly looking at the intersection between lyric and narrative. (Full disclosure: this and a few of these other anthologies include my work; it's a small world, the essay world.)

Then there's BJ Hollars' edited anthology, Blurring the Boundaries: Explorations to the Fringes of Nonfiction, forthcoming in 2012 it looks like from University of Nebraska Press. I've asked him to contribute a note about this sometime in the future too. I don't know what all is in here, but it looks and sounds interesting. And Jill Talbot is editing an anthology of metanonfiction (and interviews with the nonfictioners included there) forthcoming in 2012 from University of Iowa Press. My sense is that these anthologies are among a set trying to offer a less traditional/more radical or adventurous vision of what the essay can be.

I'm sure there are others forthcoming--and I'd invite you to join us in our conversation here as it progresses.

According to a Convert

2011-05-10T10:41:00.000-07:00

At the beginning of the semester, I was very angry. I felt there had been a bait and switch—I had thought this craft course would be a deep study on braided essays, personal essays, switching essays, literary journalism essays. Already struggling with these forms, imagine my self-righteous frustration when our lists of essays featured autotuned music videos, documentaries, atlases, a film about a plastic bag…. The Essay and Its Forms. If that didn’t mean words on a page arranged in assorted varieties, what did the word “essay” mean? It seemed to me an empty term, a phrase for anything we’d care to apply it to. And if language were so empty, why be a writer?

Ander asked me at the beginning of the class why I was so raucously against some of the forms. He asked if it was because I felt threatened. I acknowledge that it probably was. How could the dweeby words-on-page essays I created compete with an entertaining autotuned selection or a visually stimulating atlas? I was angry at the authors of these works, indignant that they could wedge in on a genre I had such strong preconceived notions.

But then, I read. I watched. I viewed. And I learned.

The Best Essay of the Year, according to a convert.

On Form:

“The two-dimensional world map strikes a compromise somewhere between impertinently simplifying abstraction and aesthetic appropriation of the world. In the end, it is simply about grasping the extent of the earth, orienting it towards the north and being able to gaze down at it like a god.” Judith Schalansky. Atlas of Remote Islands. Page 11.

“Whether an island such as --> Easter Island (100) can be considered remote is simply a matter of perspective. Those who live there, The Rapa Nui, call their homeland Te Pito Te Henua, ‘The navel of the world.’ Any point on the infinite globe of the Earth can become a centre.” Judith Schalansky. Atlas of Remote Islands. Page 14.

What’s fascinating about how Judith Schalansky puts these quotes from her introduction into conversation is that her form allows her to maintain the tension of conquested control from the outsider and subjectedness of the viewer to the land’s will throughout the remainder of her essay. A great cartographer is meant to know the land in an authoritative sense, to represent exactly what’s there while also adapting the representation to communicate to the outside reader consulting the maps. Authority and possession drips from a map (case in point: you can hold and amend a map). Every map is a repackaging of reality. Yet every map is secondary to the reality. The map may lie, but even its lies cannot change the reality of the landscape—rather, the lies can change our understanding of the landscape, leaving us in even deeper ignorance and out of a sense of control. The mapmaker seeks to dictate to the land while always being dictated to by the land.

Schanlansky holds these two characteristics of the cartographer—governor vs. subject—in hand and proves that they apply equally well to the essayist. With each island we are given two maps: one, on the recto page, to look down upon like gods. The other, on the verso page, a globe that rolls to showcase the remote island as the navel of the world. One seeks control—a top down, scaled drawing of the features of the island, named and categorized by its human conquerors. The other robs us not only of our control, but also of our perspective, showing us views of this nearly-spherical Earth that we have likely not been introduced to before. (Two-dimensional depictions of a globe rarely move away from the North-South alignment, let alone the four perpendicular compass points.) These maps dialogue with one another, allowing the reader to interrogate and reevaluate—to essay—his or her understanding of place—of any place.

The form places the material in relationship with itself—two divergent expectations of the islands upheave the perspective of the reader. The mind at work with these two perspectives must attempt and reattempt to comprehend these islands. Likewise, the mind at work with this book must attempt and reattempt to comprehend our relationship with place. If Schalansky posits anything, it is that we cannot ever be 100% governor nor 100% subject. We can never 100% know nor 100% define a place. Contradiction is inherent in the attempt. Her title for the intro is a perfect example: “Paradise is an island. So is hell.” An atlas, with its perpetual pursuit of control and its perpetual insufficiency mirrors this theme. The form depicts the material in a beautiful, understated, and ever-deepening way.

On Scale:

One of the pleasing components of this book is how measured the material is treated. Each island receives the same amount of representation—every island is put into relationship with another island, every island has two individualized maps, and every island has up to one page of narrative. The consistency of this scale is satisfying as it allows us to be able to experience each island both uniquely and in relationship with the others (just as every feature of a map is both unique and in relationship with the others). Further, the god’s-view maps on the recto side of the book feature a tiny scale of 5 kilometers. Every single top-down map uses this same scale, allowing for each map to be compared to another. In this way, the consistent scale of the maps allow for all of the maps to ever be in dialogue, deepening their relationship to one another.

Yet there’s much more than visual scale in this book. The project itself is one of nuanced and balanced scale—to read any one page is to encounter the entire piece’s scale, that of a whetted appetite and satiated hunger. In these maps we find intriguing stories as well as descriptive scenes. We find gaps in our knowledge as well as facts to fill in our experience of the places.
Everything is methodical, but everything leaves us wanting more. We are subjected to the limited information provided while also given so many authoritative facts (latitude and longitude, square kilometers, historic timeline, location in relationship with other islands/places) so as to feel in command of the material. The result: the scale of this project is both minute and vast.

We meet places but we meet our imaginations here too, bridging gaps in the narratives and expanding beyond the book. Schalansky says it so well: “Anyone who opens an atlas wants everything at once, without limits—the whole world. This longing will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining what is desired.” I believe that we can say the same for this essay—Schalansky’s wandering mind (and our own) comes to this book with a longing that will always be great, far greater than any satisfaction to be had by attaining. Yet Atlas of Remote Islands, with its stories and balanced scale, ever welcomes us in for more. We close the book and turn back to the opening page. There’s always something new to be discovered.

There’s much more to be said about Schalansky, but her essay is so deep, uses its form so much better than this blog post uses its own, that I’d rather just recommend going out and buying your own copy. Whether you read it for the language, form, facts, or beauty, you’ll enjoy the wandering mind ever present on the page.

The Case for Wood

2011-05-09T13:29:00.000-07:00

I must admit, from the very beginning of this class, I thought Everything Sings was the clear winner. Although I have admittedly wavered in my beliefs throughout the semester, as I have re-considered the book in tandem with the other two nominees, I realize that, among the three, Wood is still the best essayist.

I think perhaps one of the most useful ways to compare the three might be to think about the project, and the execution of that project through the chosen form. As Wood creates unconventional map after unconventional map of Boylan Heights, his books is, in fact, enacting its project on its own terms. Each map may be thought of as an "attempt" to create a visual or pictorial representation of the neighborhood. Thus, not only does the introduction "essay" in that it introduces the project - it continues, on each page, to "essay" with each map being an exploration of a different (and unusual) aspect of place. As one blogger posted, this book is not about Boylan Heights, it is about expanding our sense of place as we understand it through our representation of it. Here, what another blogger posted becomes relevant: the use of the second person. Far from being annoyed or "pushed in," I felt the second person to be inclusive where Schalansky and Shields were exclusive, or in the latter case, particularly alienating. The stances of each author are obvious from the way he or she posits him or herself in the titles. Re Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (rhetorical), Atlas of Remote Islands: 50 Island I've Never Set Foot on and Never Will (semi-rhetorical - these places only exist in the author's imagination, a warning label that serves as a disclaimer for the blending of fiction and non-fiction), and Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (title: rhetorical in an abstract way - re the blogger's question "What do we mean by 'Everything'?" subtitle: relatively neutral, although still abstract - it introduces us to the concept of a "narrative atlas," which is an idea we wrangle with alongside Wood and his students throughout the book). For me, and I think I can speak for my group, the author's positing of the reader in an inclusive mode allowed the book to be about presence rather than absence (Schalansky's "Remoteness", Shields' "Hunger for Reality").

While Schalansky's form self-consciously engages in the very concept she calls "colonizing" by re-creating the maps of her 50 islands in a traditional manner, Wood's approach opens up an entirely original method for making and reading maps. Wood is self-conscious in a different manner: he realizes that the places/things he maps are ephemeral, "useless," and incapable of becoming "commodities". However, his introduction is in praise of the beauty of mapping/preserving a moment that will inevitably be subject to change. Whereas we typically understand maps/the landscape itself to be static, especially in an age of Google Earth, satellites, etc. In fact, as we know, the earth and the global tectonic regime is constantly changing, eroding, erupting, etc. Wood calls attention to this logical fallacy, and points earnestly toward the importance of mapping human decision-making, and understanding how our presence is constantly shifting the places we inhabit.

In response to Shields, all I have to says is: it's been done before, and Benjamin's The Arcades Project is much more interesting to me.

In conclusion, I think it is rather obvious that Wood is still the obvious choice. His form succeeds above and beyond Schalansky and Shields, in that each page of the book marks another "attempt," or "essay" that can be read collectively. Although the same argument could be made for both Schalansky and Shields, I believe that upon close examination and scrutiny that you, dear reader, will feel compelled to agree with me when I say their "attempts" fail. Schalansky's book seeks to understand remote places, and does so with a breadth that each "attempt" is relatively the same as the previous. The same goes for Shields. After a while, it is inevitable, dear reader, that you put those two books down, and take a break from listening to the same thing over and over.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but Wood's book is the only one of the three finalists that can be and wants to be read in one sitting. Not that this should determine the prize, but I think it's worth noting. While the reader is compelled to pick up and put down both Schalansky and Shields, sometimes due to sheer exhaustion, Wood's project is accessible and interesting enough to compel the reader throughout the book, to continue flipping the page until they sadly reach the back cover. Don't get me wrong, dear reader, all three books are worth returning to. But Woods' is open enough to let you into his world, into a consideration of place, time and time again, without pressing judgment, without telling you what to think, and by letting the visuals speak for themselves.

I think it is obvious that Denis Wood's is the most idiosyncratic and creative mind at work here, and raises the most interesting questions with respect to our daily lives. His book takes the most (interesting) risks, and has the most at stake. He asks us to pay attention to the world around us, to (try to) listen to everything that sings in a world in which we must often struggle to find beauty among a damaged and urbanized landscape. He completely inverses the use-value of the map, and challenges his readers to do the same. Mapping becomes not about hegemony of place, but preservation or a moment in time, and understanding how such moments speak to how we, as humans affect our planet, our landscape, our city, our neighborhood, our own home. And what important things for us to consider deeply and abstractly as we find ourselves on the brink of ecological disaster, overpopulation, etc. the dawn of the 21st century.

My Reasoning

2011-05-07T13:42:00.000-07:00

If essaying is about thinking, or thinking about feeling, in order to judge which essay resonated with me most, I’ve been thinking about how each one made me feel. Judging, finally, for me, is entirely subjective. “Do not do unto others as you would that they should do unto you,” George Bernard Shaw wrote, reversing the logic of the Golden Rule, “Their tastes may not be the same.” I may have gauged a work and assigned it weight in my psyche upon first encountering it, alone, only to be changed after a discussion in which I discovered how the work had affected my colleagues, and, via peer pressure or sympathy, felt compelled to reassess the value of it.

However, in the end, perhaps because I failed to learn anything or because I’m incorrigible when it comes to my aesthetic conviction, I returned to my initial impressions of each work and made the decision of which ones were best based on my instinctive appraisal. Although I was moved by the visual beauty of Bahrani’s “Plastic Bag” and Herzog’s accented voice-over, once I became aware of its propaganda (and the fact that I wasn’t going to stop using plastic bags in a sometimes careless fashion) I lost interest. Boully’s tone made me suspicious that she was setting me up to look like the fool, like the boy with blue balls at the end. After much discussion I was able, I think, to see the layering and the intelligence in choosing such a controlled tone, but ultimately I didn’t want to go back, perhaps because of my unsavory first date with it. With Bucat, I remembered having my last name, Diamente, butchered, mispronounced, and made fun-of (my first name is Neil, and my father, an Italian immigrant, named me after his favorite American singer), so I was not moved by her dramatization nor did I consider it as important as Finnegan’s subject of the drug war in North America. However, with his New Yorker article, I felt I was being informed of a highly complex social problem that probably would never be solved and so I felt helpless—not a good feeling. Not his fault, but it’s exactly why I read and write poetry and not the news in which men die miserably every day. I laughed hysterically at the “Bed Intruder” song but realized, however clever and savvy it was (and how much I came to admire the Gregory Brother’s talents to Auto-Tune the news), hysteria is a naturally temporary state; I haven’t laughed since, thinking of the Bed Intruder song. Conversely, wonder is a perpetual state and Schalansky’s “Atlas of Remote Islands” put me there. I picked her atlas because it mirrored my love of simplicity, remoteness, solitude, and adventure, despite the subsequent talk about the implicit colonialism in mapmaking and writing. I also love quotations (“One thought fills immensity” –Blake) so “Reality Hunger” fed that love and fostered a desire to make a manifesto of my own regarding what it means to be a poet in the world. Shields’ personality didn’t appeal to me (he seemed like a whiner, not a winner), but his project did. Watching Soll’s “Puppet,” I was reminded of why making an inanimate object come to life is such a primeval urge in the world, why children instinctively make puppets out of anything, which is precisely my favorite activity with my own two children who can’t get enough of seeing their hands’ shadows turn into birds, alligators, dogs, and spiders. I like puppetry, period, and his documentary helped me explain why I do. I lived in San Francisco for a year, but Solnit’s “Infinite City” didn’t trigger nostalgia or curiosity as perhaps it did for others; I simply felt overwhelmed by it. And finally, Wood’s conceit, to make “useless” maps that “prove” everything sings seemed to me such a futile, beautiful gesture that only a poet would attempt, but I did not vote for it. In the end, I could only choose my top three favorites and I settled, for better or worse, on awarding those favorites in each category, or form: atlas (Schalansky), text (Shields), and film (Soll).

After all of Ander’s talk of the idiosyncratic “brain” behind each essay, how to measure it against or within its genre/constraints, how valuable it is to contemporary society, how much of the essay is conducted in the spirit of inquiry, the only question I asked myself, which was usually answered at first blush, was how did it make me feel. I feel compelled to blog, to write this post so I’ll pass this class and graduate, but I can’t say I’ve enjoyed it. Each post gets gobbled up by the next like highway mile signposts, but I’m not sure where I’m going. “What are you doing after you get your MFA,” everyone asks, with the assumption, perhaps, that I can teach now or continue on in a PhD program somewhere like many writers do today. When I was sleeping in the university library two years ago while going through a divorce and had moved out of my house and into a study carrel, I couldn’t imagine spending any more time there. Academia will always remind me of the dust on those books in the stacks. And although I would stop and stare at the titles of books I would probably never read on my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, when I lay down in my sleeping bag at night and listened to the hum of air-conditioners preserving the knowledge within its walls, I felt trapped, like a pigeon lodged in the building’s air vents. Some part of me resists the privileged life of academia even as I am drawn to it. And so I don’t know what I’m going to do with my MFA in regard to getting a job that it can help me to procure. All I know is I’m going to continue, undaunted, perhaps unemployed, as I have been more or less since starting graduate school. Like Shields who quoted Graham Greene—“When we are not sure, we are alive”—I’ll leave the blogosphere where I began by quoting Shaw again: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

THE THREE 2011 FINALISTS

2011-05-05T15:19:00.000-07:00

, for those who are paying attention, have been determined:

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of Remote Islands
David Shields, Reality Hunger
Denis Wood, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas

Let the final battle beginnnnnnnnnnnn.

Denis Wood's Everything Sings

2011-05-04T17:39:00.000-07:00

I had plans. They involved my reading glasses, a series of Diet Cokes, twenty-eight pages of spiral bound notes on Denis Wood’s Everything Sings, and indignation. I could show you these notes. They sport letters that spike and twist over college rule lines. They are an emotional mess of acute angles. (If you have read Wood’s text, think of the map image that accompanies “Radio Waves,” but rendered verbal and infused with opinion.) And all of this because I struggled with much of what I encountered in the early parts of the book’s second (Wood’s own) introduction, with small claims, contradictions, and assumptions that both implicitly and explicitly weave through pages 8-25.

I wanted to understand Denis Wood’s motivations in undertaking a project in which he and his students, over a series of years, sought to map aural and subterranean activity, electrical waves and wires, and lived experience in Boylan Heights, North Carolina. I, like Wood, believe that images are legible, whether found in combination with lettered or wholly pictorial texts. And I believe that verbal texts, imagistic texts, and the many and various hybrid blends of the two are, at least in part, both personally and politically charged. So I was glad when Wood argued that the arrangement of maps within an atlas – “political, physical, climate, natural vegetation, soils, agriculture, population density, gross national product, literacy, protein consumption, and life expectancy” – could be read as an unsettling argument that a people or place’s poverty had been induced by natural forces, even insisting that the argument was there (10). And then I was confused when, on the very next page, he wrote that “nothing obligates a reader to start at the beginning [of a series of maps] and plow through the complicating actions to the resolution” (11). I did not know what to think: Did Wood feel that the order of a series of maps within an atlas mattered or not? Was I in the midst of rooting for Wood & Co as subversive organizers of cartographic materials, scrappily armed with new approaches to human geography? Was Wood, with this allusion to Freytag’s pyramid (“complicating actions,” “resolution”), asking that we as readers be the ones to fight back, reading in whatever way our little hearts desired? Or something else?

Because I approached Everything Sings thinking (and still think) that what Denis Wood and his students have done not only matters in a socio-political sense, but as something compellingly beautiful, I also wanted to understand Wood’s creative and formal objectives. But when one section of his introduction bore the heading “The Map and the Poem” and was closely followed by a call to the reader to imagine the atlas-as-story and then a discussion of the atlas-as-essay, exactly what Wood was proposing that he was after or had accomplished in Everything Sings felt unclear (10-11). I began to suspect that these comparisons of the contents of an atlas (to a poem, to an epic poem, to a story, to a novel, to an essay and, by means of the book’s title and elsewhere, to a song) were just a rather messy way of repeatedly emphasizing one of Wood’s larger (and good) points: that maps can be read, even when unaccompanied by text, that they are even inherently narrative pieces and are more capable of conveying emotional and sensorial experience than we have yet asked them to be. But I had to come to such conclusions after having read much further in the book, because precision remains an issue in the book’s earliest pages and Wood struggles a little – through exclamatory asides, between cross-hatchings of celebrated names and movements – in articulating just what he and his students have done.

With underlines, check marks, and bullet points, with snaking and inky scrawls, I tried to resist this book. I felt cantankerous and unbearable, but I just kept scribbling away. How, I wondered, could Wood ponder a troubling staticity among cartographers in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century without any nod to the possible effects of common global fears of degeneration during those years, or the waxing and waning of empires (12-14)? And why, why did Wood insist on including me in all of this? I didn’t appreciate being called to and tugged at with these uses of the second-person, this “you” that Wood used, repeatedly, to break through the fourth wall. As though leaning across a table, or at the bar and over a foaming glass of beer, Wood says, “I know you’ve seen these…” (12). As though gesturing wildly before us and asking that we shout with him, as though evangelical and moved by the spirit, Wood cries out, “In the gap between? You, standing in the shower, the water shooting up from the underground, fountaining from the showerhead around you, …” (25, my emphasis). It is clear that he uses the second-person to pull us in, because he wants for us to join him, to feel present and a part of this experience, especially when he employs this “you” to speak in terms of ‘you, me, us’ (19). And it is because of Denis Wood’s use of the “you,” calling to me and to each of his readers, that the difficult shell around my difficult heart began to ease and crack.

Not every use of the second-person in Denis Wood’s Everything Sings is the same. As noted above, in some instances, the “you” is rhetorical, a conventional appeal to audience that easily links to any author’s concern for ethos. Some uses of “you” are emotionally charged, they seem to buzz and hum, to echo as though shouted from above a pulpit or lectern. Still other uses of “you” work to suggest the reader’s presence in the experience of the text, and seem to seek to blur that already sometimes thin line that separates sympathy from empathy. This version of “you” continues in its use throughout the larger text of Everything Sings, and comes to signify a “you” that Wood wishes to have encountered or had beside him while in the neighborhood of Boylan Heights. In this way, through references to the “power pole whose cables hum and sing as you fall asleep” or to the “stretch of sidewalk in which your kids wrote their names while the concrete was still wet,” Denis Wood offers his readers the lovely experience of what some have called “nostalgia without memory.” I first experienced this myself when reading Amy Hempel’s tiny story titled “Weekend.” When I read the conclusion of Hempel’s piece for the first time –

The women smoked on the porch, the smoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men and children played on even after dusk when it got so dark that a candle was rigged to balance on top of the post, and was knocked off and blown out by every single almost-ringer.

Then the children went to bed, or at least went upstairs, and the men joined the women for a cigarette on the porch, absently picking ticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs. And when the men kissed the women good night, and their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

– I felt nostalgia for something that I had never experienced, and therefore could not actually remember. But I felt as though I longed to return to those scenes, those people, and those places still. This is what I came to feel as I read Wood’s book, even after all of my urges toward stubborn denial: The Boylan Heights of Everything Sings was a place that I longed to return to, even while my mind informed me that it was a place I had never been. I allowed myself to feel moved by the beauty of some of these maps (“Pools of Light” (47) and “Wind Chimes” (91)) and fascinated by the accomplishments of others (“A Sound Walk” (88-91)). I wanted to believe that I recognized Lester Mims on his bike, swinging a paper so as to possibly make it to the porch (58) and I sat quietly and focused as I searched for the number 37 (“attempted suicide”) on the map labeled “Police Calls” (52-53), wondering about loneliness or isolation, about life as an unbearable weight, among these people – on the sidewalk, at the grocery store, around the corner – that I wanted to believe I had known.

Everything Sings, in the end, is not a book in which, as its publishers strangely suggest, “useless knowledge is exalted.” Everything Sings, instead, works to fight the privileging of quantifiable forms of information – that which is meted, “objective” – over the emotional and sensorial experience of place. Because of Denis Wood’s innovative approach to mapmaking, even crisp, dry numbers (“Police Calls”) and naked lines (“Squirrel Highways”) tell a story of people, of place, and the entwined experience of both. Everything Sings is remarkable in what and how it essays.

How Naïve The Essay?

2011-05-04T10:04:00.000-07:00

I love Mary Ruefle’s book “The Most of It” because of its naivety, which leads her down delightful paths of thought and fancy. You want to hug her. You want to take her home. She’s endearing.

But how much know-how do we want from the essayist? Can everyone get away with Ruefling? Can naivety go too far and become strained and unbelievable? Can we really be that naïve in today’s fast-paced, technological, polluted, globalized world? Should we mitigate or offset our naivety? What is lost when there is no naivety in an essay?

Entries without naivety so far: The Gregory Brothers and David Shields. These artists situate themselves in the modern world with their savvy appropriations. The tones of their work are different: the Gregory Brothers are satirical and goofy but hip, while Shields is intellectual and intense; the Bros spoof, while Shields argues. In both approaches, something essential has been lost. This might sound too harsh but, for me, spoofing is for teenagers and convincing is for adults. Naivety has a whiff of the child in it. Naivety retains a refreshing degree of wonder, vulnerability, and curiosity.

The most naïve entries so far: Bahrani and all the maps, that is, Schalanksy, Solnit, and Wood. On the surface, “Plastic Bag” appears to be the most naïve work. I’m sure we could all convince a roomful of kindergarteners to write from the perspective of a plastic bag. But Bahrani’s work is polemic and ironic, and—sorry, I’m in such a harsh mood right now—gimmicky. Yes, I love Herzog. Yes, I loved the radical bags ripped on a barbed wire fence. But many of the scenes, I could not get behind, especially with what felt like inspirational music modulated in the background. Ultimately, “Plastic Bag” felt forced and affected.

I learned a new word the other day in class: “twee.” This term was applied to one of Solnit’s maps. You, as I, might be wondering what the hell “twee” means. I looked it up: “affectedly or excessively dainty, delicate, cute, or quaint.” The “Tribes of San Francisco” map reminded me of the laminated placemats I grew up spilling my food on. I never liked them as a kid—they were stuffy and uptight, meant for fake kids. Though Solnit has various maps—many of which are quite beautiful, many of which are cluttered and overloaded with information, she does not successfully tap into the child-like naivety that I am now arguing for.

So what are real kids like? How naïve are they? I think they’re more complicated than first blush. Kid fears must be weighed in—kids can be surprisingly dark and superstitious. Yes, they also adhere to their stereotype of uninhibited, honest, and carefree, but they know and sense more than they can express or fully understand and this can be ominous. What I’m driving at: the most successful naïve essays create a counterbalance for their naivety; they have an edge; they refuse to be cute; they throw in some adult.

For this tough naivety, my favorite essays thus far: Schalansky and Wood. They retain their wonder and imagination, their tactile welcome and fascination, but anchor themselves in dark and unusual places. We find loneliness, cannibals, dystopias, and issues of conquest in Schalansky. Though Wood is not as dark thematically—only one map, the police calls is overtly ominous—his maps transform surprising perspectives. He takes what might be a naïve impulse—jack-o’-lanterns, for example—and makes it map-able. Wood in many ways achieved what Solnit set out to do: to show that there exist an infinite number of possible perspectives to map. He allows his naivety breathing room, then development. His essays (within his overall essay) retain their child-like wonder, presence, and idiosyncrasy.

An aside: Soll’s “Puppet” has the subject of the naïve adult. What could be more uncanny and wondrous than a puppet, especially modeled off of a real human (no frills, no purple, no Barney)? But is subject enough?

Where my other favorite essay, Boully’s “Short Essay on Being,” fits in to this wayward discussion on naivety, I’m not sure. Her angst and revenge might have more to do with the teenager or the outraged adult. But studies have shown that when we are mad, angry, or threatened, we revert back to childhood reactions and behaviors. If she has naivety, it is mischievous, layered, and risky. She could have got caught at the end of her essay, and exposed herself not only to her culinary victim, but also to herself and the reader.

This is just to say, I like essayists who act as naïve adults: full of curiosity, strangeness, and the ability to get in trouble.

Shedding The Facts For Melody: A Response To Denis Wood's "Everything Sings"

2011-05-04T03:01:00.001-07:00

When considering the intentions of this book, I had to question the ordering of its maps and what was being derived from them. Wood explains that "The maps toward the front of the atlas are about the neighborhood and its continuity in the city… [t]he maps towards the back of the book are about the discreteness in the city… [t]he maps woven in through the middle try to capture the broad givens of the front giving birth to the literal facts of the back, and vice versa: the churning and grinding that transform the city." So, to put these intentions to the test, I took a look at a few of the beginning maps (purposefully overlooking the first one, as I will get to it later).

The book initially intends to get at the guts of the town, showing a hill as if it was made up of topographic lines, then moving beneath it to “Intrusions Under Hill,” where gas, water, and sewer lines act like veins and arteries for a created body, as do the power lines in the next map (Squirrel Highways). What’s odd, though, is what’s derived from these arteries. The cables/pipes like arteries thing is a pretty obvious metaphor, but Wood does choose to end his angular, power line map by speaking about it not as a human means but as a means of transportation appropriated by the squirrel. Likewise, “Intrusions Under Hill” isn’t strictly about the transportation of human needs, but how those needs affect their surroundings, initially implying a negative connotation (the old humans ruining the environment thing) and changing it into an eerie balance (which seems forced here, but not in the next map) of human and nature, especially by positioning it next to Squirrel Highways.

As I see it, the ordering is quite logical: one thing triggers another. For example (please excuse the brevity): Boylan’s Hill turns into what’s under the hill, which turns into what’s on the hill –power lines, which turns into squirrels on those power lines, which turns into trees -because squirrels usually run on trees, which turns into tree canopies, then a realistic view of the tree coverage, then disfigured trees casting shadows, then pools of light created by lamp posts vs. those shadows, then the streets the lamp posts are on, and so on). So, while Wood seems to be transmitting the associative quality of his brain, he’s also supposing that there is an inherent network of stuff tied to humans, which in turn, ties to other stuff and other humans. This stuff is the stuff that ‘sings’ and creates rhythms (more on this later), as he puts it in his introduction.
But not only is the canopy map tied to the aerial view through ‘trees’ (because, well, they are both aerial views and have to do with what trees show and hide) it is also tied by references to Boylan Height’s history of urbanity and nature that lands in the space between guilt, nostalgia, and inevitability. “Broken Canopy” ends on a sort of guilty note about urbanity, as does “Aerial View” begin. But flip a few pages to “Pools of Light” and you get an interesting anecdote regarding the need for lamp posts in the 19th century, positing them as replacements for the moon. However, the map does not imply this guilt. Wood even notes in the introduction of how beautiful it was to watch his friend create the map and the circles of light with each brush stroke. So, does this map intentionally create a tension through juxtaposition?

As I mentioned earlier, I initially questioned Wood’s intentions regarding ordering, with each map seeming to logically speak to the one before it, the one after it, and their narrative components (basically showing how urbanity has broken down nature and there could be harmony, at least with the squirrels, but not really), then I came across “Pools of Light” which led me to recall Wood’s first map “The Night Sky,” which does work logically in that the night sky is expansive and yet weighted in the neighborhood from which it is viewed. Wood even quotes William Saroyan to wrap this point up, saying, “Birth is into the world, not into a town.” Then again, the quote and map/narrative seem oddly evasive as well. This map seems to function least as a map, but more as a picture. And its relation to the text, as I stated, is logical, but also creates a tension between Wood’s elaborate explanation of his team attempting to map this view and the uselessness of this map. I find myself not even caring if those stars are really in that specific place in the sky in that specific town. And what’s with the ones in the bottom right corner, hanging out in the darkness of the tree silhouettes? There is something oddly enlightening about this image, yet also illusive. This evasiveness, while not prevalent by any means in all of Wood’s maps, seems to come about more and more as the book goes on, leaving behind the nature vs. human idea and settling into a space that sheds the need to explain background information and facts, only showing present motion (ie: the routes of the mailman or paperboy).

It is here that Wood’s idea of rhythms, again, becomes prevalent. He notes:
"The incoming paper snaking through the neighborhood can be likened to the primary winding, the paper lumbering off in the garbage truck or the secondary. The milkman, the vegetable man, the mailman, the delivery trucks, the school and city buses (Bus Ballet), all are involved in bringing in stuff that, sooner or later, invariably transformed, has to leaves… the neighborhood inhales and exhales. It breathes."

Basically, Wood is initially presenting facts and background information that can be shed in order to give way to the narrative, the personal. This is akin to Wood’s last entry about “The Magic Tree Map Transformer Machine,” working through data to get to one, completely unique tree. In so many ways, Wood isn’t just speaking to what he’s prefaced in his introduction, but performing it. He quotes Christian Brown (through John Cage), saying (with regards to trying to only have sound without melody), “No matter what we do it ends by being melodic.” He seems to embrace the melody that Cage and Brown pushed away, calling it organic, then equates that melody to narrative, that atlases, pieces that can be read as pieces in any order are narratives. So, it is no wonder that Wood’s most successful pairings of maps and narratives are ones that don’t say the same thing, but create an evasive tension between what a map is supposed to create and what a narrative is supposed to say. Each seems to break the confines of their genres to speak to similar spaces, what remains of people and what they do in those spaces. Neither can quite be touched, but Wood certainly encircles them.

The only question that remains, though, is to what extent Wood goes to track down these melodies. He is concerned with rhythms of people (ie: the paperboy, the pumping of gas, the transference of electricity, etc) rather than who these people are and how they choose to group themselves in an area, implying a sort of arbitrariness about this that lends itself to the idea of the infinite (ie: Solnit?). However, Wood seems to have a very purposeful order, shedding his facts to get to the narrative. Given this propulsion, can Wood justly recall this arbitrariness to create melody when his ordering doesn’t seem so arbitrary?

Everything Sings

2011-05-03T16:24:00.000-07:00

After the introduction by Ira Glass, after the opening essay by Denis Wood, Boylan Heights truly begins to hum. A stark white page followed by another with a single line written across its surface act as a palate cleanser, a pause, a cinematic fade-out then in leading to the body of work. We begin with “The Night Sky,” a map that will get us nowhere, but perhaps nowhere is where we need to go. Throughout Everything Sings, Wood excludes street names and cardinal directions, giving us instead things usually not mapped. “This is what you see at night, in early July if you’re in Boylan Heights and you look up at the sky,” writes Wood. Looking between the black edges of foliage we see a streetlight, stars, and the night sky and are reminded that no matter where we think we are, we are all here, and here as Carl Sagan says “is home, is us.”

Wood builds Boylan Heights in our imaginations bit by bit. The second map “Boylan’s Hill,” maps elevation. Here I feel that Wood perhaps missteps by giving us too much information in the text accompanying the map. Elevation plays a very real role in the structuring of the socio-economic hierarchy of Boylan Heights, something that we would be able to discover on our own if given a little less information. If say, Wood would have stopped at: “In 1858 the son crowned it with Montfort Hall, an Italianate mansion designed by the English architect William Percival.” In this case we would be able to discover the information contained in the following sentences:

“While it’s only 349 feet above sea level, it’s still downhill in every direction. And in every way. Fifty years later, when Kelsey and Guild laid out the neighborhood, they used the topography to set the social gradient: every strata of class from the mansion at the pinnacle down to the shotgun houses near the creek beds.”

Wood says in his opening essay that one of his goals is to imbue his maps with the stuff that makes poems resonate. I think he accomplishes this, but sometimes, I feel the words getting in the way of this resonance. The section titled “Newsletter Prominence,” is incredibly interesting because as we learn in the text, and opening essay, the newsletter is a product of the Boylan Heights Restoration and Preservation Association, which itself is a product of racism. This all resonates, but wouldn’t it really ring if all the information conveyed in the text could be conveyed in maps? Wouldn’t it really ring if instead of telling us, Wood let us make the correlations between the big dark circles in “Newsletter Prominence,” and the lit faces in “Jack-O’-Lanterns.”

Perhaps my tastes are extreme, but what would happen if there were no words in Everything Sings, or perhaps simply a short historical blurb to give us a bit of context without any direct mention of any other maps? Wood says that while he and his students were working on a map of Boylan Heights, they “began pairing away the inessential, the map crap (the neat line, the scale, the north arrow), the neighborhood boundaries, the topography, finally the streets.” Why not do the same with the words? Don’t sentences like “On the map, there’s a jack-o’-lantern at every address where there was one or more pumpkins on the porch, and most of those porches were at addresses that were frequently mentioned in the newsletter,” act as neat lines, as the north arrow?

The fact that I want no words, that I find them unnecessary, is a testament to the strength of the maps in Everything Sings. I have total confidence in their ability to convey everything Wood wants to convey. I return to the jack-o’-lanterns and newsletter to illustrate my point. If we had no words, but instead another map before this pair to cue us to the significance and origin of the newsletter, then the placement of “Jack-O’-Lanterns,” right after “Newsletter Prominence,” along with the graphic similarities in the maps would give me goose bumps.

Despite the words, the maps are astounding. I resist the notion that they are somehow impractical or useless. That is only true if we still think an atlas should be a compendium of lines and names that get us blindly from point A to point B, if we still think this is how we should be moving through the world. Wood’s take on an atlas is a take on place, a take on us. What is really important to know about a place? The lines and names, or the pools of light, the reverberation of chimes, the lit faces of pumpkins, the newsletters, the papers, the traffic signs? Wood asks us to look at the atlas, itself an instrument of war, finance, and politics, and consider what good our fervent quest for information has gotten us.

What I Think Denis Wood Means When He Says "Everything"

2011-04-30T16:02:00.000-07:00

Toward the end of our discussion on Solnit last week, we made a brief and runty attempt to tackle the word infinite—how it’s hinted at & suggested in art and writing, what effect the suggestion of infinity might have on a reader or viewer, etc.

The talk stuck with me because I’d been rolling the topic around in my head since I was a teenager. I am a compulsive abstractor. A conceptualizer. I have a lot of pictures of groups of people taken from very far away, but not too many portraits. (I think people look best from really far away, either waving or walking.) I’m into types and symbols. I’m into ideas, not people (or, not people qua people—I’m into what people represent, what they stand for).

I don’t care about community. Or, I only care about it in theory. A couple of weeks ago, I went to the open studio of a friend who lives a few blocks away. When I went up to tell him I was there, he said, “Oh, it’s great you’re here, because there are a lot of people from the neighborhood you should meet.” I don’t want to meet people from the neighborhood. Or, I don’t want to meet them from the neighborhood because they’re from the neighborhood. I rarely meet my neighbors and am deeply apathetic when it comes to local elections.

I blame it, predictably, on my upbringing: part New York City and part semi-rural Connecticut. “Community” in Connecticut is staked on distance. You pay for the privilege of being able to go for days without actually seeing other human beings. “Community” in New York, as far as I could ever tell, was staked on a perverse pride in being able to make enough money to survive. I always found it easier to treat people in New York as contained bursts of information or service. (Benjamin’s “shock” theory is useful here—you’d die of exhaustion trying to dignify and parse the pathos of any given city street at any given time). There’s a lyric by the songwriter Bill Callahan that I like very much, and it goes, “Alone in my room, I feel like such a part of the community / But out on the streets, I feel like a robot by the river, looking for a drink.” I sympathize. Thinking about community fills me with god’s warmth; actually being at community events makes my palms sweat.

By extension, I’ve never cared much about place. I am always surprised when I visit my brother and see him wearing a VIRGINIA t-shirt, which he must’ve bought when he came to visit me during college (go hoos)—and I’m surprised because I don’t have one, and I’ve never had a t-shirt or hat that advertised any place I lived or worked in. (Though when I lived in Little Rock, Arkansas, I considered buying a t-shirt that said Little Rock, Arkansas, in part because when I moved back to Brooklyn, all my friends asked me how I liked Alabama. The whole city and state of Arkansas is just brutally underappreciated.)

I’m taking the long road around to talk about Wood, but in order to convince you I haven’t lost sight of the point, here’s an assertion: I think that the smaller the expression is, the more profoundly it can invoke the infinite.

I don’t want to structure my thoughts here as Solnit vs. Wood (even though the temptation is logical and obvious), but what I will say by way that Infinite City feels torrential to me. It’s messy, it’s an information dump, it’s wildly opinionated. It attempts a kind of life—or, it attempts, I think, to make the reader feel like the book could just melt into reality, or extend itself into it. It has an enmeshed quality. It’s eager. It’s maximal.

Everything Sings, by comparison, feels whispery and humble. The maps tend toward abstraction, and the narratives within—and between—them is subterranean. Take, for example, “Police Calls.” The two biggest numbers, i.e. the two most commonly reported crimes, are in the southern part of the neighborhood: “motor vehicle accident” and “vehicle blocking passage.” Then turn back a page and look at “Signs For Strangers.” Surprise: The places where there are the most traffic signs is also the place where there are the most vehicle-related police incidents. It’s an obvious conclusion, but the experience of piecing it together as a reader is satisfying. Or take the passage from “Trees in General” to “Broken Canopy” to “Disfigured Trees” and later, “The Age of Trees” and read it like the story it is.

Or, on the more abstract end of the spectrum, just look at “Wind Chimes.” There’s no delineated space at all, just a near-synaesthetic representation of sound. The book is filled with invitations to resonance and connections—invitations, really, to poetry, or at least to narratives whose weight lies in ellipses and off-stage exchanges. I admire that.

And I think that part of the way he achieves it is by taking a microcosmic approach and working on a very small scale. Raleigh, North Carolina, is a city with no immediate cultural heat. I doubt young teens dream big-city dreams about living in Raleigh. (Charlotte is bigger, and for what it’s worth, I always thought that Chapel Hill was more fun.) And Wood isn’t even working with the whole city, just a single neighborhood, and in several of the maps—“Sound Walk” or “The Light at Night on Cutler Street”—only a portion of that neighborhood. He spends some time aggregating history but more time focusing on his—and his collaborators’—own observations.

The result is that the book feels less like the result of research and more like the result of a practice, an attitude. Sit and watch. Write something down. Listen. Walk around and report on your block. When I read “Sound Walk,” I hear it. And as I hear it, I’m prompted to try and make my mind aware of itself, its perceptions, and its attitudes. Everything Sings isn’t about Boylan Heights at all; it’s a book about being where you are. The information is washed away by the life that runs through it.

And I’m moved by the book because I think it contains an implicit challenge. My block is the last place I’d think about visiting because I’m there all the time, but on the other hand, I know very little about it. The reflex—mine, at least—is to pay attention to other places because I imagine my block will always be there to investigate when I want to. Of course, what ends up happening is that I’ll move and realize I wasn’t really living where I just lived. I’ve had this experience over and over again. And the challenge, then, is to frame the picture, focus on your immediate surroundings, to apprehend your habits and your indifferences.

“Some guy on Cabarrus had a lovely sweetgum cut down—in its prime—to stop the gumballs dropping on his Corvette,” Wood writes at one point. We don’t just get an explanation for the absence of a dot on the map, we get the Corvette, and its annoyed owner, and we get the sticky thing falling out of the tree, and we can see this guy getting annoyed and thinking about what the heck he’s going to do with the tree because damn if he’s going to let is ruin his car (which is not described as red but I just imagine is red anyway), and from this one line we’re offered not just the lay of the land but how it feels to walk there, too—we’re offered spirit. Wood’s patience in making the maps is a devotional exercise: It’s him recognizing the spirit of all these things he could easily ignore. And there’s the abstraction, I think, or the suggestion of the infinite—this belief that the smallest and most easily taken-for-granted places have routines, idiosyncrasies, variations, infrastructure, history, change, sights and sounds—that, to use his words, everything sings, but it falls on us to listen.

Infinite City: A San Francisco Treat

2011-04-26T21:38:00.000-07:00

The commercial jingle Rice-a-Roni: the San Francisco treat catapulted rice pilaf, the underdog side dish, to fame in the 1960’s. Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, with its fluorescent orange appeal, was dominating grocery store sales at the time. Everywhere children were eating gummy pasta, devoid of nutrition, a shameful staple in the American diet. Everywhere people identified the pasta with Italy. It became a false and unjust representation of Italian cuisine, contributed to negative stereotypes, possibly even led to the production of Jersey Shore. (Research TRUTH about Italian cuisine and Italian culture and place research here in order to push back at the negative stereotypes.)
The rather murky origins of Rice-a-Roni have never been examined, despite the fact that they are important to California history, the diets of American children, and serve as an example of commercial marketing genius. One day the Italian widow of one of the founders of Golden Grain Macaroni Company walked into her elderly neighbor’s apartment and smelled the delicious air of rice pilaf. Her neighbor was Armenian, this was an Armenian dish, and she was a survivor of the Armenian genocide. (Research TRUTH about Armenian history and insert research here in order to push back on ethnocentric readers who don’t know about Armenia and don’t care.) The Italian widow immediately recognized a winner. Her family’s pasta factory began producing rice pilaf and thanks to her Armenian neighbor, they could finally compete with Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. By going outside her own Italian culture, the widow destroyed the monopoly Kraft Macaroni and Cheese had on side dishes in America and introduced an Armenian food staple to our diets. The widow expanded her 1960’s dietary worldview and our own as a result.
I am being facetious. In part because I grew up in a desert outback with little knowledge of urbane environments like San Francisco—in part because my earliest sense of SF came from those Rice-a-Roni trolley-car commercials. I was, as they say, a country girl. But I am also trying to make a point: Rebecca Solnit writes about important matters. Choosing what she would like to include in her San Francisco atlas she considers the underdog, the forgotten tribes, the marginalized ethnic groups, the queens, the environmental disasters, the trees and butterflies. She criticizes the War Machine, the destruction of the environment, the extinction of salmon, and the stupid way we ignore global warming though it threatens our shorelines and our lives. She is a serious and earnest thinker who feels it is important to seek out forgotten histories. She researches. She compiles facts. She quotes intellectual writers—Thoreau, Borges, Calvino, and Rumsey, on the first page of her introduction alone. She loves a good argument.
I enjoy Rebecca Solnit’s writing. I especially appreciate that she dismantles harmful myths that have to do with my own culture: she has repeatedly skewered the myth of the vanished American Indian, the myth of an empty wilderness that needed to be tamed. She grew up in an era when American schools taught versions of history she didn’t enjoy, from a perspective she found unsettling as she grew older. Prior to the 1980’s, in many states, ‘cleaner versions’ of history were taught, versions that left out our country’s dark asides. As her worldview expanded, as she wrote, read, and traveled, as her sense of being human tied into different demographics of people, she needed to rewrite the history she learned in school. Thus she told stories that embraced the forgotten ones, stories that enabled her to live in America and feel part of the country in a way that made her proud. I suspect that Solnit had very personal issues at stake in her early books—that she was learning as she wrote. In other words, it wasn’t knowledge that she ‘gave away’ but knowledge that she was surprised to learn. Watching her language meander across the page gave the reader a shared sense of her discovery.
In terms of her new Essay-Prize nominated work, it was not all I hoped for it to be. Though I loved the maps and the ghost-like sense of place that gets evoked in the introduction and in the discussion of ‘moving films,’ and though I loved the idea that civilization is ineffable and ever-changing, I was ultimately disappointed that I did not feel as much passion at work in “Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas” as I have in her other work. I don’t know if the diffused emotion is due to the collaborative effort, the overall tone of the work, or the fact that not enough of the topics selected for the maps relied on whimsy and imagination. The introduction claims that “maps are always invitations in ways that texts and pictures are not; you can enter a map, alter it, add to it, plan with it.” With the exception of the final “plan with it” I did not feel any of these invitations while I read the atlas. I felt somehow unable to enter the argument, to see myself existing in this world. I suspect that a sense of shared discovery did not come through as strong as the authors might have liked. I believe the atlas failed in its universal appeal. It did not hit like a catchy jingle or become a treat that non San-Franciscans could understand and celebrate.
Finally, I suspect that my younger peers here at Iowa will complain that older progressives have lost touch with their generation. Many of these young people had Howard Zinn’s version of history included in their high school curriculum. Not only do they know the names of obscure tribes, feel well-informed about the LGBT community, and have friends from every ethnic group, many have fought a sense of liberal guilt from a young age. The result is that they hate forced binaries and didactic writing. Though young students may be progressive themselves, they do not want to see finger-wagging liberalism in anyone’s writing. Especially if the authors don’t show enough negative capability: counterbalance may be one of the most prized characteristics of a modern essay.
“Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas” will be popular among those who know and love California’s northern half, or perhaps among those who share Solnit’s singular vision of the city. For those readers who like a bit of contradiction or feel the need to admit disparate voices into any argument, it may be enjoyed a bit less.

Infinite City: The Evaluation

2011-04-26T17:37:00.000-07:00

Solnit, (a solid) B

Craig and Justin: 85%

At some point during the semester, slightly befuddled at how to quantify the quality of these essays, our class brainstormed a list of elements that a good essay should contain, of ways that stellar essays ought to perform, and exactly what they should do for us. The list appeared weeks later on a handout from Ander, each criteria preceded not by a bullet-point or a number or a letter, but a little dash. This dash brought to mind the ______ spaces left blank on forms, inviting a filling-in, requiring a filling-in. The way the list was laid out on paper suggested we might check off what the essay does well. But then, we (Justin & I) thought, what if the essay does something half-well? Or 3/4-well? There are twenty-five criteria we noted—why not just assign each 4 points, and at the end of the day tally the score out of a round 100? This is how our math homework is graded—why not judge art the same way? This way you can know a work of art’s quality at a glance. Example: Kundera’s novel Immortality = 98% = a stunner. Henry Miller’s The Rosie Crucifixion series = 54% = sad.

Is there any reason not to judge art by some (this) fixed system of quantifiables? Some might say we critics can’t properly quantify that certain je ne sais quoi. Well, we say, sure we can. If it’s got it, we’ll just add some bonus points. Consider it extra credit.

The text in question: Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit

1) The question of that certain je ne sais quoi? Does it have it? Or does it not? 4 (bonus) pts. – I say, sure it does. Je ne peut pas dire pourquoi.

2) What are the essay’s materials? Its methods? How is it powered? How powerful is it? 3 pts. – My initial sense is that the essay’s power (which for me derives mainly from its intellectual ambition and quality) is diluted by the sheer amount of cramming-ness on these pages. I think I thought it was asking me to do too much, to process so much information, so many concepts I didn’t come to the book already invested in—and I was annoyed at being prodded thus. Upon getting down to work however (read: investing an hour and a cup of coffee in the endeavor), Infinite City’s mingling histories suddenly appeared not only interesting, but compelling and nuanced and important Method(s): Re-envisioning, juxtaposition, irony, collaboration, visual art—all seem more or less successful here I think. On the more end: Idea-wise, this thing strikes me as stellar. Less: compared to Schalansky’s Atlas the maps here seem less pretty than simply colorful, less provocative than they are simply an interesting backdrop to the writing, which for me, is where the real force of the essay lie. Much of the essay’s power derives from its collaboration, and it’s collaboration seemed a plus as I read it, or still seems a plus (I’m not really sure), but not all of the writing was as driving as it could have been, and though I admire the idea of incorporating so many minds into one work, of striving to defeat the bias inherent to individuals, and as much as I admire this reconfiguring of the city as an attempt to beat back the colonialist spirit and give/take the power back to the people, I am still left wondering: why is Solnit’s the only name on the cover? I suspect this is because at the end of the day it is her consciousness that is fixed here. Solnit is the dominant personality, and except for maybe Aaron Shurin’s section Full Spectrum (“…it’s generally agreed that the boys from Down Under perfected the art of drag names…”), Solnit’s writings deliver a more nuanced and meditative performance than the other included authors. Intentionally, or not, she seems to be saying, ‘This is not an anthology. This is my vision. I just had some help with the drawing.’ In any case, having only her name on the cover betrays, to me, that what we are being presented with here is less an atlas depicting some of the infinite cities of San Francisco, and more a Solnit meditation on the infinity of cities that exist within the city, and what that means: it is Solnit talking, even when she is not the one talking. And this, to me, means the essay is not as powerful as it could be.

3) How fairly does it treat the material? The audience? 4 pts. – San Francisco is treated, perhaps, as fairly as it could be expected to be, examined from myriad angles, resulting in a full(er) portrait of a complex place. The audience…—I’d wanted to say the audience was not treated particularly fairly, what with the density of words and long pages and the bundling of political topics and everything, but I suspect it was instead me not being particularly fair to the book. Yes, Schalansky was easier to read. Yes, this gets a little Lonely Planet-ish maybe and I was initially resistant to this since atlases don’t usually come with so much talking, or come with such an openly political agenda, but this is all part of the greater point, I think—subversion of given histories, of accepted boundaries, subversion of the atlas as a silent thing, a seemingly benign thing. It asks much, perhaps, of its audience. And I have decided to deem this complimentary.

4) How rich and interesting is the language? 3 pts. – The art and ideas seem to be where it’s at here. The quality of writing varies from here to there, author to author—always dependable, if not great.

5) How well it constructs or deconstructs its self/subject? 2.5 pts – Oh yeah, I think Solnit knows what she’s doing here: “reinventing the atlas,” “examining the many layers of meaning in one place,” “I joked to some of my friends when I was working on this project that owning race horses and castles is as nothing to commissioning maps when it comes to a sense of power and luxury…”—but again, doesn’t putting her name alone on the cover mean she is effectively retaining that power, the colonizing power of mapmaking that the collaborations were intended to defuse/diffuse?

6) How interesting or unusual is the material? 4 pts. – An exploration of a place, of people, incorporating history through the present, juxtaposing the beautiful with the nasty—pretty interesting, I think. Unusual?—using a reworking of the atlas as a medium, yes, unusual, I think.

7) How deeply is it explored? 4 pts. – It’s not exhaustive, certainly. It’s not a Ken Burns documentary. But it’s (relative) brevity is also kind of the point. There are infinite cities that could be explored and chronicled here, and perhaps ending where it does is simply an acknowledgement that yes we could go on and on and on and on and we know that, and now knowing that, we’ve probably gone far enough.

8) How wide is the scope/vision of the essay? 4 pts. – Rethinking a place, its histories, its politics, its peopling, its connectedness and disparities, and rethinking the form of the atlas, trying to re-create the form without any (or with less) colonial single-consciousness bias by flooding the essay with an array of collaborating biases—the embrace of this essay seems to be pretty wide open.

9)How well-tailored is the method to the material? 3 pts. – Perhaps it is a little text heavy. Perhaps the maps should be allowed to speak for themselves, but the text too can be seen as explorations in mapmaking. The collaboration of artists is at the heart of this, I think, is the fulcrum beneath the idea of maps as colonial tools versus maps as a means of real exploration. But again, why is Solnit’s the only name on the cover? Because she is the hegemon?

10) How active is the material and the form, and what is the relationship between them? 4 pts. – The material and the form seem to me dependent one on the other, each in a supporting role—drawing as map, text as map—supporting the atlas whole, which is less about marking or defining, or drawing borders, than it is about actively exploring.

11) How accessible is the essay? 2.5 pts. – I want to say it’s totally accessible. But it’s actually kind of academic, I think. Does that mean it’s not accessible? Maybe? I just taught a creative writing class at a high school, 9^th grade, and while talking about the many creative forms maps can take I passed around Schalansky’s Atlas…, Denis Wood’s Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas, and Solnit’s Infinite City. Infinite City was the first back into my hands.

12) How valuable is it to contemporary society? How timely? How timeless? Is timeliness desirable? 4 pts. – This essay’s value, I think, lies in that it strives to foster a greater knowledge of people and place, and create a milieu of greater understanding and acceptance in our society, which is at once more tolerant than ever before, and yet still alarmingly bigoted at times. It is an essay with a purpose, and it is a timely political object. On the other hand, it may also be read as more of a timeless, eloquent, interesting artifact; it is political, but pleasing to read as well. As Solnit told The Believer, the important question is “How can you write about the obscure things that give you pleasure with a style flexible enough to come round to look at more urgent matters?...can you retain some of the elegance and some of the pleasure when you look at big, pressing topics? I think you can. It’s what I’ve tried to do.” It’s what I think she does. If it was all about the trappings of nuclear energy and nuclear waste disposal we readers might be bored; if it was all meditations on butterflies and gastronomy, the same.Of course, even when it is just about butterflies, there remains a political undercurrent: “In a divided culture, being undivided and synthesizing and connecting across broad areas can be an act of resistance, just as being slow—as in doing things deliberately, walking or biking or cooking from scratch or gardening or sitting around and swapping stories, not being dilatory or sluggish—in a sped-up culture is an act of resistance akin to the work slowdowns that were one form of factory strike.” It is valuable, I think. It is timely. It is (maybe) timeless.

13) How dialogical is the essay? 2 pts. – The collaborating artists here might be seen as dialoguing, though it also seems likely Solnit was nearby suggesting what they say. I don’t know where this is coming from exactly, but it’s almost as if I can hear her, calling, “I am here and I am brilliant and I will remain calm and meditative while I talk you through it all. I will speak through all these other people. I will tell you how it is.”

14) How much does it move us? 2.5 pts. – I can only speak for myself. Stimulated—yes, yes. Moved (as in psychic fibrillation of the heart)—I don’t know. The jury’s still out. Which make me suspect: moved—not so much. (Maybe I am cold-hearted. Maybe if this was an atlas about Milwaukee my heart would have responded differently.)

15) How interesting or idiosyncratic is the brain at work? And how well can we see it work? 3 (4) pts. – There is a brain at work in this essay and her name is Rebecca Solnit, and her brain is distinct and interesting, certainly. And I am confident I could pick out a Solnit sentence from a line-up—though she is, I think, less pleasantly idiosyncratic than simply intelligent and preoccupied here with the many social issues her oeuvre regularly tackles. Perhaps such preoccupation is idiosyncratic. Perhaps I simply wish for more idiosyncratic whimsy. But whimsy is not in the equation—only interesting & idiosyncratic. So perhaps the essay deserves better than a 3 here then…

16) How are we changed by reading it? 4 pts. – Solnit may not have been the first person to articulate these minorly profound ideas regarding mapmaking and history and bias and the layering upon one another of invisible cities we can never know, but Infinite City is a remarkable articulation of those ideas, and being exposed to them here, in this way, it is likely I will never read an atlas (or think of San Francisco) in the same way ever again.

17) How much of this essay is conducted in the spirit of inquiry? 3pts.— Solnit’s project explores a way to counteract the establishment of mapping, and therefore must inquiry about its own maps. Applying Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle to map-making, Solnit states “another map is required; and another; yet another,” so on and so forth. So self-conscious about its own limitations, the text becomes an infinite exercise in inquiry with the only solution being more inquiry, another map, more inquiry, another map…

18) What movement does the essay show? 2.5pts.— Are these maps orbiting the same idea on the same plane, the different maps only being alternative vehicles? or are we in a rabbit hole and going further and further into Solnit’s mind? The trajectory, the break down by chapter, seems necessary, but distracts from the idea that one map made is complicit in the mapping of the next. These maps are individual units all reflecting Solnit’s ideas of representation. Each map inquiries in a specific way about a specific thing, but they fail to communicate with each other.

19) What spaces does it open up—either in itself or in us—and how well does it work those spaces? 3pts. – The space opened up is infinite, depending on your belief if mapping is a way to open or close doors. While Solnit seems to be preoccupied with the conception that after each map must come another map, but order for the door to remain open. As artists predominantly involved with the textual, we are forced to consider how we can negotiate with the visual for a deeper inquiry of a subject.

20) How present is the self? 2.5pts. – As commented on in a previous question, Solnit’s name appearing on the cover possibly undermines the thinking behind this project. So, the question here should be, how un-present is the self? or how has the collaboration formed a newly individuated self? Solnit writes 8/20 essays accompanying the maps and her editorial weight pressures the rest of text. The atlas becomes less of a collaborative vision and more of a folio of individual visions.

21) How important are the stakes? 4 pts.— Beyond the text’s colorful invitation, the stakes here are highly charged. We can either be complacent or apolitical and continue to have the establishment generate maps for us or we can participate ourselves. Solnit’s background as an activist influences the thinking through this text. The text gives a voice to the voiceless through maps and asks readers to do the same.

22) Do we measure the text against or within its genre/constraints? 4 pts.— Absolutely. Solnit has spent a great deal thinking about place in the rest of her work and here has chosen to broaden the possibilities of how we represent place through the once purely systematic/scientific process of Atlas making. The value of this text is how it finds pleasure in the negotiation between the organized system and the individual.

23) How might we quantify or at least understand how conscious the text is of its inquiries, subtleties, and contradictions? 3.5 – The text remains self-conscious of its endeavor throughout. The introduction provides an interesting analysis of the shortcomings of atlases and notes its own limitations. Incredibly conscious in its frame, but drops its consciousness within the individual sections in service of its exercise.

24) How much do want to privilege the personal? the individual? 2.5pts – Here the individual is valued in its contribution to the collective. As an act of essay, I want to think me about collaboration. Personally, I value the individual within the essay and how essay is the mode where an individual can operate and undermine entire institutions. All in all I need to think more about this one.

25) How complex is the essay and its methods and/or questions? 4pts. – The thinking and questioning behind this text is incredible strong. Its method of pairing text and maps further complicates are notions of space. Solnit inclusivity between mediums and genres and voice makes this text a rich, complex, pleasurable, and overwhelming experience. Besides the overarching question, I am interested to see in class what other questions, macro/micro, are being asked here.

26) Does it continue to reveal meaning or complexity or beauty after we reread it, after we press it down? How much does it keep giving us? How much do we want to return to it? 4pts.— Continues to reveal meaning as we progress into the routine of our lives, and allows us to breakthrough our routine of seeing into new territory. Powerful and continuous.

Cities within cities

2011-04-26T15:41:00.000-07:00

A number of years ago I bought a large framed map of THE WORLD: Compiled and Drawn in the Cartographic Division of the National Geographic Society, 1965 from a Chicago antique shop. It's a pretty thing to look at: a wash of variegated blues with cream-colored continents, their individual countries demarcated by pink, green, and yellow lines. As an instrument, it does not inform the viewer of the world today (it contains Rhodesia, Bechuanaland, the USSR), nor even of the world as it was in 1965 (in order to position the United States front and center on the map, China has been cleaved in two, with everything east of the Himalayas pushed to the far right side of the frame and everything west of the Himalayas pushed to the far left), so much as it suggests the way the Cartographic Division of the National Geographic Society envisioned the world in 1965. This is not a map of the world but a map of one particular vision of the world.

It is a political map in the technical sense—it demarcates governmental boundaries between nations and the regions inside those nations, with small dots and large dots indicating cities and capitals. But it is also political insofar as it makes a statement; it reveals a specific bias. This version of political mapping is the one Rebecca Solnit and her team of collaborators put into practice in the atlas Infinite City. "A map is in its essence and intent an arbitrary selection of information, " Solnit writes. Defining places as "stable locations with unstable converging forces," she seeks to present a version—or rather, versions—of San Francisco that highlight those converging forces most poignant to her own experience.

I haven't read a great deal of Solnit's other writing, but I'm familiar enough to know that the subjects she seeks to chart on the maps of this atlas--environmentalism, militarism and social justice among others--are of regular concern to her. She draws much attention to the fact that we are getting her "perspective, with all its limits" which is a nod to the more theoretical aspect of her project. If this atlas can be read as a love letter to San Francisco, it is also making a fascinating and more broadly reaching argument about the ways in which "the description will never close the distance entirely between itself and its subject". As Italo Calvino's narrator says in Invisible Cities, which Solnit takes as her atlas's namesake, "The city must never be confused with the words that describe it." Or the maps. And this gap—where each description invariably falls short of the thing it means to describe—is fertile imaginative ground, limitless in possibility. "It is in the myriad descriptions that the maps begin to approximate the rich complexity of the place, of a place, of any place," Solnit writes in her introduction. From this perspective, approximation is both a more honest and more interesting attempt than accuracy. For accuracy is an impossible myth.

The more San Francisco is described, the more it seemingly eludes description. Solnit and her team heighten this sensation by illustrating a place in flux. The city changes geographically as the sea level rises, altering the location of the shore to submerge some neighborhoods and shift the marshes inland. The city changes demographically: Solnit notes the influx of African Americans during the Great Migration (Map 8: "Shipyards and Sounds: The Black Bay Area since World War II") and pointedly ignores the migration of upwardly mobile hipsters to the Mission ("Leaving out the gentrified Mission…was one of the pleasures of making this version of the place" she writes of Map 13: "The Mission" North of Home, South of Safe"). And the city changes across time, as indigenous languages are forgotten or revived, as buildings are razed and rebuilt, as residents are born or die or move away. This city—every city—is haunted by infinite ghosts, and "learning to see some of them is one of the arts of becoming a true local," Solnit writes (76).

I find the maps most effective when they call up strange and thought-provoking associations. Bizarre juxtaposition of subjects mapped on a single page—for instance, murders in 2008 and Monterrey Cyprus trees in 2009 on the map "Death and Beauty" (p.109)—allow these subjects to be seen both on their own terms and as placeholders for myriad other subjects. (Couldn't we instead map sites of heartbreak and bougainvillea?) A fairly straightforward street map focused on Fillmore Street (p. 66) is stippled with site markings, small black dots affixed to labels marked in white ink on black backgrounds. Viewed on its own, it presents as an average tourist map with designated tourist sites: galleries, bookstores, roller rinks and churches. Yet it faces a Rorschach-like ink blot that is so formally suggestive of the arrangement of labels on the Fillmore map as to cause the viewer to see the map as a Rorschach blot of its own. Just as no two people interpret a Rorschach test in the same way, Solnit writes that "no two people live in the same city."

This idea might strike a reader as disheartening, a suggestion of our fundamental alienation from one another, but the nature of Solnit's project undercuts such a reading. It is, after all, a collaboration. Solnit may be at the helm of this project, but she shares these pages with a wide-ranging group of artists and intellectuals. Each brings his or her own voice to the page, from measured tones of the geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro ("High Tide, Low Ebb") to the ecstatic lyricism of Aaron Shurin in the essay "Full Spectrum" (from my favorite section, "Monarchs and Queens"): "Did the city itself bust out, bank into flight? […] Didn't the city itself change shape, burst through, take wing, blaze into color, catch fire and light? This is a map of incendiary lights!"

Infinite City is dense and takes a long time to get through, though the getting through is largely pleasurable. Is it an essay? One essay? I believe the project as a unified whole may well be essaying: "In the course of making it, I have discovered how many more maps each of us contains," Solnit writes, and that sensation is passed onto the reader through the accretion of the 22 maps presented here. Still, I prefer to read it as a collection, picking it up and putting it down again, reading it out of page order and never in one sitting.

Solnit invites her readers to "map their own lives and imagine other ways of mapping… perhaps to become themselves some of the living books of this city or their cities." And one of the testaments to this book's strength is that after reading it, I find it virtually impossible to decline her invitation. Weeks after finishing Infinite City, the image that lingered for me was not one of Solnit's San Francisco, but rather a half-forgotten memory of my own, come alive again through the reading of this book.

During the first winter I lived in Chicago, I found myself driving through snowbound alleys in a north-side neighborhood late one night. Chicago's geography arranges itself in a near perfect grid, the north-south and east-west streets evenly spaced and situated at clear perpendiculars. Alleys run between these streets, superimposing a smaller but proportionate grid over the main one. Where the main streets are populated by fences and front doors and pedestrians, the alleys are home to garage doors, trailing vines, trash cans, house pets prowling through narrow unkempt backyards. It is possible to wander an entire neighborhood through its alleys, and it makes for an entirely different experience—inverted, seen only from behind, the familiar becomes strange. That night the snow lay thick over the road and roofs, so the alleys appeared like tunnels, and without streetlights I only had the moon and my headlights to cut through the dark. Though I was blocks from my apartment, I quickly became lost as the alleys branched away unrecognizable and indistinguishable. I felt then not only that I was no longer in Chicago, but that I was no longer anywhere really. I felt as though I'd slid through a crack in the city's façade and entered a sort of parallel dimension. The magical otherworldliness of that experience, faded in the years since, is what comes rushing back reading Infinite City.

An Invitation to Go Beyond

2011-04-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

Fortunately, we do not have to debate whether or not Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City essays; most reviewers refer to the maps’ accompanying texts as essays and Solnit doesn’t object in interviews. Nevertheless, we can debate her comment in “The Believer” interview with Benjamin Cohen regarding her take on labeling a writer:

I have a very clear sense of what I am here to do and what its internal coherence is, but it doesn’t fit into the way that ideas and continuities are chopped up into fields or labeled. Sometimes I say I’m an essayist, because that’s an elegant, historically grounded—if sometimes trivialized—mode of literature, while nonfiction is just a term for the leftovers when fiction is considered to be paramount, and creative nonfiction is even more abject a term.

However, in the interest of awarding the Essay Prize I’m more inclined to offer comparisons of Infinite City to the other submissions about which we can then debate. Since first encountering Judith Schalansky’s Atlas of Remote Islands, I found Infinite City dizzying and disastrously complex (just look at its subtitle). I liked the simplicity of Schalansky: four colors; sparse, homogenous maps; one page per map, one page per story; and the limited, but no less limiting vision of fifty remote islands. Yet it remained unclear after discussion how Schalansky was essaying; we even wondered whether or not she was “colonizing” the places she was writing about and what that might mean. Solnit, partly through the shared effort of producing Infinite City, does not seem to be guilty of colonizing San Francisco—if we are to accept a previous blogger’s definition that “at the heart of colonialism lies a power dynamic which involves the domination of an outside over an inside.” Solnit has lived in San Francisco for most of her life, whereas Schalansky, admittedly, never set foot on the islands she wrote about and never will. “No two people,” Solnit writes early on, “live in the same city.” Additionally, in “The Believer” interview, she says, “I am still struck by how much unknown San Francisco contains after a quarter century in residence there. And…my main urge is to deepen my knowledge of known and loved places and regions rather than jump into entirely new territory.”

We could also compare Infinite City to Reality Hunger. Solnit wrote about half the essays and collaborated with over 30 other artists. Shields wrote perhaps a third of his manifesto and stole the rest from others. I wonder if Emerson and Montaigne would have objected to Shields’ appropriation? I’ve silently championed the entries from Schalansky, Finnegan, and Boully because they worked alone, or mostly so. But I’m wondering now if Solnit doesn’t merit more praise for her ability to collaborate? “Alone, we’re powerless in many ways that we’re powerful together, and that power is one of the great pleasures and purposes of life we hardly have language for in this culture,” Solnit writes.

Solnit deserves praise for rounding up eloquent spokespersons for certain maps. “Monarchs and Queens” was paired with a lyrical essay written by Aaron Shurin, who, Solnit acknowledges, “has written gorgeously about queer San Francisco from his youth in the 1960s onward in his book King of Shadows.” Shurin declares: “This is a map of transmutations; a map of tribes, of wings and of wingspread. This is a map of unfurled maps. This map unleashes its legends.” He also inquires, in regard to the burgeoning queer culture, “Did the city itself bust out, bank into flight? Didn’t the city itself change shape, burst through, take wing, blaze into color, catch fire and light?”

These questions balance the statements that the maps make. From the epigraph by Italo Calvino in the Introduction, it is clear that Solnit is on a delightful quest to answer her own inquiries about this city and to discover “the question it asks you.” “While my story is mine,” she writes, “my map of San Francisco is also potentially yours.” I find her willingness and acumen to let others tell the story of her city admirable. Like Solnit’s selection for the Mission map: Adriana Camarena, “herself an immigrant from Mexico City now living in the neighborhood of this map, [who] investigated both populations, finding stories of stasis and displacement, hope and loss, gang life and economic hardship.”

In the Acknowledgements as well as a podcast from the UC Press website, Solnit thanks UC Press Art Director, Lia Tjandra, who “found us this creamy, luscious, delicious uncoated paper” and chose “what kind of binding that would make its life last.” She made the book “tall and slender so that when you opened it would have a squarish page spread” that was “fun to handle, more portable;” “the unit is the page spread, not the individual page as it often is with pictorial and visual art books.” Alas, the peninsula of San Francisco, at 7 x 7 miles, is almost perfectly square. So the form fits the contents it would seem.

What began as a proposal for a project to honor the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art on its 75th anniversary, Infinite City may have become a model for other artists to collaborate and commemorate their own cities. Her thesis is inviting, more of a manifesto than Shields’ Reality Hunger which devours others’ language and ideas to bolster the individual, more deeply explored and lived-in than Schalansky’s islands. Infinite City is still dizzying and complex, but not disastrously so, since it’s clear that Solnit has designed it “with the intention not of comprehensively describing the city but rather of suggesting through these pairings the countless further ways it could be described.”

Why Puppet Essays

2011-04-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Reading some of the posts on this blog, I can’t help but think that there is some over-analysis of a documentary that is as uncomplicated as its title: Puppet.

This is a documentary about puppetry. It seems that the documentaries mentioned to compare to Puppet are apples to oranges. The word, “puppet” is a ridiculous word (a thought I had so many times while watching this movie) comes from the French word for “doll” not the French word for puppet, which is “marionette.”

So if I had to compare this documentary to another it would be Marwencol (available on Watch Instantly on Netflix). That film is a biopic of a man who photographs dolls. The dolls, at times, do seem silly but the art created from it seems so real, so moving. The underlying theme is that we’re seeing something that we normally think of as puerile, adding life to it, and making it into an art. The story in that documentary is this man’s incredible art born out of rehabilitation.

We’re not told the history of dolls or photography of dolls because we don’t need it. Adding some of the interesting history from experts to Puppet was absolutely necessary to me because I was like Soll whose “initial reference point was the Muppets and Sesame Street,” (and Topo Gigio).

Another question that was asked is: How does the form fit the content?

Suggesting that all documentaries cannot essay is a harsh blanket statement. While there are more documentaries being produced using conventional methods, that doesn’t mean some of them can’t essay. It suggests to me that because something is informative, that is, presenting us with just facts, that information presented to us in a certain way can’t change the way we think or the way we feel (which is kind of what I saw in Reality Hunger), especially if the “facts” juxtapose ideas of how we see a marginalized art and a man who experiences it first hand.

Because Soll is like me, I can see how he was the “puppet-master” in manipulating this information. We get the expert advice we don't know about puppetry. It was all about puppetry, and not other arts. We don’t need to see other marginalized arts in the discussion of this film. This film already has a lot going on it without confusing it with more arts or experts.

Soll didn’t show us Dan Hurlin’s life outside of puppetry because the only reactions that we needed were from the performing arts realm. If we had met people in Hurlin’s life talking about their thoughts on his puppetry, we could have easily dismissed it.

Neither did we need to see Soll, the creator, any more than we already did the same way the audience of the production Disfarmer didn’t see Hurlin, the creator. We saw an interpretation of an artist who did an interpretation of an artist. Hurlin didn’t photograph Disfarmer. He used his own art as did Soll.

It’s really quite simple: Puppet essays because it changed the way I thought about puppetry. It changed the way I saw how it was performed, how it’s received, and its place in society. That, to me, is the actual triage of this film.

Not dispuppeting.

2011-04-21T16:07:00.000-07:00

I was so excited about Puppet after having seen the trailer. The film didn’t disappoint me – I am always beguiled by the unfolding artistic process, independent of the medium under exploration. See also Lost in La Mancha, Looking for Richard, or a whole slew of mediums examined through the lens of reality TV: Project Runway, Top Chef, Work of Art, and the long-defunct Project Greenlight.

In his review of the first Project Greenlight film, Roger Ebert raised an interesting point via his old sparring partner:

Gene Siskel proposed an acid test for a movie: Is this film as good as a documentary of the same people having lunch? At last, with "Stolen Summer," we get a chance to decide for ourselves. The making of the film has been documented in the HBO series "Project Greenlight," where we saw the actors and filmmakers having lunch, contract disputes, story conferences, personal vendettas, location emergencies and even glimpses of hope.

For Ebert, this film did turn out to be as interesting as the documentary about it, but with Puppet, most of us (all of us?) will never know if the performances of Disfarmer were as good as the documentary about its making. Such is the ephemeral nature of theatre, or any live performance, really—certain concerts have grown epic in my memory, for example, based on whatever odd/interesting thing happened onstage. Through this alchemical-seeming process, I switch from being just an audience member to a witness.

Anyhoo. What does all that have to do with David Soll, or Puppet, or Dan Hurlin, or Mike Disfarmer?

To be honest, I’m not completely certain. But it’s interesting to me that in our discussion of the film yesterday, and in the other blog entries below, and in my blathering above, we seem to be projecting an awful lot onto the film: what we think it should be doing that it’s not, what it reminds us of, what implicit thing(s) it seems to be about. On one hand, whatever—this is what people do when they talk about anything. But on the other hand, isn’t this curiously akin to the experience of watching puppetry, as described in the film? It’s almost as though this film, like its subject matter (puppetry, Disfarmer the man) is open enough to contain all sorts of projected associations from the viewer (which is why we looked at Scott McCloud's book before our discussion).

I think that alone is one kind of argument for the degree to which the film essays. Isn’t it grim when the essay under discussion yields nothing in the way of conversation? A silent, collective shrug is the worst kind of damnation, I think. (Note: I don’t think that applies to anything we’ve discussed this semester.)

But here is another argument for this film as an essay, from this interview with David Soll:

And what I was hoping to do was not just make it a lot of context for this guy [Hurlin], but have Mike Disfarmer, Dan Hurlin, and the form of puppetry as three intertwining threads, which have these overlapping themes of disappearance and revival. All three experience issues of disappearance and legacy and marginalization, and I was hoping to find a way to put those three in dialogue with each other.

This strikes me as a fundamentally essayistic impulse, and I am not bothered by David Soll’s lack of screen time or apparent invisibility in the film. As someone in our class pointed out, David Soll edited this film as well as directed it, and he co-produced it too. If we want the project to fulfill the criteria of being present with the author/creator’s idiosyncratic mind—well, it is. What else could the filmmaker’s choice of subject matter be, if he is his own producer? That Soll largely absents himself from the final project in terms of voice over or screen time is a stylistic choice and not a defining characteristic of the project’s status as essay. Finnegan is just barely in “Silver or Lead” as a first-person narrator, for example. Similarly, the inconspicuous visual language of this film is a stylistic choice, a decision to get out of the way of the material, to let it speak for itself.

I’m talking myself into making a pronouncement here. It’s this: To me, Puppet is unequivocally an essay.

Before our class discussion, I was on the yes side of undecided in that matter, so I’ve tipped into more definitive territory. But the real question is whether this is the best essay we’ve discussed this semester, all mediums being equal. I tip on the no side of undecided in that regard.

If we weren’t writers, but scientists – OK, fine, there are scientists among us, too – maybe we would have a neat and tidy rubric to consult, through which we could indicate whether we think each essay succeeded or failed on a series of agreed-upon measures. (This is top of mind for me because the head of a program where I work showed me a really beautiful and exhaustive analytic document she developed to determine her students’ learning outcomes – a three-judge panel quizzed each of 23 teams and cued in their responses to 11 learning outcomes in real time using clickers – !! – and now the program can tell which of those outcomes is struggling to gain traction in the classroom, etc.)

I AM SO DIGRESSIVE TODAY. Sorry.

In conclusion, it’s not so much that Puppet falls down for me in terms of its essaying (although I wanted the threads Soll speaks of entwining above to collide more spectacularly), but that in decision making of the sort we’re being asked to take on, I tend to rely to some extent on my gut, and I have been more in thrall to other projects we’ve looked at.

A different reading

2011-04-20T11:09:00.000-07:00

I, too, must admit, there were points at which the film attempted to wax too poetic, and waned for it's audience.

And, also, I'm not sure how much a documentary can "essay" either. Especially a prototypical documentary with basically only one (polemic) dissenter.

What interests me in this film is the notion of puppetry as a marginalized but apparently still-vibrant art form. Cyrus Console called poetry "a possibly sustainable art form". Although very different, I wonder if puppetry might fall under this category. With a rich and varied history, we are shown the various cultural responses to the proprietors of the uncanny. Puppetry is, of course, like many art forms, even our own, being kept alive by those passionate about it, and those curious enough to buy a ticket. Similarly, advances in technology (although one of the puppeteers is very distrustful of technology) and design seem only to serve and challenge this form of art to evolve.

More interestingly, I think, is the meditation the audience is asked to perform: what is the value of puppetry? What is beautiful about an inanimate object being brought to life through the choreographing and cooperation of multiple, visible human beings, obviously devoted to their art? Can we dismiss puppetry as easily as David Sefton, that is, asserting that it is more interesting to watch his dog run around the yard than to watch him, although that doesn't make it "more beautiful" and it "certainly doesn't make it art." It seems problematic to have such a reductive approach to the art form, and art in general, especially as we trudge ourselves out of the (post)postmodern era. Do I trust an art critic to define art for me, simply because of his credentials? No. Moreover, the analogy doesn't fit the bill. The fascinating thing about puppetry, which is pointed out time and again, is that the puppets are lifeless without human beings, and dependent upon their hands, bodies, and mutual interaction to highlight the smallest motions in life.

Like one of the puppeteers mentions, there is a growing renaissance for many ancient art forms that seem in danger of extinction* - often these are forms that rely on patience, innovation, cooperation, etc. Things that force us to slow down in an over-stimulated world. I myself bought a quill and ink last week, and it has taught me to appreciate the physical act of writing in a way that I had heretofore been unable to consider. And I can now somewhat, in an oblique way, come a little bit closer to understanding why writing, and the alphabet itself, have often been considered sacred in ancient cultures.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure this film, if it is capable of essaying, is about puppetry. It's a case study within a case study, and it challenges us by asking us to make - somewhat uncomfortable - judgments about what we consider "art" is capable of being in the 21st century. In this documentary, the construction of the puppets is minimized - that is, puppetry as art is presented as a live act, rather than the puppet itself as art. I'm not sure how the puppet really differs from sculpture, or the live act differs from dance, other than that the medium is reliant on humans using an inhuman object to heighten the subtleties of human motion.

I'm not sure that this film is actually that far off from Schlansky. It presents a whimsical approach that harkens us back to childhood, and challenges notions of form and genre. Could Soll have done better? Probably. Is any work of art ever "finished"?

*This is an unexplored moment in the film, when Dan Hurlin ventures the possibility that the Disfarmer production is actually autobiographical.

Note: Although it is long, I encourage everyone to read the linked review. It is quite interesting, and I think, relevant.

Watching puppets breathe, seeing myself wanting more.

2011-04-19T09:16:00.000-07:00

At first, I started to fall in love with David Soll’s Puppet. I admired its convergence of cultural history, behind-the-scenes exposé, and biographic information about a tornado-swept photographer. But as the film pressed on past the twenty or twenty-five minute mark, I had more and more trouble staying in love with the film. I kept thinking, puppets are cool, unique. Where else am I going to find out about them? But the problem with Soll’s film, I realized more and more sitting in front of the television, was that I didn’t find out enough.

I certainly felt that the experts interviewed gave enough of a historic and cultural background for puppetry, but I wanted more. I listened to expert after expert wax historic about how puppetry and puppets are the red-headed step-child of theater, but I never heard any of them put puppetry in the context of other art forms. The Lion King, Being John Malkovich, and the like were mentioned, but they were mentioned as other forms that are beginning to feature puppets. Not other art forms that relate to puppetry. It was as if puppetry evolved completely isolated from other art and culture.

Yet the film lets me know that this wasn’t quite the case. Earlier on in the film, an expert tells me that puppetry has improved the lives of Americans in eras of conflict. The 1930s, with its economic and social dislocation, was a time that needed puppets until after World War II. Similarly, the chaotic social and political moment of the ‘60s created a socio-cultural need for puppets. This idea of the social need for an art form, this close tying of artists and the public en masse, engages me. It takes artists a bit out of control of their work and puts them at the whim of history in a way. Though I’m not sure it’s entirely new, I do still like it. It makes me reconsider that I may have known this, in some sense, of visual art but more importantly, that I rarely grapple with this fact when it comes to essay writing and essayists.

Nevertheless, this analysis of American societies need for puppets in various decades is one of few instances in the expert commentary that’s very enlightening. Aside finding out that the form has ancient roots in almost every culture, I’m given fairly thin information. Again, I’m reminded again and again of how much of an underdog puppetry is, how its only subjugated to the world of children in the States. I wished that more of this time was taken to interview folks outside of who you might expect but who could give a broader scope of insight. What if Soll had interviewed a famous pantomime actor or a choreographer from Joffrey or the Merce Cunningham company? What if I got to hear what a philosopher specializing in theory of mind had to say? What if Soll had interviewed theorists like Brian Rotman or Andy Clark? What if I got to hear from a cultural studies expert who didn’t necessarily write a book about puppetry but still had a vantage on it? It’s not hard for me to rattle off a rather long list of folks I would’ve rather heard from than those that I did. Certainly they serve a function and, in my mind, serve it well for the first half hour or so of the film. But the overall thrust of the expert interviews almost never diverged from a rather easy-to-predict path of informed support.

There is perhaps one voice of dissent among the chorus. David Sefton, former executive and artistic director of UCLA Live, gets a few minutes late in the film to voice his critique. He tells us how he feels that part of the problem is that too many people have been doing it over the past fifteen years. And slightly more poignantly, he questions the view that puppets can make banal movements and activities more profound. “It’s no more significant if a puppet does it or if I do,” Sefton says. “Look, it might be a bit more fun to watch my dog run around the garden than me, but it makes it no more significant, and it certainly doesn’t make it art.” Sefton’s argument might be a bit of a straw man but at least it’s a bit dissonant from the rest. At least he questions the gravitas given again and again to puppets. And, for me, it’s not that I dislike puppets or that I necessarily dislike what most of the experts are saying about puppets, it’s just that it hits one note and stays there. I want at least nuanced voices of approval and probably a bit more active questioning of the form as well. Perhaps the point is that enough people question puppetry in the States, so the film wants to wave the banner for it a bit. That’s fine, but I just think that there are much deeper and broader ways of doing it.

There are even moves that Soll makes as a director that could’ve been capitalized upon more. One of the most captivating parts of the film for me were moments of slightness, quiet moments when I was able to watch the puppeteers work. To watch the grace, uncanny rapport between a puppeteer’s hand, a camera trigger, and a puppet’s body. Somehow it all gets elided and is visually acceptable. My heart hits the bottom of my stomach when I watch the puppeteers of Disfarmer rehearsing with an incomplete, armature version of Mike Disfarmer. The rapport between puppeteer, puppet, space, and motion hit a lyric fluidity that engages me and proves so much to me about the ability of puppetry as a form. Perhaps more than the intellectual through-line of expert interviews.

And, of course, there’s also the thread of Dan Hurlin and his production of Disfarmer. The thread did give me a behind-the-scenes look at the world of puppetry. It also allowed me to have a few rather ecstatic moments of awe while watching puppets move. But even with these noteworthy aspects, watching Hurlin and his colleagues prepare for opening night felt a little stayed. Something I’ve seen before. We start in medias race on openings night then jump back three years and work our way forward. The form is typical of documentary and is surprisingly out of sync with Disfarmer itself. Hurlin seems to have a much more artful way of portraying Mike Disfarmer’s life than Soll does of capturing Hurlin’s production. Hurlin employs a more impressionistic, almost magical realist tack while Soll stays in the typical documentary mode.

Perhaps Soll doesn’t need to parallel Hurlin’s aesthetic. Maybe this kind of mimesis isn’t needed. But I do think that something more is needed in its place, if not. I’m simply not invested enough in Hurlin and his colleagues to feel the emotional weight of whether or not Disfarmer is going to succeed after opening night or not. Instead, I’m more so waiting for the form to finish. I can sense that I’m supposed to be invested in a way that I’m not. And more than that, I can feel the way that I wished that Soll would’ve taken some cues from Hurlin. The Mike Disfarmer puppet gets smaller and smaller, he becomes more and more paranoid that every sound he hears is a tornado, but the accretion in Hurlin’s show doesn’t translate to Soll’s film. Neither does the mystique that Hurlin and his colleagues portray in their show. Instead, we find out perhaps too much about Mike Disfarmer’s origins. Soll goes the easy route of using Hurlin’s research for Disfarmer as a foil to give me biographical information about Mike Disfarmer.

Maybe this is a “two pony” reading of Soll’s Puppet; perhaps I’m trying to make his film into the film I would’ve made or just the film that I wanted it to be. Though, I’m not so sure. It feels a lot more like I saw the potential in Soll’s subject matter and even in the first twenty or twenty-five minutes of his film but both the content and the form fell flat for me soon after. I wanted to love it a lot more than I did, and perhaps all of these comments are my way of trying to fill a gap of creative work that I felt was left undone after I finished the film.

Soll-Searching

2011-04-18T12:49:00.000-07:00

If Puppet is an essay, it’s a braided one with three strands: the creation--from conception to delivery--of puppeteer Dan Hurlin’s production; the history of puppetry; and the life-story of a withering small-town photographer. But Puppet isn’t an essay, it’s a straight-forward documentary: informative not speculative, objective not subjective, rigid not amorphous.

Puppetry is a transgressive, marginalized artistic movement turned out by its visual and performing arts family. One expert in the film explains that puppets are used at whim by American culture when a throw-back to simplicity is desired, in times of conflict, and during “economic and social dislocation.” Puppet shows, for instance, do not warrant critics who specialize in the field; it is the theater and dance critics who are relegated to cover the performances. We see this idea of the transgressive marginalized in the life of Disfarmer, the town photographer, “the ultimate insider” documenting his neighbors’ major life events, but also “the ultimate outsider,” allegedly ousted by his family, an alcoholic recluse who one former acquaintance notes he had never seen converse with another human being. Hurlin, as mentioned in the film, came of age in small-town New Hampshire to a “Mayflower family” that was as “‘in-crowd’ as you can get,” but, as a visibly gay child, was simultaneously an outsider. It is their inborn disenfranchisement that bonds Hurlin to Disfarmer and both of them to puppetry: each one navigating societal norms. But this transgression is embedded solely in the content; Soll adds little, if anything, to the conversation.

We literally hear Soll’s voice a handful of times throughout the film: once when he asks a puppeteer what he does for a living, and again when he asks a puppeteer if he’d like to read the New York Times’ review of the show. Of course we shouldn’t have to actually hear the author’s voice to sense his presence--we might be able to sense his presence on the other side of interviewees--the unheard dialogue. But among the many fervent talking heads in Puppet, the viewer gets no sense of Soll. Instead we get a more authoritarian presence deviating from the very essence of Essay. Experts like Eileen Blumenthal provide us with gobs of historical and cultural insights resulting in a 74-minute long video research paper rather than Soll’s reflection on “disappearance and revival”--his own words to describe the film’s themes.

Puppet’s composition fails to complicate or question--it just tells. Visually it is unremarkable save for intermittent splicing of Hurlin’s fully realized production throughout the film. The sequencing is chronological and methodical. Opening with the creation of the featured puppet’s many heads, we are subsequently provided with a lengthy history of the art form beginning with the Cro-Magnon period. Next we’re present for the first rehearsal and alerted to the fact that Disfarmer will be at least two years in the making. We can assume then that this will, in large part, be a journey piece--we will see this production carried through to fruition. We receive background about Mike Disfarmer--connections are made between his disintegration and that of the form of puppetry thus returning us to the talking heads, back to rehearsal, to the talking heads again, the story of Disfarmer, repeat, repeat, repeat.

While screening Puppet, the documentary queen in me could not help but be reminded of Douglas Keeve’s 1995 film (and one of the top-grossing documentaries of all time), Unzipped, about the development of fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi’s fall ’94 collection. The film is framed by scenes of Mizrahi at his neighborhood bodega, pouring through a Women’s Wear Daily to find the review of his most recent fashion show. A similar scene plays out in Puppet as we witness Hurlin read an underwhelming New York Times review. Unzipped, like Puppet, is part creation story and part rebound chronicle, an attempt at redemption from a naysaying media outlet. However, unlike Soll, whose only “initial reference point was the Muppets and Sesame Street,” Keeve was a successful fashion photographer and Mizrahi’s former lover, which, according to the New York Times, only “heighten[ed] Mr. Keeve’s acuity rather than compromising his perspective.” There is no evident intimacy--or passion--between Soll and his subject.

Keeve does not rest on Mizrahi’s laurels--he utilizes conceptual and structural tactics. Title cards are used throughout, directly addressing the viewer: a hallmark of the essay film according to film theorist, Laura Rascalori. Vignettes seemingly unrelated to the creation of Mizrahi’s collection break up what could be a typical linear progression. At one point, Keeve leaves the screen black to emphasize the comedy in a Mizrahi voice-over. He uses grainy black-and-white super-8 film in the opening to provide a sense of historical footage, later transitioning to a sleek 16 mm black-and-white, but astutely switching to color when Mizrahi’s textile creations see the light of day. The cinéma vérité style of Unzipped is described by one critic as “a conceit. Many scenes appear staged, and a great deal of cutting-and-pasting has been done in the editing room. Genuine spontaneity is at a premium, and everyone is aware of and playing to the camera.” One might ask that critic how anyone who knows they’re being filmed could not play to the camera, but Keeve “couldn’t care less about the ‘truth’...I was more interested in capturing the spirit and love in Isaac and in fashion...I was not interested in making a textbook about fashion.” Puppet is, in great part, a textbook about puppetry.

Unzipped, in the tradition of Essay, breaks the rules of “legitimate” documentary or non-fiction by planting itself somewhere between fact and fiction, and by effectively merging reason with sentiment. Puppet, on the other hand, resides comfortably in fact and orthodoxy and, perhaps as a result, lacks any kind of introspection from its creator. With that said, I doubt if Soll’s intent was to produce an essayistic piece. He accomplished what I suspect he set out to do: convince the layperson of the cultural significance of this other art form.

Another Day, Another Memoir Controversy

2011-04-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

Let's add Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea to the list:

The CBS News report questioned, in particular, a central anecdote of the book that was as dramatic as it was inspirational: in 1993, Mr. Mortenson was retreating after failing to reach the summit of K2, the world’s second highest mountain, when, lost and dehydrated, he stumbled across the small village of Korphe in northeast Pakistan. After the villagers there nursed him back to health, he vowed to return and build a school.

The CBS report, broadcast on “60 Minutes” Sunday night and citing sources, said that Mr. Mortenson had actually visited Korphe nearly one year after his K2 attempt. Mr. Mortenson said on Sunday that he did reach Korphe after his climb in 1993, and that he visited again in 1994.

But he added a disclaimer in an interview with The Bozeman Daily Chronicle, saying that while he stood by the information in the book, “the time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”

I feel like the discussion comes up a lot, but I don't think it's ever come up on this blog: what do we make of the false memoir, the "compressed version of events" that create a better pacing/story at the possible cost of fact? Personally, I'm at a point where I basically read everything as fiction anyway: I don't necessarily feel like I get more out of a story based on it's truth value.

With that said, as a writer, I like the idea of the "truth" as a formal constraint: how can I write this story in a way that engages a reader without having to compress time/make shit up? I think dealing in fact forces us to find innovative ways to work with what we have, to push on our stories and memories in more challenging ways.

In short, I like to write nonfiction because it's more difficult, but I wont hold it against you if you fabricate as long as you do so in a way that interests me as a reader.

What's your take on the false memoir?

David Shields = Straight Gangster

2011-04-12T20:10:00.000-07:00

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, author David Shields is straight up gangster. To call something you produce a manifesto is like posting up, which means standing your ground wearing your colors. In this case the ground is Essayland and the color is the essay, at least as he sees it. And let’s face it, in bookstores, on campuses, and in people’s home libraries the essay is still a second-class literary form, or the “fourth genre.” In fact many people wouldn’t even refer to essays as essays, but as nonfiction, a term that mirrors and reinforces the supremacy of fiction, sort of like when you categorize a person as nonwhite. In his book Shields argues for the dissolution of copyright laws and genre. He is a proponent of writing that is driven by thought rather than narrative. He likes brevity. He loves doubt. He quotes Mobb Deep.

The book is organized into twenty-six sections labeled with the alphabet in its order. Each of these sections is given the name of the subject it will engage, and contains numbered bits that go to six hundred eighteen. There is a frame and it all seems very organized, but the ideas push against this order. One of the strongest threads that run throughout the book is uncertainty. From the very first page in the “a” section titled “overture” number one starts, “Every artistic movement from the beginning of time is an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle more of what the artist thinks is reality into the work of art.” It is not an attempt to smuggle, but “an attempt to figure out a way to smuggle.” It is not more reality; it is “more of what the artist thinks is reality.” In fact, there is an entire section titled doubt, which seems somewhat strange since doubt is so heavily present throughout the book. The section titled “memory” might as well have been called the unreliability of memory, or doubt II. Even in the very next section titled “thinking” number four hundred twenty four reads: “If I had the slightest grasp upon my own faculties, I would not make essays. I would make decisions.”

Even with all this doubt, Shields seems certain that the essay is the superior literary form. This may seem counter to another thread that runs throughout the book, which is that genre should be obliterated, and that the constraints that separate forms are illusory, but just turn to the “o” section titled “contradiction,” for a possible fix. No? Okay, maybe look to number three hundred eighty six: “‘Essay’ is a verb, not just a noun; ‘essaying’ is a process.” Certainly doesn’t provide certainty, but at least for me is a notion that makes essaying much more exciting than crafting rigid narrative fiction, even rigid narrative memoir. Or four hundred thirteen, “Maybe the essay is just a conditional form of literature—less a genre in its own right than an attitude that’s assumed amid another genre, or the means by which other genres speak to one another.” So I correct myself, Shields seems certain that essaying is what writers should be doing, or what writers should be filled with and motivated by.

Shields wants Reality Hunger, to be a collage, or mash-up, or remix of ideas. A collage is an assemblage of different forms, for example a visual collage may contain newspaper clippings, a piece of cardboard box, a lock of hair, and the disparate forms crash into and inform each other. The fragments may have overtones or cultural codings attached, or they may be selected for their texture. In this text the fragments, although gathered from a diversity of sources, seem somewhat homogenous visually, syntactically, and thematically, which doesn’t disqualify them as collage, but leaves me a tad wanting. I wouldn’t call it a mash-up or remix, because that implies a fluidity and continuity present in most music, at least the hip-hop that Shields mentions in the text. When reading the book I often found myself needing to take breaks, but that is to be expected with aphorisms, which take time to savor and unpack.

At times, the text becomes repetitive, seems less like circling an idea than merely repeating. Number two hundred sixty: “Good poets borrow; great poets steal.” And number two hundred sixty one: “Art is theft.” These two seem so similar and in such proximity that they can be combined: “Good artists borrow; great artists steal.” When parsed the aphorisms in this book get at a core of truths, the question for me then becomes how many of these numbered sections are necessary to get the point across? My thought is that if you have a section titled “in praise of brevity,” perhaps shaving away some fragments that really syntactically similar or approaching an idea from a similar angle could be cut.

I think Shields achieves something else, which is perhaps not the most important part of an artistic manifesto for the world, but it certainly affects those participating in an artistic tradition: the creation of solidarity and unity among young essayists, which is why I’ll reiterate that David Shields is straight gangster. To my understanding not only does this mean posting up, as in writing something unabashedly and standing by its colors, but also helping to bolster a sense of community for those who essay.

Powering Theft

2011-04-12T15:01:00.001-07:00

In between reading parts of Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, I graded rhetorical essays for my English 102 class and, as fate would have it, came across a plagiarized paper. My darling, little freshman had plunked sections from an online travel guide—“crystal indigo seas”—and the U.S. Consulate website—“U.S. citizen victims of crime in Mexico are encouraged to”—into her essay. Though slightly manipulated—a word omitted here and there, a chance, original, ungrammatical phrase—the sources were obvious and easy to trace. I found myself comparing her plagiarism to David Shields’. Her theft was bad theft as opposed to his good kind. Why? Because his theft is conscious: she stole words in lieu of thinking, whereas he stole words as a form of thinking, as an idea. Her failure brought into relief for me what characterizes his essaying: the degree, originality, and intentionality of his manipulation, the confrontational relationship he creates with his reader, and the overall self-reflexivity of his work.

This is a highly manipulated text. By my autistic calculations, Shields uses about 62.3% of quotes from other sources, 32.4% of his own, and 5.3% of a hybrid of the two. But even the direct quotes are often tinkered with—compressed, so as to read faster, or combined with other quotes. He becomes his own DJ, scratching, re-contextualizing, juxtaposing, and manipulating words. Fragment 284 can easily be applied to his book as a whole: “In hip-hop, the mimetic function has been eclipsed to a large extent by manipulation of the original (the ‘real thing’): theft without apology—conscious, self-conscious, conspicuous appropriation.” Shields couples conspicuous plagiarism with originality. His inventiveness manifests itself through not only editing and collage, but also through his own aphorisms. Shields, that stuttering deconstructionist, might argue that his own words, that all words, are other people’s and part of the larger, murky language-culture-world pool. But, come on, you know what I mean: the words that he puts together in idiosyncratic, memorable (so we can better consciously or subconsciously plagiarize them), and original ways.

I read this book as a kind of game with the reader. Shields first gives me citations in the epigraphs, only to stop giving these citations in the body of the work. He weaves in (uncited) quotes that cite other works and authors within their passages. He riffs off of famous quotes (for example, Eliot’s “human voices wake us and we drown” in fragment 2) that he knows that I know that he is making. Through these techniques, he situates me, the reader, in the standard, expected world of citation and allusion, so as to better provoke me when the rug is inevitably yanked. I felt cognitive dissonance as I read half-remembered quotes, until finally, I chanced upon one that I knew outright (Hemingway’s “shit detector,” fragment 46). After a startled, bewildered moment, I found the citations in the back and felt relief. But this relief had a false bottom: the citations are not quite citations. Shields never gives titles or page numbers from the source, will quote a source through another source, conglomerates sources, etc. Then I came—even before I finished the book—to his plea to the reader at the end to “restore this book to the form in which I intended it to be read” and to rip or cut out “along the dotted line” the last eight pages with the citations. I laughed aloud. But, ultimately, I ignored his wishes and looked up the quotes I liked only to find that many of them were Shields’ words himself. This combination of originality and plagiarism elevated the form for me. This DJ not only can spin the works of others but also his own (as far as any words are our own).

Additional paradoxes arose in my reading: Shields’ manifesto is anything but manifest; this abecedarian progresses; his definition of reality is very slippery for, on the one hand, our memory makes things up but is still part of reality and, on another hand, artifice and persona have become a part of reality (and authenticity); the most autobiographical part of Reality Hunger, the chapter entitled d[avid] s[hields], is the most like a work of fiction, developing character in a jumpy but chronological order; Shield wants a form that will reflect the modern world, but gleans quotes from as far back as antiquity; he lauds the lyric essay as the form most suited to the world today, but shows how hip hop, documentaries, graffiti and other visual and oral mediums have become more popular; for someone who demotes the novel for, among other reasons, being too controlling, he exerts a lot of control over this book.

But these small and large dissonances, contradictions, and paradoxes all serve to reinforce the true (loaded word) credo of this manifesto: uncertainty provokes contemplation. As Shields explains in (oh, it’s so tempting not to cite where) a lecture at the University of Richmond: “This manifesto is an anti-manifesto” and, later, “basically the whole book is an ode to uncertainty, to doubt.” By openly professing such paradoxes—a manifesto that praises uncertainty—Shields shows his hand: he wants his work to be controversial and contradictory: he wants you to think. You should be frustrated and intrigued, as you struggle with this slippery book.

Many readers, many reviewers, many writers seem to hate Shields’ work because they felt patronized by his pronouncements on fiction. I agree that Shields’ major contention that the lyric essay be promoted over fiction as the conveyer of (a problematic) “reality” oversimplifies. But I think that because Shields riddles his book with paradox, he opens up space for the reader to grapple and contend. These paradoxes goad this reader into blur and contemplation. His ideas on fiction are just one small piece of an overall, more fascinating puzzle. In addition to paradox, Shields uses confrontation as an electric-prod. This manifesto has forced our literary culture into a conversation about itself and its connection to a new, fast, changing, contradictory, “reality” hungry culture.

Reality Hunger is by far and away the most brazen, argumentative, and postmodern work we have encountered thus far in the submissions for the Essay Prize. Though I thoroughly enjoyed this orchestrated and provocative ride, I didn’t get swept away. It is timely and timeless. It is risky and confrontational. It is political and social, as well as literary. It is idiosyncratic. It constructs and deconstructs itself. It embodies itself, melding form and content. It lingers afterwards. In short, it does everything that an amazing essay should do. But it stays intellectual for me, and, ultimately, doesn’t tap into my emotions enough. Shields’ theft does not include my heart. If he were one of my students, I’d be very intimidated, of course, but I’d also recommend that he throw more pathos into his overall logos. This manifesto ends for me not with a surge of adrenaline, but with a contemplative: Writers of the world, keep thinking.

IS VIOLENCE ORANGE AND BLUE?

2011-04-10T18:56:00.000-07:00

In the end of her intro to Atlas of Remote Islands Judith Schalansky says that “every map is the result and the exercise of colonial violence.” And yet open before us is a book of fifty maps, fifty islands. Almost all of these islands were historically (whether through discovery or domination) part of the era of massive colonial expansion (roughly 1500-1900), and even the ones who were named in later years seem to have been discovered as a result of the lingering ambitious ethos of those times, long after the ideas of conquest and discovery of remote places on the earth's surface have reached their utilitarian maximum.

Our class discussion on the Atlas at some point engaged with the question of whether Schalansky's work is colonialist. This seems to be an important question. In a post-colonial paradigm, colonialism is a force we're seemingly morally obliged to resist (in light of the destruction and violence of colonialism's history and our currently supposed revered values of freedom and justice), and we'd be morally tainted by awarding a colonialist work with the Essay Prize 2010.

So, is Atlas of Remote Islands a colonialist work? We can take Schalansky at her word, that is that “every map is the result and the exercise of colonial violence.” The “and” in this sentence is crucial. Had she said “every map is the result OR the exercise of colonial violence,” then colonialism could have been relegated to the past, and Schalansky's work morally exonerated. But the “and” is very much there, making this discussion complicated, messing things up. Schalansky did create 50 maps, or in her own words 50 acts of colonial violence.

I suppose we therefore need to understand what colonialism is, a topic which seems difficult to articulate in the short scope of this blog post. I will say that broadly speaking, to my mind, at the heart of colonialism lies a power dynamic which involves the domination of an outside over an inside. This domination could be manifested in a myriad of ways- physically, emotionally, intellectually. Knowledge too can be a colonial act, for when we know something we attain power over it.

During our class discussion Ander raised the question of whether every act of writing is an act of colonialism. After all, every act of writing (and I extend writing to include any form of artistic expression) can be seen as an act of mapping, as we use symbols to make meaning of the world, and as with a map we chart a terrain, be it geographical, emotional, intellectual, spiritual, or any other. Following Schalansky's claim, our writing is an act of colonial violence. In the specific context of the Essay Prize competition this would make it easier for Schalansky- since every essay nominated for the Essay Prize would then be considered an act of colonial violence, and she'd be no worse than anyone else. But not every act of writing is an act of colonialism, and I believe examining Atlas of Remote Islands can tell us why.

In her intro Schalansky also tells us how, as a result of her own personal history, she became distrustful of political world maps: “Maps tell us much more when they do not divide nature into nations; when they allow it to form the basis of comparison across all the borders made by man.” And indeed in her illustrations Schalansky creates a space which aspires to bring these islands together, rendering them more equal, rather than differentiating them: all the islands are blue and orange, they are all drawn to the same scale, and every island is the naval of the world. They differ in their shape, in the topographical features she chooses to highlight, their elevation markers, and the names they were given, but that is all.

In contrast with the visual equality of these illustrations, the text itself, the story attached to the island, is a space of relative inequality. Schalansky did have a space constraint for how much text she could fit on the page, but the stories she tells are enslaved to her own imagination. OK, I'll soften that claim a little- Schalansky was also limited by the scope of her research and by the island's own history; she did not set out to create works of utter fantasy, she had to rely (as far as we know) on factual historical accounts. But what she did with these stories, what she decided to take or discard, is an act of creative tyranny. The islands are a projection of her own desires and inclinations and imagination. So is Schalansky (an outsider) imposing her creative powers over the islands and their inhabitants? Is her work colonialist?

In order to answer that I think it is necessary to consider the following question: why islands? Why not a survey of fifty remote places? After all, some locations on the continents are more difficult to get to, more remote, than some of the islands Schalansky describes.

I believe she is drawn to islands because of their discreteness. She is deeply engaged with the idea of physical boundaries, and what boundary on the face of this earth is more concrete than the line between land and vast ocean? Perhaps for us humans, the only boundary more concrete is that which separates ourselves from the world and each other. OK, islands as metaphors for people is a little corny (or perhaps, very corny), but there is something interesting that Schalansky is doing with this idea in her book.

While every island in the atlas is discrete, at the top of each verso page we are also provided with three geographical markers of distance, which connect the island to other land masses. Two of those bodies are usually recognizable place names, while the third is another remote island in the atlas (followed by a page number). Why does Schalansky do this? If the islands are remote, why attempt to connect them to one another? It's possible this is an attempt to break the watery boundaries surrounding each island, to state how, while they are remote and discrete, they are also placed on the same surface, touched by the same oceanic waters (yes, in different oceans, but notice how Schalansky doesn't include any islands in the middle of lakes or inland seas).

However, this attempt to connect is ultimately a failure. Schalansky begins her book with Lonely Island in the northern Arctic Ocean. At the top of the verso page she displays the distance to Rudolf Island which is described on page 30 of the book. If we then flip to Rudolf Island on page 30 we are directed to Bear Island on page 28. Following this reading pattern (instead of reading the book chronologically), we go through all 50 islands, eventually finding ourselves back on page 26- on Lonely Island. Our attempt to bridge the distance between the distinct bodies ultimately only brings us back to ourselves, though through our journey we have perhaps learned about other bodies.

So how does this reading relate to colonialism? Schalansky subverts the atlas, and its historical colonial agenda, to make a statement about the human condition. Thinking of both islands and people, we can chart our distance from one another, we can catch glimpses of a discrete body's history, but we cannot control it. Ultimately we will return to our own body, our own lonely island.

This argument is not watertight, the subversion doesn't always work. Schalansky's treatment of Iwo Jima reads as sentimental, and seems to fall into a nationalist narrative without questioning it very much. Other islands are described in such a way that their exotic beauty or terror provide a pleasure too similar to that Western readers receive from othering travel narratives.

But all in all, I believe Schalansky was aware of her position in crafting these stories, of the danger in exploiting these foreign places. After all, Schalansky describes her object as “fifty islands I have never set foot on and never will.” A map (and by extension- any creative work) that contains within itself the acknowledgment that it will never lead to conquest is perhaps one that avoids becoming an act of colonial violence. Some essays do that.

For further discussion of this topic please check out this video.

*Shout out alert: Just wanted to acknowledge the often unacknowledged work of the translator, Christine Lo. Translation is difficult work.

More Than Maps

2011-04-06T10:52:00.000-07:00

First, yes, Atlas of Remote Islands does look good. No one’s arguing that. Why would we? But I don’t think critical engagement with this book stops and starts with the orange and the gray-blue. If it were just the colored maps than I’m not sure we would be discussing it now. In other words, Peter Turchi’s actually:

As readers, we know that if a work’s conclusion is disappointing, if we aren’t satisfied with where it has taken us, the guide has let us down. A map may be beautiful, but if it doesn’t tell us what we want to know, or clearly illustrate what it means to tell us, it’s merely decoration. The writer’s obligation is to make rewarding both the reader’s journey and his destination. (“Metaphor: Or, The Map” 22)

Given this, the question is: What do we want to know? The answer should be: We want to know about these islands. Schalansky, however, doesn’t care about that question. At least she doesn’t care like a traditional cartographer might. The question that she does care about appears to be the relationship of maker and map. This atlas perhaps more deftly surveys Schalansky’s own tension with her material than it surveys the islands themselves. To her, the facts—or whatever she has attained through research—aren’t reliable or sufficient for her, and therefore she is not content to report them in the most straightforward way. This decision is evident by her preface; “What is unique about these tales is that fact and fiction can no longer be separated: fact is fictionalized and fiction is turned into fact” (20). She makes bold choices about how these islands will be—not described—but written about. And those choices represent, at different times, two different ideals.

1. Exploitation: Schalansky argues that “Every map is the result and the exercise of colonial violence” (20). Interestingly, in a book about islands that have been invaded by colonials and strangers, Schalansky occasionally, though not always, writes from the point of view similar to those invading rather than the natives—“This is a topographical disaster,” she writes in anger about the under-siege Trindade (44.) We, as the reader, come to town, bear witness to a catastrophe or tale of woe, and then move on to the next island. The form, then, comes across as exploitative, a device that she barely addresses “I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover” (20). Is that good enough? What if we’re taking part in the laziest, most artistic form of neo-colonialism? Basically, the way in which Schalansky presents her material, possibly even twists it, has to indicate a relationship between the recorder and the recorded. Schalansky seems to care about, even admire, these islands, but “Experience reminds us that there is often a world of difference between what we hope to find, or think we might find, and what we discover. Goals of our exploration, then include refining our intention and determining the best way to present it.” (Turchi 15). Schalansky is wrestling with the way to be part of her islands’ history, and this tension of where to stand in relationship to material is what underpins the book.

2. Exploration: At other times, Schalansky doesn’t seem to be investigating the world of the islands as much as she’s imagining it. Thus, the choice of what information or non-information to provide eventually tells us more about her—they become almost confessional. This echoes one of the ideologies from her preface; “Geographical Maps are abstract and concrete at the same time; for all the objectivity of their measurements, they cannot represent reality, merely one interpretation of it” (10). Rather than ignore the artifice of that reality, she opts to let the reader in on her own manifestation. And it’s an incredibly rich and complicated manifestation aided by her obvious research and her ability to unmoor the presentation of that research. For instance, she writes some expressive and unnatural things, like “St. Kilda – you don’t exist. Your name is just a faint cry made by the birds that make their home on the high cliffs” (34). This exemplifies a fear and doubt, probably her own, of meaningful living in these dire places; Schalansky even accuses the visitors of being “obsessed by the thought that they might be left behind and be forced to eke out their existences on this lonely island for the rest of their days” (17). So, even as this world emerges, plenty of Schalansky does as well. Turchi says that’s inevitable:

No matter how hard we work to be “objective” or “faithful,” we create. That isn’t to say we get things wrong, but that from the first word we write—even by choosing the language in which we will write, and by choosing to write rather than to paint or sing—we are defining, delineating, the world that is coming into being. (14)

Schalansky does define her own world, and we are surprised to see it as a dreamy and personal one because it is posited next to scary, difficult facts. But that surprise grounds her exploration while humanizing her maps. In that way, the author and material enhance each other.

In conclusion, Schalansky responds to a surprising but provocative question: How can I talk about a land that I have never been to and never plan on going? How can I present the unknown? Turchi suggests that “The earliest maps are thought to have been created to help people find their way and to reduce their fear of the unknown” (11). Throughout the book, Schalansky navigates these questions with a variety of approaches that help understand the nature of the unknown even more. Understanding this, I am ready to admit that the book sure is something to look at.

An Argument for Judith Schalansky’s "Atlas of Remote Islands"

2011-04-05T16:10:00.000-07:00

“It is high time for cartography to take its place among the arts, and for the atlas to be recognized as literature….” This statement Judith Schalansky makes at the end of her introduction for her "Atlas of Remote Islands" is possibly the strongest reason for me why her book “essays.” This atlas excels in, I think, the criteria that a successful essay should have. How deeply is it explored? How accessible is the essay? Is it interesting? How powerful is it? Does it ask a question?

Inquiry

Schalansky asks us to look at something we never really would. How many of us really ever think about remote islands other than the occasional exceptions of maybe St. Helena, Trinidade, or Easter Island? Those still include stories that play up to the theme of “island as stage.” Each island’s narrative portrays the afflictions of territorial isolation. While the approach was original in Raman Bahrani’s “Plastic Bag” by comparison, I felt the message was not. There are have been other media approaching the use of plastic bags. The idea of dedicating a book to this literature as an atlas, to me, is totally unique.

Accessibility

I can’t think of anyone who wouldn’t take an interest in this book. I could give it to my teenage niece or if I give it to my father, and I bet both would enjoy flipping through the stories. However, if I pulled up an autotune remix of a newsreel, I think my father just might consider it weird noise and “crazy things kids do with the computer.” A YouTube video might get 77 million plays (which has to be divided since mostly those are repeat plays), but popularity and breadth of audience are two different things. You could reach 1 million of one demographic: a small age range of YouTube watchers but there’s much more to be said for being universal.

Visually Stimulating

It won the German Design Prize 2011 for communication design and the German Arts Foundation Prize for Germany’s most beautiful book. Robert Macfarlane of The Guardian described it as, “It is an utterly exquisite object: atlas as Wunderkammer and bestiary, bound in black cloth and sea-blue card, its fore-edge bright orange, and its pages populated by rare creatures and lost explorers.” Clearly, Schalansky had a heavy hand in the creative control of the design. She typeset and illustrated this story book all on her own.

Mentally Stimulating

I have to admit that I approached this book with a skeptical eye. It is “a little precious.” I also admit that some of the stories are over-wrought, like the entry for Iwo Jima. The last lines of this section are a good example: “This image is now part of every battle scene. Three New York firemen raise the flag in the dusty ruins of one September- the summit of Suribachi is reborn on Ground Zero.” However, other more fable-esque pieces use the space to control how we’re feeling. The first piece “Lonely Island” sets the tone with description and imagination. She also has control over each island, the pieces themselves are islands since her space for writing is so limited.

Complexity

Judith Schalansky conceived, wrote, illustrated and typeset this book. How many authors do that? It’s not to say that collaborative work is weaker by any means. However, the amount of work that went into this piece was tremendous. Don’t know what else to say beyond that. I admire this woman and the achievement in this book.

Fiction

For me, the greatest aspect of this book is that the literature is fiction. That is, it’s non-fiction but as we say in class— non-fiction is also fiction. It’s art. In her intro she writes, "What is unique about these tales is that fact and fiction can no longer be separated: fact is fiction and fiction is turned to fact. That’s why the question whether these stories are ‘true’ is misleading. … I have not invented anything.” That is her main statement about history books and atlases. “…they cannon represent reality, merely one interpretation of it.” In an interview with Spiegel, she gives the impression that she went out looking for happy stories but only found ones of desolation. (Though, I'd argue Pukapuka seemed like a paradise). It's not so much that the stories are factual, but they are truthful, which is the definition of fiction.

This Is Way Better Than Everything Else So Far

2011-04-05T14:42:00.000-07:00

Schalanky’s cover is uncluttered, clean, a little tense but for the relief of the gray silhouette of an island. The dab of orange in the penguin logo at the far bottom corner prepares us only a little for the expanse of global orange inside the bindings. The effect is exciting. Schalansky designed “Atlas of Remote Islands” and typeset it herself. The design, which is perfectly and inevitably deliberate, will put you in mind of a text book, but a more artful than any textbook you were ever issued. The kind of textbook that you imagine brilliant and talented children read in their father’s studies. It is raining. Dust stings their palms. The book is colorful and arid enough to evoke some nostalgia for what a better childhood might have been like. A childhood where the maps’ paper smelled of sea salt and your brother didn’t spit pennies at you.

Maybe it’s only the kind of childhood that you can imagine in adulthood, when you know what elegance can be, how quiet actual romance is. This is a book that so seduces you with its cover and endpaper that you’ll dwell on the relative blankness of the title page. I can only describe Schalansky’s use of blue and orange as incredibly satisfying. It makes me wish I knew more about colors, knew better names than just blue and orange. I’ll try: The blue is like a robin’s egg, but darker, so maybe the robin was sick or under a lot of stress.

Seriously, everything about the design is perfectly aged and perfectly new. The book is the marriage of Robinson Crusoe and The Life Aquatic. It brings perfect form to something I’ve always wanted to see but didn’t quite know it yet. This is where Schalansky’s essaying starts, in the artfulness of the design. She says in her introduction that “it’s high time for cartography to take its place among the arts, and for the atlas to be recognized as literature, for it is more than worthy of its original name: theatrum orbis terrarum, the theatre of the world.” She describes cartography with quill strokes that were “so perfect that it seemed barely possible it could have been made by a human hand.” Schalansky has replicated these kinds of strokes and put them in the proper context, framed them as they ought to be framed: as I imagine you would find them if they were done by a masterful cartographer. After her preface, the format of the book is incredibly simple: we spend one page of text and one page of map on each of the fifty islands, three of which are in the Arctic Ocean, nine in the Atlantic, seven in the Indian, twenty-seven in the Pacific, and four in the Antarctic. We are not plied with information. Each entry has the island’s coordinates, the island’s position on a very helpful globe, three line graphs which situate the island in relationship to other places, and finally, a sparse timeline of the island’s history which, very often, efficiently helps us read the island’s story by acting as something of a key. We might learn the year. Or the truth about what’s plaguing the island’s inhabitants.

As with all good literature, this is a book executed with deadly seriousness but with no real day-to-day utility in mind. Thankfully, Schalansky has put together the most impractical of atlases. The atlas and the island here are a stage: “Everything that happens on it is practically forced to turn into a story, into a chamber piece in the middle of nowhere, into the stuff of literature.” On the stage of the island, we hear stories of abandoned research stations, messages in bottles, pirate radio, nuclear bombs, ufos, the history of nature science. All the ecstasy and brutality of the human condition can play out: there are siren songs and consequence-less sex, mutiny, exiled conquerors, murder. As made explicit by the title of her preface, the island is both paradise and hell. Like the Garden of Eden, its inhabitants are made powerful by both beauty and their ability to suffer. Infants throats seize shut; others are laid face down to die; men are pecked to death by penguins. Some of these islands are given names from mythological traditions, science fiction, explorers, vessels, kings. The island, Schalanksy suggests, is potent because something about it remains unknowable, haunted. Imprisoned by the expanse of the ocean, our better angels and the monsters we harbor tread too closely to one another for violence to stay in abeyance.

This stuff had never occurred to me until I read this book. It is a good book. Some of the islands’ entries are expository, some are narrative, all of them are elliptical and evocative. We often open to a scene: bloody footprints in the snow; antennae stretch into the sky; Bonapartists demand a whole fleet for their emperor; a slave ship runs aground. Regardless of the scope of the island’s story, the prose remains big, atmospheric, incorporating the details Schalanksy’s original research and putting them into mythological relief: an entry on neonatal relief ends with a newborn “lifted high into the air;” boats are found empty of their crew thousands of miles from their harbors of berth; mermaid-like sea cows are hunted to extinction; whole mountains move for heartbreak. Schalanksy writes that the fact and the fiction of the tales cannot be separated—the details that compose the stories are real, but the stories themselves become much larger than details, because in the best kind of storytelling, actual experience is transferred. She tells us that “the act of looking at [maps] can replace the act of travel.” And for these maps, this rings true: Schalansky creates a stage where not only can we feel the physicality of the islands, but we begin to sense how unknowable they are. These are small continents and the size of their history crashes down on us like the ocean that surrounds them.

The Gregory Brothers and Who’s Doing the Work

2011-04-01T10:20:00.000-07:00

The Gregory Brothers and Who’s Doing the Work

Let’s say there’s a chart that looks like a horizon. Something like the figure at the right.

Let’s say it gauges who is doing work (author or reader) in an essay. A pull from the left side represents the author’s effort to make meaning or show thinking or whatever the goal is. The right side represents how much the reader has to struggle to make sense of that meaning or thinking.

When the line (red block) is buried to the left, the author is doing all the work. This is a bad essay because the author tells us exactly what they are discussing. There is no real work for the reader to do, and without work there is no thinking. This seems to be the problem with hyper-confessional memoir or any piece of writing with an obvious agenda.

This seems to be the problem with Bahrani’s “Plastic Bag.” It looks and sounds nice, but there isn’t enough to wrestle with—the essayist knew everything already.

When the line is buried to the right, then the reader has to do all the work. The author has put so little information out that the reader does not know what to make of it. An example of this could be lots of things, but I jump to abstract physical art. The point is that the author hasn’t provided enough textual purchase for the reader to understand what is being presented.

This model should represent the perfect blend of work. The author has presented plenty of information and the reader has strived to understand that information. This is an equal amount of effort, but I contend that’s not what we want. My problem with Bucak’s piece has a lot to do with the neatness of her ending. She presents the information in such a way that the reader too clearly understands her feelings about Turkishness. The definitive understanding leaves no room interpretive inquiry.

This represents, in my mind, a more beneficial approach. Although still close to shared, the reader is doing more interpretive work without being pandered to by the author. In some ways, this was how Jennifer Boully’s essay might have been working for me. I had to struggle to find her thinking in the essay, but she certainly is presenting various and thoughtful ideas in her work

This last figure represents what I consider to be the problem with The Gregory Brother’s “Bed Intruder Song.” I feel like I’m doing too much of the interpretive work, and I don't think they have given enough effort for me to understand my interpretation is grounded. While I listen to “Bed Intruder Song” I think about any number of things, but I can’t always attribute that thought to the efforts of The Gregory Brothers. After watching the video, I think about the presence of sexual assault and how people deal with it. However, that is something that is present in the original newscast, so to what degree can I give credit to the Gregory Brother’s for their reimagining of it? How much work have they done to make me think about that? I feel like only a little bit. Their effort to highlight the issue seems secondary and less convincing than their obvious impulse to entertain. And intentionality matters, especially when the source material was provocative enough.

Likewise, the video does lead the reader into this corridor of related information. In addition to the original newscast and the song, there are many remixes, and each one poses questions about treatment of the source material and about meaning in new and exotic contexts. That corridor represents hypertextuality, which is a fascinating and relevant issue, one worth thinking about. But “Bed Intruder Song” is not the corridor, it is only a door, albeit a crucial one, in that corridor. This brings me back to the charts. How much work are The Gregory Brothers really doing to pro the readers hustles a lot more in the attempt to make sense of other information—that which is not wholly “Bed Intruder Song.”

Many people will like “Bed Intruder Song,” and will therefore dismiss my windshield-wiper-of-work diagrams. That’s fine. Maybe I’m asking too much from the authors, by way of me asking them “to know what they are saying” too exactly. Some may think a piece of art could lead to valuable thought even if the author had not intended it. Still, I think that I would like to reward artists who have more mastery over their ideas than I believe The Gregory Brothers indicate with “Bed Intruder Song.” Perhaps, a compromise is to skip the singular author on the nomination and give the award for a bigger scope, whatever that means. I know this will never happen because it is absurd—I imagine us giving the award to the Internet for it’s “essay” on hypertextuality. This alteration seems to break the rules, too. But that’s the only way I feel we could appropriately give credit for the thinking that is done with “Bed Intruder Song.”

To close, I should say what work I think The Gregory Brothers are doing. I think they are making a good song. I’m sure filtering through the news to find provocative and useable clips to make songs takes awhile. The auto-tune itself takes a lot of time. Making a good song takes time, and that is, primarily, what they’ve done. I applaud them for that, but I really think I should stop clapping after that.

Allow me to interject in our discussion

2011-03-30T23:43:00.000-07:00

a brief note about an interesting essay that arrived at random in the mail last week (thanks to you, unknown person who sent this; it's pretty great to get a package as cool as this one without notice), M. Kasper's OPEN-BOOK, not nominated for the Essay Prize, like other texts under discussion here in recent days:

It's a lovely package, the book itself, an accordion-fold essay made up of eleven five-line, all caps strophes of essay slash possibly poem or crypto-prose, printed on spreads of digitally manipulated backgrounds that are meant to suggest "MARBLE FACING ON WALLS OF WEALTHY CHURCHES...CALLED 'REVETMENT' / TWO SLABS...SOMETIMES MOUNTED LIKE PAGES IN AN OPEN BOOK". The structural conceit is pretty straightforward but is no less lovely for its transparency:

. The book as physical, manipulable object--and the spread as unit of meaning--creates a great deal of what's interesting about this particular reading experience. Don't get me wrong: the prose is right on too, even though there's not a lot of it. What prose there is reads aphoristically, and spreads can mostly be read fruitfully individually, though they're clearly meant to add up to a larger whole. One spread reads: "NOW INSTEAD WE ADMIRE ITS DIALECTIC OF GRAPHIC DAZZLE AND COOL / SERENITY (ON A HOT MEDITERRANEAN DAY ESPECIALLY, ITS META- / MORPHIC MAKE-UP, ITS DISCOVERY, ITS MINIMALISM ("A PRODUCT OF / CHANCE WITH A SMALL DEGREE OF DESIGN" (ALEXANDER COZENS), ITS / LONG, VARIED, MODEST LIFE AS AN EPITOME OF ABSTRACT EXPRESSION," buttressing its ideas with some nice linguistic licks. I'm actually not sure if these lines are prose or poetry or something else (I suppose the hyphenation suggests the prose, but you never know, meta- being one of those words that, isolated, seems to suggest its own reading), but I can say that it is a lovely little reading experience, this one essay, floating up history and philosophy and some serious thinking, all in pursuit of its subject, which is partly the act of reading, that same dirty act that I'm (and now you're, I becoming accomplice) involved in here. One section explains that "OPEN-BOOK REVETMENT DEVELOPED IN THE SAME EPOCH AS THE CODEX / DO THEY BOTH INVITE VIEWERS TO READ? TO READ IN? LATE CLASSICAL / COMMENTATORS ADMIRED HOW RANDOM FORMATIONS IN THE STONE / SUGGESTED REPRESENTATIONAL IMAGES," and it's true that the images behind the text lend themselves to interpretation. Which after all is a space opening up in the reader as we do our thing, right?

I've been thinking a lot lately about the future of the book, if the book has a future (hint: of course it does; see also here if you're interested) and how so much of the hand-wringing about the future of the book is tied up with books that as physical objects don't do a whole lot right now to justify their physical form, the pulp and ink and glue they're made with. They might as well be e-books, I think, or apps, or whatever cloud-based awesome is coming next, because they're hardly books at all. They're text that could be reflowed fruitfully in most any container. So why complain about the end of those books, I wonder? This book, however, is one that couldn't be presented in any other way, really, since the physical act of accordioning the book open is so inherently pleasurable and involved with the meaning of reading, and the text so well tailored to the layout and design and production of the object.

This also strikes me as a hallmark of a successful essay, that its form is the one best suited to its content, and in fact that they're inseparable, like me and pigs-in-blankets, the fs in bff. Which is all as it should be. Stay sweet, M. Kasper. Remember the old technology of the year book, Ugly Duckling Presse? Have a good summer! See you in the fall!

Antoine Dodson’s Bold Speech as Found Text

2011-03-29T21:49:00.000-07:00

Rather than dive into the controversy surrounding The Bed Intruder Song, I would like to start by examining the Gregory Brother’s iTune hit as a work of found art. The Gregory Brother’s have repeatedly selected text that is topical in order to create their music: the debate over health care, the regulation of cigarettes, the melting of the polar ice caps, to name a few. The fact that they find their lyrics by watching televised news programs gives me a clue as to the intent of their work.
Imagine a suburban working couple who, after running their kids from one activity to the next, plop down on the couch to watch the evening news. Images flit by their half-closed perception: corporate scandals, nuclear meltdown, drug busts, and rapes. Their level of retention is nil. Though the images create anxiety in them the emotional impact passes once the television is turned off.
We are increasingly inundated with images. The news has become symbolic, a simulated reality that has nothing to do with our daily lives. The television itself is a giant pacifier, a glowing lullaby that makes people drowsy before heading off to bed. As a result, television news reporting has lost its efficacy, its political import, its journalistic edge. Remember the boy who wasn’t in the balloon? What about Charlie Sheen’s goddesses and trolls? The average television watching American is on autopilot, the level of information piles up weekly, with no foreground or background to contextualize it. Our connections to the myriad events, the happenings in our world, get lost in a nonsensical heap.
While television in its early days brought the world closer to its viewer, I would argue that our jaded population now uses the television as a distancing mechanism. Many of us have replaced our subscriptions to the New York Times with TV Guide or YouTube. We have become comfortable with the dumbing down of important issues, the metamorphosis of crime into entertainment. I think of Jon Stewart’s satirical bite on The Daily Show, his claim that Fox News regularly twists information to fit a conservative agenda, the funny way he calls them “the meanest sorority in the world.” The GBs have taken to mocking our counterfeit news musically in their Auto Tune the News series. They question our state of mind: we either laugh at their work as satire or roll our eyes and say that it is meaningless drivel. Our state of perception, our understanding of the GB’s interpretation, dictates how we receive their work.
For found text to qualify as essay it needs to filter through a subjective process and be transmuted by the artist. Like Borges essayed in “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” the post-modern idea of found text gives centrality to reader interpretation. Thus I ask myself, have the GBs created something innovative in their juxtaposition? Has their reading and manipulation of the text given it something new?
The format for the song is the local news frame: red and blue stripes displayed quasi-patriotically across the bottom of the screen. The anchor Elizabeth Gentle, Antoine Dodson, Kelly Dodson, and the GB’s as newscasters, flit on and off screen. A split ‘news’ frame shows one brother in dual capacities: on the left he is a serious-looking reporter in the studio, on the right he is a reporter on the street wearing a ridiculous white hat and white sunglasses. Antoine’s portion of the song ends with his voice echoing over the image of a silent and staring Elizabeth Gentle.
For those critics who say Dodson is the only character who is acting ridiculous or funny: an overly serious, piano-playing brother follows. In a farce of a blues singer, he croons like a fool while an advertisement is displayed across the screen, “Subscribe! day. cover? Original.” An arrow points at the word “original” while a talk-show host voice advises the viewer to click on the word, “Watch the original video here if you haven’t already seen it [the news segment] enough.” The implication is that we’ve all seen it enough, a million times over.
I admit that their technique is not subtle. What I like about the video is Antoine Dodson as he was in the original news segment. He is so charismatic, so angry, so witty and lyric, he overshadows the other characters. In the original footage, I can hear a song, a poem, in his speech. He draws out the vowels in certain lines, “hide your kids, hide your wife,” then rushes into a run-on, “and hide your husband because their raping everyone out here.” In front of the cameras he is savvy, he knows what he wishes to convey.
I understand the argument that his portrayal as a black man may be construed as negative, the suspicion that people may be laughing at him rather than with him. As a half Native American and half Chicano woman who grew up on a reservation in Arizona, I am not insensitive to issues of appropriation or instances of unfair stereotypes. I know what it means to have your culture appropriated, but it is important to remember that Dodson is not performing. He is being himself and I would argue that he has nothing to be ashamed of. The GBs are promoting him and he has made them money because he is so (fill in the blank). What is your response to Antoine Dodson?
The Bed Intruder Song controversy reminds me of two stories that made the national news in a suburb of St. Louis in 2009. The first story: a pizza-delivery man, Caucasian, kidnapped several boys and kept them against their will for several years. He was captured and convicted. The boys were freed. It shocked the middle-class community of Kirkwood: they had driven by his apartment on a regular basis. The second Kirkwood story: an irate African American homeowner who was a regular at local events went into a Kirkwood City Council meeting and shot a politician after years of aggravation over some government policy. Kirkwood was up in arms after the City Council shooting. Many people wrote editorials talking about their new distrust of African Americans in their community. Supposedly, the shooting felt like a betrayal of the good will they had shown local African American organizations.
No one, after the pizza man was arrested, professed a fear of pizza men in the aftermath. That is, while many professed a fear of black men in general after the shooting, no one associated the one pizza molester with a larger demographic. Why was one man viewed as an individual while the other was considered representative of an entire ethnic group? I understand the impulse but it hardly seems fair to Antoine Dodson. He should be allowed to act as an individual. It’s too heavy a load to bear, to always be an ambassador, an apologist, a representative for an entire group of people. Dodson has benefitted from this song. He should be allowed to operate independently, to be eloquently angry at the camera, to promise retribution to his sister’s attacker, and to enjoy his monetary success.
I believe that Antoine Dodson has star power, that he acted admirably, and that he has nothing to be embarrassed of regardless of what people might say. I am aware that his song went viral because it made people laugh yet I am uncomfortable, in fact I find it dangerous, to assume that the reason they are laughing is because they are prejudice. I am in control of my own subjective knowing, outside of that it seems important to assume the best in others until the worst is proven. To do otherwise is to undermine the possibility of civility among ethnic groups in the U.S. before any sort of conversation can get off the ground. Perhaps this is naive but I would rather be hopeful than cynical. It is not that I am blind. I just can't live my life always suspicious and defensive; it takes too much energy.
The only people I see who should be embarrassed are the newscasters who interviewed Dodson and claimed, right in front of him, that the humor in the piece had to do with people mocking him. Their suggestion that the song perpetuates stereotypes and makes fun is something they should think about in regard to their own 'entertainment' work. I’m not saying that The Bed Intruder Song deserves to win the Essay Prize this year. I’m not even saying that it is a song I would purchase. I am simply saying that I am happy that Antoine and his family have moved out of the projects as a result of his charisma, his innate musicality, his wit and energy. It’s a bummer that we the viewers have to project our race fears on him as an individual. I hope, as they say, that he laughs all the way to the bank.

Autotune & Authenticity

2011-03-29T20:30:00.000-07:00

This post explores the Gregory Brothers' "Bed Intruder Song," and the use of Auto-Tune to investigate the value of authenticity as a literary tool or device.

La Inseguridad

2011-03-23T13:48:00.000-07:00

There’s something I got stuck on when looking at the Essay Prize nomination for Finnegan’s “Silver or Lead.” It’s that this piece is “the kind of real-world essay I’m always dying to share with anyone around.”

What, exactly, is a “real-world” essay?

Are other essays, say the work of past winners Mary Ruefle and Aaron Kunin, not of the real world? Ruefle’s world has fantasy elements, sure, but does the weight of Finnegan’s “real world” trump these, I don’t know, less-grounded works? I am reading “real-world” here as a signifier of relevance, of importance. I’m inferring that, to the nominator, the scope of Finnegan’s work – not just the depth of reportage, but also the topic’s scale, from a private ranch owner outside of Zitácuaro to international relations – makes it significant in ways that other essays of 2010 were not.

This seems problematic to me, the idea of an unspoken sliding scale of relevance and import as applied to works that, when it comes down to it, are pretty tough to compare. But of course I do it, too. One of the things that bothered me about “Plastic Bag,” for example, was the way it was essentially a commissioned project resulting in what I saw as a form of propaganda. But since Finnegan is a staff writer for The New Yorker, does that make this project commissioned as well? What stake does he have in telling this particular story? He traveled, as he seems wont to do, to places where his personal safety was at risk. I don’t get the sense that Finnegan is only telling the story because he was paid to in the way I felt that Bahrani was. Finnegan doesn’t have an agenda. Or! Is it that any agenda he’d be pushing would come from the prize scapegoat of conservative activism, the liberal media, whose bias I’m blind to because I share it?

The answer to that, at least, is below in Lucas’s entry – that Finnegan’s uncertainty is so visible on the page that I think it’s clear he doesn’t have a stake in pushing the reader to develop an actionable political stance on the vast clusterfuck of issues facing Mexico—its cartels, its government, its ordinary people – and of course – the basic issue of supply (Mexico) and demand (U.S.) that seems to be at the root of all the power grasping. I mean, this is the stuff of book-length essays. Like The Devil’s Highway. Or the back catalog of unapologetic breast man Charles Bowden (seriously…read Desierto and try to come away with a different impression).

There’s a book’s worth of material in La Familia. That Finnegan was able to wrangle this into a comprehensible and digestible piece of journalism strikes me as an accomplishment in and of itself. And I can’t overlook the fact that to me, “Silver and Lead” was not only comprehensible and digestible, but devastating, once we moved from the attempt to untangle the post “Pax Mafiosa” political environment and into the personal stakes of nearly-executed ecology officer Delacruz or retired school teacher Don Miguel. I am invested in these people. The uncertainty about Don Miguel’s ranch at the story’s end is more upsetting now, because I’m reading it almost a year later, and so much can happen in a year.

Call me out for misspeaking, Lucas, but it seems to me that initially you had some doubts as to whether this piece of literary journalism qualified as essay per se. On my first read, I had reservations about its contention for the Essay Prize, not because I don’t think it’s a very fine piece of work, but because I too have some lingering parochial concerns about category. It’s journalism! It’s reportage! Lucas quotes: “Work that is defined by what it does—the activity that it engages in—rather than what it is—its ‘nonfictional’ verifiability.” To which I additionally quote that the Essay Prize “emphasizes the activity of a text, rather than its status as a dispensary of information.”

This is a dispensary of information, yes, and important information, but on second read, it seems to me that it is the presence of Finnegan’s first person narration that tips this work into essay territory. And not the “I” alone, but the action of the “I” – Finnegan’s relentless lines of inquiry are visible on the page. We know when he is conducting an interview in Mexico vs. Washington, D.C. We know when information is second-hand. We are aware when he has been forced to choose sides (traveling with the “Queen of the South”) for the purposes of information gathering. And we get loaded observations: “Such violence sounded so benign and neighborly that I felt odd asking about the kind of violence that La Familia is better known for.” I think that Finnegan’s methods in “Silver or Lead” are unequivocally essayistic.

Which brings me back to the question of weight and scope and the idea of a “real-world” essay. It’s so hard to shake my own poorly-defined sliding scale of relevance and import. One way would be to ignore content in favor of structure and craft. But these are all interrelated, and discovering the way that they integrate in this particular piece (thinking here of the way that this formally traditional essay controls the release of information, from the abstract to the personal), is evidence, I think, of a fine mind at work.

So as far as I’m concerned, at this juncture in the nominee discussions, it’s Finnegan’s hand-carved walnut box to lose.

Entre Los Otros

2011-03-22T15:53:00.000-07:00

Silver or lead. The expression is derived from a philosophy attributed to Mexican cartels. Either you cooperate and accept due compensation or your corpse becomes ad space for cartel propaganda. William Finnegan begins his essay by introducing us to Michoacan, a western state of Mexico, and corpse messaging, the mutilation and dumping of what amounts to a pile of limbs and torsos wrapped in marked poster board or cloth. The messages, we are told, read something like, “Talked too much.” or “You get what you deserve.” Welcome to Michoacan: “The People of Iowa Welcome You” this ain’t.

Finnegan is not trying to entice the reader in with poetic devices or formal tropes, he is offering us a grim story of violence and corruption that reads like an arc for a season of “The Sopranos” or “The Wire”. Michoacan is a state rotting from within, barely maintaining the façade of civil structure. Mexico’s president Felipe Calderon is waging a war on drugs that has proved as successful as Bush’s war on terror (when will governments learn to avoid fights with nouns?). Those opposed to Calderon even have a “Dubbya” for purposes of disparagement, distilling the president’s name down to “Lipe”, which, as Finnegan points out, puns on “Fe” which means faith.

During a visit to a communications official in Apartzingan, a city of Michoacan, Finnegan notes that the woman hangs a picture of the governor, Leonel Godoy, in her office but Calderon’s image is absent. The governor and president belong to rival parties, a feud which led to an unannounced raid of Arpatzingan’s municipal offices, landing some members of Godoy’s officials in federal custody.

What is apparent from Finnegans essay is that there exists no unified effort in Mexico. The politicians, soldiers, cartels, and citizens are fractured between myriad sides from the highest officials to the poorest neighbors. Some seek greater wealth and power while others just yearn for basic human rights like healthcare and food—most are willing to deal within the terms of silver and lead in order to reach some semblance of either.

Throughout the entire essay Finnegan is aware of his U.S. readers. Our country is familiar with political scandal, yet, despite the cynicism and disenchantment, there is still a certainty that order will be maintained and rights upheld—a certainty that comes with such entitlement it is barely recognized as existing. I realize that an average reader of The New Yorker rests a spectrum away from the average Joe or Jane that demands the right to strap on a Smith and Wesson M&P to buy Cheerios, but even those who are three degrees deep can be complacent in self-reflection and appreciation. This certainty does not exist in Michoacan.

There are no heroes emerging from the ranks of politicians and the conversations Finnegan has with
officials and locals makes it clear that from their perspective, the only party resembling salvation is La

Familia Michoacana. “If people don’t trust the police or the courts, crime groups will fill those roles,”Finnegan writes. Perhaps it is the cartel’s Robin Hood-esque method of maintaining order. One connected
woman Finnegan speaks with has a number that gives her direct contact to La Familia’s services. “The police work for them,” she says. Though we are never certain what she has done or currently does to
obtain this level of safety, we understand why she did.

On "Silver or Lead"

2011-03-22T15:35:00.000-07:00

I’m in an airport bar, slightly drunk and being glared at for typing too loudly by a man in a “One Tequilla, Two Tequilla, Three Tequilla, Floor” t-shirt. For a moment in this mode, drinking, writing my way through hostile territory, implying a whole lot about a stranger’s character from a single observed detail, I can pretend to feel a kinship with William Finnegan and his writerly persona. But I know that it’s a very, very tenuous connection. Ridiculous, in fact. I’m trying and failing to think of a clever metaphor to express how odd it feels to have Finnegan’s “Silver or Lead” in our Essay Prize pool, jockeying for position with transcendent maps and play essays and talking bags. Perhaps it’s the booze or the hours of awkward, exhausting bar chat about Libya, but all my distracted mind can come up with is Pretty in Pink. Finnegan is Blaine, strolling into a funky record shop in a crisp polo shirt, conventional, successful, amused to be slumming. And we’re Ducky.

It is tempting, therefore, to hate on Mr. Finnegan and list the flaws in his nomination. For one thing, I will guess that he has no truck in essaying and perhaps (gasp) never even thinks to use “essay” as a verb. He is a self-identified journalist, though a “new new” one, part of that elite, McPhee-influenced dream team of white dudes and Susan Orlean. He wins awards given for hard nonfiction and gets paid grownup money. He’s a fucking staff writer for the New Yorker. And his bio picture is the kind of straight-laced handsome that makes me think he plays bi-weekly racquetball games and curses himself in the third person when he screws up. The nominated piece doesn’t seem to be in any way untraditional, at least on the first couple of reads. It’s easy to glance over “Silver and Lead” and find a content heavy, standard piece of reporting, written by a true master of the genre. Finnegan goes to the Mexican state of Michoacan where violence stemming from the drug trade dominates peoples’ lives. He pokes around in this world. A lot. In his meticulous detail, he shows off the specificity of his research. In his frequent admissions ¬— “it was impossible to know for sure,” “I was unable to confirm the reservoir story,” etc. — he lets the reader know that much of the power of his piece will be derived from a sense of fidelity to the gruesome facts. All of which is really admirable, displaying the clear language and dogged work ethic that has made Finnegan so good for so long. But, on the surface, it seems to fly in the face of what the Essay Prize purports to award: “Work that is defined by what it does—the activity that it engages in—rather than what it is—its ‘nonfictional’ verifiability.”

So I didn’t know what to write about “Silver and Lead” for a long while, other than that I find it really powerful. Now, finishing my second inebriated reread, I think I’ve finally realized what it is that makes me like this piece more than I usually like New Yorker articles. Why it leaves me with a sense of wonder and deep, nagging sadness, rather than the dulled effect of simply being told of a reality worse than my own. It’s those admissions that Finnegan makes, his reaching for truth while being forced to acknowledge how hard truth is to find in a terrorized world. Underneath the exhaustive research, the muscular, attempted-expert tone, I think that Finnegan is showing us a writer failing. Sure, he dispenses a lot of information, but as he travels from town to town, he finds no certainty, no answers. He gains no expertise. This is a wandering narrative, a staple of literary journalism that, while captivating, isn’t exactly new, but it feels fresh to me because Finnegan expresses just how desperate, how hopeless, his wandering is. From the very beginning, we are shown a world where the writer has no footing, where there is no reliable authority to guide him through the story. Finnegan enters into a town where “the dismembered body of a young man was left in the middle of the main intersection.” Of course, he wants to find out what happened. The reader expects him to, that’s his job. But by the end of the first paragraph, he’s already conceded that, “I wanted to ask the police some questions, but I was advised not to let the police know I was in town.” By showing us his how all-encompassing the danger and lies are, he’s quickly begun not just to tell us things, but to give us the feeling of a world that is terrifyingly uncertain.

Throughout most of the essay, Finnegan weaves his way through teaching paragraphs that deftly drop massive amounts of research, but he always returns to his own uncertainty, outsider status and fear, tempering the facts with a chilling inferred question – how can anyone know anything for certain here? On p. 47, after nearly a page and a half of fascinating exposition about crystal meth production and distribution within Mexico, the nasty effect of U.S. drug markets and weapons dealing, and the La Familia crime syndicate’s assumed role of outlaw hero, attacking local meth use, Finnegan jumps to his own suspicious gaze in a hidden rehab center in Zamora. His “appearance caused a stir in the street” and the police escort that he still doesn’t trust, but that he needs because nobody else would point him to a rehab, refuses to leave him alone, certain he’ll be hurt. Then, we get a haunting scene – our writer touring the facility with a trusty who claims that La Familia ended meth use in the area, suspicious that this trusty is in La Familia, himself, even as the man “denied any connection.” After giving us all of the information out there about La Familia, its violence and influence, Finnegan is willing to show himself unsure of who to trust, unsure of what will happen next, unsure of just about anything in the place that he set out to report on.

I’m not trying to say that Finnegan explicitly crafted some meditation on the limits of knowledge and managed to slip it past David Remnick’s uniformity scanners. I am aware that this essay is, at its core, hard-hitting, urgent, badass journalism, the kind that prizes content above all else. But still, the effect goes beyond that. Our writer keeps trying, keeps pushing at doing his job, wandering further into secrecy and horror. And I keep going back to the last four pages of the essay, where there is, I think, a real turn. First we get another moment of admittance. Finnegan writes that he had gone into the project with “an idea of how organized crime took over towns” but that was “a composite sketch” that “left out a lot.” From that point on, he forgets about interviewing higher-ups and summarizing outside research. Instead, he ends his essay with a rolling list of horrifying anecdotes. He cannot get an official voice to fully trust, so he seems to give in and let voices that are never heard speak, each expressing unverifiable tragedies. There is no certainty, just pain. We see our writer kicked out of his hotel as tourists swarm for butterfly season, trying to reconcile his gorgeous surroundings with the horror constantly percolating there. We see him flailing for peoples’ stories and then putting them on the page because what else can he do? In the end, we’re given no conclusion because that’s impossible. Instead, just a quiet scene: Finnegan at a family cookout with a man who was almost murdered while innocently building his granddaughter a tree house. The man’s sons are there, too, ever prepared to “avenge him.” They eat and drink and enjoy the sun. It’s a brief, peaceful moment that leads to this last sentence: “The granddaughter’s tree house, they said, was almost finished, which was good, since she would be fifteen very soon.” It’s an odd sentence, sweet, yet also a reminder of the constant chance of a violent death. There’s no closure to it, just the triumph of tenuous survival, a loaded image representing a world that is impossible to really make sense of. It’s a beautiful, artful move, an essayist not leaving us with facts but with disconcerting, unshakable feeling. It’s a bold, unique ending to an essay that makes itself hard to forget.

Moron, the Form (on Bucak's "Eight Questions... and her formal constraints)

2011-03-21T16:36:00.000-07:00

Excuse the punny title; I’m more of the moron because I overlooked the form for far too long. So, to make up for this, this post is purely about form.

I’ve been going back and forth trying to place the formality of this piece, and the more I read it, the less formal it gets. In fact, the further I get into the reading itself, the more I feel included in what Bucak is attempting to say (although, of course, her speaker doesn’t want to completely divulge her purpose, keeping with the façade that she still just figuring shit out). And although Bucak initially seems insensitive (distancing the reader), at the end she becomes more amiable. Looking at the form on the page, the beginning of the piece has more of the switching of dialogues, more of the play-like qualities; the end, the more amiable bit, has less of the constraint. So, wondering how the form affects the piece, I have to assume that the formal constraint causes the tone and language to be terser, even obtuse. As Bucak puts it: “Me has been in this play before, and is not trying to be a jerk about it, but she kind of is.” Bucak knows she’s created a jerk of a character (though her definition of a jerk must be much different than mine; I kind of like her jerk), but that Me doesn’t feel like the same type of Me as the beginning. It feels like she’s slightly altered, changed, or, dare I say it, grown! But grown over the course of 3 pages? Yeah right…

What my winding introduction is trying to say is that while yes, we all want to see some growth or change in a character in a story, it’s not logical to see it happen that quickly, and it’s the form that’s making us think this.

Briefly, I’d like to ramble about the play as a form. Initially, I credited, even yearned the piece to be less formal than it is because I thought that a play was less formal, that there was room for interpretation, thought, even room for the actors to improvise. Bucak even writes variations for those actors, noting a tendency towards improvisation. She even has variations of the variations (Question 2 variation C). While this is all well and good, (nice, even, for Bucak’s ‘jerk’) by inserting multiple improvisations, she is taking away the You’s (or reader’s) ability to improvise. It’s as if she’s assumed (or lived) what the reader will do or say, but is leaving the guise that you (as the reader) can actually choose what to do/say. And this is where I began wondering more of the formality of her play.

Plays are meant to be performed, leaving room for actor improvisation, but the audience will typically never know when a line has been altered. However, Bucak’s piece is not a play; it is an essay (of sorts) and hardly begs to be performed. And because an actor, the You, is actually YOU, you have no problem filling the role. What Bucak takes from You (the reader, the actor) is space for you to think about what she is speaking of. Okay, I’m not saying you’re not thinking while you’re reading the piece, I’m just positing that you’re experiencing a different kind of thinking while reading. You’re filling a role, which is sort of liberating, to be part of a piece; however, in filling that role you are also limited by how much you can change what is being done/said/thought about you (or by you). You are both implicated and not, though, in either sense, because Bucak has already prescribed variations of certain events, you can never be certain if she really is implicating you or someone else. Either way, though, your space to think (and thus talk) is limited by the construct of the play. Furthermore, Bucak’s blurring of the lines (as the other posts have mentioned, so I really won’t go into this aspect) between You and Me complicates the equation. Both You and Me are present and acting, but the construct of the play truncates their abilities (their, meaning the reader’s) to think beyond the faux improvisation.

However, as I noted earlier, if you take a look at the last page versus the second/third, the last has far less of the variations and structured dialogue, feeling more relaxed and agreeable. I chalk that up to the form again. Our sense of Bucak’s friendliness towards the end doesn’t come with a shift in language (diction/syntax affecting tone), but a shift in form. On the third page, the page made up mostly of oscillating variations and a confusion with the You and Me, Bucak limits the reader’s ability to speak (think), truncating any stray thoughts (improvisations) with variations. What she is also limiting, by using the play-form more readily (more dialogue switching between the cast), is room for her speaker (more the Me [to the audience] than the Me [to You]) to speak.

It is in those moments where the ‘Me’ speaks to the audience that the most is learned about the Me’s situation, thoughts, etc. It is also in that moment that the reader is free from his/her ‘You’ role responsibilities to contemplate Bucak’s divulgences. The more room Bucak gives her ‘Me’ to speak, the more room the reader has to think, and, oddly enough, talk. In short, the space teaches the reader how to read Bucak’s affect. It is easier to note her flourishes, as in the Me [to the audience]’s answer to Question 7 (the whimsical bit about Pops), along with the abrupt stoppage of the flourish with the injection of the structured dialogue again (Can I call you Patty?). Even on the less-structured last page, the play-form attempts its truncation. One can, of course, posit the Chorus as being a more truncating force than the You (or vice versa), but it is just the inclusion of the play-form that does this. It’s as if Bucak has such a hyper-awareness of how she is supposed to act in certain situations (with You, with the audience, with the Turkish Chorus) that she is constantly cutting herself off with tangents or variations. Though those mostly come earlier, as noted, the last page attempts to do so as well. It’s that post-modern self-awareness of “I know what you’re going to say before you say it so I’ll just put it in here so you don’t have to say it. Yeah, I’m that aware of what you think of me and I think of me and the world thinks of me. Here.” What’s interesting, though, is that she chooses to have her final flourish at the end, never coming back to the play-form constraint. Although the last line is a bit cheesy and over-dramatic, the end is a nod to a more romantic realm of the individual (juxtaposed against many definitions of person/place/culture/individualism). Is it an abandonment of the formal constraint by which she and her situation (and us and our situations) has put her (and us) in? Probably not. But it is a freeing of her voice, and thus, our thought, which is welcome enough.

Two Papatyas (on Ayse Bucak, posted for Rebecca Epstein)

2011-03-17T16:34:00.000-07:00

Two Papatyas

"Eight Questions You Would Ask Me If I Told You My Name" is, reduced, a clever package tied neatly, a script with elements that fall into their grooves and remain. It is so tidy that to read it is to feel a shiver of perfection, an appreciation for a well-oiled machine with smooth, sliding, soundless parts. But that perfection of form says to the reader, I defy you to peel away my layers; I defy you to look deeper. And so many a reader likely reads the script in all its orderly design and puts it down sated, though one might argue that this satiation is nothing but a desert mirage. To peel away the layers is to ask the following:

1) Why such a compact, delicious package anyway?
2) And what’s with the pronouns?
3) What function does the Turkish chorus serve, really?
4) What is the tone of the piece? Does the form affect the tone?
5) How are we supposed to feel about each of the characters?
6) Is there anger here?
7) Is there self-pity here? Is that a bad thing?
8) What, then, is the point of this essay? Where is Papatya going with it?

The reader cannot answer all of these questions at once, but perhaps the one question that will answer itself most readily, or will at least beg its own question most seductively, is the last one. What is the point of Bucak’s Eight Questions? Is it an exercise in sympathy-gathering? Does she want the reader to feel for her, for her troubles as a Turkish-American, straddling two nations? On the surface, yes. Bucak feels bad for herself, a touch outraged, and the reader, who as someone outside of the piece, straddles the points-of-view of all characters, especially You and Me, should feel some of this outrage, too.

But there is more to it. Bucak calls the interrogator You, the person who is mired in misunderstanding, ignorance, and insensitivity, not to mention the dreary cliché of always asking the same questions as every other You, and by calling the interrogator You, she is also addressing the reader, who is not Bucak, but is an other, a You. Bucak is saying, if we met, you would ask me these questions too, and this is what I would be thinking. So as frustrated as the reader feels on Bucak’s behalf, the reader must also acknowledge that she, too, would make the same offenses in Bucak’s presence.

Bucak takes it even a step further, by transliterating the entire issue into the Turkish realm, as when she meets a Turk or travels to Turkey, and then she adopts the “’help me’ expression” herself, that so often graces the faces of her American interrogators. So in a way, Bucak is admitting that everyone, under the right circumstances, is an ignorant jerk, and she just so happens to have a name in America that makes her subject to this ignorance more of the time than most.

So, yes, there is a satisfying balance of responsibility in this piece. But ultimately, despite that balance, it appears as though Bucak herself is unaware of whatever her point might be. Does she want the reader to feel guilty? Does she want to relieve the reader of culpability? Does she want to advise the reader on how to act should she encounter someone with an “unusual” name? And if Bucak doesn’t know, then neither can the reader.