Adventures in Reading

Charles Baudelaire, Collected Poems

First of all, God bless you, Carcanet, for putting out complete-ish editions at reasonable prices. (Also, if you don't know, you can pretty much always engage in book price arbitrage by ordering from LRB Bookshop or Blackwell's.)

It helped, I think, that the collection began with Paris Spleen, and Flowers of Evil was toward the back. It also helped that I began it on a very hot Halloween night as I waited for trick-or-treaters: this is not the poetry of feeling good, but it is the poetry of feeling vaguely uneasy, or understanding exactly why you are uneasy. After a hundred pages it does get a little redundant--the downsides of consuming a lifetime of work all at once--but the appeal is easy to see, now, Balzac giving way to Zola, the rise of the flaneur, Paris in a time of industrialization and political and social upheaval, what it is like to witness something becoming modern as it happens.

Abandoned Books: The Mezzanine

I can imagine a nearby possible world where I read this before any David Foster Wallace. I think that would be a better world for me, because the tone is lightly comic but not ridiculous, and it works as straightforward high concept, but alas we do not live in this world, so it received the worst of all possible reactions from me: "I can see what the author is trying to do here".

This is the somewhat defensive signal that indicates that the brain has activated and I'm no longer in something as an immersive experience; it is critic-brain. "I understand what the book/movie/tv show is attempting and it executes its attempt with style" really just means that I have emotionally disengaged from it, and there's no point in continuing. 

The opposite does happen from time to time--I stick with something out of obligation and find that I love it--but vita brevis longa ars, so often I will just never know.

From Some Ongoing Reading

 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

Okay, I get it now. Reading Ulysses earlier this year was probably the missing piece, because there's something modernist in its endless lists and its flow that eventually becomes that more well-known form. But the equation for enjoyment itself is pretty simple:

x + y = satisfaction in reading Whitman

where x is "have ever spent time outside appreciating the varied and sublime faces of nature" and y is "have ever believed, even for a fleeting moment, in America as an Idea".

Ultimately, I don't think I will quite love it, for the typical modernist reasons that the constant reference back to what it is doing in the text itself means it can't quite be loved, only appreciated.

From some ongoing reading

Claire Bishop, Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today, "Information Overload: Research-Based Art"

The funny thing about going to an art museum is that it can involve a lot of text: there are informational placards, artists' notes, audio guides, and juxtapositions that need explaining. There are rules to follow about how much time you can spend in front of any particular work of art, the practical limitations of how much you can absorb from an image or an object without specialized training, and whatever your own personal gaps might be--all of it can easily turn into an experience where you spend more time on text than actually looking at the things you came to see. It's not the only reason I have continued to pursue my interest in art history, but it's nice to be able to read style, era, general location, iconography, motifs, and general story if historical or literary in the picture.

So the first essay here is about this, the increased tendency to explanatory text, and how it multiplied and increased as a certain dogmatic tendency in contemporary art exhibitions: by providing more the artist decenters themselves and provides information, context, and trusts the viewer to assemble the information in a meaningful way, even if that way is not the one or ones meaningful to the artist. Vast, liberatory, a way to think of the interconnectedness of the world and the contingency of what we see. 

Except now, not. If I walked into an exhibition filled with text and an exhortation to figure it out, I would simply walk through, or back out again. But people who feel a slightly higher level of obligation will sample or skim and come away with an incomplete picture of what was being done. A partial reason for this is that the information overload that opens up possibilities has been replaced for most of us with the information overload that we want to shut down.

This has some corporate resonances, in my work experience as an HR person tasked with making sure people can find information. The tendency to dump information into a wiki or intranet, often unorganized, and expect people to make their way through with no guidance. (Sometimes worse: continually restructuring the wiki to make it easier to find things, so that nothing is consistently in the same place from one year to the next). The tendency to turn an FAQ into a long list of every question that has ever been asked, usually unorganized. (Or half-organized and then with additional questions just added in at the end). Or sitting back with expertise and refusing, for various reasons, to apply it: if you have done a few cycles of health insurance renewals, you probably have the ability to do the quick math necessary to recommend a plan--I know because I do it with friends and former colleagues who need to figure this out for their new jobs.

That's the primary suggestion of the chapter, to the extent it's interested in making recommendations: recognizing that the context of information overload has become negative, there needs to be more effort towards guiding through. This doesn't mean reverting to Only One True Meaning, but it does require more careful thought and practice.

Adventures in Museum-Going

North Carolina Museum of Art:

It's a privilege and an important part of my life to have a very good art museum close to where I live. I'm not as faithful of an adherent as I could be, but in the 20 years I've lived in the area, I've been (conservatively) 30 times. So it is the single collection of art I have seen the most, and by a lot--the next closest would probably be the National Gallery in DC, and I've only been there half a dozen times.

The way I experience most art museums--the way most people experience most arts museums--is "oh shoot in Paris gotta see the Louvre don't know if I'll be back gotta see it all". A mission doomed to failure that inevitably fails in one way or another. Your attention wanders, you look for something in particular and can't find it and miss everything else along the way, jet lag or fatigue from being out and about all day do you in. But the NC Museum of Art--I can drop in, look at the exhibits, and cut off or curtail or rearrange secure it the knowledge that I will get around to the rest of it next time.

There was a significant change to how the museum was organized in the last ten years, and I have found it to be agreeable on the whole. The Museum was built originally around a lot of displaced German artists--LA got the novelists, NYC the intellectuals, and North Carolina the visual artists--and modernist works of art that could be had for not a lot of money. I loved that museum. More recently, the museum has expanded and diversified what it displays, and dedicated a lot of space to putting works into juxtaposition. The curation is always careful, considered, and really does draw out a lot that you might not notice if a work was simply one in a row with a bunch of other things that were kind of the same.

And then there's the Michael Richards:

When I first came to the museum in 2004, it was the first thing I saw. The promise of postmodernism, a work that juxtaposed two different things I had independent knowledge about, and made something more of the juxtaposition: I could recognize it immediately as a St. Sebastian figure and a Tuskeegee Airman. I had met some of the Tuskeegee Airmen when I was a kid--they were warm and kind and honest about what they had experienced--and knew the St. Sebastian story, and I could see in a flash why those two worked together, how each heightened and deepened the other, and the work required no didacticism to say what it meant, it just was it. 

I was young when I saw it first, and I assumed with the confidence of youth that all art was going to be like that, but in truth very little art is like that. But it's there for me to see, 30 minutes away, to remember and be reminded.

Abandoned Books

The Narrow Road to the Deep North: nothing wrong with it, exactly, but nothing to commend it either. Heroism in war is often an illusion. The trauma from war lasts a lifetime. Love is great but desire is inexplicable and maybe even destructive. We think of the other side as inhuman, but did you ever stop to think that they're people like us, too?

As I say, nothing wrong with it, but it was a little... flat.

Friday Reading Check-in: 10/25/24

Uwe Johnson, Anniversaries 1: I originally attempted to read this as a book, a huge mistake that failed almost immediately. Since it's written as a series of diary entries, I've switched to reading each day as it comes. Like any journal I've ever kept, it switches between contemporaneous reports of what happened that day, snippets of conversation, remembrances of things that happened in the past (1930s England and Germany, and presumably some East Germany but that has not come yet). It's a very manageable read but the magnitude of it--I'm committed for a year--does occasionally daunt.

Anton Checkov, Fifty-two Stories: they're Ukranian-Russian short stories? Like Gogol, but not entirely in love with them yet. Three stories a day. My feelings about the translation of Pevear and Volokhonsky have changed over the decades; I've gradually come to prefer a translation that's academic or antiquated, and there was some very 21st-century American English expression that leapt out of one of the translations.

(Corollary: I once read this referred to as "actors who look like they know what texting is" in historical movies; I was watching The Witch (2015) last night and the family had a dog who was, very clearly, a 21st century dog)

Peter Weiss, The Aesthetics of Resistance, Vol 1: Nearly completed. There are books that reward extensive outside knowledge, and this is one of them. It presumes a lot of knowledge about the city of Berlin, Wiemar and 1930s Germany, and the Spanish Civil War, as well as wide familiarity with the state of visual art in the early 20th century, and makes detailed reference to the rise and fall of proto-national entities in the classical period, all subjects on which I am well informed. 

But it speaks to me because it poses and then discursively attempts to answer one of the central questions I have as a reader and admirer of culture who is unlikely to make a substantial contribution to it on my own: what's the point of art when it will not change any objective conditions of the world? And to the extent that there's any answer to the question, it seems to be that there are still human beings underneath all the movements of history, and they still need art in the way that people need the other things that keep them human.

Katie Kitamura, Intimacies: Loved A Separation, so we're giving this one a go.

Karl Marx, Capital: Trying to take a measure of my sympathies to communist and socialist thought by going directly to the sources. The labor theory of value is an error, to be sure, and fundamental to the system. Similarly, there does not appear to be much recognition that fiat currency can be unpegged from any material object as a source of wealth, nor a lot on colonial systems of exploitation, but it's not surprising that no one had thought much about these things in the mid-19th century; the sort of exploitation Lenin talks about in Imperialism hadn't even really happened yet, and Bretton Woods didn't end until the 1970s. Strip these away and a lot of it looks like typical 19th century liberal economic analysis. We'll see whether and how that continues.