I reviewed a couple of books for the Times Literary Supplement: John Kaag's wonderful Hiking with Nietzsche, the incomparable James C. Scott's Against the Grain
I must be getting toward two hundred columns for splicetoday over the last few years. In praise of my outlet I want to say that splice gives you some of the liveliest and most various and fun writing you'll find. Some 2019ly items:
i began a series of resoundings or recoveries of somewhat-forgotten recording artists, or lost-and-found musical loves: The Bellamy Brothers, Augustus Pablo, the Kendalls, Blue Angel (Cyndi Lauper), and Ann Peebles. There will be more of these as time unfolds.
I think early in the New Year I'll have long pieces in Reason and Quillette, among others. I'm working through Robert Brandom's unbelievable book A Spirit of Trust (750 pages on Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but also about everything else; it is itself a philosophical system) for the TLS right now.
i never lost a job, i believe, except because i wouldn't join a party, or i said something a feminist might construe as objectifying or something. they leave you speculating at the time, but sometimes you learn what happened. i believe i lost the job i really wanted at vanderbilt, because of my crazed, palpable anti-semitism. idit dobbs-weinstein and julie klein - real pc killers - did not give me a chance to say meet my great grandfather. on my mother's side. they missed my daughter's bat mitzvah. somewhere in the process i picked up the outlines. i hope i managed to convey that i was jewish.
then it was sort of: we learn to hate ourselves in our oppression; sometimes jews are the biggest anti-semites! not talking about you, of course...but they did hear one of the counter-examples i used in my job talk, and were retraumatized from the holocaust. that's 1992, y'all. much worse now. the next month, the same paper appeared in the journal of philosophy, merely despised until zagzebski found it. i was also doing some politically suspect columns for the nashville banner, like the one where i argued in favor of school vouchers. that sort of thing will garner you some pointed silence, though no arguments.
i'll throw a paragraph at mica, a place that was beloved to me before i ever got there, having lived around the corner and fantasized the whole time about teaching philosophy to art students. they don't have tenure. they brought me in with the understanding that i was permanent and there were no issues, they were lucky to get me, they said. i gave up my tenure track job teaching journalism and media studies and advising the school paper at penn state harrisburg. this is what i'd always wanted.
i was on campus a couple of days after 9.11, and i had already recorded a spot for all things considered. they were looking for someone who would express any sort of anger, could not find one among their staff or usual contributors, i gather. i had been talking to my (now-deceased) brother jim, who was an unbelievable cynic, raconteur, and artist of the hyperbole. 'i want to fly over the middle east and see nothing but piles of smoking rubble.' i started there. you know, i too want vengeance. in fact this distinction between justice and vengeance is complete jive, just a way of pretending you don't want revenge, or collectivizing responsibility, effectively offloading it from everyone entirely. i had three minutes, years of argument behind it. then i said: but even if it is legitimate to take vengeance, you are morally obliged to take your vengeance only precisely on the perpetrators. no burning rubble, my brother, without osama & co inside it. only them.
next day, robert merrill (a senior colleague), confronted me in the hall and said "that was disgusting!" the next words out his mouth were 'osama is a freedom fighter!' i felt a marked cooling toward me and rallying around him after that.
then for whatever political reason, they put my job to a national search. i did 'six names of beauty' as the talk, just or soon-to-published by routledge. anyway, it defines beauty' as 'the object of longing.' then i put up my childhood crush emma peel. then i went on to buntings and roses and the universe as a whole. a lit prof, soheila ghaussy, hopped up and started saying my whole thing was just (paraphrasing) coming from the dick, and weren't millennia of oppression enough? they hired someone else, who did not work out at all.
what i have found over and over again is that teaching, research, and service are irrelevant in an academic career (research, for sure). the only real criterion of advancement is conformity. that's why you have all these mediocrities at the very upper reaches: mere careerists. that's why the senior level of the profession now is lilliputian compared to the last cohort. i think the last actually interesting or sincere president of the apa was stanley cavell. if stanley was starting out now, he'd be drummed out of the profession for even mentioning greer garson, or because of that weird beret.
to clarify, i am definitely not a progressive. but i am definitely not a reactionary. i think the whole thing makes no sense, which is why it's enforced with insane social sanctions. i define my position as anti-hierarchical: i am opposed to both state and economic hierarchies and think they go together. this position is incomprehensible to academics because it is internally consistent.
one conclusion i'd draw is that anything besides the noodly socialism that is unanimous in academia is incomprehensible to the people there. another is that in the long run it is impossible to be both a professor and any kind of honest opinion journalist.
if you're wondering why so much blogging: well, i decided to quit pitching to publications and just recommit to the blog. and then it just started flowing and i was writing again like i once did: a lot, with great pleasure. as zora put it: polishing my sentences with a soft cloth.
alright, even though i love lucinda inordinately, i hated the last album. let me give you my first impression of the ghosts of highway 20. it is incredibly beautiful and wonderful. right she is still sounding pretty depressed (well, the theme is death), but now that is deepening everything. i still want her joy very much, but maybe that's a quality of my fantasy marriage to lucinda williams (sorry, john rawls). (i was always going to heal her; let's say i tried that approach here and there and it wouldn't have worked out.)
on the other hand, speaking of zora neale hurston as well as people whose bodies have actually been in my proximity [let's make it five times altogether counting those two; those are my big loves] i have fallen in love with women because of their art, or partly, or inseparably. sometimes experiencing her music, or her prose style, or her painting, is looking deep into her eyes, but at the same time from her eyes into yourself, for a long time, seeing all the way in, and then you really might fall in love, you know, and it can change the way you hear or see or read things; that's when i've had the biggest changes of perception, as well as the most intense experiences of beauty. there has to be an opening in her art into her. she has to be there, be findable, all of her, in her art, and not even all good artists are, and then you have to be moved by what you find, what is emerging from her and into you, and then you have to somehow pour it back into the world too, toward her if she's really there and right around you both until you are embedded together in the same sweet and bittersweet life. that's when the loss begins.
good heavens lucinda, thank you so much for teaching me that. thank you for expressing it so completely.:
[among other things, that is a perfect country song, and the guitar just kills.]
you can't bring someone joy at a distance, or insist that she be joyful. but maybe being here will make joy possible again. oh my god this is so intensely lovely and sad. and i think she has made the decisive turn: she's pretty ok with the age she is now; she's inhabiting her body as it is now, and thinking about her life elegiacally. (i am a little worried though, because she keeps saying how ready she is to die. maybe those are personae, though. um, i want 16 more albums, so go right on.) man she is writing good poetry in her distinctive way too. i am so happy to be able to say this. maybe this is her best album, though that seems impossible considering what she has done before. she is making me cry again. harder.
i've had a lot of death. and now i can explore its implications for the mandolin. at the moment i first heard 'sweet old world,' my brother had just committed suicide. also i was really in love for the first time, and early in recovery. i was trying to change everything in my life so i wouldn't want to die. i listened to that song hundreds of times. i still love it so much and i can't stand it. i don't know whether to let it play. i might shatter. it is my favorite song. and it is my candidate for 'most beautiful thing in the world.' so when something like that happens it's hard not to start thinking about what the person who wrote that song knows that made it possible for her to write it, and the guts and self-knowledge it took to just write it and record it and let everyone hear it. she didn't make any big show about it, but in that song she just let people see who she was, kind of all the way down. i started thinking about her life, and how if she can say that she must have really been through the shit, something like the same shit, but she understood what it meant and i didn't. and it's not just a piece of writing; it is her actual voice embodying and conveying the life and my life. and it is a beautiful woman's voice, knowing you, healing you by tearing you to shreds. how do you not fall in love? when she is in despair on her next album, you just want to heal her back, with the very things she gave you. you want to teach her the melancholy but total affirmation of life she taught you, because now you can't live without it. plus the whole thing yielded the professional benefit of refuting kant's aesthetics once and for all forever; i got a theory of beauty from it. amazingly, there is a song about her little brother on that album that i swear could be a description of mine.
also, it says that love redeems. you could have said that to me all day every day at that point and i wouldn't have believed it. when she sang it, i started trying to believe it; i knew what i needed to believe if i was ever going to wend my way back to joy. and i did actually fall in love with the person who showed it to me. she could play it on the guitar and sing it ok, and i could do something with it on the harmonica. we played it in the subway one time. then it was really mine and ours. it's the acoustics in there; it's like you're vibrating the whole planet. people threw money, and she paid her rent. at the time, her father was dying. the presents she gave me were clothes she made with her own hands, some of the few things i could never throw away. i don't know where she is.
i can't seem to get exactly what i want on youtube right now, so go stream/download etc 'death came'. ok? 'if my love could kill.' "can't close the door on love.' then go watch the videos on that first post.
[don't worry, i'm clear on the difference between really digging someone's novels and, like, dating her etc. i've never needed to talk to luci, but also have never not been. i've gotten quite a bit of writing out our relationship, though. i remember when i really couldn't stop writing about zora neale hurston; i had to swear off. well, sadly, you do sometimes! one good thing about loving the dead or distant star is that if you fuck around on her, or get a sudden crush, she doesn't even notice. dead women, or distant women you've never met, are polyamorous, which is good because you can't actually cuddle up with them anyway, and you might want that. so, every few years luci might put out a bad album and i might get pretty pissed off and turn to edna st. vincent millay or chrissie hynde for solace, or just to feel like a man. taylor swift would be wrong for an old man like me. i had my mid-life crisis long ago with one of the 5 - but still. dude, have you ever had daughters? that's pretty romantic too, and then you watch them begin to fill the space, and read and sing and write and play and paint and you do those things with them, loving them so much and losing them too as you do, and loving even that you are losing them; that's the job. i'm afraid i'm not going to be able entirely to avoid the cliches on this; sometimes that is what is most particularly true. maybe you don't think so, but i've noticed that all of taylor is in fact in her art. it's a different kind of art, but it has to be.]
i don't know whether i would think lucinda williams was beautiful if i just happened to run into her perched on a barstool somewhere. i have forgotten to think about that at all for the last 20-some years. i know she is beautiful. that is a completely unaffected and unguarded performance. and it is also masterful.
i think that art is one of the best ways we show that the human self is not contained in the skin, that it is assembled bits of other people and broken pieces of the world. maybe as you gather it, you haphazarardly or systematically try to mend. that's what zora kept trying to show us. it's notorious that you can't know what someone is really thinking or feeling; i feel that is false. right, there is no such thing as telepathy; but you're picturing the human mind as this mysterious little box inside the body. when you love a real artist, you see how her mind extends and is available, because it is reshaping and inhabiting the environment you share. sometimes someone's selfhood is remaking your visual environment or filling your house and head with sound. sometimes her words are running through your head, merging with your internal monologue in a kind of counterpoint. also it isn't just mind, is it? it's the physical activity, skill, craft; it's her body too. lucinda's body is singing. i think that's why i've found artists especially compelling and transforming, sexually and lovily and aesthetically and stuff. it's better than telepathy.
yes i'm sorry it is important to me that it is a woman and i think there's something a little different about the way women typically do art; maybe something a little more generous or true or sincere, or a little less filled with preening and ego and armor: those things are isolating rather than enveloping. i want to be enveloped. with the right person, that doesn't make you disappear, it makes you more. or, well, i'm fascinated by women, ok, irritated with men. picasso might be trying to blow you away, control you, or bludgeon you or something. not georgia o'keeffe. richard wright, but not hurston. i believe i know who were the better artists. obviously these are waytoobig generalizations. but i don't actually think anyone's aesthetics are entirely separate from their sexuality, and i think that's good as long as it isn't too oppressive or something. i just don't think it is that surprising that someone like me keeps gravitating back to the art of women - certain women, and i'm definitely not trying to establish a norm or something. i'm just trying to say what this heterosexual love thing is like for me.
[i just watched that 17 times.]
i want to tell you why i am able to do this now. it's because i am loving and being loved by jane irish. she is a painter. we met here and there a couple of times; i liked her vaguely but didn't form that much of an impression. she's kind of a quiet person. then i went to her place. it was filled with art, a whole life, +minimalist sculpture by her lover, the late bill walton, and other stuff. a whole lifetime was in there, like i was surrounded by it, inside it, and it is so beautiful, but so pointed and smart too. then we made love. since then, my taste in visual arts - which i love - has broken wide open. she is taking me to museums and helping me see. for forty years my approach was "if it doesn't look like a vermeer, it sucks.' even i was getting tired of myself.
i'm writing this at a rest stop on pa turnpike, on my way to see her. i don't know what it will be like, because i have spent the last 48 hours crying, listening, yearning. like this is where i always thought i might get, but now that i'm here at the rest stop i don't know whether i'm having a breakdown or reaching the peace i never could have. i could feel this bit by bit. but i could not let myself feel all of it at once. then suddenly after 57 years i couldn't not feel it all: the adam part (fuck, two other brothers too). the judith part. the marion part. the jane and emma part, and the jane part. here it all is in the truest thing i ever wrote, ok? now what?
i really did just set out to write a record review, but every time i have had a new idea, and many times i have had a new feeling, i was actually at that moment typing. writing and thinking and feeling are sort of the same thing for me. the most genuine, most sustained, most various example i can think of like that - the person in all of history who i think thought and felt about writing the most like i do - is zora neale hurston.
they are playing 'passionate kisses' here at the rest stop. i am not kidding. oh dang now they're on steely dan. on the way here my random ipod was hitting everything i couldn't take in just the order i was imagining, like emmylou's version of 'sweet old world' or lucinda and emmylou on 'greenville.'
[update: the second i got down there i knew it was more of a breakthrough than a breakdown. i am in an excellent mood. love redeems, bro! ok i can listen to it now,]
[this entry, really quite the swoon, might be yinyanged with this one.]
i feel the link should be forwarded to all female artists and writers. love.
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