They Are Crazy About? Romance and Illusion?
Like, who is the hero, or heroic, and then how and why so? And then: really? Does free will and passive resistance need a (noble) cause to make it admirable?
Maybe something about the limits of compassion, understanding and/or sympathy? Or, re-examining/testing/pushing those limits? for no other reason than that more compassion, understanding and sympathy may be administered? for someone not seemingly receptive to compassion, understanding, mercy and sympathy? I don't know. It feels like I'm stretching Melville's story to fit my agenda. And, not that I have to "get" it right away.
The terrific part is that Bartleby has awesome prose work, and is such a wild, wickedly absurd comedy. The story was way ahead of its time. And Melville is the shit.
Perhaps another reason Bartleby is sticking to me as problematic is that I read it after reading Billy Budd, Sailer: An Insider Narrative. That other titular character Melville casts in the most sympathetic and glorifying cloth, draping welkin-eyed Baby Budd with descriptives like handsome, angelic, and innocence. Bartleby on the other hand is matched, inscrutably, with pallid, forlorn, ghostly, cadaverous, etc.
I should say that unlike, I'll characterize as additionally lazy, common readings of Bartelby as one who has been dehumanized by a capitalistic and industrial system, I don't see him as that. And against more popular critique, I found a genuine evolving humanism with the narrator.
I should add that one big problem I had with Orwell's 1984 was the characterization of Julia, that she was half drawn and served mostly and merely as a prop for Winston's story. I say this because perhaps the same issue might be charged against Bartleby, that since his motivations were not mentioned or, at best, implied, he was a prop for the narrator. Without looking back at 1984, at least in Melville's story, it was written in a voice/person from the narrator's perspective and the information about Bartleby was constrained/limited to what the narrator could receive/perceive, which is not so with 1984. 1984, I believe, had a more omnipresent third person voice. I believe. Or I could be sloppily applying contradicting and different standards.
Only perhaps tangentially related:
The quality of mercy is not strain'd,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.1
Shakespeare is also the shit. Shakespeare is a necessity, ya know.
Not that long ago, I caught Wilder's Our Town. Having never read nor watched it previously, my understanding of it springs mainly from a couple of its most popular scenes, and the ideas behind its innovative staging, structure, and use of the narrator. But seeing the whole thing, via a well crafted production, Wilder's play deserves the classic tag. What I got, as modernity and time accelerates, it is not (or perhaps, not only) technology and tradition that gets transformed/waylaid, but core values, virtues, and humanism may as well; and truthfully anyway, these (moral/ethic) things consistently teeter on the edge, even in the best of time. Which, really, is one of the obvious themes/messages of the play. Hopeful not sounding quaint, but with the impression that Our Town laments a bygone halcyon age (way back in 1938), the play remains up to date and resonates on today's issues/problems.
Odd, or not so odd, is that all the innovations within the text, or historically in the staging, which Cromer utilizes deftly, along with his surprise twist in the end, went over my head. Or didn't strike me as unusual as the 1938 crowds may have thought when first viewing Our Town, and, the surprise twist, didn't strike me as unusual as all the subsequent, post 1938 crowds visiting Our Town, as I didn't have that pent up history and expectations. In the first case, those innovations that Wilder included in Our Town, sparse sets, the stage manager breaking the "4th wall", temporal shifts, and more, are commonplace these days. Commonplace in the mainstream, even. And Cromer's added touch, without familiarity to what specific convention he was breaking/stretching from the usual Our Town staging, I accepted it as just par the course of a contemporary minded staging.
Though by saying it didn't strike me as unusual, is not to say that it was not awfully powerful and thoughtful. All that stuff was powerful and thought provoking.
I can't work at all. The moonlight's so terrible.2
Jennifer Grace, with what I found to be at times awkward and at times, or perhaps simultaneously, charming diction, was pretty off the hook super as Emily Webb.
If I had to think about it, what is mercy and how is it better or different from kindness, compassion, charity, etc. Thankfully, at this moment, I am not thinking about it. Though generally I aim for a certain precision.3
Not that I don't miss the mark either.4 If I had use the word honesty or some derivation, as an example of what I might have said, which I can't quite remember having expressed thusly but certainly easily could, I would prefer if your email was more honest, it could have been imprecise. I don't mean honest in the sense that instead of what was actually written that I wanted something else, some type of big bean spilling confession. In general, if given the option, I guess I wouldn't mind if folks take a shut the fuck up approach. But what I did mean, if I used honesty (or a derivation), is honestly. Communicate in such a way where the meaning/intention and what is expressed lines up, a sort of directness or plainness, sans abstraction, nuance, subtlety, and criminal coyness.5
More perhaps tangential:
The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.6
Orwell is alright. I'd say the great enemy of clear language is unclear language. The great enemy of sincere language is insincerity? Though as excerpt and quotation goes, there is the context bugaboo to factor in.7
It is an inaccuracy to consider innovation (or avant garde or modernism) through the lens of newness or radicalness. Part of it is that, fo shizzle, but just as much is how it relates to the historic/classical/traditional approach and whatever is contemporary or for that matter timeless. In that sense, art/culture/science/politics/technology/anything is not a search for newness or strangeness for its own sake, but, or what I most look into, is what type of dialogues are transpiring, and how or why these dialogues are meaningful.
Take, for example, Wilder's shattering the 4th wall.8 Circa 1938, that device of commenting directly and somewhat objectively with/to the audience was something, but as innovation goes, the playwrights way back in Pericles' days routinely did so via the chorus. And then Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream ends with Puck disclosing to the audience/reader:
If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumbered here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream,
Gentles, do not reprehend:
if you pardon, we will mend:
And, as I am an honest Puck,
If we have unearned luck
Now to 'scape the serpent's tongue,
We will make amends ere long;
Else the Puck a liar call;
So, good night unto you all.
Give me your hands, if we be friends,
And Robin shall restore amends.
And besides, Luigi Pirandello's Sei personaggi in cerca d'autore.
Which is to say, yeps, there is a new or unique quality to Wilder's Stage Manager, but also with more than a cursory long look back at the traditional/conventional classics.
Along with how it relates to the past, Our Town engages the progression in its contemporary culture/politics/arts/etc. Literature already had long ago taken to addressing the reader in a straightforward manner, but modern literature, via Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, etc., opened up the mechanical parts by emphasizing language and structure. Movie house newsreels gave direct and immediate narrative to current events. And RCA, Westinghouse, GE, Zenith, Atwater-Kent, one of those consoles ruled the waves, radio waves that is. In addition to the regular radio programming dominating the familial experience, there were those casual, intimate, chatty President FD Roosevelt fireside chats. And Pirandello (and Bertolt Brecht, for that matter) blew the spot already. Wilder's innovation(s) was propagated by its time, or perhaps a comment or summation of the manifold confluences going on.
This play is called Our Town. It was written by Thornton Wilder.9
From there, television, movies, and theater ran with it, most typically utilizing a 4th wall breakdown for comedic effect, or cynicism, or hipster posing. But oh wellz. Though I don't follow enough theater/art/culture to really qualify a proper opinion. Sam Beckett does/did some innovative stuff, I know that.
Like most other (perceived) innovation (avant garde and modernist posturings too), the actual innovation is not discovering something totally new or different, but focusing on a narrow strip of what was already existing, like what the Greek and Shakespeare already did, and stretching, pulling, prodding, stripping and otherwise refining it from a contemporary minded perspective. Innovation or modernism, or forward progress, for the most part is an exploration of stripping or taking away. Along the same lines, it is not so much (or not solely) the subject material that is so cutting edge or explosive, but refining or rethinking techniques or the medium. Look at Manet.
Let me backtrack to more personal stuff. I get picked on for favoring modern, though I'd say I like contemporary/minimalism/conceptual more than modern per se, art. But I concede on a certain level it is all the same, in terms of what it does to a viewer's expectation, modern and contemporary. Anyways, take the Italian renaissance, it was partly predicated on rethinking representation via linear perspective lines, and using it to enhance representative realism and to create a focal point/area. Popularized by Brunelleschi, formalized by tradition and the academy, and tired by tradition and the academy.10 Linear perspective rose from innovation and descended to rigid, bored convention.
Then, in terms of the development of Western art, whatever the perspective rules were they were splintered by Manet with his multilayered perspectives and flatten/shallow surface/plane. Among other things, in say Le dejeuner sur l'herbe half tones are eschewed, lighting is exaggerated and crafted as oppose to naturalistic/realistic; in say Olympia the composition is reduced to a two plane spatial construct with no middle, lighted foreground fronted a dark/black background that, to me, recalls the gothic/pre-Renaissance days; or in say Un bar aux Folies-Bergere and its ambiguous, destabilized, or irreconcilable mirror reflection.11
Not to suggest that was all Manet did, cause he had plenty of other tricks up his smock sleeve like his color palette, texture, brushstrokes, choice of subject matters, and more, but to my point, Manet could see what linear perspective was offering and how muted or disconnected painting under that regime had become in commenting on and communicating with contemporary times.12 There is the old standby of photography's emergence shaking things up for both the creators and viewers of art, and Asian art, African art, world art just getting more and more accessible. Plus all the other mid 1800s going ons, fervent industrialization, martial skirmishes, rampant colonization and so forth. Manet unhinged the rigid application of perspective, stripping it down, loosening it up, and opened a way for a new dialogue. And his updating ultimately paved the way for further experimentation with impressionism, post impressionism, cubism, non objective, abstract, pop, minimalism, etc.13
Actually, horrible. I am so out of my element in discussing art as I know jack about it. You rightfully'd say, anything else for that matter. Not to mention how incomplete this whole redundant digression is.
Dreams dressed in blue,
It's all they need for now and forever,
Dazed by the moon,
They shatter their heartbeats,
With singing.
Somebody lurks in the shadow,
Somebody whispers,
Somebody lurks in the shadow,
Yeah yeah yeah.14
Just one more thing about innovation. Pretty much everything descends to rigid, bored conventions. The thing, in the end, is to stay opened, and tuned.
I just want to end saying, considering Kayne's lyrics, is it that shocking that he disrespected Taylor Swift? Fuck Kayne.
Oh, and Michael Moore. Lots of folks take exception to him perhaps playing a little loose with the facts, or self promotion, or manipulative editing or whatever. Which I mostly come away quite perplex. Moore comes out and brings attention to some of the more vital issues going around, attacks them with a tremendous sense of urgency and humanity, that coincidentally is (shamefully) no way addressed by most other mainstream media outlet. And above that, most of the haters I think insist on a level of accountability or credibility that they don't turn around and hold let's say business leaders, the media, or government officials to anywhere close to the same standard. I totally don't get it, and it's mad stupid.
And oh, I regularly check out Glenn Greenwald's blog. In one entry, he spotlighted two things, which I liked so much, I am doing the same. This about Iran and, from that site's comment section, Iranians ain't no Arab.15 And then a young lad chats with his parents.16 Really really nice story. Good for him/them.
This, respectfully, is for the fallen dead Mid East veterans:
Over here are some Civil War veterans. Iron flags on the graves - New Hampshire boys - had a notion that the Union ought to be kept together, though they'd never seen more than fifty miles of it themselves. All they knew was the name, friends - the United States of America. The United States of America. And they went and died about it.17
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Footnotes:
1. Will Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice.
2. Our Town.
3. Achieve is a totally, like, different matter.
4. See footnote 3.
5. Fuck, this teeters too much to too personal and whiny indulgence.
6. George Orwell, Politics and the English Language.
7. Great, now I have to read the essay. (theme music) Ok, maybe slightly out of context, but whatevs. Yeesh, I don't think my blog writing would please Orwell's corpse. Orwell's essay was too preachy, and kinda boring. And gives less incentive to complete Herman/Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Yet, this line was nice too: Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
8. 4th wall implies, and this is my made-up, not-very-helpful definition, a reassessment of the relationship among the audience, text/author, and the production/performance, and with cross complicity or collusion.
9. Again, Our Town. That's how the play begins.
10. Popularize because I don't want to quite get into the re/discovery debate with regards to linear perspective. A taste of the controversy.
11. Or perhaps reconcilable after all.
12. A lot of critical and popular writing have focused on Manet's choice of (controversial) subject matter. Which is interesting, but not the main thing I key in on. Partly because I'm much more of the art for art's sake camp, and don't need a narrative to make things compelling. Partly because speculating on the subject matter either is too gossipy or too much pushing for an agenda. And partly, well, I don't think it is that controversial/shocking/necessary/etc.
13. Picasso and Matisse throw out Cezanne as the "father of us all." But come on, Manet is the guy when it comes to advancing modernism. Moreover, Manet really came from the Salon/Academie/classical tradition and he was really pushing against that from the inside. Manet ended up obliterating the old mold is another story. And the impressionist and post impressionist and Cezanne sprung up, taking certain things Manet was doing to a new place, and adding to it. I had a bunch more on Manet's relationship with the classics, but, uh, that's why Google invented itself. Right?
And this is from me who before really did not appreciate and really hadn't love Manet's stuff.
14. M83, Kim & Jessie.
15. I'd like to visit Iran one day.
16. Definitely tangential. In the local mayoral debate recently, a question asked was whether the candidates thought Obama had done enough for gay right. Thompson said, "He's been there for nine months, Yes." Bloomberg after a pause, "No." From brief Googling, Thompson supposedly has supported gay equality/rights for a long time, but his affirmation for an administration who has done absolute zilch for gay rights, typifies why he can't win. Bloomberg, I don't know, I don't feel quite like NYC has gone through a rainbow renaissance under his 8 year mayorship, I guess I take his more accurate assessment of Obama's piddling record. That, and other reasons, this is my official endorsement, 4 more years of Mayor Bloomberg.
17. Our Town, still. Excerpt with Paul Newman as Stage Manager.
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