Slow Down

Still slogging through Hegel and Milton. The semester has officially begun, so I’m already behind. Also started The Good Soldier, just for fun.

I did, however, take two days to read Thomas Pynchon’s newest, Inherent Vice. While in my heart of hearts I wish it was just The Crying of Lot 49, TP’s newest was fun, sometimes though-provoking, and even moving novel. If I’d just picked it up in a state of ignorance, I’d think it was Elmore Leonard crossed with Ken Kesey, but coming as it does when it does, it seems almost painfully elegiac about the sixties. There are moments of gorgeous lyricism, the half-baked conspiracies are especially half-baked, and what I come away thinking most about is the strange friendship between the PI protagonist (whose name escapes me now) and the LAPD cop Bjornson. Hm.

Also saw Inglourious Basterds, which was exquisitely put together, at times quite beautiful, always unique—and also fatuous, empty, and stupid. Tarantino is truly Godard’s American bastard-child, but without ideas, politics, patience, or any intelligence beyond that of the cinema. I had expected much more violence, but what I got was a lot of the usual Tarantino blather passing for banter. Ick.

Finally, I won an award. I’m very honored to have won the Theresa A. White Literary Award for my short short “Never Closer.” It’ll be in the journal Quiddity next year, and featured on their radio program/podcast this week.

Back to Hegel.

Wait, uh, hey. Where'd my summer go?

So before I just give up completely and lose myself to backlog guilt, let me do this. Anne Carson’s book Eros was beautiful and brilliant, a really smart, well-written, provocative inquiry into the relationship between erotic poetry, the formation of selfhood, and the impact of literacy in ancient Greece. I am now a huge fan of Anne Carson, not only for Eros but for the poems of hers I’ve been reading in Glass, Irony, and God, which are the most exciting contemporary poetry I’ve read since… well… ever. “TV Men: Hektor” was startlingly good.

Number two: Henry James’s The Ambassadors. Delicate, funny, complicated, cool, and at times astonishing, it’s great. I never thought I’d care so much about whether the spoiled son of an industrialist stayed in Paris or not. Of course James is a grand master. I wish I could offer a more nuanced reading, but it’s about a month behind me now.

Otherwise, have been reading English poetry, in preparation for the English Subject GRE, Milton’s Paradise Lost (still) and also (still) Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I’m hoping to finish those two bastards by next week, before school starts.

Also, it’s about that time for the best/worst list. So here we go.

The five most interesting books I’ve read in the last year would be:

Capital, Vol. 1, Karl Marx Not only is it a brilliant, exhaustive critique of capitalism that every red-blooded American ought to be required to read, but it’s also funny, splenetic, vicious, erudite, and moving. The way that the book is structured, moving from an analysis of the commodity to exchange to production, from the abstract to the concrete, then back again, is a remarkable achievement.

Goodbye to All That, Robert Graves This is my second-favorite war memoir, right behind Junger’s Storm of Steel, but it is by far the more enjoyable, funnier, and humane of the two, while still facing the complexity of war in all its terror and glory.

Sentimental Education & Madame Bovary, Gustav Flaubert Damn. Damn damn. How could Flaubert have such a cold, distanced view of humanity and still write with so much verve, beauty, and compassion? From the transitions (who said “All writing is transitions”? They must have been reading Flaubert) to the characterizations, from the structure to the sentence, from the first words to the last, these are amazing books. I’m glad I waited so long to read them, though, because frankly I think they would have been too subtle and knowing for me before. I would not have been able to hang.

The Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau Crazy, sometimes tiresome, and often so stuck up his own romantic ass, such a fucking drama queen, that you want to grab him by the ruffled collar (or whatever) and shout “Man up, Swiss Miss,” Rousseau gave us something special with his self-absorbed, very absorbing autobiography. My favorite bit was the erotic spanking.

The Ambassadors, Henry James Mentioned above. I’d also give a shout out for Eros, Phaedrus and the work of William James.

Now the worst: In no particular order, and without fully venting my ire, they would be Stefan Helmreich’s Alien Ocean, John Law’s Aircraft Stories, Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (pure nonsense), and Francois Jullien’s The Propensity of Things. There. Now I’m all caught up.

Also

And also, thanks to Working Class Magazine, for deciding not to publish my review of Problem Radicals, included below, but instead deciding merely to quote it for the last paragraph of their own review, without bothering to ask or even let me know. Thanks.

“Fun Is Not Subversive”: Problem Radical(s) and Political Theater

The opera’s called Problem Radical(s), the stage is a mess of clothes and balloons. I find myself wondering: What’s the problem with radicals?

Actors walk onto the stage and start handling things, big sunglasses, bags, ropes. They speak but not to each other, and not in any recognizable locution, their words strangely emphasized, drawn out, as if being chanted in twelve-tone scales. In the middle of a profusion of inflating columns, wigs, pads, balloons, bags, clothes, cables, and other junk, the actors do exercises, speak, and perform solitary, alienated tasks. Music begins, a distinctly rock sound, then gets loud. Across the wide coverage of the performance space we’re forced to focus our attention now here, now there, looking from this to that in an effort to keep from missing something. What are we looking for?

Drama promises resolution. Whether it’s a personality flare-up performed in the “reality” of America’s Next Top Model, a baseball game, or the tragic conflict between ethical worlds, the dramatic form derives its power from the promise of release it offers from the anxiety and tension that the drama itself creates. Audiences of unwitting masochists punish themselves daily, reliving erotic fear through dramatic narrative, turning their minds over to the skilled craftworkers in the culture industry who promise manageable rehearsals of a terror that in reality may never abate and a catharsis that may never come.

We watch the performers talk, do things, struggle into and out of costumes, canvas sacks, and personalities, we watch them sweat and twist and grapple. We watch them swing into rock-star gestures and crumple on the floor. We’ve come here tonight from our jobs and lives to watch these people, maybe looking for distraction, entertainment, a sense of escape or titillation. We have our expectations. We want them to do something for us. To us. And they’re giving it their all, shifting mercurially between different actions and mindsets with a focused intensity that makes whatever they’re doing seem like the most important thing in the world, even if it’s just pulling a rope with gloves attached to it or stacking taped piles of cushions. Then there is Brendan Regimbal, who with silent aplomb keeps inflating balloons and pulling them up over the audience. What’s going on here?

Drama promises harmony, rest, reintegration, but whether the social cohesion and security offered by drama’s promise disappeared in the smoke of World War I or more sinisterly turned to serve a repressive order profiting the few at the expense of the many, we have long suspected drama’s promise was a lie, nothing more than balmy illusion, at best a utopian dream. The ongoing crisis of modernity has provoked an unending critique: since the late nineteenth century, serious artists have struggled to explore what art means when mimesis, wholeness, and beauty can no longer be convincingly reconciled.

The action fails to cohere. It’s hard to tell how the music relates to the events, the events to the text, the text to the performance, any part to any other. One actress puts on a tutu and helmet and pushes a disco ball across the floor with her head, while another marks spots on a map. The guitar growls, people put on wigs, some more balloons get inflated. Somebody talks about packing a backpack and taking a hike, somebody else says “That’s sort of my downfall is that I want change.” Two actors start humming and singing “Birds birds birds” over and over. “I think this is a pile of shit,” one performer intones. “Back off,” another responds, “Back off my fucking stage.”

Drama’s greatest promise was in theater. Considered once the highest of arts, theater has suffered a profound loss in prestige since the development of film and video. In some ways now it’s the most marginal art, serving mostly as minor leagues for the culture industry and a spectacle for season subscribers and tourists. Yet this very position, co-opted, threatened, questionable, and ambivalent, gives experimental theater a remarkable freedom to reconsider and even renounce the dramatic illusion that is its greatest heritage.

What theater becomes when it frees itself from drama is a question explored in fascinating ways in the new opera, Problem Radical(s), staged at Performance Space 122 in April by the performance group Object Collection. Problem Radical(s) both exemplifies and opens up the idea of postdramatic theater, challenging the ways we think about the world we live in by repudiating the easy machinery of dramatic structure, focusing on the close relationship between ourselves and our stuff, problematizing performance, and explicitly politicizing the theatrical production.

Written and directed by Kara Feely, with music composed by Travis Just, Problem Radical(s) is a work-in-progress and a work-in-process. It has a modular structure that allows Feely to change which scenes happen each night and also their order, so we never see the same show twice. Moreover, we may not even see the same show the first time, since the stage action is like a multichannel production, with different events going on all the time, all at once. Our attention has to pick and choose, and where we favor one performer or one action, we lose something else. Then we come back the next night and things have changed: materials and props are added during and between every performance—the opera’s not only a performance but an installation, the performance of an installation, taking up space right before our eyes. The process-oriented nature of the show highlights its collaborative nature: the installation is built and designed by the visual artist Hannah Dougherty, and graced with video projections from the German multimedia artist Daniel Kötter.

What begins to happen, watching the show, is that you stop waiting for things to make sense. Instead of looking for a plot, a symbolic or lyrical structure, or even the quiet-loud-quiet dynamic that so often crudely reinstantiates dramatic structures ostensibly eschewed, you begin to give yourself over to watching, wondering, thinking about all this stuff on stage and what the idea of political theater even means. A play called Problem Radical(s) undoubtedly has something to say about politics, yet the deconstructed performance before us doesn’t offer a protagonist, a conflict, or a moral: unlike most political theater, which means to tell us that war is bad or Republicans are bad, or at its best explores ethical and moral complexities, Problem Radical(s) refuses to engage in the dramatization of politics, perhaps for the very reason that drama itself is inherently political. A self-induced hypnosis given over to tension-and-release narratives culminating in the orgiastic unification of an audience applauding a singular hero-scapegoat who will save us or suffer for us or both, traditional drama re-enacts a political pattern we recognize in a variety of unsavory forms, but which most importantly keeps us trapped as impotent spectators to a political spectacle which may decide our fates, but about which we can only decide whether or not to turn away in disgust. Problem Radical(s), by provoking us with theater that is both postdramatic and explicitly political, challenges us not only to see and hear in new ways, but to rethink our investments in both politics and drama.

Problem Radical(s) is the fourth major theatrical project from Object Collection. While continuing to explore ideas and practices that inform their earlier works like FAMOUS ACTORS and Evoke memories of a golden age., Kara Feely and Travis Just move in new directions with Problem Radical(s), bringing an explicitly social dimension to their formally innovative work, and presenting it with an engagingly fresh and rigorous approach.