Inkhorn; Don't Truckle

I have been very happy with the last two words of the day from the Merriam Webster website - ‘truckle’ and ‘inkhorn’.

‘Truckle’ is just a fantastic and simple good ol’ anglo-sounding word, and, for some reason, is just now used. It means ‘to act in a subservient manner.’ Imagine the succinct insults: Stop truckling to me. Stop be such a truckler. Trucklehead.

The other word is great, and for far more interesting reasons than concise insults. ‘Inkhorn’ and its etymology sum up, in a single word, highly visual and based on material object, a whole tension within the English language I often think about and feel - the tension between latinate words and anglo words. The ‘inkhorn’ itself refers to the horn of ink scribes would use in the 16th century - and as was the vogue, they would introduce into English text many latin and greek words, rather than use the vulgar English ones. The term ‘inkhorn’ became an insult to this practice.

For as long as I can remember, I've had very emotionally colored relationships to words in English - warm, direct feelings for this of Anglo descent, cold, detached, clinical feelings for those of latinate descent. The quickest way to give an example of this is with quite vulgar words, dealing with sex, genitalia, excrement. A doctor says penis, a child says pee-pee, an adult (barring mixed company) says dick. See also: Vagina, hop-hoo, Cunt. Feces, poo-poo, shit. To have sexual intercourse, to fuck.

All of these examples are colored by a specific historical-social structure: medicine. Professionals in medicine, as well as in law, preferred latin terms. That was the professional language, which also was the language of the upper-class. I feel this presence is still somewhat felt - latinate words, when used in place of just as clear anglo ones - feel bother clinical and pretentious.

When recently reading a Martin Luther King biography, I was surprised a bit when reading on the college student MLK’s rhetoric training - and MLK’s love of finding as many latinate and high-sounding words he could to replace any pedestrian ones in his speech. Surprised because his later speech doesn’t have that kind of abstruseness, and is heavy on biblical and folk idiom, which avoids inkhorn words. I wonder, though, about race and class… and adolescence. When I was a student in high school and college, I also felt like these words - precise, esoteric - contained some innate power, like they truly showed or inculcated knowledge. That line of thought has completely given way for me to the more basic (and I suppose ‘democratic’) American style.

As for class and hierarchy though - I do think that the desire to showcase one’s education and verbal superiority must arise in certain social configurations. MLK was a young black man in 20th America, and he was planning to be a public speaker. He must have felt the compulsion to excel in the craft of language in order to impress and cow whites, in order to not feel less-than.

I think of some of my soviet students, too - some of them have what seems like a holy reverence for inkhorn words, for latinate errata. This seems to me to be connected with soviet people’s reverence for experts, for authority - a gross generalization, but one I’ve encountered (a soviet biologists who would not discuss homosexuality in a class debate, for instance, because homosexuality ‘is not natural, and how can I talk about it with all of you who do not know the science?’). I suppose it’s safe to say that when there is a class divide or desire to assert power and cow others, language is always a field of that battle and subsequent discrimination.

Live Wire

I ran into an old friend the other day at gathering. An old lover, to be specific - though that term moans with some sultry sentiment. She is of the omni-feeling, uber honest type. To be a little detached, I might say per formatively honest (but that would be the suspicious person in my head, who has the face of some internet troller).

I am always impressed by her, in part because of her leaving out the axiom of speaking what is real but unsaid to make it manifest (Czesław Miłosz’s “What is unpronounced tends to nonexistence."), and, also in part because what she says is very flattering towards me. The first time we met, and our first night together, meant a lot to her - as she says, because of my generosity, and kindness. She had been going through some hard times - is often going through hard times. Little things - things I would never have taken note of - like listening very well, and making sure she had a seat at the table at the bar when she got there later than the rest of the crew, left a deep impression on her, which she never fails to mention in the few times I’ve seen her over the past few years.

She is a lively person - exuberantly joyful and dedicated to positivity, which is the flip side of her wild sadness. She doesn’t live in an emotional calm world - life itself is a big question to her. She kept leaning over to my ear at the bar, always shifting from topic-driven conversation to meta-what-am-I-doing-right-now-as-I-talk-to-you conversation, asking me if her behavior towards behaving towards life like this, or giving absolute attention to her boyfriend like this, is sane/insane.

One thing she discussed (she is great at passionate monologues) is generosity and commitment.

She tried to make clear for me, when she bought me a drink, the joy of being consciously generous, and described and articulated ways I was generous - with my presence, coming to this celebration, ect.. She believes in training our minds to be conscious of others’ generosity as well as out own. Which goes into the next topic…

Commitment. She articulated an idea of relationships that I often think about, as a move from short relationship to short relationship, and that is the Practice of loving somebody. In some sense, it’s a mutual lifting yourselves up by your bootstraps agreement, but also a way of altering one’s perception, and refocusing on positive attributes when negative one’s are finally noticed. In this way, it is way to foster deeper a understanding of people. 

There’s more to say, but not now. Humanity - a live wire, or one sheathed and quieted in polyethylene. 

Scott Pilgrim

Scott Pilgrim

How to begin with Scott Pilgrim? Other than to say that its unique humor and cultural and formal fusion have made my life qualitatively better.

Actually, there are many ways to talk about it. Let me try a few.

First off, the comic book versus film. The film definitely has greater pacing, plot-wise and and humor-wise. Watching the film, many of the jokes are speedily and tightly executed, but I do remember a few which I laughed at but couldn't get ("Be good. No, be really good." "I will be so good."). But these jokes specifically, like a candy that is too chewy to quickly chew and so you must proceed slowly with focused mastication, help make Scott Pilgrim unique. Not being able to quickly or completely consume media makes it memorable. Like Dylan lyrics, something you can't reduce, or comprehend and promptly write off.

So, in the film, the jokes are tight. Reading the comic, I recognized the source material of the jokes, but also saw a difference in how they were rendered. The comic's sense of humor is intentionally of a slacker-style. A humorous scene often ends without a final beat, and I often found myself turning the page, expecting to continue a scene or dialogue, only to find a whole new scene beginning. This became a habitual thing, where I often checked to see if I had missed pages, which isn't super easy, because most pages aren't numbers, and the paper has a thick, dry quality which somehow denied my digital probing (incidentally, I missed a page only once).

I believe this flipping back and forth happened less frequently as the six-volume series progressed, but there are other places where this slacker, anti-professional, post-moderny sense of humor and playfulness is exhibited - in plotting. The most glaring plot-laziness I can remember is when Scott is fighting Todd, the super-vegan, and our hero recognizes he can't beat him, and prays for a deus ex machina to save him. Which, of course, then promptly happens, in the form of the vegan police (who, hilariously, are only armed with their hands making the gestures of guns - one of the other great tropes of O'Malley's humor, the unexplained gags of the world he's created). That's how O'Malley, the indie comic book auteur does it.

But see how the the movie does it differently - and better. The same beat happens - Scott realizes he can't beat Todd. But then, Scott tricks Todd into imbibing half-and-half, and this summons the vegan police. Clearly a better plotting mechanism, as this shows linear causality (the stuff of plots), and we get to fully root for our wily hero.

It is hard to criticize an author who consciously makes 'weak' parts of his story. It is done by artists sometimes to great effect for the specific effect of emphasizing the artificiality of the story/movie/book, which can highlight the relationship between author and reader, or nudge the reader out the slumber of fictionland. I think of the emotional painful one at the end of Richard Adam's Plague Dogs, where he ends his story tragically, then has a sonnet-dialogue with the reader who wants a happy ending, and then, half-askedly, does just that, and writes a perfect and happy fairy tale ending, an ending, though, that feels bitter in the heart, and reminds the reader that the wishful thinking we have for happy resolution in stories doesn't happen in the world. DFW and his footnotes, Italo Calvino when he discussed how you bought the book in your hand. I mention these few examples, because the technique can be effective, and it often is in Scott Pilgrim (I enjoyed characters consistently referring to previous volumes rather than explaining to characters what had happened). Patching up plot, though, doesn't work very well. But honor the impulse to do differently!

I know how it feels, too. There is creative joy when working on a story, and you're working in a genre, and you tie up a loose end by a super-trope. In Blue Belt, in the epilogue, I originally just had one lion randomly turn into a princess and fall in love with the boy. I thought this was snarky-funny and sophisticatedly wholesome. It was a knowing thinness, and that made it funny, though without fully diminishing it's dramatically functional potential.

Then people pointed out that I was wrong. My ending was easy, and it was a funny (mostly to me), but it was lazy, and the audience let me know that. I rewrote parts of the story, and, poof, the scene now has causes and is a consequence, and now has dramatic-emotional resonance, i.e. it works.

So, the slacker/post-moderny sense of humor has its charm, and the young artist might charm himself. But it doesn't make for a more engaging, effective story.

Though, anthropologically, the slacker tone is quite nice. In volume 3, where we cut from fight, to pizza joint after the fights be delayed, to brunch the next day, to the mall, to a concert, to work, and, eventually, to another show and (finally) to the conclusion of the fight, we have here a confusing situation of plotting - why don't they finish the fight! Why all the delays! And we could mark it to funny lazy writing, which we can, but it's hard to deny that it's also a willing reflection of slacker, early-twenty something tone, which is a vital and unique part of Scott and his universe. If this were the story of young, responsible, go-getter, it would be all fore-ground plot - battling exes is important! In the series, though, we have a confusion of priorities, for the hero, and for the narrative. Scott, as we see, consistently avoids conflict. But perhaps he should be the one, and not the writer, avoider the conflict for him?

* * *

Some of O'Malley's humor comes from *** nature of the world. Things are a certain way, and he doesn't explain it. Sub-space. Video-game style fighting - video-game style fighting, where, if someone dies, their body bursts into coins. This no big deal. Or even, what is Scott and Wallace's arrangement, of Wallace paying for things and the two sharing a bed, if not sexual? (It probably isn't, but the running gag is that is't never made clear, and Scott is always uncomfortable discussing it.)

Sometimes, these unexplained things do get explained farther down the line, to good effect. Such as, one of my favorite meta-comic moment from the first book, the glow. The glow is drawn with bold, exuberant lines around Ramona's head when she enters a very nervous, personal mood, eyes bulging as she pretends to feel normal. The thing is, the other characters can see these bold lines, and talk about it. In the final book, there is an explanation of the glow, which has a satisfyingly psychological edge. What their reader thought was style and symbol turns out to be an actual presence in the world. This is genius, a satisfying way to being awareness to the medium and style.

Sometimes the unexplainedness of things bogs the reading down, as with the evil exes. It is not the existence of them, or the league itself, but specifically, their motivation, and, especially, the timeframe in which they operate. In some volumes (such as 5), they appear in the very beginning, but do not choose to fight til days (weeks?) later. They just float around, hang out, sometimes send a robot to kill Scott, and then, for no reason, kidnap Scott's friend. As a reader, it was mildly frustrating not knowing what rules the exes functioned by, or what would push them to fight. It made the plotting soupy.

The fighting is something special. That people can fight as if to the death, or to the death, and it's no big thing, and they can go meet up for a drink or go their party afterwards; that Scott can be fighting for his life and his friends just watch bemusedly as they chat each other up - this is fun itself, but also suggests something: perhaps, in Pilgrims world, fighting is an expression of tensions and struggles people have with each other, and, in this world, people can act on them, without it straining social cohesion.

* * *

To discuss Scott Pilgrim, we must discuss the two main characters - Ramona and Scott.

When I first saw the movie, Ramona was clearly a problem. She wasn't a character,;she was a hot, stylish girl who for no reason complies to dorky Scott's desire for her, and is the prize if he defeats her evil exes. Feminists tremble in wrothe agony at this film (when they're not too busy enjoying it), and anyone interested in Story (the capital 'S' here implies dynamic psychological interaction and gut-wrenchingly potent representations of reality) should stay home and watch In Treatment. I do think that the video-game-fighting structure of the story avails itself to some neat interpretations - to be with some one, you must overcome/they must overcome their preconceptions with people who have formed their past experiences. But this is not what the film's virtue rests on.

Ramona: a girl who so identifies with her mystery-preservation and run-away-from-someone-knowing-you mentality, as well as with, externally, her system of evil exes (which she is complicit with: she stays with Scott on the condition he will fight them). How can I root for the relationship, knowing she is bad news for Scott? And so the story, speaking from the heart of the audience (me), is a false story. You don't win someone who doesn't want you. Her character needs more agency if she is going to change and be with Scott.

This was my first (and lasting) impression of the story, informed as it is by my own life experiences, my own, as it were, Ramonas. (Sigh.) But re-engaging with Scott Pilgrim, via rewatching the movie and reading the comics, that critical reservation is overwhelmed by the humor and vibrancy of the universe. The epic quest of the video game conceit is foiled beautiful with the indie-hipster-geek-slacker sensibility of all the characters, it makes me cry with love. It is a world where, at a loft party, Scott can fight for his life against a robot as his girlfriend and good friend Kim talk relationship and get drunk upstairs, knowing Scott will be just fine. It is a world where anxieties of male inferiority and status are enacted through fighting (and killing) rival males who are cooler than you. Awesome! (I think. Right?) It is a world where, no matter the suckiness of the situation, or the laziness and selfishness of our hero, he brings a buoyancy, shamelessness, joyfulness for trivialities, and manic optimism that carry him and us through his quest.

This almost brings us to Scott himself, an interestingly hard to pin-down fictional entity. But one final look at Ramona. Specifically, at her film and comic representations. My first impression is derived form the film, where she is super stylish and hot, while Michael Cera still is Michael Cera. In the comic, she is fashionable, but doesn't exude the super-model out-of-you-league-ness she does in the film. Also, in the comic, Scott looks cute, and somewhat stylish, and so, though he acts like a boy, we feel he has some appeal, which is quite different from the movie. But more importantly, their relationship makes more sense, if not complete sense. Like all the sexual-romantic relationships in the Scott Pilgrim universe, it is mostly sexual. It starts off as hooking up. The two of them are just 'hanging out', so to speak. People hook up in the comic, people go out with each other, but there are no strong relationships. No commitments. Everybody is trying everyone on, but no one is buying anything. And so, though the book is not pornographic, we see Scott and Ramona getting it on a bit more than in the movie, and so part of the mystery is resolved - Ramona's getting her cookie. This gave her some agency, and, to my satisfaction, it gave O'Malley's story-kudos for representing casual youth sex culture.

The two representations, comic and film, of Scott,go the other way around. Scott is appealing in the comic (cosmetically), but in the movie he is without sex appeal. This makes it easier to root for him as an underdog, if it makes the story unbelievable. It makes the story the fantasy of one overcoming men who are cooler and hotter than you to get the hottest girl. Okay.

Though it's important to note the film makers for their original instinct - a truer choice, if a less satisfying one - that at the end, Scott is more confident, but Ramona leaves him anyway, and he reciprocates Knive's devotion and dates her. Interesting, though, is that the test audience focus groups did not like this ending - they wanted Scott to get with Ramona! The whole structure of the the story is built around that. An artsier take is always to deconstruct the precepts a story is built on - but the exuberance and, yes, simple-minded joy which is Scott Pilgrim and our enjoyment of Scott Pilgrim, is infectious. We want him to win.

In the comic, I found I couldn't imagine Scott as in real life. I don't say this is a criticism - it's interesting. He is supposed to both be a loser and relatively cool - I think. It's hard to draw him into real life because his conditions seem unreal - he has no job at the beginning, and just lives off friends, I think. Money isn't expressed as necessary, and not making money does not prevent Scott from having a normal, bar-hopping post-college life. And Scott is a loser, somewhat stupid, and not a good bassist, and yet people like him a lot, and girl after girl are shown to fall for him. Why? Does this look like anybody I've ever known, who wasn't just super hot? No.

This brings to what I do like about Scott Pilgrim - he is not a psychological character. He is a fictional stand-in for exuberant selfishness and being extremely joyful for creature comforts (and extremely emotive when these desires are frustrated). Especially in the later comics, O'Malley draws Scott with bigger eyes, and in a more cute/kawaii manga style, crying whenever there is the slightest disappointment, or crying with joy for the slightest word of encouragement (from the right person). Generally, O'Malley strips Scott of having any interiority. Scott shows all his emotions loudly and immediately. Scott becomes, not a person (people control themselves, repress, have hidden thoughts, learn to not be selfish in social interactions), but an animal, transparent and exuberant, and is, in this way, utterly endearing. The audience can project, because Scott becomes that part of ourselves that just wants everything he wants, and doesn't want to work hard for it. He is a representation of our childishness which doesn't survive in the real world on its own, but, without which, our exuberance and joy would be much diminished.

As a final note here, I should say that, yes, Scott gets everything he wants, and he doesn't really work for it. How is he the best fighter in the province? Does he practice? Does he train? No. He just is. Because... No because. The author wrote it that way.

Interestingly, I read an interview with O'Malley, and he discussed this same point with some criticism: "I feel like culture is going this way, this kind of no-effort thing. Like, Scott Pilgrim didn't have to work to be a superhero – he just kind of is one, when he needs to be one. Sometimes that makes me a little depressed."

* * *

Final note. Dorkiest note.

Scott Pilgrim is also notable for -Video game referencing.

How can I keep from singing? When so much of my youth was spent in love with NES games, 8-bit violence, and here, I find loving homage after homage to them. By the end, Pilgrim has became a Link, complete with sword and upside-down tri-force. My giddiest moment would be, though, for an obscure reference which I was surprised to find myself even noticing. In volume four, the final battle with the evil ex-girlfriend, the visual sequencing is lifted directly from the opening cinematic of the original NES Ninja Gaiden (1988), itself modeled after a Kurosawa-style samurai charge. I haven't played that game since I was 10, but there it was, in my brain, waiting to be remembered. There's also a scene of Ramona dive-bombing Scott as an winged warrior with a sword that, I swear, is quotation of a comic version of Legend of Zelda I read serialized in the magazine Nintendo Power in the early '92, when I was 9.

I bring these up - well, why? Is it happy nostalgia? Yes. But it's also something more, and Scott Pilgrim is this also: a synthesis of video game culture with story and comic and film. That is, a synthesis of video games with smart adult culture. I imagine for many of us that played and loved games - it is for me - that, on the road to becoming adults, we put away childish things. I don't know anyone, other than my brother, who I could make these video game references, mainly because I hang with an artsy crowd that don't share these past experiences (when I showed my brother the page I thought to be a Ninja Gaiden reference, he got it with blinking an eye). Scott Pilgrim is the only artwork I know that pays fulls homage, without shame, to games.

There is something alchemical that happens - kind of like with Tarantino, wherein an artists loves a genre considered shlocky and low, but loves it so much, so wholeheartedly, the he or she can produce a rarefied version of it which is both schlocky and art, and is bold enough to perceive the art and moments of elevation in schlock. Why do people love video games? Why do people pony up and pay greenbacks and hours to go see imperfect schlocky movies - all the time? There is also pleasure in schlock, and a satisfaction in the form of the medium itself, yes, but there is also hope for greatness, if only in moments, that can be catalogued in the mind's great book of pleasures.

What I learned from Scott Pilgrim:

- Some elements of story or world can be elegantly opaque - unknown to the audience. To prevent the audience from a feeling they completely understand something can cause them to become more engaged. Don't show all your cards.

- Don't underestimate the appeal of endearing-manic-self-absorbed characters. We socialized people need that reminder of childish selfishness.

- Don't let a great story shape or structure blind you from making the actual story good, and give the characters true motivations.

- Love your subject material and theme and style unabashedly.

The Corrections

I am currently reading Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections (thanks for the copy, Liam and Melissa). After page 17, I was prepared to write a piece about how terrible the beginning is, and, possibly, the whole project. I should note I've listened to his other book, Freedom, read some memoir-y book of his (The Discomfort Zone), and read some essays from his book How To Be Alone (and was disappointed that he never discussed the premise of the title in any direct fashion). But I wanted to read this super popular book. Just like I read the last Harry Potter - I want to know what people are reading. I should also note that I then got sick, bed-bound for a day, in which I read the next hundred pages. I softened. It reads really well. It's funny, it's smart. Some of the scenes and some of the writing are excellent. Most of it. I could bootlick and learn something, sure, but that's not to say I don't have broader problems with the book.

And so I started the book with a bit of impatience. We open with a 10-or-so page chapter watching the elder Lamberts in the decline of their years. We see their perfect, americana, midwestern suburban house, kept magazine-clean ("the fiction in the house was that people didn't live there"). Enid, the matriarch of the book, is overwhelmed by material - she hides bags and bags of mail in different places throughout the house. Alfred, the patriarch, is in physical decline, and spends a lot of his day in the overwhelming embrace of an impossible large and cushy chair. Most of the opening is about the thingness of the house, the materiality of living, and the small apparent concerns (of furniture, etc.) which consume these old folk.

This depiction of being overwhelmed by material, and of being fully occupied with the material world (materialism), is contrasted at the outset of the second chapter when we meet Enid and Alfred's culture-critiquing, marxist, leather-clad idealist son. Bring on the familial conflict!

There is an excellent bit of writing right in the first paragraph, when we see the parents after they just landed in NYC: "To anyone who saw them averting their eyes from the dark-haired New Yorkers careering past them, to anyone who caught a glimpse of Alfred's straw fedora looming at the height of Iowa corn on Labor Day, or the yellow wool of the slacks stretching over Enid's outslung hip, it was obvious that they were midwestern and intimidated."

So good! See how the comparison to corn, emblem of the midwestern plains, elegantly and concisely characters the old man! Without breaking a sweat, without a paragraph of digression, just in one sentence, nail on the head. Economical writing is elegant. See how the mother's bight colors (also of the color of that regional crop) clearly cuts her figure for us! And the humor, without condescension, of the whole thing (well, that's harder to see, but how I feel it).

See how seamlessly it works, and how it asks to ignored. Perhaps my opinion of good writing is similar to that old-school feeling about children: it should be seen, not heard begging for attention. Writing should serve the story, not the other way around. A number of patches in the opening I found tedious and cutesy, purple and clever. One digression on 'crepuscular' and 'corpuscular' is the perfect example. For me, such a passage is vibrating with the author's desire for special attention for his cleverness. Cleverness, in our diploma-saturated nation, in this media saturated time, in our wired and infinite information age, in our stupidly smart world, is at a period of great devaluation. (Save in conversation, where it's spontaneity and ease validates its impulse, and distances itself from that feeling that it is trying to please.) If I want cleverness, I'll go be with my friends. My friends are clever. My kitchen table is clever. My pillow talk is clever. Cleverness is the fizz of living - but it doesn't last long in the fridge without going so, so flat.

It could be argued that this 'crepuscular' passage is in a section about Chip, our feckless, straw dog academic, and it is just like the cute intellectual show-offy thing he might do, but this argument would avoid the fact that we know, we know in our blood, going into this book, that this character is a caricature of the author himself. Which brings me to this line on the third page of Chip's introduction, and, perhaps, it points out my greatest issue with the book as a whole: "... he was thirty-nine years old, and he blamed his parent's for the person he'd become." This line confirmed exactly what I had felt in the first section about the parents - an intelligent, unsympathetic, and vengeful eye turned on one's parents at particular moment in American history.

I grew up in the glut of the American 80's and 90's; as a reasonably intelligent and relatively angsty teen and in my new-found high-school intellectualism, I analyzed the consumeristic practices of my parents like it was the punk rock thing to do. I thought it was, but never had sex in high school, so maybe it wasn't so punish or rockish. I wrote about how cosumerism-materialism belied an existential hole, and how these traits were harming all of our relationships and happiness. I wrote a lot about this. I consumed David Foster Wallace at the time, and was enormously impressed by the endlessly clever and footnoting critique of, well, you know, Society. There was a phase, and I passed through it. I haven't been able to return to DFW without feeling a certain futility and intellectual-clever vamping in his endless salvos.

Considering DFW, an anecdote: There was a summer in my early twenties when I was at the beach in the Carolinas with some friends, and one of the girls and I were chatting a the widow's watch, she was a Foster Wallace book in her hand. We talked about the book and the author, and my two-cents were that his loudly intellectual-esque form (a literary voice that aped that of academic writing, complete with footnoting and esoteric words, as well as an inherited post-moderny story sensibility of fracturedness) covered up and belied an inability to tell stories. How does this work? (How am I such a good actor?) Stories require recognition and change and acceptance of things that aren't ideal. Stories are the conflicts between people and reality, and the consequences. The person changes, or they suffer. The possibility of change and recognition is the combustion in the story's engine - otherwise, we have only mannequins and automatons (and maybe that's DFW's perspective). Stories also, as a matter of structure, require their creator to be able to prioritize what things are important to the story. For Wallace, and his sprawling style, the dissecting lens itself has all the priority, and nothing within its gaze can rival it, or it challenge it to control its shape. I remember saying that someone who couldn't write a straight story had some disconnect with their emotional life, with their heart, didn't know how to prioritize the humanness of the story. A little pat, I admit, but it was a few weeks later Wallace killed himself, and I felt, irrationally, mildly guilty for uttering my verdict.

(Which isn't to say Wallace didn't have a huge heart, and express such concerns beautifully: his graduation speech was something that did, and also, it comes to mind, his essay, "Signifying Nothing", which is, surprise surprise, his shortest essay, running at four pages. Also, a short story about a sleazy guy seducing a woman who discloses that she is a rape victim, which made me consider rape more intensely than I ever had. I bring it up as a stylistic trend of his - to overwhelm his stories and his characters with ideas and asides and moreness, rather than concision, rather than emphasize what was important. This trend of his led him to produce Infinite Jest, a thousand page book, and one which has no end.)

* * *

For me, personally, this type of fiction (intelligent, culturally well-versed, pessimistic realism, sullenly antagonistic towards our cultural configuration) pushes boundaries of sensibility for me. Literary Realism: A steady look at realistic people and their realistic unhappiness. An examination of our family, those close to us, ourselves, and the use of this material for our work, to give to others. Some atavistic sense that one shouldn't air dirty laundry, some recoil from voyeurism, rises in my mammalian, tribal blood.

That's a lie, it's not an instinctual thing at all. It is a preference in stories for a small amount of distance between real people and the story. Greater distance, to me, indicates that then the author must craft his story, intentionally choose everything, no

It is the sense that the author may not be trustworthy, that his his perspective may cold, bitter, and decidedly pessimistic, and that he me be stuck in the noble rut of serious fiction (literary realism).

To the point: Dissecting something is a different operation entirely from creating something, which is the province of parents, of gods, and of artists.

I'm not sure that focusing on neuroses, countless little failures, and catalogues of our material life is powerful literature or storytelling. Just as I've known brilliant people who are depressed, and who sit on the couch and intelligently articulate their (and the world's) problems, I appreciate listening to (reading) Franzen, but I don't trust him as someone with a wide view of life. I can't help but think ( I may be wrong) that there is a peculiar satisfaction to being unhappy and correct about conditions, and that there's a desire to punish the world by exposing the machinations of unhappiness one has discovered.

That said, The Corrections is reading very nicely, after the initial 20-page hump. The presence of one seeming sane character (the sister, Denise), and the satire which is Chip is entertaining (though I wish I could feel more empathy with his erstwhile love of Theory, and I was surprised that his career as a professorial Lothario was so short and so inexplicably unstable)

* * *

I can come off as anti-elitist, anti-snobbist, which, I don't know, is more or less right. I suppose what rubs me is that a certain tone in popular literary literature, in the literature of modernism and after, which is suspicious of hope, and eager, mostly, to diagnose our malaise. As if analysis and craft is enough. We come to stories because we're hungry for a vision. A broader vision of life. Now, hope is a cheezy, sentimental, and easily commercialized vagaries of our language. Sarah Palin made fun of Obama's Hopey, changey thing. I think hope, and eliciting in people the feeling of and motivation to rise up to it, is one of the functions of literature, of storytelling. Not that stories should be sweet and harmless, or have a patently happy ending, or be optimistic, but that, in the balance of tragedy and comedy, which all great stories are, riding on the fulcrum, there is always a pulse, a character, or believable possibility of a better health, of a better people.

* * *

I finished The Corrections. It was okay. Kinda.

Story-Writing

As the new year begins, people make goals: to reduce waistlines, to be disciplined, to succeed, to self-cultivate - and just, as my friend would say, to do better. Be better. Done and done.

Sure. But I want to add a question to this year's list of intentions, a question I want to understand and answer as fully as I can in the months ahead.

The question's just a little thing: What is Story?

* * *

'Story' itself has different meanings. The simplest is, that a story is a narrative. Story is a unit of media that has a beginning, middle, end, credits. That's it.

* * *

The second meaning is little more complex, but, in essence can be defined as a the aspect of media having human appeal, based primarily on conflict. Conflict can be big or small, Hungry Caterpillar’s endless desire or King Lear's rejection by his favorite daughter.

The human-appeal aspect of Story is when a story presents human conflict and desire, and suggests, implicitly or explicitly, a possibility of resolution.

The human-appeal aspect of story-telling is a bit of an x-factor. It is the answer to the question, Why should watch/read/listen-to this? For a good story experience, we empathize with the subjects of a story, and we resonate with the story in certain specific ways. Human-appeal can be basic and universal empathy (I cared for Frodo and the hobbits, as well as a few other million people around the world), but it can also be connected to the presentation of specific identities, specific conditions, and specific cultural moments. A story can gain special power and resonance if it tells the story of a group or condition that has not gotten much airtime in culture at large. Below, I talk about the film The Master. I connected to the film strongly, not because I was a WWII vet or that my life resembles the life of the main character in any external way, but the movie felt to me to be about certain conflicts of being an man, and maybe more specifically, an american man. I felt the story was telling a story about *me* that hadn't been told before.

* * *

Two examples of stories with both narrative and human-appeal: There is a problem (A plague in Thebes; A handsome Lothario who can't form an emotional relationship with a woman [Classic Greek fun, rom-com trope, respectively]), an exploration of the problem through the character (The king of Thebes investigates; The Lothario tries his calculated seduction tricks on a woman he respects and crushes on), a crisis point (The king learns the cause of the plague - himself; The ladykiller loses the woman to a rival), and a resolution (The king punishes himself to save Thebes; The man learns how to open up to a woman and be himself).

Both these stories are clearly narrative, and both have pretty strong human-appeal. Oedipus Rex has been reread and re-enacted for over two millennia, and whatever cliche Romantic comedy I described made millions of dollars in the box office last week.

Sometimes, though, a piece's narrative is weak, despite it's human-appeal being great, and sometimes the narrative and writing craft is great, but the human-appeal is thin.

* * *

Different media effect story. Highly commercial film must have excellent narrative (a lot happens). Art films can be baggy - an exploration of conflict, but without a narrative sense of direction, or promise of resolution. Novels also have looser plot structure, and the lens of the novelist is one of the critical features (perspective, essays, language.)

* * *

Let's look at some examples.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World would be a great example of a movie whose narrative and writing are great, and who's story (human-appeal) is thin. The narrative: boy falls in love with girl, boy must defeat who 7 evil exes in order to be with her, boy does so. The film is a blend of video game, manga, and indie culture humor. The movie is great (unless you just don't like it) and offers up some a little meat for interpretation and discussion. The story, though, hinges on, subsists on, Scott's infatuation with a girl, and her reciprocated interest in him. This is not drawn out in any interesting or relatable way. She's stylish and hot. He's a dork. She goes on a date with him, and that's that. She takes him to bed, despite his utter un-smoothness, and suddenly, the conflict is, Scott can 'win' the girl if he can beat her seven evil exes. It is the barest kind of outlining of boy-meets-girl, because both we don't know why she would want him, and, besides her hotness, we have no idea why he would care so much about her as to face down the overwhelming obstacles. So, the heart of the story is weak. But this movie doesn't need a heart, because this movie isn't the kind of story-creature that needs a heart. It is a sugary, funny, narrative romp.*

*(I also love the movie - and the books they're based on - on other grounds. I won't get into them here, but, in short, no book or movie I know has paid homage and played with video games of the late eighties and early nineties. Video games, being a bastardized, insipid medium they are considered, are sent at the little boys' table of culture, and don't get much air time in the general cultural discussion, despite the fact that many of us who grew up playing them are adults, and many of those games were early and exciting experiences of story. Unique cultural appeal there.)

The P.T. Anderson film The Master has a great story in terms of conflict and creative human appeal, but a slack narrative. The film has good plot-flow up until the mid-point, when Freddie verbally breaks with the Master, but then, afterward, is still part of the group, as if the break hadn't happened, and so things are generally murky to the audience from then on, and then, at the climax, Freddie does finally break with the Master.

One could criticize the narrative flow, then - but the Story and conflict is great, drawn on at multiple levels, from intimate personal break-down to national trauma.

WW2 is the set-up, and Freddie Quill is our traumatized, tortured hero. We seem him as socially incapable, acting out through sex and drink. He is an animal, who does not feel constrained by societal rules, and who is motivated by pleasure and confused anger. He is destructive, but sincere. He is a wild man without a higher ideal to strive for or check himself against. Enter Lancaster Dodd upon his illuminated, loving, party boat, and Freddie encounters a number of things: a group of supportive people not put off by his strangeness, a charismatic man who loves Freddie, and can match him, if not wield authority over him, and a new age cult. Conflict: the lonely, feral man. The loving, supportive cult, and the man who leads it who has his followers call him 'Master.' How does Freddie negotiate this choice, misery and integrity on one side, acceptance and submission to a fraud on the other? How does the Self negotiate such a proposition?

The end of the movie, for all its psychological complexity and sadness, if not tragedy, made me the happiest I'd been at the movie in a long time. The chemical high lasted for the next day. My happiness was not a about happy ending, which there wasn't - it was about hearing the story I didn't know I needed to see, and having the experience of a character's/our trauma transformed into something different, and something shared.

Golden Compass

Golden Compasss

The novel is, mostly, and in the build up, plodding and clumsy. Transitions happen suddenly and with little context or reason (when the gptians find her), new conflicts and goals are introduced arbitrarily through the alethiometer, some whole characters and groups are pure platitude – and yet, that is all forgiven for one of the greatest climax-finales. The whole build-up and architecture of the novel, including the fierce indepenence of Lyra, who love for her friend, her companionship to the bear, the great mystery of Dust, and, finally, the great drive and allure for going further North, all culminate in this sequence. The Aurora comes alive for the event, so light ad Dust are shining incandescent about her as she races on op of the roof of the world, towards the betrayal, away from the hunt behind her. And the whole swell of friendship in the book now deflames to just her and Iorek, and finally, crossing the icy chasm, just her and her daemon, alone again.

 The lines of drama are clearly drawn, which is great, but the clincher, the exciting bit, is the set piece, and the way the end of the book opens up the sky, literally and metaphorically. The sudden changes of signicance – Asriel doesn't need the alethiometer, which had been Lyra's sole quest, and he betrays Lyra, Lyra unwittingly brings Roger to his death, Dust is Sin, Asriel is waging war on something wildly philosophical, Sin and Death, but also Dust is Good. It all gets blended, and this all happens in this great set piece of the barren icy North, which further accentuates solitude and aloneness and choice, as reality and psychodrama manifest in the Dust-Aurora, and the other world becomes visible in the sky. It is that fantasy climax aspect I always love, where the climax visually, physically imitates the psychodrama. The world for Lyra is coming alive with colors, is becoming incredibly complex, opposites are true, she is more independent and lonely and free then ever, and another world is opening for her and her daemon. And they embrace it. They step off into the unknown.

Andre Gregory

Andre Gregory Doc

Interesting.

The movement stuff, the laughter, the all that is great. The movements of the inspired body, the expressive body, the grotowski essence. The humor of it, and of Andre, was wonderful.

There was a whole holistic pleasure to the movie, and to Andre Gregory. As more often has it, though, it is the hooks and snags that I remember the next day.

I had a similar envious reaction as I did to Dinner, specifically about the invisibility of money in Andre's description of his life (and at the high class restaurant they attend, where the movie makes Andre's knowledge of french cuisine one of his gestures of aristocracy and superiority to Wallace Shawn, which the whole movie rides on in a sense). Money is never an issue; then there's the telling episode of one of Gregory's theater mates from the seventies describing how scary Gregory's father was - as the theater mate was collecting a periodic check from him to support the theater. Gregory wouldn't go himself, but we send his friends to pick up money from his dad. And the production he was directing, Alice, was, as the interviews would cast it, in his own words, an analysis on his father's authoritarianism.

Another strange moment: Andre describes his audition for Martin Scorsese for the part of John the Baptist in exuberant, wild terms - that he acted the shaman, got necked and danced, and Martin took a video. The doc then shows the video - which shows nothing more than Gregory in a button-down shirt, reclining on a couch, reading lines from a book.

This disjunction between story and fact is perhaps nothing serious - Gregory is just a good raconteur, improving the stories of his life. But it left a little spoiled taste with me because of the way it illuminates how he projects himself, as he wants to be seen, which is (which is another strand of the documentary) as a shaman. I want to not let a trifle like what really happened get in the way of making a more interesting experience, but - some honesty is broken. Some trust. Andre Gregory, for all his virtues, is a man who likes to control an exciting image for how people view him, and that, in conjunction with the hagiographic My Dinner and this documentary, leaves me cold, despite the incredible content of his ideas and life. The difference between just being something and wanting to be seen as being something.

Oh, and the difference between young and old Andre! That was fascinating. Old man, laughs a lot, talks a lot - similar to his appearance in My Dinner. But young Andre, in interviews: angry, intense, sexy unbuttoned shirt. Angry at culture, angry at his parents, confident and, in his direction, in his attacks, seemingly single-minded. That is, too me, the worst kind of character. I like his older self, but that creator and revolutionary who is obsessed, whose identity is built on the negative and dissenting relationship to another, or to power - well.

 Seems pretty cool.

Job

Job

1. Primal Story

I remember the Book of Job as being the best book of the Bible; I've never forgotten the impression it left me of it's primally horrific quality, and it's pithy, folkloric frame, which smoothly introduces the story and big theme. I recently went back and reread it.

Plot, in brief: we meet Job, a perfect and upright man, and his family; we see a bet between God and Satan concerning whether Job only believes in God because he has such a sweet life, and what Job would do if he lost everything; we see the most brutal, painful things happening to this good man. Of his calamities, the most visceral is the death of all ten of his children. After each terrible thing, Job praises God (The Lord giveth, and he taketh away). We see Job's friends come and sit with him in his grief and sit shiva. The audience wonders - Will he Curse God? This is the question of the narrative. Will his lose faith in the idea of divine order and perceive that creation is as injust as to to have a parent watch his all children die for a bet. Finally, Job does curse God, in a bleak poetic mode ("Let the day perish wherein I was born, and the night in which it was said a child had been conceived. Let all those days darken."), and in a dramatic setting where his dryly religious friends are eager to use their learning to prove Job's emotive assertion wrong. This mid section is incredibly long and dull, in that nothing new is much said in 20 pages, but, rather, we experience poetic variations of the same back and forth. (Essentially this: Friend: "Job, man, God is Just. How can you be more right then God? You must have performed some sin you know not." Job: "Fuck you.") Then a fourth, unannounced character, Elihu, pops up and monologues for a good few pages . But before we get to ask this who Elihu is, a whirlwind appears, from which speaks God.

Ah. Some action. This is good stuff.

Poetically vivid. God is pissed at Job for cursing Him. God's argument goes thusly: Who are you to question me? Did you create the world and all the animals? Are you as strong as me? Who was it that created the horse? Have you ever admired the horse? I mean, really admired?

Job repents. God chastizes the friends (we don't why). Job gets back wealth, has new kids, and lives... happily ever after?

As a studio exec, I'd have to say, all in all, it has a great premise, but fails to deliver. The narrative is cut up and jarring, moving from folklore to poetry, from religious argument to super-rational argument. The pacing is baggy, the ending - inedible.

I wonder whether the greatest stories are often imperfect? It seems to me subject matter of the Book of Job is too intense, too rousing for the bindings of logic and psychology. For psychological narrative. For folk narrative, for poetry even?

This great stories pose situational questions - but ones that can't have answers.

Any Theophany - appearance of God - suggests a break down of story as story (the conflicts of mortals, some amount of cause and effect), and a transformation into religious sermon. I think of Bhagavad Gita here.

When one is dealing with primal issues, such huge themes, any conclusion one gives will be smaller, and localized to the story, where the statement of the question is mighty and grand. The Book of Job can't answer this question, and resolves itself with a theophany.

I think here of Princess Mononoke - another story built around a big question about the coexistence nature and humanity, and the ending is also soft. Did the nature god spirit thing just die? Or will it come back?

I later learned that Miyazaki's understanding of his ending is more pessimistic than he would articulate in a film that kid's watch (Miyazaki is big into the idea of making artworks full of hope, which is at odds with his personal worldview). He felt that the story of Mononoke, which takes place at a specific historical moment in Japanese history, is about a that specific historical watershed moment in which Japanese society irrecoverably let technology and culture and society usurp feelings of reverence for nature. If he had been explicit in the movie, that would have made a stronger ending.

Job also fails at the end; the book is evidently a hodgepodge, made up of many hands, none having ultimate authority over what the story should be. The final editor, though, I can;t help but think had an ulterior agenda. In this reading of the Book of Job, in my most impassioned interpretation of it, which I know is probably false, I perceive the structural dissonance as intentional and necessary. The mind that looks at the universe with the belief that it is a fair place overseen by paternal good will, a place where a parent can witness the death of his children, with genocide and horrific disease and a whole list of things I won't say, will splinter and fragment when it encounters heart-breaking injustice and the cruelty of reality. The conception of God as just - goes against experience and reason. Which is to say, in my most impassioned reading of Job, I see its chaotic structure and it's terribly tactless ending as a signpost, hidden in the Holy Book, which announces the death of a kind of belief.

* * *

2. Jung's Answer to Job

Jung reads and considers Jahweh as a coherent psychological person, as if Yahweh were a developed character in an epic Mythopeic novel instead of the jumbled deposit of many middle-eastern beliefs fallen through the sift the Hebrew people, which he is. Genesis establishes a certain famous Old Testament character. We are familiar with his "Do X [give me foreskins, invade this city, kill your son], or else" attitude, and his belief that "I am the deity and singular, despite the many other gods around here." In the Old Testament, though, are also traces of other elements of Yahweh that teh greater tradition has silenced. Who know about his consort, the female deity Sophia, or that had a great battle and killed Leviathan, the embodiment of chaos, before the creation of - creation. Is there a continuous Yahweh, is he an incidental synthesis of unintentionally related texts?

All this is to say, that the Old Testament is a rather messy stew text and culture fragments, and that Jung acts pretty boldly silly to propose two things: Yahweh is a cohesive entity, and that Yahweh is an entity that has a psychology. Silly though it is to me, reading Jung's essay is interesting, for a number of his ideas, but also because we get to see him psychoanalyzing God (as He is depicted in old book).

The arc of Jung's book is this: When Yawweh berates Job from his wrathful vantage in the Whirlwind, it is really, Jung explains, God acting out against a projection of his doubt. The faithful servant has expressed doubt about God, and so God, rather than perform a self-examination, suppresses the external source of doubt. Job provoked this doubt, and yet Job, mortal man made of dust, receives cosmic fury and threat of strength by from God. Yahweh is not fully conscious of himself, and is acting out. But the episode, by virtue of Job's integrity, forces Yahweh to see himself, to become self-aware. This self-awareness, and presumable shame, instigates the next big chapter in the epic cycle (from the Christian cantage) of The Lord of the Jews: namely, Jesus. Jesus is God's attempt to make amends with Man by becoming Man, and suffering as fully as Man can suffer. And Jesus himself softens the laws, promising a loving God. A change has happened.

I got bored reading the book, largely because of a fallacy I suspect Jung of: Submitting his attention and belief in something as true because of it's status, as myth or otherwise famous. In other words, I think that Jung thought The Book of Job has an elevated status, and that necessarily implies that every written ambiguity, dissonance, and paradoxical thinking is intended, as a form of secret knowledge. Secret knowledge, and that this knowledge has been hidden in the great stories and philosophies, and can only be unpacked by a scholar, seems demonstrative of a man who needs to see the world that way. I suspect that he saw so much secret knowledge in every old fragment he read. An example of Jung's stretching it is when God in the Whirlwind says to Job "Who is it that darkens my counsel," Jung says the God is not referring to Job but is actually referring to part of himself, which is Satan.

Jung's life project was, of course, the development of this idea of hidden knowledge, in the form of dreams, myths, literature, and the collective unconscious. He has paved the way for how so many of his think and feel, to varying degrees, of dreams and myths. Much of his writing is interesting and inspiring, and his Red Book is one of my favorite objects. Kudos immeasurable to him. But Jung was secretive, too, and careful to present himself as he wanted to be seen. His public writing depends on the authority of a scientific style of writing, and the authority of his status as doctor, and his authority of experience. In this ways, it seems he is often trying to create a distance between him and the reader, and almost trying to hide his ideas. I can't help but that part of reason for this was that he knew that, despite being a revolutionary mind that changed the world, some aspects of his project were a hoax.

Calendar Cycle: Annakir

The calendar cycle seems like a great project, for many positive reasons, but also one negative: it is a narrative but not an explicit story. It doesn’t have to have the logic and drive of a story - it is 12 (well, 14) pictures, and I can let myself create what I love - relations of psychic and visual elements. I can imbue meaning, without making it ‘entertaining.’

Who I am writing this for? I don’t intend for this blog to be a journal, but I do like a platform to chew on the thoughts that occupy me. And the fact is, this thought, both my love of story elements and my hardship with creating story, is a big one.

Let’s look at the terms.

Story. An entertaining narrative, that proposes certain values, enacts their complications and oppositions, and arrives at a satisfying resolution or testament to that conflict of those values.

Story Elements: These are the values and relations that are embodied in the story. The shape of the story as well.

I love reducing story to static images, to dense imagery, to a kind of iconic level of visual understanding.

Also, I am exciting to layer, to really stack the images and the cycle. I want there to be a surface narrative (the girl is looking for something, struggling for something, achieving something, losing something, celebrating), a showcase of the months and seasons, an allegorical relation between her life cycle and the life cycle of the earth. Whatever else we can get in their, via border subplots and other characters, is great. Density os beauty here - what draws people in and asks them to unpack the images.

I am thinking of poems for each month, too - very rhythmic, very structured - four lines of iambic pentameter, ABBA.

December: The Winter Feast.

"Please toast again what always burns,

Our love of life; of this I never tire,

Of this, I will not mourn.

Oh, wake me, love, when spring returns."

Osterhase

The day after Easter: family, gospels,neo-liberal ideology, speech explosion, n+1, errata.

My niece’s verbal ability has exploded in recent months. In december, she had a handful of words, and one (‘up’) stood in for many, many meanings. Four months later, she knows hundreds of words, and is making sentences. The linguist in me is especially impressed by her phrase: “I do myself!” One would assume “I do” is all the child would need to say at first, but she already picked up on the unnecessary but emphatic phrasing or reflexive pronouns… or, she has some quick emotional and communicative understanding of it at least. Apparently asserting her selfness is a powerful enough feeling that she is tuned in to appropriate the most sophisticated language forms to express it. Cool.

At the Hamilton Sculpture Garden, I say a sculpture which through into relief, so to speak, an aspect of the aesthetic I’m interested in: relationships between characters (characters? desires? aspects? Something not as formalistic as pure forms, but not as specific as psychological people. Whatever the psychic building blocks are is what I mean). It was some kind of animal scene with fantastic trees and animals, and it immediately put the viewer in the state of relating the objects - it makes the viewer synthesize elements. 

This makes sense to me - in ways that portraits and paintings depend mostly on sensually and textural and pure experiences, I am most excited by what I might call Psychic Content. Stories necessarily have relations between things: Characters, Desires, points of view.

::

Thinking about art and patters: thinking of ornate patterns, stories, and music. All can have a similar function: creating a space that is beautiful and rhythmic within which some painful aspect of life of is shown. A safe and aesthetic space for terror, for grief. The pattern itself, the composition, the ornamental frame, the rhythm and melody - these are what’s real. Pain and joy are just leaves on the vine which greater than any single growth.

::

Read an essay by Jebediah Purdy in N+1, The Accidental Neo-Liberal. A good essay… ash, I left my notes at home.

It does make me reconsider my 'realist’ stances. It also embodies a certain political interpretation of my Orphan Prince story, the radical Aneia being bound and sentenced to death by the maternal and considerate and realistic sphinx.

His main idea is this: We (um… I suppose we is some kind of leftist but not radical america) largely that we have accepted the notion that we have reached the ‘end of history’. Democracy with free markets is where it’s at, with just a little more fine tuning. What we don’t believe is a radical change in any direction. What we don’t believe - is the possibility of a big change.

::

A line I came upon in both some anarchist literature and in the Jebediah Purdy essay concerns that there should be a shift from analyzing psychological problems to analyzing structuring problems. That is, if a given societal structure effects people in a certain way, fixing one person is hardly beneficial; the structure must be changed.

This reminded me of a question put to me by a radical group I once joined. They had asked me: “What radicalized you?” Most of the people in this group queer, and I was the whitest slice of bread in that bunch. But my honest answer I didn’t say… In the way that certain ‘subjective’ problems of first world angst don’t seem valid in relation to the oppression of the minorities. My unspoken answer (I forget what I actually mumbled) was the way I felt consumer capitalism and societal structure effected my family. Certain members seemed cut off from society, wholly dependent on the nuclear family, necessarily disappointed, and found solace in the hungry ghost game of shopping. Shopping itself became to me sad expression of misdirected and confused desire for life. I felt, and feel, should crushed and misshapen through our culture.

Even watching the joy which is my two-year-old niece - there is something about the structure of two parents raising a child, segregated from a larger community, which seems like a misuse of certain energies, and limiting of our greater affections. Why should older adults have to wait so long for little ones to take pleasure in? Why should their affection be limited to a few? Why not live among non-related ‘uncles’, ‘aunts’, ‘grammies’, ‘pappies’? Why so much depending a single child, a few children? I think a parent, I think a grandparent could love and co-raise a greater number of children.

I think of this another way, too, in terms of emotional investment. Watching my parents undergo the loss of my sister - was dark and brutal. Now, my goal is too make the the pain of loss less, but how to diffuse it through other joys of life, other continuations of life. Our family was lucky in terms of this, in that, 3 months before the death of my sister, my brother and his wife had a baby girl, Ava Isabella. To try and imagine that terrible fall without the babe is painful. At the wake, I remember one scene: Us, the family, lined up, receiving people, and my mother breaking down in tears, and Suz presenting to my mother, in the midst of her sobbing, little Ava. My mother - through her tears - smiled, and her sobs slowed down, and she took up her granddaughter in her arms and cooed.

I suppose my point is this - the life cycle is a thing we are largely removed from in our culture, and what experiences we have are more intense and disarming for all their rarity. More relationships means more encounters with disease, death, birth, and joy.

The last category of thinking here is, of course, one I feel very much: the responsibility of the child to the family. I feel this love, this bound, and, yes, this dependence. I want to be both loved and more free. The intensity of desire to gain and maintain the approval of one’s parent’s is profound.

Quotation Station: Rilke and Joseph Campbell

I heard this Rilke quote on an episode of On Being with Joanna Macy. It's the shit.

"The great secret of death, and perhaps its deepest connection with us, is this: that, in taking from us a being we have loved and venerated, death does not wound us without, at the same time, lifting us toward a more perfect understanding of this being and of ourselves."

Letter to Countess Margot Sizzo-Noris-Crouty
January 23, 1924

And this had been bouncing in my head - the final passage in the first chapter of Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Ton of Faces. Shit is ill elegant.

"Centuries of husbandry, decades of diligent culling, the work of numerous hearts and hands, have gone into the hackling, sorting, and spinning of this tightly twisted yarn. Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world."

Resurrection One

Yesterday, was happy to chew into a lot of work - sketched a full composition (barring two insets) on the sunny roof at he studio, and worked on some font stuff.

Easter approaches, and I’ve been meaning to develop some ideas on stories of resurrection. In an early draft of the ‘Baldr’ story I’m working on, the epilogue, based on the old norse poems, ends with resurrection in a reborn world. Telling this story to people, I often saw the light in  people’s eyes diminish at this point. “Oh, it’s a Jesus story.” No. No no no.

But then, what is Resurrection? What is it doing int his story?

I realized I was working with some poetic/mythic ideas I thought were self-evident as clearly artificial, clearly metaphorical. (This is tendency that, for myself-as-storyteller, I need to get offer. If I want to mystic, that’s fine).

So I’ve since been *translating* ‘resurrection’ in to more psychological, more dramatic, more human terms. I want to put to paper some interpretations of Resurrection.

::1:: Literal, way back, plants and the world coming back to life.

::2:: Literal - religious, bodily

::3:: Literal - Spiritual, Reincarnation.

These are the religious iterations. Quite literal. But the next ones are my own, idiosyncratic ferrying over meaning into the metaphoric and psychological realm.

::4:: A renewed sense of life in the griever, achieved through the soul’s image of the deceased. In this way, the dead person’s form creates new (quality of) life.

::5:: Again, with the image of the deceased in the mourner’s psyche, the mourner now takes their own love for the particularness of the deceased and projects it onto others. Experiences with death can bring us down to our common humanity; anyone who has grieved a terrible loss can empathize with someone else undergoing the same. In this way, the beloved who has died has come back as all humanity.

4 and 5 are elements I’m building my Baldr story around - gone is the magic of confusion of resurrection. In this way, a mythic story and holiday like Easter, for me, touches both 4 and 5. Through the suffering and loss of a single person we care about, we gain a more expansive love for the world. And if this love is not more general, it will be more facile, readier to jump the boundaries of difference into the realm of sympathy. Nothing seems to be a greater unifier to people than common suffering, and the story of the Passion of the Christ mythologizes this - an innocent person suffering to death.

Morbid thoughts on a rainy day. I’m sure I’ll keep working on this one.

A Trip to the Library, Alphonse Mucha, and a Connection between Stained Glass and Music

A lot today.

Went to the library to check out books on color theory and pattern-making. Found and borrowed two books - Color in Art, by Stefano Zuffi, which is fun and has a chapter on 8 colors and tours art history looking at ash one. Kinda fin and inspiration, but also great at seeing how color can structure a composition. For gaining my technical chops, I was glad to find Stephen Quiller’s Color Choices. Great book.

Also, a color book by Leslie Cabargin led me to an incredible and famous artist whom I’ve never known by name: Alphonse Mucha. SO MUCH of what he does, with frame composition, body, and ornament, is what I want to do. He and Beardsly are masters of ornate and dynamic framing.

And framing is something I’ve made an abstract extraction about today, while perusing this books, and maybe mulling over Jun’s books on Mandalas. Jung says… oh, where is it… So writes Jung, concerning mandalas:

“[T]he severe pattern imposed by a circular image of this kind compensates the disorder and confusion of the psychic state - namely through the construction of the central point to which everything is related, or by a concentric arrangement of the disordered multiplicity and of contradictory and irreconcilable elements. This is evidently an attempt at self-healing on the part of Nature, which does not spring form conscious reflection but from an instinctive impulse.”

::

In that passage is so much I’d love to discuss.

Immediately, I will just draw a connection to a beloved literary theorist of mine, Mikhail Bakhtin. He had a theory of polyglossia, or ‘many-tongued-ness.’ A particular beauty of certain novels and stories, he described, was that, within the bounds of single book, which is it’s own field of consciousness, can exist many contrasting and opposing points of view and characters. Thus, a novel contains - and possibly synthesizes (not sure what that might mean) - opposing elements of existing. In that synthesis of what may seem chaotic, even if it’s just a perceived synthesis, lies a stability and quality of beauty. 

The common threads through these, then, is that the idea that when can place irreconcilables on a single field and, in some sense, synthesize them by means of framing, by means of making them part of a complex whole.

The other thing: Linda and I went to sit in on a Joey Weisenberg jam. I was there to get a taste of it because Ilusha wanted to possibly hire me to do the album art for Joey’s new music.

I had a great time, and a number of things coalesced in my mind as I doodled in that most productive state: half-listening to live music, half swimming through the unbound currents of the mind.

Firstly, architecture. We were in a synagogue on Kane St., and , well, I loved it. Photos here. Paper-cutting composition and color theory with out-spooling form my mind. And the patterns in the high windows effected me, especially later.

The architecture immediately became a part of my design doodles- the intimacy of the playing (a loft in high alcove, the musicians huddled around a bundle of christmas lights): a kind of gothic size and austerity juxtaposed with the warmth and intimacy of the music/ians.

What was interesting was that, after 45 min or so, I was done doodling the space and the people (that is, the visible), and wanted to try doodling what I was hearing and feeling - this wonderful music of many voices and instruments, supported and building themselves. What I found was that I drew patterns - apparently rhythm and and repetition in music is the aural equivalent of visual pattern design. I began drawing the music this way, created angled beams that were supported by contrary beams and intern support the contrary beams above them, and all of this in an ascending pattern. Suddenly, what I drew looking very similar to the stain glass window. And that was - either a pleasant and superficial epiphany, or a connection that I might spend the rest of my life poking at.

Alright. Basta.