The Vitalist

Polis

 I.

Look at the flower-like structure of the universe: how unlike

living it really is. Couldn’t a child tell the difference between

the beauty of the Ionian mode and a Sycamore losing its bark?

Couldn’t each metalepsis of poetry last as long as a Hayden quartet?

Couldn’t each of us begin to replace the ontology of death

with a new, more radiant idea? Yes! But the community of

poems lacks the materiality necessary to endure: rationality

divides people into houses, houses into gathering secrets,

secrets into mornings of precarious self-awareness.

(And what categories define our unity? Friendship, courage,

love, desire, family? Sunlight, water, air?)

II.

(When Olivia read the poem I wrote about her last year, she told me she cried and then went back to being who she was: moving forward despite her ridiculous lightness and the wound that Eros had made in her otherwise coherent sense of order.)

 

III.

An American sublime is not a metaphysical concept: it’s an honest perception of movement, color, beauty: a reworking of autumn finally into frost, of simplicity into a thing of assertive, fluent truth. The inevitable grace of separation and freedom pours out of the air every time you look at it closely (and there’s still a crack in everything that love has made): nature is non-Euclidean when you map it out in the absolute terms of human existentiality. What I’m trying to say is that we are breathing, alive, moral, earnest, sincere, and real. That we correspond to the motion that sweeps through a Bachian fugue or a Beethoven sonata: that biological machinery is only one interpretation of what an infinite deductiveness will yield. That our summers force light to escape from underground. That no one is who they want to be, that no one is going anywhere, o’ my weary.

MG

Why You Should Never Read Reviews Of Films By Directors Infinitely More Intelligent Than Their Reviewers

http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/to_the_wonder/

MG

The Novel’s Wisdom

As human beings and social creatures, we have a tendency to cast ourselves in the role of judge. Quite distinct from the role of victim, this instinctive inclination to pass judgment on decisions and behaviors that do not involve us is frequently marked by a profound resistance to self-reflection – we judge by idealized moral principles and often ignore our personal records of imperfection. We tend to carry this inclination into our engagement with the novel; however, the mark of a great work lies in its unique capacity to undermine our moral certitude. Indeed, the novel teaches us to be ever skeptical of our superior righteousness.

In evaluating our personal lives, we deeply understand the complexity and ambiguity of moral decision-making, and are thus often inclined to be more forgiving of our own transgressions. We allow ourselves a leniency that we do not necessarily extend to others, whose transgressions are perceived to be acts of simple immorality. Without understanding the complex nebula of situations and circumstances, we are less able to extend empathic sensibilities into our judgment of the transgressor. Naturally, empathy is a trait that occurs in the population as a spectrum: each of us falls somewhere between the extremes of those agonized by universal empathy and those dangerously incapable of it.

Furthermore, most of us experience stronger empathy towards certain people in our lives, and a much fainter version for others outside the scope of our personal experience. The more empathetic one is by nature, and the stronger the bond between oneself and transgressor, the more likely one will be to understand the psychological pain of morally ambiguous decisions – the shame or remorse of a loved one carries far more weight than the imagined discomfort of a stranger.

The beauty and facility of the novel is its unique capacity to invoke empathy and emotional investment in the reader: a great novel complicates the process of moral judgment by weaving a tapestry of contexts, characters, and emotional complexity in which the reader is submerged.

A perfect (though extreme) example of such mastery is Nabokov’s classic Lolita: we are morally disgusted by the idea of seducing, abducting, and molesting a child – but Humbert Humbert is magically and inexplicably able to captivate and, in a way, seduce the reader. The legal and moral norms violated over the course of the narrative are shrouded in an aesthetically beautiful web of emotions, intentions, and contexts – all which serve to nurture the seed of empathy within a reader’s mind. (In fact, the reader-as-judge role is made brilliantly explicit by Nabokov’s choice to frame the novel as the protagonist’s defense speech before a judge and courtroom.)

In more subtle narratives, the novel is unrivaled in its ability to impose upon the reader a perfect state of uneasy moral ambivalence. We empathize with the characters, some of whom are formed before us with lives as rich and complex as many of our real acquaintences. We are uncomfortable and spread thin with contradicting empathy for several characters simultaneously. More often than not, we realize we have found ourselves faced with similar moral dilemmas in our own lives, and regardless of what decision we ourselves made at the time, we can empathize with the difficulty of such choices.

A brilliant author who has mastered this intriguing form of moral ambiguity is a personal favorite I often discuss: renowned Czech novelist Milan Kundera. In his novels, the narrator cultivates an atmosphere of philosophical inquiry and moral subjectivity, achieving a playful yet soul-probing dialogue about human behavior. We know infidelity is wrong, but when reading Immortality or The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we find ourselves frozen with gavel in hand: the affairs, the moral transgressions are far more complex than could be encapsulated within a simple verdict. And we begin to doubt the legitimacy of our judgment regarding such matters in the first place – considering, of course, that we have all at some point found ourselves overwhelmed by moral ambiguity and desire, and maybe even once succumbed to weakness.

I suspect that this is one of the greatest gifts the novel bestows upon humanity: this reminder that in practice, empathy is a function of how able we are to understand the complex humanity of another. Often, we fail to extend our empathetic considerations beyond those who we know and love – we find ourselves treating others with judicial severity: the sexually licentious woman, the man who steals food for his family, the drug addict who is unreliable and self-destructive. By no means am I suggesting the cold blooded killer, the rapist, the torturer, even the white collar criminal should be judged in the same manner as one who has intentionally done no harm to others, but the novel reminds us to question our illusions of moral superiority.

Certainly all immoral or normatively transgressive behavior warrants the appropriate severity of punitive response – this is a critical feature of the social contract into which each of us has entered. But as we inevitably find ourselves in the role of judge throughout our lives, the novel exhorts us to serve with empathy – it reminds us that beyond deviance there is often a complex web of internal and external forces, and surrounded by these forces is a human being – a soul with as much humanity as ourselves.

MM

Blogs and Aphorisms

Are the conditions for writing blogs adequate also for writing aphorisms – that is, for writing laconic philosophical statements or pithy wisecracks that make a relevant point?

To answer this question, we need to have a sound grasp both of what a blog is and of the general history of aphoristic practice. While there are many varieties – journalistic, reflective, catalogical, humoristic – a blog is basically a finite repository of written or verbal enunciations that are cast out into an expanding web-space. The expanding web-space demands that individual blogposts be brief and, if not succinct, at least very short, so that a reader will not be overwhelmed with content. As a result, stylized blogs have proven themselves to be prone to soundbytes and snark, presumably because this is what makes them compelling to the general reader.

Without a doubt, the classical practice of aphoristic writing holds the potential for blog writing within it. Hippocrates, generally considered the original aphorist, wrote aphorisms chocked with wisdom about day-to-day medical problems – ‘Diseases about the kidneys and bladder are cured with difficulty in old men…’; ‘Hemorrhoids appearing in melancholic and nephritic affections are favorable…’ (1); and so on.  Offhand, we can all probably think of a blog with alternative medical advice, dietary planning strategies, or a related daily living theme. Since Hippocrates, however, the writing of aphorisms has expanded to include ‘high’ Western philosophy – an unofficial but more or less continuous tradition that began with long-ago folks like Erasmus and La Rouchefoucauld, and continued with moderns such as Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, et al. Even Karl Marx, in his ‘Theses on Feuerbach,’ dabbled with aphoristic writing.

But not all aphorisms are of the high philosophical tradition. In fact, most Americans with a high school education are likely to be aware of the humoristic application of aphorisms – the wisecracks and wisdoms of Mark Twain, for example, which tend to have a snappy political bent. According to the standard definition, the effectuality of a funny aphorism derives chiefly from its ‘pithy’ delivery. Pithiness has a twofold effect of being rhetorically expressive and of intensifying the significance of what has been said so that it appears to make a shrewd critical point. Many popular political blogs today try to extend this tradition, commenting on legal and political affairs with a Twainian snark that, while perhaps less effective than in Twain’s day, nevertheless attempts to achieve that kind of effect. The snarky blogosphere scoffs at the pretentiousness and pseudo-wisdom of the high philosophical aphorism, containing a wit, as one New Yorker contributor recently put it, that ‘saves the aphorist from self-importance’ (2).

It is not difficult to see the connections between aphorisms and blogs, nor the ways in which aphoristic thinking has shaped how ‘thoughtful’ bloggers produce intellectual content. Nevertheless, there are formal features particular to a blog that would deter it from achieving the same ends as the philosophical or pithy aphorism. Here are a few that I feel comfortable conjecturing:

1. Blogs that purport to produce ‘intellectual’ content tend to do so in a brief though not necessarily succinct manner. Tumblr and other platforms tend to encourage amalgamated, copy-and-paste enunciations via the various sharing functions. Thus, the outcome of thoughtful blogging in the majority of cases is not a cannily delivered, aphorism-like enunciation but rather a mish-mash of lofty quotes and book-clippings.
2. Since becoming ubiquitous over the last decade, so-called thoughtful blogs have tended en masse toward seeking private self-reflection or individual subjective truths. This fact does not necessarily sever their relation from aphoristic writing, which can also be a mode of subjective truth-seeking, but it does, in a fashion, suggest that bloggers prefer to access objectivity through their digitally individuated subjectivity and not through the practice of writing ‘objective’ statements that contact a socialized truth.
3. Blog language, like many other digital modes of communication, has a Newspeak quality to it. Aphorisms also suffer this problem as participants in their determined form, but it is usually because they are attempting to access an objective truth/truism and must use the codified language of ‘thought’ to access it. The intense codification of language and the inflation of certain key-words is inevitable even in so-called wizened discourses.
4. Inter-media tweeting and sharing on blogs gives them a journalistic pulse that aphorisms do not have. The quote-impulse of blogs makes them great for cataloging but not always for original thinking.
5. Personal blogs affirm without question the meaningful individuation of the author. In turn, blogging becomes a hobby, something I as an individual like to do and take a special interest in, without always being reflected upon as a practice corresponding with digital-age socialization.

Those are just some conjectures. However, if thoughtful blogs have become popular repositories for truism-like aphorisms, it is in large part due to their ability to inflate the signifying effects of soundbytes and memorable quote-clippings. The arrangement of personal blogs around aestheticized quote-clips proves, on the one hand, that there is still a ubiquitous interest in cataloging wisdom, and yet, on the other hand, that catalog-blogging does not always produce reflexive thinking about its own practice, since its very ubiquity as a practice has already de-sensitized us to the purported wisdom of its content. (That’s why when you read an unapologetically pretentious blog post you go… ‘Ugh!’)

A great example of unreflective cataloging would be blogs that are literally dedicated to cataloging aphorisms (these are surprisingly numerous – try a Google search). While aphorism-blogs may produce something of archival interest, in form they crystallize the truth-seeking character of aphorisms and stunt their potential to develop in accordance with digital trends. Quotes on blogs, however pithy, cease to move us once they become too numerous or kitschy. Our situation in the blogosphere is therefore this: that thoughtful bloggers en masse are articulating truths that are so subjectively mediated that their only objective element is the truth of bloggers’ hyper-mediatized thinking space. The aphorism, in turn, is affected by this objective situation, in that the truth-content it carries is no longer as valid as it once was in previous moments of aphoristic writing when the content of the phrase was less mediated by digital materials.

The takeaway is that aphorisms, if they are still valuable, have to change their style. They can’t just be snippets or witty wisecracks anymore without running the risk of complete neutralizing their truth-content. Feel-good wisdom, positivistic assertions, and even great quotes have lost their luster during the profligate growth of the blogosphere. So where does that leave bloggers who want to produce ‘thoughtful’ or ‘intellectual’ content of social and political relevance? It leaves them, perhaps, with a mandate for a new approach. To make meaningful statements about the world, digital thinkers need to focus more deliberately on critical activity and less on wisdom-accumulation.

KMS

SOURCES

1. Aphorisms, by Hippocrates. Sourced from The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu//Hippocrates/aphorisms.html
2. ‘Yes, I wrote a book of aphorisms,’ by James Guida. Sourced from The New Yorker. http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/12/writing-aphorisms.html

The Sequel To Before Sunset and Life Itself

Before Midnight the sequel to Before Sunset which was the sequel to Before Sunset (Joseph son of Jacob son of…) has made its film premier at Sundance and will soon everywhere in theaters so that I can watch it and…what other film deserves a run on sentence to begin an essay and what other film or sequel to a film am I more afraid of writing about (and watching) as Before Midnight? Because…what other film has so worked its way into the way that I think and talk and live than the Before Sunrise and Sunset…to the point where someone the other evening in a bookstore maybe because of my age (24) or my hair (wavy/greasy) said that I sounded like Ethan Hawke in Before Sunrise…and who was that person other than a European girl I was going to end up walking around New York with, talking, with until 5 a.m… and how bizarre is it that without trying but without not not trying you can begin to become just like Pierre Menard writing Don Quixote word for word without actually reading the book itself or having it open in front of you to copy? Or that my college girlfriend resembles Clarissa Dalloway and that I swear I feel just like Peter Walsh when I see her with her Richard Dalloway-esc probably future husband or that the love I feel I’ve lost for good reminds me not a little of La Maga in Cortazar’s Hopscotch or that when Kundera’s Tomas talks about his erotic escapades I can’t help but think…but no the point is that Before Midnight is coming to theaters unavoidably soon and that my whole generation—twenty years younger than Jesse and Celine will be in the new film—will plan dates on Couchsurfing and call it their “before sunrise” moment and talk about it on Skype with the person they met on Couchsurfing the week after they had their planned affair, not realizing that it took Jesse and Celine ten years to find each other again and that they met in the first place as strangers on a train and…that the reason they love the films so much, anyway, is because it represents a fatalism that their own romanticism has lost… which makes their own romanticism not romanticism at all, but a kind of irony that they themselves aren’t even aware of… Before Midnight according to early reviews is “perfect” and I don’t doubt it because Before Sunset was perfect probably the first or second best film of the last decade and had an ending even more perfect than the film itself and I have no doubt that it will say something incredibly important about the way our relationships in the west in the first world in the postmodern world are…that it will be beautiful and poignant and real…but all of that makes me terrified that the whole point of these beautiful films is to become an icon for a whole generation of unreality and a whole generation of superficiality that it will be easier to blog about it (my god what am I doing?) than actually live. That a life centered around the search for love, the search for a genuine connection with another person is much harder to attain than the status of modern romantic is to acquire…and what’s the point of genuinely great films about love (and these films are genuinely great) if we don’t know how to be genuinely great lovers…if we lack the recognition in our own lives of what makes a single night, a single conversation, a single kiss worthy of a film, or book, or record, or poem, or painting? Standard intellectual criticism isn’t enough to describe why it’s so important that Linklater’s films exist, or why it’s so terrifying that we find ourselves needing those films and emulating them…why Jesse and Celine themselves, in Before Sunset, almost as if they were us, having watched Before Sunrise, discuss how important that first night (that first film) was…I will undoubtedly go to see Before Midnight more than once, and I will certainly go the first night is available in wide-release…but my eagerness and the eagerness of those like me (and they are legion) is only a sign that life, while it can often emulate art…can rarely attain its magnificence.

MG

Why Criticism?

We need good criticism because bad criticism already exists: because while bad criticism can be the result of common human failings— sycophancy, ignorance, dogmatism, reflexive niceness…—good criticism can only be the result of a discerning, open-minded, non-theoretical, empathetic care for the state of the arts. Without trying to seem too misanthropic —while not trying to seem completely otherwise—I would suggest that good critics are as rare as wise people, and that the two are, in actuality, one and the same.

I’ve been thinking after spending a few days rereading Clive James Cultural Amnesia and John Bayley’s essay collection The  Power of Delight and generally after absorbing much of George Steiner’s writing over the last six months or so. All of these critics I’ve found beyond excellent and beyond useful in my own attempts to better comprehend literature and the halo of art and philosophy around it. While their styles are superficially different (James often reads like a funnier, poppier version of Steiner) I’ve noticed that each of these critics (and there are more like them) have similar backgrounds. Each is unabashedly multilingual, each received the kind of education one imagines the brightest students got at Cambridge or Oxford in the mid-twentieth century, and each is essentially journalistic despite academic backgrounds—that is, their criticism is typically culled from a series of reviews from a variety of middleish to upper brow magazines over a period of years—and each, unsurprisingly, are practitioners, if not masters, of fiction themselves.

The profile of the amalgam critic—my ideal critic it seems—above, summarized looks like this: pragmatic, learned, multilingual, moderately polymathic, and er…British (though James is an Australian expat). This still seems a little too broad so I’ll offer further criteria: all three critics are humanistic critics, which is itself a kind of anti-dogma. That is, they are—despite a serious awareness and comprehension of critical theories—critics who want to elucidate texts for the primary purpose of making them comprehensible to a general audience, while explaining simultaneously why a general audience requires the enrichment of this kind of reading. Steiner (like American critics Harold Bloom and John Simon) is concerned with falling standards for cultural literacy, which is also the de facto concern of James in his Cultural Amnesia.

The reason these critics are so important, to my mind, is that the kind of aesthetic-minded, passionately learned, yet passionately general criticism they exhibit, is if not dying, severely underrepresented and underappreciated in American cultural life. It is a cliche to bemoan the jargony historicizing of most academic literary writing, but it is worth just noting that bemoaned or not, such theorizing is still fashionable and widely practiced. And we should also note, that many general, popular reviews published in The New York Times Sunday Review, rarely if ever exhibit the kind of graceful erudition of the average Steiner piece. All the critical vitriol seems to be reserved for the political-theoretical takedowns of academic criticism, while most journalistic criticism seems pleasantly nonchalant and pleasantly unaware of the huge background radiation present in our most important books. Bayley and James, like Edmund Wilson before them, read fluently in Russian, while Steiner reads—by my estimation— at least six languages and lectures in four. Critics like this simply catch more resonance in the books they review, and not just because of a fluency in multiple languages, but because of a fluency in every major domain of cultural production, past and present.

Most mainstream book reviews, even in vaunted publications like the Times, tend to assign specialists to their book reviews. That is, a historian reviews a history book, an anthropologist an anthropology title, and so on—which makes perfect sense, I grant. But looking at the sheer breadth of Steiner’s work, or again, further back, Edmund Wilson’s, one feels a real loss at the vibrancy present in the best generalist criticism. Except in cases of absolute specialization—and there is something already self-defeating about a book that can only be understood by a specialist—the advantage, to my mind, will go to the critic who can unpack a text with the broadest sense of its possible application and scope. In American criticism, we are more likely to find this kind of writing in music or even some film criticism—fields less ossified and theory-obsessed than literature and literary nonfiction.

The reason that music criticism, for instance, is more alive than literary criticism—at the moment—is that music critics are still allowed to respond to a record with range and even emotion. Contemporary music critics tend to more encyclopedic, I should mention, that literary critics, if only because it is easier to take in all the records relevant to a particular release than it is to read all the books relevant to a new publication. But this should only be a reminder that the public role of music in our culture—that is, it is something everyone talks about—used to be occupied by literature. Music criticism is more alive, simply, because music is more alive. Our critical responses to literature are more specialized, it follows then, because literature has become more specialized.

The deeper problem then, is, that we essentially have two (among many) cultures: one where people can discourse on Proust or Mann and one where they can talk about Yo La Tengo or Radiohead and where there may be some overlap, but only nominal. I’ve read, in other words, some very literary music reviews on sites like Cokemachineglow—but never reviews where the literary touchstones seem more than ornamental. While on the other hand, the people who teach the Joyce-Proust-Mann type courses rarely could say why certain works of contemporary music are so important to their students.

What used to hold all these disparate forms and modes of art and inquiry together was a general cultural humanism—the sense that what matters in art isn’t its category or contemporary or classic status—but rather how much light that art shined on the art of living itself. No generalist can be a completist, I should admit, no generalist can have good taste, deep understanding of everything—but the total mesh of a culture should represent all of its best facets—something I suspect we lack now. The subterranean channels between the arts are blocked off, mutual respect and even distant understanding are simply not present between them—which means that bad art can more easily flourish and breed in the shadows.

To return to where I began to this article, and hopefully complete it, bad criticism is a result of our worst human and therefore cultural tendencies, the worst of which, one uneasily concludes, is self-satisfaction. Without saying too much about what a critic looks like, but using a few examples, as I have, to point the way—at least in literature—it means, at minimum, being unerringly focused on what people need: good art not bad—and learning as much as is necessary for one to make those important critical distinctions…which is nearly everything.

MG

How to Be a Russian Novelist

I suspect that one of the reasons that Latin American fiction was so good during the mid-20th century—the years known as “The Boom”—was that the societal and political conditions that surrounded life for Latin American writers and intellectuals then (and now) were such that fiction could draw equally and paradoxically on both optimism and despair for its energy—as well as look towards Europe for cultural inspiration.

The conditions of life for the “Boom” writers (Cortázar, Márquez, Llosa, Fuentes among others)  closely resembled that of the great the 19th century Russian writers (Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov). Politically, spiritually, economically both 20th century Latin America and 19th century Russia were intensely, feverishly revolutionary; the literature which comes out of those times, even if not even not literally about the events of the day, reflects the dynamic intellectual atmosphere of the times.

I am not trying to imply that there is some absolute sociological law which dooms or guarantees the production of literature (Marlowe couldn’t write like Shakespeare despite drawing on the same cultural energy, et al) but that there are patterns in literary boom times that indicate the heuristic importance of certain cultural habits and the irrelevance of others. The paradoxical embrace of despair and optimism in other words, the existence of which—as I’ve pointed out—was a feature of two periods of classic writing, should therefore be considered important to any culture that wants to cultivate its own great works.

Without exhaustively cataloging what I might as well call the spiritual bipolarity of certain books, one only need brush up on one’s Dostoyevsky—or Márquez for that matter—to know what I mean: one of the things we love about reading is having our inner highs and lows mapped out for us, and as easy as that might seem, only the rare writer can do it profoundly.

Russians took their inner lives seriously (as least their writers did) and they took the fate of their nation, their national identity as Russians, seriously (very seriously) as well. The exploitation, the dictatorships, the economic volatility, the Catholic history of Latin America (Latin America is a term I’m using very loosely and broadly here) can easily be interpreted to resemble Russian society of the previous century—so too can the huge importance placed on new literature and public intellectuals in both epochs. A new book or article by Dostoevsky or Tolstoy, a new play by Chekhov was a national event, while in Latin America, the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa ran for president of Peru in 1990 and lost a close run-off election.

For a literary writer to hold political office, or to exercise real political, public clout, in the U.S., is almost inconceivable—but my point is not to suggest that writers should run for political office (I would suggest the opposite), but that a society which vaunts its writers on a national scale, is one that loves literature, and one where literature must be flourishing; one where the sense of national fate is somehow tied to the fate of national aesthetics.

For a writer working in the United States, while the actual politics of a nation like 19th century Russia should not be enviable, the sense of event and importance that surrounded the release of new books in my examples should be a source of jealousy.

But more seriously for our writers—the spiritual, political, and aesthetic intensity (generated by the movement between hope and despair) of a great Russian writer, or a great contemporary Chilean or Mexican or Argentine writer, should be something worth emulating. Our writing, and more deeply, our sense of what it means to be a writer, has just become—on a general level at least—too trivial, too flippant. While the next pamphlet by Tolstoy was an event that legitimately could change the course of Russian history, the next novel by Jonathan Franzen is likely only to change the schedule of a book signing in Park Slope.

Writing a novel, a poem, a play, an essay—anything that one intends to publish and not keep private—should not be an act for the sake of itself, or for the sake of self-satisfaction. I don’t know for sure how it is that we can intensify (that is: Russiafy) our literary lives and our literary culture, but I do know that we ought to; that our new writing seems to lack (and this is a collective action problem) a singular conviction and power.

One suggestion, might be that we simply have to take life more seriously, as seriously (and yes that means we dispensing with our reflexive postmodern irony folks) the Russians did, or as the “Boom” writers did. We have to be serious in the sense that we see literature as having force enough to alter its surroundings, and serious in the sense that those surroundings are worth the time it would take to alter them.