Crazy, the power of distraction a man has who is bored, intimidated, or embarrassed by his work: working in the country (at what? At rereading myself, alas!), here is the list of distractions I incur every five minutes: spray a mosquito, cut my nails, eat a plum, take a piss, check the faucet to see if the water is still muddy (there was a breakdown in the plumbing today), go to the drugstore, walk down to the garden to see how many nectarines have ripened on the tree, look at the radio-program listings, rig up a stand to hold my papers, etc.; I am cruising.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes

For Geoff Dyer’s protagonists, life seems like one long concatenation of distraction. They set out (or put off) doing one thing and end up doing twenty other things, yet somehow they manage to circle back to something like original purpose. In other words, Dyer’s protagonists are highly successful failures. They are world-weary slackers who get sent on exotic writing assignments; impotent men who manage to have tons of sex; procrastinators who get the work done; do-nothings who do.

In Dyer’s most well-known book, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence, the protagonist has only one goal: to write a “sober” academic study on D.H. Lawrence. It sounds easy and straight-forward enough. Unfortunately, the “I” in the book—Dyer himself, we are told, though the words “a memoir” are conspicuously absent—suffers from something a little more serious than writers’ block. He suffers from chronic indecision.

At the start, Dyer describes not his desire to write the study of Lawrence but his desire to write a novel. He waffles back and forth between the novel and the academic study until he finally decides to apply himself “wholeheartedly” to the study of D.H. Lawrence. Rather than simplifying the picture, he is again confronted with an exhausting list of further decisions. First, he must decide where to live in order to compose the book (Paris? Rome? Greece? Oxford?); where to go to “research” (Taos? Oaxaca? Taormina?); and what books he will need to read and to consult.

After much mental rallying, Dyer moves from Paris to Rome with determination. “I was ready to begin my study of Lawrence,” he declares. “The only trouble was the heat.” Turns out, he can’t write in Rome because it’s too hot. In Greece, he is ready to start anew, but the setting is just too ideal: “It was impossible to write on Alonissos, it was impossible to read . . . it was actually impossible to do anything.” Then, another attempt in Oxford: “Now that I’m here in Dullford, in England, all I want is to be back in Rome.”

In the span of the book, Dyer travels all over the world in order to find a setting or starting place that will feel “just right” (a homophonous command?) so he can begin his study of Lawrence. He is desperately in want of inspiration. Not finding any causes him severe agony. Here, great storytelling is happening, even if nothing is happening. If distraction is dread of the present moment, then the present moment is automatically charged with conflict. Because what is happening right now is always the worst possible thing that could be happening—each undesirable situation supplies enough drama to prod the reader on. It is almost guaranteed, under this method, that the reader will keep reading.

“I made a serious mistake in Rome,” Dyer laments in one of many such passages, “a mistake of such magnitude, in fact, as to jeopardise any chance of going on with—let alone completing—my study of Lawrence. From the start I’d known that I had to write my book as I went along. There are people who like to complete all the reading, all the research, and then, when they have attained complete mastery of the material, then and only then do they sit down and write it up. Not me. Once I know enough about a subject I lose interest immediately.”

Contradicting claims exist simultaneously. Dyer claims he is one of these writers who must write as he goes along, which means he must have generated some pages during this ordeal. But since he keeps insisting he’s made “no progress” we think he’s written nothing. For example, one section trails off with some vague ellipses and a page break, after which Dyer begins a new entry. (This is on page 123, in my edition–already halfway through the book.) “Well, it’s been a hectic couple of months. Action-packed. You won’t believe what I’ve done. Only bought a flat in Oxford. Yes, really. Unbelievable but true. Oxford! Now if there’s one place on earth where you cannot, where it is physically impossible to write a book about Lawrence it is here, in Oxford.”

Then, pages fly by while he’s still in Oxford. As one reads, one can’t help wondering: so now, is he writing this all down in Oxford, the place where it’s impossible to write? If not in Oxford, then where? It is difficult to imagine Dyer sitting down long enough to compose anything. Yet as he keeps telling us of his failure to write, the book continues to move forward; the pages continue to materialize. In fact, we do learn things about Lawrence. We are entertained. There are scenes, descriptions, and dialogue. It is a real book.

If Dyer (the writer in the book) isn’t writing, then who is? Of course, the only way Dyer (the author, not the character) can write so well about not writing is that he is not the narrator, that he is putting in the work, and he never intended to write an academic treatise on Lawrence in the first place. The book was intended to be about a writer who can’t write. And because of Dyer’s ingenious use of the first person, this book is better than metafiction, it’s magic; the book seems to write itself spontaneously alongside life. We truly experience what it’s like to struggle (aptly, wrestle) with a goal. The journey, the cliché goes, is more important than the destination. But this isn’t a trick that can be pulled twice, and thankfully Dyer hasn’t, yet.

At the very end, Dyer/the narrator sums up the book’s itinerary in one short paragraph:

And there you have it. One way or another we all have to write our studies of D.H. Lawrence. Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D.H. Lawrence. The world over, from Taos to Taormina, from the places we have visited to countries we will never set foot in, the best we can do is try to make some progress with our studies of D.H. Lawrence.

We understand that when he says “our studies of D.H. Lawrence” he means very generally any goal or ambition we have in life. Even if the study will never be published (except that it has), we must keep going along.

Read Dyer’s new book of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition.

Workbook pages. Images courtesy of Harry Ransom Center at UT Austin.

On April 15, the day Pale King was to arrive in bookstores, I got a sign from David Foster Wallace.*

That Friday, I was getting ready to go out when I heard a tremendous thud from the hallway. I was momentarily terrified, as I was the only person in the apartment. Birds?! (Rewatching Hitchcock.) Clumsy robber? When I went to see what the sound was, I saw that one of my books had mysteriously tumbled out of the shelf “on its own” and was now lying in the middle of the hallway. The huge brick of a book was none other than my copy of Infinite Jest. Boom!* I looked down, and there was DFW’s author picture, staring right up at me. This, I thought, was definitely a sign.

Edits for Infinite Jest

Being pre-inclined to think people are mad at me, I naturally assumed that DFW was mad at me. I must have done something bad! But had I not recently gone all the way to Austin, TX during the week of SXSW, not to partake in hipster revelry, but to spend all day in the overly-air-conditioned library of UT Austin poring over the DFW archives? Had I not driven in a rented Ford Focus with three other unshowered, unrested people for 56+ hours? I thought hard about what I had done.

I came up with a few possibilities. 1) I had not attended the midnight Pale King “release+reading+sleepover.” 2) I had not pre-ordered Pale King on Amazon or tried to obtain it before anyone else. 3) I had said, in secret, or maybe to one or two of my students during office hours, that the language in his recent New Yorker story “Backbone” was “not all that alive.” This was all concrete evidence that DFW was mad at me.

I apologized for all these things, put Infinite Jest back on the shelf, and tried to forget about the incident.

Fast forward to April 18, the next Monday, as I was preparing for my undergraduate Creative Writing class. Based on my findings at the UT Austin archives, I was planning to do a kind of “editing workshop” where we would examine certain changes and “decisions” DFW made between the first and final drafts of his story, “Good Old Neon.” My plan was to project onto a large screen the first handwritten pages of “Good Old Neon” for us to study and scrutinize. For those who haven’t read it, this is the story about the character who believes himself caught in an endless cycle of fraudulence and so drives full-on into a concrete abutment.

As I prepared my notes for my class, I began to get a sinking feeling that this kind of thing just should not be done. First drafts should not be shared with the public. The “magic” and “illusion” of fiction should not be revealed to just anyone, not unless they had really earned it, prayed at the altar of, & etc. Maybe these drafts contained information that the devout, practicing fiction writer should just keep quietly to herself.***

I chatted some people up on gchat and asked if these were indeed “signs” coming from DFW himself.  Some friends said they might be “auspicious” rather than inauspicious; others–my sister–said I was being crazy and Chinese.

She said: “If thunder strikes you down then you’ll know it’s a sign.”

Draft page from Pale King

Now, I know some New Criticism type people will probably feel a little queasy as I begin to describe what we actually do in my Creative Writing class. In my class, we actually talk freely about intentionality, without shame, and often conflate the views of the narrator with that of the author. One of our favorite things to do is speculate on an author’s personal life as if we were gossiping about a common acquaintance at a bar. I guess I allow this because I’ve always had this gut feeling that writers shouldn’t engage with a text in the same way an academic would; as writers, we are I think just trying to find friends and company among our predecessors.

So why was I now treating these first drafts as mere “text,” as if it were completely divorced from the person behind it?

In DFW’s drafts, there are funny remarks scribbled in the margins, i.e., “Cheers wasn’t ON in 1977! When did Cheers! run?” as well as not so funny remarks—“I am so sad.” There are remarks where he is goading himself on—or chastising himself—“Just finish this.” The drafts of “Oblivion” (or, the “Snoring Story”) show him struggling in a very sad way. These parts were like looking at stolen pictures of a celebrity on getaway. They instantly satisfied that voyeuristic desire to delve into the private life of a celebrity, but also made me queasiest about showing them to other people. Would I ink out these sad parts? That, too, felt wrong.

Of course, the drafts showed equally meaty stuff that can be so helpful to writers trying to understand craft. The drafts show very clearly how delaying desire is a valuable thing. How replacing the word “therapy” with “analysis” can make a lot of difference. How an engaging list is just a matter of patterning. I wanted to show my students that his long digressions and overabundant detail weren’t a result of lack of discipline/understanding. That his insertions of “whatever” and “and so” were not accidental or arbitrary. These were the kinds of discoveries I planned my lesson around.

If this were a piece of unrealistic fiction I would tell you that my lesson was a disaster because the projector exploded from its dock in the ceiling, and the much-needed classroom fans sputtered to a stop in an almost spiteful way.

If this were a fairy tale, I would say that the ghost of DFW appeared before the class as a semi-transparent, bandanna-ed head, and cried in a booming voice: “DON’T LOOK AT MY DRAFTS!”

If this were non-fiction, I would say that the adapter connecting my computer to the projector turned out to be broken, and I didn’t try very hard to fix it. And as a result, the drafts couldn’t be shown.

Annotated copy of Don Delillo's Players

What’s the point of this article anyway? I just wanted to tell a story about how I tried to show my class some drafts by a very famous and brilliant writer and got subsequently thwarted.

Is it “right” to look at a writer’s drafts and unfinished work? Especially one who died in such a tragic way? Somehow it has an icky rubbernecking feel to it. But why?

Maybe it all depends on belief. If you believe that good art is simply a well-constructed vessel with its rows of sturdy nuts and bolts, then the idea of looking at drafts is no big thing. It’s like looking at an architect’s sketches, or at a dancer rehearsing. Even if what’s inside is unpolished and horrifically embarrassing, it’s okay, because these imperfections are just technicalities that need to be dealt with. But if you believe that good fiction also comes from a place of fear, vulnerability, insecurity, ugliness, and extreme doubt, then of course looking at drafts is anathema. It exposes what should not be exposed. Because drafts is where petty, raw, immature things sit loudly on the page; things that need to be expurgated or transformed before it can become something beautiful.

Why was my lesson plan thwarted, either by DFW or by my own unwillingness to share something true that I also felt should be kept secret? I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about it, and I guess I still don’t know. If this essay or article or whatever I’m writing has to end with a moral, or something learned, I would say that it’s not magic that makes something good, but at the same time, it also is. A writer should know why it’s valuable to thwart desire. But wouldn’t we say that it’s miraculous when an artist is able to (using his words) “[apply] CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness”?  And to show what is still worth salvaging, despite darkness and fear?

Anyway, I didn’t go to the archives to try to steal craft tricks. I think I just wanted to get to know someone better.****

___________________________________

*100% true!

**Apparently the MS of IJ was so heavy that when it was dropped on DeLillo’s front porch it sounded like a gunshot.

***There was also that scary, bolded clause in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center’s copyright contract that warned of serious lawsuits if one used materials acquired for anything other than “personal research.” I’m sure, though, that this had nothing to do with my feelings of fear and dread.

****This is a kind of apology.

Author and Activist Alaa Al-Aswany leading a Cultural Salon. (photo credit: NYT)

Note: Many links are unavailable as the Egyptian government continues its internet ban.

On Friday, January 28, during the most violent of Egypt’s protests since they began on January 25, WikiLeaks released several US Embassy Cables which discussed the increasing role of bloggers as political activists. The media has focused predominately on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter as centers for activism and mobilization. However, blogs and contemporary literature fueled the revolution in another way–by igniting discourse.

Blogs, though still censored, are able to bypass traditional publishing outlets which are heavily controlled by the government. The world of internet blogging allows people to air their opinions more freely. According to one anonymous blogger (name X’ed out on cables), blogging allowed Egyptian youth to talk about topics that were “unimaginable five years ago.” Topics range from Muslim/Christian tensions, the military, women’s rights, sexual harassment, and job scarcity. The cables report that the majority of bloggers are between 20 to 35 years old, the same demographic that led Tuesday’s uprising.

The language of the blogosphere carried over into other mediums. Blogs are mostly written in colloquial Arabic, or, 3ammeya, which is different from the Classic Arabic that is used in literature. Blog talk is synonymous with street talk: slangy, intimate, frank. Writers and activists felt a need to talk about the issues of the street, what every day Egyptians are feeling and experiencing. The most influential books in recent years became popular because they pushed the censors, told the truth, and incorporated populist landscapes into their work.

These kinds of books are often the most difficult to get published. Even after publication they risk getting pulled from the shelves. “Writers must fight against censorship but also support literature…We live with censorship. We must survive with it. We don’t accept it but we live with it,” says Khaled al-Khamissi, the author of Taxi. There are variations to this strategy–some writers choose not to publish in Egypt at all. Some writers publish (though still at risk) with small presses, often safeguarding that their books will never get read by the people. For Alaa Al-Aswany, a lifelong struggle with government agencies leads him to publish with an independent press, and in this case, his book does get read. The overwhelming results speak for themselves. (More below).

Two books that have met critical and commercial success in Egypt despite problems with censorship are Taxi by Khaled al-Khamissi (2007) and The Yacoubian Building, by Alaa Al-Aswany (2002). Both are bestsellers that have been translated into many languages, drawing attention to Arabic literature internationally. Both writers have a shared disinterest in linguistic pyrotechnics and showy elitism, and declare their works as books for the people. Both are bloggers and political activists.

Taxi is a book that captures the pulsing smog and shimmer of Cairo’s streets through a series of interviews and anecdotes with Cairo’s taxi drivers. The book contains beautiful moments, but more so there are ugly, painful realities that are being uncovered daily as the protests continue. The dialogue is written in blunt colloquial Arabic and gives much-needed voice to the ignored populous; Khamissi highlights this with an epigraph from Paulo Coelho’s Maktub, which tells the story of a humble juggler who, despite his own embarrassment, juggles two oranges before the baby Jesus and is rewarded by being the only monk present allowed to hold the infant on his lap. “I have tried to relate these stories as they are, in the language of the street–a special, blunt, vital and honest language quite different from the language of salons and seminars that we are used to,” Khamissi writes in his introduction; these are “words that need to be said.”

Between the bribes taxi drivers must pay to the police and the duplicity of the government and the unwelcome influence of rich foreigners, Taxi‘s 58 small vignettes add up to a scathing expose that reveals the corruption and injustices of Egyptian governance. It is a government that has dealt heavy blows to its poorest and least educated.

Taxi drivers are often too old, too young, too poor, or too well-educated. They work under inhuman, backbreaking conditions, their lungs assaulted daily by fumes and dust. The passengers they carry through the sprawling city all have stories of their own. Every story in Taxi has thousands of real-life counterparts. (The vignettes are called “fictional dialogues,” although they are obviously about real people and events, perhaps to escape libel charges.)

In Story #18, the cab driver reveals to the “narrator” that his son is in the Cancer Institute and that the medical fees are insurmountable. While the narrator pities the driver and gives him a large tip, the narrator’s friend scoffs: “That’s a story that’s repeated often. That must have happened to me a hundred times. We’ve become a nation of beggars. You’ve never heard that?” This episode is fittingly placed one-third of the way through the book; at the moment readers begin to question the likelihood of so much suffering in a “democratic” country. Perhaps this is the only real disclaimer Khamissi offers, as if to say: I am human too, I can only draw conclusions through what I observe to be true, and even if only half these stories turn out to be true they should be enough to break your heart.

Alaa Al-Aswany has been a political activist longer than he has been a novelist. (His father was a famous activist-lawyer.) Since 1993, Al-Aswany has written a column of political and social issues. He hosts a cultural salon that has become such a liability that cafe owners have screamed for his group to go away. (The cafe owner later apologized, saying he was being watched by government officials.) Al-Aswany is also a member of Kefaya (“Enough”), a grassroots coalition that opposes the presidency of Hosni Mubarak.

This week, Aswany took to the streets alongside young Egyptians, demanding justice, equality, dignity. He writes in The Guardian’s “Comment is free” blog: “A democratic regime might fail to beat poverty, but the people enjoy freedom and dignity.”

The Yacoubian Building is a novel about how Egypt under the current regime fails to provide these very basic human rights–freedom and dignity–to its people. The novel interweaves the stories of characters from all classes and walks of life. They are residents in the Yacoubian Building, an actual historical building in Downtown Cairo.

There is the wealthy, aged Zaki Bey el Dessouki, an inveterate womanizer who speaks French, drinks Johnny Walker Black, and gets vitamins shot into his ass in preparation for his women visitors. There is Taha, the idealistic son of the building’s bawab, who gets his dreams crushed by the corrupt police system, and eventually joins an extreme Islamist group. Equally disheartening is Taha’s girlfriend Busayna, a beautiful young woman forced to endure sexual harassment on the job. But as there is no justice for her, no one standing up for any woman; she has to find other ways to survive. A homosexual newspaper editor falls in love with a poor police officer and the doomed relationship leads to a crime of passion.

Of all these stories (and there are more) the most sickening are the stories about the machinations of government officials who are as corpulent as they are corrupt. Even Mubarak makes an appearance in this novel, although he is referred to only as “the Big Man.” The Big Man never comes out of the shadows, but the characters always know he is there, demanding 50 percent of the profits, or else.

True, this is all “fiction,” and in fiction we are presented with holograms, not flesh and blood. But Al-Aswany relates a telling anecdote in the preface to The Yacoubian Building. Years before, he had been trying to publish a novel in which the protagonist mocks the nationalist leader Mustafa Kamil who said, “If I weren’t Egyptian, I would want to be an Egyptian.” A younger Al-Aswany had naively believed that the opinions expressed in his novel were no big deal, as it was the sentiment expressed daily on the streets. (Also echoed by Khamissi, who was forced to take out certain well-known stories and jokes that would have landed him in jail.) So, in hopes of being published, Al-Aswany took his novel to the General Egyptian Book Organization, a government agency funded by tax payers. After the employee of the committee looked at his book, he said:

“I can’t possibly publish this book.”

“Why?”

“Because you insult Egypt.”

“I don’t insult Egypt.”

“You make fun of the leader Mustafa Kamil.”

“I don’t make fun of him. I love and respect Mustafa Kamil. The one who makes fun of Mustafa Kamil is Isam Abd el Ati, the hero of the novel.”

“Do you want me to believe you don’t agree with what you said even though you’re the one who wrote it?”

Al-Aswany and the employee continued to argue about whether a fiction writer could be responsible for the views of his protagonist, as if the writer were the protagonist. The anecdote ends with the employee requiring Al-Aswany to write a disclaimer to say that he, the writer, shared none of the opinions of his protagonist. After Al-Aswany wrote the disclaimer the committee nevertheless refused to publish the book. Eventually, Al-Aswany stopped seeking out government agencies.

The Yacoubian Building was published by a small but renowned press, Dar Merit, which took great risk in publishing the book. “I have no choice but to praise the Lord,” Al-Aswany says in describing the events that followed. The book quickly became the bestselling Arabic novel and stayed there for five years, taken down to second place only after the publication of his next novel, Chicago. He writes that Egyptians approach him daily in the streets to thank him for writing his book. This kind of outpouring comes only from the writing–earnest, convincing, unsettling–of the truth.

Post Script: AlJazeera’s license has been revoked and they are to close their bureau in Cairo today (1/30). Additionally, the Arab world’s largest book fair, that would be taking place right now in Cairo, has been postponed indefinitely.

Best Book for the Chronically-Paranoid Manhattanite

Chronic City by Jonathan Lethem (Paperback, Vintage)

Most consistently-read book on the subway for the early part of 2010, and deservedly so. Lethem deploys line after line of careful, streamlined prose which contain a wild logic insidiously persuasive in its precision. There’s a lot going on in this book, as with all of Lethem’s work. Plot-wise, there are firecrackers exploding all over the place; we have no idea which conflicts and dilemmas are most dire, but somehow this constant feeling of panic suits the book well. Double entendres, hidden meanings, uncanny duplicates, alternate universes, desires too nebulous to satisfy — this is reality filtered through Lethem’s lens. The cast of characters, briefly: Astronaut-fiancee lost in space, writes beautiful tear-inducing letters to love-object Chase Insteadman, protagonist and retired child star who befriends legendary rock-critic-turned-recluse Perkus Tooth of the constant debilitating migraines; a posse consisting of protege/femme fatale Oona Laszlo; a homeless guy named Biller. Other minor characters include a celebrity acupuncturist, an enormous Second Avenue tiger on the loose, two eagles, a poetically-inclined weed dealer, sketchy government types (naturally), something called a “chaldron,” and cameos by such elite art institutions as The New Yorker and Criterion. I spent a summer week reading this book out loud with my sister inside our insufficiently cool New York apartment, and then stumbling outside at night into the city’s sticky, stifling streets. Why is this city so…grid-y? Why is it never possible to remember the faces of your taxi drivers? What does it mean when pigeons circle a church steeple? After this book, you see everything differently.

An excerpt:

January 8,

C.,

Severed-foot disposal in a pocket biosphere is really a daft problem, one I hope you never need face, love. We considered air-lock ejection, a sailor’s funeral, but to send my pedal appendage spinning down to Earth, or worse yet, to trigger a mine, seemed florid, flamboyant, a bit of a flambe, and not in the least flame-retardant, even if we wrapped it in a foil boot. (If we had a thousand feet among us, a millipede’s supply to lop off and defenestrate, maybe we’d kick our way out of this crate!) So we opted for a somber burial in the Greenhouse, under the shade of the tallest of the mangroves, though in truth it meant a slightly watery grave after all, stuff seeping up through the muck to swallow the foot, bubbles of mud detaching and floating among us during our tiny, foot-size ritual observances. Sledge, having scooped up the dead bees from the shelf in the Nursery, embedded these in the gunk to form a ring of bee emissaries, the better to passport the foot into whatever afterlife it deserves. Keldysh recited a poem in Russian, Mstisav made a joke about Gogol, then we sealed up this weird stew with cheesecloth mesh, as we do the rest of the topsoil, to keep it from absconding in the zero-G.

Afterward, back to work or to moping in our various private nests. I’m not so much an occasion, anymore, for renewed bonhomie. My ailment is another ambient backdrop now, another machine falling apart with no parts to replace the scrapped ones, another grim dispatch from the various quadrants of the deadly dull but not yet quite deadly enough condition our condition is in. My cancer is a mood. We all of us up here have our moods.

Now a part of me will never touch Earth again, Chase.

Happy New Year!

Footloose,

J.

Best Book for the Young and Aging Hipster

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte (FSG)

The Ask is thematically similar to Chronic City but the real schizophrenia in this book is found in Lipsyte’s syntax. By now there must be something we can call “The Lipsyte School” of stylistic followers and imitators. To see it at work, working, is awesome and miraculous; to see a cheap imitation of it not working is cringe-worthy. Lipsyte, however, has so perfected his art that he rarely ever makes us cringe. When he decides to leap the semantic distance of a canyon he will do it and make it to the other side, effortlessly. A sentence like, “But I was biased, and not just because I often loved my son,” inverts expectation so quickly the humor could easily be missed. At readings, Lipsyte will read the sentence slowly and let the laughter ripple through the audience. Readings is where Lipsyte’s language really comes alive. He’s best as narrative monologuist — standup comedy as high art. The punchline often comes at the end of the sentence. Modifiers are unexpected, atypical, sacriligious: “Horace, after all, was [the students'] age. He had no health insurance, just hope.” It’s easy to picture Milo, the middle-aged, balding narrator employed at a “mediocre” arts institution (Lipyste teaches in the MFA program at Columbia) when he’s sitting right in front of you. The book’s descriptions of hipster loft-living are scathingly accurate and hilarious. Scenes of fatherhood are another of the book’s strengths. The plot has been described by my favorite people as being “loosely hung, like a skeleton,” which I completely agree with. But don’t worry, the novelty of Lipsyte’s sentences make this a totally worthwhile, pleasurable read.

An excerpt:

“Gentlemen,” said our supervisor, Vargina, coming out from her command nook. “Did you send off those emails about the Belgian art exchange?”

Horace swiveled back to his monitor with the mock panic of a sitcom serf. Vargina took scant notice of our talk, tolerated foul banter for purposes of morale. But the fact remained, we had forgotten the afternoon’s assignment. The gods of task flow did not easily forgive.

Where we worked was in the development office of a mediocre university in New York City. It was an expensive and strangely obscure institution, named for its syphilitic Whig founder, but we often called it, with what we considered a certain panache, the Mediocre University at New York City. By we, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean once.

Our group raised funds and materials for the university’s arts programs. People paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk. Still, the sums didn’t quite do the trick. Not in the cutthroat world of arts education. Our job was to grovel for more money. We could always use more video cameras, more caulk, or a dance studio, or a gala for more groveling. The asks liked galas, openings, recitals, shows. They liked dinner with a famous filmmaker for them to fawn over or else dismiss as frivolous.

Best Book for the Irreverent History Junky

Love Like Hate by Linh Dinh (Seven Stories)

Linh Dinh has written some of the most influential and widely-taught books of poetry and prose poetry, and his novel debut is equally groundbreaking. Love Like Hate paints an intimate picture of Vietnam before and after the Fall of Saigon, when the country reunited under communist rule. Dinh follows a family through two generations and traces the trajectory of a nation through the details of domestic circumstance. Hoang Long, captain in the ARVN and imprisoned patriarch of the family, comes from a wealthy landowning clan of South Vietnam. He marries Kim Lan, the daughter of a “wannabe Frenchman.” She eventually becomes the owner of a cafe called Paris by Night, and represents the resilience of the average Vietnamese citizen caught in the middle of a war they perhaps don’t quite understand. They are the transition generation: those who are forced to radically shift deeply ingrained ideologies and loyalties and consequently reemerge believing nothing. During the time Hoang Long is in reeducation camp, Kim Lan marries a Chinese-Vietnamese (more allegorical implications) who triumphs by ousting Hoang from his own home. Kim Lan’s two children represent the polemical divide in Vietnamese youth: the daughter embraces Western culture and elopes with a rich, well-read punk-rocker, and the son marries a submissive, uneducated fishmonger from the countryside. In the end, we are left wondering if the fate and future of Vietnam are nestled somewhere in between the two poles or if it rests with the daughter, who comes into adulthood with the last words of the novel: “The next day Hoa turned 18. THE END.” The bluntness of the statement leaves an unsettling peace, one detects perhaps a note of bitter resignation. On a stylistic note, Dinh proves the age-old mantra that poets often write better prose than prose-writers.

An excerpt:

Her father was a wannabe Frenchman, or, rather, an aspiring Corsican. He had studied at Lasan Taberd, a French school in Saigon, and supposedly spoke French, although no one had ever seen him talk to a Frenchman. His conversations were sprinkled with a dozen or so French words, such as moi, toi, bon, and ecoutez.

“Ecoutez! Do toi want to drop by moi house this evening?”

The only book he had ever read was a biography of Napoleon, which he kept rereading until he knew all the details of Napoleon’s life better than Napoleon himself. He was one of those people who simply assumed that whatever they happened to be thinking about had to be of immediate interest to everyone else. Looking up from his crumbling book, he would ask Kim Lan’s mother, “Did you know that Napoleon was only five foot six, only an inch taller than me?”

“Why are you always talking about that man? What has he ever done for you?”

“Did you know that Napoleon was killed by his wallpaper, which contained arsenic? Isn’t that amazing? Did you know that Napoleon only had one testicle?”

“What’s wallpaper?”

“It’s something they do in France. You wouldn’t know.”

He kept a nearly full bottle of Napoleon on the highest shelf of a glass cabinet, flanked by upside-down snifters and brushed by cobwebs dangling from the ceiling. Even an adult standing on tiptoes could not reach it. He admired the liquor’s amber glow and aroma, appreciated the bottle’s elegant shape and brown-gold label, but had no stomach for cognac itself. He began each morning with a croissant and a cafe au lait, chain smoked Gauloises, and snacked often on pate chaud. Once a week he had to have a steak au poivre or a steak tartare, which he ate while scanning his wife’s face for hints of amused disapproval. “What are you grinning at?” It also irritated him to no end that she could never tell cheese from butter. The only cheese she had ever tried was Laughing Cow, which she always enjoyed with a banana. The sight of his wife holding a banana in one hand, a wedge of Laughing Cow cheese in the other, chewing happily, always made him seethe. I’m married to a monkey, he’d think.

The career of artist Paul Chan has taken many surprising turns; the most recent is the founding of his new e-book publishing house, Badlands Unlimited. The venture has prompted both excitement and dismay, because wherever Chan’s attention goes, the public goes with it. Chan’s past projects have actively engaged political issues–(the 2004 election in Now Promise Now Threat; the Iraq war in Baghdad in No Particular Order; Katrina in Waiting for Godot in New Orleans)–so one can’t help but wonder if there is a note of protest in this latest gesture.

Badlands’ presence at this year’s NY Art Book Fair, organized by Printed Matter, seemed both incongruous and momentous. Their Kindles and iPads floated alone among a sea of paper ephemera and book objects. An unspoken rule was officially broken; one got the feeling that from that moment on art books would undergo a radical revitalization process. Armed with the ability to reflect on history and see into future problems with enviable astuteness, Chan always seems to know exactly what needs to happen and when. I interviewed Badlands’ Director of Operations Ian Cheng about their project: what they (Paul and Ian) hoped to accomplish, what they feared. . . what they did in the office on mescaline. . ..

HYDRA: Aside from the ability to publish art books with more speed and ease, was there anything else motivating the founding of Badlands? Was it a sort of intervention on behalf of the art book industry? Or against?

BADLANDS: Paul was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with traditional art book publishers. They made great books no doubt–Paul has worked firsthand with some great publishers–but they couldn’t see that the historical distinctions between books, computer files, and artworks were rapidly dissolving. Badlands was started as a way to publish books and works that embody the spirit of this dissolution, and moreover books that we really wanted to read and experience but that didn’t exist yet. We’re not against paper books or the art book industry or tradition. We want to publish books in an expanded field. We want to be present in the art publishing landscape, but not have to belong there.

H: Some digital writers and artists who create strictly for the screen view the switching of mediums as inevitable and necessary, because art has to engage the present; make it new. For them it’s an issue of aesthetic integrity. So is Badlands taking a similar stance in renouncing physical matter? I’m thinking how your new downloadable e-book Mans in the Mirror is in 3D, and each page kind of lunges out at you with its own holographic physicality–a new kind of sculpture.

B: I think Timothy Leary tried to renounce physical matter once. But we’re nowhere close to being as tripped out. In any case we relate to physical matter and love physical matter because our bodies are still physical. We publish paper books and artist editions in tandem with e-books. Maybe we can say that virtuality is simply a part of the present, but that it doesn’t have to be antagonistic or zero-sum with the material world.

H: Do you think the screen destroys the reading “experience”? Scrolling isn’t the same as flipping pages, the glare of the screen isn’t the same as paper between your fingers, etc.

B: Well, whatever you think of the iPad, its touch screen is still an acknowledgment that people want to come into tactile contact with immaterial information–to physically move through the virtual. I think “the new” will be dissolving of boundaries, integrative, and strangely mundane or second-nature in this way.

new_books.gif

H: What do you say to critics who insist that the screen simply does not relay information like a book object? Is that a valid argument, or is the goal of the e-book to create a totally new kind of reading experience?

B: At the NY Art Book Fair and elsewhere, we’ve gotten an equal number of enthusiastic responses and fearful, angry responses about our e-book venture. The fear is that e-books are going to replace and kill off physical paper books. This fear is reinforced by the fact that the e-book form is in its infancy, and the first instinct of many book publishers doing e-books, e-book designers, and interface designers is to simply mime the experience of reading a physical book transposed within a digital space. This seems to offend a lot of book lovers, the thought of a simulation of a physical book taking the place of the physical book.

Then there’s the new media tendency to create e-books that are actually interactive apps, with all the bells and whistles of 90s CD-ROMs, a mania of animated distractions that seem to say, “Look! Reading doesn’t have to be a chore!” Which ends up obliterating the activity of reading itself. All of this is just an identity crisis in the gestating infancy of the e-book form. At Badlands we recognize this infancy as a moment of freedom, an opportunity to re-imagine how text, image, and sound can come together to expand the fundamental activity of reading. What that actually looks and feels like is the question we are asking, in the form of the books we make.

The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade's Sake

H: It is interesting to think about how we engage or disengage when we come in contact with a book object or electronic device. I liked the message at the beginning of The Essential and Incomplete Sade for Sade’s Sake (which I read on the Kindle): “Please turn off all other electronic devices, including mobile phones, pagers, electronic games, media and music players, and delink from all connections that may interfere with the reading experience.” If I was Justine and I was in a room with Marquis de Sade, he probably would have said the same thing: Like, “Ok. Now it’s time to get serious.” Do you think that the act of writing or making a book is like an assault on the reader? And that the problem with modern readers is that we refuse to be totally, utterly assaulted and consumed by one source? (I mean “readers” in the general sense; not just readers of text, more along the lines of Jacques Rancière when he calls for a community of “readers and interpreters” of art.)

B: At its very best, reading is an immersive experience. But to commit to being immersed is really hard these days. Digital space is both glorious and horrifying because desire can be enacted so immediately–desire for information, counter-information, images, contact, response, pleasure– (although not necessarily fulfilled). On the other hand, activities that demand sustained focus– art-making, writing, exercising, watching a movie, even getting to sleep– all require their own set of rituals to prime you, to commit your attention and your body for a duration to come. The message at the beginning of the Sade e-book is partly a joke, but it’s also a rudimentary primer. It’s something you have to pass through that will ready your attention and cue your focus into the e-book.

H: It reminds me of the David Foster Wallace story “Oblivion,” where a couple’s formerly-adequate sleep-priming rituals totally stop working. Not being able to transition fully from state to state is almost the contemporary status quo, right? Like sometimes I dream about my gmail inbox screen.

B: Actually I recently dreamt that I could check my gmail from within my dream, without having to wake up to do it. . . Maybe what you’re describing is a feeling of dislocation, which is different from being lost. There’s no sense of panic or alarm attached to dislocation, it’s just a condition. But when you’re in a state of dislocation, your attention easily enters into a competitive economy, it becomes scarce. Maybe the activity of making new priming rituals for sustained attention could be what raving was to inaccessible health care services.

H: The Sade fonts are really fun and actually strangely addictive. Whatever you type, no matter how mundane–(“Hi, Mom!” becomes “I see hetero-I see trans-incest, lustmurder” in the “Oh Dr. Ebing” font)–the message becomes very sexualized and rhythmic. It turns us all into Sade, really, this insatiable sex writing machine. How do you imagine or hope that users will interact with these fonts?

B: Maybe couples having communication problems will write disarming letters to each other using the fonts. I’d like the fonts to be in competition with YouTube cat videos as the 21st century way to say what we can’t say.

fonts for Mac + PC + Linux

H: (For Paul) The Phaedrus Pron reading at the NY Art Book Fair was really incredible, and I’ve been to more readings than I can count. I was like. . . experiencing a word painting. (Especially in the “Oh, Gertrude” section.) It was visual, sensual, I saw gradations of color, smelled smells. . . anyway, it is hard to verbalize. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean when you say (in recent Opening Ceremony interview) that (à la Socrates) “We are given messages from the gods, and we become mad because we are only vessels for these divine messages”?

B: Divine messages drive people who think they hear them mad. They also and usually sound mad when those same people try to speak those messages. This, for Plato, was not necessarily a bad or wrong thing, since these divine messages held the secrets to another kind of order. A divine order, let’s call it. I’m not sure, however, if Plato would hold madness in such high esteem if he rode that D train at 3am.

H: What’s next? What are you guys working on now?

B: We have exciting things in store for the upcoming year. Newly translated conversations by artists, experimental e-books, works of grossly applied philosophy, and more. . .

downloadable e-book made under influence of mescaline

H: Okay, and the making of Mans in the Mirror. . . the entire office under the influence of mescaline!? Any stories to share about that?

B: Part of being a new young publishing house is to constantly maintain a coefficient of vulgarity in everything we do. We chemically abolished quality control and completed the book in a day and were very professional about not touching each other. The results speak for themselves!

A prominent blogger friend was undergoing catharsis by unsubscribing from certain aggressive email lists when he received this phone call–

“Is this _____ of _____ (website)?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“I’m _____ from ______ (organization). Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from our list? You will no longer be notified about our exciting x and y events!”
“Uh, yes? I’m sure. How did you get my number?”

This blogger thought it was funny that his stature had grown to such proportions as to warrant a personal call from this organization. “I made something out of nothing,” he mused. “I made something happen on the internet.”

And isn’t generating “something out of nothing” undeniably what the internet is best at doing? Writers and personalities emerge from the digital whirlpool, but so do memes, manufactured interest, and hysteria–the internet replicates and redistributes like wildfire, like cancer. A lot of the time this redistribution seems to be an end in itself. The more hits something receives the better. Degree of exposure becomes analogous to value.

The Architectural League’s Situated Technologies Pamphlet 7, “From Mobile Playground to Sweatshop City,” aims to dissect our perhaps unexamined concepts of value, labor, and mobility. Considering the endless hours we spend absorbing and generating blog posts, flicker uploads, Facebook profiles, and product reviews, it seems shocking that very few of us have stopped to think whether this “work” translates into labor or play. I think many of us operate under the impression that our hours still fall under “play”–but if we think what we do on the internet is labor, we must be expecting some serious remuneration if we believe it prompts such devoted attention.

In the pamphlet, media activists Trebor Scholz and Laura Y. Liu attempt to section off digital labor into distinct camps to better understand how our definitions of labor, value, and mobility are evolving and overlapping. One of these separations is to put “data labor” on one end and “fan labor” on the other. Data labor is closer to the work done on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform and fan labor closer to the work done by Amazon book reviewers. Fan labor is work we willingly do for free and post onto the internet out of sheer good will or freak compulsion. But the borders blur and bleed when one considers how little Mechanical Turk workers get paid, or how some workers testify that it is “entertaining” or “relaxing” to complete the mindless little tasks for cash. Or how book reviewers actually develop a reputation that translates into more significant material gains.

"Getting to Know Seven Mechanical Turk Workers"

Scholz calls what generates economic value on the internet “value fluency.” Here’s one kind of chart of how material and immaterial goods accrue on the internet.

VALUE GENERATED FROM FAN LABOR

Fan Labor –> Material Gain (i.e. getting a real salaried position, free fashion merchandise, a book deal, millions of dollars)

Fan Labor –> Increased Personal Fame (i.e. lifestyle bloggers, YouTube stars, Tila Tequila)

Fan Labor –> Increased Cultural Value (i.e. what we do here at Hydra, to inform people about things we love)

Unlike other forms of media such as newspapers and television, the internet hides its economic support systems–or rather, as Liu puts it, the way it generates profit is “embedded in the medium itself.” Because the internet serves multiple functions, what is commercial and what should be excluded seems less apparent. Unmonetized blogs aren’t generating economic value for the blogger, but the accretion of images uploaded to google increases google’s archive and thus increases its use value which then increases its stock value. Liu cites the fingerprinting of children as an example of a body of data that can be potentially exploited; I think a more cutting example would be the use of Facebook profiles as a source for marketers. Zuckerberg can genuinely believe that Facebook’s primary function is for social networking, but the fact remains that the information contained in millions of profiles is out there to be used in a way that is outside of that function.

Adrian Piper

The Possibility of Self-Exploitation

Scholz also asks a particularly terrifying question: Is it possible to self-exploit? Since it seems ridiculous to claim that posting on a blog or submitting a review of a product is a form of exploitation comparable to actual low-paid factory labor, Scholz rallies behind a less loaded term—what he calls “expropriation.”

According to Scholz’s statistics, 40% of all internet traffic is concentrated on 10 websites. Even highly trafficked websites don’t make that much money on AdSense, but the collective value of every user’s collective labor (like an ant hive) amounts to a lot of value for Google. YouTube works the same way–without the users that go to it to upload and watch videos, the site would have no value. By participating in the most basic way, by simply using the internet, we exploit ourselves.

As of now, the internet is a medium that demands its users to self-exploit. We exploit our own hours of the day, our attention spans, our privacy. The more we reveal and share and interact, the more our presence is valued in the digital world. Is this the only model out there, or does the internet have more redeeming factors?

Francis Alys "When Faith Moves Mountains" (2002)

Before reading this pamphlet I can honestly say that I never gave much thought to what I was doing on the internet. Writing for Hydra for example, what was I doing this for? We believe we are generating value in support of the things we love, but is it really that simple? Does passion justify activity on the internet; should the right to publicize every impulse be a matter of morality? Last week Adri diagnosed chronic flattening via over-emphasizing of frivolous content re: n+1 in her “WTFC” post, but all we can do is just throw up our hands in a kind of “you caught me” kind of way, like–oh well, this is the way it is! We too, perpetuate this system of micro-blogging, emotional micro-management, and voluntary self-exploitation. The internet opens up myriad possibilities, knowledge is exchanged for free, people connect, things grow “organically” (or at least it feels that way), but what if the internet requires a whole new set of rules that is counter-intuitive, a morality that applies only to the internet and not to the material world?

Case Study: The Ethics of UbuWeb

In mid-October, UbuWeb, the  now indispensable avant-garde video, sound, and text art archive was hacked. UbuWeb has for years ripped hard-to-find and out-of-print materials to post on the internet, sometimes in downloadable versions. Ubu never asks permission to post an artists’ work, but if the artist ever wants their work taken down, Ubu will take it down immediately with no questions asked.

After the site was mostly back up and running again, there was a message by founder Kenneth Goldsmith explaining Ubu’s posting philosophy. The post was in response to a Frameworks community thread where someone declared, “Ubu is hacked? What good news!” which spurred a deep conversation both for and against the ethics of Ubu. “Because we have no money, we don’t ask permission. Asking permission always involves paperwork and negotiations, lawyers, and bank accounts,” Goldsmith explains.

I can’t help but think that most people in my generation would agree that nothing is wrong with Ubu’s system. I am sometimes almost morally offended if I can’t find something on the internet. We don’t think we are “stealing” from artists when we view or download their work for free, in fact, we expect that it be free.

Exposure now seems to be a greater “good” than money. To be known by many in many ways leads to more opportunities. (Fan Labor –> Personal Relevance –> Material Gain). A system involving professional contracts, copyrights, permissions seems stifling, especially for artists.

Kenneth Goldsmith’s “If it Doesn’t Exist on the Internet It Doesn’t Exist,” a controversial talk he gave in 2005, outlines the shifting ethics of our system. He declares in manifestoesque bravado that “it is our obligation as educators and intellectuals to make sure that the bulk of our production ends up [on the internet], preferably with free and unfettered access to all.” Good virtue and hard work and sharing stuff on the internet result in “oblique but substantial benefits.” Although he gets no money from Ubu, he now has fans, cultural relevance, honorariums, compensated travel around the world.

So now: is it ethical for Goldsmith to receive these perks based on his “exploitation” of other artists? Or is he actually doing the morally right thing by making their work available and these perks just reward? It will be interesting to see how our ideas change in another five years.

(Kenneth Goldsmith Sings Frederic Jameson!)

Santiago Sierra, Palabra de Fuego (Word of Fire), 2007

It is impossible to view the work of Santiago Sierra and not have a strong opinion about it. His work does not invite quiet, personal contemplation; rather, it leaves the viewer feeling used, debased, guilty, full of rage. Sierra’s work can be seen as a series of exploitative gestures that targets society’s underclasses–immigrants, prostitutes, the poor, the homeless. By causing discomfort, Sierra perhaps intends to recreate for the viewer the discomfort experienced daily by his subjects.

Santiago Sierra, 160 Cm Tattooed on 4 People, 2000

In this piece, 160 Cm Line Tattooed on 4 People , Sierra recruited heroin-addicted prostitutes from the street to have their backs tattooed in exchange for one shot of heroin. Sierra’s description of this piece is eerily clinical:

“Four prostitutes addicted to heroin were hired for the price of a shot of heroin to give their consent to be tattooed. Normally they charge 2,000-3,000 pesetas, between $15-$17 for fellatio, while the price of a shot of heroin is around 12,000 pesetas, about $67.”

“People need money, people have to work, and I’m looking for strong images to express this,” he says in the Tate Modern interview (below). How are we to interpret this statement in relation to 160 cm? Is it an act of charity that instead of having to give 6 blow jobs for a shot of heroin all these women have to do is get tattooed? Or is it an act that reinforces existing structures of domination and submission? It’s no new revelation that drug-addicted prostitutes devalue their body, but to be reminded of this fact in the context of art makes us feel uneasy. The role of the artist as perpetrator forces us, the privileged viewers of the art, to be complicit in this act of charity and violation.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=naoYNgnDUl8

Other Sierra projects have included:

• Hosing Iraqis with polyurethane.
• Paying $60 to dye the hair of illegal street-vendors (mostly African) blond.
• Trading homeless women one night in a hostel in exchange for standing with their faces to the wall of a museum.
• Paying 10 people to masturbate in front of their houses.
• Paying workers (mostly of Mexican and Central-American origin) to move 24 cement blocks back and forth in the hallway of a gallery.

Los Penetrados 2008

Santiago Sierra, Los Penetrados, 2008

I just went to see Los Penetrados (2008) which is now being shown at Team Gallery. Los Penetrados is a 45-minute video piece in 8 acts showing different couples having anal sex. All the performers faces are blurred. Act 1 shows 10 white men penetrating 10 white women. Act 2 shows 9 white men penetrating 9 white men. Act 3 shows 3 white men penetrating 3 black women. The final act shows 10 black men penetrating 10 white men.

The video was shot on 12 Oct 2008, both Columbus Day and Dia de la Raza, the Spanish holiday commemorating the discovery of the Americas. The literalization of “being fucked” by some body/country/gender/race is immediately obvious, but it takes a while for the other possible readings to settle in. Seeing couples performing anal sex in this mirrored dance-studio-esque space makes their collective thrusting and bobbing almost comical, like aerobics class. Or, it is like a mechanical copulation factory where nothing is being generated. A ritualistic, religious orgy done for penance. For me, the work is provocative enough without the specific reference to colonization, which some feel unnecessarily garbles the message.

You can see Los Penetrados at Team Gallery until 23 Oct.

still from Eric Rohmer's "Chloe in the Afternoon" (1972)

When people break up; risk stability for wild relationships; give in to desire, self-destruction, silly romantic notions; when people do things nobody can explain or understand, not even themselves; when people do nothing, just sit/sleep/stand/settle; run home to repent to their wives; when people complicate the comforting formula [you + me = love]; the spirit and cinema of Eric Rohmer lives on.

That is to say: Eric Rohmer, master of ambiguity, has explored enough variables of love as to last us many more generations of perplexity.

For example, this is generally how one feels after watching a Rohmer film:

• What was that all about?
• Wow. So emotionally consuming.
• Were the actors beautiful or handsome or what? I couldn’t tell.

Which is pretty much the same thing I ask myself after wrecked relationships.

A couple nights ago, my boyfriend and I went to the Lincoln Center for an Eric Rohmer retrospective and saw Tale of Springtime (1990), the first of his Tales of Four Seasons. We had watched Rohmer’s last film The Romance of Astrea and Celadon (2007) in San Francisco during our early courtship as a kind of official date. Now here we were, almost three years later, understanding no more or less about why we were still together. After we watched the film we got ice cream and resumed our conversation about something that had happened. Friends of ours were breaking up after many years of a (seemingly) loving marriage. What had happened? Cheating was involved. Their explanations were vague and tinged with regret, nostalgia, fury, a sense of inevitability. Who was at fault? Who caused the rift? Who was telling the truth? We speculated but could come up with no conclusive answer.

“The whole thing feels like a Rohmer movie,” I sighed.

still from "My Night at Maud's" (1969)

Though Rohmer is one of my favorite film auteurs, his films are frustrating. Best known for his story collection and film series the Six Moral Tales – which include such Criterion favs as My Night at Maud’s (1969), Claire’s Knee (1970), and Chloe in the Afternoon (1972) — Rohmer promises moral conclusiveness but does not deliver.

I watched all of the Six Moral Tales in college after a bad break-up, living in an uninsulated and isolated cottage in the “woods” (actually, a large yard), hoping to glean just one small bit of insight about what good, moral behavior between couples is supposed to be like. Though I gathered nothing, the films were addictive because they were so much like peering into real life, a boiled down, essentialized version of life. A character–usually male–wanders around trying to decide between one woman and another. Love forms triangles and sometimes squares. Of course, seductive seduction is hard to portray and is itself amoral, because once the artist decides with certainty that “this is the seducer and this is the seduced,” the story becomes much less interesting. Then it becomes a struggle between villainy and naivete — a Disney movie like The Little Mermaid, with an evil singing one and a good one, one we can hate and one we can root for, and so on.

In Tale of Springtime, a young girl, Natacha (Florence Darel), befriends an older woman, Jeanne (Anne Teyssèdre), at a party and the two spend a weekend together. They talk about many things, but mostly about the girl’s relationship with her father, mother, and the father’s abominable girlfriend. The relationship is felt to be incompatible; her father is 40, the girlfriend is almost Natacha’s age. On the other hand, Natacha is dating a man close in age to her father. It becomes “apparent” that Natacha is plotting to match her father with Jeanne. She doesn’t tell Jeanne her father will be coming home, runs out to buy bread at opportune times, claims to have an engagement and can’t come home, leaving the two adults on a couch together. Can we attribute this behavior to Natacha’s “dreamy nature” as she subconsciously weaves her web of fantasy, or to her irrational petty hatred for her father’s girlfriend? Or it it as Jeanne explains it: that we all do things without a thought in our brains, that if one were to follow us around all day and analyze our actions, none of it would make any sense?

I will venture to say that all the characters in Springtime are immature and unformed. The title/season perhaps signals that the true protagonist and only moral center of the film is the 18-year-old Natacha. Her 40-year-old father says things like “I’ve only ever been loved madly” and means it. Jeanne has a fiance yet allows herself to be lured into the embrace of a man she doesn’t even really like. It’s interesting that the apartment where everything begins is Natacha’s apartment, as if she were the true choreographer of this comedy. “God” does not enter in, and neither do his rules; only Natacha’s persist. (P.S. The ending is shocking. Won’t reveal why here.)

still from "Tale of Springtime" (1990)

If nothing is conclusive, one might wonder: why call these tales at all? (Interestingly, in Springtime, the very important line “I’ll tell you a story” is immediately followed up with “A fairy tale?” as if to accentuate the weirdness in calling a situation a “tale.”) Such a proclamation makes one think of punishment in biblical proportions — heads cut off, people turning to ash, insane floodwaters, etc. Rohmer’s films are not “tales,” nor are they “moral lessons.” Not in the way Bresson’s films can be, or even Resnais, who I suspect never intends to moralize but always inadvertently dishes out some grand philosophical treatise. It seems Rohmer only wishes to show how people conduct their lives based on this or that perceived moral code.  He said in this recent interview (emphasis mine):

I’ve managed to show people discussing morality, whatever morality that may be, in a completely natural way. Whether it’s a dandy’s moral code in The Collector, or religions questions in My Night at Maud’s, or issues of eroticism in Claire’s Knee. They’re all covered by the word “moral” in the general sense.

Perhaps “Moral Tales” should have been translated as “Discussions about Morality.” The etymology of “tale” –> talk, “conte” –> conter, certainly supports this notion. Talk results in momentary compromise between fleeting systems of belief. Maybe the whole project of Moral Tales is to glorify this definition of morality as vague, nebulous, negotiable, and undercut the notion of “morality” as an objective set of laws that has to be obeyed.

Still, even with this tiny observation, after we left the Lincoln Center I felt that same rush of excitement and anger I always feel after watching one of Rohmer’s films. I can’t help it. It’s no fun not to know who’s guilty and who is innocent.

“Why did I waste my money/time on that thing? What does it even mean? It doesn’t mean anything! Why does it have to drag us in like that? I probably won’t do this again.”

Only — I know I will, and then I will write a long blog post.

Kubrick designed his own filing boxes because he felt the store-bought kinds were too restrictive, the lids too tight. When the customized boxes arrived, they found that someone had absentmindedly left a note that read: "Fussy customer. Make sure the tops slide off." --The Guardian, "Citizen Kubrick"

“Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes” is a must-see documentary for all film fans. In 2001, journalist Jon Ronson was invited to visit Stanley Kubrick’s family home at Childwickbury Manor, where he discovered dozens of trailers filled with archival boxes, some which had been unopened for decades. The boxes explain the wide gaps between each film in Kubrick’s later career, substantiating rumors of his manic meticulousness to detail.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBIP6ZbRqbQ

For Eyes Wide Shut (1999), his last film, Kubrick asked his nephew Manuel Harlan to shoot the entire length of Commercial Road in England so that he could see what each storefront looked like. The problem was, he didn’t want any photos of the buildings leaning in at an angle. The solution: Harlan had to get on top of a 12-foot ladder to shoot each store front, and then tape the entire street together in an extended panorama.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2x35wjHrTl4

For every scene, there are hundreds of accompanying photos: large estate gates, domestic interiors, hotels, the backs of womens’ heads, and, my personal favorite–the droogs in A Clockwork Orange (1962) all wearing different kinds of hats. (Kubrick was apparently looking for the perfect “sinister hat.”) The amount of research he did for each film is hard to fathom. Ronson describes how a former cinema room in the home was slowly transformed into a Napoleon library for a Napoleon film that was eventually abandoned. Historical research for it eventually went into the period piece Barry Lyndon. For The Shining (1980), Kubrick procured every ghost book ever written.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wql4DwuN_y0

The hoarded items were not just restricted to location scouting and film ideas. He collected so much stationary he once joked he could start a stationary museum. Every single note or letter of correspondence he received was carefully stored away. Fan letters were labeled either “F-P” (Fan, Positive),  “F-N”  (Fan, Negative), or “CRANK.” The letters were then filed under the folder of the city where the letter came from.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rV3YG-f74UQ

This level of specificity, along with the aforecaptioned self-designed boxes, seemed to Ronson indicative of something bigger, something vastly important, and he spends the whole of the documentary trying to figure out what that is. Ronson sifts through the archives for years, looking for that essential piece of evidence that will finally unlock the enigma of Kubrick. The epiphany he settles on in the end may not satisfy everyone, but I found it to be an important reminder that great art lasts for a reason.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_KkqKuSlYc

Channel 101‘s “Yacht Rock” internet video series has permanently altered our relationship with “smooth music,” that stuff on adult contemporary radio some of us probably gagged at–or secretly gorged on–as kids. The phrase “yacht rock” almost tells you everything you need to know about the genre. It’s the kind of music one imagines yacht owners like to listen to while sailing, sipping champagne, having a good time. Soft rock from the 70s and 80s that is totally, unapologetically heartfelt. Yacht rock doesn’t seem like it should be appealing, and yacht, it is. And it’s no longer a guilty pleasure.

The show “Yacht Rock,” created by J. D. Ryznar and Hunter D. Stair, is a fictionalized account of how seminal yacht rock anthems such as “What a Fool Believes,” “Rosanna,” and “Keep the Fire” came to be. The cast includes key players Michael McDonald (the husky-voiced baritone of Steely Dan and the Doobie Brothers), Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross (who wrote the yacht rock anthem, “Sailing”), and the great pop duo Hall & Oates. Behind a backdrop of yachts, flaming cocktails, and dramatic sunsets, our heroes strive to write and sing the smoothest music ever.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jMTI8vg7A5U

In the first episode, Michael McDonald (played by J.D. Ryznar) is sitting in a corner, despondent because he is one bad song away from being kicked off of the Doobie Brothers. His old friend Kenny Loggins (Hunter Stair), better-faring, comes to his aid and says: “When a friend is drowning in a sea of sadness, you don’t just toss him a life vest. You swim the life vest to him.” McDonald initially resists Loggins’ help and says: “I’m an artist. I can’t write hit songs.” After some heart to heart, they decide to visit fellow sadness-wader Jim Messina, who has recently been kicked off of Loggins & Messina. He is drinking alone in an alley. “This is going to be me, I know it!” McDonald laments. Luckily for McDonald, during this impassioned speech, he happens upon the fateful words, “That’s what a fool believes!” Immediately, Loggins & McDonald exchange knowing, epiphanic grins. A quick montage shows the two artists writing “What a Fool Believes,” a song that will launch McDonald back to the top of the charts.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nX1Nh6c80wo

In addition to the insane plot and costume choices, “Yacht Rock” is overlaid with a hilarious faux-16mm film grain that imbues each scene, mustache, Hawaiian shirt, and Topsider with a kind of vintage kitsch credibility that is almost synonymous with the whole “smooth” sound of yacht rock. It’s consistent, nostalgic, emotive, totally cheezy. We love it because it’s old and flawed. Enough time has passed so that the earnestness of a lyric like “I cried when I wrote this song” (“Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan) can be appreciated with less irony and more genuine feeling.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnahCol3lXs

There is not a bad installment in the 12-episode series. In Episode 7 McDonald is kidnapped by Warren G and Nate Dogg. Smoking together in some basement room/recording studio they remix McDonald’s 1982 hit “I Keep Forgettin’ (Everytime You’re Near)” into the 1994 hit “Regulate.” In Episode 11, tropical-island-escapist-music-cheeseburger-guru Jimmy Buffet and his Parrot Heads kidnap Loggins, and out of that saga comes the song “Footloose.”

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvEpsDNQ75g

www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckOULenKxiQ

J.D. Ryznar tells New York Press, “Turning people on to Steely Dan is the hardest thing in the world, but I think we achieved it on our show. It makes people laugh and then they go and listen to Steely Dan and they can’t stop because it’s amazing.”

While Michael McDonald acknowledges that the show feels a bit like “a stalker who’s never met you,” there is an “intuitive” truth to what the creators portray. “They somehow hit on something,” he says. The facts may not be all there but the crises and struggles are real. In the finale, McDonald finds that his worst fear from Episode 1 has come true: it is 1985 and he is officially an irrelevant artist, excluded from the “We Are the One” Aid for Africa charity single. His beard is totally white; the more relevant rock artists somehow mistake him for Santa Claus. How will he rise back to the top and show up the younger rockers? Can he do it? Will McDonald come out on top? Save an outer-galactic planet from a treacherous black hole? Avenge the beloved Koko? One only hopes that the cliffhanger ending suggests that there will be more episodes to come.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHLAq3VffHo