It’s the Dirt

“Every story has a happy ending especially if you have the knack for pretending” [Steve Wynn]

It’s amazing how similar our stories are. I suppose it might have to do with the fact that we grew up in the same place around a year apart. My father was an oil man too, and we moved there in 62.

There is just something about that place. I suppose I always have to fall back on my old friend Slim’s explanation: “It’s the dirt.”

On a completely unrelated note:

You are Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari!
That’s right! You’re two people! Actually, you’re
probably a lot more than that, because you
argued that all of us are, fundamentally,
schizophrenics. Your notion of the rhizome is
far too popular amoung people who fantasize
about digital technology. One of you is dead,
and the other isn’t.

What 20th Century Theorist are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Thin Film (4)

Trying to imagine the thinnest film possible, I came upon the idea of the zone on the surface of an overfilled glass of water. Curving slightly, it contains the potential of the water to flow over the edge. It’s a sort of balance really, between the pressure of air and the demands of gravity.

I was thinking that there was a gravity of a different sort to the image of images in Lucretius. If objects far away push their thin film through the air, they increase in pressure as they travel. Thus, objects far away hit with increased force and weight. I think we often view history that way, and ignore what is recent in favor of a deeper past. Objects that are closest to us hold the least amount of pressure, create the smallest disturbance.

Oliver Wendell Holmes sees these films as streaming too, traveling in waves. Nearest to us they are faint ripples, but as they build and multiply they build up not only pressure but also layers. The thin film is one of many, arrayed like leaves in a book. The further away, then, the denser the volume— the more complicated the impressions are to read.

Arago seems most careful of all. Don’t disturb the thin film, or the image will be destroyed.

Hillbillies

I was thinking about the construction of the idea of the dispossessed (as in depression era migrants and Southern sharecroppers) represents a fiction that is every bit as pervasive as Said’s exploration of orientalism. Postmodern writing tends to portray the representation of poverty as exploitive and classist. However, it seems to me that those who did the representing did so with motives as variant as the people involved.

I do not see the sort of “institutional conspiracy” that most of the critics of a Marxist bent do. What seems to have been “sold” (as much as the rhetoric of big-brother government takes care of the people) is that there is something worth representing in the culture of the downtrodden. What dominates the rhetoric surrounding the music and art of these “hill people,” and what perseveres, is the idea that they were masters of resistance.

The South, or better still, migrant cultures, represent a people who resist assimilation. Migrant people are not seen as people, but rather, as an idea. I was reminded of this today as I was listening to the 1971 Kinks album Muswell Hillbillies.

Continue reading “Hillbillies” →

Signifying Nothing

I woke up thinking of Faulkner. I have been reading The Empire of Signs, Roland Barthes’ exploration of Japan as a useful fiction. My first thought upon encountering it was that Delacour really needs to read it; my second, that modernism ultimately leads to Zen. Barthes postulates that the perfect language is a language free of its slavery to meaning. In the irresolvable koans, language is liberated to merely be. For some reason, in my sleep this thought came full circle to The Sound and The Fury.

The novel commences with a scene unfolding before the eyes of an idiot. I remember how I struggled with the book, finally resulting in taking my instructors advice: “Read it straight through in one sitting. Don’t worry if it doesn’t make sense.” After reading it the first time, he suggested that I read it again more slowly to reconstruct things. It makes no sense until you can see the world of this novel, told in multiple perspectives from multiple time frames. The Sound and The Fury is a magisterial pile of historical debris, piled in layers upon memory. But this morning, I could only think of the fuller Shakespearean quote:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

It occurs to me that the paradox of Barthe’s writing degree zero rests in those last two words: signifying nothing. Degree zero is the fulfillment of the indexical function of language—pure denotation. It points without meaning.

But the freedom from meaning seems to contradict the political impulse to use communication to do something. If the goal of language is personal, rather than political, transformation then this model of a “degree zero” is worthwhile. I don’t think this is ever the case. We want to sort through the debris and use it somehow, to shape our world in a new way, not just ourselves. The freedom from striving preached by Zen is antithetical to political consciousness.

Perhaps the Tutor is right. Faulkner is the model of modernism closest to the American soul: a series of grotesque discontinuities that frustrates us while we try to make sense of it. Faulkner is forced to leave off the “signifying nothing” part, because it is incompatible with our desire to build worlds, and ultimately, make sense.

No Fun

I am struggling through some difficult things right now. I use my blog to write through them, which results in more than a few moments of total incoherence. I tend to expect that most visitors will not want to read the majority of the more intensely critical theory involved posts. I am aware that this has become the bulk of my postings of late.

Each of these fragments seems to me to be the link in an indeterminate chain. I try to sustain them, but I am usually seduced away into something else. The map for all this exists purely in my head. They are not really indicative of my writing style as a whole. Gradually, some things have begun to take shape in my head, which would not be apparent to even a careful reader of my progress. Each step forward results from writing through the theoretical knots, leaving behind a strange trail of breadcrumbs here. Often, I think that at this particular moment, if I surfed in, I wouldn’t want to read myself.

Many of these pieces will probably be severely edited, or grossly expanded into something else. This is just a record of becoming.

I was reading one of Walter Benjamin’s final letters tonight. It was a letter to Theodor Adorno which discussed his projects. Among them was a projected work on Baudelaire, which Benjamin related to a recent article by Adorno “On the Fetish Character of Music.” The character of music is deeply related to the concepts of memory and of aura which were rapidly evolving in Benjamin’s late essays. Benjamin said he was hoping to get to work on the project in a few days. The letter was dated May 7, 1940. In June, as the Nazi’s approached Paris, he had to run.

Within a few months Benjamin was dead. I cried when I read the letter, so full of ideas that were never completed. I thought about these fragments, and hoped that I might someday connect them. I get up each day and work, and hope that the Bush nazis will be deposed and my work will continue without interruption. There is a problem with projecting yourself onto tragic figures. It makes you no fun at parties at all.

Constipation

I’ve been having difficulty controlling bits of irrational anger lately. The only explanation I can think of is constipation. Nothing physical, mind you—just mental. There has been so much information flowing into my head with almost none of it finding its way out. It may have to do with my cloistered semester—I have almost no physical contact with people other than my girlfriend. Talking is the way that I tend to get ideas worked out. Writing is similar, but much slower.

When Wood s Lot and Akma pointed at Writing With Images I should have been thrilled. Instead, I found myself angry. This is the same material that I’ve been plowing through at an increasingly rapid rate, neatly organized and formed into a class. My first thought was: “Why don’t I ever have an original idea? Everything I think of has been done before . . .” The second thought was: “Who did this? If this class is from some young lion, I might as well roll over and play dead.” That’s when I started to get angry at myself, and started feeling really stupid. I couldn’t be satisfied until I figured out whose class it was—there was no credit anywhere on the linked pages. I got really mad about that.

I know all this is irrational. I should have been really relieved when I found out it was George L. Dillon. Thirty years in the field makes a difference, you know? I was most relieved by his attempt at a similar project from two years before— The Rhetoric of HTML. It is nowhere near as polished, functional, and comprehensive. People get better. I hope to get better myself.

I don’t know what I meant to accomplish by this rant, but I had to get it out of my head. I think it’s just that overwhelming feeling of turning over every stone and finding an iceberg underneath. The scariest thing is thinking of things, and then reading a nice destruction of that idea in the next book you pick up. The anger is irrational. I should be happy that someone else is there to help save me from wasting too much time on untenable ideas, or to map out (in a really eerie way) the material I’ve been reading for the last four months.

Fidelity

I met a man yesterday who triggered a shift in my thinking. My girlfriend’s grandfather is in the process of moving from a large house into a small retirement village. The house is filled with what might be considered debris, but each thing is infused with layers of memories. As I scanned the piles of books, I saw lots of familiar titles. They were mostly self-teaching books about electronics from the late-seventies and early eighties. I had read many of them when they were new, because I used to be a stereo geek.

In the room with his computer were SSB transmitters, breadboards, and testing equipment. Old Commodore 64s could be seen in various locations. He was a radio man. On the wall of the kitchen, there was a certificate for the “old timers” club of the Radio Relay League. There was an oscilloscope, and a vacuum-tube voltmeter on the porch. There were jumpers and wires in those breadboards. There were still projects in the man’s mind. He was noticeably angry and sad when he spoke to his relatives. But when I talked to him he perked up, perhaps because I knew what all the equipment was.

“People don’t know that it wasn’t Marconi that invented radio, it was Maxwell—he did it fifty years before Marconi, but because he couldn’t put it to use Marconi got all the credit.”

This man started experimenting with radio in 1929, and from the look of things, he didn’t want to stop just yet. My girlfriend told me that he tried to teach her Morse code when she was a child, but it just didn’t stick. It seemed strangely poetic that there was a cell phone transmission tower in the front yard; the man was fascinated with communications. My interest in electronics was different. I was interested in high-fidelity first, and only later in communications.

Continue reading “Fidelity” →

A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling up wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. (257-8)

Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” (1940)

Rhetoric of Retribution

I’ve never been a fan of Quentin Tarantino. It’s perhaps a result of my preference for substance over style. I had to see Kill Bill though, because of the cast. I’d write a reaction piece, but MadPerc has written one that pretty much says all I would have cared to say regarding the film. But there’s a larger trope that is really starting to bug me—the rhetoric of retribution.

I started thinking about an older story. A guy is abused by a man at the crossroads. In anger, he kills him in retribution for the wrong. The reward for this retribution is a life of sorrow. Alas, poor Oedipus. Or there is always Titus, who under the influence of retribution creates a masterpiece of a massacre. Everybody dies. The audience cheers, but no one is left to stroll away in triumph. For a more modern version, New Jack City comes pretty close. That sort of tale is believable to me. Violence begets violence.

Maybe it’s just me, but in the post 9-11 world the master narrative seems to be changing. Retribution=good, or more pointedly, retribution=no consequences. I revisited another old film just for fun today, and it’s funny how much more you see in a film when you haven’t seen it in twenty years.

I was watching the 1969 film The Italian Job and thinking about the way it subtly undercuts blind nationalism. The film is very British, and is centered on a tongue-in-cheek solution for England’s balance of payments problem. Just as the Italian government is set to start trading with China, a patriotic gangster in a cell lined with pictures of the Queen Mother agrees to finance Michael Caine in a heist of the initial payment to China of fourteen million in gold. Caine is a wonderful Austin Powers style crook, with a typically hollow sixties girlfriend. The gender roles in this movie would be a different post entirely. What fascinated me most was the ending. The spoils end up in a rather precarious position—dangling in a bus over a precipice, with the crooks on one side and the gold on the other side. Each move towards the stolen loot threatens to hurl these (ahem) British nationalists over the cliff.

Then I watched the 2003 remake. The nationalistic theme is gone, and replaced with a motivation of retribution. The evil crook kills the good crook. The good crook’s partner and daughter plot (with lots of technology, rather than the smash-and-grab job in the original) to steal back the gold from the unexplained heist. Of course, inflation has brought the value of the gold up to 35 million, and we must have more high-tech goodies and their attendant specialists, instead of what really seemed like a group of football hooligans in the original. But the most shocking shift was in the ending. Everyone gets away and lives happily ever after—the good crook’s partner (Marky Mark) marries the good crook’s daughter. Give me a break.

The easy answer to “why remake this film?” is that the world needs more chases involving minis. However, the more pertinent cultural trend seems to be to knit up the ragged edges of retribution stories, to make them neat and tidy, and to make our culture comfortable with its idea that violence can solve the problem of violence. This makes me sad. The subtle irony of the original has been displaced by bald-faced moralizing and techno-flash. I just don’t get it.