I hope, then, that I won't be thought a nostalgic fool if I insist that even in my lifetime there was a much more attractive culture than the one we're enjoying now.They speak about the dumbing down of America as a foregone thing, already completed, but, duh, it's a process, and we haven't seen anything yet. The contemplation of this culture is not for sissies, and speaking about it without becoming shrill is increasingly difficult, maybe impossible. In spite of this, even for those of us who were most attached to it, there are better things to do than cling to the wreckage of the liberal-humanist literary culture that seemed so invincible thirty years ago, to forever pick over the debris and salt it with our tears. Nevertheless, I can understand why people miss it. At its most radiant, it didn't just shine its light into literature but suffused all the arts, the movies most of all.
Michael Herr, Kubrick
I keep re-reading this, going, "but... but... but..." And there are plenty of reasons to talk back, here, but I think I'm sort of with him on this. Maybe my skepticism is borne of the fact that this claim follows his almost persuasive defense of Eyes Wide Shut.
At the very least, the contention that our collective dumbing-down is an ongoing process seems supported by many of the... uh... events that have succeeded Herr's book's publication in 2000.
From today's Washington Post:
An unsigned one-page memo, distributed to Republican senators, said the debate over Schiavo would appeal to the party's base, or core, supporters. The memo singled out Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who is up for reelection next year and is potentially vulnerable in a state President Bush won last year."This is an important moral issue and the pro-life base will be excited that the Senate is debating this important issue," said the memo, which was reported by ABC News and later given to The Washington Post. "This is a great political issue, because Senator Nelson of Florida has already refused to become a cosponsor and this is a tough issue for Democrats."
No comment seems adequate for the substance of this unconscionable business, but I humbly recommend that the memo's author invest in a thesaurus.
Whoever recommended several years back that I read Gretel Ehrlich's memoir of being struck by lightning, A Match to the Heart, thanks.
She makes a compelling case for the materiality of experience, though there's never a sense of reductive determinism. That is, her story walks through the physics, the chemistry, the meteorology, and the biology of her subjectivity after the lightning strike; yet it allows for a spiritual read of things. Often, her language matches both the physical and the metaphysical, and her metaphors for cardiovascular function and for the role of electricity in the body work. That's not to say that a few sentences weren't exhausting. I got tired of trying to figure out this one: "At the beach, Sam [her hero dog] lay in elliptical slices of shade cut out of dark air by returning swallows" (181).
Connecting the autobiographical body, experience, memory, and a sense of self capable of fashioning all of that into a thoughtful text stumps plenty of memoirists. This instance feels successful, though.
Without comment for now, three passages to which I want to hang on:
How odd that we walk around with these bodies, live in them, die in them, make love with them, yet know almost nothing of their intimate workings, the judicious balancing act of homeostasis, the delicate architecture of their organs and systems, or the varying weathers of their private, internal environments. Up to this point my living and breathing had been an act of faith. I existed but I didn’t know how. I was a stranger to the body whose consciousness said, ‘I know myself,’ which meant only that I had decoded the brain's electrochemical message that told me to think such a thought.I lifted the bedsheet. All I saw as I looked down was a pale container, skin whose bruises and cuts were only ornament, ruby and onyx jewels. How could I have been so uncurious? If I held a match to my heart, would I be able to see its workings, would I know my body the way I know a city, with its internal civilization of chemical messengers, electrical storms, cellular cities in which past, present, and future are contained, would I walk the thousand miles of arterial roadways, branching paths of communication, and coiled tubing for waste and nutrients, would I know where the passion to live and love comes from? It is no wonder we neglect the natural world outside ourselves when we do not have the interest to know the one within. (27)
In the aqueous territory of the synaptic cleft, transmission occurs: the release of calcium activates an enzyme called calpain, which eats into the membrane of the adjacent cell body, changing the shape of dendritic spines and, in the process, creating a physical memory. New neural pathways—new brainscapes—are made each time a memory occurs. (70)
I dreamed that the shape of this book should be a convection cloud, a rising bubble swarming with up and down drafts of electricity, moisture, and air. Inside, the narrative would zigzag like lightning and the pages would be laid end to end to resemble a tree trunk, a channel down which fire suddenly flows. Once the book had been read, the top of the cloud would explode leaving the reading holding a burned shell. (161)
Recommended reading for those who pulled the front of their skater haircuts into devillocks as they sang along to "I Turned Into a Martian" and "Mommy, Can I Go Out and Kill Tonight?": Jon DeRosa's Pitchfork piece on the Misfits (and Samhain and Danzig), "Stuck in Lodi".
At a small, let's say salon-ish, party last night, among socially strong and intellectually quick people, I apparently adopted a defensive and submissive posture while rehearsing my graduate project for the hostess. I am told that I sort of wrapped my arms around myself, pulled my wine up near my chest, tilted my head, and rocked side-to-side.
The moment I fell into the abyss of jargon (I must have said something like, "a critique of narrative subject construction"), the subject was changed. Seriously. No transition of any sort; just a new topic. This did not feel like rudeness on the hostess' part at all (the preceding is either the most naive response I've ever had to anything or a happy testament to the unpredictability of conversation among the capable). The point is that none of this is offered as a complaint about the person who listened to a few sentences describing a scholarly project. It's reasonable to think that, had we been talking about physics or accounting or international relations or surfing (the on-the-waves kind), we would've moved along just as quickly. Maybe travel stories or weather would purchase more time.
I don't generally blush and cower when talking about my interests. Or do I? It was distinctly unsettling to hear that I took on the aspect of an uncertain student in that situation.
I study the ways fiction is part of autobiography and biography.
There. That works for wine and cheese, doesn't it? The written version: I'm producing analysis of works that at once tell stories of lives and undermine the telling, most often by overtly making things up. That is, life writing that seems not to trust its own project of reporting on and talking about actual experience. Incorporating that suspicion into the projects themselves makes the work more meaningful, even more honest. If I create a fictional character in an ostensibly nonfiction work, a character who provides a critique of either the story or the way it's told, I take a step towards historiographic transparency. Let's take Edmund Morris' memoir of Ronald Reagan, Dutch, in which an imaginary "Edmund Morris" relates the biography of the President. The work accomplishes more than fun experimentalism: along with a number of unconventional narrative devices, the presence of a fictional Boswell keeps the reader from running away with the fantasy of biographical transparency. If Morris controls one fiction, he might be deploying more. The work is a sort of biographical pedagogy, insisting that readers ought to bear in mind the unreliability of the form. I think that unreliability's wonderful. Of course, Morris can't escape the pragmatism of the political, and his book found a chilly reception among its subject's admirers. A convincing reminder of at least one characteristic of these works: they are not literary exercizes without interested readerships.
Fine. All well and good, but over cocktails...?
At the moment, more than ever, I wish this blog was anonymous.
The trick, here, is that talking about yourself is an autobiographical act. Too much autobiography. The experience of talking about your experience of writing about other people talking about their experiences begins to spin the head. I sort of wish I had a fictional device that walked along with me and started interjecting whenever my version of my work got undigestable.
In the January article on academic blogs, it sort of looks as if the group pointed out to me that I write autobiographically, here, and that so, in a sense, my blog and my work share some native connection. I dunno. It seems like I already got it. I had just explained that the few instances in which my scholarly work had become part of the record, here, had been unsatisfying. Well, once again...
Yeah. Anonymity.
...you just feel stupid. Box-of-rocks dumb.
No stories to tell, just a general sense of duh.
The absence of stories is actually symptomatic of the day's intellectual nadir. Didn't really do anything poorly. Missed opportunities to apply the frontal lobe to the situation, though. Went to a good talk, talked to the presenter a bit afterwards. All of my conversational questions all day sought the most simple information: "How many students are in that program?" "Where are you from?" "Are there really just fifty states?" "Do you like purple?" I feel too young to have my brain check out on me for twelve hours like that. Had all these smart insights while reading on the train this morning, then, poof... I got nothin' between the ears. The fun, of course, is in the anxiety that accompanies stupid days. You know, that growing panic: "What the hell am I doing in grad school, trying to finish a dissertation? How did I ever finish high school? How did I find the bus stop this morning?"
Yeah, I gotta go watch some teevee or something.