Considering the artist's challenge of walking away from a project some have an easier time than others. This is partly a matter of temperament, but partly also circumstances.
Those who have been allowed to feel themselves genuine artists who have done worthy work in the past and thus given grounds to think that they at least can do so again probably have an easier time than those who, like Kilgore Trout, have never been allowed to think of themselves as artists.
Those who have support from those others, and don't have to rely so fully on their own judgment--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--probably have an easier time than those who don't.
And those who have someone to take a work off their hands--as people only do when they have been allowed to think of themselves as artists--have especially valuable assistance here. The thing is off their hands--and even if they were tempted to go back and go on working on it the "abandoned" work has already been carried off, giving them that much more inducement to look ahead rather than back.
By contrast the self-published writer tends to be without all that. They are often not allowed to think of themselves as genuine artists, and unsure whether their work has been worthy. They often have no support from others. And what they produced remains on their hands, even after they have put it before the public. Their manuscript with the self-publishing service they used is just one login away--all as the temptation to go back and tinker or more is enormous.
Consider it yet another of the miseries of their lot.
Tuesday, November 5, 2024
"Art is Never Finished, Only Abandoned": A Few Thoughts
It is reputedly an old saying (the kind attributed on dubious evidence to a great many famous figures) that art is never finished, only abandoned--with this, I think, sayable of just about any comparable endeavor. One could always do more.
Of course, it is possible that the time really had arrived to walk away, that the artist doing more would just ruin what they had already accomplished. But one can never be really sure of that, anyone who really cares about what they are doing has some faculty for self-criticism--and often, some element of perfectionism in their makeup--all as they endlessly judge the Platonic ideal in their mind of what they set out to create and what they have realized in material reality and find the latter wanting.
There is, too, the sense of exhaustion that sets in after being deeply involved in something for a long stretch. "Am I thinking of walking away because it's really done," they wonder, "or am I just tired?"
And of course, tired of it--tired of what began as a toy and a plaything and became a monster (as Winston Churchill had it).
As if all that were not enough they live in a society with a brutalizing default mode, which assuming that people are all lazy and stupid endlessly exhorts them to "More, more, more!" rather than encouraging them to think good and hard about when to say "Enough!" The fact that there are always people ready to pounce vindictively on any failing, imagined as well as real, does not help, the bad reviews in which the courtiers and claqueurs of the media world display such delight in tearing apart some hapless authorized victim taking a far greater toll than those laughing along realize, not least by exacerbating every insecurity, every source of that self-doubt which so easily becomes crippling for an artist.
The result is that walking away is not such an easy thing as some imagine it to be--and the artist having a very hard time letting go, all as, I think, much of this can be said of any comparable endeavor.
Of course, it is possible that the time really had arrived to walk away, that the artist doing more would just ruin what they had already accomplished. But one can never be really sure of that, anyone who really cares about what they are doing has some faculty for self-criticism--and often, some element of perfectionism in their makeup--all as they endlessly judge the Platonic ideal in their mind of what they set out to create and what they have realized in material reality and find the latter wanting.
There is, too, the sense of exhaustion that sets in after being deeply involved in something for a long stretch. "Am I thinking of walking away because it's really done," they wonder, "or am I just tired?"
And of course, tired of it--tired of what began as a toy and a plaything and became a monster (as Winston Churchill had it).
As if all that were not enough they live in a society with a brutalizing default mode, which assuming that people are all lazy and stupid endlessly exhorts them to "More, more, more!" rather than encouraging them to think good and hard about when to say "Enough!" The fact that there are always people ready to pounce vindictively on any failing, imagined as well as real, does not help, the bad reviews in which the courtiers and claqueurs of the media world display such delight in tearing apart some hapless authorized victim taking a far greater toll than those laughing along realize, not least by exacerbating every insecurity, every source of that self-doubt which so easily becomes crippling for an artist.
The result is that walking away is not such an easy thing as some imagine it to be--and the artist having a very hard time letting go, all as, I think, much of this can be said of any comparable endeavor.
"Speaking Truth to Power": Reflections on a Phrase
The phrase "speaking truth to power" has long seemed to me one of those phrases that, like a good deal else in contemporary language, gives away the reality behind society's democratic pretenses--and indeed, shows how comfortable even ostensible progressives are with that very un-democratic way of thinking that prevails. In a democratic society, after all, power rests with the public--but the phrase "speaking truth to power" always denotes speaking truth to a power elite of the kind that those democratic pretenses say does not exist, while the speakers--journalists, for example--are cast in a particular relation to that elite, as their courtiers. Enjoined to "speak truth to power" it seems that they are being told not to act as something other than courtiers, but to be the good courtier who tells the potentate what they need to hear, however unpleasant the listener may find it, rather than what will simply advance them personally.
Surely those who purport to be progressives should set their sets a little higher than that for their media.
Surely those who purport to be progressives should set their sets a little higher than that for their media.
Form, Content--and Politics
As Upton Sinclair observes in Mammonart, "all art is propaganda." However, he also observes that there is an "Art of Beauty" and an "Art of Power," the former stressing form, the latter stressing content.
Why is that? If, as Sinclair says, all art is propaganda, why should not both lay equal stress on content over form?
For Sinclair the answer lies in who is producing the art. As he remarks, "[t]he Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained," for it is an art of "pleasure in things as they actually exist," while the advanced technique involved in it shows that "the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do."
By contrast those who are not established and safe and contented with things as they are, the "rising class" most obviously, when it has "risen" high enough to have its art, is more concerned with what it has to say rather than how, which is a big enough task with the creative process, reflecting the way in which that class is still thinking things out, "crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion," and the artist, at any rate, unlikely to be leading the cushy life of the rich lord's well-cared-for favorite.
Once again, Sinclair seems to get a lot right with this explanation, but I still do not think he quite exhausts the issue. It also seems to me that the propagandist for those in power have an additional advantage connected with the fact that the message is clearer to them than for those struggling against the order of things, namely that it is clearer not just to the artist, but to their intended audience as well. The message is the same one that audience has been bombarded with all its life, and which that audience at least pretends to accept. One can be more creative with form when the audience already knows the substance of what you are going to say. Indeed, they may have to be so if they are to have any effect at all, because even an audience that accepts the message may have been subject to it so much for so long as to be desensitized to presentation of the idea as such. Subtlety can work, a hint will do when people know well what is being hinted at, and if they make it pleasing everyone will be impressed (all as, again, there is that premium on entertaining the comfortable).
By contrast those presenting a newer or at least less familiar or less worn-out idea face an audience which may not know the idea at all, and with which they will have to emphasize content to be understood at all--the more in as the artist struggling to be clear in their own mind about what they are saying, and beyond presenting the message, explain it, justify it, rather than repeat what is already accepted, so that subtleties are less likely to be plausible, even if they are practicable. Indeed, rather than a desensitized audience they have more occasion to worry about the intensity of the audience's reaction to the content itself, whether it might not bring on them persecution.
Turning from the artist to the art critics, who by and large are creatures of the established, it seems natural that for them the Art of Beauty sets the standard--such that they exalt form above content--with this also convenient in a rather cynical political way. If the Art of Beauty sets the standard, then it is Establishment Art which is worthy--whereas the Art of those challenging the Establishment can be dismissed as poor art, or not even art at all (as at least one critic who fought this battle in the literary arena in the twentieth century had it, journalism rather than literature), inducing those respectful of such critical opinion to ignore them or join in their denigration. Meanwhile, to the extent that those standards induce those for whom the Art of Power is the natural course to use the techniques of the Art of Beauty, that critical standard induces them to be a lot less effective in their propagandizing they might be, forgetting what they are trying to say as they worry about how to say it, and when they say anything at all saying it in such a way that no one cares what they were saying. Indeed, the artist in question may end up adapting their content to the forms they feel pressed to use--as E.L. Doctorow and Bill Moyers had it in their interview, painting in miniatures with very small strokes, rather than addressing "the big story" that is arguably the greatest and most consequential of the artist's concerns.
For those who desire that they not get the Message out there at all, this is the ultimate victory.
Why is that? If, as Sinclair says, all art is propaganda, why should not both lay equal stress on content over form?
For Sinclair the answer lies in who is producing the art. As he remarks, "[t]he Art of Beauty is produced by ruling classes when they are established and safe, and wish to be entertained," for it is an art of "pleasure in things as they actually exist," while the advanced technique involved in it shows that "the leisure-class artist has time to study technique, and knows what he wants to do."
By contrast those who are not established and safe and contented with things as they are, the "rising class" most obviously, when it has "risen" high enough to have its art, is more concerned with what it has to say rather than how, which is a big enough task with the creative process, reflecting the way in which that class is still thinking things out, "crude and instinctive, full of surging, half-expressed and half-realized emotion," and the artist, at any rate, unlikely to be leading the cushy life of the rich lord's well-cared-for favorite.
Once again, Sinclair seems to get a lot right with this explanation, but I still do not think he quite exhausts the issue. It also seems to me that the propagandist for those in power have an additional advantage connected with the fact that the message is clearer to them than for those struggling against the order of things, namely that it is clearer not just to the artist, but to their intended audience as well. The message is the same one that audience has been bombarded with all its life, and which that audience at least pretends to accept. One can be more creative with form when the audience already knows the substance of what you are going to say. Indeed, they may have to be so if they are to have any effect at all, because even an audience that accepts the message may have been subject to it so much for so long as to be desensitized to presentation of the idea as such. Subtlety can work, a hint will do when people know well what is being hinted at, and if they make it pleasing everyone will be impressed (all as, again, there is that premium on entertaining the comfortable).
By contrast those presenting a newer or at least less familiar or less worn-out idea face an audience which may not know the idea at all, and with which they will have to emphasize content to be understood at all--the more in as the artist struggling to be clear in their own mind about what they are saying, and beyond presenting the message, explain it, justify it, rather than repeat what is already accepted, so that subtleties are less likely to be plausible, even if they are practicable. Indeed, rather than a desensitized audience they have more occasion to worry about the intensity of the audience's reaction to the content itself, whether it might not bring on them persecution.
Turning from the artist to the art critics, who by and large are creatures of the established, it seems natural that for them the Art of Beauty sets the standard--such that they exalt form above content--with this also convenient in a rather cynical political way. If the Art of Beauty sets the standard, then it is Establishment Art which is worthy--whereas the Art of those challenging the Establishment can be dismissed as poor art, or not even art at all (as at least one critic who fought this battle in the literary arena in the twentieth century had it, journalism rather than literature), inducing those respectful of such critical opinion to ignore them or join in their denigration. Meanwhile, to the extent that those standards induce those for whom the Art of Power is the natural course to use the techniques of the Art of Beauty, that critical standard induces them to be a lot less effective in their propagandizing they might be, forgetting what they are trying to say as they worry about how to say it, and when they say anything at all saying it in such a way that no one cares what they were saying. Indeed, the artist in question may end up adapting their content to the forms they feel pressed to use--as E.L. Doctorow and Bill Moyers had it in their interview, painting in miniatures with very small strokes, rather than addressing "the big story" that is arguably the greatest and most consequential of the artist's concerns.
For those who desire that they not get the Message out there at all, this is the ultimate victory.
"Show, Don't Tell" and the Triumph of the Art of Beauty Over the Art of Power
Looking back at the birth of the modern novel in Western literature as discussed by Ian Watt it seems to me that one can see this distinctly "bourgeois" form passing over from an Art of Power to an Art of Beauty. Distinguished by the plainness and directness of its writing in the eighteenth century when the bourgeoisie was a rising class--consider, for instance, the writing of a Daniel Defoe--in the nineteenth century, when the bourgeoisie was established and safe and conservative one started to see the preoccupation with "style" in the ascendant, as reflected in that banality of the ill-trained and unimaginative writing instructor, "Show, don't tell." As James Wood (who sees the career of Gustave Flaubert as a watershed for the ascent of style) explained, "[s]tyle" turned fiction into "a vessel defined by what it could not hold"--all as reputable opinion required the writer to present their work within that vessel, or not present it as literature at all.
E.L. Doctorow's Talk With Bill Moyers: Some Thoughts
E.L. Doctorow is one author of whom I have only read a little over the years. (I did pick up Ragtime, long ago, and while it had its interest in its use of historical figures it did not seem to me to add up to very much.) Still, I did find some interest in Doctorow's remarks during his interview by journalist Bill Moyers back in 1988, because of the ways in which he broke with the tendency prevailing in literature and "respectable" intellectual life, rather than the ways in which he has been representative of it.
In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) " whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.
Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)
Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."
It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.
In that interview, at least, it was Doctorow's view that contemporary writers had become "Miniaturists," writing small stories about small things and ignoring "the big story"--"who we are, what we're trying to be, what our fate is, where we will stand in the moral universe when these things are reckoned." He also drew a comparison between the situation of the 1980s and that of the interwar period, when writers (he named Dreiser and Hemingway as examples) " whether they were on the Right or the Left . . . Marxists . . . [or] southern Agrarians . . . whether they believed in the past or the future," all seemed to be " vitally connected to [a] crisis which everyone recognized" as the crisis of the time, whereas "our crisis today" (which in America he thought a crisis of democracy) "is something that we recognize as writers or that we have any particular passion for." In explaining that situation he stressed what seemed to him a declining tolerance of political criticism in America (except when it was of other countries, especially those on the official Enemies List), and the fatuousness of the standard behind which proponents of the view hid that treated Dissent--the kind that as his interlocutor Bill Moyers put it "challenge[s] the underlying belief system of the rulers," what Doctorow called their "mythology"--as having no place in art, or anywhere else, such that anyone who does question it "is going to find himself in a very uncomfortable position," with "orthodox intellectuals . . . defending the prevailing myths" eagerly playing their part in that.
Of course, Doctorow was less than perfectly consistent in challenging those orthodoxies himself, expressing a characteristically centrist suspicion of "ideology" and pluralistic resistance to "truth claims" (in his talk of the "democratic mind"), and also a characteristically centrist, psychologism-touched pessimism about people (citing Wilhelm Reich's remark about "the average man's mind [being] structured for fascism"). Indeed, Doctorow shows himself a horseshoe theorist, speaking of Fascism and Communism as equivalents at one point as sources of "violence and evil." All this certainly carried over to his view of fiction. (The writer who "knows what's right and . . . wrong . . . good and . . . bad . . . is going to write worthless stuff" he declares, seeming to all but regard confusion and muddle as an artistic necessity!)
Still, the extent to which he did raise the matter of the evasions of authors and the shrinking space for dissent is undeniable, with something of this combination of views reflected in his stance toward the Cold War. He did not reject the "orthodox" view of the Cold War as necessary opposition to a threatening Communism, but he also did not hesitate to see the Cold War as having played a pernicious part in it, as having "cut into our democratic sense of ourself," citing the security state with its militarism, its "secrecy and deception and assassination and all sorts of un-American things . . . defending democracy by attacking people who ran the world who don't do it the way we want it done."
It seems to me that few of our major writers dared say that much in his time, and still fewer of them since, all as what he saw as troubling in society and in art has only come to dominate it the more completely.
"Entrepreneurship" and Self-Made Millionairedom in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay
Reflecting upon the rise and fall of his uncle's pharmaceutical empire in H.G. Wells' Tono-Bungay (1909) George Ponderovo remarks "the supreme unreason of" the situation which saw his uncle Edward--who "created nothing . . . invented nothing . . . economised nothing," whose businesses never "added any real value to human life at all" and indeed "were unmitigated frauds by any honest standard, the giving of nothing coated in advertisements for money"-- was rewarded by the "community in which we live" "for sitting in a room and scheming and telling it lies" with "a controlling influence in the direction of nearly thirty millions" at his peak (the equivalent of a billionaire in today's terms).
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
The contrast between the understanding of such a figure in Wells' novel, and the tendency of American literature, is really extraordinary. After all, Wells here satirized not merely any rich man, but that figure so central to the "aspirationalist," Horatio Alger tale-addicted mythology dominating the American cultural, social and political imagination, the self-made rich man. Admittedly American orthodoxy does not demand unqualified admiration for all such persons. It allows that they may have personal failings--their perhaps not always being as gentle with others as they might be, for example. However, it brooks no questioning of the view that they did give something to the community, a lot more than they got in return no matter how many billions they have made out of it, and respect for them as the Atlas bearing up the sky on his shoulders as they can only be because they are "smarter" and more "hard-working" than everyone else (this means you), you, geniuses all, all as their fortunes are the glory of the social model which permits them to exist, while even excusing their failings as a necessary part of the package, their nastiest behavior "necessary" for "getting things done" given the worthlessness of the inferior human material with which the best have to work (and once again this means you). Granted, every now and then some figure comes along that even the most strident champion of this view cannot deny proved to be a fraud rather than some great creator of value--but they regard such as a regrettable but unavoidable, temporary, not very important error inevitably corrected by the Market on which they prefer not to linger, regarding it as unseemly, even calumnious to society's worthiest strata to give too much thought to the Ken Lays, the Sam Bankman-Frieds, the Elizabeth Holmeses and the rest as they ceaselessly sing tech billionaires they assume to be "the real deal."
In George's telling, however, the Edward Ponderovos are not a bug but a feature of the system, and indeed fundamentally characteristic of the "irrational muddle of a community" in which the Ponderovos lived, with its social system out of date and, in the very same perversity that rewards such frauds, stifling of anything that would bring real progress.
All that being the case it seems little surprise that Wells' book is little read in our times--and indeed, that Mark Schorer, doing his bit to persuade the student of literature that Wells is not worth their time, singled out Tono-Bungay for abuse in his landmark essay "Technique and Discovery," not incidentally a significant moment in the cultural Cold War in which Schorer was such an enthusiastic soldier. (After all, just ask Richard Lingeman who it was that destroyed Sinclair Lewis, and why.)
"Why Do So Many People Want to be Writers?"
The answer to that question is that "so many people" are convinced that they have something to say, and find satisfaction in saying it. The human artistic impulse, for which the Market provides such wretchedly little outlet, should not be underrated. Ever.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
Still, as Upton Sinclair observes in Money Writes!, it is also the case that being a writer, or at least one of the few who can be said to have really "made it" as a writer, looks like a very agreeable way of getting a paycheck compared to most of the jobs the world offers--an alternative to a life of quiet desperation. That the stodgy bourgeois sneers at such desires only affirms the fact--the more in as a stodgy bourgeois highly approves a life of quiet desperation for the many.
How Film Viewers Respond to Tracy Flick
Alexander Payne's Election hit theaters a quarter of a century ago, and, I think, has lingered a bit more in pop cultural consciousness than most of its contemporaries. (Thus did A.O. Scott devote a piece to it a few years back, which is characteristically Scott and therefore not worth reading, but all the same, testimony to its presence.)
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
Particularly important in this has been the character of Tracy Flick, and the complicated feelings she seems to provoke in viewers. On paper she would seem to possess many of the qualities that people are supposed to admire--a measure of intelligence, a capacity for hard work, a readiness to learn, the ambition to improve her lot. However, they also find a lot about her off-putting, with this going beyond the aggressiveness of her demeanor, or her undeniable moral lapse in the course of the election.
My sense of this has always been that they are reacting against Tracy's being a raging ultra-conformist, a True Believer in the System and its aspirationalist propaganda ever pushing to heed its injunction to "Get ahead," who really thinks that those who have enjoyed "Success" have "The Secret," and looks down on those who have not been "Successful" (like her social studies teacher) with contempt. If someone deep down dislikes the whole success culture, with its insecurity and inequality and exploitativeness and brutality and pieties then they can hardly take a kind view of the Tracy Flicks of the world--and if in this society this is something few dare to express, perhaps something that few even know how to express because its expression violates American society's stronger taboo, the sentiment still comes out in their reactions to a figure like Flick.
Which, of course, is exactly the kind of idea that would never occur to a film "critic" such as Mr. Scott.
Monday, November 4, 2024
Notes From a Reader's Journey Through the World of Literature
For some years now I have found myself gravitating toward the literature of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in my "discretionary" fiction reading. I suppose this is because I am too much of a "modern" to be very drawn to what came before--and not "Modernist" enough for what came after.
That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.
Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.
That said I am much more interested in some parts of that stream of literature than others, the Symbolists, Decadents and company having little interest for me. Good old realism/naturalism appeals to me more strongly than ever these days--particularly where it has been combined with that "discovery of society" of which Karl Polanyi wrote.
Maybe it helps in this that the art critics of our time are so dismissive of such work. Critical respectability has, I think, tended to make me skeptical of the claims for the value of a literary work, rather than the opposite--especially given what the critics have so often been, all the way down to our times.
"Traditional vs. Self-Publishing"
Back when there was more talk about the phenomenon of self-publishing than we hear now due to the comparative novelty of e-book readers, print-on-demand and services like Createspace and Kindle Direct, established, traditionally-published writers made characteristically pompous statements about why an aspiring writers should forgo the seemingly quick and easy path of publishing themselves in favor of the route of getting a publishing firm to take them and their book on.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
I will not for a moment deny that self-selection is a far from perfect system for deciding what is put before the reading public; that writers need the input and support of others if they are to produce the best work of which they are capable; that if the digital technologies of the twenty-first century make it possible to convert a manuscript into a book available for worldwide sale in short order at no cost, the editing, copyediting, design, marketing of a book have not been appreciably automated at all, making publishing a book anything but a one-person job; and that if in spite of all these obstacles people can and do produce self-published works that would do any publisher credit, and indeed shame those publishers when one fairly and honestly compares them with the dreck they foist on the public as they assume those insufferable elitist "We are professionals" airs, the return on effort--how hard they have to work to reach an audience, let alone make a dollar at what they do--is far, far lower outside than inside traditional publishing. Accordingly, what a writer should really want is not to self-publish, but to have a competent, capable publisher that will treat them and their work with respect.
The problem is that the odds of their getting such a publisher are pretty much nil. Superstars get a lot of deference, but even established writers who are not superstars are apt to find themselves and their work treated pretty miserably by the business. (They are, after all, mere "labor.") Meanwhile at least 99 percent of aspiring authors--especially if they come from the "99 percent"--have no chance of getting even that much attention. The reality of the publishing business, exactly what Balzac described in Lost Illusions, is such that there is no meaningful choice for them between self-publishing and traditional publishing. After all, publishers are capitalists for whom books are a speculation, and no more; they traffic not in literature but in Names; and because the name of a nobody who is no name is a poor speculation, as capitalists they have absolutely zero interest in giving the newcomer a chance in the absence of some ulterior motive; making the cruelty of the death march through the slush piles that those who approach them endure the worse because it is completely pointless.
The result is that their real choice is that between self-publishing, or giving up all hope of ever publishing altogether--and to say otherwise is to mislead horribly. But then the point of the talk was never to enlighten listeners, just in their grubby, self-serving way direct them away from the self-publishing that the jobbing writers of the day saw as a threat to their livelihoods.
Of course, those days seem far behind us now--because Big Publishing succeeded in crushing the self-publishing revolution, and because those who are managing to make some sort of living writing have other things to worry about, like the collapse of reading generally, even as Big Publishing and the media which reports on it continues to offer mostly upbeat boosterism when talking about the business.
Of "Artistic Freedom"
In Money Writes! Upton Sinclair early on acknowledges the time he spent laying the intellectual groundwork for his survey of American literature as it stood circa 1927, and answered those who would take issue with it the argument that "You cannot understand a plant except you know the soil and climate in which it has grown," with the "soil and climate" here the "political and economic" forces that make literature what it is--in his view, and I think in the view of those who have not been robbed of their judgment by the Cult of High Modernism, an "unwholesome thing" that "is poisoned with pessimism."
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
Sinclair explained this as a matter of "the great Fascist magazines and publishing houses of America, with their direct Wall Street control . . . determin[ing] American literature and art," and the fact that these "by official decree" had "banished" all "truth-telling and heroism," so that for the writer "there is nothing left but to jeer and die"--or " retire into a garret and starve," this the kind of "freedom" the artist has.
A near-century on there is little to dispute in that--except to acknowledge that old-fashioned garrets may be harder to come by these days, and that self-publishing, entirely in line with the differences between what the cyber-utopians promised and what we actually got, has yet to make a whit of difference regarding the control of the media and of culture.
On the Demand for "Humility" in Film Directors: A Few Thoughts
In Vincent Minnelli's cinematic classic The Bad and the Beautiful producer Jonathan Shields gets into an argument with director Von Eilstein over the shooting of a particular scene in their film. In the course of the subsequent argument Von Eilstein tells Shields that "In order to direct a picture you need humility."
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Von Eilstein ends up out of the project, the direction of which Shields personally takes over in a spirit of "Humility? Humility? Why I'll be the humblest person you ever saw! You just watch me!"--and the all too predictable result is an artistic and financial cinematic disaster that finishes Shields' previously thriving career (such that the onetime Hollywood Player is, in the present day of that flashback-laden movie, all washed up and pleading with the people he betrayed to give him another chance).
Von Eilstein's remark stuck in my memory not just because of its significance within a film that has a lot to commend it, but as a reminder of an earlier era's notions of just what it is that directors do. That movie was made in the waning days of a studio system in which directors were important to filmmaking, and not always humble about that importance, but in which the image of the tyrant on set was more apt to be associated with the producer who so often had his name splashed across the poster David O. Selznick style, and studio bosses like Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn.
It was made, too, a whole decade before Andrew Sarris brought the "auteur theory" to America, with all that followed from it--the director not necessarily expected to know, to decide, to interfere in every last little detail of a movie's making for the sake of realizing their own authorial vision, but presiding over an unavoidably more collaborative endeavor, more like the technostructure-helming Chief Executive Officers that a John Galbraith wrote about in the age of "the organization man" than the dictatorial CEOs who are so fawned over by the elite's courtiers in the "leadership"-besotted business press so quick to call anyone with high office or a lot of money a "genius."
I suspect that, more than the writings of Sarris, lies behind our image of the film director today.
Is There Really a Political Divide by Gender Within Generation Z?
It seems to have become fashionable to claim the opening of a chasm between men and women of the younger generation in this political era--with women skewing left, and men right. Indeed, the editorial board of the Washington Post declared last November that the divide might threaten the institution of marriage itself (!).
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
I have to admit myself skeptical of such claims, frankly, because the mainstream news media loves, Loves, LOVES to play up "polarization." This is partly because this enables it to bemoan that polarization in that way that lets their centrist selves feel that they are the "adult in the room" (Oh how they love that hackneyed phrase!), but more importantly because emphasizing divisions of gender, ethnicity, region, religiosity, "culture" and all the rest gets us away from those matters of hard interest and policy that the media does not love reporting about (as that study discussed in the Columbia Journalism Review demonstrated quantitatively, not least by looking at the front page of the Post itself).
Moreover, it seems there is more than the media's well-known prejudices in support of such skepticism. As Vox's Zack Beauchamp demonstrates, the conclusions that those promulgating the gender divide narrative derived from polling data are far from unimpeachable, or broadly supported, especially if one remembers just how large a matter politics is. Thus Mr. Beauchamp in the end, while admitting that it is not the most satisfying answer, says that the only honest one is "We don't know"--which seems to me excellent reason to be attentive to what we actually do know, which is that there has been an enormous public-elite divide on many of the issues that transcends the lines the media like to stress, and the truth an uncomfortable one for the guardians of the "conventional wisdom."
Is Every Day Now Eliza Doolittle Day?
With the idiots of the media abuzz with talk of chatbots for over a year now (we can seem to be going from "The Singularity is Near!" to "The Singularity is Here!"), some have bothered to look into the history of the technology in however clumsy a way, and in the process reminded those who had forgotten (and informed those who never knew) of the fact that the first chatbot, created way back in 1964, was named ELIZA--after the then-recent hit stage and film musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, My Fair Lady.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
At one point in the play Eliza, amid the rigors of her training in elocution, has a daydream in which, Eliza a celebrated figure in society, the King of England proclaims an "Eliza Doolittle Day," in which "All the people will celebrate the glory of you . . ."
So it has gone this past year--every day seeing the "glory" of what the still-skeptical see as a mere autocomplete talked up by Silicon Valley types longer on hucksterism than their highly touted "INNOVATION!" in their turn talked up by their (to use a politer word than they deserve) courtiers in the press, inflating a new technological bubble here, because that is pretty much all that anyone does these days, after which it may all well pass into obscurity.
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