Stormy
Hanging out at the mall
Things are getting stormier and stormier. I sort-of stopped smoking last Friday. I sort-of lapsed on Monday. I sort-of don’t want to turn this into an addiction-kicking monkey blog.
I’ve started hanging out in shopping malls because you can’t smoke there. Also, I am becoming more and more fascinated with them as a project of sorts. Not quite of the magnitude of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, but something kind of like it—only a bit more visual.
I once thought that Southern California had the most highly developed plastic-shopping-mall culture. I’m now pretty sure that the great white north has them beat. When the weather is awful six months out of the year, the sort of indoor culture provided by malls is not just a teenage phenomenon anymore.
Now More than Ever
Strange things crop up while digging through old boxes . . .
Younger
Conversation strives toward silence, and the listener is really the silent partner. The speaker receives meaning from him; the silent one is the unappropriated source of meaning. The conversation raises words to his lips as do vessels, jugs. The speaker immerses the memory of his strength in words and seeks forms in which the listener can reveal himself. For the speaker speaks in order to let himself be converted. He understands the listener despite the flow of his own speech; he realizes that he is addressing someone whose features are inexhaustibly earnest and good, whereas he, the speaker, blasphemes against language.
Walter Benjamin, “The Metaphysics of Youth” (II), 1913-14
There were so many things that flowed through my head when I was teaching the photography class (just over a week ago) that I wanted to write my way through. But there was no time, and even now as I take this moment the guilt rises that I haven’t written my final comments to all of them. I am easily overcome by messianism when speaking about photography. I often think of writing as so many nuts, bolts, and screws—but I never think of photography that way.
I was teaching about style using Roland Barthes and Susan Sontag, rather than using a parade of stilted stylistic examples. The thing common to both is a conception of style as something internal, rather than the external dress of a work. Barthes, in Writing Degree Zero offers the rather succinct thesis that language represents a horizon, a horizontal plain that governs possibility. In photography, the limits of the materials (particularly in regard to contrast or dynamic range) set up a sort of horizon which photographs dwell within. A photograph can be nothing more than a thin approximation of a slice of the experience available to the eye. A photograph is flattened in dimensions, compressed in tonality—in essence, a sort of shorthand in much the same manner as language for a boundless world of experience.
Style is a vertical dimension; Barthes claims that it is tied to our corporeal bodies and our position in time. I spoke to the class about this because so many of the people there seemed intimidated by the concept of “art” (as in fine art) in general. Style, the way I prefer to think about it, is not something validated through canonization but rather something that is intrinsic to having a discernable point of view. In other words, everyone has style whether they work to extend it skyward or not. In speaking on this topic, for the first time I began to see a congruence between style and ethos. It was almost a sort of conversion.
Reading Benjamin’s letters, I noticed that in the ecstatic correspondence with Carla Seligson of June 5, 1913 he remarks concerning his memories of a visit to Paris, “a wonderfully consummated experience,” that:
The following truism can be found in Brand [Ibsen’s Play] Here of course, it should not be taken so solemnly.Happiness is born of loss
only what is lost remains eternal.
I resist assigning much value to silence or loss. Part of it, I think is that Benjamin was under the heady influence of being twenty-one years old. Like Yeats, who wrote most of his “old age” poems in his early twenties, I think Benjamin grew “younger” as he aged. I hope I can do the same.
Squall
Darkness at the break of noon
Hiatus of Sorts
I had not intended to take so long before updating around here, but life has been busy (in a good way). Lest anyone wonder what’s up, I am now wrapping up the photography class and have already started teaching another one in technical writing; it’s going to be a busy summer. Both classes have really reinforced how much I really love this stuff. For the first time in my life, I feel like I have my dream job. Of course, this is an illusion because I have to go back to being a student in the fall. Somehow, teaching without taking classes at the same time just feels more like, well, teaching.
I’ve always been the sort of person who learns best when he’s talking—not just listening. I work things out for myself when I have to explain them to someone else. The photography class really excited a lot of connections that I hadn’t thought of before in my research, and the class seemed suitably entertained by my dog and pony show. They did good work too. That helps. I’ve got a couple of potential future tech-writers in the class I just started too. I think I’m going to have more fun teaching it in the summer than I did last year, because the students just seem more motivated. The bad part is that it is a 16 week course taught in 8 weeks, so I’ll be scrambling for a while.
Things should calm down and allow me some time to write in a few days; right now, all the words I can generate are going to students instead of the blog. I haven’t abandoned it, in fact, I’m really beginning to miss it.
