Some trajectories
The afterlife of the author
It is important, when reading Kafka, not to read him too Brodly.
A neat turn by Adam Thirlwell, from “The Last Flippant Writer” (1999), quoted by Zadie Smith in the latest New York Review of Books. The joke is that Kafka, it is theorized, suffers from the effect of his executor, the gnomically named Max Brod, who arranged much of his work posthumously and possibly with a religio-mystical bent. There are many parallel examples, and on some occasions it seems to have even occurred sometimes multiple times (Nietzsche comes to mind). Smith quotes from Thirlwell several times but her article is an occasion to meander around Louis Begley’s The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay. Typical of the New York Review, it is divided into sections without any apparent purpose or determinant structure; and Smith, also typically, seems interested in only those aspects of Kafka’s personal identity that hinge on race or gender issues: the conflicted Jewishness, the misogyny. The constant assumption is that these are instructive in a kind of instinctive way about the literature: and about the relevance of all these claims, Brod aside, there does not even seem to be a pause for doubt.
William Logan makes a similar case in his review of Frank O’Hara, but with greater fluency and more crafty conflation of the writer and his body of work, which he says “gives us as much of a life as poetry can”. This sounds suspiciously like a half-hearted buy-off appearing, as it does, at the end of a review spent mostly condescending to the work, or setting up signposts to the critic’s range with nonsensical metaphors (we get both “Wallace Stevens at the soda fountain” and “Ezra Pound on happy pills”). He yearns to be Randall Jarrell but lacks any of the intuition. The faint praise is unrelenting, and most of it is bound by the critic’s approach to the poet’s life, rather than the actual material of the poems: their words appear in unbroken blocks and their specific operation goes entirely unmentioned. Instead,
Whitman’s search for the democracy of the American demotic — what he called slang — had a century later become the hilarious musings of a vain young man about town (O’Hara wrote about homosexual life with a cheerful nonchalance rarely matched since; Allen Ginsberg by contrast was slightly lugubrious about sex). It’s hard to know whether Whitman, who took poetry seriously, would have laughed or wept.
At the start of last year, Logan authored a loathsome review of the Modern Library’s Hart Crane collection, in which he had time for the poet’s “voracious sexual appetites” and his bad spelling but not enough for more than a dozen or so lines of verse.
It may be more than a difference of degree between these two articles: Smith’s, convoluted but not ultimately upsetting; Logan’s, more direct but verging on poisonous. But each eventually amounts to “a way of avoiding literature”.
Pasolini in pictures
Photographs by Foto Cortesia, Cevignano. From Roman Poems, first published in 1964.
From Louis Armstrong's steamer trunk
“Reel To Reel.” The Paris Review, Issue 184, Spring 2008—
When not pressing the valves on his trumpet or the record button on his tape recorder, Armstrong’s fingers found other arts with which to occupy themselves. One of them was collage, which became a visual outlet for his improvisational genius. The story goes that he did a series of collages on paper and tacked them up on the wall of his den, but Lucille, who had supervised the purchase and interior decoration of their house in Corona, Queens, objected. Armstrong decided to use his extensive library of tapes as a canvas instead, and the result is a collection of some five hundred decorated reel-to-reel boxes, one thousand collages counting front and back. The collages feature photographs of Armstrong with friends (like the snapshot captioned “Taken at Catherine and Count Basie’s swimming pool, at his birthday party, August 1969”) and with fans (Armstrong seems never to have refused a photo op or an autograph); congratulatory telegrams and clippings from reviews of his performances; a blessing from the Vatican (as reassembled by Louis, the first lines read: “Mr. and Mrs. Most Holy Father Louis Armstrong”) …
These are exquisite. In these examples they demonstrate effortless variation, expert control of proportion and color, and apparently very little respect for the niceties of production, focusing on the interrelations of the matter itself. It anticipates many of the music-centric ‘zines that would appear decades later, both in its freedom of reference and stylistic position as an emblem of a kind of personal music curation. I will be interested to see if anything like this level of consistency is maintained through the rest of the collection, which will be published next spring in Satchmo: The Wonderful World of Louis Armstrong, by Steven Brower (which is apparently given entirely to Armstrong’s visual art).
Takes on Clement Greenberg
A peculiar exhibition at the Jewish Museum, Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976, which went up in May and will remain on display through September 21, 2008, is organized not around the relationship of these artists to their era, nor a real or imagined relationship between the two, but instead on the comparison between two of their (perceived) standard-bearers: the magazine critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. The museum says,
Two rival art critics played a crucial role in the reception of the new American painting and sculpture: the highly influential New York intellectuals Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg. In the pages of magazines as diverse as Partisan Review, The Nation, ARTnews, and Vogue, these critics wrote incisively about seismic changes in the art world, often disagreeing with each other vehemently.
They certainly had a rivalry, though it’s difficult to evenly pitch Greenberg, who was a serious theorist in his own way, and essentially defined the American approach in his era, with Rosenberg, who, at least from what I gather of admittedly limited exposure to his writing, was an interesting writer, but a very limited critic without anything at all like his rival’s organized, coherent perspective. Obviously, though, setting up a binary opposition like this — rather than what might be more reasonable: say keeping them each around as a mile marker in the vast spectrum of cultural context that might be used to compare the artists — emphasizes explicitly the Jewish element of the project, which is presumably desirable from the perspective of the museum.
And that said, I do find it interesting when a major cultural institution even acknowledges critical discourse prior to the 1980s; and revisiting these guys is enlightening, even now that many of the issues they hotly contended are more or less retired. In the enlightening (and very different) excerpts that follow, there is some evidence of the significance Greenberg has continued to have for a wide range of critics, though he seems to be mentioned less and less. I was at first surprised that he was, despite his hermetic ultra-formalism, treated generously and unusually incisively by the French theorist and October editor Yve-Alain Bois. This fragment is purely analytical, but in another part of the essay (“Resisting Blackmail”) he speaks for taking a similar angle or sharing a sort of attitude about the manner of conducting criticism (he contrasts it with what he sees as the belle lettrist strain in French art writing). This is more purely about Greenberg’s practice:
If Greenberg’s discourse was flawed, I realized, it was because it deliberately disjoined the two levels and chose moreover to speak only about the first one, leading to such insipid statements as “the quality is the content,” and to the transformation of structural oppositions (“opticality versus tactility”) into purely morphological criteria of judgment. … Although he speaks about the medium of any art as its principal horizon, he seldom discusses the actual stuff of any work of art (or when he occasionally does, it is with gross errors: Barnett Newman, for example, was absolutely enraged when reading Greenberg’s assessment of his color-field canvases as bearing a “dyer’s effect”). Form became an a priori for Greenberg, an idea preexisting its actual “projection,” its actual descent into the realm of matter, just like the “image” had been for Sartre.
And, as usual, we rely on Peter Schjeldahl for a very pretty, steady and precise wide-angle shot. From “An Inclement Critic” (1981):
Seeing him makes it easier to grasp his intellectual terror tactics as tactics and to start imagining why someone would want to employ them. I picture a man who loves his own response to art so extravagantly, so beyond all reason, that reason in his hands is just a device to protect and generalize that love. No mere Bernard Berenson-style King Connoisseur or even a T.S. Eliot-like Voice of High Culture, Greenberg historicized his love and rolled it into the present—art for art’s sake on tank tracks. Almost incidentally, he organized the unruly data of modern art more persuasively than anyone else.
Quartered
Machiavelli and Tolstoy: “Cool Guys”
Thoughts on “Mike Tyson Film Takes a Swing at His Old Image” by Tim Arango, in the New York Times.
“I don’t know who I am,” he said in an interview in his Las Vegas home, one of the few extensive interviews he’s given in the last few years. “That might sound stupid. I really have no idea. All my life I’ve been drinking and drugging and partying, and all of a sudden this comes to a stop.” He speaks in his familiar high-pitch voice with a trace of a lisp, but there is no menace as he frames his past as a series of mistakes. It is easy, sitting next to him as he speaks softly and contritely, to forget how feared he was.
With Ali it’s possible to see a narrative perfectly defined by race. A black man competing at the top of a physical sport many people consider to be barbaric, speaking with an accent while making remarks very easily characterized as stereotypically black, undergoing a religious conversion to a strange and threatening (some would say racist) faith, fighting the white government by refusing to fight in its war, becoming a figure of defiant American blackness, then gradually succumbing to the Parkinson’s disease, his outspoken personality and physically imposing presence reduced to a bumbling, nearly mute, birthday-party magician brought around for photo ops with Fidel Castro and the Olympic torch – a sort of disabled, emasculated Uncle Tom. When Ali was painted in the media as a bad-boy, for dodging the draft, for his multiple marriages and promiscuity, it was minor and it seemed always somehow to be symbolic of something: Ali’s race, the 60s, Malcolm X. And now that he’s a good guy, it’s just that the symbolism has changed: America, the 60s, a tragic hero or a martyr to less civilized times.
Mike Tyson was different. He wasn’t outspoken, he didn’t pay lip service to being any sort of community leader, when he talked about religion it came out more like drug addled nonsense than conviction, and when he was convicted, he was really convicted, incarcerated, and written off by everyone. There was no moral high ground. When he was painted as a bad-boy it was usually because he was, at least in the sense that he did bad things like rape people or beat them up outside of clubs.
In that context it was fun for some people to play Tyson as an inhuman killing machine, an animal, a brute force. He was a boxer, and it’s hard to deny the existence of this sort of mentality, if not it’s implications in regards to his personality or intelligence, for Tyson. But anyone familiar with Tyson outside of the boxing ring knows that while he may not exactly be erudite, it’s not entirely surprising to hear him use the word “erudite” in conversation or, in this case, an interview. As a boxer, though, he was able to keep this side of himself out of the public consciousness, and as long as he was a boxer he was to be feared. As long as he was a boxer he was able to capitalize on that fear.
But now, Tyson doesn’t box anymore. He’s broke. He needs to play on his past glories to pay his debts and he’s roped Ali’s marketing team in to do the job. Even with the face tattoo, the force-of-nature Iron Mike angle isn’t gonna work anymore, so it’s time to play up the soft spoken, intelligent, down on his luck, Great American Boxer angle, and hope that the public buys it.
Given these circumstances, the question is, should we be concerned with the idea that Mike Tyson might turn into the next Muhammad Ali? A once-mighty personality turned into a meaningless spokesman? Only if he has the lack of foresight to let his handlers have their way with his image. Tyson doesn’t have Parkinson’s, and he never was stupid. Essentially, nothing has changed for him now, except that he doesn’t box or take drugs anymore. Unfortunately, these were the two things that comprised Tyson’s public image as a dangerous man. If Tyson is still a public figure, it’s no longer as a menace or a symbol of the rage of inner city youth. Unlike Ali, Tyson can’t really signify anything anymore. I wouldn’t catch him carrying the Olympic torch anytime soon.
RELATED Tyson vs. Colay and a typical post-fight interview.