Saturday 26 February 2011

On Reading and Aging and Not Reading

Sad snippets from Geoff Dyer:
I’m like Pessoa in The Book of Disquiet, "torn, in a futile anguished fashion, between my disinterest in the landscape and my disinterest in the book which could conceivably distract me."

The opportunity cost of reading a given book is always too great. Some books, obviously, are a waste of one’s eyes. To feel this about airport blockbusters is perfectly normal, but I feel it is beneath me to read Jeanette Winterson, for example, or Hanif Kureishi.

This would be fine if I could transpose a reluctance to read James Hawes into a willingness to read Henry James, but I am unable to get beyond the first five paragraphs (i.e., four sentences) of The Golden Bowl.

But now, at forty-one, I don’t even have the patience to read the books I read when I was twenty... now that I am older I wish I’d read it when I was younger, when I was still capable of doing so.

Reflecting on the way he had gradually lost interest in fiction, Gerald Early asked if "this is how one, by stages, loses the ability to read or the interest in reading altogether." This in turn, he thought, might be part of a process whereby one loses "slowly but inexorably the ability to feel deeply about anything."

* Or ageing, if you prefer.

Tuesday 22 February 2011

How To Tell A Joke

In the shower yesterday I realised that I'd been telling the joke wrong. It was the joke from Blue Valentine, the one that starts off with the child molester and the child walking into the dark woods together. I'd been quite proud of my delivery (having performed it three times to fairly appreciative audiences), but I really knew I was doing something wrong when, the fourth time, somebody said 'yeah, but it's just really well told in the film.'

I can't remember how it's told in the film; I guess I could find the scene on youtube maybe. But it doesn't matter, in the shower I realised what I should have been doing. Instead of changing my voice for the punchline, changing it to a sort of over the top 'this-is-a-punchline' voice, I should have just kept talking in the 'this-is-a-creepy-ghost-story' voice from the rest of the joke. How could I have let the joke down so badly? Of course it should be deadpan.

Because the thing with deadpan is that the beat comes after the joke is told, before the laugh. Which is the opposite to non-deadpan jokes, where the beat comes just before the punchline - we already know the punchline there, because it's a pun, or something like that, which we can work out from the joke itself. But in the other kind of joke, like the Blue Valentine one, the punchline is a twist, it is really the whole joke - using the funny voice tilts your hand before you have anything to show. It's a disaster.

Thursday 17 February 2011

Its Very Inaccessibility

It is only now, however, that the true experiment begins: the scientists performed a surgical operation on the rat, messing about with its brain, doing things to it with laser beams about which, as Miller put it delicately, it is better to know nothing. So what happened when the operated rat was again let loose in the labyrinth, the one in which the “true” object is inaccessible? The rat insisted: it never became fully reconciled with the loss of the “true” object and resigned itself to one of the inferior substitutes, but repeatedly returned to it, attempted to reach it. In short, the rat in a sense was humanized; it assumed the tragic “human” relationship towards the unattainable absolute object which, on account of its very inaccessibility, forever captivates our desire.

Wednesday 16 February 2011

Jeff Buckley and Hipsters


I don't know much about music, so much of this is cribbed from a conversation with my friend Mike. I put it here as part of our ongoing investigation of irony.

Jeff Buckley's music is characterised by a complete lack of whimsy, humour, or irony. These markers of self-consciousness are basically expected from most cultural production, although they become devalued or inverted when they are used un-self-consciously (i.e. when they become part of the basic cultural framework, when they are marks of participation in the norm rather than distance from it). The lack of them is what turns lots of people off Jeff Buckley but it's also what makes his music powerful.

Is there something specifically American about his earnestness? Context is important. Buckley can be read as a response to (and building on) the radical, even revolutionary earnestness of grunge, as epitomised by Nirvana. How self-conscious was grunge as an attempt to construct a straightforward, non-staged, more raw style of music?

Is it even possible to be "earnest" deliberately? Does cultural performance (where there must be an audience) simply preclude sincerity? Perhaps we should just see all our performances (everyday as well as cultural, since there is really always some sort of audience) as incapable of total "authenticity". That is the classic "hipster dilemma" - or perhaps it is more true to say that it is the artist's dilemma, to which hipsterism is one possible (and now untenable) answer.

Tuesday 15 February 2011

Blue Valentine


O title of film, you mock me. This is a film that will affect you pretty differently depending on your own feelings, the status of your own relationships now and behind you. So it's some sort of rorschach test maybe. The point is it's, more than most films I think, heavily "identifiable": perhaps that means the characters are too much "types," a male type and a female type even. But they are characters too, it's just that we see them in a framework - the beginning and end of their love - that makes them also containers for the meaning of those times, to us or everyone.

It is sad to watch the end of a love that you are also seeing born at the same time, but longer ago. That's why it is blue, depressing. But the people I went to see it with found it entirely depressing, while I didn't. They're less jaded, I think, although that might be patronising. From what I know, neither of them have experienced the end of love quite like this, while I think I have. I think most people probably have, but I might be wrong - maybe most people just don't have such a good love, or if they do they don't lose it, it does not break down. So I can see how a film that shows that happening could be quite terrifying.

But some of us live in a world where that does happen, or has happened once (more than once? Can that happen?). And to us I think the film says something a little different. It reminds us that for all the sadness there was an equal, maybe a greater portion of joy. Just because that came before, and the badness came later, that doesn't mean that one is more important or more real than the other. That is the magic of film, which can cut time up and stick it back together in new ways, to tell different truths.

There is just as much happiness as sadness in a failed love. So don't say that it's not worth it. It's always worth it.

Thursday 10 February 2011

John Cusack and Irony

Irony infects our lives, the way we speak and understand people. It places us at a remove from those we talk to, creating the assumption of a projected negative persona; it alienates us from our real selves and from others.

In Grosse Pointe Blank, Martin returns to his hometown for a high-school reunion, after he disappeared ten years ago. He finds there a certain freedom that comes from the town's seeming detachment from the real world (even though it is constantly being invaded by forces from that world, from Martin's life). Somehow he feels able to tell his old high-school friends about his job as a hired killer, with impunity. He even tells his long lost love Debi. The reactions of these people are always jokes: "Do you get dental with that?", "Do you have to do postgraduate work for that?"

These conversations reveal the inherent awkwardness of all such reunions, and the inevitable "so what do you do now?" question. When Martin's truth-telling breaks social conventions, his friends attempt to dissolve the awkwardness with humour - a classic strategy that never completely works. Awkwardness, as Adam Kotsko has it (watch out for my review soon), shows us not only how conventions can be broken or inadequate: it also shows us that we can live without such conventions, we can break them.

But it's the assumption of irony that comes back to bite Martin. People assume he's joking. So when she finds out that he was telling the truth, that he really is a contract killer, Debi is shocked. "You were joking! People joke all the time about the horrible things they do, they don't do them! It's absurd" In the film's most ironic - and tragic - line, she tells him, "You're a liar."

Irony makes liars of all of us. It is so powerful that, much of the time, we even tell the truth in an exaggerated, ironic way. People assume we're joking even when we tell them the truth, and what emerges is a social contract - a set of ironic conventions - in which we just can't tell the truth.

Wednesday 9 February 2011

Blockquotes

Be careful following this next link. What I have quoted isn't the part that really moved me. That other part killed me, not in a laughing way. This part is good too though, and apter here. This is not a confessional blog.
When I strip away my dreams, what I imagine to be my potential, all the things I haven’t said, what I imagine I feel for other people in the absence of my expressing it, all the rules I’ve made for myself that I don’t follow—I see that I’ve done as little as anyone else in this world to deserve the grand moniker I. In fact, apart from being the only person living in this room, I’m not sure what distinguishes me.
This is also good, but it's really a different league. I found it moving at the time. Now I'm not sure.
During the lunch, you order salad and don’t eat it. You struggle to talk about anything with the person who once was your everything. It won’t be easy. Watching the people pass by with their friends and lovers in front of the restaurant having their moment together, it would become clear that that kind of moment no longer belongs to you and this person. Looking at their face would be too unsettling so you’d spend an inordinate amount of time stirring the sugar into your drink and watching it fade. Once that’s finished, you’d have to fixate on someone else in the restaurant. Maybe a little boy who’s screaming for food or an attractive young professional. Everything they would say to you would sound like static except for one thing: “Let’s get the check.” When you leave, you’d pick up your exasperated stomach from the floor and try to push it back in. It might not fit right for the next hour or so.

Tuesday 8 February 2011

I've just written one of those "sorry I haven't been writing" posts from the early 2000s.

Oh dear, I'm not doing very well with February blogging, am I? But let me say this, I have been doing a good week's work. Well, since last Thursday anyway. It happens that last Thursday was also Chinese New Year, and therefore the start of my personal lucky year! Well, shared with everyone else born in the same Chinese year as me. Rabbit. Or hare, for slightly more nobility and mystique.

I'm told that rabbits signify productive and steady. A little bit disappointing, huh? But actually I'll take productive, this year: and as I say, I've been productive work-wise (although what I've produced is only lots of notes, and some ideas, not written down yet). And then, there is that other thing you think of when you think of "rabbits" and "productivity". But this isn't a confessional blog. Regularly scheduled programming will be resumed tomorrow; maybe.

Saturday 5 February 2011

Our odd mix of paternalism and freedom

Robin Hanson says,
I can mostly understand wanting people to be free, and I can mostly understand parents wanting to limit kids freedom “for their own good.” I have more trouble understanding our odd mix of paternalism and freedom. Why do we limit some things, and not others?
 The founding fathers exhibited the same pattern: they wanted Americans to be free but they also wanted to control them. They were the founding fathers, after all.

Thursday 3 February 2011

Train Conductor Also Writes

Yeah just another blockquote:
We watched them as she straddled him, and at first we didn’t complain, because it saved room, allowed at least one more passenger to board an already-packed train.

She kissed his forehead, massaged his earlobes, touched his nose with her index finger and smiled.

Their warmth made everything colder. The railing. The ice through our boots. The gush of wind when we were finally above ground again.

Tuesday 1 February 2011

Howling

There is a Polish word, żal, a beautiful word, impossible to translate.  It means sadness, nostalgia, regret, being hurt, and yet it is something else.  It feels like a howling inside you, so unbearable that it breaks your heart.

- Arthur Rubinstein, My Young Years, 1973