INTERVIEWER
How much of your writing is based on personal experience?FAULKNER
I can’t say. I never counted up. Because “how much” is not
important. A writer needs three things, experience, observation,
and imagination—any two of which, at times any one of which—
can supply the lack of the others. With me, a story usually begins
with a single idea or memory or mental picture. The writing of the
story is simply a matter of working up to that moment, to explain
why it happened or what it caused to follow. A writer is trying to
create believable people in credible moving situations in the most
moving way he can. Obviously he must use as one of his tools the
environment which he knows. I would say that music is the easiest
means in which to express, since it came first in man’s experience
and history. But since words are my talent, I must try to express
clumsily in words what the pure music would have done better.
That is, music would express better and simpler, but I prefer to use
words, as I prefer to read rather than listen. I prefer silence to
sound, and the image produced by words occurs in silence. That is,
the thunder and the music of the prose take place in silence.INTERVIEWER
Some people say they can’t understand your writing, even after
they read it two or three times. What approach would you suggest
for them?FAULKNER
Read it four times.INTERVIEWER
You mentioned experience, observation, and imagination as
being important for the writer. Would you include inspiration?FAULKNER
I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know
what inspiration is —I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.…
INTERVIEWER
What were the kinds of work you were doing to earn that
“little money now and then”?FAULKNER
Whatever came up. I could do a little of almost anything—run
boats, paint houses, fly airplanes. I never needed much money
because living was cheap in New Orleans then, and all I wanted
was a place to sleep, a little food, tobacco, and whiskey. There
were many things I could do for two or three days and earn
enough money to live on for the rest of the month. By temperament
I’m a vagabond and a tramp. I don’t want money badly
enough to work for it. In my opinion it’s a shame that there is so
much work in the world. One of the saddest things is that the only
thing a man can do for eight hours a day, day after day, is work.
You can’t eat eight hours a day nor drink for eight hours a day nor
make love for eight hours—all you can do for eight hours is work.
Which is the reason why man makes himself and everybody else so
miserable and unhappy.
Category: tPA 4
Working Metaphors
Michael Crawford wrote Shop Class as Soulcraft as a way to make sense of his work history:
This book grows out of an attempt to get a critical handle on my own work history; to understand the human possibilities latent in what I was doing when the work seemed good, and when it was bad to identify the features of the work that systematically preempted or damaged those same possibilities. In sorting things out, we have had occasion to think about the nature of rationality, the conditions for individual agency, the moral aspect of perception, and the elusive ideal of community. (198)
One of Crawford’s conclusions is that when a job is “scaled up, depersonalized, and made to answer to forces remote from the scene of work” that the results are disastrous. The formulation is not a new one. Karl Marx came to this conclusion in the mid-nineteenth century. I remember vividly getting tossed out of a high school government class because I agreed with Marx’s theory of the alienation of the worker, based on watching the slow gnawing despair in my dad as he coped with his job. The textbook (and my teacher) insisted that capitalism was perfect and that this “theory” was fatally flawed. She would not allow me to endorse such a “communist” thought in the classroom and she ejected me as a troublemaker.
I never can seem to think of “work” in the same way as other people. It comes from my upbringing. My father went to a job he hated every day. Increasingly, automation and MBA’s were running the oil fields from the central office and he felt as if he was not taken seriously. Dad seldom talked about this “work” but he constantly had work to do that he did discuss with me. Mostly, what he was interested in doing (and sometimes talking about) was the work at home—building fences, raising animals and crops, sawing firewood, shingling the roof. None of these activities resulted in any monetary benefit (other than spending less at the supermarket, I suppose). Work and the earning of money were completely separate activities.
Shopcraft as Polemic
Breaking back into serious reading after the travails of the summer came in the form of a popular polemic, Shop Class As Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work. I saw the author, Matthew B. Crawford, on the Leno show one evening and talked to Krista about it. She mistakenly thought that I wanted to read his book so she ordered it. [She also informs me that a friend had read the book and said it was awesome and wanted to read it herself.] I read it, and its sloppiness motivated me to pick up the habit of reading again and look for something good. Michael Pollan’s A Place of My Own was the next book I read, and it made me get over just how shallow Crawford was in comparison. It’s not that the Crawford book was that bad, it’s just that the logic underpinning it seems hopelessly flawed. Hopefully, I’ll return to talk about Pollan’s book later, because it genuinely excited me—but for now I want to record some notes about Shop Class as Soulcraft.
Crawford was made for Leno, because both of them are motorcycle fanatics. There is a long tradition of biker-philosophers tracing back to Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I hoped that this new book might extend/develop that line of thought, but it deliberately avoids the mysticism associated with most of the “craftsman” literature. He wants to deal with the more prosaic side of working in the trades.
Oneida, NY
Calipers to the head of a songbird
What is most menacing about the logic of sustainability is evident to anyone who wishes to look into its language. It will “operationalize” sustainability. It will create metrics and indices. It will create “life-cycle assessments.” It will create a sustainability index. It will institute a “global reporting initiative.” It will imagine something called “industrial ecology” and not laugh. Most famously, it will measure ecological footprints. What the so-called sustainability movement has accomplished is the creation of “metrics,” ways of measuring. It may not have had much impact on the natural world, but it has guaranteed that, for the moment, thinking will remain only technical interpretation. In short, it has brought calipers to the head of a songbird.
Agency and the arts
I’ve been reading a thread about the role of artistic intent that seems to have sprung up here and there. I’m not interested in the role of intention in the reading of art so much as I am in the link between intention and agency. Specifically, I wonder why it would trouble some people that being mindful of the image being made (implying a conscious intent to represent something in a specific manner) must be classed as either relevant or irrelevant to the final result. Joerg Colberg phrases it in this way:
Photography, of course, has become an established part of art – the implications of that have important consequences for how we understand photography. If photography is an art form (and not, say, a technical craft to produce images) then this means that we need to treat it like an art form.
But it also means that we can use practices well-established in the art world to approach photography, and we might learn something very valuable. Of course, this doesn’t mean that we have to treat photography just like minimalist art – each art form clearly deserves to be treated according to its own characteristics. But we better stop thinking about photography as if it was a technical craft to produce images.
I am confused. The Aristotelian definition of techné is an ability to make with a consciousness of what is being made. The invocation of photography as a “technical craft” reads as techné for me, which makes it no different than say, the ability of the sculptor or painter. So why then should the craft of photography (because it is “technical”?) be excluded from consideration? The only way that I can get this assertion to make any sense is if one classes “art” as an activity that requires the absence of any mindfulness of the potential result. In short, a photographer is denied any agency in his products (photographs). He is merely a conduit through which verities or falsehoods “flow” on their way to an interpretive community.
This is all quite counter-intuitive. I like making things. I like to think I have some awareness of what I am doing. I do not care whether it is classed as “art” or not, and if it means that in order to be considered as such that one should surrender any sense of photography as a craft, well, count me out on that one.
Of course, on the interpretive (reading) side, then the consideration of the artist’s agency (whether in the form of technical ability or communicative success at conveying their intent) is always optional. On the making (techné) side intent is never superfluous. Without intent, it is no longer making—it is finding.
State of the blog address
As should be clear to anyone who has bothered to follow me for the last year (if you haven’t I don’t blame you) I have grown increasingly disinterested with writing/reading the Internet. I sort of hang on to the nostalgia of it by posting a fragment now and then, but the times when I was genuinely excited to be able to write in an arena where a public (however small) might be reading it are long gone. No matter how I might try to fight it—I just don’t care what the world thinks anymore. There are only a few people I’ve conversed with on the internet that I hold dear.
In the 3d world, I have lost almost every person I’ve ever cared about in the space of two years. One part of me wants to turn to the virtual environment for consolation—and around fifteen years ago, in similar circumstances, I did. It turned out well, and is perhaps the reason why I am married and happy and don’t require consolation from strangers anymore. But that’s simplistic. The internet was, and is, more than a repository of potential friends.
I’m not new to public discourse, and I am hardly surprised when things get ugly for no apparent reason. People who have no real responsibility to each other, as is the case of the imaginary internets (sic., for the humor impaired), can be unbelievably cruel. I won’t go into the reasons behind this observation, although a google search might ferret out the trigger for my discontent. It sort of puts a damper on my desire to actually start to write in public again. Chances are it won’t stop me, but it does make me sad that exposing oneself to the public is to invite being abused.
Things have changed, and I’ve updated my about page to reflect that. It’s been a cruel few years, though now on the other side of it I’m happier and more comfortable than ever before. I’ve recently rediscovered reading for the joy of it (books, not the internet) instead of for “work” and thought I might like to write again just for the joy of it instead of taking notes for work. This blog has oscillated between work notes and moments of personal whimsy while I have avoided strenuous mental activity.
I have become increasingly interested in image work again, and other types of physical work that don’t involve reading. I have read incessantly for most of my life, and it hasn’t always been good for me. I’m not giving it up, but I think it’s time I moderated it.
Dealing with so much death, stress, and disaster has left me sort of hollow. I worked so hard for so long that I cannot leave my research interests behind, but I want to approach them in a more grounded way. I’ve got a solid roof over my head and am secure personally and financially (for perhaps the first time in my life). More often than not I have the sense to turn these bloody machines off when they are not useful.
It’s a harvest time, of a sort.
Another day in paradise
Frame breakers win battles, not wars
“If copyright law, at its core, regulates something called ‘copies,’ then in the analog world… many uses of culture were copyright-free,” he explained. “They didn’t trigger copyright law, because no copy was made. But in the digital world, very few uses are copyright-free because in the digital world … all uses produce a copy.”
The paradigm for copyright law enforcement emerged out of this “analog world” as a way of ensuring authors were remunerated for their contributions to culture, thereby creating an incentive to make further contributions and drive the progress on human art and discovery forward, he said.
Times have since changed, said Lessig, but the letter of the law hasn’t.
Copyright law was originally intended to protect those who create for profit (Lessig used the example of recording artist Britney Spears). But academics also create original works, he said, and they are — or should be — motivated by a desire to advance human knowledge, not line their pockets. Therefore, sealing their work behind copyright barriers does no social good.
I was thinking about the Luddites, wondering if they wouldn’t be stringent copyright protectionists these days. E.P. Thompson seems to suggest this, in his reading of their history. From Wikipedia:
In his work on English history, The Making of the English Working Class, E. P. Thompson presented an alternative view of Luddite history. He argues that Luddites were not opposed to new technology in itself, but rather to the abolition of set prices and therefore also to the introduction of the free market.
Thompson argues that it was the newly-introduced economic system that the Luddites were protesting. Thompson cites the many historical accounts of Luddite raids on workshops where some frames were smashed whilst others (whose owners were obeying the old economic practice and not trying to cut prices) were left untouched. This would clearly distinguish the Luddites from someone who was today called a luddite; whereas today a luddite would reject new technology because it is new, the Luddites were acting from a sense of self-preservation rather than merely fear of change.
A belated (but new to me) thought on open access from Matrullo has relevance as well. I wish I could forget about the whole kerfuffle, but I can’t.
Cheezy does it
