To you, dear readers—present and future doctors!
The other day I was really happy to receive a comment on my post about Kamal, from none other than Bernardo Winson, Ph.D., the editor-in-chief of Immortal Muse publishing! Winson provided some really useful bibliographic background on the “masses/ ass is” passage, reproduced on the bookmark. It turns out that the poet Zireaux uses this rhyme, not only with reference to Eminem’s ass in Kamal, but also with reference to J-Lo’s ass in an entirely different work called Res Publica (full stanza here).
Subsequently, my indefatigable web master informed me that my site was getting some incoming links from Bernardo Winson’s blog. Imagine my feelings when I checked it out and saw there is a whole post about me (w00t!). So what if it’s mostly about what a superficial person I am?
I think, the editor was offended because I wrote about Kamal in the context of something I got for free in the mail:
I’m merely struck by the labor required for [Ms. Batuman] to untie the insignificant knot of her first impressions-impressions, I assume, manufactured to some degree by publishing tradition, such that a free book delivered in shrink-wrap with a “classy” bookmark is worth writing about (”look what someone sent me!”), never mind the fact that it contains the first half of an epic work exhaustingly composed by a well-known New Zealand poet whose four volumes of verse contain some of the most thrilling modern poetry this editor has read (would I be publishing Zireaux’s works otherwise?).
I have a few things to say in response, which I will do here, since Dr. Winson appears to have disabled comments on his blog.
Dr. Winson! You must know as well as I do that context is everything! It was a wonderful surprise for me to receive a shrink-wrapped epic poem by a little-known (in the US) New Zealand poet, packaged with a bookmark about J-Lo’s ass! Please do not mistake my surprise for disregard or ingratitude. If I inadvertently left this impression, then let me make amends here. Receiving Kamal made my day. My thanks to you, and especially to Ms. Majumdar, who I trust is enjoying her well-deserved vacation.
Furthermore, I assure you that I would have been equally delighted (equally in quantity, if not in quality), had the work in question been mimeographed and stapled together, and unavailable from Amazon. I mean… just imagine that! I would definitely have written about it in my blog.
You conclude your post with these words:
I simply wish to ask the learned Ms. Batuman—how else does one expect to encounter a work of epic poetry by an out-of-place poet? In the display window of Walden’s bookstore? In the London Review of Books? Is that what’s required for Kamal, the work of art, to survive?
Bernardo—if I may call you that—I’m going to level with you here. With one thing and another—and notwithstanding my enormous respect for many individual poets and their productions—I am at best only an occasional reader of poetry. What can I say? I’m just more of a prose person. (This is why it’s so surprising to me that I regularly receive poetry collections in the mail. Nobody ever sends me novels!)
Frankly, if I had seen Kamal in the window of Waldenbooks, or reviewed in the LRB, the chance I would have bought or read it is about 0%. On the other hand, I make a point of reading at least a few pages of every single book which is mailed to me. So, in answer to your question: no! I heartily encourage you and Ms. Majumdar to continue mailing your books to obscure writers! (Unless, of course, you will be irritated when they respond after their own obscure fashion.)
* * *
While I am responding to my respected readers, I will take a moment to answer Peli’s comment about Wes Anderson.
…Pagoda v. Ryleigh, or the train-owner vs. the mother, or Seu Jorge vs. script girl-there’s just no chasm there. And all are made out meticolously [sic] to be their own centers we only get to experience the edges of.
Dear Peli! Future Dr. Grietzer! Insofar as this is a cinematographic comment, I agree. Who would want to dispute Anderson’s ability to compose beautiful, fascinating frames that complicate the foreground/ background, center/ periphery relationships?
In narrative terms, however, when you talk about the train-owner vs. the mother (in Darjeeling Express, I assume): they are both peripheral, but for different and incommensurate reasons. The train-owner is peripheral because he is a ”background” character; the mother is peripheral for the same reason the dead father is peripheral: because parental absenteeism is the main dramatic subject.
To the best of my memory, the mother in Darjeeling Express is the same spacey, well-intentioned, self-absorbed Anjelica Huston character from Tenenbaums and Life Aquatic: withdrawn more-or-less literally into her own private world, unable or unwilling to protect her children from, or compensate them for, their egotistical/ domineering/ absent father. To distract us from the fact that this is the same—and, in my opinion, already-uninteresting—story, being told yet again, Anjelica Huston is ingeniously disguised as some kind of Himalayan nun.
The mother’s status as a nun is similar to the role of the Indian train-owner: local color is being used as an exotic coloring for the unexotic story of some affluent American adults who are still for some reason paralyzingly incapacitated by how their parents didn’t love them enough.
What I was trying to suggest in the Guardian article is that this kind of disconnect (between local color and the family drama) is harder to avoid in narrative media than in pop music. That is, it seems to me to be a more manageable (and generally better-managed) task, in pop music, to actually fuse together exotic-Third World sounds and affluent-pop sounds, in such a way that one doesn’t feel like, “Oh, that’s some 40-year-old white dude mad at his mom, and trying to dress it up with sounds of the jungle.”
* * *
On the subject of the Guardian article, I was really happy to receive such a kind comment from Dr. Rittenberg, author of ”On Charm.” (It arrived just as I was in the middle of writing this post.) Those of you who have sold their souls for university library privileges can check out another of his articles: “On Fantasies of Self-Creation.” I have only looked at it very quickly, but I definitely plan to return to the Great Gatsby part. Gatsby and Nick were one of the hero-sidekick pairs I wrote about in my dissertation.
Speaking of which, thanks also to Ben Geer, for his incredibly interesting suggestion that the hero-sidekick duality—which I trace, in my dissertation, to Don Quijote—might actually have reached Cervantes through an Arabic form called maqama. The maqama, a form popular in medieval Spain, typically features two characters: “a trickster who is always in some sort of disguise and who lives by his wits and eloquence, and the narrator, who follows the trickster out of sheer fascination and sometimes acts as his assistant.” Amazing, no? That’s exactly the hero-sidekick pattern that turns up in sidekick-narrated works like Sherlock Holmes, Gatsby, etc. I’m definitely going to look into this.
In the meantime I will leave you, admired readers, with a very belated response to a comment from Katy. Dear Katy, I had a wonderful time in Leipzig, thank you—although, contrary to the fascinating trend you observed in recent German literature, I did not have sex with any overly adoring fans.
Tags: academic life, comparative literature, d-list, dissertation, Don Quijote, Germany, New Zealand, publications, reviews, Spain, w00t!
April 29th, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Yay for the honor of inclusion, ouch for the sic. I plead second language, disgraphia and the flue.
My now-I-realize-totally-subjective point was that my Wes Anderson experience was always that the minor characters are “made of the same stuff” as the major ones, and that they are told apart only by the degree of access allotted to the audience. I always felt distinctively that their animated by personality algorithms just as nuanced a complex as those crafted for the major characters, and their “quirks” provoke and reward connect-the-dot efforts with psychology just as much. But then again I never thought Wes Anderson movies were about family drama as much as about its transcendental condition in the impossibility of saying anything really important because really important things are diffused beyond individuation. So for me the way in which the “background” characters significantly assert themselves through a series of lateral glimpses, and I really think they do, is the core of what makes Wes Anderson movies meaningful.
April 29th, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Paul, if I may – your central contention here is that W. Anderson’s films concern “transcendental condition in the impossibility of saying anything really important because really important things are diffused beyond individuation”. Therefore, you imply, the fleeting glances of the minor characters perhaps just as significant as the action of the main ones. But the point is only really demonstrated when it concerns a contrast between these nonverbal forms of communication ad what’s actually said. We can only observe this tension in the central characters, because they’re the ones given the attention, furnished with the dialogue, etc.
In a way, this division then exoticises the minor characters even further, by pinning them into a realm of silent, mysterious, meaningful communication that’s inaccessible to the (white) protagonists. So what we’re left with is India (or other origin points of W. Anderson’s minor characters) as a sort of “magic” terrain that can’t be fully grasped by Westerners – a Dark Continent. Not only that, but this Dark Continent appears to determine the nature of those who come from there (the even partial assimilation of immigrants is not permitted in W. Anderson films, when their geographic origins are necessarily pressed into service as the essential, rather than chosen, essence of their “quirkiness”).
So while I agree with Elif on this point, I can’t fully agree that it’s more difficult to exoticize within pop music. The simultaneity and layering of musical melodies and rhythms, of course, is much more permitting of cultural interchange than narrative, which forces juxtapositions between characters, characters and settings, etc. But I have to wonder what bands like VW really intend with this kind of syncretism. I’ve tried to access some meaning from the lyrics, to no avail – for the most part, these seem to compose, beyond the band’s wardrobes, the “preppy, northeastern” component of its art. On the one hand, I could say that there’s still a contrast being drawn here – between lyric and style on the one hand and musical rhythm on the other (which is of course deeply problematic given what it implies about a contrast between the Western ability to speak vs. subaltern silence and African rhythm), but this presupposes too much about VW’s musical composition that I just don’t know. More obvious to me, at least, is that the importation of anything African into VW’s music merely counts for having something, anything unique and/or different (leading to that holy grail of modern cynical culture, irony). In this, I find a somewhat empty gesture. Perhaps VW would do better to persuade those who pay as much attention to the nonmusical elements of their gesamtkuntwerk (because modern music is really seen and read as much as heard) and how they interact. Show us there’s a real cohesian in this dialogue of Cape Cod and Congo – and not just counterpoint.
April 30th, 2008 at 12:06 pm
alas, my reply is now locked in the laptop that ran out of energy just as I was reaching for “submit”. hopefully I can get a new power cable tomorrow — it was a really good reply
April 30th, 2008 at 5:00 pm
Thank you for the interesting comments!
Dear Peli, honestly I think your non-native English is phenomenal, I only said sic to be: “merciless.” For future reference though I’m still gonna tell you that a flue is something in a chimney; influenza is flu (no e). Also dysgraphia is with a y, like dysfunctional, as in: “The Darjeeling Express, the latest addition to director Wes Anderson’s growing collection of movies that feature dysfunctional families” (Popsugar.com).
Dear Peli, dear C. Szaba: reading your comments, I was reminded anew of the vagaries of subjectivity! I mean, I think these formal-aesthetic discussions often hit a wall where it becomes a question of what one does or does not find annoying, on a visceral, pre-theoretical level.
At least, that’s how it is for me. E.g. I do have objective reasons for thinking that the films of Wes Anderson are flawed (similar to the reasons described by C. Szaba); but I could probably overlook them if I weren’t so immediately, viscerally annoyed by the “family drama” aspect (the spectacle of grown men, approaching middle age, rushing around in a funk because they are resentful about things their parents did when they were kids). Peli, meanwhile, clearly isn’t as annoyed by these dudes. Possibly there is a cultural explanation—I bet there are more such stories in the US than in Israel—but who knows? It could be any part of our subjective experiences/ personalities/ etc.
As for Vampire Weekend: I think some of C. Szaba’s objections are logically plausible—but I don’t experience them when I listen to the music. VW just doesn’t annoy me like Anderson does. I don’t know if it’s for objective theoretical reasons, you know, based on the workings of cross-cultural syncretism in narrative vs. non-narrative media. I do think it’s objective… I’m inclined to believe that the idea of Western/ non-Western music in counterpoint is less problematic than the idea of, you know, taking the dysfunctional-family show on the road to the Third World (after all counterpoint implies a juxtaposition of two theoretically self-sufficient lines)… I also think pop lyrics don’t have to “account for” pop music, in the same way that the script/ dramatic action of a film has to account for its setting/ characters/ milieu. On the other hand, maybe it’s just that my subjective annoyance threshold is lower when it comes to music.
May 1st, 2008 at 7:30 am
Woot! My laptop is resotred along with my precious comment! I will add the caveat that Elif is totally right about how the game is rigged.
“Szabla — I’m with you on the theory but diverge on the empirics. The non-verbal communication is practiced as much by the major characters, and the “laws” of Wes Anderson minor characters guide the scores of anglo upper-class minor characters as well as the non-anglo ones. Thoughs it’s not “non-verbal” communication at all, but “seeming insignificant commmunication”. And yes, we don’t get to see the contrast of “earnest” and “seeminglfy insignificant” communication in minor characters, but this is constructed as an issue of acces rather than an issue of nature — we just don’t get to see them in their “intimate” situations. Now if you want to ay in We Anderson there’s a sense of limited acces to non-anglo people, I totally agree, and think that’s both unfortunate and understandable.
I also don’t know about “W. Anderson films, when their geographic origins are necessarily pressed into service as the essential, rather than chosen, essence of their “quirkiness””. When did you ever see that in a Wes Anderson movie?
I don’t mean to be contrarian. It’s just that becase of the unfortunate cultural position Wes Anderson has come to occupy it seems like people feel free to declare of Anderson whatever’s appropriate as cultural critique of preps or hipsters, without alway substantiating the claims very carefully even as empirical observations”