Art Scatter

Bernard-Henri Levy (BHL, as he is known in France) arrived at Powell’s last night (Tuesday) just a little late, fashionably late, actually, because he looked great in his black suit and deep purple shirt. He’s been here before, two years ago, to read from American Vertigo, his travelogue through American places and faces, and so he knew the landscape — the smallish Powell’s lecture nook packed with… well, really I have no idea, maybe “fans.” The woman sitting next to me had heard him on OPB and decided to come hear him in person. She was grading papers from a high school French class and speaking French with those around her. Which gave me pause when I first took my seat. Would BHL be lecturing in, horrors, French?

No, he would not. Accented English, yes, but confidently employed, expressive English. And what was his subject? One of his favorites since his first big book (Barbarism With a Human Face) more than 30 years ago — the problems with the Left. Of course, the problems then were much bigger than now, specifically the embrace of Stalinism, either actively or passively, by Left and Left-leaning parties and intellectuals. Now, the Left in Europe is ineffective and practically “broken,” or so it feels in France, I suspect, after the election of Sarkozy, an old friend or “buddy” of BHL’s, who appeared in BHL’s talk (and the beginning of his new book) several times.

So what’s left to criticize? BHL argued that the Left (or Liberals, in the American formulation, though Liberal doesn’t quite have the historical depth or granularity of the European Left) has abandoned many of its core principles to embrace another ideology, another Grand Narrative, that of anti-Imperialism, American Imperialism. And in dividing the world into Evil (the U.S. and Israel and their supporters) and Good (the rest of the world), the Left manages to overlook little things like the genocide in Rwanda, the bloodbath in Darfur (BHL doesn’t think it qualifies as genocide at this point), the suppression of democracy in Iran or the rights of native peoples in Ecuador. These don’t fit the Narrative.
(more…)

I have been brooding about the suicide of David Foster Wallace since hearing about it last weekend. I thought of him as a sort of “family friend,” primarily because my son Nathan, one of his biggest fans, and my wife once had dinner with him (and a table full of other people). When I heard that he and Nathan spent a large chunk of time talking about movies, I couldn’t have been more pleased — and proud that my son could keep up with him. I don’t think I could have.

I think of Art Scatter as a sort of argument in favor of breadth. But it’s the shadow of the shadow of the argument made by DFW himself, whose supple brain could wrap itself around thorny mathematical ideas (his book on infinity is a wonder) and cruise ships with equal facility. I started to type “felicity,” so that, too.

Unlike a real “family friend” might have, I have no interpretation of the specifics of his death that makes a bit of sense. It just makes me profoundly sad. I heard about the death of William Gaddis right before taking a cruise of my own, found my way almost unconsciously to a bookstore and picked up a Gaddis book I hadn’t read, A Frolic of His Own, which weirdly proved to be an excellent commentary on the trip, not as direct as DFW’s own but equally keen to the absurdity. Now, I’m feeling called to do the same for David Foster Wallace as he joins the company of Gaddis. It’s the best I can do.

Walter Benjamin is the prophet of Scrounge Scatter. The German critic of things broken, Benjamin embodies the true spirit of Modernism. Susan Sontag quipped that his essays end just before they self-destruct. But not before I’m lulled to sleep, usually. He’s the philosopher in search of an interpreter who will synthesize his scattered observations. In other words, he is the must-cite (site) for any post- or post post- critical theory—or critique thereof. His famous essay “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” speaks volumes in its title alone, even before the age of endless links.

Benjamin’s Angel of History, based on an interpretation of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, stands breathless, back turned to the future, watching as the wreckage of the past piles up at his feet. Benjamin was chief forager in this cultural dustheap. I’ve spent the past week browsing an intriguing book, Walter Benjamin’s Archive: Images, Texts, Signs (Verso), drawn from the salvage of Benjamin’s odd collections and catalogs: notes, photos, picture postcards, toys, news articles and lists—endless lists, including, charmingly, the first words and phrases spoken by his son Stefan. Loads of it is reproduced (paper yellowed, cracked, water-stained, but without the archival dust that would have me wheezing and choking in a minute).

A short note titled “Excavation and Memory” contains this bit of Scatter lore:

Language has unmistakably made plain that memory is not an instrument for exploring the past, but rather a medium. It is the medium of that which is experienced, just as the earth is the medium in which ancient cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging. Above all, he must not be afraid to return again and again to the same matter; to scatter it as one scatters earth, to turn it over as one turns over soil.

These are images, treasures in a collector’s gallery. But it is not mindless scattering (and conjoining). There’s the time, place and circumstance of good historical research. We must mark “the exact location of where in today’s ground the ancient treasures have been stored up.” The investigative report on authentic memory documents the strata of origination, “but also gives an account of the strata which first had to be broken through.”

Fragments, shards, shored against ruin, but tagged, referenced and carbon-dated.

(Compare the origin of Art Scatter.)

*Image: ”Angelus Novus”, Paul Klee (1920).

The miracle (or the curse, depending on your point of view) of the Internet tubes is that they extend to the Oregon coast, and so, it is possible to share one’s vacation slides with the universe almost in real time. Not only that, it is possible to post from there/here, too. One suspects that it will be an excellent place from which to Scatter widely, if not consecutively, on such subjects as Jane Austen, Elfriede Jelinek and Mickey Mouse. So, having already 1) dipped nether digits into the briney Pacific, 2) ruminated on the pleasures the world offers while eating a smoked oyster from Karla’s Smokehouse (Karla is a genius of the delicate art of smoking), and 3) fought off the assaults of sand bugs attracted to smell of fresh meat from the city, we settle in to the broadcast booth to enter our code.
(more…)

Should we allow movies to pulverize the soft images in our brains of the books we’ve read, poor defenseless images that they are? A Guardian blogger thinks it’s time to fight back, and Scatter rummages around for a few thoughts.

So, for the past few weeks we’ve talked about movies and we’ve talked about books, specifically books we were embarrassed to admit that we hadn’t read and then a little later movies that moved us to the max. Reading David Barnett’s book blog in the Guardian yesterday, I realized that some of the books I hadn’t read, books I might feel I should read under ordinary circumstances, didn’t occur to me. I’d seen the movie. This would involve the collected works of Jane Austen, for example. I just love those movies; never picked up a copy of Pride and Prejudice and probably never will. Though never is a long time. Strangely.

Barnett argues that ANY film version of a book, perhaps even including brilliant film versions, is an affront to the reader of the book, who has invested many hours of imaginative time over days or weeks or (gulp) months recreating the text in her/his head. Barnett’s key sentence:

Can there be anything worse than lovingly engaging with a couple of hundred thousand words of prose over perhaps two or three weeks, drinking in the author’s dialogue and descriptions, creating your own vision of the work in the privacy of your head, only to have every man and his dog (special offer on Tuesdays at your local Odeon) blast your intellectual ownership of the book out of the water after spending 90 minutes slobbing out in front of a cinema screen?

Here at Art Scatter we don’t believe in this sort of “intellectual ownership,” but we do think reading is a pretty sweet thing. And in comparing the way I approach movies to the way I approach books, I find that I am far more casual, generally, about the movie. I didn’t spend nearly as much time with Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, to cite a very recent example as I did with Peter Nadas’s essays, but felt no reservation about plunking a post down about it for your reading enjoyment. I’d read and re-read those three Nadas essays many times, assembled notes, thought and thought, before I ventured to the keyboard. Would that movie withstand that sort of scrutiny? That’s another question. But some movies do.
(more…)

A recent (completely fictional) email to Art Scatter began: “Sweet Mother of the Muses, can’t you get over the Shakespeare festival already?” Art Scatter was gob-smacked. Over the Shakespeare festival? Who would want to get over the Shakespeare festival? We are just beginning to sharpen our dull thoughts on the subject. We might even go back this fall! When it isn’t so hot and crowded! So, we aren’t promising anything. But we can already feel our collective attention wandering.

According to the advanced metrics generated by the advanced spyware technology affixed to this site, which, by the way, never really add up, we know that more of you are joining us here than ever before. We now may have enough for a couple of tables of bridge! But from those same metrics (don’t you just love how “metrics” gets thrown around willy-nilly these days? When all we need is “numbers”?), though, we have determined that we need to re-sell a few posts that were washed out to sea in the flood of confessions about what books you haven’t read and the thousands of words we have devoted to the Shakespeare festival.

So, hot links to our OWN POSTS!

Peter Nadas We couldn’t be more excited about this Hungarian writer, some of whose work has just been issued in crisp new Picador editions. Maybe all I have to say to this crowd is “Hamlet, people,” because Nadas on theater is such a delight, but there’s even more than theater in Nadas, who is headed for Nobel Valhalla no doubt.

Thoreau and Bellow We don’t often lump Mr. Thoreau out on the pond with Mr. Bellow in hurlyburly Chicago. But you take the dramatics of Mr. Thoreau and the pastoral moments of Mr. Bellow and they sort of meet in the middle.

Come live with me and be my Love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dale and field,
And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks
And see the shepherds feed their flocks,
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

OK, that is neither Thoreau nor Bellow, but it IS Marlowe — and we love Marlow, too!

Tolstoy and the price of rice Look, we city folk, for reasons unascertainable but perhaps linked to our constant exposure to pastoral literature as youths, are fascinated with the country, specifically with farming. We know in our bones that something is wrong with our current practices and maybe we even subvert them a little by buying local or husbanding a plot of our own. We aren’t the first to think along these lines, though, not by a longshot.

So, those should keep you busy, yes? While we devise new ways to describe the Oregon Shakespeare Festival or create a forum that might squeeze yet more personal confessions out of you? Cool… By the way: If you want to comment on those posts (and by all means!), you might double back to this post and leave them here…

“Reality cannot stand too much wakefulness.”

America could use a Jenny Diski.

Joan Didion, Annie Dillard and Janet Malcolm exercise a comparable ruthlessness, waged against received opinion on subjects of comparable range, but they are not as unrelentingly unreserved as Diski. America cannot abide too much wakefulness, which is why I resist sleep. And Diski, post-empire British to the core, is one of the things that keep me up nights.

Check her “Diary” column in the latest London Review of Books, (31 July 2008), one of the select items the Review posts online. “If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep,” she begins. In the next paragraph she turns to “the second most absurd thing we do: wake up.” In the space of a page and a half she describes the several levels of wakefulness through which we descend in and out of sleep—for descend out of it we do, she convinces us, in an endless spiral, with occasional freefall.

In Diski’s hands, such a tale is magic. There’s humor: “As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep.” And she can tap the nostalgia for those “delicious,” slightly anxious moments we never outgrow: her earliest memory of “sensual pleasure,” lying in bed, “the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that),” perfectly comfortable, “falling slowly into sleep.”

Read it, and marvel how this brief essay–a miniature novel–slips in such short space from human cruelty and stupidity to Raquel Welch saving our beleaguered world!

If you enjoy reading and re-reading this piece, click Jenny Diski’s blog for more.

Diski is a novelist, but I’ve only read her non-fiction. I’d like to report that she grasped Portland’s unique essence in her American travelogue, Stranger on a Train: Daydreaming and Smoking Around America with Interruptions, but, alas, her night journey from Spokane to Portland, on the Empire Builder, the train she had boarded in Chicago, is recalled only for the fact that it was a non-smoking leg, except for a brief stop in Pasco, where she stood on the platform and inhaled “the best part of two cigarettes.”

“I do not believe that history obeys a system, nor that its so-called laws permit deducing future or even present forms of society; but rather that to become conscious of the relativity (hence of the arbitrariness) of any feature of our culture is already to shift it a little, and that history (not the science but its object) is nothing other than a series of such imperceptible shifts.”

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America

* * * * *

At the end—the end of the novel, which, as we know, can be the beginning of almost anything—Herzog feels something, perhaps happiness, something at least that “produces intensity, a holy feeling, as oranges produce orange, as grass green, as birds heat.” Feeling, after all his adventures that spring and early summer, “pretty well satisfied to be,” and with “fullness of heart,” Herzog lies down, by turns, on mattress, under locust tree and on old dusty couch, expectant.

I feel the same sense of intensity and fullness this summer morning beginning a new book, Reimagining Thoreau, by Robert Milder (Cambridge University Press). Expectant, because Milder’s recent study of Herman Melville, Exiled Royalties: Melville and the Life We Imagine, is one of the finest things I’ve ever read about how a writer’s words come alive, not by giving us an idea to carry away, but by immersing us in the indeterminacy of all ideas—true, an “idea” itself, but one consistent with the general scatter of things human. On life’s ocean we tack to and fro, an island moving in the stream, occasionally finding the isolated Ishmael afloat on his own idea’s island.

Milder’s theme in Reimagining Thoreau, as I absorb it in the first pages, is that Henry David Thoreau’s “writings are dramatized answers to the social and psychological problem of how to live.” And these were “strategic” answers, the probing initiatives of Thoreau and others who formed that famous American Renaissance literary class which sought to “rescue itself from the margins of national life,” and to reshape the world “according to the imperatives of personal and collective need.” Of course we reshape the world in part by reshaping ourselves and thus our relations with the world. Thoreau’s shapeshifting was in response to “unexpected resistances in nature, society, and his own being.” Resistances to his idealized or mythologized self, a self-conception always in flux. So Thoreau was “a Proteus who eluded tragedy, chronic frustration, remorse and despair through a sidelong change of form” that repeatedly infused new energy into his work. A bracing thought this cool July morning!
(more…)

A discussion of three essays by Hungarian essayist/novelist/Nobelist-in-waiting Peter Nadas, dealing with the executions of the Ceaucescu’s, the depths of Hamlet (another killer of tyrants) and the knotty language distortions of Soviet Bloc Hungary, plus some related observations.

I picked up Fire and Knowledge: Fiction and Essays by Peter Nadas based on what short story writer Deborah Eisenberg wrote about it in the New York Review of Books. I’m usually not THAT suggestible, but Eisenberg is obviously passionate about Nadas. Here’s what she said about his novel A Book of Memories in that same review: “After finishing the book, I… felt irreversibly altered, as if the author had adjusted, with a set of tiny wrenches, molecular components of my brain.”

I pictured nanobots, each armed with a multi-tool (including a wrench), scurrying about inside my own skull, opening up some gates to allow more neuronal “flow” and shutting down others. (Until this, I had no idea my mind was like an irrigation project.) Would the sensation be “pleasant”? Or is it simply necessary to experience “what it is to feel or think two mutually exclusive things at once,” which is what Eisenberg says Nadas enables us to do. That doesn’t sound SO impressive, as Eisenberg admits, but frankly we don’t expect it in literature, just our confusing lives, and we certainly don’t expect it to be revelatory in the way Nadas is for Eisenberg.

So, I randomly plucked three essays from the set of 9 short stories and 14 essays and sat down to read. I didn’t hear the clanging of nanobots up there, but I think I understand what Eisenberg has on her mind. Nadas possesses a sharp, insistent intellect that he uses to complicate our thinking, to blur our distinctions, to clog our mental templates. He manages the sweet double of demonstrating the muddiness of our intellectual apparatus in a precise and powerful way: He’s clear about the complexity. More important for my humble purposes, though, these three essays, written in 1977, 1986 and 1998, seemed immediately applicable on all sorts of levels, some of which we’ll get into shortly.
(more…)

Right now, as my fingers stumble across the keyboard, the top story at the ArtJournal site is from the Telegraph in the UK, specifically a video of short interviews with prominent Brit writers who confess their sins: The classic books they haven’t read. Go ahead, click the link! It’s only 3 minutes or so, and really, it’s worth it, because it will make you feel better about some secret reading omission of your own.

The Bible, Wuthering Heights, Middlemarch, Shakespeare, Catch-22, Ulysses, On the Origin of Species … The big books spool out, unread. As I watch the guilty rat on themselves, my favorite is playwright Michael Frayn, who suggests that he hasn’t read ANYTHING and is “in a state of perpetual embarrassment.” Which is exactly how I feel. Not that I haven’t read anything (and frankly, come on, the erudite Mr. Frayn has read a lot), but even if I’ve read it recently, important details have begun to leak out of my brainpan immediately. Was that book really great, or does it simply leave the impression of being really great…? More than regretting books not read, I regret books not remembered.

But OK. I’ll play. The book I’m most embarrassed that I haven’t read. Hmmm. Suddenly there are so many to choose from! Let’s see: Crime and Punishment. It is so big, it is so important, it is so daunting, and I know almost as much about it as books I’ve actually read and forgotten! But still… Hey, that feels better. Your confession below?