Leonard St Collective

Because last words are for fools who haven't said enough - Karl Marx
An unsalvageably bad movie, but not without its charms. Baz Luhrmann is grotesque, but not totally untalented, and I suspect that Leo really enjoyed the process of playing his Gatsby. If this film has any future, it will almost certainly be a camp thing, for “We’ll always have West Egg” fails on romantic levels that would make even Rick Blaine cringe.

An unsalvageably bad movie, but not without its charms. Baz Luhrmann is grotesque, but not totally untalented, and I suspect that Leo really enjoyed the process of playing his Gatsby. If this film has any future, it will almost certainly be a camp thing, for “We’ll always have West Egg” fails on romantic levels that would make even Rick Blaine cringe.

“… and his name became a tag for abject failure, for deviant, for skank.

To pull a Monomian.

To go Monomian.

Fucking Monomial.

No one, had you asked them, would have thought he was real. Only he knew he was real. And he only knew that, he thought, by his suffering.”

-       Joshua Cohen, “Emission,” Four New Messages

“But death on the page is just a typo, I said: You can’t say for example, She is dead – ‘she’ no longer is. You can’t say for example, She was dead – death itself, a condition coterminous with eternity, renders the past tense inaccurate.”

-       Joshua Cohen, “McDonald’s,” Four New Messages

“Sora, who’d overwrite and overcharacterize and overdetermine and overexplain and just spoonfeed you, the reader, everything – she’d tell you what clothes a character was wearing only when it had no bearing on her story, she’d cite exactly what kind of meals her villain was munching when it had precisely nothing to do with advancing her arc or deepening characterization (why should it matter that her Alaskan psychic lesbian spy preferred spotted jumpers belted with appliqué flowers, pink pigskin gloves, and purplestriped, kneehigh galoshes, a strict diet of turkey chili and fries?)…”

-       Joshua Cohen, “The College Borough,” Four New Messages

“Toyta, for her part, was never infected with the worst of the diseases you could contract in America – doubt…”

-       Joshua Cohen, “Sent,” Four New Messages

“One day an older nun stopped me in the corridor. She asked me whether I knew what I was doing, and when I said I didn’t understand, she said the staff had a name for people like myself: hyaenidae. As I still failed to understand, she said: hyenas. Men of my kind, she said, lurked around bodies that were dying; each time I fed upon a women, I hastened her death.”

            - Jerzy Kosinski, Steps

“I am in the wrong heaven I said to Queen Houri.

I walked in strange to them shoes around and around the trunk of the Tree around and around their infinite ring (or at least never remembering one of them the women twice in thrice and more around) and around the trunk of the Tree and said to them I was embraced by explosion into this paradise that is yours and not mine, that I do not belong here because you say I don’t belong here (I listened), and that I am I only because you are you.”

            - Joshua Cohen, A Heaven of Others

“In a university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended her? Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh’s dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class, sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it.” (The Penguin Press, 2012)

“In a university prospectus, an italic script over a picture of the Firth of Forth: Philosophy is learning how to die. Philosophy is listening to warbling posh boys, it is being more bored than you have ever been in your life, more bored than you thought it possible to be. It is wishing yourself anywhere else, in a different spot somewhere in the multiverse which is a concept you will never truly understand. In the end, only one idea reliably retained: time as a relative experience, different for the jogger, the lover, the tortured, the leisured. Like right now, when a minute seems to stretch itself into an hour. Otherwise useless. An unpaid, growing debt. Along with a feeling of resentment: what was the purpose of preparing for a life never intended her? Years too disconnected from everything else to feel real. Edinburgh’s dour hill-climb and unexpected-alley, castle-shadow and fifty pence whisky chaser, WalterScottStone and student loan shopping. Out of her mouth: a two-syllable packing company Socrates, a three-syllable cleaning fluid Antigone. Never, never forgotten: the bastard in that first class, sniggering. I AM SO FULL OF EMPATHY, Leah writes, and doodles passionately around it.”

(The Penguin Press, 2012)

“Everything is a cipher and of everything he is the theme.”
- Vladimir Nabokov, “Signs and Symbols”

“All right, I want something beautiful, and it will be done by June.”

- John Cheever, Journals 

Observations on the First Official Biography of David Foster Wallace

Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace
by D.T. Max

- There will be better biographies. This is more of an acknowledgment of the way history tends to shake out the white noise than a criticism of Max’s book, although he is at least a little guilty of the sort of “St. Dave” narrative which infects a great deal of contemporary Wallace studies. We will simply have a better idea in 50 years if Wallace was justified in his theoretical rejection of irony (a rejection he had a difficult time actualizing in his fiction); if his enduring admiration for the early postmodernists – Barthelme, Sorrentino – was deserved, or if it was, as Zadie Smith devilishly advocated, “a fascinating failure, intellectual brinkmanship that lacked heart”. Great literary biographies, like Andrew Motion’s Keats or Joakim Garff on Kierkegaard, benefit from historical distance: they are able to suss out the diffusion of a given artist’s thought not only within his own milieu but also on pursuant generations, an advantage Max obviously doesn’t have.

- You can make a decent case that Wallace’s critical influence was baleful – Mark Leyner didn’t publish a book of fiction from 1998 to 2012, for better or worse – and you can make a near-airtight one that his stylistic influence is deadly. With regards to (w/r/t in Wallacespeak) the latter point: like Hemingway’s, Wallace’s prose seems easy to imitate: exhaust one’s thesaurus and slangily hedge and qualify into eternity: prove that you know that they know that you know that they know ad nauseum. This is not to say that his acolytes are necessarily disingenuous piggybackers (or “crank-turners”, in his memorable phrase), merely that once you’ve read enough of Wallace’s stuff it has a way of permeating and ultimately altering the way you think and therefore write (or vice versa, I suppose, depending on how one feels about Chomsky). Similarly, the nascent reaction against his style/thought is simply what happens when you become a titan; it is a form of literary patricide.

- Wallace’s insecurity was not just a literary tic. Evan Hughes wrote a great piece last year for “New York Books” about Wallace’s generation of writers, in which he details Wallace’s response to Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: ‘That breakthrough novel provoked a six-page letter in ten-point type from Wallace. He wrote of his mix of happiness for his friend and his feelings of envy and depression. Franzen says, “I think it hurt for each of us to get the latest [book] from the other.” Franzen became more secure in himself in the wake of The Corrections, [the novelist Mark] Costello says. But Wallace? “Dave never had a secure hour in his life.”’ In another instance, when Wallace completed “Up, Simba”, his piece on the 2000 presidential campaign, he wrote his agent that he hoped it would prove that “I’m still capable of good work (my own insecurities, I know).” Yet when you consider that a line like “Ghosts talking to us all the time – but we think their voices are our own thoughts” didn’t even make it into the final draft of “Good Old Neon”, it’s tragically evident what little need Wallace had for doubt.

- There are many parallels to be made – see Hughes’s article – between Wallace’s friendship with Franzen and the friendship between Walter Berglund and Richard Katz in Franzen’s most recent novel Freedom, some more suspect than others. However, the following is fairly striking:

‘Once talking to Franzen [Wallace] wondered aloud whether his only purpose on earth was “to put my penis in as many vaginas as possible.”’ (Max, D.T.: Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story, p. 232)

‘Over the years, Patty extracted from Walter various disturbing things that Richard had said to him in private, including “Sometimes I think my purpose on earth is to put my penis in the vaginas of as many women as I can”…’ (Franzen, Jonathan: Freedom, p. 142)

- One alarming motif that emerges from Every Love Story Is A Ghost Story (what a title!) is that Wallace was more than just a depressive, or even manic-depressive – he was often literally crazy. Max on his relationship with the poet and memoirist Mary Karr: “Wallace’s literary rebirth did not coincide with any calming of his conviction that he had to be with Karr. Indeed, the opposite. In fact, one day in February, he thought briefly of committing murder for her. He called an ex-con he knew through his recovery program and tried to buy a gun. He had decided to he would wait no longer for Karr to leave her husband; he planned to shoot him instead when he came into Cambridge to pick up the family dog.” Karr herself emerges as one cool, no-nonsense lady though: ‘When [Wallace] told her he had put certain scenes into Infinite Jest because they were “cool,” she responded, “that’s what my fucking five year old says about Spiderman.”’

- Wittgenstein’s influence on Wallace can’t be overstated. Wallace: “If words are all we have as a world and god, we must treat them with care and rigor: we must worship.” Such a conviction is not only illuminatory of the aesthetic seriousness of Wallace’s project, but also of the intellectual paucity of much of the aforementioned piggybackers.

- There is a legitimate danger of Wallace’s oeuvre being reduced to “This Is Water”, his deservedly acclaimed commencement speech at Kenyon College. A) Of all his writings, it’s probably the most accessible, at least linguistically; B) facile interpretations give it the impression of being appallingly self-help-y, a sort of Rhonda Byrne with intellectual heft, like Sartre at his worst. I suspect that many people read “This Is Water” and assume it to be representative Wallacia, which it is manifestly not. Rather, the speech is a form of the self at its best, and while this should be applauded, we should also bear in mind that many of the characters who populate his fiction have more in common with the psychic grotesqueries of Poe than perhaps any other American author.

But more on “This Is Water”, maybe more for my sake than yours (for which I apologize, dear potentially fictional reader). The fact is that Wallace was a deeply bourgeois guy, someone who once wrote his editor, “everyone here has a tattoo or a criminal record or both!” “This Is Water” is accordingly bourgeois, as is perfectly appropriate for a “triumphal academic setting” (Wallace was, to the last, extraordinarily conscious of, and sympathetic to, the “know thy audience” trope). The recognition of the essential middle class-ness of the Kenyon speech in no way lessens its power, but it does limit its scope. It’s one thing to tell a cute college sophomore to maybe stop taking so many party pics with that neat Warhol effect on her Macbook Pro – “Hey babe, this is water, there’s a world outside one’s skull-sized kingdom, etc.” – but quite another to tell a harried Ecuadorian mother of six to maybe pay more attention to what, exactly, is happening around her. Or think of the Bang-Bang Club: “paying attention” is precisely what contributed to photojournalist Kevin Carter’s suicide, “haunted by the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain… of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.” “This Is Water” is a profound and important document if you have the luxury of being able to think about it; yet as far as slogans of postmodernity go, it becomes empty and absurd when run up against another three words that once adorned an iron gate somewhere in southern Poland.

“Ghosts talking to us all the time - but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

“Ghosts talking to us all the time - but we think their voices are our own thoughts.”

“I had come home from the office one day, late, tired, and irritable. We all sat down to dinner. My two daughters, Miriam and Ruth, eight and five at the time, had been quarreling and continued to quarrel as we sat down to the evening meal. I asked them to stop but they ignored me. They also ignored several additional requests, increasingly less gently put. Completely involved with each other, they paid no attention to me. In my desire to put an end to it, and possibly motivated unconsciously by other preoccupations, such as those described earlier, I turned to them and, addressing each by the other’s name, demanded they stop. The quarrel was immediately forgotten. To my surprise, they turned from each other toward me with laughter and delight. They had interpreted my action as a new game I had invented for their amusement, and they urged me to continue it. I did.

But not for long. Within a few minutes Ruth, the younger, became somewhat uncertain about whether we still were playing and asked for reassurance: ‘Daddy, this is a game, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ I replied, ‘it’s for real.’

We played on a bit longer, but soon both girls became disturbed and apprehensive. Then they pleaded with me to stop - which of course I did. The entire incident took less than ten minutes.

I had violated their primitive belief in their own identities - a belief they had in the first place learned in no small measure from me. For the first time in their lives, something had led them to experience serious doubts about a fact they had previously taken completely for granted, and this sent both of them into a panic reaction. The stimulus that evoked it seemed on the surface trivial enough. It involved nothing more than changing a single word. But this word represents the most succinct summary of many beliefs, all of which together make up one’s sense of identity.”

- Milton Rokeach, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti

“I will say that learning how to write has to do in part with learning how to accede to yourself and your object, instead of writing what you think you ought to write, or what at that point in time the world thinks poetry is about. Or what you think you ought to be about. The moment comes, if it ever comes, when you have enough strength to give way, to give in to being who you are, to give in to your themes. Giving in to your obsessions, giving in to the things that you will be writing about over and over. And sometimes the things you’ll be writing about over and over are things that some people don’t find very nice.”

- Frederick Seidel, Interview

*          *          *          *          *

“A naked woman my age is just a total nightmare,
But right now one is coming through the door
With a mop, to mop up the cow flops on the floor.
She kisses the train wreck in the tent and combs his white hair.”

- Ibid., “Climbing Everest”

(Some) Anxieties of Self-Expression

“And he obeys, even as he oversteps the bounds.”
     - Rainer Maria Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus: First Series, #5
 
“The maestro says it’s Mozart/ But it sounds like bubblegum”
     - Leonard Cohen, “Waiting for the Miracle”
 
I.
     I had a high school teacher who once said that while Bob Dylan was poetic, he wasn’t a poet. I was, at the time, outraged. In hindsight, however, my righteous indignation stemmed from notions about Dylan that were defensible but naive, informed but unreflective. I had conflated the concepts “poetic” and “poetry”, a common, but, I have increasingly come to suspect, alarming fallacy.
 
     On one hand, it’s embarrassingly obvious that the act of writing lyrics differs from the act of writing poetry in that one is meant to be spoken and the other read. As such, the type of language that a songwriter tends to gravitate towards is going to be vastly different from that which is possible if one limits oneself to the page alone. Popular music - “popular” here meaning any music that was made for sale/consumption, not merely Top 40 stuff (this excludes strictly art music, like classical or jazz, whose album sales are basically irrelevant to the business model) - takes as axiomatic the act of repetition: a set chord progression, chorus, hook, etc. It’s in a songwriter’s best interests to therefore write things that are not only worthy of repetition, but at least a little familiar to the imagined listener. (This does not, of course, excuse the unconscious deployment of a cliche, which is one thing that differentiates the serious and thoughtful musician from, say, Katy Perry, whose newest single “Wide Awake” consists almost entirely of a stringing-together of literal cliches; in light of the title, the irony is painful.)
 
     For fear of sounding like an aesthetic conservative here, allow me to qualify. Let’s say you’re reading a particularly obtuse poem (just select any one of Les Murray’s). You have the text in front of you, you’re able to read it at your own pace. If you encounter an unfamiliar word, you set the book down, reach for a dictionary, go “A-ha!”, and continue where you left off. You’re able to do this as many times as you need. The poet has no strictly chronological say in when you start his piece and when you choose to finish it. He gives his text up to you and trusts that you, the reader, will give it a fair and attentive shake.
 
     The difference between this and a set of lyrics is more formal than it is aesthetic; that is, constrained by a different physical method of consumption. You’re listening to a text that has a pre-ordained beginning and end. Sure, you can pause it and go back to listen to some verse again, but it’s sort of a pain in the ass to click that little button in the middle of your iPod and try to guess how many seconds prior that part you so admired occurred. If there’s a word you think you may have misheard, or didn’t understand, you don’t have the luxury of knowing exactly what the artist said, or if his intent was to misspeak or render unintelligible. (See: Dylan’s well-known mondegreen, “They split up on the docks at night” vs. “They split up on a dark, sad night”.) Again, this is a difference of form (with regards to poetry), not necessarily of intent. The poet can take certain linguistic liberties that become much more difficult for the consumer in a musical text.
 
     Plus, there’s the realpolitik of how we read vs. how we listen. When we’re reading, it’s pretty much the only thing we’re doing, other than maybe breathing and digesting (literally or otherwise). When we listen to music, however, we’re usually doing other things in addition: driving, working out, sunning ourselves in self-pity, etc. If your mind wanders mid-sentence, not to worry - it’s easy to recognize the last thing you remember comprehending, so you return to that point and begin anew. If your mind wanders mid-song though, you almost never know exactly when that happened (because it’s not like you’re assiduously paying attention to the seconds of the track ticking by), so you either start the track over (if you’re really anal) or you just let it continue to the next song. We read to escape from existence, but we listen to complement it.
 
     These may all be modest points, true, but they’re rarely discussed out loud; at least, not very concretely. There are a couple of reasons. The first - and more obvious - is that most musicians tend not to have much in the way of a formal education. They haven’t been run through the academic gauntlet of public speaking, logic, and formal persuasion. This is the great promise and the great power of pop music: the Springsteen model: “We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby/ Than we ever learned in school.”
 
     The second and more abstract reason is that musicians, like painters, are primarily intuitive people, not cerebral. It’s why they often speak of “feeling the sound” in places like the heart, the soul, the gut. For really great songwriters, the lyrics are almost incidental, a sort of musical afterthought: even when their lyrics have been worked at very hard, and even when they’re very good, they still often assume a secondary role, if only in the mind of their creator. Pop musicians tend to make poor theorists, even about their own work, because their genius is by definition non-verbal.
 
     These last two paragraphs fall in sharp contrast with the model provided by novelists and poets, both of whom are easily capable of discussing “art” as a monolith, in part because of their formal educations and also because their primary medium is language itself. (Although Faulkner, until late in his career [which, in the case of an artist, is synonymous with his life], refused to assume teaching positions because he was convinced that his students were better-read than he was, which only goes to show how much a writer can accomplish by limiting himself to a diet of the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Melville, and Joyce.)
 
II.
     Another germane topic here pertaining is the anxiety-fraught relationship between pop art and the avant-garde (both rather squishy terms, it’s true). It’s ever so easy to mock Top 40 music because it is, on the whole, bad and contrived and pandering, a transparent attempt to appeal to people’s lowest common denominator. Yet the weird paradox is that, in a sense, Billboard smashes are the truest current continuation of the spirit of the early rock ‘n’ roll pioneers; that is, they get people to dance. Little Richard and Jerry Lee Lewis may be worlds apart from Rihanna and Fun in terms of sound, but their primary aim is the same: get us our of our heads and into our bodies, for three-and-a-half minute segments at a time.
 
     Needless to say, musicians pursuing more elusive sonic game have objections, sometimes theoretical, sometimes personal. It’s better to examine this second objection first. The most common line goes something like this: we are, often at great psychic cost, telling people truths they don’t want to hear; therefore, our art exists on a higher, purer, more real plane than that of people whose albums go platinum. It’s a fair point, albeit a little self-righteous. (Plus, who is anyone to say that their art is more “real” than anyone else’s.) The problem is that the avant-garde artist expects to be congratulated for his difficult work; expects to be patted on the back for exposing life as we know it to be a delusion. When you choose to create a less user-friendly form of art, you can’t expect acclaim or exposure, in the same way that you can’t reasonably expect to be both liked and considered an authority in day-to-day interactions. The only sane approach to a career in the avant-garde is akin to going to confession: this won’t be fun, you say to yourself, but let’s hope it saves my soul.
 
     In a sense though, there is something noble about flogging away in anonymity, and this is where more serious, theoretical objections to popular entertainment come into play. The young American novelist Joshua Cohen has elucidated such a path: rather than write like “white boys who write to be liked,” he composes 800+ page “Semitico-literary eschatons”, even if it means that “some months I can barely pay rent.” Cohen’s example is the first, rather obvious, of the afore-mentioned objections: it is generally admirable to follow one’s creative vision regardless of consequences, even if that vision is ultimately folly. The second is Theodor Adorno’s: the avant-garde, being difficult to access, is the least likely of all artistic modes to be co-opted for political ends, and therefore the most worthy. (Then again, he was writing in the age of Stalin, so that observation is somewhat less tangible now.) The third is that avant-garde art - good avant-garde art - tends to be a sort of ground zero for the ensuing generation; tends to create a sort of splintering effect in its recipients, a polyphony of interpretation that results in a vast disparity of seeming influence (see under: Velvet Underground, The.) It is in this last respect then, that the novelist Tom McCarthy’s statement - “To ignore the avant-garde is akin to ignoring Darwin” - is perhaps at its most topical. (McCarthy also wrote one of the greatest English language avant-garde novels of the last decade or so - imagine the brains and sterility of Nabokov minus Nabokov’s relentless aestheticizing, plus a seemingly total excision of psychology - so he knows whereof he speaks.)
 
     Yet the pop/avant anxiety isn’t only intra-disciplinary; it’s also inter-. You often get the feeling that musicians, for whatever histori-cultural reason, aren’t quite comfortable with their chosen art form, or unconsciously regard it as some shameful creative lowland. The result is the ghastly Regina Spektor discussing her literary influences, or Billy Corgan releasing this genuinely embarrassing collection of poems. Or Jim Morrison - “An American Poet” - who was for some unholy reason driven to write unreadable Keats imitations when his lyrics were never even anything to remember him by in the first place. (“Ghosts crowd the child’s fragile, eggshell mind” - way to struggle for your image there, Jimbo.) Almost as bad are the critics. Reading Robert Christgau, for example, you get the feeling that not only does he not like/appreciate/empathize with his subject matter, but that the real object of his disdain is you, his reader, for not having read all the Althusser and Paul de Man theory that he has. (Let’s not even get into Pitchfork.) Christgau may be fairly discerning as a critic, but he’s a hatefully condescending writer. He almost categorically fails the test of authorial goodwill.
 
     None of this is eo ipso bad, of course. (The artist, ultimately having very little choice in his subject matter, should glean material from wherever he can find it, and if that means Dylan singing “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot/ Fighting in the captain’s tower”, fine.) The problem is in expression, in the often bald discomfort musicians evince in their evaluation of pop music when compared to other, perceivedly “higher” art forms. The obverse, however, is that novelists and poets have uneasily (and reluctantly) shifted their anxieties as well. There’s a great nostalgia for the roughly hundred-year duration of the novel as the top artistic dog - from early Dostoevsky to early Norman Mailer - and writers undertaking the form often come under the grip of a temporary sort of amnesia: they seem faintly surprised when the earth doesn’t shift along with their work, as they imagine it to have before the rise of popular music. The result has been a grudging concession: very well, the novelist says: you can have the cultural spotlight, but I will reserve the right to say the really serious things. Couple this concern with the aforementioned anxieties of musicians and you have, as an elderly French lady once told me, une grosse salade; a fine mess.
 
III.
     Art and self-expression are antipathetic pursuits. Anyone who thinks otherwise has either never tried to create art or never thought very hard about what, exactly, occurs in the process. While a given piece may often enough begin with a desire to exorcise some grotesque metaphysical cyst, something strange happens by the time the piece is finished. (Not that any artwork is ever truly finished - abandoned in various states of disarray is more like it, sort of like our dreams.) This is the gift of the post-structuralists: the alienation of author from text, a gift that gets especially germane in the case of pop music, where the literal voice sits shoulder to shoulder with the text. The great fallacy of musicians is to presume that the added vocal element brings their art closer to genuine self-expression than the written word; is more real in its evocation of the self.
 
     The converse is the case, as the word “performance” ably demonstrates. This is hard to think about, and harder still to write about. What actually happens in the act of listening is the construction of another layer of distance between the artist and his recipient: not only is the musician alienated from the text, but also from his own voice. The forum for misinterpretation has been doubled in the process of total concession of his work. It’s incredibly destabilizing to lose control of such a perceivedly fundamental part of one’s own identity; to helplessly become complicit in such a shift in interpersonal power dynamics; to witness even the notion of sincerity become meaningless. The listener becomes God, and the musician becomes a statue. There is, as Eliot said, “no freedom in art.”
 
     So what is the way forward? What legacy do contemporary musicians have to grapple hardest with? If we conceive of art as a series of subsequential reactions, then both action and passivity have, in their own ways, proved to be inadequate. Anarchism and Quietism are equally hollowed-out. They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom/ For trying to change the system from within. The twinned concepts of rebellion and individualism have been so effectively shanghaied by capitalism as to render them incoherent in theory and hypocritical in practice. The only thing we can reasonably ask of an artist is seriousness of intent, even when his craft assumes the veil of frivolity.
 
     The novelist Iris Murdoch suggested that the bipolar of “excellence in morality” is “… personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one… This is not easy, and requires in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that is in this respect a case of morals.” An offshoot of Murdoch’s point is that the very act of artistic creation is an inherently moral one. (The question of which system of morality is, for now, irrelevant.) What a piece of art does is impose order, in a formal sense. Even the most abstract, a-logical avant-garde work still delineates the literal limits of its subject; in less imposing terms, it has a beginning and end, a front and a back, a top and a bottom, an inside and outside. The physical nature of either space or time inevitably, and without exception, erects its own perimeters. Because formal order cannot be bypassed, then its very imposition drags behind it a hermetic moral order. (An imperfect but suitable analogy is that of the creation of government: legislative codes, after all, bespeak a kind of morality.)
 
     So if order is inevitable and morality is implicit, then the difference between good art and bad art, it seems to me, comes down to the question of trust. Do you trust that the artist is treating you, the consumer, with goodwill? More importantly, do you trust that he is both conscious and serious about the redemptive qualities of his project, no matter how misanthropic it may be? Because art is at base a form of communication, the reality is that intent and reception matter a great deal: hence, the consumer becoming God. While I must confess an attraction to Auden at his most curmudgeonly - “Poetry makes nothing happen” - his ensuing statement - “it survives/ In the valley of its making” - is proof otherwise; or at least, proof of its doggedness (from “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”). The way in which two consciousnesses are able to meet in an artistic creation - the creator and the consumer, together in textual communion - provides a kind of empathy of stillness, an empathy impossible in day-to-day, body-to-body and speech-to-speech interactions. In art, we find a way of communication distinct from any other found in this life. It is vital - maybe even necessary.
 
     So then. Place well thy trust.

“It’s interesting how young poets think of death while old fogies think of girls.”

- Bohumil Hrabal, Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age

“Gentlemen, Chicolini here may talk like an idiot and look like an idiot, but don’t let that fool you. He really is an idiot.”

- Groucho Marx, Duck Soup

“Part of our minds - in any normal person it is the dominant part - believes that man is a noble animal and life is worth living: but there is also a sort of inner self which at least intermittently stands aghast at the horror of existence. In the queerest way, pleasure and disgust are linked together. The human body is beautiful: it is also repulsive and ridiculous, a fact which can be verified at any swimming pool. The sexual organs are objects of desire and also of loathing, so much so that in many languages, if not in all languages, their names are used as words of abuse.”

- George Orwell, “Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels”