Culture and Stuff

If you’ve got any notion of reading any Neal Stephenson book you haven’t already read, you might consider skipping this post.  I’ve got this stream of consciousness thing going on, and the current is very, very strong.

Stephenson’s (relatively) recent Baroque Cycle three-parter is a significant time investment.  The character of the series is quite different from previous offerings (fewer cackles per page, I think) but it’s no less interesting.  Great story, but there were segments of each book that had me dozing a bit.  That could be due to sleep deprivation, though, so who knows?  Just to give you a sample of Stephenson, I give you one of my favorite passages from the first volume, Quicksilver.  Background (circa 1680, I think): Eliza, a slave of some Turk or other, has just been rescued by vagabond Half-Cocked Jack Shaftoe, whose name comes from the result of a disastrous and abortive attempt to rid himself of the French pox.  Jack, having been deprived of some amount of sensation in certain lower extremities, has abandoned his hopes of any sort of sexual partnership.  Eliza shows him the error of his ways:

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by hilzoy

(Warning: long musing.)

We all have stories that we tell ourselves about our lives and how we are living them. They are crucial to our attempts to make sense of ourselves, but they can also be dangerous if we accept them uncritically, assuming that we know the shape of the story we fit into, and what it requires of us. I remember one night when this came home to me particularly clearly. I was working at the battered women’s shelter, and I had taken a crisis call from a woman with two children at 2am, and I turned her away, even though we had room, because I thought she was crazy. (There were homeless shelters to go to, and I had given her their numbers, but they are not nearly as good, especially for kids.)

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–Edward

Until relatively recently, there had been a dominant linear narrative in Western art. Up until its final decades, the 20th Century illustrated this as well as any previous one, with successive movements supplanting fading ones in a series of what I call "kill the father" manifestos. With the end of Modernism, however, and the shift in Western art’s central question from "What is the essence of art?" to the more deconstructably open "What is art?" any attempt at a manifesto was devoured by an increasingly sophisticated and vicious critique, often before the ink on its first-run pages was dry. This has left contemporary art historians with a migraine-inducing problem. As critic Donald Kuspit recently noted at a symposium in Mexico City:

There may be a history of modern art and a history of traditional art, but there can be no history of postmodern art, for the radically contemporary can never be delimited by any single historical reading. Even if one was a Gibbon one could not fit all the pieces of contemporary art together in a unified narrative. In postmodernity that is no longer any such thing as the judgment of history, only an incomplete record of the contemporary. If every piece of art is contemporary, no one piece can be valued more highly than any other, except from a certain psychosocial perspective. But every perspective turns out to be procrustean because it shuts out art that contradicts its premises.

Now this central concept is already old in art circles. Noted art critic Arthur Danto published a collection of now 10-year-old essays in his book "After the End of Art" declaring that "Art" ended in the 1960s, when, essentially, artists stopped believing/participating in a progressive narrative. What he seems to mean by this is that "Art" requires a dominant theory of art. Contemporary artists, each of whom must choose their own constraints and rules (in essence, write their personal manifesto) reject this notion, and so it goes in circles (because a narrative about the end of a narrative is still a narrative…but I digress).

But, Kuspit is right. It seems to have become a narrative no one can write as definitive:

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Isn’t it lucky that the supply of poems is large enough that I could go through years of National Poetry Month without scratching the surface?

Since today’s poem is longish, I’ve put it below the fold.

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London

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice; in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear

How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlots curse
Blasts the new born Infants tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse

— William Blake

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by hilzoy

Since today, like yesterday and tomorrow and twenty five days after that, is part of National Poetry Month, here’s another poem. And since it’s too long to put on the front page (but not too too long), it’s below the fold.

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And so I pop up, like some sort of unkennable furry rodent, from my piles of briefs and filehistories and pleadings to comment on the least consequential story of the day:

Ramesh Ponnuru is an ass.

I’m not an anti-Ponnuru.  Indeed, I don’t know him from Adam.  I’ve barely read the guy.  I do find it a little weird that everyone at NROnline takes pains to point out how intelligent he is whenever they criticize him — but, then, I find a lot of stuff at NROnline a little weird.  Calling a conservative commentator "K-Lo."  John Derbyshire’s strange affection for the word "buggery."  Donald Luskan. 

Look, man, don’t judge me.  I just read it for the articles.  The Jonah Goldberg articles ….

I digress.  Back to Ramesh Ponnuru, and his recent ass-hood.

For those who have had better things to do with their time, a quick review:

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By Edward

Warning: if the art world bores you, like, oh, say…NASCAR does me, you’ll want to skip this one.
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The art market is beyond white hot again and so, with success, of course, comes scandal. In fact, it feels like the press is paying a bit more than the usual amount of attention to the wheelings and dealings of the last great unregulated industry in the Western world lately (and of course, that makes everyone associated with the art world feel all warm and fuzzy for finally being noticed, on one hand, and rather anxious about strangers peering in too closely, on the other).

Two scandals of particular note are the Lehmann/Mehertu scandal and the NPR/MoMA scandal. The Lehmann/Mehertu scandal involves money, access, and ego. The NPR/MoMA scandal involves money, Nazis, and Egon Schiele.

Scandal 1:

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Fifty years ago, the Crispus Attucks’ Tigers of Indianapolis won the state basketball tournament.  It was the first time — anywhere in the nation — that an all-Black school won an open basketball tournament.  In basketball-hungry Indiana, it represented a sea change: 

For almost three decades Crispus Attucks High School quietly went about its business, serving as Indianapolis’ segregated black high school.

Opened in 1927, Attucks produced mechanics, tailors and stenographers, doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, musicians, military officers and politicians. It was a source of pride for the black community, a center for social activities.

Most of Indianapolis hardly noticed.

That is, until March 19, 1955, when Attucks accomplished what every high school in the state of Indiana dreams of.

Honoring a segregated school for winning a sports tournament seems a bit like missing the lake for the water; the school was segregated, after all.  That should be the lede.

In diverting your gaze to the bigger picture, however, don’t miss the nuances in the focused field.  This was admittedly a small step.  But, in an existence made up almost exclusively of small steps, the small steps — however imperfect — also deserve your attention.  This was one.

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On more than one occasion, comedian and sometime actor Chris Rock has spoken of his new role as daddy to his little girl:

When he walked on the stage, he immediately professed having become the father of a baby girl and now his only job was "to keep her off the pole." He contended that having a daughter who is a stripper is the ultimate failure for a father. He went on to dispel what he called "The Stripper Myth," which believes that girls are only doing it to pay for their education. "I haven’t heard of a college that takes dollar bills. I haven’t seen any clear heels in biology. I haven’t ever gotten a smart lap dance."

I can just hear his distinct voice saying that.  Well Chris, scratch Palo Alto from your list of schools:

Students at a Palo Alto middle school learned more than school officials ever expected when a recent "career day" speaker extolled the merits of stripping and expounded on the financial benefits of a larger bust.

The hubbub began Tuesday at Jane Lathrop Stanford Middle School’s third annual career day when a student asked Foster City salesman William Fried to explain why he listed "exotic dancer" and "stripper" on a handout of potential careers. Fried, who spoke to about 45 eighth-grade students during two separate 55-minute sessions, spent about a minute explaining that the profession is viable and potentially lucrative for those blessed with the physique and talent for the job.

According to Fried and students who attended the talk, Fried told one group of about 16 students that strippers can earn as much as $250,000 a year and that a larger bust — whether natural or augmented — has a direct relationship to a dancer’s salary.

Now there’s a fine message from the Jane Lathrop Lapdance Stanford Middle School.  For 11-to-14 year old girls, a father’s ultimate failure is a legitimate career option.  At a school-sanctioned career seminar, young girls just blooming into womanhood got to hear that shaking their naked asses in a dark, sleazy, windowless tavern is a path to riches, that having a nice rack can help them pull down a cool quarter mil a year.  Impressionable teenage girls–most of whom are already fully self-conscious about their looks–heard from an authority figure in a taxpayer subsidized school that if get themselves a larger set of bazoombas they can increase their income-earning potential.  I know I’m sounding like the church lady here, but isn’t that just special.

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